Post #7: Writing a Novel on Privilege Pills (plus the landlady sends a spy)
It’s ten thirty in the morning, mid-April, four weeks into the madness, and I’m supposed to be writing. It’s all I really have anymore. Like millions nationwide, I’m alone with only my thoughts to keep me company. But that’s okay, for me at least, because I’m a writer, so I can write. And I’m so very close to writing, I swear. I’m even repeating my mantra in my head over and over again.
Write, you stupid bastard, write!
I’m working on my novel, you see. It’s called Grease Traps of Bourbon Street and it revolves around the insanity of the ghost tour world of the french quarter. I really think it’s something special, something hilarious and provocative. Or it will be, once I finish the damn thing. But right now it’s just a collection of unfinished words and pages that are staring at me from my laptop screen, mocking me.
I’m in my dining room (or rather, what used to be my dining room in the before times when my roommates were still here and furniture was still present, now it’s just another empty room in a house full of them), sitting at my “writing desk” with my fingertips standing alert on top of the keyboard of my laptop.
Write, you stupid bastard, write!
But I don’t. Instead I’m squishing ants.
You see, my “writing desk” is actually just a white fold out table that I found in the back of the shed a couple of weeks ago. Aside from my bookshelf it’s the only piece of furniture in the house outside of my bedroom. I’ve been using it as a writing station for the last week or so and it’s been working well enough. Except for the ants. I swear it’s like the table has some secret portal to a different dimension that consists solely of black ants. Because they just keep pouring out from somewhere underneath the table. Every minute of every day more and more black ants just crawl up from somewhere under the table. But the oddest thing is they only come out one at a time, as if they are waiting in an endless single file line for the last ant to be squished by my thumb before the next tries their luck.
I’m not just squishing ants though. I’m also thinking about what I read online five minutes ago, that news article about how the CDC has now reversed course and declared that people should be wearing masks out in public. Jesus. It took them a whole month to figure that out? And what does this mean for us? It’s been a whole month of everyone walking around without a mask, breathing in each other’s air, taking in all those unprotected sneezes, burps and coughs. That can’t be good.
I press down on another ant with my thumb, obliterating its existence.
What’s really frustrating about all this, though, is that all this provides a perfect excuse for not being productive. How can I be expected to write when the world is melting all around me?
Of course that’s just a lame ass excuse, and as I sit here, watching the next ant scurry across the table, I take my anger out on it, squish, and right as I do, an idea hits me. A bad idea.
I should take another pill.
I take one privilege pill every day in the morning for my ADD. I’ve taken to calling them my privilege pills because of the focus and drive they give me. I told my mom this once and she didn’t like it all.
“But it’s not a privilege for you,” she said, “you need them.”
Which I believe is true, to a degree. Without them it’s extremely hard for me to concentrate on anything or even sit still. But if I were to tell you taking one of these pills brought me to the exact level of normalcy in terms of focus and drive that would be a lie. Without the pill I can’t focus on a damn thing, with the pill it’s just the opposite and I feel like a shiny beacon of creativity and concentration. And somewhere inbetween those two planes of existence is what you would call normal. So in that sense, yes, I do believe having access to these pills is a privilege.
And they’re great. I’m very grateful for them. But I’ll let you in on a little secret. Some time ago, I used to take more pills than I was supposed to. Not everyday, just on those special days. Usually after I had just re-upped, I’d take a handful of them and take one about every hour. This allowed me to stay up all day and night and just write. I honestly cannot explain how great this felt. Imagine being able to sprint all day, mile after mile, without ever feeling tired. That’s how it was for me, except for writing. But I stopped that nonsense a long time ago because it ultimately did more harm than good and left me feeling like absolute shit for the following three days. It’s a journey that’s just not worth taking, and becoming an adult means understanding journeys like that have to be left behind.
I should take another pill.
