This story is based on a combination of events in my life which I have combined into one. Please indulge me my memories of loved ones lost.
Of course, I knew it before the doctor gave me the news. I know my body and for some time now it hasn't been right.
The prognosis didn't frighten me. Not so much anyway. At least now I knew when and how I was going to die. The difficult part was dying alone.
Estranged from my family, or what was left of it, having been divorced for some 12 years, and having my latest stomp off in anger and confusion because I'd stopped having sex with him, left me quite alone.
I could have told Leon that I was sick. He might have understood. He might have. Leon was a spoiled shit even if it was me that spoiled him.
All these thoughts and a cluster more sped through my mind as I walked home from my latest and last medical appointment.
The wind was harsh, cold. I put my hands in my pockets and hunched my shoulders up, and my chin down. Dead leaves and trash swirled and danced to the gusts. Overcast skies matched my bleak mood and dulled the cityscape.
The city had all but turned to crap and that crap was evident in the streets. Once a vibrant city, the corruption that was tearing it apart from within was now devouring it from without. I knew that feeling. I think it was almost a year ago when I first felt something was eating away at my insides. I had my suspicions but did not act on them. The battery of tests I'd subjected myself to were for confirmation only. "Why delay the inevitable,?" I said to myself over and over. "None of us are getting out of here alive."
I stopped in the liquor store near my apartment and bought a half gallon of VO Gold. "Ah yes, the stuff dreams are made of, the breakfast of champions, chicken soup for the soul". My getting drunk wouldn't change the outcome, not one iota. It would, however, help dull the pain, and sharpen my reflections. "Add a carton of Kools to that Mike."
I hadn't smoked for nearly 15 years but they say it isn't what you do today that will kill you. It's what you did 20 years ago. Some shit has a way of catching up to you. Some shit you just can't out run. My diagnosis confirmed that.
I turned my collar to the cold and damp and thought about that song of Simon and Garfunkel's, "The Sound of Silence" and had a minor chuckle about the absurdity of it all.
A light drizzle spit at me. "Fuck, is this my karma?" My death sentence assured on a cold and windy day wasn't bad enough. Now it was going to rain on my parade. "Parade hell. My procession."
I left the lights off in my flat. The gray from outside suited me and I opened the blinds. The filtered gray created a kind of film noir look to my apartment. I opened the carton of Kools and took out a pack. That first cigarette was like seeing an old friend. I held it under my nose inhaling the familiar scent of my assassin.
My head spun with the first drag. My lungs, what was left of them, welcomed the mentholated intrusion. I coughed until I was dizzy and then hit that smoke again.
I poured myself a very generous glass of VO, neat. Ice is for summer and sissies, this is winter. The winter of my discontent as it were.
I sat back in my recliner and reached for the remote. I turned on a cable provided music channel, baroque, sound down low.
"Down low," I snorted. I knew what that was. I lived it. Lived it until I was no longer on the DL. It was ultimately the cause of my divorce. Sue simply refused to share me with a man. I couldn't blame her. I had lost all interest inn pussy after I met Leon. No, that isn't right.
Leon took me away from pussy into a whole new world.
I exhaled, took a swallow and thought back to the beginning. My beginning.
I remembered back in the day, back when I was in my early twenties, I could do more tricks on new pussy that a monkey could on 50 feet of vine. Pussy was my drug of choice, my raison d'etre. I was proud of my ability to "pull" a woman out of a bar for a one nighter. But that's wasn't the half of it.
Women pulled me as well. I smiled remembering the time I was eating in a steak house alone. One side had jazz bands; the other half was dining. Vicky, the hostess flirted as she showed me to my table. My waitress was pleasant but not too friendly. But later, when I was half way through my porterhouse she stopped by. I was going to tell her everything was fine but she pointed to one of her co-workers and told me that she was shy but wanted to know if she gave me her number would I call.
Her name was Susan and I don't care how many times she corrected me; I called her Sue.
I absolutely fucked that hostess Vicky. Spent a night and half the next day fucking and sucking. She had been around block more than once. My kind of gal. She knew what she wanted and was none too shy about getting it.
Susan was another story.
I made love to Sue. I hadn't planned on it. I thought she was going to be another conquest but I had to admit it, there was something special about her. Magnetic. The attraction was mutual. Shortly after our first assignation, we became inseparable.
Then husband and wife.
I smiled remembering the feeling I had when saying, "Forsaking all others." I assured myself that I'd most certainly left a trail of well fucked ladies in my wake.
What was it about her? I remember looking down that first time we had sex and seeing her large brown eyes looking back at me. There was something there that captured my heart. A look of trust that I wouldn't take advantage of her; use her and toss her out afterwards as I had so many before her. She was vulnerable yet open.
I would come to have that same look about me the first time Leon looked down at me with his cock in my ass. He did not react the same way I did though.
But that was a few years later.
At the start, my life together with Sue was one of happiness. We challenged each other in ways that were new to me. I worked hard to surprise her, to make her feel loved, wanted, needed. Sue returned my efforts with her own.
She had come to the East Coast city from the mid-West. Some small town 80 miles West of Chicago. Sue had all the Mid-America small town attributes which "big time city folks" either ridiculed or readily took advantage of.
That was until I looked down into those trusting and hopeful brown eyes. There was nothing I wouldn't do for her and told her so.
Sue took that as an opportunity and had me swear off cigarettes. I went cold turkey becoming an ogre for a month. She stood by me and forgave the meanness oozing out of me as the urge to smoke finally faded. I was then 25 and had smoked for more than half my life. Cigarettes had been a friend, a crutch. Always there when I needed comfort, when I needed reassurance, when I was bored. I said good bye to my old friend because Sue came first.
We bought a house in the burbs and my best friend gave us a Pug puppy as a wedding gift. Sue loved that puppy. Me, well I was amused at the way he tried to fuck every stuffed animal toy he had. The Deacon was relentless in his pursuits. He reminded me of me in earlier times.
Thoughts of that Pug brought a smile to my face for the first time in days. I sipped my drink and tilted my glass in a mock salute to my long gone puppy.
I thought of my family and how, when the end, my end came, they'd probably welcome it.
My parents were dead. Mom by breast cancer which she bravely fought for two years before succumbing. Dad, passed a year and some later from what we all suspected was a broken heart.
That left me and two sisters.
At 18 I was an orphan.
It wasn't that we were close. We touched base every so often and kept up with the family goings on.
My sisters were supportive of our marriage and accepted Susan as one of their own. She and my sisters spent loads of time together.
