Cigarettes & Mirrors - Chapter One

My eyes burst open. I can feel the stab of the florescent lights and flickering neon repeatedly jamming into my retinas, like needles. The whine of electricity coursing through the room at a low buzz, just loud enough to overcome background noise and annoy me. Every day seems to start the same for me. My cheap digital alarm clock blaring at me from the nightstand, the annoying, poorly synthesized tone assaulting my eardrums through the vintage tinny Chinese speakers. The sunlight filtering through the holes in the broken, sagging blinds, illuminating the swirls of dust in the air like a Van Gogh painting. I’ve already got a fucking migraine. The amount of sleep I got was a joke. Just like every other night. The insomnia still has its filthy, black gloved grip on me. My mind works overtime, thinking of countless things branching off into other things which all swerve off onto their own tangents. My mind is like a Google Chrome window with 647 tabs open at the same time, with nowhere near enough RAM to handle it. Some days the black gloves have such a tight hold on me, I don’t sleep at all. I’ll go for 3 or more days awake at a time. That's when the hallucinations start. That’s when the shadow people come. Or worse.

I roll myself off of my broken bed, stumbling blankly into the bathroom, bleary eyed and unsteady. My hand shakily flips the light switch, seemingly of its own accord. The other fluorescent demon above the mirror explodes with an electric buzz, stabbing itself into my eyes like dozens of syringes, forcing me into full consciousness. I look into the cracked mirror on the wall, and force down the urge to shudder. I look like a strung out heroin addict. Pasty, doughy skin, gaunt cheeks, red rimmed sunken eyes, shaven head shining like I was Mister fucking Clean. The hairs making up my scraggly goatee curling in all directions. I grimace at the image, tearing my eyes away from the mirror, and start the shower. Maybe the (hopefully) warm water will help. I stumble in, my body still on autopilot.

Barely five minutes later I shuffle out, throwing on the pair of worn jeans from the day before. Fucking shower. With all of the people in this building, there’s never enough hot water, with even less water pressure. I get more pressure from my dick when I take a piss.

I do not look forward to my day, but then again, when do I ever look forward to it? It’s never anything different. Nothing but the same mindless repetitive fucking bullshit. Day after day after day, seeing and hearing and doing the same goddamn thing. I throw my shirt on, feeling the almost paper thin fabric scrape across my back. The shirt is over 10 years old, the fabric worn frighteningly thin and assaulted by numerous washes and chemical submersions. As I slip my boots on, I grab my phone and check it, suppressing the briefest glimmer of hope in the pit of my stomach. No messages, no calls. What’s new? I scoff and toss it back on the bed. I grab my jacket and keys and walk out of my apartment, locking the cheap Chinese deadbolts. Everything in this building is practically Chinese made. I'll eat later, maybe. Maybe not. I don’t eat most days. As I walk out my door, I can only hold onto a single thought. How much I hate this fucking building. 

The hallways look like a crackheads dream of a 3^rd rate bombed out Bowery motel. Cheap plasterboard filled with holes and pockmarks from a million different impacts building up over time, forming a dull patina of damage. Multiple fading coats of powdery whitewash, the garbage that the cheapest bastards paint only the cheapest walls with. The landlord couldn’t be bothered to use real paint. The fat greasy bastard is never here, he never responds to calls, and never bothers to visit the building, unless you owe him money. I'm surprised he even had proper plasterboard installed. He’d try hanging sheets of cardboard or fucking tarps if he could. The sickly sweet tang of sweat and bad cooking is hanging in the air, a smell that never seems to go away completely. Cabbage and farts. The grey threadbare carpet has been worn into wisps by years of footsteps. It’s like tissues glued to a sheet of plywood. You might ask yourself why I continue to live in this hellhole. It’s because places like this tolerate people like me. I can live out of sight here. Away from the mercenaries, the roving groups of street toughs itching to prove themselves, the steroid fueled police, and the drug addicts. It beats the Lincoln Street motels, where you’re lucky if the door even has a functioning doorknob. I resist the urge to throw myself down the flight of stairs and just slink down them, the thud of my heavy steel capped combat boots clunking over and over rhythmically until I’m at the bottom.

