Once Upon A Time In Argentina

Chapter 1

Chapter 1

“The thought of suicide is a great consolation: by means of it one gets through many a dark night.”

- Friedrich Nietzsche

If I left now, it would take me 34 minutes to get to the Dodge dealership. Maybe two hours for them to run a credit check and get me in a new Hellcat. After all, I wouldn’t really haggle, or maybe I would. Really ruin the salesman’s day before I left. Black, with a red interior, that’s what I would get. Maybe even trade in my F-150—I wouldn’t need it anymore.

From there I would run it hard, all the way up 101, the Pacific on one side of me, until I finally found a cliff.

I would throw it down a gear and stomp the pedal, and hit the guard rail at 130 mph. The car would buckle, but momentum would carry me over, and I would tumble through the air, a jumbled mass of fiberglass and steel. If I hit it fast enough, the guardrail wouldn’t matter, and I’d make it to the water. I would disappear in the black maw of the ocean, lost at last to the sea, my body given back to the chaos, and I could be free.

This is what I had thought about every day for the last year. The most dramatic, most obnoxious ways to kill myself.

It was a game we used to play in the unit, this was how we wiled away the hours on a long deployment, or during night shift. We came up with the most intricate, obscure, and offensive ways you could kill yourself, and then trotted them out in front each other as if we were in show and tell. We would howl with laughter for hours, snorting and choking, at the images of our best friend hanging themselves from an industrial warehouse ceiling fan. On a long rope, of course, so that when they found the body, he would be whipping around the giant room. Suicide was like going AWOL, except they could never catch you. It was the only real way to say “fuck you” to the world. I think that was the attraction.

I had made my first suicide joke a week after I started at CORPOSUCKCOCK, and my new co-workers’ reactions had been awkward requests to see if “I needed help,” or was “doing ok.” That was the first time I regretted leaving the Corps.

I stared at the fluorescent lights above my cubicle. They buzzed and flickered. Sometimes I swore they flashed messages, but whenever I noticed, they stopped, and the light held droningly steady. I resented being trapped there, held under artificial light while the California sun gleamed brightly outside.

The thing I realize now, is that in the Corps, they were really just jokes. Out here they were an attempt at self-actualization.

I worked for a start up, they had moved out here a year ago, fleeing San Francisco. The company was called Artificial Spaces and was supposedly working on using machine learning to generate virtual spaces. I worked in the finance department, and they were bleeding cash, but it didn’t matter. Most of America is an optical illusion that way, if you cross your eyes, and maintain the proper emotional distance to most of the buggery, you can sort of see what should amount to a culture and a country. Businesses don’t have to be solvent as long as you can sell the vision.

Artificial Spaces had bought out an old aerospace building, and converted it to offices, so the windows were heavily glazed to prevent the soviets or whoever else they thought had been spying at the time from spying, but the Cold War had been over for the better part of 30 years now. So, it just dampened most of the natural light, and turned the inside into a depressing cave of fluorescents and cubicles.

I had worked here a year, and every day seemed a lifetime. The work was tedious. I spent most of my day answering emails, and chasing down spreadsheets, comparing cost proposals and receipts. I often wondered how I ended up here when I had so many other options. But in reality, all options had led to here, or a version of here.

“Let’s meet in the Inspire room,” Luke said, startling me from my thoughts. He stepped into the center aisle. He was a small man, with a well-trimmed beard, and dark rimmed glasses. He was also my boss. His hairline was receding, but I could tell he had not quite given up on it yet.

Three days ago, at a bar, he had confided in me that he was in an open relationship. I don’t know why he did this, but he did, probably because he was sad and drunk, alone at a bar, and saw a familiar face. He also confided in me, that while his wife had slept with several new men, he had been unable to “score” at all. Even worse, he wasn’t completely sure he wanted to. “I still love her,” he had said. Although she apparently thought he was fine with the whole thing, he had only given in to her, because he was scared she would leave him. And who says men aren’t the real romantics.

At the end of the night, he had tried to explain how freeing it all was, and that the experience had really taught him a lot about himself, and how to overcome his insecurities. How he desperately loved his wife, and letting her be with other men, was the surest act of faith in that love. He had told me this teary-eyed, and drunk, without the slightest hint of irony. That’s when I realized the man had spent the whole night convincing himself of the idea. The experience turned my stomach. However, I had glimpsed a mirror image of myself in that instant. Always talking myself into the “right” course of action, the life that was expected, until I too, expected it.

