Untitled Novel - Chapter One, First Draft - Part One

As the title states, this is a rough first draft that hasn't even been proofread. It hasn't been edited in any fashion. However, I feel that it is important for me to get whatever constructive criticism I can, so I share this here. If you have any offer, feel free.

One last thing. Don't assume that this is strictly autobiographical. As one of the tags says, it's fiction. It certainly has autobiographical elements, but it's not a case history.
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             Of all the things that Jericho Adams could be in this world, to be himself was the least appealing of them all.

            All of us desire a sense of place, a coherent definition of self that can provide us a map for what paths we should take in life. Many never discover a clear purpose to their days. They stumble from one distraction to another on their way to the grave and leave an indifferent trail of wreckage behind them.

            Jericho saw himself as a writer. At an early age, he discovered that he had an intuitive grasp of how to frame language in such a way that it produced a reaction in others. His grasp of this brought him the praise of his elders. It brought him attention and hinted that perhaps he had his own unique gifts that set him apart from his contemporaries. It gave him a sense of identity that the circumstances of life had hitherto denied him. He was a writer and he would work to become one of great distinction.

            By his twenty-first birthday, he was an alcoholic of distinction. He had read all of the biographies of his literary heroes and embraced the image of the tortured, hard drinking artist who spun gold from his misery.  To live hard, write hard, and make a beautiful corpse became a principal for living. His parents looked on baffled, powerless, and pained as he sunk into a miasma of chemically fueled degradation. On his twenty-first birthday, he was in jail serving a sentence for a series of public intoxication charges. His release was in two days.

            On his birthday, a homeless drunk in his cellblock that he knew from the streets offered him a gift. His name was Billy, but for reasons unknown, everyone called him Trig. Due to a severe back injury, he took four Somas a day. Unbeknownst to Jericho, he had saved him four as a birthday present, but there was a drawback; the pills had been in his mouth. Anyone who was administered medication in jail had to take it in front of the nurse in an effort to prevent hoarding, but Trig, deft at the deceptive arts, hid the pills behind his tongue and passed the nurse's inspection. Saturated by his saliva, the pills now had a slightly misshapen shape. Jericho did not want them for that very reason, but the warped etiquette of jail life would not allow him to refuse the gift. What a birthday, he thought.

            "How should I take these, Trig?" Jericho asked. Pills were not his forte.

            "All four of 'em, all at once!" Trig exclaimed. "You'll get all fucked up! Try to avoid the guards though. They'll be able to tell." he cautioned.

            "Aw, thanks Trig. It might be the best birthday present I've ever gotten!" he answered with a smirk.

            "Yes!" he drawled. "Just remember that I'm goin' without to make your birthday fun! It's such a shame that you're locked up on your twenty first birthday. Poor Jericho!" he said with mocking sympathy.

            "Yeah, I feel like a Merle Haggard song."

            He followed Trig's sage advice and took all four. For much of that day he slept, and when he was not sleeping, the air seemed to swim around him and reality had taken on a surreal, blurry hue. The effects of the Somas lingered and he slept the next day except for meals.

            On the day of his release, his only thought was about the drinking that lay ahead of him. Legal drinking. The excitement that he felt was palpable. They could not get him processed out quick enough. The thoughts of bars, gorgeous women, and loud music filled his mind as he removed his jail uniform and put on his street clothes.

            "You ain't ever comin' back to see us again, are you Adams?" The jail guard asking this question was a portly middle-aged man with a reddened, bloated face.

            "Of course, I am. Just not any time soon." Jericho replied with a grin. He thought he was such an outlaw.

            The jail guard frowned and silently shook his head. "You've got a lot comin' to you."

            After his release, he stepped into the jail lobby bathroom. He urinated and began to comb his hair. The face that looked back at him in the mirror was a little pale from lack of sun and the harsh fluorescent lights of the cellblock. His shoulder length hair, dishwater blonde and slightly frizzy, was a disorderly tangle of knots and broken strands. A few days worth of stubble covered his face. Nevertheless, despite his rough appearance, his bright blue eyes remained brilliant and undimmed. He wanted to appraise himself, but what he saw in the mirror was difficult to determine. He wanted to interrogate the image. Who are you? What do you want from me? Even now, released from jail, he did not know who he was looking at. The identity of the image was elusive.

