Short Story for critique/discussion

[twosevoff]

Here's another short story I wrote that I'd like to get some feedback on. Any and all comments welcome.

Link to previous Here's my previous short story I posted that I'd still like to get feedback on.

It Will All Be Over Soon

Rich Lucas stands outside the closed bathroom door of his apartment, wielding a handgun. “I know you guys are in there,” he says to the closed door. “Say something, goddamnit!” There is no response. Rich takes out his cell phone and dials 911.

“911, what’s your emergency?”

“I’m at 87 Spring Road, apartment 23. Two intruders broke into my apartment. I’ve trapped them in my bathroom and I’m holding them at gunpoint.”

“All-right, stay calm, the police will be there shortly.”

Ten minutes later there is a knock at the door. Rich slowly backs away from the bathroom door towards the front door, keeping the pistol trained on the bathroom. He opens the door and two officers enter the apartment.

“Put the handgun down, sir,” orders one of the cops. Rich lays his gun on the floor. “OK, that’s good. You say you’ve trapped burglars in your apartment?”

“Yeah, intruders,” says Rich frenetically. “I think they might be trying to kill me. They’ve been trying to break in for a week. There’s two of them. They broke in while I was in the bedroom. Must’ve picked the lock on the front door. I heard them come in and got my gun. I saw them in the bathroom. I shut the bathroom door and trapped them in. I tried negotiating with them but they won’t talk to me.”

The cops draw their guns and fling open the bathroom door. The bathroom is empty, with the exception of two pieces of paper scrawled with messy handwriting that were slipped under the door—Rich’s attempts to negotiate with the “intruders.”

“That doesn’t make any sense. They must’ve…they must’ve…” Rich trails off.

“They must’ve what? Disappeared? There’s no window in the bathroom." The officer smirks. "Do you have a license for that handgun sir?”

“Yeah.”

“We’ll have to check on that. Are you on any drugs?”

“No.”

“Sure seems like you are. What’s that over there on that table? Looks like a meth pipe.” The officer goes over to the pipe and examines it. “Yep, it’s a meth pipe. This gives us probable cause to search the apartment.”

The officers find a digital scale and a quarter pound of crystal meth. As they are leading Rich out of the apartment in handcuffs, one of the officers says, with a grin, “So you hallucinated that you trapped ‘intruders’ in the bathroom? ‘Cause the first thing people are going to do when they break in somewhere is take a [censored], right? Man, you really [censored] yourself over; you’re gonna get some time for this right here. Meth is one helluva drug, huh?”

Rich did not discover drugs until relatively late in life. Sure, he smoked pot from time to time in high school and college, but that was the extent of his drug use, and it was not until he was 26 and already married that addiction began to slowly, yet inexorably, consume him. The turning point came at a party, when, very drunk, Rich decided to try cocaine for the first time. After he had snorted a line off a hand mirror through a rolled up twenty, a bitter taste trickled down his nasal passages to the back of his throat. Rich experienced a sudden rush, the intensity of which instilled him with an invigorating sensation of invulnerability—he was untouchable, acutely alive. Well shee-it, he thought, so this is what I’ve been missing out on. The next weekend, he called up the friend he had done the coke with, and they bought an eight-ball and spent a sublime Saturday night snorting all of it.

After that, Rich felt like he had found a new lover. In the next three years, he tried all types of drugs—hashish, opiates, amphetamines, pills, hallucinogens—whatever he could get his hands on. But mainly it was cocaine. He spent hundreds of dollars each week on the intoxicating white powder. He did lines at home with his wife in the next room. He did lines at work in the bathroom stall. He snorted it off of his keys while stopped at red lights in his car. He became skinny, and his nostrils were raw and frequently bled. His personal and professional life suffered. He struggled to pay his bills, and he fell behind on his credit card payments and mortgage. He embezzled money from work so that he could cover his increasingly extravagant expenditures. He neglected his wife and stayed out until all hours of the night. If his wife asked where he had been, he would make up some ridiculously contrived excuse about how he was doing something for his job. But most times she did not ask, and if she did, she did not rigorously cross-examine him when he made his dubious explanations. He started seeing other women, engaging in epic, all-night, coke-fueled sex sessions. If he could not find a woman for free, he would pay for one—get a hotel room and order a hooker from an escort service.

