The Long Inhale and the Short Crash – Barry

"It was hard being a precocious child. Okay, that was a lie. When you were, in fact, a precocious child, it was easy. Adults thought you were adorable with your tiny little man ways. Teachers lived just to have you in their class, and, while the other kids may hate you, you always knew you were better than they were anyway, so you didn’t really care. What was hard was when you were no longer a precocious child but instead just a very smart young adult who’d been put on a pedestal his whole life. That part, that part was hard. Before, no matter what you had done, people thought it was outstanding. You won every high school award whether you tried for it or not. You weren’t expected to focus in class or care about grades or prove how smart you were because everybody already knew, and they wouldn’t want to hamper the creative development of your super smart brain by forcing you to behave like average kids had to. Your mind should be free to expand on its own.

"That? That was easy. But now, now was hard. It wasn’t like that anymore. Now that you were twenty-four, people were waiting for you to prove just how smart you were. Sure, you’d gone away to Austin and graduated Sume Cum Laude with your degree in in business and finished up your MBA at the McCombs School all in just five short years. But what were you going to do now? What was the great thing you were going to do to show everybody how smart you really were? You’d been running your mouth about how insignificant they were and how, obviously, significant you were since you were young enough to wear Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles pajamas. Now they were all looking at you to prove it. And you didn’t kid yourself. They were hoping that you failed. They wanted nothing more than to find out that all this time you were nothing more than some big talk. They wanted to see you brought down a peg or two.

"You weren’t sure you didn’t want the same thing. It was hard work, proving you were better than everybody else. And you didn’t like hard work.

"And here you were, a solid year after your picture was in the local paper congratulating you on getting your MBA – a picture of you in your new suit with a fresh haircut in grainy black and white right next to it. You had picked up that paper from the kitchen table and taken it upstairs to your bedroom, the same bedroom you’d slept in when you still had those Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles pajamas, and you’d put it down on your desk. And it was still sitting there, getting brittle like newspaper does. And you were still living in that room, with your parents’ room down the hall. Getting up late every day. Doing some light day trading even though the markets had been dead for a couple of years now. Going downstairs, still not showered, at noon to sit at the kitchen counter and drink coffee while your mother, who still thought you were going to be the next President, made you whatever you wanted for lunch. Going back upstairs to you room to trade, masturbate to online porn, read some books designed for smart people and, finally, at around six in the evening, drag your ass to the shower.

"I mean, it had only been a year. You just needed some time to unwind from the pressure of doing all those big things. It was hard, all these expectations. You just needed some rest. People don’t understand the pressure. They just don’t.”

For some reason, whenever Barry took his first hit for the night, that monologue about himself, all in the third person, ran through his head. He couldn’t stop it. In fact, he thought it was very relaxing. It made him feel better to know that somebody out there, some higher consciousness or whatever was talking to him in his head, must understand how hard it was to be him, why he needed to rest. Why he needed the space and time he found when he rolled out into the sandy fields outside of the city with his old friends from high school and pulled out the crack pipe.

Barry chuckled in the middle of his fix. He knew what everybody would say if he told them he was doing crack. “That drug is SO nineteen ninety. We’ve all moved on to meth by now. Get with the program.” But Barry knew that wasn’t true. Anybody who liked a real fix, a real rush, a real sensation, still used crack. Meth just made you jittery. Crack took you on a ride. Barry needed a ride. The rest of the time he felt like he was chained down.

It hadn’t been the plan at all. At all. After he finished up at UT, Barry had planned to come back to the Dallas suburbs where he was raised just long enough to go on enough high powered interviews to land a coveted position with one of the big five consulting firms. Something glamorous with travel involved. Then he and Jennifer, the same girl he’d dated since he was a junior in high school, would move wherever his home base would be for his new job. Sure, Jennifer thought small, acted small, didn’t know a white wine from a rose, but Barry could turn her around. There were night classes she could take. And she was pretty. Texas pretty. She’d look good at all the company events. Maybe he’d even get lucky and get a job right there in Dallas. Then his and Jennifer’s moms would be able to help out and babysit when the “Little Barry” babies started coming. There was no way he’d be back at his parents, stuck in his room, running to the grocery store in his old Jeep that looked worse for the wear from all the trips between Austin and Dallas, for more than three or four months.