I walk onto the sidewalk, and I am hit with a wall of pure sound, and smells even more heinous than the upstairs hallway. Sirens, cars honking, people cursing and screaming, gunshots in the distance, fighting, walking, talking, existing. The putrid stink of engine exhaust and more bad cooking from the street vendors is in the air, laced with pollutants and industrial waste from the river. I could be breathing in radioactive isotopes and arsenic right now, and I wouldn’t even know until I vomited out my liquefied organs into the gutter. That’s life in Newark. The streets are filthy and broken, covered with piles of trash and scraps forever swirling over the cracked pavement by the whisper of the wind. I pull on my faded green Army jacket and fish the crumpled pack of cigarettes out, shoving my silver mirrored shades on at the same time. Only three cigarettes left, one of them half broken. I grimace and pull the broken one out, licking the paper back together, spitting out the bits of tobacco as I slowly roll it back into proper shape. I light it with a flick of the battered Zippo, and inhale sharply. I am 23 years old, and I’ve been smoking since I was 14. At first I started just to be another cool, edgy kid craving to be accepted, but eventually it grew into a crutch I needed to get through my days. Hey, it beats shooting up heroin, right? I shuffle down the broken sidewalk, drawing on my cigarette as the sounds of the city continue to assault my eardrums. I pass crowds of vendors, business people, crooks, thieves, vagrants, cops, and every other kind of person you’d find in a city like this. I instinctively clench my eyes shut as the sound of the subway screams out of the entrance on the corner. I’m still not used to that sound. I’ve lived in cities this filthy all of my life, but this is the first time I’ve lived in a city with a properly functioning subway system. I try to avoid the subway, with all the creeps and weirdos riding on it. People that would just as soon sell their grandmothers for five bucks than ask you the time.

A police car slowly rolls by me on the street, the faceless officers inside undoubtedly staring me down behind the polarized glass as I walk past. Cops always like to hassle people like me. Cops like to hassle anyone, really. If you don’t look like a normal do gooder citizen you’re automatically a target for extortion, beatings, or even cold blooded murder if you catch a cop on a bad day. Or maybe you could be a downtown high-rise banker, maybe they'll still cap you. This city is filled with power hungry psychotic gangs, and the police department is the biggest one. Steroid fueled, power tripping ex-soldier juggernaut types, eager to break apart teeth with their billy clubs and shoot people in the head with barely a second thought, with absolutely zero repercussions from the department or the city government. I’ve managed to escape their unchecked wrath since I moved here a few months ago, keeping below the radar, moving around in the underbelly of the underbelly of the city.

I take a final draw on my cigarette as I get to the store at the corner of Mulberry and Pennigton, and throw it in the gutter with a flourish of my wrist. I raise a hand to the clerk as I walk back to the cooler. This place is filthy, always the same constricting stench of Indian food and cheap tobacco. If the smell had hands, it would have them around my throat. If I’m going to get through this fucking day I’m going to need some caffeine. But of course they are out of the energy drink I like, just like every Friday. I grab a regular Rockstar and take it to the counter. “Anything else I can get you sir?” the clerk asks in his unplaceable Arabian accent. “Yeah, pack of Marlboro menthols.” I manage to croak out, my voice sounding foreign even to my own ears. “$8.42, sir.” He says, ever smiling. God damn taxes. The miserable cunts in power here have raised the taxes on cigarettes almost quarterly. I hand him two worn fives and stuff the smokes in my pocket, cracking open the can and chugging half of it quickly. I’ve been on a steady diet of cigarettes, caffeine and varied other chemical substances since I graduated high school. Then again you’re going to need something to make yourself feel better after you leave the soul crushing hell that is the Newark public school system, short of offing yourself. If you even graduate. I put the change into my pocket and shuffle out again, eager to get away from the ever smiling clerk. He may perennially be in a good mood but something about him rubs me the wrong way. Maybe it’s his yellow teeth, or his one eye, or his missing thumb. I have no idea. I've heard that thieves and adulterers get fingers chopped off in the Middle East.

