DAY 1.5: Busy Thoughts

  ​     Hello Dr., whatever the hell your name is. I can’t remember your fucking name right now because it’s late and I'm super stressed out.  It’s me again, Jack.  It’s 2:22 am and I cannot, for the love of God, fall asleep right now. I’ve tried counting sheep, watching Braveheart (in my head) and I even imagined myself winning big at the casino, but my mind won’t shut the fuck down. I think it’s because tomorrow is the big day and that I’m nervous. It may also be that it’s kind of cramped in this little friggin' closet you have us sleeping in. The cot is somewhat comfortable, but the confined and constricted feeling sucks. This must be how my father feels being locked up. I wonder if I should try sleeping on the couch out in the main room. Nah, that’d be a little weird, I think. At least I have a little door here that I can keep shut so the others don’t mess with me.

     My head is racing with funky thoughts about what’s going to happen tomorrow. Stuff like, what if I lose my mind and go crazy? I’m getting more creeped out by the minute, what if someone has a bad reaction goes full zombie and tries to eat my face off? Not fucking cool man. Or… what if the drug doesn’t do anything for anyone and they end this whole trial early? That would pretty much screw me over in ten different ways. I guess on the plus side, I’ll get the 300 bucks and this laptop and then I can pay down some shit when I get out. Which brings me to the worry of; what if I can’t get out of here and pay my bills when I need to? Dammit! So many shit outcomes here!

     All this crap won’t stop flooding my brain, man! I wish I could talk to that Dr. what’s his face… right now, so he could tell me all the good things again. I also wish I could teleport back home and ask my neighbor Willy if Rent-A-Center came today and picked up their shit from my apartment. Stupid! If I’m going to make a wish to teleport… I should be fucking using it to teleport into a bank vault! But shit… how would I get out? Man… fuck this shit.

     Let me focus on the real problem here. What am I really worried about? I think I know, and it all has to do with the gambling debts. I owe a lot of money to people. I’m sure I’ve had a few visitors drop by my studio to collect that money I owe.

     Like the fuckin’ Rizettos.
 
   There’s these two goons, who usually come around to collect from me and for now… they go a little easy on me because of my Pop, who is doing a long stretch in prison, but their patience is running thin. The thing here is, the Rizetto family runs the City of Boston, completely Godfather style. Whitey Bulger ain’t got nothing on these guys, man, and my father was their main hitman, which is still a weird thing for me to think about. You know, now that I reflect on it, it must have been really fucking strange for my dad to come into my third-grade classroom and lie to all of my classmates and tell them he was a plumber. I remember sitting there, 9-years-old, being kind of embarrassed about it too. All the other kids had cool dads that had cool jobs, like firefighters, police officers, and that prick Steve Randall’s dad was a pilot! What the shit, Pop? You were lying anyway, why didn’t you say you were an astronaut or something cool like that. 

     The murdering prick pretty much missed my whole childhood because of all the shit he was doing for the Rizetto boss, Carlos. Or he’d have to go into hiding until the heat turned down after an assassination. I suppose I should be proud, at least he was kind of a badass. My pop was the most feared hitman in the country in those days, so they tell me. Unfortunately, he was careless one night, and got caught red-handed in the middle of an FBI sting. The Feds offered him immunity if he was willing to testify against any of the Rizetto bosses, but he never did.

     I haven’t gone to visit him in over a year because I just don’t know what to say to the guy. Like I said, he was never around that much. Mom didn’t ever talk about his exploits unless it was one of the nights we had to pack up and hide at grandmas on the possibility of a vendetta strike from the Rizettos’ enemies. On those nights, my mother would fill me in with a few details she was privy to and it was never anything that made any sense to me.

     A few years ago, Carlos Rizetto offered me a chance to make some money, figuring my father’s loyalty ran in the family, but I declined. Don’t get me wrong, it was tempting, especially with my debts piling up, but I’m not a bad guy. I’m certainly not a murderer like Pop. I may lie a little bit to the people I owe money to, or I may do some crazy shit when I’m in a fix, but mostly I try to do the right thing. Besides, it would break what’s left of my mother’s heart, and I have a real soft spot for her, despite her alcoholism. She’s all kinds of messed up now that Pops is locked up. At least that bastard left enough money behind for her that she can afford to pay the bills. I hope that after I get flush with everyone and get my bills paid; I can find a good job and help her out a little bit. Get her into AA or something.

     Hey hold on a minute… this shit is confidential, right?  Like you fucking said earlier today? If it’s not, then everything I just said is all a fucking lie and I’m just yanking your chain.  I better not get pulled from this experiment to go testify or some stupid shit.  So again, I’m a fucking liar and everything above is all bullshit. Seriously, I make shit up. All the above is not true.

     Anyway, before I was the total fuck-up I am now, and to prove to you I’m an honest working citizen, I will tell you that I was a damn good salesman for a company called Interstellar Communications. I was out there in my fresh-pressed suit, hitting the pavement every morning, sipping my precious Starbucks Caramel Macchiato. I dealt in commercial sales, so I was going business to business right in downtown Boston. I busted my ass all day talking to business owners about how my company could provide better phone and internet service than whoever they currently had. It was decent pay, if I hit my quota, which was tough, but I could do it most months. In the end, though, I guess I couldn’t do it well enough because they laid me off.

     In some ways, I’m glad to be done with that job because I got sick and tired of talking to self-important assholes all day long. Most people were cool, but some of them just hated salesmen and that’s all I really was, a salesman. It’s just one of those jobs you get stuck with for the rest of your life if you don’t go out and get yourself a higher education. When I dropped out of school, I thought I was so fucking cool, you know? But look… eighteen years later, I’m in some weird fucking lab experiment so I can pay off gambling debts. Crazy, right? Just last summer I was out one night, riding my huffy bike, when I saw one of my old classmates drive by in a black BMW. Jimmy Lugano. He went to college. Makes me feel like a real shitbag.

     So anyway, after I was laid off, I started collecting unemployment. Almost two months later, I decided I was going to gamble all the unemployment money to hopefully strike it rich, because fuck those college people that get to have nice lives. Fuck you Jimmy! I was going to show them that Jack McCoy made his money the “cool” way. Regrettably, that didn’t work out for me all too well. Obviously, I can’t be too smart if I’m out there gambling with the money I need to live on, but that’s the drawback to being addicted to shit. You just don’t fuckin think right. You get to this point where you’re in so deep, that your mind tells you that only a big win will save you. I never got the big win, just loss after loss after loss, the curse of the losing streak. All the while, my delusional mind, kept telling me that I’m “due” to win. Something BIG is going to happen, you know? Pffft. Yeah, fucking right. See those bums out there in the alley ways? They used to think they had a great destiny waiting for them too. What really sucks, is when I was out there gambling, I could have been looking for a new job. I never did though, and consequently, I never bothered to submit any of the “jobs applied for” applications to the Unemployment Office either. So, they cut me off last week. Which is how I got myself into this desperate situation of being part of this mind experiment.

     I don’t know man, I’m in this weird state of mind right now and I feel like I have crashed into a new kind of bottom. You ever feel so completely out of your mind that you actually sit there and wonder about yourself? I do man. I think about shit, like, “who am I” and “what the fuck is wrong with me?” all the time. It’s a living hell. It’s a fucking nightmare. I wish I could pull myself out of this inferno I’ve buried myself into, some easier way. Are you Doctors going to be writing back to any of these things I write in here? I could use a little guidance here. 

     Anyway… gotta try and get some sleep. Big fucking day tomorrow.

     -Jack 

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