“Actually, the Inspire room is already booked,” Lisa said. Her voice was a cast iron grate scraping over concrete. Her perfume gave me a headache, and I imagined in several different lives she had been the girl to raise her hand at school and remind the teacher about the homework.

Luke looked exasperated at this scheduling mix up. I swallowed my disgust. He overreacted to everything. He acted neurotic, like a beaten woman, flinching at the slightest creak in the house.

“Ok, lets meet in the Believe room,” Luke said at last, finally finished panicking. His voice weak and estrogenic, as if his diaphragm was perpetually compressed.

This was my manager. This was our fearless leader. A man in an open relationship. A man who feared the most basic decisions. He was made for middle management. Born to it, the way a Khan is to the steppe. If only he had ever read Jocko’s Extreme Ownership then he too could command the platoons of corporate America.

The Inspire Room, the Believe Room, I don’t even hear them anymore, it’s normal now. The lights flickered again. They sent messages out in morse code. When I looked up, they stopped.

Everything in a corporate office, in corporate culture, in corporate anything is designed to extract your soul. I had heard startups were better, and if that was true, then I would likely not make it a day under the normal bureaucracy of a fortune 500. They break you down more thoroughly than bootcamp ever had, but never go through the trouble of building you back up. There was no crucible at the end of this mountain. Only a rock, that rolled backwards. An Outlook inbox that never filled. Call me Sisyphus. Somewhere in the distance of my mind’s ear a hellcat savages pavement.

They pair brutalist architecture with stock images of sunrises and grassy hills, and then those are overlaid with inspirational words. Motivate. Learn. Achieve.

They give you pointless tasks. Approval loops that take a day to navigate before you end up back where you started. A tracker for updating the tracker. And then there is email. Thread after thread, of confusion, the shirking of responsibility. You learn other people’s jobs just to tell them how to do it. Zoom meetings that go nowhere.

You think if you gut it out long enough, smile just right and talk at the perfect pitch you will get promoted. And often you do. But it’s never for the reasons you think. It’s never because you had a great quarter, or because you fixed a system and saved x hours of time. No. It’s because you were there. It was your time. You were the one dumb enough to sign up for this, dumb enough to stick around.

And then you get promoted. A whole level. That’s a step up. Your 70k a year becomes 83k a year. But somehow you only see $100 extra a paycheck. That can’t be right, there is a mix up you think. But there wasn’t. The step up puts you in a new tax bracket, which means the government gets its share, and since your health benefits are calculated on a company-wide curve, you are now expected to pay more of the premium compared to the company.

Your yearly raise will be 2-3% if you are lucky, and the company did “well.” Whatever that means. But real inflation (use shadowstats.com and not that CPI calculated garbage) is running hot and has been year after year. If you calculate from three years prior, your dollars go 19% less far.

Quicksand. That’s your life, and every day you are sinking.

But the one rule, and one rule only, is never bring any of this up to anyone ever. To break the illusion, just for a second, to shine a light in the dark corner, or mention that the king has no clothes, is a hard no. They are automatons and programmed to kill.

Why I can’t disappear into collections of poorly made plastic figurines like everyone else, is a question I could never answer. They know it’s bad. Caring just makes it worse.

The Believe Room is white walls, a laminate wood table, circular, the carpet dirty blue. My coworkers shuffle in, pick their spots with strategic precision. Which chair will let them extricate themselves the quickest.

Luke sets up the overhead projector while Lisa tries to help by giving him directions. Small men and wine moms are the slave drivers of the 21st century. They keep the machine moving. They are the ghouls that work for Master. Instead of whips they use empty smiles and nurturing voices, but eyes are empty, and bosoms cold.

“Today, boys and girls, we are learning about diversity, can anyone tell me why it’s wrong to use N***** to describe Terrel?” my boss asked.

He didn’t say this, but it’s what I heard. My mind’s ear again.

I make eye contact with Terrel. He had heard it too. I feel vindicated. Maybe, my boss did say it.

I zoned out for the rest of the meeting, bronze age warriors sack villages in my mind’s eye. Red-bearded Scythian steppe nomads sitting atop squat, muscular ponies as their prey flees before them—the merchants, and the farmers, the self-domesticated. Scalps hang from their intricately decorated saddles, and their helms glittered with rubies. Swords flashed and men fell. One has a black-haired buxom beauty tossed across his saddle.