That, of course, was not how it worked out. At all.

The interviews? The jobs? Well, the interviews came, and they came in abundance. How could they not, given his pedigree? He flew all over the country – Chicago, San Francisco, New York, Miami. He bought new two hundred dollar ties for each interview. After all, soon he would get hired at a nice, fat, six digit salary and a grand here on designer neckties wouldn’t mean anything. He bough an online subscription to Zagat and ate at the most highly recommended restaurants everywhere he went. After all, he would need to learn all the food and wine lingo. His choices of gourmet venues in Austin had been limited. He shook hands powerfully, answered questions with confidence and always appeared with a fresh copy of his resume in an expensive cloth-bound folder for any interview. In Miami, he stayed for a few extra days to sit on the beach and watch the girls in their thongs. He even took one of them back to his hotel later that night. Jennifer was beautiful, but she was a sweet suburban girl. Those Miami girls had other ideas altogether. And he was a man. He was out to explore the world … and then to conquer the world.

The interviews were fantastic and exciting and promising. The response to the interviews was nonexistent.

Actually, the response wasn’t nonexistent. The response was very existent in the form of letters thanking him for his interest in company such-and-such. Company such-and-such unfortunately didn’t think that he was quite the right fit for their corporate culture, but they wished him the best of luck and were sure he was going to go on to do great things. Each time he received one of these letters, Barry snatched it from the mail before his mother and father could see his failure and buried it in the kitchen trash, well below the left over chicken bones and wilted salad. Down far enough where nobody would dig for it.

He called people he knew at the companies where he had interviewed to ask them to scout around and find out why he hadn’t been hired. His friends, acquaintances, whatever, wouldn’t return his calls. After days of calling them and leaving friendly messages in a tone that clearly conveyed that their lack of response was creating an increased agitation on his end, they would finally call back. Usually in the middle of the afternoon when they could use “the afternoon staff meeting” or “my lunch hour is just about to end” as an excuse to rush off the phone. The calls would start off with the typical jockeying, good humored ball busting about whose baseball team was ahead in the standings or the latest rumor about that girl they’d all slept with sophomore year. Before long, the friend, acquaintance, whatever, would shift into a different tone. A tone that kept the frat boy good humor tone while adding in a layer of formality over it, as if to say, “You know this isn’t me, I don’t think this about you, It’s just goddamn business speak I’m about to give you.” The reports back from the field were all the same. Barry was obviously super smart. Yes, he had all the pedigree and paperwork. But he just came across as so full of himself in the interviews. Some people even called it arrogant. The managers and partners and HR people all thought he just wouldn’t be able to take direction or listen to management or respect his bosses. They’d dealt with his kind before and it had always ended badly. With the way the world was going, globalization and cheaper workforces overseas, nobody wanted to spend all that money to bring on an employee who probably wasn’t going to cause the company anything but grief.

The calls always ended the same way, a shift back into the more fraternal tone of the early part of the call and this: “Barry, seriously man, they’re so short sighted. They’re just a bunch of corporate lackeys. You’re the MAN. You should just go off and do it on your own. Show them, man. You don’t need them.”

“Yeah,” thought Barry, “I don’t need to be held down by a bunch of people who aren’t as smart as I am and have no real creative vision…just a bunch of rules they follow from the company handbook. I can be twice as successful doing it on my own. Ten times as successful. I’m just going to take a little downtime to get focused, and then I’ll start getting some funding together to do something. A financial firm, maybe. Or my own consulting firm. I’ve never let that kind of bullshit hold me down before, why would I start now? I don’t know why I ever thought I’d want to go out and work for somebody else. That’s just naïve. I just need a little downtime to recharge. Then it’ll be all me. Just a month or so to recharge.”

And that’s when Barry started day trading. And even though the markets had been dead for months, he was ahead. Maybe he didn’t need to go find funding. Maybe he could just day trade for a year or so and by then he’d have made enough to fund the expenses to start up his own consulting firm right here in Dallas. He could just live at home for that year, save up some money. That was a good idea. He liked it here. It was nice to have his mom and her adoring eyes around, and her home cooked food. And it was nice to spend Sunday on the couch watching football with his dad. And it was nice to be able to get out of the house when he started to feel cooped in and go spend time with Jennifer and her two roommates in her apartment downtown. This actually, Barry thought, might end up being one of the most laid back years of his life. He should enjoy it.