And yet, things are different now. Perhaps I’m still an adult, but am I living an adult world? It doesn’t feel like that. It feels like I’m living in a sick, childish world filled with stupidity and ignorance. Everything around us is melting, people are dying, and the CDC just realized now we should be wearing fucking masks. So yeah, maybe that’s why this odd thought has returned after being dormant for so long…or maybe it’s because I just can’t think of anything to write and I can’t bear another unproductive day during lockdown. Whatever the reason, I give in to the temptation and swallow another orange pill.
Immediately, I regret this.
Immediately, I’m excited by this.
Twenty minutes later, my mind is buzzing. It’s a light buzz, the exact kind of buzz you would expect from doubling your dose. I don’t feel like a god yet, but I do feel like I could climb any tree in the world and reach the top in less than a minute.
But I’m still not writing. I’m still squishing god damn ants. And I’m getting mad at myself for doing this but I just can’t seem to stop. I now remember another danger of going on this journey, your mind tends to focus on the first thing that seems even a little interesting, and it requires some serious mental work to break this path. Squish.
Knock, knock, knock.
A cold shiver runs through me. A knock on my front door. How? Nobody has knocked on my door in weeks. I haven’t seen anyone in a month. I’ve been in solitude for thirty days. Who the hell is knocking on my door? What kind of person knocks during a pandemic? My buzzing brain conjures up the image of the grim reaper holding his scythe and standing on my front porch.
“Everyone else is dead, now it’s your turn,” I hear Death say, “that’s what happens when you don’t wear a mask during a pandemic, I swear you Americans are so very stupid.” (for some reason, the grim reaper speaks with is British in my mind).
Knock, knock, knock.
Slowly I rise from my chair and head to the door.
“Who is it?” I ask, trying to sound casual and not like I’m worried about the grim reaper.
“Barrett,” a voice responds, before adding with a tone of familiarity, “you know, the plumber.”
My heart bursts with understanding and empathy. The understanding comes because I now remember that M, the landlady, texted me early in the morning to tell me that her nephew Barrett would finally be coming to fix the shower that’s been busted for a month. The empathy comes from the pills. That’s yet another side effect of my privileged medication, it gives me an extra oomph of compassion for my fellow man. Even my normal dosage gives me a slight urge to give the world a big hug and tell it I understand. Life is hard but I know you’re trying your best.
And now, with my brain buzzing the way it is, I excitedly open the door to let my plumber and occasional weed dealer know that I’m very happy to see him and understand his soul.
But as I reach for the door, I feel a hesitation run through me. In the back of my mind I know I should to be wary of Barrett, but for the life of me I can’t recall why. So I ignore this mild foreboding and open the door and fight the urge to hug him or say anything weird about understanding him. Instead, I see his bare, greasy face, and his beady eyes looking at me, and I greet him in another weird way.
“You’re supposed to be wearing a mask,’ I hear the words come out of me in an almost accusatory tone. I didn’t mean it like that, I mean it’s not like I’m wearing one either. I intended to say it like ‘hey have you heard the news? We’re all supposed to be wearing masks now, crazy right?’, but I can tell by the confusion on his (bare) face that it didn’t come across that way.
“We all are, I mean,” I try to correct myself. “The CDC reversed its…like, opinion, now they want us to wear masks. I know they said the opposite before, but like I said, they reversed their decision.”
There is a long pause here.
“I’m here to fix your shower,” he finally says.
“Yes of course. Come on in,” tell him, without moving out of the way. He looks at me expectantly until I finally realize what he wants and take a step to the side. As he moves past me I take in the sight of him. He looks a little sickly, if I’m being honest. His face was always a little red and pimply, but now it seems oddly greasy too. Is that the covid? Or has just stopped caring what he looks like?
“Bathroom this way?” he points down to the other end of my house.
“Yeah it’s the one in my bedroom. You wouldn’t believe what happened. One day, the first day of lock down actually, the shower head just fell off the wall…”
My words trail away here as I notice that he’s not really listening to me at all but instead looking around the house with his beady eyes. It suddenly comes to me why I had that wary feeling toward Barrett. He’s a fucking spy! A narc, a stoolie, a pigeon. Whenever he comes to fix something, I almost always get an angry text from his aunt, M, a few hours later, giving me the business for something she would only know if Barrett told her.