I wondered if my ancestors would disown me when I got to Valhalla, then I remembered that you had to die with a weapon in your hand. I’d have to rethink my suicide.

I should have died in Iraq. That had been my chance. But they had forced me out, I went to college on the G.I. Bill, after I was too jaded to enjoy it. I got a finance degree.

I had hated the Marine Corps, but in the way you hate a toxic girlfriend—you drive each other wild. She drives you nuts, keys your car, but when it’s good, you are going eighty down a two lane road, smoking a cigarette, and her head is bobbing up and down in your lap. It’s no long-term way to live, but it is a great way to die. She didn’t have to break up with me.

Lunch was at my desk, and I spent the rest of the day sorting emails. When your job is wasting time, your time is wasting.

A black hand waved in front of my face. It was Terrel.

“Smoke?” he asked. Terrel and I were the only two people at the company that smoked.

“Alright, you got a lighter?” I asked.

“You know I do,” he said.

“Cool.”

We had to smoke fifty feet in front of the building. We knew this because we had been chased away from the front door more than once, by more than one sad, strong matriarch.

“This shit is gay as fuck, man.”

I inhaled the cigarette. “I know, I hate it.”

“For real, I would quit if it didn’t pay so well,” Terrel said.

He was doing the thing too, talking himself into it. Talking himself into life in the 21st century.

* * *

I pulled up outside the Palm Vale Apartment complex and waved my key card in front of the access panel. The iron gate grumbled open, and I pulled inside. I drove my F-150 through a maze of drives, cell block after cell block towering over me. My own cell was nine hundred square feet of white walls on the second floor that I paid the jailer $1500 a month to live in.

I parked the car and rolled down my window. I lit another cigarette. The sun had reached that place in the sky, where the palm tree outside of my apartment shaded my specific parking spot, at exactly 4:05 p.m. when I got back from work. I figured it only happened once or twice a year like this. I took a long drag on the cigarette, basking in the serendipity of the moment. This was my summer solstice.

I found a package left by the front door. It was from MedTest Industries. For $150, you could take your own blood work. I set the package on the counter. Sarah had left a note asking me to get groceries. A little smiley face drawn at the end. Sarah was the only reason I was still here, in the country, in the universe, which were not great reasons to be with someone.

I tacked her list to the fridge with a magnet that said, “I love you”. We hadn’t had sex in a month and the problem was me. It had started a year ago, right when I switched jobs, my libido died, or at least that’s what I thought. At some point later in this story I’d realize it was just depression, but alas. My junk works fine now.

I scanned the chore list and wondered why she couldn’t do them. They were always simple things, things that could have been done in the time it took to write them down. Everywhere, my life was managed by women. Things that just a generation ago no woman in her right mind would dare suggest her husband do. But then again, a single man’s job would have kept her fed, and clothes on her children’s backs. I guess ultimately, this was the problem.

Instead, she worked a job. She was a certified girl boss, making twenty eight dollars an hour as a “manager.”

I sat on the couch and googled low testosterone. I had tried it all, raw eggs, working out, vitamin D. Nothing had worked. I googled boxing gyms in my area. I found one ten minutes away, I would try it. Fighting would give me my life back. I ordered a pair of gloves on Amazon.

I boxed in the Marines. We even had to settle a few disagreements that way on deployment. All I knew was I needed something. I was dying. Withering. I could feel my soul leaking out of my ears and I had no way to stop it.

Sarah came through the door. “Did you do anything on the list?” she asked.

“No, I just got home,” I said.

She huffed and disappeared to the bedroom.

I flicked the tv on and looked for a game. Every five minutes an ad for an antidepressant came on, and then one for a new diet, and then one with a mixed-race couple, the white guy cowering beneath the ire of his beautiful ugly afroed wife. Interracial marriage or sex, or whatever you want to call it, had never offended me until it was meant to be offensive, and by then it had become illegal to say it was offensive. What luck. Also what the fuck is with everyone in ads having vitiligo. I’ve never seen one in real life.

* * *

My gloves came three days later. I tore into the amazon box and tried them on. They were black, shiny, and new. Begging me to break them in. I gleamed.

The gym was in a brand-new shopping center. I pulled up and parked. I stared at it. My class started at 7 p.m.