When his wife found out definitively about the other women, she was enraged. She found out about the infidelity in a rough way: Rich contracted gonorrhea and had given it to her. She had already known about the cocaine for a while and had tolerated it, hoping it was just a phase, a midlife crisis fifteen years early. The affairs, though, those she would not tolerate. They were an absolute betrayal, and the thought of them, especially the thought of how he had given her an STD, caused her blood to boil. She confronted him and aired him out, screamed and swore at him, hit him, said she would leave him if he did not give up both the drugs and the women. Through tear-filled eyes, Rich told her that he knew that he had [censored] up, that he would make it up to her, that the drugs and the other women were a thing of the past. She cried along with him and told him that she forgave him. He flushed his coke stash down the toilet in front of her and then they had sex, sex more tender than they had had in years. Rich kept to his promise for a while, but after a few weeks, he returned to using cocaine, and after a few months, he resumed his infidelity.

By and large, the first three years of Rich’s infatuation with drugs was a joyful period for him. It was akin to a spiritual awakening; it was like he had found God. That is not to say that there were not times between coke binges that he felt rotten, or that the drugs did not lose some of their luster, but for the most part Rich experienced contentment during that period, greater contentment than he had known in sobriety. After those first three years, however, the infectious sense of novelty which had previously accompanied his binges disappeared, and his life rapidly deteriorated.

Finding a used condom wrapper in his pants pocket and hotel room charges on his credit card bill, his wife filed for divorce. Rich pleaded with her to reconsider and once again resolved to change, but she told him that she had already given him his second chance and was through with him. After the divorce, Rich started using crystal meth heavily—cocaine no longer provided the edgy, heady rush he craved. The meth took a toll on him in a way that the coke had not; it gave him acne and scabs on his face and made him act extremely erratically. He got fired from his job for poor performance and strange behavior (his company never did find out about the nearly $100,000 he embezzled though). Out of a job, he began selling meth to support himself.

The combination of drug-dealing and heavy meth use caused intense paranoia. Psychotic paranoia. Rich was continually convinced that the cops were after him, that his phone was tapped, that he was being snitched on, that people were trying to rob him, that people were trying to kill him. He bought a gun for protection. Sometimes he saw things and heard things, things that were not there. When he walked the streets, he appeared deranged: his eyes were glazed over slits and a desperate fear emanated from his sunken, emaciated face. His eyes darted from one darkened corner to the next, scrutinizing every shadow with a suspicious and savage glare.

Once, in the midst of a particularly bad binge, Rich called 911 and hysterically shouted into the phone, “There’s no drugs here! So don’t come here looking for drugs!” Then he hung up. When 911 called back, Rich did not answer and so the operator sent the police over. Fortunately for Rich, he pulled himself together by the time they arrived, and the cops had no interest in searching the apartment once they had ascertained that he was all-right. Another time, someone knocked at his apartment door, and, forgetting that he had just invited a friend over to use, Rich became convinced that it was the police, coming to arrest him. He gathered up his stash and leapt out of the living room window, two stories up, breaking his ankle upon impacting the ground. Terrified and in excruciating pain, he hobbled as fast as he could to the nearby Pemagwassat River and pitched $2000 worth of meth into the current.

After the fateful visitation by imaginary intruders, Rich pleads guilty to possession with intent to distribute and is sentenced to four years in prison, of which he ultimately serves two. Two utterly hellish years. When he gets back on the outside, he begins using drugs again: heroin. Every time he sticks a needle in his vein, it fills him with a profound and unmistakable pleasure and the memories of his incarceration fade from his mind. When he is not high though, he is miserable and depressed and cannot shake the haunting recollections of jail from his consciousness. Five months after his release, police bust him buying fifty dollars worth of heroin. Since it is a class A drug and a parole violation, there is no doubt that he is going to receive relatively significant jail time.

One night, two months before his court date, an event occurs that changes the course of Rich’s life. He is in his studio apartment drinking by himself. His apartment is dirty and barren; there are clumps of dust on the floor, the walls are undecorated, and it is all but unfurnished. He sits in a grey easy chair with the cloth torn in places. The chair had been put out with someone’s trash and Rich took it from the side of the road and transplanted it into his apartment. There is a mattress lying in one corner of the room and a telephone at Rich’s feet, but otherwise the room is empty. Rich downs the last of the bottle—cheap, vile-tasting vodka—and dials his ex-wife’s number.