I'm sure you've been trying to figure out just what I'm doing with my day. Most of the time I have no fucking idea, but today I'll tell you. I’m on my way to see Carla. Carla likes to call herself my girlfriend, but that’s just something she says. Sure, I'll bend her over the couch once in a while but that’s it. That’s the depth of our relationship. There's not really any love there for her. There’s no room in my heart for love and relationships and all of that horseshit. My heart is a blackened oil spot in the middle of the driveway of life staring back at you, mocking you day after day. I have other things to worry myself with. Carla is a nice enough girl, from one of the ever present, maybe Mafia Italian families around here, but I certainly don’t need to be in a relationship with the girl. I don’t like relationships. I haven’t since I was 18. They exist purely to suck you of money and your time, killing your spirit and happiness as you toil to make her happy, and she still fucks the neighbor all while smiling in your face, getting pregnant with a child that isn't even yours, forcing you to stay with her, so she can milk the welfare system to feed her own habits, while she fucks the other neighbor on the other side of you. Why would I need something like that? No thank you.

All of a sudden, with a shake of my head I find myself on a corner of Parkhurst Street. How the hell did I even get here? My thoughts distracted me again. I turned the wrong way coming out of the store, fuck. Parkhurst is not a place you want to find yourself on, even on the best of days with a bullet proof vest and a shotgun in your hands. The entire god damned street is a collection of crack dens and wannabe gangbangers on every corner that would just as soon slit your throat than look at you. The dirtiest part of the city, the very bottom of the barrel of the underbelly in this fucking city. It was nice at one time, sure, but that was probably before I was even born. Even the police avoid this area most days. It might have something to do with the gangs, or it might have something to do with the orders from City Hall. Just let 'em kill each other, come in to clean up the mess. I sigh and pull another cigarette out and quickly light it as I make to turn around and start the walk back to my apartment on Market Street.

“Hey man.” I hear a greasy voice behind me say.

I know that voice. I turn around to see the scarred caramel brown face of Antonio grinning at me. Antonio is one of a million nothing special Hispanic local hoods thinking that he was a big shot gangster, trying his best to look the part in his black jeans and Knicks jacket and backwards turned cap. “Got another cigarette mang?” he says, picking something out of his crooked teeth. “Nah man, last one.” I say, taking a drag. Antonio is not someone most people want to fuck with, but I love messing with the little piss ant. Word on the street was that he cut up a shop clerk just because the store was out of Corona one night. He leered at me, brown eyes narrowing, still picking his teeth. “Come on man I know you got one, just give me one, culero.” He said, finally picking the something out of his teeth, spitting on the sidewalk. “Nah man, this is my last one.” I say to him, about to turn around to leave.

He puts his hand on my shoulder and roughly spins me around, a switchblade appearing out of nowhere in his hand with a metallic snick. “I said give me a fucking cigarette you cracker fool, you want to get cut?” he sneered at me, attempting to look tough. I smiled as I took a drag. I can never resist the urge to be a dick to these people. “Go fuck yourself Antonio. I don’t have a cigarette for your greasy burrito eating ass.” I said to him, exhaling a puff of smoke directly into his face. His eyes widen, staring directly into my own. “Now that’s not very polite man. I just wanted a cigarette. Now I’m gonna have to fuck you up.”

I grin, clenching the cigarette in my teeth, and whip my hand out to grab his wrist, twisting it hard to the right and making the knife fall to the ground. I slam my knee up into his groin, driving the air from his lungs and forcing him to bend over in agony. I let go of his wrist, and grabbed the back of his head driving my other knee into his face. I can feel his nose crunch against my knee. He falls to the ground screaming, his exploded nose gushing blood down his chin onto the pavement.

“You’re fucking dead pendejo, you’re fucking dead!” he screams at me, hawking a wad of blood and phlegm into the gutter and running into the alleyway. Eat a pile of shit you fucking greasy ass churro.

I decide not to hang around and briskly walk north towards Pearl Street, cigarette still in my teeth. I stop suddenly outside Carla’s apartment building, exhaling hard. Fuck Antonio and his wannabe gangster bullshit. I take a final drag on the cigarette and whip it into the street, exhaling the pungent smoke from my nostrils. I grab the dented steel door and throw it open, stepping into the building and walking up to her apartment.