A short story by Matt Coppens

My father lay there on the hospital bed with a bandage covering the right side of his throat from the esophagus cancer surgery he’d just had. He lay there limp, weak, helpless. My pop, the man who served 5 years in the U.S. military between 1962 and 1967, the toughest son of a bitch I’d ever known lay there not even able to lift his arms to feed himself the ice chips the nurse’s had left for him to keep his mouth from drying out too badly.

The rest of the family, my girlfriend, and brother in-law were all there, too frightened to feed him the ice chips so I did it. Leaning over him with a plastic spoon in my hand I gently dropped a few ice chips into his mouth, a thin-lipped Belgian mouth that he inherited from his father, the same thin-lipped mouth I inherited from him.

As I was feeding him my pop opened his eyes half way to tell me ‘Matt. Matthew. You’ll always be my favorite son…’ before passing back out into a drug-induced sleep, snoring away like an overgrown, stubbly, fast-talkin’, hell-raisin’ son of a bitch, that my pop is.

Maybe it was the drugs talking or just a poor use of words or maybe he was just trying to joke around to let the family know he was okay but I mean of course I’ll always be his favorite son, I’m the fuckin’ guy’s only son.

This was heavy. Yes, the surgery was successful. The doctors had caught the cancer early enough and were able to cut it out of his body. But, to see the man you once boasted to your childhood friends about for having the ability to lift a house over his head if he felt like it knocked out and beaten, looking so frail, so weak, so close to the other side, this weighed on me.

I didn’t know it then but the events that unfolded that day had shaped and molded me in more ways than one and made me realize in order to not explode completely from the inside I was going to have to start doing something, anything, to get these things, these feelings, these monsters out that live inside of me.

On the drive back from Ann Arbor, Michigan to Chicago from my dad’s cancer surgery that night my long time girlfriend announced to me that she no longer wanted to see me. I’ve written about this in the past quite extensively and am somewhat tired of the subject as it’s become mundane and we’ve recently made peace so I’ll just say it made quite an impact and certainly molded me into who and what I am today for better or worse.

After the split I found myself living in a dumpy dingy dive with 4 other people in a 3 bedroom apartment. I lived there for 9 months and was drunk and depressed and doing drugs the entire time. I’d lay in bed blasting sad broken hearted love songs and drink until I couldn’t see. I wasn’t writing music or doing anything creatively. I had no outlet.

With no outlet and no place to go my behavior went from rational to irrational. My thought was that there’s no reason to even try acting rational in an irrational world where lovers turn their backs on one another and world leaders kill off women and children for their own financial benefit. This world was not kind. It was fucked up and I hated it and wanted to destroy it.

I went from bad to worse: Throwing glasses in bartender’s faces, pissing on people’s kitchen floors at parties, kicking in headlights of parked cars, smashing bottles into my own face out of drunken spite, drunken pain, etc. I had a fist full of problems and nowhere to go with them and noone to talk to.

This was where I learned I could hold my own with the best boozers in the world and where I discovered that I could get a woman to find interest in me. After my long-term relationship ended I never thought I could get another girl to speak to me again. Soon I was out womanizing and pouring booze down my throat at least 5 days a week.

I was always coming home in the morning from a night of drinking covered in bruises and cuts and couldn’t explain them. I had no recollection of what had gone on many times after bar close and often couldn’t even tell you whose floor I had woken up on or who the girl sawing logs in bed beside me was before sneaking out of her house and making my way back home.

My only accomplishments in those days was meeting some great people, making friends, staying out of jail, and getting and holding down a social service job working as a job counselor with developmentally disabled (mentally retarded) adults. Despite the benefits though, this wasn’t quite enough to soothe and satisfy my diseased and damaged brain.

After 9 months I moved into another 3 bedroom apartment with another 4 people. I was drinking like a fish and tried getting into martial arts to distract me from myself and help me relax. It worked for a little while but then it took a backseat to booze before becoming something nonexistent in my life.

I wasn’t quite as self-destructive anymore in the way of physical injuries even though my drinking had gotten even worse. This was where I learned I needed a 15 pack of Old Style or a fifth of Mad Dog 20/20 every single night to make the screaming in my head come to a soft and subtle whisper.

I could drink my beer and hang out at home playing my own records. I didn’t need or want people around, but when I’d lay down for bed 2 or 3 hours past the time I should have been in bed that’s when it would all begin, all the darkness. In my head I’d make a list of my failures in life and this was death to have your mind screaming at you, keeping you from even a second of rest. Suicidal thoughts and heartache and wanting, needing something else, but what? I didn’t have any answers. The slate was black.

I was miserable and it was obvious. Friends of mine knew I wrote record reviews but they told me they thought I was capable of writing about so much more than solely music. ‘What would I write about, though?’ I asked them. ‘Anything. Whatever you want. Get it off your chest…’

I can’t remember when I sat down and wrote it but the first thing I wrote was a sloppy untrained raw abstract musing on how my life was spiraling out of control but how I still had hope that I could get things back to ‘normal’, if you could ever call my life that, again. I titled it Untitled, like how I felt, and to me though sloppy, much like most of my work done even as little back as a year ago, it still holds a certain beginner’s charm and was done in some ways like an unschooled similar style as Last Exit To Brooklyn.

