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       Meat Won't Pay My Light Bill Excerpt

I found myself drinking and smoking more than usual.
Life's compromises were endless, it seemed. You occasionally wondered if they were worth it.
Or if you were simply selling your soul for a sack of dog shit. That’s when the drinking and
excessive smoking came into play, I guess.
My mother began beating on my door at 9 a.m. I’d gotten out of the bar at 3:30, fallen into
bed at 5:00. Again, the woman was trying to finish me off, push me over the edge, drive me
toward the blade.
I tore off the sheets and ripped the door open:
“WHAT IS IT? A FIRE? IT BETTER BE A FIRE YOU WOKE ME FOR!”
“IT’S 9 A.M.!” my mother screamed. “GET OUT OF THAT BED AND TRY TO MAKE
SOMETHING OF YOURSELF!”
“WOMAN, YOU ARE LOOKING AT A MAN WHO HAS JUST RETURNED FROM A
TRIP THROUGH ALL NINE CIRCLES OF HELL!”
“GET OUT OF BED, YOU BUM! COME OUT OF THAT CAVE OF YOURS! YOU
DIDN’T WORK THAT HARD LAST NIGHT! I TALKED TO CELESTE!”
Celeste was one of the owners of the Sauce Box. She and a friend of hers named Sally co-
owned the place. I liked Celeste and Sally. They were always swilling scotch and yukking it
up, trying to run the place while seeing double. My kind of women. They’d most likely been
too drunk the night before to acknowledge my quality labor. I got about as much recognition in
the work world as I did in the art and literary world. Me and Van Gogh. Me and Hamsun. Oh,
the world would come to know my name one day. The world would be damned sorry it hadn’t
kissed my ass a little more ... Well, it was a nice delusion. And the more you failed, the more
you came to believe it. Perfect.
I stood in the doorway, scratched myself, said nothing.
“YOU SHOULD HAVE SEEN THE WAY YOUR FATHER WORKED AT YOUR AGE!”
my mother screamed.
I’d seen the way that guy had worked.
“YOUR FATHER HAD AMBITION!”
I pushed the door shut and climbed back into bed.
“HE COULD’VE BURIED YOU WITH ONE HAND TIED BEHIND HIS BACK!”
I buried him with both hands tied, I thought. Then nodded out and into dreamland.

   Two hours later I was at the grocery store, cutting steaks from a side of beef. From bed to
the butcher’s block. Then to the bar. My old man had held down three jobs toward the end of
his life, and never less than two—the eternal impossibility of making ends meet. No wonder
the guy drank and smoked himself to death. It was the only way he could get a day off.
Despite all the work, he never did manage a way to make those ends meet. At least not
comfortably, not without having to forfeit both health and sanity, not without
having to lay down his life. It wasn’t until after he died and my mother received a pile of
insurance money and a pension from the U.S. Army that the ends finally met. Spend your life
digging blindly, and find your pot of gold at the bottom of the grave. The American way.
   I hacked at that expensive side of dead meat, up to my elbows in blood and gore.I was
feeling a little unsteady from lack of sleep, unfocused. One had to be careful while cutting
steaks, even when wide awake. Those knives were sharp enough to cut through bone. From
outside the meat-cooler one of the girls yelled a standard lowbrow witticism:
“LUPUS, STOP PLAYING WITH YOUR MEAT! WE KNOW WHAT YOU’RE DOING
IN THERE!”
I heard it all the fucking time. It was as stale as the day was dull. If I was in there, or Jack was
in there, one of the girls was sure to shout it, usually at the top of her lungs. But I was half
asleep that morning. My nerves were ravaged, my mind was frayed. When I heard it, I
jumped. And brought the blade down on the wrong piece of meat. For a moment, I didn’t
even feel anything, the cut was so clean. Then the pain asserted itself and began to spread,
white hot and larger than life. I began to scream. Donnie Lynn stuck her head into the cooler
to see what the problem was. Her hair was gathered into a crazy ponytail that shot straight up
from the top of her skull. One look at her and you knew that humanity was a flash in the pan,
a dime store novelty, faulty by design and doomed to fail. Our extinction was inevitable.
The cockroach would soon be King again.