As he looked back on it now, Barry was surprised that he hadn’t figured out that Jennifer was looking to break up long before she hammered him over the head with it. It had been a long time since they’d lived in the same city. She’d stayed in Dallas to get her nursing degree while he was in Austin. They’d seen each other over holidays and part of the summer most of the time, but it had always felt like a visit, like how they were sneaking in time to stay connected until Barry was done with school and they could start a life. But Barry must have been the only one to keep that vision, he figured, because one thing that became clear almost as soon as he moved back to town was that Jennifer wasn’t exactly the sweet and adoring girlfriend he remembered her to be. She’d gone out and gotten herself some ambition. At the hospital where she worked, it had been suggested that she’d make a great physician’s assistant, and she was actually planning to go back to school the fall after he moved back. Barry tried to tell her what an incredibly stupid decision it would be to commit to a school program. She was going to end up moving soon anyway – as soon as he knew where it was that he’d be working, and he was sure to know that soon.

And Jennifer looked right across the dinner table at him (He HATED her dinner table. He was pretty sure she’d bought it from Wal-Mart.) and said that maybe they would just have to spend a few more years apart. It hadn’t been a big deal with they needed to spend time apart while he went to school. Was it really such a big deal that she’d found something she was good at?

When Barry told his mom about the conversation, his mom just smiled and told him that Jennifer would come to her senses. There wasn’t a girl out there who wouldn’t see that Barry was an unbelievable catch and change whatever she needed to change so that she could be with him. And Barry had taken such good care of Jennifer for years and years, buying her things that she and her family thought were so opulent and staying faithful to her even though he was away at college where the girls were, his mom was sure, clamoring for a chance to be the future Mrs. Barry.

Well, okay, thought Barry, maybe he hadn’t exactly been one hundred percent faithful, but he was a man. And Jennifer was always so self-conscious in bed anyway. Plus, there was no way Jennifer could understand the stress he was under every single day. Sometimes a man just needed to find a way to release the stress.

His mom was wrong though. He’d only been back for about three months when Jennifer called him to ask him if he could stop by the coffee shop across from her school before her night class started -- to talk for a little while. Barry was glad to see her making the effort. He didn't like her time being tied up with this night class at all. On the three nights a week that she was in class, he was left to kick around his parents’ house or spend hours at the local driving range just killing time. And when she was done with her night class, she usually was too tired to do anything except curl up with a blanket on the couch and watch television. It was not in any way what he had expected from her, and he had told her that. He was glad when she called to meet up for coffee. That showed she was listening to what he was saying. Maybe soon she’d see the silliness of this whole going back to school and taking some space thing. He stopped on his way to the coffee shop and bought her a gift card to Neiman Marcus. Just a little something to show her that he cared…and hopefully inspire her to get some clothes other than the jeans and button down shirts she was always wearing.

He came up behind her and kissed her on the cheek while he slid the envelope with the gift card into her hand. She fiddled with the card for a moment before sliding the envelope back across the table at him. She didn’t think this was going to work. She wasn’t the same person he remembered from when she was a kid in high school. She had goals too now, and she thought he needed somebody who could devote all of their attention to him. He infuriated her, the way he thought that everything was about him, but she could understand why he was like that. She’d grown up with him. She knew everybody had always treated him like he was the Maharaja. But she wasn’t that girl any more. She didn’t really want to move to some super huge city with him. He was going to get some kind of job and work a million hours and she was going to be stuck in a city with a bunch of stuck up people who probably would make fun of her southern accent. She liked it right here in Dallas where her friends and her family were. She wanted to be good at something too, and, no, being good at being a girlfriend didn’t count. He didn’t really love her anyway, and he knew it. Their relationship was all about looking good together and his having somebody to take care of him. And she understood that, too. His mom had waited on him, hand and foot. But Jennifer wasn’t going to be like that. There weren’t that many women out there who were going to be like that, she warned him. This was really the best thing, their breaking up, she said. He could find somebody who was more like the kind of girl he imagined himself being with, and she spend some time just doing things for herself. She looked and her watch. It was almost time for her class. She got up, kissed him on the cheek and walked out. It was the last time they were ever together as a couple.

