THE DOG HUNTERS (completed)

42 - BABIES

Morning light when I finished unloading the supplies, maybe dawn, maybe dusk.I couldn't tell and I didn't care. Too much heavy lifting, and too many heavy thoughts. I was transporting the last of the glass jars,delicates I couldn't just shove in with everything else. I was a nervous wreck again, now that my task was done. I was convinced I would be discovered. This time, I thought teenagers were going to show up at any second to start partying, or the suppliers had alerted the Nurse family who were now sending the cops, or their own hired thugs.

All this ugliness swirling around in my head when something caught my eye. It was the sort of thing that's probably happening everywhere,all the time, but you never see it unless you've been real still fora while, or you're completely strung out, like I was then.

It was nature. It was a yellow baby bird being eaten alive by a posse of ants. Small red ants, brown in the sketchy light, moving fluidly over the bird's body, apparently not wasting what was clearly a wonderful opportunity for them.

She must have fallen out of her mother's nest. She looked like she was only a few days old. Her whole body looked like it had been dipped in a glaze, her eyes were shut, and her little beak opened and closed in slow, silent wails. I assumed it was a she, and I couldn't tell you why. She was half the size of a Twinkie. I think she was trying to get away, but it was hopeless. There were too many ants, and they had her.

It was the most horrible thing I've ever seen, much worse than the multitude of atrocities I witnessed on Skid Row. Other than watch herdie, I felt the only choice I could make would be to take one of the broken slabs of concrete littering the site, and smash her to death with it. Make it fast. And then get some lighter fluid from the bunker and burn those fucking ants. But, of course, I was too much of a coward to do this, and instead I found a dry leaf, scooped her up,and chucked her further back into the weeds.

It was that baby bird who got me out of the bunker.

I couldn't sleep that night, couldn't get her out of my mind, or whatI'd done. I basically stopped sleeping after that, and spent my time obsessing about the bird. She came to represent every reason in the world why I was a complete dick, a total loser. What I had done to her was no different than how I treated everyone else around me.

I'd never had friends. I'd only pretended to so I could prove I wasn't Johnny Bobo, and as you can imagine, such relationships don't last. Same with girlfriends, therapists, caseworkers, in that order.

When I stopped working, when I'd lost all my money on those lawsuits, I'd started understanding why other people dug support. But you've got to give it to get it. No wonder my mother shunted me on the family house. She wasn't the asshole, I was. All the relationships I'd ever had ended the same way, with me leaving, with me acting like a dick because it was in my best self-interest to do so.

I spent all my time in bed, obsessing. I only got up to use the bathroom, or open a can. I stopped being diligent about the food. I stopped drinking booze because it didn't make any difference. I was living in a world of post-buzz. The bunker was the perfect place for a selfish asshole like myself. That was the real reason I couldn't leave.

We create our own coffins, or something like that.

I tried to accept this. Not surprisingly, there was a small library of books next to the videos, and I guess, even more not surprisingly most of the titles devoted to the self-help genre.

I read everything in what seemed to be one sitting, and even though they all had different covers and different titles, and were particularly aimed at different sexes, or just different kinds ofsex, they were all basically the same, with the same messages:accept, meditate, unconditional love.

And for a second it all seemed so easy – easy to accept I was loser.But that didn't make me feel better, even when I meditated on it and tried to love it. Actually the more I meditated, the more I felt that I shouldn't feel better, that the whole point of trying to follow some self-help guidelines was fighting against the inevitable truth, that it was part of the problem.

This might have connected with another self-help buzz word: forgiveness.If that was the big problem then I'd give it a shot, and I did, but like acceptance, forgiveness went nowhere. It was like trying to throw a switch in a dark room, with your hands tied behind your back.One thing that my forgiveness work did produce: tears. I cried, and I cried and I cried.

The only peace I received during this time was when I pretended my life was different. I pretended I'd saved the baby bird. I pretended I'd nursed her back to health, and she was now my little friend, who lived with me and tweeted happily at me from the TV console where she'd made her nest. Everyday I'd go out an find the biggest juiciest worms for her. If I overslept she'd tickle me with her feathers.

I could usually get about five minutes of peace out of this fantasy before the truth came crashing back, like a mean cold wave. And then it hit again, and again...

At some point I decided, once again, it was all over. There wasn't exactly a particular moment, or insight, or revelation. I realized,  in the bed in a fetal position, it was time to die, again.