Life only has beginnings, middles and ends in hindsight.
At the time I was 17, I had run away from boarding school in Ireland and was living in New York, stuck in the top floor of a shitty building in a one room bedsit, no kitchen, no fucking anything. I worked as a landscaper over the border in Connecticut. I worked for a prize A asshole - The American dream, a big babyish white boy living out in the burbs, had his own business, wife too, was a big fella in the fire department. Oh yea, wanted to be a captain or some sort. Well that was how I saw him then, now… 30 years later, was he just a fella who ran a business, someone who gave people jobs… from his eyes I must have been a sight… I was a bit of a mess I guess, not a bad worker, but I didn’t talk much and didn’t really give a shit about people. I was a kid, far from home, living out some punk dream and finding that life bloody hurt. The other people working there… bloody hell… Bunker, the Connecticut red neck. I hated him. He has a rebel flag in the back of his pickup. He was a fucking baby too, had been a marine, or parachutist or something, had been discharged I think. He was in the bloody fire department too. They were all volunteers I think. To me it seemed that they were just trying to make out they were big players in the community. Then there was Charlie the crack head, a kid too, he thought he was younger than me but I had lied about my age, lied about my green card too, I was illegal. Charlie was a fucking mess, another baby, smoked a lot of crack, as his dad (to my amazement) shouted, ‘ah Charlie, you up there smoking all that crack.’ I don’t think my dad would have been so accommodating!! But my dad was dead, had died 3 years before. The way I figured it, it was me out in the world and that was how I liked it. Of course, we’re talking about a guy here who is going to slit his wrists soon, but I had a stance that I liked – I was out there doing my own thing, wearing what I wanted, caring less, smoking weed, drinking, bit of crack – luckily I didn’t have an addictive personality.
Well anyway, I don’t know why this day was any worse than any other.