Johnny's Story

I want you to think about the warm bed that you slept in last night, then I want you to think about how being rained on will affect your dreams. I want you to think about your job, whatever it is that you do for hours on end when you’d rather not be. Then I want you to think about how it would feel to never do that again. I want you to think about how you would feel if you knew, for a fact, that everything you will ever need has been provided for you and is there for the taking. I want you to imagine how sweet a rose or young girl’s perfume might smell when you are covered in self-excrement and dumpster gunk every day. Think of all your friends, all your dreams and commitments, think of all the things that make you, you. Then think of the beautiful simplicity of sleeping under the stars and walking everywhere you go. Think of your bills, and all the reasons you do the things you do; then imagine you knew that none of it mattered. What would you do? Would you perpetuate the lie, or would you steal your life away from those who would claim it as theirs?
Only if you can imagine all of this, if you can live it all in your mind can you imagine what this life is like. But, even then, you won’t really know. I didn’t really know what Juba was talking about until many years later, after I had been where he was.

I was face-deep in an inch of water when all I had to do was get up and walk away. I was drowning in things I wanted to buy, people I wanted to know, drugs I wanted to do. Then a simple man with simple needs taught me the wisdom of simplicity.
The words he spoke to me shattered and changed the world. Sometimes I wonder if maybe he was an avatar of the god of coincidence, come to create and destroy. Sometimes I think maybe he was an agent of the same forces that made so many people betray me. Whatever he was, his words stayed with me, and continue to stay with me, the only friend I need.

“Don’t let them get you down, Johnny.” Juba consoled.
“Oh, I’m alright, I just have a headache.” I lied, not about the headache, but about being okay, I was anything but.
I had been evicted from my apartment a few months prior and moved back with my mom. She died two weeks ago and just that day some guys came and said I couldn’t live in the house anymore because she owed a lot of money. They threw everything I owned into the rain.
Watching those men throw my TV, stereo, bed and assorted other material shackles into a pile reminded me of Nazis throwing Jewish bodies into a mass grave to be covered with lime and forgotten about with as much malice as possible.
Juba looked into my eyes and got a look on his face as if he were reading something. “I know.” He said. “Just don’t let them get you down, that’s how they win.”
I looked down at the concrete at my feet just outside the back door of Bennigan’s, still wet from this morning’s rain; then I looked back up at him with a face that read, ‘either say something that will help or shut up.’ He sat down on the curb next to me and lit up a cigarette. Drawing in the smoke with a long smooth breath, Juba paused for a minute. He was staring, almost as if he was looking through something. He turned to me and said, while exhaling the mentholated cigarette smoke, “there are many kinds of success, there are many ways to look at this world and there are many ways to live. It would be foolish to think that any of them is right.” I looked back at him with puzzlement. It would be many years before I would understand what he meant, but at that time I was too confused to understand anything.
Just as I was about to pass him off for another raving old kook, he said, “Let me tell you a story.” With apprehension I stopped myself from speaking and opened my mind.
“I’m a painter, I don’t know if you know.” I nodded ‘no’ just to appease him, I knew. “A few years back this hippie-chick comes into the homeless shelter looking for talented people to be in this art show downtown. I thought this was my big break; I thought about all the money I would make, all thing things I was going to buy, and all the girls that would want to fuck me.” Again, he gets that look on his face like he’s looking through something. “I got sucked in, I began to desire. I wasn’t selling out, I was buying in, or at least that’s what I told myself.” He took another deep drag of his cigarette, I looked in the direction he keeps looking, and trying to find what is so interesting. All I see is the concrete wall of the dumpster corral.
“Well this chick came up to me and said she would get my paintings into this showing. She said that there would be all kinds of people there who loved to throw their money away. She said I would make a lot and get recognized.”
“So I went clean,” he said as he pulled a half-pint out from under his plastic apron. “I quit drinking and started working. I started painting like a demon trying to possess his own soul.”
“Okay so what’s the point of all of this?” I questioned.
“Would you shut the fuck up and listen for a second. Close your earth-blinded eyes and see something for once. Absorb something real, some real wisdom.” Something deep inside me told me that I should listen to him; maybe he would be good for a laugh, if nothing else.
“So I was clean for months. I told G not to bring the green around anymore; I told the party boys that I would not be coming by the house anymore. I didn’t even go near a liquor store, I was clean.”
After a long and smooth gulp from the bottle, he twisted the cap back on and put it back in his pocket without a single facial expression.
You should’ve seen some of the stuff I painted. But the bitch, she screwed me. On the day of the show she sent me a gift basket, complete with a fifth. I had half of it finished by the time I stumbled up the door. The guards at the door would not let me in, something about disturbing people. It was my show and they would not let me in. I ended up lying down on a park bench and finishing the other half of the fifth. I woke up a few hours later to the hippie chick shaking me, hoping that I was dead so that my paintings would be worth more. She told me that the paintings sold for thousands of dollars apiece, that I would be rich, that she would send me the money. She lied; I never saw that bitch again.”
He seemed to get a slight swelling in his eyes, like a tear might fight its way through, but his clenched jaw said only anger. He then pulled his half-pint out again and prayed to the god of coincidence.
“The only things that they can take away from you are the things you have. If you don’t have anything, you can’t lose.”
I looked back at him, breaking my concentration on the concrete.
“Don’t let them get you down, let them have what they want, they won’t be any happier with it than you are.”
Just then, Sully stuck his head out of the back door and said, “Boonsty, get back in here, we got a rush; and Juba, we need that silverware down so the servers can roll it.” With that he shrunk his head back inside the beast.
“Allah the Dolla, that’s who they worship. You shouldn’t worry about him, worry about coincidence.”
He turned and went back into the building and so did I. Many years passed before I know what he was talking about. It was only after I lost everything that I learned I needed nothing.

