paved with best intentions

Tonight I find myself at another dive outside city limits named the “Batters Up” club. Old school, hip-hop, and rap is spinning on the tables and beers are two dollars a draft. The place is crawling with cholo’s, jaina’s, and even whitey’s who think they’re down with la raza. There is an uneasy tension in the air. I see it. I can read the signs… huddled conversations held in dark corners, menacing backward glances, and brazen macho posturing. Every guy has a shaved head, sports a moustache or a goatee, and wears an oversized football or basketball jersey. Every girl in the place is dressed like a fucking hooker in too tight, too revealing, disposable clothing.

Everyone is overweight.

I’m an outsider here. A couple of guys I know at work invited me down for a couple of drinks. Tonight I am a guest in their world. But it’s obvious I’m out of my element. The choice of drink I ordered, the way I sit in my stool, the nervous glint in my eye… these are all dead giveaways. I wouldn’t dare venture in here alone. I’d surely get jumped, robbed, and left out in an alley to hopefully bleed to death and die. I’ve never understood the banger lifestyle. I was never truly a part of this scene. I had way too much book smarts and not enough street smarts. I always had too much to lose.

Up until a year ago I always told people I met, with confidence and flirtatious charm, that I was a student at the university. That I had a future. I always told people I had only 36 credits left to graduate.

Every year since the age of eighteen I’ve had only 36 credits left to graduate.

Every evening spent passed out on some strangers couch, or asleep in an alley, or catatonic on a park bench… I’ve had only 36 credits left to graduate.

Every failed relationship, every fuck up, every time I walk the line I have only 36 credits left to graduate.

Every wasted day I spend at my brainless, degrading job taking orders from inept, stupid-fuck managers I’m 36 credits away from graduating. Every second spent blankly staring at a computer monitor… working just hard enough to remain employed… a clock puncher… an order taker… a yes man… flying below the radar and slightly just above it… snorting coke in the company bathroom… a loser… a failure… a tweaker… a drunk… I am and always will be 36 credits away from graduating.

I could have graduated from college. I had half of my credits completed upon graduating high school. I could have finished college but I couldn’t get up in the morning or go to bed at night… I was too damned lazy. If I had I would have gone on to graduate school and you wouldn’t be reading these words right now because I’d be out driving around in my BMW changing the world one lawsuit, one surgery, one bestseller at a time. And my life would have had more worth… or not. I’m thinking I would have wound up doing the exact same thing I’m doing now but worse. Wealth would guarantee easier access to drugs and women.

I’d have fallen farther and harder.

So I find myself here at the “Batters Up” or “McPhie’s” or “Jim’s Tiki Lounge” or “Dee Jay’s” or “the Barbary Coast.” So I find myself hiding in these dive bars among the cast-off’s and riff raff and I don't have a clue from what. I’m another face among the drunks, the tweakers, the dreamers, the bikers, the winos, the bangers, the lost and the hopeless. And without doubt everywhere I go, to everyone I meet, I am forever considered an outsider...

... does this mean there might still be a place waiting for me in the “real” world?