Dead-end inspiration. Shot in Brixton, South London, 2011.
Image credit: Lexia Snowe © 2014. All rights reserved.
It was in his small, squat hometown that Drake became aware he had lost all will to live.
Living was expensive, messy, disrespectful, and when it gave you anything at all it gave you a cheap imitation. Particularly in this town. Its streets the color of a smoker’s lung. Its skyline of industrial exclamation marks, against which its trees held up lattices of foliage as frail as the lesson plans of its teachers.
Pigeons here pecked at their own feet as though to guard against carrying anything away with them. Its paperboys were angry. Its lost cat posters were angry. Even its walk signs flashed fast and furious: walk, if you still think that’s gonna get you somewhere, walk.
Living, meanwhile, was done and undone here with all the grand force of its graffiti. This said WHO THAT, persistently, in various hands, and BLACK PAINT in black paint.
Drake was done. If anyone missed him, they would mean they missed the cartwheel kid in the happy-go-lucky hand-me-downs, who could have been the face that launched a thousand alphabet oven chips. They would mourn for that boy, holding the Kodak sarcophagus of him closer to the light to be sure that was happiness. They would mourn for him, despite knowing that boy was lost long ago in a man they would not miss. Man or maybe mannequin; either way, with suspicions that to be meaningful was beyond him, propped in escalators, or at his desk at work, or in a driver’s seat. Making motions, cocking smiles, shedding cells.
The first thing Drake decided was: not at home. It was the only possibility that scared him — to have the chiselling monotone of the fridge or the plaintive thumping of the radiators for his background music as he took the elevator up or down or in every direction at once, whatever death was.
Also, his girlfriend Gail would find the body. She’d call a radio show, then his mother, then the police. Wanting to be famous wasn’t quite strong enough for Gail. Gail lived only to be immortal. The purpose of her life was to add value to her biography; she lived in the future past tense. She would not let this opportunity pass to have heartbreak go wide in her story. Drake didn’t resent it because he knew, when her hair grips were plinked off onto the bedside table and the TV was turned down low and left on because its shuddering light reassured her she wasn’t missing out as she slept — he knew then, in that queasy darkness, Gail would indeed be heartbroken. She loved him. That was the only thing that was true.
Drake decided instead on the trees curled like a clipped toenail of Eden behind the golf course. He liked that a passing bird might perform the perfect requiem by publishing its bowels’s thoughts on yesterday across his body.
As for method, he meant to avoid those ways in which it was possible to leap for the fire, then fall short or slip, and clunk into the frying pan instead, still breathing when they scraped you out and towelled you down and said what’s it all about, you big queen. Maybe ending up a zigzag in a wheelchair who couldn’t so much as pick out the fluff from his own navel. He’d have to sit there with nothing but the whistling scrape of his own breath: the perfect soundtrack to the infinite internal slideshow of all his old mistakes, of which falling short or slipping was merely the most obvious.
Jumping from a parking structure was generally conclusive — but not in this town. Here, it was just four levels high, and had trees at the bottom. Drake just knew he’d be the guy who ended up hanging upside-down from a lower branch, held there by the quiet, cruel fortitude of the laces of one snagged sneaker. Flies sordidly sniffing at all the blood like nature’s own crackheads. When consciousness set to work on his eyes, there would be his mother. Staring at him from the grass a meter away, flanked by her lapdogs Lucky and Strike. Growling, “That’s my son indeed, Officer,” before coughing once on her cigarette.
He decided on pills. Hundreds of them. Tiny pellets the color of innocence that taken together would unfurl and shut off his life passages. No, it wasn’t a noble end, but he wasn’t looking for that. Just a certain one.
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