Barry sat there for ten minutes taking it all in. He knew she’d regret it. He’d hit the bars in Deep Ellum that night and have a new, prettier, more appreciative girlfriend before sunup. And when Jennifer was done acting out, she’d come back to him and they’d have an even better relationship, because by that time she would have realized how much better of she was with him as compared to without him, and she’d be more appreciative. Maybe he’d make her wait. Act like he didn’t really want her back. Make her do something dramatic to win him back.

The truth, of course, was that the breakup rattled Barry. Barry wasn’t good at the idea of being alone. Jennifer had always been a secure net beneath him. It was hard, when everybody expected something big from you, not to feel alone out there proving to them that you were as good as they thought you were. Jennifer had been something, no – someone – he could always come back to for safety. He wasn’t out on a ledge alone when he was with her. And no matter how many confident things he put in his head, he couldn’t kill the little voice that wouldn’t go away that said that without her there he was suddenly very, very alone. Sure, she was right, they probably didn’t love each other, but they had supported each other. That, to Barry, was more important. But how could she understand that.

He hit the clubs in Deep Ellum that night. Went home with a dark-haired law student who turned on CNN after they had sex and poured them both glasses of amaretto to put them to sleep. He forgot to get her phone number when he headed back to his parents’ house in the morning. In the car on the way home, he realized he’d never picked the Neiman Marcus gift card up off the table in the coffee shop. Some crazy hippie girl with dreadlocks was making out with that card right now, he was sure. Oh well. Soon the $100 he’d spent on that card wouldn’t mean all that much to him.

And so time passed like that. The job offers didn’t come. Day trading made him a profit, but he had such a hard time getting motivated to roll out of bed and work that the profits were slower than he had hoped for. He still talked to Jennifer on the phone once a week or so. She was doing fine. Getting good grades and had already gotten more responsibility at work. He hit the clubs at night. His mom kept him in clean sheets and casseroles. Any day now, he’d be ready to hit the streets full force and start his consulting business. He just needed a tiny bit more capital to cover some of the start-up expenses. That was all he was waiting on. His mom reminded him that he didn’t need to feel like he needed to rush just because people were starting to whisper the word “slacker” and “burn out” behind his back. Do things at his own pace. In ten years when he was living in a mansion, they wouldn’t be whispering those words anymore.

Barry hooked up with some of his old buddies from high school who had all stayed in the area. Dan was working as a security guard at an office building, Butchie was driving a delivery truck and Jacob was in charge of shipping and purchasing for some big design firm downtown. The three guys had gotten a “dude condo” together just a couple of miles away from where they had all grown up, and Barry started spending evenings there. They’d crack some beers, order some pizzas and watch whatever game was on. Some nights after they got good and drunk, they’d get the basketball out of the closet and go play two-on-two down the street at the local high school. Some nights they’d invite some girls over and get a keg and some Christmas lights and have a party.

It was one of those party nights that introduced them to crack. And it was one of those girls who did it.

It was one of the young girls. They always had young girls there. And the young girls were always appreciative of the free beer. And the young girls were always ready to party. Sometimes, the girls brought their own treats. Some weed here and there. Some meth. Some Oxycontin. Barry tried it all. He liked the rush of drugs. He liked feeling invincible with the drugs. Like he was able to get away with using them when everybody warned him that they could destroy him. He would get high and just think about how he was proving everybody wrong. All you had to be was a strong person and you could do drugs without there being any kind of life-threatening situation. Look at him, after all. He was using drugs three or four times a week. He wasn’t sitting in a gutter. In fact, he was still in the process of putting his plan into action. And when he did, he’d have one final blow out party with his boys and some hot girls and all the drugs they wanted. Then he’d probably never talk to them again.