Three years later I was bankrupt from my mother’s funeral and squatting in my mother’s abandoned house. I was still working at Bennigan’s, a manager even. None of them knew that the person that told them what to do everyday shivered on cold nights and took showers at a truck stop. I was still holding on to what I was told was life.
Sometimes I would come by my sister’s house and catch a warm shower and see my little nieces. I already hated my sister; a smug, prissy whore of a woman, she always acted like she was better than me. One time I left one of my paychecks at my sister’s house on accident and that bitch signed my name and cashed it. When I asked her why she did it, she said, “I bought things for my kids, I knew you wouldn’t care.” And right then, I realized that she was right, I didn’t care. I had lost so much that anything more didn’t make a difference. I thought I had already hit rock bottom, but I was wrong, as most people are when they think they’re there. After informing my sister of my opinion of her, I left her house and went straight to the closest liquor store.
No I was no angel at this point, I went to college; I did every drug put in front of me. With only a few ragged bills in my pocket I spied a beautifully cheap bottle on the bottom shelf. “Gilbey’s gin,” I said to myself, “it can’t be that bad.”
“Don’t be so sure,” the clerk said; a tall hairy white boy with a giant blonde afro stood there. “That stuff will put chest hair on our chest hair.” Ignoring his warnings and sliding two bills across the counter, I took the bottle and walked out of the store and into the cold, unforgiving night.
I left this world that night. I left all its pain, all its worries and all its business. I traded all those things that were me, for another world. Like a ship in a bottle, I felt cramped and contrary to my purpose. I was caught in an endless cycle of emotionally blunted reactions to increasingly less fulfilling stimuli. No matter the surroundings, my reaction remains the same, a dull wanting for something known. But it is the unknown I was seeking. I was seeking the un-knowing of all that I was. I was seeking that which unmade me, destruction, as it were, of myself. I had been, therefore I have been a being, to myself and what I perceived to be to others, for many years. Now was a time to destroy all of that. Not the annihilating, ending-of-all-things-to-come a kind of destroying, but the kind of destroying that was exploratory. I was seeking to know who I truly was as a being and therefore what it is to be a being, and by extension of that, what it means to be. I had to first strip away all those things that had built around me, confusing who I was with what I was. Possessions are distractions from true purpose.

That night I slept under the stars and awoke with a terrible thirst, but felt it being quenched just as it arrived by the down pouring rain. Falling into my senses is never pleasant, but it kept happening to me more and more and I thought that it was a sign. Not a sign of something being wrong necessarily, just a sign that something needed to change.
After orienting myself and taking refuge under a tree for a few minutes, I decided to make my way to the paper mill. It stopped raining on the walk over there, but I was already soaked. The paper mill, as it was, and is, and always will be; is a spiritual place abandoned by society and its ideals. Coming here somehow gave me a sense of peace. It is somewhere lonely souls can go and feel comfort in the whole. Its blood red brick is scarred and weathered from the hunger of time. Hard to find myself here, whom I didn’t know, but anywhere else leads to nothingness.
Forsaking the sky by looking down all day, I stared at this rock lying in the river, inspired. Like a million calamitous pixies fighting a way over territory, the sun reflected off of the waves of the river. The waves were passing to and through the rock and my consciousness as one. I came here today, of all days, to find peace. I steal little bits of serenity from the waves. For some reason this rock captivated me. It is not really a rock, per se, it is more of a hunk of concrete dumped into the river and forgotten about. It seemed so artificial. But it also seemed like it could not have been anywhere else but right in front of me at this moment. The rock struck me strange because it had a large hole in the middle of it through which the river flows through and around it at the same time. How envious I was of the rock, something so strong that still let’s give and let go where it needs to go. The water caressed the rock from the inside out, leaving it perpetually blissful. I wanted to be like the rock, strong and unchanged, but not fighting against anything. There were many rocks lying in the river, making its flow distinct, but this one seemed so out of place. It seemed out of place but at the same time it seemed like every river should have a hunk of concrete in it for people to contemplate upon.
I thought about the last time I had come to this part of the river. It was winter time and very cold, the kind of cold that froze the snot inside your nose. I had come there on that day to find myself, to be with myself and caressed by the river at the same time. The rock had not been here back then. Back then it was the ice that comforted me.
Over the waterfall that came after the small dam in the river, there had been a log, stuck halfway over the waterfall. It was just dangling there, as if it were suicidal and indecisive. It dangled there for so long that ice started to form around it. It stayed cold long enough for a succession of ice coverings formed on it. The ice draped around the log like some regal robe. Just under the log there was a little part where the water kind of spit forth, apart from the rest of the waterfall. The ice and the single stream of water made it look much like some lord of the fish, a person peeking his head out of the waterfall, spitting forth his disdain for us “surface dwellers.”
I became ever more envious of the rock, having known such wonders apart from my world.