“Hi Beth, it’s Rich.”

“Oh. You’re out of prison?”

“Yeah, got out eight months ago. Wasn’t too bad in there. Only really did two days when I think about it now, day I went in, and day I got out. I got myself straightened out in there too—I’ve stopped all the drugs. I’m doing great; I really turned things around, got a new lease on life. How about you? How’ve you been?”

“Fine,” she says curtly. “Is there a reason you called me out of the blue?”

“Just wanted to catch up. I was going to ask you if you maybe wanted to get together sometime too.”

“I don’t.”

“Why not?”

“You can’t figure that out for yourself?” Rich does not respond. “You think I forgot about everything you put me through while we were together?” Rich still does not answer. “Well, I didn’t. All the drugs, the late nights, the other women. It was horrible. You gave me gonorrhea for chrissakes. And then you kept right on cheating.”

“Look, I’m sorry about all that. But that’s in the past. I told you, I’m different now. I changed.”

“That would be more convincing if you weren’t slurring your words.”

“No I’m not, that’s ridiculous.” He is slurring badly now. “I love you Beth. I’ve missed you so damn much. I know I [censored] up bad when we were together, I know it. Just give me one more chance; I’ll make things right. C’mon, just one more chance. Just one more. I [censored] love you!”

“I used to love you too, Rich. More than you know. It was the only reason I put up with your [censored] for so long. But all I feel for you now is revulsion. Goodbye, Rich.”

All of a sudden, Rich feels very nauseous, and he staggers into the bathroom, falls to his knees, and vomits into the toilet. On returning back to the living room, he sits back down in the easy chair and continues his drunk dialing, picking up the phone again and calling Ray, his former best friend

“Hey Ray, what’s going on, it’s Rich.”

“Do you have my money?”

“Well, no, but I’m gonna try to…”

“[censored] you then.” And he hangs up.

A minute later, Rich calls his parent’s house.

“Hi Ma, it’s Rich.”

“No, you can’t have any money. And I thought I told you not to call here anymore.”

“I just want to talk, Ma.

“Well, I don’t want to talk to you.” And she hangs up.
Rich calls his brother next. Before hanging up, his brother tells Rich that he has heard that Rich is going to jail again, that he is glad, and that “you’re getting what you deserve you sonuvabitch.”

Rich walks unsteadily into the kitchen alcove next to the door of his apartment, opens the silverware drawer, and removes a sharp meat-carving knife. He looks at the blade and considers what he has done with his life. He thinks about how he has alienated everyone who he ever cared about. He finds himself futilely wishing that he had stayed on the straight-and-narrow path. He thinks of the prospect of getting brutalized and raped again in prison, and he quickly and decisively slices open his wrists.
Blood gushes as if from a spring. Rich does not feel much pain because of his drunkenness. He goes to the mattress in the corner of the room and throws himself onto it. As he bleeds out, he thinks about what is going to happen when he dies. He knows he is not going to heaven, which leaves only hell or non-existence—everlasting nothingness. He was counting on the latter, but the possibility of hell is seeming more and more real and he is petrified.

He tries to focus on something else. He turns his thoughts to drugs and realizes that he sure would like to get high at least one more time. This thought spurs him to action, and he sits up, with the intention of calling 911. He is very faint and weak however, and he lies back down. A peacefulness suddenly washes over him, as if he has spiked a vein with heroin. It’s okay, he thinks, it will all be over soon.

[twosevoff]

Don't know why it came out with all the "’" and such instead of apostrophes and quotation marks. Sorry about that. Too lazy to fix it though.

[Peter666]

"As he bleeds out, he thinks about what is going to happen when he dies. He knows he is not going to heaven, which leaves only hell or non-existence—everlasting nothingness. He was counting on the latter, but the possibility of hell is seeming more and more real and he is petrified."

No doubt Rich was an avid reader of our Science Math and Philosophy forum.

This is more of a newspaper article than a story. I am simply watching a stranger degenerate with what seems like lack of artistic intent. I think if we learn more about Rich's history and previous motivations, it will become more interesting and moving.

But I like the structure. It just needs to be built upon and refined.