It was a December night (He had no idea how it had gotten to be December. It felt like the summer had just started, like he’d just moved back into his old room, like he’d just started interviewing for jobs, like Jennifer had just broken up with him), when they boys had a party to celebrate the Cowboys making the playoffs. It was a Saturday night, and the boys were planning to party straight through until the game the next day. Jacob had invited some girls he’d met out at a club a few nights earlier, and Barry couldn’t stop staring at the one. She looked just like Drew Barrymore, but skinnier. He picked up a beer and headed over to introduce himself. He already had a nice buzz from a joint he’d smoked earlier and the beers and shots he’d done at the party, but as he was talking to the girl, he offered to get her some Oxy or some angel dust from somebody else at the party if she wanted to have a really good time. The girl laughed and said she’d brought her own stash, and it was something better than dust or Oxy for sure. Then she took him by the hand and they went up to Dan’s room and he’d smoked crack for the first time. It wasn’t like anything else he’d ever had. The girl showed him how to suck the smoke in with force. It wasn’t like pot, she said, you didn’t want to take your time and savor it. You wanted to breath as much of the potent smoke in as fast as possible to jumpstart your rush. Barry took the pipe from her. He took a few short breaths to fill up his lungs with oxygen, and then he put the pipe to his lips, lit it, and sucked in as much of the narcotic smoke, as deep into his lungs and heart and muscles and brain, as he could.

It was the greatest feeling of power he’d ever experienced. Would ever experience. He felt like his arms were ten feet long and ripped with steroid-big muscles and able to pummel the world or anybody who came close. He felt the exact same way about his dick. He was on fire. Better than any orgasm. Better than any drug. Like he was a god or a warrior king or the most powerful man on earth. He looked out of the bedroom window and saw the streetlights burning and knew that ordinary people lived under streetlights, and that he was more powerful than that. He would someday live in a private mansion with no lights so that when you arrived at night you would be intimidated by the darkness around you. You would be intimidated by him. Hell, you should be intimidated by him right now.

There had been, would never be, any feeling like this. He woke up hours later with the girl laying half-dressed next to him and half-drunk beer bottles spilled on Dan’s dirty laundry pile and he remembered the King Kong feeling of owning the world. And he wanted it again.

The girl proved to be a reliable source for the drug. She’d sell it or trade it or smoke it with them if she thought she was about to get laid afterwards. And as soon as the rest of the guys found out what crack felt like, it became a nightly pursuit. They weren’t addicted, but it was just simple math. Of all of the things that they could do on any given evening, smoking crack felt the best. They were chasing the high, but nobody had warned them that it never feels as good as the first time. But it didn’t matter. It still felt better than anything else in their lives.

The crack kept Barry up until early morning every night. He’d wait for the rush to start to wear off, down a beer and drive back to his parents’ house. On the way there, he’d stop at Seven Eleven to get a tamale or a breakfast sandwich or, if it had been a super rough night, a hot dog. Then he’d crawl into bed, sleep until noon and get up to trade. About once a week or so he’d call Jennifer and hang up when he got her voicemail. She’d stopped answering her phone when she saw it was him calling. About once a week he’d pull out the incorporation paperwork for his consulting firm and look for office space to rent. At least ten times a day he thought about how good it felt when he sucked the powerful smoke into his body. It was like he wanted to hold the drug inside him and never exhale, but life demanded that he not hold his breath.

He would have if he could have -- held his breath with the super secret power formula of the smoke inside him. In the moments when he was alone in his room in the middle of the day with the blinds pulled down and the scent of lemon Pledge around him, he would stare at the truth standing in the corner. And the truth was that he may not be fearless enough to do all the things that people expected of him. The truth was that he had always been very scared of failure, of being alone, of missing out on something, of life being too much, of life being not enough, of finding out that maybe he wasn’t all that he thought he was. But when he smoked the drug, it was like he became a different person. If he could walk around with that power inside of him all day long, he could do anything. They would all fear him, and with good reason. Without the crack, he was just Barry – living in his high school bedroom with his mom still cooking for him, no job, no girlfriend, no motivation to put plans in action. And now, almost no money. The money he’d saved up day trading had been whittled away at to pay for a case of beer here, an order of fried chicken there, gas for the car, and, mostly, nightly drugs. Maybe if he just stayed high all day it would be easier to turn this around. Yes, he could use the drug instead of the drug using him like it did most people. He could use the drug to mask over the fear and become the brave, confident, imposing person he needed to be to get out there and prove them all wrong about his being a failure and a spoilt burn out. He would just hold his breath and never exhale the smoke once it was in his system. That was all he needed to do.

But life demanded that he breath.

It was four in the morning and time for Barry to head back to his parents’ house. He could feel himself coming down from the rush. He always knew when he was starting to come down because the third-person monologue about himself would start in his head. And then the questions would come: What was he going to do? Would he be forty and still hanging out in the “dude condo” with some young chick bringing him drugs? Did his mom really know what she was talking about? It went on and on, the questions. Like a car he was trying to pass on the freeway, he’d try to get past them, but they’d just speed up to stay neck and neck with him.

