Why I Committed Suicide Read online

  Why I Committed

  Suicide

  sam paul

  iUniverse, Inc.

  New York Lincoln Shanghai

  Why I Committed Suicide

  All Rights Reserved © 2004 by Samuel Paul

  No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means,

  graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping, or by

  any information storage retrieval system, without the written permission of the publisher.

  iUniverse, Inc.

  For information address:

  iUniverse, Inc.

  2021 Pine Lake Road, Suite 100

  Lincoln, NE 68512

  www.iuniverse.com

  A portion of the profits from this book, if there ever are any, will be donated to

  Spinal Cord Research.

  All Names Have Been Changed to Protect the Unwilling.

  For author information and permissions, address Samuel Paul, 5507 Bent Bough,

  Houston, TX 77088

  Paul, Samuel E., 1963-

  Why I Committed Suicide or ‘Le Petit Mort’: a sexual double entendre’ that extends

  from the belief that whenever a man ejaculates and gives himself fully over to a woman

  he must die a little. When that happens it isn’t so much a tribute as it is a chronicle.

  Samuel E. Paul

  ISBN: 0-595-32695-1

  ISBN: 978-0-5957-7500-2 (ebk)

  CONTENTS

  PART I

  SUMMER ‘93, DEAD

  SHOWS and LIFE

  PART II

  TRAVEL, HABITS and

  LIFE

  PART III

  THE ACCIDENT, JAIL

  TIME, SUICIDE and

  LIFE

  PART IV

  THE REST

  ENDNOTES

  You are about to read something that made me die. Just a bit. Enjoy!

  For her of course

  “You gonna give all this up?

  8-Track Stereo, color TV in every room and can snort a half a piece a dope

  every day, that’s the American Dream nigga. Well ain’t it!?

  You better come on in man!”

  —Superfly, 1972

  PART I

  SUMMER ‘93, DEAD

  SHOWS and LIFE

  1993

  “Turn around you dumbass!”

  The summer heat was bearing down on the yellow hat I had perched on my head. The grease inside my skateboard trucks was approaching meltdown and the bearings were whirring with the not unpleasant sound of overuse. Push, push! Go, go! Smoke, bearings, smoke!

  It was only in the blink of an eye that I saw her. Not that I hadn’t seen her around before, or seen her in the way I would pass a thousand other girls on the street. But this time it was different. I actually saw her, or very nearly ran her over while lost in my personal masochistic world, pushing the boundaries of maximum skate-power into my body’s overheat zone. Instant endorphin serenity, pause. The pause of seconds among the fleeting shade filtered through hot pulsating, green leaves.

  “Turn the fuck around you dumbass!!” My brain screamed at me again from beneath the hat of fire. Turn around or you’ll regret this for the rest of your life. Wipe the sweat off your nasty face. Turn around and say “hi” to her or you’ll have one of those regrettable memories like the guy in “Citizen Kane.” Turn around and say… “Hi” . “Hi.”

  “What are you doing?” Her smile was disarming. My feeling of false-bravado fading beneath it.

  “Sitting on Fry Street and writing, you?” Cue the pounding heart and visions of children. Say something before she thinks you ‘re retarded.

  “Trying to skate, um, so, do you wanna go do some bong-hits?” Ooh that was bad.

  “Sure.”

  So it all begins. She merely smiled and I got the intelligence of an orange. Today, one of the most incredible women I have ever had the pleasure to lay eyes on, graced me with her company. No matter that I already broke up with the supposed “love of my life” less than a month ago in a messy fucking scene that took place in a flowery wallpapered bathroom. Never mind that earlier in the week I had given a completely gorgeous girl the “I don’t want any sort of relationship to ruin our friendship” talk because it was impossible to carry on any sort of conversation with her for more than ten seconds. What was I supposed to say? “Okay bronze Barbie would you mind leaving now that I have released my manly frustration upon your loins in a multi-hour bit of passion and sweat induced drench.” Of course I couldn’t ever put it that way because I’ve always had to be anice person, even when the topic is the unappealing unpleasantness of breaking up with a very dumb member of the opposite sex.

  I got so much grief about tossing away a perfectly good bimbo from my other brethren in the flophouse fraternity I’ve chosen to lodge in this sweltering summer that I had to put out the rumor she dumped me because I’m bad in the sack. I’d rather let them all think that I’m a lame fuck than know about my graduation from only appreciating hot dumb women on beer posters. My attraction for her waned immediately after easy attainment and how do I explain to my frat brothers that I’ve reached a turning point in my lusts and wants? Tits and pussy are great but eventually there needs to be more substance to a woman, even if my brothers can’t see it through their beer goggles yet. No, it’s far better for them to think me the victim of feminine rumor than doubt the seeds that define my primitive masculinity.

  But this girl I met today is the spark of existential I need. A feeding frenzy of electric eels are already swimming and stimulating the pleasure zones of erotica in my mind.

  Ask me how it feels when you know. You just know.