I look around my house now and cringe. You might think that no furniture means less chance of making a mess, but then I guess, if you think that, you don’t really know me. Empty beer cans and whiskey bottles adorn the otherwise barren room. The remains of my last couple of escapes this week. There’s also small piles of trash in every corner, my attempt at clearing my dance floor. I look over to my “writing desk” pressed against the window of the dining room and wonder if Barrett can see the infinite surge of ants performing their own escape on the white surface. Yes, I don’t feel good about any of this, so I lead him away as fast as possible.
“Come on, let me show you.”
“Yeah, it looks like the showerhead rusted through,” he tells me once we’re in my tiny bathroom, holding the detached head from the floor.
“Yep,” I agree. “And I’ve been showering using just that hole in the wall. I tell you, it feels like I’m getting pissed on by a donkey everytime I clean myself.” I wait for some laughter from this, even a polite chuckle, but nothing comes.
“Well, it shouldn’t be too hard to replace, I just gotta go to the store and pick up a new one. Are you gonna be here all day?”
I suppose if I weren’t on my pills I might have just given a sarcastic response to this obvious question, Yes I will be home during this pandemic lockdown, but thanks to the energy surging through my veins I take this as an invitation to talk about my novel.
“Yes! I’ll be home working on my novel. It’s called Grease Traps of Bourbon Street and it’s a sort of a humor novel, a combination of humor and heart I like to say, and it’s about the wild world of the ghost tour business in the french quarter. It’s gonna be great. Dynamic characters, morality issues, societal issues. I’m taking it all on. But it’s humorous too, like I said. Really. Sort of like Confederacy of Dunces but more modern, and more based in reality, you know what I mean?”
Again, I am met with silence.
“…ok,” he finally responds, “well I’ll just shoot you a text when I’m heading back over.”
He leaves quickly after, and as I watch him go only one thought circles my mind.
I should take another pill. Maybe two more, actually.
I walk back over to my “writing desk” where my translucent pill bottle stands, I think back to when I first started taking my pills. I was diagnosed with ADD when I was in third grade. I don’t know why, but to this day I still find that rather impressive. Just imagining a third grade teacher observing a classroom of frenzied, imaginative little kids all running around and babbling throughout the school day and seeing me, and realizing that I, above all the other little monsters in her room, is especially unfocused and wild.
But obviously, that wasn’t the official diagnosis. No, that was just what got me to a real doctor who asked me a lot of questions and listened carefully to my answers. Sometimes I like to imagine how the conversation went with him and my parents after this meeting.
Dad: What seems to be the problem with my son, doctor?
Doctor: Well, he’s a bit of an unfocused whackadoo and I fear this will lead him to a sad and unproductive life.
Mom: My god that’s terrible. What do you think we should do?
Doctor: It is my professional recommendation that we put this eight year old on the best speed that money can buy and the law will allow.
Parents: Will this make him normal?
Doctor:…yes.
I’m back at my “desk” now, trying to write. It’s not easy though. My head is absolutely pulsating. I’m three pills deep and that means the euphoria has begun. Now euphoria, that’s the real bitch. That’s what you don’t want as a writer because you’re just too filled with joy to write. But apparently squishing ants is a different matter entirely, because I’m back to doing that and just having the best damn time in the world.
I’m trying to meet myself halfway though, trying to think about my novel while I destroy more ants.
But I’m not really thinking about my novel because I’m too distracted thinking about Barrett, about his life, about his hopes and dreams. What makes a man like that tick? A blue collar man of few words who feels the need to sell me out to his aunt every chance he gets, what makes him do that?
Write, you bastard, write!
And so I leave the ants and start writing. But not my novel. I’ve opened up a new google doc and I’m writing all about my plumber. My fingers are just blasting away, and empty pages turn to half filled pages which turn to full pages. It’s just all coming out of me and I couldn’t be having a better time.
