Ninth of December

C’mon, man. You read these pages, or you know me personally; do I strike you as a fisherman? Could you picture me out on a charter boat, bracing for my balance, with rod and reel in hand, as the vessel bounced up and down on the high seas? Waterproof overalls and a yellow floppy hat would probably not be my best look.

The nearest experience I ever had to being an angler was when a cocaine dealer told me he had “fishscale.” If you don’t know what fishscale is, good, keep it that way. I’m not here to glamorize drug use. I’ll just say it’s a term a drug pusher uses to describe high-quality cocaine. The term is used as bait; you nibble, he hooks you and reels you in. More often than not, after you hand over your cash for said product, it more resembles a dead fish, cloudy and coming apart from rot, rather than the shiny, strong, and unadulterated product which was advertised.

I did have fishscale once, though. I was in Orlando, Florida, with my friend Jacques. Jacques is this freelance cameraman who moved to the U.S. from France in the late ’90s. Together, we became friends and covered the September 11th Terrorist Attacks, Hurricane Katrina, the Virginia Tech Shooting, and many other stories for some of the most notable news networks in the world. Over the decades, we forged an unbreakable bond, which is still intact, to this day.

So, Orlando, the home of the magical mouse, Jacques and I were documenting some hurricane back in 2004 for the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) when I came across the legendary FISHSCALE. I’m not here to titillate myself by telling the entire story, but I will say that the night ended with hallucinations of people chasing me, after ingesting the elusive and often sought-after product.

I checked into four different hotel rooms that night, trying to escape these fellas and eventually called Jacques to come help me fight them off. My friend and colleague arrived at the upscale hotel where I was at at that particular moment, came into the room, and calmly took the brass lamp which I was swinging at the imaginary perpetrators, out of my hands, and put me to bed.

Jacques stayed with me until I fell asleep. This is the drug addict’s definition of Love Thy Brother.

Anyway, I digress, back to the tuna.

I was laying in my bed in the rooming house, last Wednesday. I believe it was the first day of fall, maybe the second. It was around 7:30 in the morning, and I was just starting to open my eyes and wake up. I had my head completely under my soft, sweatshirt like, blue comforter and was enjoying being fully surrounded by the solitary silence and complete blackness, when I heard CRRRAAACCCK!

Without taking a peek, I figured it was just my roommate, Rob, opening one of his Fanta Orange Sodas.

Oh no, this definitely wasn’t pop. Seconds later, the smell permeating from his freshly opened can, which made its way across our six feet of floor space and penetrated my cotton and polyester fortress, was not one of citrus and fruity pleasure, but rather it was tuna.

Chicken of the Sea. Charlie fucking Tuna.

At 7:30 in the morning.

I haven’t been so nauseous, so fast since 1980 as a student at New York City’s P.S. 69. I used to sit next to this kid at lunch every day named Lonnie Shankstein. Lonnie was a shmegegge, and a putz. So was I, and we were the best of friends in Mr. Adams’ 5th grade class. The only thing which Lonnie and I disagreed on back then was he ate tuna, and I despised it.

I used to want to punch him in the face daily, as I would gag, watching his little shaina panim get covered in mayo while chunks of the white meat fish fell down onto his lap, and then trickled to the floor. This worst of it was when he insisted on talking with his mouth full, spitting his lunch at me in the process.

I’m still friends with Lonnie, he’s a lovely man, even if he is a tuna eating fuck.

Back to the present – I was not about to take a peek at Rob eating the nastiest of delicacies, the smell was bad enough. My sudden nausea soon turned to anxiety. I needed to get out of that room and out of that house. The disgust of how I ended up there was now coming over me in waves. The thoughts were drowning me as my mind raced through every cheap thing I’ve ever done since my first bump of cocaine at the age of 19.

My body could not keep up with the faster-than-light speed of my mind, but I eventually managed to get dressed and stumble out to my car, all while Rob was scraping his metal fork against the rigid bottom of the tin can, consuming every last morsel of tuna.

I pointed my chariot towards the shore and ended up in Belmar Beach, New Jersey.

I walked the coastline, the cool early fall Atlantic waters cascading over my feet.

I saw a young woman, staring out at the big blue ocean, seemingly with a tear in her eye. As I was watching her, she looked at the water’s very edge, pointing her toes straight down and slowly making circular motions. She concentrated as she made her own tiny whirlpool, possibly envisioning her own lost love circling the drain. I connected with this unknown stranger.

As I moved further along the beach, I saw a young couple playing with a dog in the sand. I saw another pair of lovers laying on pillows and blankets, staring into each other’s eyes as the waves crashed onto the shoreline, just a few feet away from them.

I was inspired by all my new friends’ sense of serenity and decided I was going to do something to change my situation. I was going to find a new place to live, right there, and right now. There’s only one small problem, I can’t afford to live in New Jersey.

I make under $50,000 per year in a land where that won’t get you a cardboard box under a bridge, so I came up with the bright idea to apply for an apartment in the projects, or “Low Incoming Housing,” as they political correctly call it here in The Garden State.

I drove home and got my financials together. I excitedly revealed my new plans to a housemate, when he expressed his concerns. I went on to tell him a story of how I lived in a homeless shelter in 2011 and pretty much became the honorary mayor of that facility.

I enjoyed giving those folks a glimpse into my life while also closely examining theirs. I and the other residents became friends at the point where the two intersected. It ended up being one of the most beautiful and wonderful experiences of my life.

I imagined this wouldn’t be much different.

The next day I went to the apartments and arrived to see old women in wheelchairs. I saw men without teeth. And I saw a strung-out blonde laying on the sidewalk.

I felt like I was right back at the corner of Goode Street and Lake Wheeler Road in Raleigh, North Carolina, where that homeless shelter sat. There was something strangely comforting about it.

Anyway, I went in, toured the place, applied and got denied. They explained to me that my credit score was under baseball’s equivalent of the Mendoza Line. In other words, bad. So bad that even government subsidized housing won’t take me.

The feeling of discard was just another version of December 9th…