Robin Williams’ First Suicide Note, circa 1987
By: Davy Carren
Tags: Fiction, World, Life

Weather report: partly cloudy with a slight chance of dying.

You see, nobody’s been in the business of writing me love letters for quite some time, now. And the clowns? Don’t you worry about that; they’re already here, of course. It’s all a real jiffy, a cantankerous moan consumed with attention-getting, this taking of time, these paltry gesticulations of a showboating ham, this haircut (or lack of one) that passes for a man. Sorry. I have trouble with beginnings — a born malingerer.

Last things last. Or some that won’t. Accident prone as ever. My nerve’s shot. Relapse on the horizon. The gritty scuffle of making do with less. In a daytime-TV trance, I bark orders at crossing guards and run for cover, confused and bookish beneath the junipers. A rufous-sided towhee takes a dump close to my shoes. I feel blessed for the first time in years. Nothing nearby left to depend on except this bowdlerized excuse for being me.

Capsized in guttural mumbling, songs that won’t sing. Grow beard grow, wherever you may chance to go. Arrested in my overcoat. Take me away. Take me away from reruns and alarm clocks. Splink about it all. Make up words and sense. Put your suit on backwards. Yes, Na-Nu fucking Na-Nu and all of it. Nothing’s timely here. Flying beyond all Orks for a career change, perhaps a priest at long last, or a dog walker, or a watercolor specialist with a penchant for heliotrope. I am not a man built of fulfilled desire. Just something spawned of rainbow-suspendered unrest and less-than-holy gestures. Good motherfucking morning to it all. All of it. And all the rest too.

Listen. A morbidly obese lady wearing a tan curtain-like dress smiles at me. I am withdrawn. Her right deciduous maxillary lateral incisor is off-yellow and slightly bent inward. Look. I am smiling back. There is a fortune between us. Riches of loosely held awe. A pity that isn’t taken without a restive quality. A knack for being alone. The worry less than golden over lost sleep. We exchange pleasantries. Nothing short of a curtsy and a whiff of looted hay. We light out and roam through lost territories. There are needy moods in our most insignificant asides and glances. And our names are all that might live on without us to guide them. Desperation is a thinness to all weight that slithers by without thought. Yesterday I screamed, “Alaska!” at a meter maid. I am not handling anything well.

“Look at me!” I would plead with a lump aching my throat. Disperse the troops, or some replacement hurt to belie all tenderness. But nobody looks, and I am seen too much yet never noticed. Laughs seem gratuitous in this trackless cut of shadows so far from the spot’s mark. Pockets jangling with airplane bottles of booze, I scramble from blackout to blackout between bouts of sanitized sanity. It gets later here all the time: this is what happens to me when I’m alive. The shakes. The trembling moments between clatter-happy despair and showy decals of this hirsute botcher of all ideas. Everyone understands me better than I do.

The faulty spigot of my wherewithal gushes until it only drips. Entire weekdays lost. A more even upheaval I don’t get — unfashionably odd at all times. And who calls the shots? Whose action is it to call? But mine’s a ruffled sort of indispensability: that tawdry little shine on the seat of my conscience. So late in the game to ponder new strategies. The fight’s what the weak and competent never put up. At least I can relish the fact that I am neither. Believing in yourself is for the mutually funded backers of bad taste, the shirkers of boredom, the assuredly lenient mimes, the passive do-gooders of a mindset hardwired with humdrum tendencies and meager troubles: those who would rather be of the crowd that they are lost in than be ruined with selflessness and doubt. But my two cents is just a borderline drunk’s flapping of the lips, so don’t invest too much in it. I don’t.

After wandering around downtown all day, trying to keep from going insane on the outside, I found myself sitting on a curb attempting to find a button that had first fallen off my suit jacket and then — after I’d recovered it and placed it in my breast pocket — slipped through a hole in that pocket; and a guy in a white flannel suit came up to me and gave me some change.

So little ever returned on these slight and empty investments I keep making with imitations of my personality. A rawer deal I’ve never seen the likes of. All I get are reasons to quit, to take one final dive and go under into what’ll probably only be the mediocre beyond. I say let the Swedish Fish eat gummy worms.

During the span of its usage the French guillotine was known by many names: La Monte-à-regret (The Regretful Climb) Le Rasoir National (The National Razor) Le Vasistas or La Lucarne (The Fanlight) La Veuve (The Widow) Le Moulin à Silence (The Silence Mill) Louisette or Louison (from the name of prototype designer Antoine Louis) Madame La Guillotine Mirabelle (from the name of Mirabeau) La Bécane (The Machine) Le Massicot (The Cutter) La Cravate à Capet (The Necktie of Capet, Capet being Louis XVI) La Raccourcisseuse Patriotique (The Patriotic Shortener) La demi-lune (The Half-Moon) Les Bois de Justice (Woods of Justice) La Bascule à Charlot (Charlot’s Rocking-chair) Le Prix Goncourt des Assassins (The Goncourt Prize for Murderers)

I make lists of odd things. I am not sure why.

I’ve found myself spending preposterous amounts of time pondering the old joke about Grock again. The one where a desperately ill man goes to an analyst and tells him that he is seriously considering suicide. The analyst listens to his tale of melancholia and then tells the patient that what he needs is a good belly-laugh. He advises the unhappy man to go the circus that night and spend an evening laughing at Grock, the world’s funniest clown. The analyst sums it up, “After you have seen Grock, I am sure you will be much happier.” The patient rises to his feet, looks sadly at the doctor, turns and ambles towards the door. As he starts to leave the analyst says, “By the way, what is your name?” The man turns and regards the analyst with sorrowful eyes, “I am Grock.”

To wait and wait. Godot ain’t showing up, Little Shavers. I’m only here to wait, holding out (or maybe, on) to be some strangled and madcap version of me that I can never quite become. An 80-proof disaster on hydrangea-dashed currents. Lashing out on the inside. Rationed away, holed-up out in the open, in view of all.

Asphyxiation. It just moodily rolls off the tongue. Such a beautiful sound when bereft of its meaning. The absence of a pulse. A curious infelicity of etymology. A wonderful lack of all throbbing. An inept attempt at breath, a stifled choke, and then all vain motion stops. A noose’s sure grasp — something to be counted on, at last. Snapped, firm and real, gone, finally, so brittle, like all who breathe to live. Steady now. In the certainty of the drop, paced slower towards the finish’s indefatigable celerity.

I’ve got suspicions that there is much more to gain in what one gives than what one gets from all this. Something quite worthwhile, perhaps, to be done, to be known. Maybe a twig of joy artfully caught like a butterfly’s wing between pinkie and thumb. A stillness that doesn’t need to last because it just is. But it is not for me. I cannot know it, and there is only me here to do the knowing. Just a quick tad of boasting (anhedonic at best), a purposeful slip, perhaps a slight nod, a subtle expression worn to outlast me, a curse cured, a laugh dismissed; and the dull and ordinary people will still sleep well, and these meager explorations we all make in the narrowly wide swaths of consciousness will still go unnoticed. Nobody here to make the bed or grow chard in an empty lot’s makeshift garden between the buildings. Tell the super I’ve gone to hell — just like he always wanted me to.

And all that will be left: only this curious love letter to the world, for the world — to whom it never concerns — to ignore. Damn it. There is bird shit in my hair. I’m through.