Time, by the way, has no meaning anymore. Minutes, hours, seconds, they’re all the same now. But at some point I stop and realize I’ve written ten pages. And oh how good it feels. So what if it’s not the novel, or any actual story even. I got the truth down on paper. The truth regarding the soul of a man that I only know three things about for sure. He works as a plumber, he smokes weed, and sometimes, he tells on me. Fascinating character.
I decide to celebrate this goodness and godliness by taking another pill. As I do though, a new memory comes to me.
“You do realize your meds are basically speed, right? They’re study pills that most students would kill for. You can take a few and write an essay an hour, or take a bunch and tweak out all night.”
That’s Luke, my best friend from my college days. You might call him the devil on my shoulder during that time of my life. He was the one who first made me aware of how privileged I was to have my pills. And he was the first one to convince me to have a little fun with them. One night, freshman year. Starting at sunset in the meadow that stood just next to our dorms, I unscrewed that orange translucent bottle and dispensed my gold to me and my friend as we sipped on some beers and talked about our big goals and dreams in our life to come.
A few hours later that night, Luke had left me to go see some girl at Stevenson and I was left to my own devices. So I retreated back to my dorm room, hopped on my 2003 laptop and typed for about, oh, ten hours straight. God, did it feel good. Not just good even, it felt like I was a god. An actual god who had been cast down to the world of mortals just so he could squeeze out his genius for others to read.
And if the memory stopped there it would just be a good one. But it doesn’t. Because I remember the heavy price that came soon after. Not only a three day hangover but also the sad realization that my entire night of writing was useless, resulting in fifty pages of garbled, pretentious, nonsense.
Have I done that again?
I launch back into my seat and try to read what I wrote, but I’m having a hard time. I think I’m at the stage of the journey where I’ve taken enough pills so that I can write with ease but can’t read a damn thing.
Knock, knock, knock.
Oh god, he’s back. He’s back and I have his whole life story right on my computer. I shut it close before heading to the door, just in case. But then, I turn back around and open it back up again, fearing it’ll look suspicious if he comes in and suddenly finds my laptop closed.
What the hell are you talking about, why would he give it a second thought either way?
Knock, knock, knock.
“Hey Barrett, back so soon?”
“…it’s been two hours. I got called into another job.”
“Oh right,” I tell him, trying to play it off like I’m joking.
“Anyway, I got the part,” he tells me, pushing his way past me.
He then asks me a question that I think is about my novel, so I answer him honestly, ranting about the difficulties of capturing a character, making them true and real, while also keeping them interesting and provocative for the reader. When I’m finished he just gives me that look of his.
“OK, so can you go shut off the water to the house or not?”
My face blushes with embarrassment and I flee to go do what he asks.
I have to crawl a bit under the house to reach the water valve, and while I do, I think of a question to ask Barrett, which I think will allow me to understand him perfectly.
“So Barrett,” I say upon my return, “what made you get into plumbing in the first place?”
“To make money,’ he answers, before mumbling a few curse words at the troublesome showerhead that’s not being cooperative.
“Fascinating,” I tell him, with no hint of sarcasm. “Tell me, do you ever feel like the pipes you work on represent the limits of your own life.”
He doesn’t answer me this time, but that’s ok, his silence alone has given me three pages of writing to get down.
I leave him, puttering away back to my desk, pinching the life out of a few ants before giving my fingers another work out.
Write, you stupid bastard, write!
Oh don’t you worry, I am. In fact, I’m four pages deep into the psyche of my plumber before I hear a voice behind me that makes me jump in the air.
“Hey look man-” is all I hear before I gasp loudly and jump to my feet, slamming my laptop closed as fast as I can.
“Uh, oh, sorry, what’s up?” I ask him, pretending like i didn’t just freak out.
Barrett stares at me and then at my closed laptop and then back to me. He doesn’t know what to make of any of this and as I stand there I realize he might suspect I was out here watching porn or something. Which of course is ridiculous. I just didn’t want him to see the extensive fifteen plus pages about his life that I had written. But how do you explain that to someone? Especially to a guy like Barrett.