After writing this story, if you will, I felt good. It all just poured out of me and I felt for the first time in almost a year like I had accomplished something. That ‘something’ was getting feelings out of me onto paper that I didn’t feel comfortable enough to talk about with my friends. It was like a gorilla being lifted off my chest.

I started writing more and more, feeling good, ambitious. I published my first zine around this time and named it after my favorite song, Panic Attack. I did a few readings around town and they were all well-received and the zine was being bought and given good reviews.

Feeling good and ambitious didn’t last long though and soon I was off to drinking more heavily than ever and when I’m drinking I can’t write. It would be months before I would even sit and try to write another word.

I was out on the town a lot by this point. Parties, punk shows, bars, literary events. People were introducing me to their friends as a writer. ‘writer? Me?’ I thought. I just grinned and talked the talk, feeling like a fraud. How could I be a writer when I haven’t written a thing in months? Every writer I knew wrote and seeing as I wasn’t writing squat I wasn’t a writer. Not in my eyes.

Frustrated, I sat down one night after receiving emails and requests to have me out reading. I sat there and started typing and what came out was good. Real good. Surprisingly, taking a couple months off without writing had somehow made me a better writer. So I sat back down the next day and more words came and soon I was on my way. I had somehow managed to sit in my little room in my underwear with a cup of coffee and type out a very well written fiction story about a girl trying to send a boy, the hero of the story, to AA against his will, which easily displayed the finest dialogue I had written at the time.

Satisfied, I ran off to the liquor store, feeling accomplished, and went on another 2 month bender where I wrote virtually nothing, save for the occasional poem. Poetry is a nice easy form. You can knock it all out in one page and when you nail it you feel perfection in the printed form, the best feeling I’ve experienced yet. But unfortunately the booze man was right across the street and he gave me the store discount on 15 packs of Old Style and like I said earlier, when I’m drinking I can’t write and from 5 pm to 1 am Monday through Thursday I was drinking. Weekends I didn’t stop drinking. There was no time to write so I drank and drank and blasted my music and broke a few hearts, never really able to get over my own broken heart. The booze was keeping it all at bay and without writing these beasts and demons inside me were beginning to gnaw away at my insides and grow stronger than ever.

A year went by and I moved into an apartment with one roommate who worked different hours than I. I had the run of the place from around 5 to 8 or 9 pm on most nights. I used these valuable hours I could be using for writing, for drinking beer and sitting on my ass or staring a hole into the floor.

Alcohol shakes weren’t new to me but they had started coming on so strong that they were becoming obvious to my parents and co-workers. They’d ask if everything was okay and I’d just tell them ‘too much coffee’. Just one sip will stop the shakes but to be going through withdraws of this kind is not healthy, or natural. Your nerves have got to be pretty fucking damaged and your body, chemically dependant, on the substance you’re using/abusing.

Nights were getting even worse and I was missing many days of work. No vacation or sick or personal time left for me and I was only halfway through the year. All pissed away from weekend benders that didn’t end on Sunday morning. At night I’d think of the stories I’d written and had plans of sending them out to be published but my brain would begin screaming from inside my skull ‘Punk-ass motherfucker! Why ya gonna send that SHIT out, man? It’s fuckin’ bullshit! You look and sound like a pussy! Noone’s gonna take it ’cause nobody’s THAT fuckin’ stupid! Phony little bitch!’ and I couldn’t figure out how to shut it off, shut it up.

Then it hit me, out of the blue, like a baseball bat to a kneecap, I came up with an idea: I’ll write that motherfucker’s mouth shut and anybody else who ever doubts or disrespects me again, I’ll write their ass into the ground. Kill ‘em all with these words. These words are all I got.

The next day I sat down and decided whether it be good, bad, or the other, I wasn’t going to stop until I could breathe normally again. I pecked away and away feverishly for hours on end, sweat dripping down my nose, eyes blazing with a scowl on my face nailing poems to the walls, drilling these words into the heart’s of those I loved and hated. These were poems of love and hatred and understanding and searching and compassion and broken hearts and sadness. These poems were my bullets.

The next day I wrote more and more and with a bit of time the prose began to form again and more stories were written, not so romantic this time around, aged, finely. The passion had returned and I swore then that I wouldn’t let it escape again.

With writing, and I won’t lie, it did take years, I was finally, eventually, able to overcome a broken heart and the mortality of myself and my loved ones and I did it all alone with only myself to thank. The screaming in my head has stopped and at this time I can say I am well, though I am not a saint. In fact I can be mean, selfish, strange, withdrawn, egotistical, sloppy drunk, and obnoxious. But deep in my heart I know, and those closest to me know what’s really lurking about in there. Nothing ever comes up roses and sunshine for me but I feel I’ve moved slightly away from the darkness. I don’t know if I can stay in the light for long. Only time will tell. But mark my words: when the writing has finally come to a permanent stop, it’s probably pretty safe to assume that the authorities are zipping my limp, lifeless body up and dragging my carcass out of my house in a body bag.

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