            When he stepped out into the sunshine, he had thirty-five dollars in his pocket and felt thirsty. He had told Lee, his father, not to bother picking him up from the jail, he was going straight from the jail to begin the belated celebration of his twenty-first birthday. The conversation had taken place the night before. It was strained and tense.

            "Yer just gettin' out of jail and wanna drink again, eh?" his father asked. He sounded frustrated.

            "Dad, I had to sit in jail on my twenty-first birthday. I wanna go out and do some legal drinkin' finally."

            "You know what happened last time you started drinkin' after you got outta jail."

            He had done his first stint in jail at the age of eighteen. After twenty-nine days, he went out to drink his first night and drank a fifth of bourbon, countless beers, and a few bottles of cheap wine. He blacked out and finished the night passed out on a People's Park bench. He had urinated all over himself. He awoke to find himself arrested again and face down in the drunk tank less than twelve hours after his release.

            "That shit will never happen again. I'll be drinkin' with good people tonight." Jericho protested. His father blamed the people he was drinking with for his arrest. Back in his day, your friends went to jail with you, or so he said. By regarding them in an unfavorable light, Jericho was attempting to align himself with his father in an effort to gain his approval. Then, as before, he always had an agenda.

            "I'll bet" Lee replied. The wearied disgust in his voice bordered on contempt.

            "Dammit, I know what I'm doin', I feel like I've gotta right to party on my twenty-first birthday, ya know?"

            "What you need to do is come home, get a good night's sleep, and start lookin' for a job the next day. You don't need to be drinkin'." His voice was stern, resolute.

            "There's plenty of time for that stuff later." The last thing he wanted to hear about was getting a job. He wanted to play and have some fun. He felt entitled after his time in jail.

            "No, there isn't plenty of time, because I'm not puttin' up with this shit much longer."

            Jericho sighed. "Look, Dad, I don't wanna fight. I'll talk to you sometime tomorrow. I'll be home late tonight.

            "Fine. Remember what I said though." his father shot back and hung up.

            The conflicts with his family were dismal and deepening. However much he longed for a better relationship with them, his longing to follow his own path, damn the consequences, remained stronger.

            He found a nearby pay phone and called Christina. Christina was one of the few female friends he had. At one time, she had been a drinking companion who had since become pregnant and tempered her life accordingly. She had given birth to her daughter during Jericho's incarceration and he was eager to see her newborn child.

             "Hello?"

            "Heya, Christina, what's goin' on?"

            "Hey Jericho! You're outta jail?" Her elation at hearing his voice was genuine and unambiguous.

            "Yup, sure am. Whatcha up to?"

            "Just feedin' Willow. Where are you?"

            "Downtown right now. You busy? I was thinkin' about walkin' out that way."

            "I'm not busy, come on out." she replied.

            "I've got thirty five bucks on me. You wanna go out and help me catch up on celebratin' my twenty-first birthday?"

            "Sure, I'll hafta find someone to babysit Willow, but come on out anyway, we'll think of somethin'!" she exclaimed.

            "Okay, see ya soon. It'll take me a while."

            "I'll be here. See ya."

            They hung up. The walk across Bloomington would be a long one. He walked past the courthouse square. The city had once been a bastion of traditional Southern Indiana life that seemingly hosted a major university only by happenstance. However, Jericho had seen his hometown evolve a great deal in his twenty-one years.

            The old Bloomington was dying. Edifices of red brick and limestone had been the target of extensive restorations meant to approximate the architecture of a bygone era and those that escaped restoration faced destruction.  In this era of Clintonian dot.com prosperity, a new social paradigm had refashioned downtown Bloomington into a gentrified enclave of custom sandwich shops, high-end clothing boutiques, upscale restaurants, and bakeries. Only vestiges of Bloomington's humble, rustic roots remained.