“Uh, anyway, one of the pieces isn’t fitting right, so I have to go back to the store, I’ll be back in a bit.”
“OK cool, but before you go, can you tell me why you have chosen to work for your aunt over anyone else? Is your connection with her really that strong?”
He sort of chuckles at this and leaves. I take another pill. My body is literally a bolt of electricity right now, and to add another privilege pill to the game is just stupid and unnecessary. But as Hunter S Thompson once said, the tendency with this kind of thing is to push it as far as you can.
So here I am now, four in the afternoon, turnt the fuck up, pushing it as far as I can, writing page after page about my plumber and the difficulties of his life, despite the fact I know very, very little about him. But it doesn’t matter, every word is both gold and fire and I’m loving it all.
Buzzzzzz….
That’s my phone vibrating. A new text message. I eagerly grab it, excited about communicating with more people. Until I find out it’s from M, my landlady, and I already know what I’m in for.
Barrett tells me your bathroom is disgusting and possibly swarming with disease. You need to clean it up if you want him to fix your shower!
I read the words over and over in the text until they finally make sense to me. Now I’m seeing red. Dammit Barrett, you did it again! You turned on me, even after I made you a literary hero! A god among the pages of literature. How dare you Barrett, you will pay for this.
I rush over to the bathroom to check it out for myself. Even in my energized state, I have to admit that it’s not great. I won’t go as far as call it disgusting, and certainly not ‘riddled with disease”, but yeah, I admit, it’s not great. I decide the right thing to do is to clean it. Kill Barrett with kindness, you know? But my juiced mind can’t leave alone his betrayal, and I decide before I clean I must destroy Barrett with my words.
I can tell you right now that the next five pages I write are not suitable for human eyes (Just know the terms “tattle tale devil” and “brownnosing blue collar” are used a great deal). The anger and hatred I pour into these five pages is something no one should see. I feel like Barrett knows this. My words are so powerful they have traveled to his mind, letting him now my place is now a dark cave of danger for him.
A stretch of time passes again, and Barrett the Plumber returns.
“I found the part. Should have it all ready to go in just ten minutes.”
“Awesome,” I tell him, completely forgetting my anger towards him and just happy to have someone to talk to again. So I keep talking to him, about my novel, as we walk to the bathroom. I hear him sigh as he enters and realize I forgot to actually do any cleaning. Dammit. Oh well, that’s what narcs get, I figure.
I leave him in the bathroom and go back to my desk. I notice now that the walls in my peripheral are slightly shaking, and that I realize I’m coming close to that stage in the journey where I can’t write anymore, at least not for awhile. Not until the reality comes back just a little. So I grab my headphones and play some old school eminem and it is just absolutely heaven. I realize a privileged escape is most certainly in the works.
And as I rock out, the ants come out and join me. No longer one by one, there’s a whole swarm of them now. Coming from underneath the goddamn table. I crush them all to the flow of the beat, letting Em’s acid words take me away to a world of reckoning.
And in the middle of all this, a new memory comes to me. It’s from a few years back, the last time I was stupid with my meds. But this isn’t a memory of that, it’s a memory of the day after, laying in bed feeling like a puddle of death. My brain decomposing inside my skull, my muscles weak and crying out each time I move. But the worst of it all is knowing that I had at least two more days of this. That’s why the journey isn’t worth it. That’s why this whole thing is stupid. And that’s what I have to look forward to, I know, come tomorrow. Feeling like a puddle of death in a world that also feels like a puddle of death. Fantastic.
“Ah!” I scream as I feel a finger poke my shoulder.
It’s Barrett, letting me know my shower is back to normal.
“Thanks man, I really appreciate it.” I stare at him now, thinking about whether to call him out for telling on me yet again. The moment comes, and then it goes, and I remain silent.
“Wanna smoke some weed?” he asks. “I got a bowl packed in my pocket.”
“Yes Barrett,” I say, “yes I do.”
Up Next: The Landlady Writes Me a Letter and the Internet Explodes.