  Her name is Jenifer Jane Lansing and despite being born and bred here in the college town of Denton, Texas she carries herself with a worldly air that suggests she knows this town isn’t her fate. Jenifer’s just come back from a bad stint down south at A&M University and it just so happens she’s spending the summer doing the same thing I am, bumming around.

  After our brief street introduction Jenifer and I went into the room where I share space with my roommate Ernie and we smoked ourselves into a silly relaxing pause. The room is deep forest green and the ceiling’s that authentic color of tar. It even has uneven spots and crap poking through from decades of neglect to give an officially sumptuous “tar” color. The loft inside is made of wood the color of spilled bong water and it divides the room into a lopsided upper and lower half. This was quite a feat for a room that only has ten-foot ceilings. The heat became stifling. The ever-present odor of cats, wild inbred beasts that used to reign freely in this very room, came wafting back in a pinching sensation that offended the roots of everyone’s nose hair.

  We talked the talk of people that ‘click’ when they meet. It was weird how we had a lot of the same stuff in common. She had just moved back to Denton after a long relationship with a future egotistical doctor went sour and she first went away to college to escape from home just like myself. She had even been on several road trips including an annual trip to Mardi gras. Just like me.

  The smell of cat piss is one of the more permanent odors in this vast world of particularly rambunctious odors, but it allowed for a properly realistic excuse to walk the new love of my life home. My stomach was doing flip flops because I knew when we got to her apartment I was going to kiss her and after that I was going to make love to her. I was mentally saying a brief prayer already to protect me from the deadly virus us college folk are apparently particularly privy to. Another psychotic psycho
logical legacy of my ex. “God”, I said, “I know I have been with a lot of women and that she has been with a lot of men, but all I want out of life is for someone to love me as much as I love them with all of my heart. So if this isn’t meant to be then please give me some kind of sign” Like I said, it was a brief prayer but I figured God understood the way I was feeling at the moment.

  Her kiss was electric. It had more of a rush than the time I accidentally used wet hands to plug in the motor of the fountain by my parents pool. We went into her apartment with its sweet, God sent, air conditioning where we consummated the relationship and secured the mantle of partnership. It’s a hot weird summer, the pot is good and the wheels of my mind are simply in love after a single afternoon.

  I thought I was sure that I loved her later, as I buried my face into the hot mound of goodness between her legs and entered her with a sigh on the forest green sheets of her bed. We were making it next to the cage of her giant pet rat Rico who has a fluorescent green tail from the cage liner Jenifer uses to keep him sanitary. We fucked under her giant Jane’s Addiction poster with Perry in his effeminate pose and orgasm heightened my senses to the out of body feeling that gave the illusion of floating and I knew it was real. Then a symphony of cigarettes followed and preceded our third and fourth bouts of animalistic copulation on the bathroom floor and against the wall respectively.

  The morning sunlight shone like a spotlight through the thick felt-like green blanket hanging over the window. I awoke to the pleasant and unfamiliar sensation of not sweating or the need for immediate hydration. I awoke with an angel in my arms and absorbed the scent of her hair and the meditative rhythms of her breathing. Nice. Her skin was soft and smelled like girl. The girl. I managed to squirm out from underneath her arms and kiss my way down her soft flat stomach until I could feel the harsher hairs poke into my mouth. I just turned my head and let my cheek rest on her tight belly, moving slightly up and down with her breaths. I planted a brief kiss that tickled the lips then I sat up in the bed, put my back against the wall and just watched her sleep.

  I acquired that habit a long time ago. Watching a woman deeply asleep in the morning is one of the most beautiful paintings God’s ever created. Jenifer didn’t know yet, but I did. We are meant to be together.

  This IS going to be real. Real enough to stand the test of time. The problem is that like so many other times in my life when I knew, the opposite sex of the coin has reservations. So I let the evening of torment and agonies ensue. I drowned out the mere prospect of thinking about it with alcohol and whatever else was around to postpone any imaginary pain and insecurity until another date with her. Alas poor Horatio, I am the king of all.

  ♦ ♦ ♦

  The smell of her and this intense summer. The prospect of the wide open road inspired by a winter of Jack K. and the pink paperback edition of everyone’s classic motorcycle Zen companion manual, the latter of which I have been toting around in the back pocket of my pants to strike intrigue into the female persuasion that have cause to need the benefits of a phone call. Usually some sort of lame excuse provides that backdrop. Honestly, it really isn’t too hard to inspire the mind of young college co-eds who have been taught all their lives that after prom it would be man-snagging time and there would be no better place to look for that intellectual best friend for life than their college campus.

  In college there’s a heavy moral pendulum that suddenly releases and swings back along its lifelong arc. College is a place designed for exploration. Eager minds, raging hormones and cheap beer by the keg all in one mixed up sexual stewpot. Just heat, simmer and serve.

  I’m infatuated with Jenifer. She is cool and laid back about everything and it works for her. Normally I would be slightly embarrassed to show a girl that I really like where I am living. Of course she’s already seen the Lodge, and being that she is from Denton, she’s probably been around the Deltas more than I have.