            You just had to know where to look to find them. Those fading vestiges were still present in cornerstones etched with dedications and building completion dates from the early 20^th century. Those vestiges were visible in the limestone fountain on the courthouse lawn that bore Biblical quotes and an inscription that read:

ERECTED BY MONROE COUNTY

W C T U

AD1913

            He reached Kirkwood Avenue. When the warm weather came, Kirkwood held its own particular allure for Jericho. It was the primary conduit between the city and Indiana University and he always felt a distinct charge in the air when he was here. Due to his circumstances on this particular day, the atmosphere on the street was even more bracing than usual. The air was thick with humidity and the sidewalks were teeming with people.

            Even here, one could still bear witness to the remnants of old Bloomington. The empty Indiana Movie Theater and its garish, neon sign still stood as it had for over thirty years. Three doors east of the theater, the downtown's lone remaining diner, complete with stools and a breakfast bar, remained open for business. Nevertheless, the new Bloomington had asserted its dominance here in unmistakable ways.

            Next to the small county library on the corner of Washington and Kirkwood, they were busy building a new spacious, imposing library. Renovations were ongoing to a variety of other buildings and long-standing, locally owned businesses were rapidly ceding ground to national franchises offering the greatest and latest in everything. Everywhere around Jericho stood shops selling university apparel, music, fast food, alcohol, bagels, and gourmet coffee with all of the subtlety and restraint of heavy artillery fire.

            At the end of it all, there was People's Park. Ground Zero. It was the besieged nerve center of the local counterculture and erstwhile community substrata. This tiny corner of a city block had a rich, checkered history as a gathering place for hippies, druggies of all persuasions, drunks, fugitives from law enforcement, confused and wayward children, homosexuals trolling for companionship, and the mentally ill. It had been three years since Jericho had first set foot in the park and it had already been the scene of some grisly humiliations. However, he romanticized his humiliations and instead saw the Park as the center of some endless free-for-all, a modern Wild West where he intended to earn his spurs. He was not the only one.

            When he finally reached Christina's apartment on Bloomington's east side, he discovered that his enthusiasm for the night he had planned was undimmed despite the long walk. She lived in a small apartment complex north of the city's only mall. It was a busy commercial area hosting a number of retail outlets, an assortment of restaurants, and even a miniature golf course. The housing available in the area seemed like an afterthought, a half-hearted gesture to the questionable theory that there were people who would be eager to live in the midst of such activity.

            Christina lived in one of those elegantly named, faceless and undistinguished apartment complexes. Halstead Manor was a trio of three floor red brick buildings that looked cheaply constructed and poorly maintained. The bricks were chipped and weathered, the screens from many of the windows were missing, and the paint on many of the window frames had peeled away. Jericho crossed the parking lot, ascended the stairs to the second floor, and knocked on Christina's door. She answered within seconds.

            "Hey, Chris, here I am. What's shakin'?" he asked with a smile.

            She opened the door wider and embraced him affectionately. "Not much, it's great to see you. Come on in."

            Jericho entered her apartment. It was a modest place. There were two bedrooms on the northern side of the apartment, a single bathroom, a small living room, and a small kitchenette. The apartment looked cluttered and disorganized. Compact discs, overflowing ashtrays, and scattered cigarette butts littered the floor. There were two ratty couches situated in a half square, a coffee table placed in front of them, a small stereo sitting on the floor against the southern wall, and a baby swing near the kitchenette. Inside a small playpen, Jericho could see an infant sleeping soundly. He assumed that it was Willow. Jericho found a seat on one of the couches and Christina sat down next to him.

            "So, have ya found someone to watch Willow?" Jericho asked.

            She nodded. "I called Eve and she said she'd come over and watch her. She'll be here around six. Allison called after I talked to ya and said she wants to go out with us."

            Allison and Eve were close friends of Christina and Jericho knew them well. "Cool, sounds like a party to me. Too bad we don't have more money, we'd really tear the fuckin' town up if we did." he said.

            She laughed a little. "Well, Allison is supposed to be gettin' her tax check today, so maybe we might be able to party a little more. We'll see." She smiled mischievously. "Wanna smoke a joint?"

            "Hell yeah. That'd be cool as shit."