Inside, there were rows of heavy bags. The place gleamed. Pop music blared overhead, and my heart dropped. It was full of women—yoga pants, and athletic wear—the entire gym reeked of anti-septic. I scanned the place quickly, there wasn’t even a place to spar. This wasn’t a boxing gym; it was Pilates with gloves.

“Welcome to Boxer’s,” the woman at the front desk said, “have you been here before?”

I glared.

But it was too late, I couldn’t turn around now. I feigned interest in her droning, and ten minutes later I was signed up for three free sessions. Five minutes after that, I bobbed and weaved, as “our” homosexual Puerto Rican instructor led me and “the girls,” through a series of routines. He wore an earpiece, his spiky hair gelled, and instead of actual work out clothes he bobbed around in an overly tight red polo shirt that had the gym’s logo embroidered on it—Boxer’s.

He looked like he should be selling ShamWow. I imagined the bag was his face. His energetic voice, frenetic over the gym’s speakers, urged all of us on, and by the end of it I was convinced that this class was equal to, if not actual—sodomy.

I walked outside. My bubble of motivation burst, the wave that had given me new hope, dashed upon the fake and gay reality of the 21st century.

When I returned home, I threw my gloves in the corner. I pulled a glass container full of leftovers out of the fridge and sat on the couch. I had thrown all our plastic containers out three months ago and bought glass. I lived in fear of micro-plastics and waged a losing war on parabens. I refused to touch the receipts at the store, convinced that they contained dangerous phytoestrogens. Despite all this, my testosterone still hadn’t improved, or so I thought.

I scrolled on my phone. Wondering why I did it. Every two posts was some sort of ad for a testosterone booster, or a course that would make you a millionaire. Every day, the answer box showed women how ugly they were, and showed men how poor they were.

Again, I googled boxing gyms in my area, but this time I pulled up a crime map of my city. I found a couple streets where the dots clustered, and then searched for a boxing gym in the triangle. I found it, Lion’s Gym. That was my spot. That’s where I would try next.

* * *

I trudged my way through Walmart, gathering the things on the list. I went to Walmart because it was close, and it was cheap, but also because I am a masochist.

Small family-owned grocers gave their life for this. For cheap foreign made bullshit, picked over by white trash and their black neighbors. Obese women, freed from their duties to husband and family over fifty years ago, and given the authority a name tag carries, deputized by Sam Walton himself, now roamed the aisles, some would call them the commissars of a new age.

“Excuse me,” a voice from behind me says.

I have zoned out in the middle of the aisle. I scooch my cart over awkwardly, the wheels groan and creak, I’m suddenly confused, as to how I was even in the way. But then I see the rest of her. She smiles at me as she passes, her smile another fold in her giant neck. She’s a blob, a mass of flesh. A monstrosity of sagging skin stretched to its breaking point underneath pound after pound of pork fed flesh.

She waddled past.

At the front of the store, I went to the self-checkout. There were only two registers manned by human cashiers. Part of me longed for the days when you were forced to talk to an awkward teenager, or the lonely grandma, forced to participate in the community you lived in. Instead, they had replaced all of them with these infernal machines, the ones that beeped at you when you didn’t put your items on the scale fast enough. I finished checking myself out, and bagging all my groceries.

I headed to the exit.

The commissar was there. I tried to avoid eye contact as I wheeled past her.

“Sir, I need to see your receipt,” the woman said.

I stopped the cart, white knuckling the handle.

“The receipt is in that bag,” I said, and pointed to the sack on top of the cart.

“Can you take it out for me?” she asked.

“No, you take it out,” I responded. I have a thing about phytoestrogens remember.

“But we aren’t allowed to touch your things,” she said.

“Not really my problem is it,” I said.

The woman huffed and picked the receipt out of the bag. She scanned it, pretending to check it, never comparing it to any of the items in the cart. She went to hand it back to me, but I pointed at the sack. She huffed again.

“How do you know that what is in the bags is on the receipt, if you aren’t allowed to touch any of my stuff?” I asked as earnestly as I could fake.

She stared at me, her eyes glassy, and then said, “Sir, we do this at every Walmart.”

“Why do I have to show you my receipt if there are CCTV cameras in literally every aisle?” I asked.

At this the woman grew visibly frustrated. “Sir, please leave,” she said.

“That’s what I was trying to do before you stopped me,” I said.

“Sir, if you don’t leave then I will call security,” she commanded.

I wheeled my cart outside.