dostoevsky one day.

Like...25? years ago I lived in NYC and worked at a small printing company run by a married couple.  She was into the Russian novels and we were all avid readers so during the Great Russian Novel Era many subway rides to and fro were spent reading the likes of The Brothers Karamazov, Anna Karenina, and Crime and Punishment.  At some point we had a Russian expat working with us so I got to bitch about how the novels were good to a point but would inevitably collapse into a pool of twaddle.  The endings ruined everything.  His most brilliant response: the first 499 pages are for the people; the last page is for the state.  Of course! I don't want to live in Siberia any more than Dostoevsky.

In NYC, I lived in an old welfare hotel on the upper West Side of Manhattan.  It was units of single rooms with shared kitchen and bathroom.  My own room was 8x8.  I lived there seven years.  My take was, dude, it's fricking New York City; all you need the room for is to sleep, the rest was spent Out There.  And I was right. In seven years I only recall one or two days not leaving the room due to weather emergency.

But I was poor.  I was poor. Who could I date living this way? Who, like me, would piss in a bucket because the asshole Muslim guy was in the bathroom during sunset or whatever the fuck doing his prayers for half an hour?  I'd go in there to dump the piss into the toilet afterward and the floor, the sink, the toilet would be drowning in many waters.  I dig any religion generally until for half an hour it keeps me from taking a dump.

Pauline had the room next to the bathroom.  I had the room behind kitchen. There were three others in between, the Muslim guy and two rooms of varying Latino peoples who maybe knew each other.  Every Sunday morning Pauline would be in the kitchen frying chicken in a cast iron pan.  But before that, I'd wake up to Pauline in the kitchen straightening her hair by heating her metal comb in the flame; I'd wake up to the smell of burning hair.

The Latino peoples were fond of  tripe, tho only smell possibly worse than burning hair. And the Muslim guy would store a chicken in a pot of water in the cabinets for days, leaving me with the gift of roaches.  One day, all roached out and pissed, I threw his fucking chicken out the window into the alley below.  Later we would have words over the matter and the knife he'd been using to cut up his replacement chicken was suddenly lingering in the space between us. I lodged a complaint at the local police department should I turn up dead one day, but nothing further came of it.  This was the same police department where I reported my stolen car.  A year later I was sent a bill for a parking ticket. New York.

But we were talking about Dostoevsky.

All I remember was reading Crime and Punishment and then going down for the count.  Down, baby!  It was my first breakdown, my first fissure, my first introduction to vulnerability and a fleeting, tenuous existence. Raskolnikov. 

During this breakdown, my sole directive was to: get up. Get up and go to work, just get up, get up. If I did not get up just once, it was curtains.  I became certain I could will myself to die in about a week's time.  I still believe this. I fought for it, and one day I was still alive, and so it went.

So...twenty five or so years later...I got to thinking about ol' Raskolnikov and the very moment that sent me down that rabbit hole.  I knew the line almost precisely but would take naught for granted.  In my present incarnation I needed to rediscover that line, that moment.  Christmas seemed like a fun time for this. I went to the library.

Crime and Punishment is like a LOT of pages, over 400.  I didn't remember much from my first reading of it other than The Line. This round, all I really wanted was to find it. It took nearly 300 pages of HOLYCRAPWHATISTHISSHIT?!? and two check out renewals and one internet to find it.  Such drama, this Raskolnikov, what a pussy, this guy!  Half the time I had no idea what was going on.  What's changed in twenty five years? Was it a crappy translation or was it just me getting older and less open or patient or curious?  No matter, around page 250 I no longer gave a rat's ass; I wanted OUT. Also I'm pretty sure there was more than one page Woody Allen plagiarized verbatim in Love and Death.

So I googled the sentence as I remembered it, and it turned out I was a mere few pages away.

Those days, not too unlike now, my own clothes weren't new, I didn't own a telephone and I wasn't opposed to picking up off the street a mostly intact-but-discarded cigarette. I'd assigned nobility to my eternal dearth, like if I could give it purpose it would make it livable, honorable even. So that when I stepped outside at 6 a.m. and encountered half a dozen homeless people asking for money between bed and work, I very nobly would give them each a certain amount. It was small, but it adds up, right?  When there was a naked guy passed out on the subway platform one early rush hour, I peeled off a layer to drape over his privates. When the cops stirred him to consciousness with the tip of their boots and he managed to stand up, it was my shirt he clutched into his groin. "Hey, Bud, Where's ya pants?"  

I was saving the world by these acts, I was saving myself.  Noble, honorable, elevated: I had reason to be on earth. 

And then I read that line and then I saw my reality and the house of cards tumbles down, down, down.  All I had to do, every day, was get up.  Then years passed.

I've been thinking about ol' Raskolnikov but was ambivalent about tampering with my new house of cards. But then it was the holidays and you know, fuck it.

I've never figured out the point of being here, on earth.  Alive.  My parent's had sex, I'm here; we have sex, more arrive, and so it goes.   A smart man would know it's all some strange infinite circumstance and sit back and enjoy the ride. I enjoy much of it; I enjoy, everyday, drifting down a side street on my bicycle and feeling the sun on my arms, and this is love.   Earlier this week I was painting, the windows were open and the air was perfect and I was listening to Nick Cave's Push the Sky Away CD and I was floating through space and this is church.  Love and Church, I know both and I am fortunate.  But I am also restless and cut off and have never been able to find my place, really, and think a lot about what I have done to get me here and worse, what I do to keep me here trapped in no place and maybe I needed Raskolnikov to break a few dishes again, inside me.

But the thing is, it's exactly that, ALL THAT, that is my house of cards now.  I'm supposed to just GO to TGI Fridays and eat really bad food and laugh too loud at everything and go home and feel goodgoodgood to be part of humanity.  I got along!  I fit in! People liked me!  They were awesome!  It was fun!  Except I can't do this because it's really, really horrible.

I no longer think myself noble or elevated or honorable.  I'm older now, I know better, all the little tricks we play to get ourselves out of bed everyday, assignations and subterfuges, white lies and conceits and bravados and pretenses. Sometimes I think I still might become the man I want to be.  Mostly it's because I have to pee.