the naked man

part one | part two | part three | part four

How does a night go so wrong, so quickly?

You leave work, exhausted, in pain, desperate to lie down and try and pass out through the pain you're feeling in your kidney.

Next thing you know you're still out drinking at three in the morning, barely able to stand, but determined to keep going.

It's not until four that you realize the girl you keep drinking for is not the girl you should be talking to.

And then everything hits you all at once.

Who you are.

Where you are.

Why you should be anywhere else in the world than where you are at that exact moment.

You're drunk and alone in New Orleans.

When I came to, I wasn't even sure if I was walking in the right direction. I just knew that I had left a bar, that I had been talking to the wrong blonde, and that I felt like someone was pressing their thumb hard against my left testicle.

I guess it was the pain that woke me up.

I was in New Orleans, still.

I was passing another stone. How many had it been? Three? Four? Wait…it couldn't be four…I've only been here…

Right…I've been here four years. And this will be my fourth stone.

I don't know whether to blame it on the booze or the etouffe…

I don't know where I'm going, I don't know where I live.

I just know that I'm in pain and I'm confused and I don't remember very much of the past four years.

But the pain above my left nut wakes me up to all of it.

Right there, on the corner of Decatur and Frenchman, I wake up.

I feel everything.

I remember my wife's death, I remember Ridge Ave. I remember leaving Philadelphia. I remember getting into a car crash in Raleigh, North Carolina. I remember finding an apartment on Elysian above the lesbian bar the very first day I arrived In New Orleans.

I remember getting a job working the front desk at the Best Western on Bourbon Street one month later, after I first got tired of drinking twenty-four hours a day and decided I needed something to separate me from the booze.

All because I'll never forget that moment, that night, when the unbearable pain in my groin made me wake up from the desperate, drunken sleep I had been in for four years.

I'll never forget that day, the very first day that I started to feel things again, even if only for a little while.

But then, I doubt if anyone forgets the day that everything they've known collapses on top of them, leaving them broken, bruised, and stunned amongst the shattered remnants of the walls they've built.

And when everything falls down, you realize that it's just you, alone, standing on a corner in a strange city with blood dribbling down your leg.

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