When I walked back to my mother’s house I saw two cop cars sitting outside. Knowing that I could be arrested or at least questioned just or being young and black, I decided to just go take a shower at the truck stop and go to work. After successfully dodging some prostitutes that smelled like they were unaware of the showers just inside, I cleaned myself and made myself into that other person. I became Boonsty, the successful me. That was my nickname, I don’t really remember where it came from, but that’s what most civilized people called me. I became that other me that is successful and rich and cool. I was still Johnny, the one who thought and felt things that Boonsty could never understand, the one that slept under the stars last night and loved the morning dew. But to the world, when I was in it, I was b.
I successfully piloted the Boonsty raft to Bennigan’s. Walking in the front door, I was greeted by two police officers talking to my manager. I could overhear a few words, “squatting, and “Mother” and illegal” were among them and I started to get a sinking feeling.
As I walked in they turned to me and said, “Jonathan Boyd, you are under arrest for assault.”
“What, against whom?” I protested.
“Your sister, Gloria.” One of them responded.
“What, I did no such thing.”
“She said that it occurred in December of ’86.”
“But that’s twelve years ago.”
“Well, unfortunately there is not statute of limitations on assault in this state.”
I thought to myself for a second, I knew what this was about. Back in high school I slapped my sister once for being a total bitch to me and the entire family. It happened at school after I had given her a ride and another student saw it and told the principal. I almost got expelled. And now that bitch was pissed at me and she was trying to screw me by bringing this up.
So I conceded to the men and let them shackle me. They took me to the county jail and threw me in a poorly lit room smelling of feces and loss. I was printed, processed, and re-processed like so much cheese. I spent the next thirty days in there because the inept lawyer that the state gave me didn’t seem to even care because I had no money and it wasn’t a high profile case. And the Femi-Nazi judge that they gave me didn’t care that my sister was a bitch, she didn’t care that it had happened twelve years ago, she didn’t care about anything but her revenge on that first boy that she had a crush on that told her she was too fat or ugly or poor or whatever.
So I spent the next thirty days wallowing in resentment. All I had was hate. I did a lot of thinking in there; there was nothing else to do but talk to crack heads. I thought about all the time and hard work I had expended to get my things. I thought about how my life had revolved around those things. I began to hate those things. I began to hate all things. I hated people-things, I hated animal-things, I hated insect-things, but most of al I hated thing-things; those things that confine us through their own definition. I kept thinking about that day when those men threw all of my thing-things into a mass grave. At the time I had hated those men because I loved my things, but now I know that they were just angels of coincidence, come to liberate me. I did a lot of thinking about Juba. I had worked with him for a long time but I only really talked him once, yet I could not stop thinking about it. I became envious of the way he was so happy to know where happiness didn’t come from. He didn’t think he knew the answer, he just knew where not to look. I built myself a cocoon and stayed there, changing, for thirty days.
When I got out I didn’t bother going back to Bennigan’s, I knew that they knew that I was Johnny, and Boonsty. They would never look at me the same; I didn’t want them to anyway, because I wasn’t the same. I wasn’t the same as I was; I wasn’t the same as them. I was reborn, remolded into an amorphous being free of care. I didn’t have anything, no money, no family, no friends, nothing to tie me down.
The first few days were rough, sleeping wherever I could find shelter, eating out of the garbage, finding limitations to my limitless transcendence. That is, until a kind man came to me one morning as I sat, half conscious, under the awning of a restaurant that hadn’t opened yet. The man came to me and said, “Here buddy, you’ll be happier with this than I will be.” As he set black plastic garbage bag full of bottles next to me and walked away before I could even thank him. I was saved.
I took the bottles to the Kroger’s and exchanged them for a new life. A life free from care, free of worry, free of need. At that moment I new that everything was going to work out because everything that I will ever need will be thrown out by someone who thinks that they are better than me.
Allah the Dolla is dead in my mind, now I worship the god of coincidence.