            Christina reached behind one of the couch cushions. She pulled out a sandwich bag with what looked like a quarter ounce of marijuana and a pack of rolling papers inside. She removed a large piece of marijuana from the bag and broke it down on the coffee table. With an economy of movement that was born from thousand of joints that preceded this one, she twisted the marijuana into a tightly rolled joint. She lit the joint, took a large hit from it, and then passed it on to Jericho. He took a hit and passed it back to Christina.

            "Man, I can't even begin to tell ya how good it feels to be outta jail. It was only twenty nine days, but shit, I missed my twenty-first birthday, I missed the birth of yer daughter, it just fuckin' sucked." Jericho said.

            She smiled faintly. "Yeah, it woulda been nice if you'd been there. I know ya woulda been there if ya coulda been though." She took a long drag from the joint, held her breath for a few seconds, and then exhaled. "See anyone we know in jail?" she asked.

            "Well, Trig was in my cellblock."

            "Oh god."

            Jericho laughed. "It wasn't all that bad. Or at least not as bad as you'd think. He actually kept me laughin' a lot."

            Christina smirked and widened her eyes. "Uh, yeah, I guess." she said sarcastically.

            The relationship between Jericho and Christina was one of the closest he had with a peer, but the same problems that plagued his other relationships burdened this one as well, only to a lesser degree. They only spoke in generalities. Trivia dominated the discourse and there was no in-depth discussion of issues. Both the triumphs and debacles of their personal lives were fodder for gossip rather than private experiences that fostered humility and gratitude or prompted quiet reflection. They thrived on drama and self-aggrandizement and disdained the substantive side of life with vehemence. They were beautiful children playing at being grown-ups, but maturity had eluded them so far.

            "So are you free and clear of everything? No probation or anything?" Christina asked.

            "Unfortunately no. I've got a year's probation and a 60 day suspended sentence hangin' over my head. I'm not worried about it though."

            "Not worried about it?"

            "I'm not gonna quit smokin' pot or anything, so the first time they piss test me, I'll fail. My suspended sentence will be revoked, I'll do thirty days and then I'll be free and clear."

            "So you're gonna violate your probation on purpose?"

            Jericho grinned and nodded. "Basically, yeah." He shared his intentions with perverse pride that made it seem like he wanted congratulations for being such an outlaw. His need to glamorize this behavior was essentially infantile.

            Christina frowned a little and silently shook her head. The joint was nearly gone and she stubbed it out with her wet fingers. "Your parents still givin' ya a place to stay?" she asked.

            Jericho sighed. "Yeah, but for how much longer, who knows?"

            "You should get a job for a while. Ya could make some money, maybe put some back even, and it'd get you away from the booze for a while." she said with a mildly reproachful tone.

            "I'm not workin', I just wanna soak up the streets and party all summer. You're only 21 years old once, ya know? I've got time for all that other shit later. Besides, what am I gonna do? Wash dishes for a fuckin' Waffle House at minimum wage? Fuck that. I'm gonna enjoy this summer and I'm gonna write."

            It sounded good on paper. You could see it in the biography now. In the summer of his 21^st year, Jericho spent a legendary summer filled with prodigious drinking and hard, creative work that heralded the beginning of his first great period as a writer. It would be much more banal and predictable in reality. In the summer of his 21^st year, Jericho had still failed to find the maturity to start his adult life, was writing precious little, and did nothing to arrest his deepening problems with alcohol. He would not even entertain the idea of working. He wanted to drink down the summer and the paltry obligations of holding a job were a nuisance.

            "Speaking of your writing, I wanna thank you for that poem you wrote about Willow's birth. It was sweet." Christina said with a smile.

            Jericho smiled in return. "Thank you. Considering I couldn't be there, it was the least I could do. I'm glad ya liked it."

            Christina's fondness for the poem was undoubtedly sincere. She was the sort of person whose emotional weather was evident for everyone to see. She was unable to manufacture enthusiasm for what she did not like. When she attempted to do so, you could see the holes in her veneer. Her smile would become faint, thin, and well practiced. Her gaze, tightly focused when something engrossed her, would become distracted and perfunctory. Instead of gesticulating wildly when she spoke, her hands would lie dormant and lifeless in her lap. She was either interested in what you wanted to share with her or she was not; there was no discernible middle ground.