He should try it. He should take another hit right now and then go home and trade and fill out the rest of the paperwork and call Jennifer while he was still in his power mode. He should do it. The girl, the one who always brought their drugs, was asleep on the living room floor, and Barry knew from experience that she wasn’t going to wake up any time soon. He found her jacket in the kitchen and, just like he thought there would be, there was extra stash left in her pocket. He went back to the living room and dug a pipe out from in between two sofa pillows. There was a downstairs powder room that was near the door. Barry went in to take his hit. He didn’t want anybody to smell the smoke and get woken up to find him stealing from the girl’s stash.

This would be his biggest inhale ever. He needed enough in his system to power him through the day. It was going to be a big day. He was going to make all the changes he needed today. And then, once he’d put his plan into action and started proving everybody wrong about what a loser he’d turned out to be, he wouldn’t need the crack anymore because the questions would go away. He took five or six huge breaths and held them to expand his lungs so that he could pull in as much smoke as possible from the pipe. Then he lit it and covered the end with his mouth as fast as he could and inhaled as deeply and as powerfully as he ever had in his life. He couldn’t imagine that his first breath in the world had been as desperate and as needy as this one was. And as the smoke filled up his system, he felt himself start to expand into a bigger, stronger, scarier version of himself. Like the smoke was filling him up like a balloon, but like a Teflon balloon. He never wanted to exhale.

But life demanded that he breath.

He snuck into the living room and put the pipe back between the pillows so that nobody would suspect that he had stolen from the stash. Then he made his way out to the Jeep. It was August. Hot. Burning hot so he had left the top off of the Jeep. The sky was still dark, but within the next hour the streetlights would automatically turn off and the sun would start to rise. Daytime was long in the summer in Texas. His seat was wet. One of those freak rainstorms must have passed through while he was inside. But it was refreshing.

He turned the ignition and started cutting through the uninhabited residential streets that led back to his parents’ house. People were still asleep at four thirty in the morning. Even the early risers were still tucked away in bed. The only people out on the roads were the ones who had been out all night and were just coming home now, and there weren’t too many of those in the Dallas suburbs. Was he driving too fast? He couldn’t tell. The world always felt fast after he’d had a hit. He was just trying to keep up with it. The wind rushed through the Jeep and over his face. Too fast? No such thing. And this speed was nothing compared with how quickly he was going to get back on track to accomplishing his goals. He just needed this little boost to do it.

And he needed breakfast. A tamale sounded good right about now. Some fortification so that he could work straight through without having to take the time to go down to the kitchen and sit while his mother made him food and blabbered about the neighbors and the landscaper and the latest rumor that Jennifer had started dating a chiropractor. Three or four tamales, actually, was what he needed. Was he driving too fast? Everything felt so fast. Did it feel like the Jeep was almost tipping over when he turned into the Seven Eleven? Didn’t matter. Life was fast, and he was going to keep up with it. There was a parking spot right in front of the door. That’s what happens when you go to Seven Eleven at four thirty in the morning. You get the prime parking spots. Who ever said nine to five were the most efficient hours to work? He’d never known a genius who worked a nine to five schedule, that was for sure.

Barry slammed down on the gas to accelerate into the parking spot.

And Barry and his Jeep went through the spot, and over the sidewalk, and straight through the glass doors of the Seven Eleven. Life had been going fast, but when Barry flew out of the front seat of his Jeep, through the windshield and across the store to land up against the doors to the wall of refrigerators that housed the beer, soda, milk and juice, life had never moved more slowly. Barry felt every nanosecond as he flew through the air. He saw the cashier ducking underneath the counter to avoid the flying glass. He saw the refrigerator doors getting closer and closer and closer until he flew into them and they, too, shattered around him. And as he crashed into the doors he realized with complete clarity that he had held his breath the entire time he was flying through the air. And maybe he should just keep holding his breath and that would protect him. Holding the air in so that he would stay inflated even with all of the glass punctures in his body making holes for the air to rush out and Barry to deflate. Yes. He just needed to hold his breath in.

But life demanded that he breath.