Breadcrumb #106

DALLAS RICO

It’s Comic Con for Christ’s sake! I should be ecstatic. I’ve been looking forward to this for a long time. That’s what I keep telling myself as I walk up 5th Avenue in San Diego’s Gaslamp Quarter among the crowd of colorfully costumed geeks. The last panel just finished, so everyone’s hitting the bars and restaurants for a fun-filled night. Each place I pass is packed with superheroes, aliens, and other iconic characters, many I recognize, others I don’t. This would be the perfect environment for Han Solo, who I’m dressed as in his iconic black vest, white shirt, and navy pants. But despite the fact that Solo means “alone” in Spanish, he never rolls by himself. That’s why Iris was going to be Princess Leia. I bet she returned her costume by now.

     She could have at least waited to break up after Comic Con! She knew how badly I wanted this. Well, fuck it! I’m determined to have a good time without her, damn it. Now where am I going to eat? A Darth Vader standing outside an Irish pub salutes me with his lightsaber as I pass by. I stop and nod. This place looks like a typical bar, with walls lined with TVs showing the Padres game and dim lights.

     The hostess grabs a menu before I even decide whether I want to eat here. “Bar or table?”

     I take a look inside. Scores of folks sit at the bar shouting above the obnoxious music and drinking beer from pitchers fit for giants. The tables are a bit quieter.

     “Table, please.”

     She sits me at a booth near the back next to the restrooms and leaves me my menu. The moment I sit down, I immediately feel out of place. Looking around makes me acutely aware of how empty I feel inside. How alone I am. Groups of superheroes and villains laugh and talk about the day. In my head, I see them all turning around and laughing at me. All alone at a comic-book convention? Pathetic.

“Looking around makes me acutely aware of how empty I feel inside. How alone I am.”

     So I dash out before my waiter comes. On my way up the street, a group dressed as Star Wars characters asks to take a picture with me. I’m especially impressed by the spot-on Boba Fett costume. Standing by their Princess Leia and smiling, I let a depressing thought creep in: This could have been Iris next to me. The camera flashes. Hopes of possibly joining the group immediately crumble when Luke Skywalker quickly thanks me, and they head off together.

     I decide to take a high stool outside a Mexican restaurant one block down to look at all the nice costumes. But as I sit there, drinking some mixed drink, I realize I’m the spectacle, not them. What a loser. That’s probably why Iris broke up with me. In fact, I’m sure of it. She didn’t give much of an explanation before she packed her bags, leaving me to reach my own conclusion.

     But I didn’t come here to ruminate on all that! To help get my mind off the breakup, I pull out a few of the limited-edition comics I just bought. Careful not to spill my drink on them, I read each one with glee. This is why I came here: to be soaked in nerd culture. This is my world, and I should be loving every second of it. The waiter comes, and I order fish tacos and another mixed drink that sounds good. The warmth from the alcohol relaxes me. I continue ordering drinks as I read through the comics. When people stop to take a photo of me, I give Han’s signature sheepish grin, which I’ve been practicing for weeks. I’m in heaven.

     Once I flip through the last comic, I slip it back into its sleeve and pay the bill. When I stand, it dawns on me just how much I drank. Thankfully, my hotel is just a few blocks down, so, as if in character, I wobble my way back to my room. Sinking into the king-size bed, I begin to drown in the sorrow I’ve been ignoring. It was there all along, pooled beneath the vodka and cilantro. I am not OK. But today, I’m a little less not OK than yesterday. Right now, that’s all I can ask for.

• • •

Breadcrumb #105

BOB RAYMONDA

Argus shifts his body on the cold metal cot jutting out of the wall in an attempt to sleep. He’s unsure at this point how long he’s been in the cell, but the dull pain in his lower back tells him it's been a few weeks. The yellow robed guard that arrested him sometimes visits, saying nothing but passing ocean-scented breads to him through the opening in his cell door. He can’t be positive, but he tells himself that they’re gifts from Helena. It’s what gets him through his days, this rare sustenance unmolested by the crawling appendages of the pests that plague this place.

    On the opposite side of the room lay his bunkmate, an overweight brute of a character dragged in days before. The ruffian stands a head taller than Argus and speaks a language he doesn’t understand. They keep to themselves, but sometimes he’ll share one of his small loaves of bread, unwilling to create any unnecessary tension with a being three times his size. Whenever the guards drop by, with gifts for Argus or one of their standard moldy trays of scraps, the brute smacks his head against the plasma bars cackling at the shockwaves it sends through his body. 

    Less seasoned members of the Wolfpac scurry away at the outbursts, but Argus’ captor merely smiles. A long scar on her forehead, stretching up to the tentacles tied behind her, communicates her confidence in a way words can’t. She’s been through something bravado could never diminish, and it eeks out of her pores. This goads the brute into repeating himself, often enough to let the shockwaves do their work at incapacitating him. She chuckles as she leaves Argus behind to smell this unwashed wretch, to watch as he awakens hours later still seething.

   Argus feels reduced to the life of a primate in the zoo. Living day in and out in his cell as those only slightly different than him revel in his captivity and their own voyeuristic tendencies. It makes him sick, this confirmation that the residents of the upper platforms view him and his family as less than.