  The Delta Lodge is an “alternative fraternity” that I pledged way back when I was a 17-year-old freshman in the fall of 1991. It was hard for me to balance getting good grades, the dependence of a new girlfriend and the “I don’t give a fuck” party attitude of the Lodge but I managed to squeeze into the brotherhood while I was young, unnoticed and nai’ve to the ways of the world. The place held some of the magic that the Animal House/Revenge of the Nerd movies offered. I knew that I wanted the full piss-in-your-face college experience and I knew that to do this I would have to associate with the people my “higher” education was designed to keep me from. I wanted to be able to look the hardcore drinkers in the face and have the stamina to kick each other in the nuts. Well maybe nothing that crazy, but I knew the flophouse frat called the Delta Lodge was going to play a far greater role in my life than anything I had done up to that point and would finally test my mettle. This was the one spot in Denton where the one percent of the population that truly knew they were cool, dark and different deep down in their soul could hang out. A place they could gravitate to and not feel persecuted. Either that or just party their asses off and stir up trouble in a fairly safe haven.

  The Delta Lodge became my escape from the serious side of college while I still lived on campus in the dorms. When the chance to live in the “house with no rules” became available this summer, I took it. The house is three stories tall and perches on one of the tallest points in the city. During the hot summer nights you can climb out of the third story window onto the crumbling roof and look at the stars and tops of the trees for miles all around. I scrawled my name in big black spray-paint up here for the entire world to see, or at least those folk brave and drunk enough to climb up here for themselves. The other day I found an old broken television and painted the words “I am watching you” on it in an acidic moment of clarity. I dragged that old TV up to the roof and perched it up on the highest chimney so that the television could watch those who watched it for so long. Down in the depths of this old house is a basement filled with foulness and an old light that hangs from frayed and shaky wires. The walls here resemble a New York subway car, it’s layered with tales of graffiti and past pleasures. There are catacombs of crawlspaces with dirt floors and secret exits under here too. Here and there, among the hallways of the main body of the house, is a sporadic doorway that leads to someone or the others room. The cast of players in the house is ever changing except for a few mainstays. I have been in all the rooms at some time or another and each one is so different in shape and décor from the others that I could spend hours going into the details of each. I have put in a lot of time stumbling around this house drunk, listening to aspiring local bands in the front room, painting the walls, tripping on acid and smoking obscene amounts of marijuana with good people I would not have otherwise met.

  This summer is my break. This summer is where I cast off the domineering presence of Melanie (the ex) and have choices to make without fear of fighting and repercussion. Melanie was THE girlfriend. The first super-serious girlfriend I ever had. She had a great body and a buck-toothed face that kept me pussy-whipped for two years. The one that made me wait almost four months to get an AIDS test before I could fuck her. The one that was always getting bladder infections and smoking cigarettes in that annoying matter where each drag took an intense showy draw to inhale. This method of smoking caused her front left vampire tooth to be slightly off-color than the rest of her teeth. She was the one who tried to be so classy and gothic without ever figuring out class is not defined by money but rather is a sense that exists in your soul. The one who always had me give her oral sex without ever truly wanting regular sex, or so I thought. I kept a journal of that whole time we were together and used smiley faces as symbols to denote what sexual activity I participated in on certain days. A frowning face meant just oral sex for her, a neutral face meant just oral sex for me and the face that grinned like an idiot meant the whole walla-walla-sha-bang. When I go back now and read my journal from that time, I see that at some point I was
getting quite a bit of the grinning like an idiot good stuff.

  I had a lot of developmental experiences with Melanie that looking back now seem like good things to have done, but at the time they were a little bizarre for me. Hell, some of them are still bizarre when I think of them. The handcuffs and bondage was nice and I could even stand going to the gay bars and getting drunk while she played the fag-hag role. I could have done without that one experience where I was wearing makeup while naked and handcuffed to the bed when the Resident Administrator walked into our dorm room though. Melanie would study and sleep mostly but she was pretty cool about letting me trip acid all night and then stumble into her bed during the dawn hours.

  I finally moved out of the dorms and all that silliness and while we’ve been broken up I’ve had sex with her once after she made a surprise visit to my pad. My roommate Ernie warned me not to do it with her, saying she was just trying to get back together, but my cock wanted to believe she only wanted “one last fling” and so I had to invoke another tear session when it turned out her and my cock didn’t have the same understanding of the “one last fling” concept. At the time I was kind of pissed that she thought she would get me back merely by fucking me again, but some girls are taught their whole life that sex can equal love when they want it to.

  Basically I can sum up Melanie by saying that I really thought I loved her for a few months and convinced her to love me, and then we got trapped in one of those relationships that doesn’t quite work, but doesn’t not work enough to call it off. I was in that whole soap operatic scene until the beginning of this summer. I’ve been dead-set on celebrating my relationship freedom until life threw me this crazy curveball in the shape of Jenifer.