    He awaits sentencing from their Queen, Wanda, in the clouds. She’s rumored to be kind to offenders of his nature, more the scolding mother than the belt-wielding father. But her Wolfpac’s overbearing surveillance of the region guarantees there are hundreds of others awaiting an audience with her before him. He spends many of his waking hours scripting out his response to her one simple question: How do you plead?

    When his time finally comes, his captor again appears at the bars, a pair of plasma cuffs in her left hand and a staff taller than her in her right. She calls to him and asks, “Are you ready?” while staring down his roommate, “Go ahead, and try me Rex.”

    Argus nods, stepping forward while Rex visibly tenses up on his cot. The yellow-robed guard lowers the bars and restrains him when an explosion sounds somewhere in the neighborhood. Alarms, mounted on poles several dozen stories high emit a unfamiliar bleet. Not one of civil ordinance, but one of an oncoming attack. 

    His captor, momentarily frazzled, looks away for a moment and it’s all that Rex needs. The brute rams the full force of his body into her, sending her staff flying and Argus standing behind, confused. Rex bounds off of her toward the staff when she reacts, kicking out his ankles  and toppling him. She pins him to the ground with her knees on his shoulders as he grunts in defiance. A prisoner in another cell shouts, “What the fuck is going on?” But no one else is around to respond.

    The guard lands a few punches into Rex’s face before finally reaching the staff, slamming it behind her back, and into his gut. He passes out with little fanfare. She stands, wiping blood off of her face and spitting on him. She faces Argus, “Get back in your cell. I’ll deal with you later.”

    In the one moment while she has her back turned, Rex stops feigning unconsciousness and stands quietly. Argus pleads with his eyes for his captor to turn around, and steps back into his cage without uttering a word. She doesn’t catch his failed attempt at telepathy, though, and is thrown from her feet as Rex pulls her back by the tail of her robe. The two continue wrestling when Rex briefly catches Argus’ eye. “Run, you idiot, run,” he yelps, for the first time speaking in the planet’s common tongue.

    Still restrained, Argus takes off in the direction opposite of their scuffle. Other prisoners plead with him to free them, but he doesn’t stop. The women of the Wolfpac guarding this building have abandoned their posts to investigate the explosion, so his escape goes mostly unnoticed. Until, that is, he stops dead in his tracks mere feet away from the elevator that could take him to his salvation. An entire battalion of guards stands together on the balcony flanking it, yellow hoods removed and eyes thoroughly fixed up into the sky. Argus, who should fear these women, instead joins them in their curiosity.

    One of them looks away for a second at him, perplexed, but instead of guiding him back to his cell she removes his cuffs and points upward. A vast array of alien warships are tearing through holes in the atmosphere and raining fire upon their city. The Queen’s anti-aircraft weaponry does its best to fight back, but Argus watches with her as their once impenetrable defensive is reduced to ash effortlessly. Two of the ships flank Wanda’s castle in the clouds, and begin infiltrating it.

“A vast array of alien warships are tearing through holes in the atmosphere and raining fire upon their city.”

    The guard who unshackled Argus looks at him, “Whatever you did… it doesn’t matter anymore.” She looks down at her own arms and tears the robe off of her body. Not the first in the group to do so, they all head toward the elevator behind them. “Go and find whoever you care about. It may be the last chance you have left”

    Argus, still silent, nods. Slowly, he follows the young defecting recruits toward the two elevator shafts and is faced with a decision. Upwards, toward Helena, the woman he loves but has never spoken to, and likely certain death. Or down, to find his siblings and the uncle who raised them. Maybe his one last chance at survival. 

    It takes him no time to decide.

• • •

Breadcrumb #103

SEAN MULLIGAN

"What do you do for a living?" they ask.

     "I do sales."

     It's an easy question, one we hear all the time. Everyone has the built in answer. I do accounting, I do manual labor, I'm in the union, I'm a waiter. Doesn't matter. We all know what pays the bills.

     "Do you see this as a career?" they ask.

     Here's where the answer changes. A career is full-time. A career is the thing you pursue outside of just the 9-5. A career you see growth.

     9-5 I'm productive. I do well. Great even. I'm one of the few people who figured out my skill set and grabbed ahold of it.      To you my job sounds like a career.

     But let's think about this. Career implies I think about it outside of 9-5. I strive to be better. I strive to reach the next level. I am here because I know I'm qualified, I know I'm persistent, I know that when the time comes I'm ready for the next level.

     I should think about my "career" from the moment I wake up, until the moment I fall asleep.

     Here is where the issue lies.

     Some of us will focus on work. Some of us will focus on love. Some of us will focus on ourselves.

     There's a select few who will focus on taking care of ourselves, taking care of 'the pain.' We self diagnose, self medicate our problems away, and know the prescription from day one.

     We will not get the credit we deserve. Waking up to stomach lining vomit, but still making it through a day at the office. Sitting around literally thinking about the next time we get to imbibe alcohol. These things are seen as childish, irresponsible, and dumb. 

“Sitting around literally thinking about the next time we get to imbibe alcohol.”

     Somehow we muscle through. Day after day. We walk in each morning knowing the hill is steep, but we walk upwards. Sisyphus himself would be proud.

     We move forward against a downward sloping spiral of addiction and depression, anxiety, or a number and combination of a million other ailments.

     "What do you do for a living?" they ask.

     "I do sales."

     "What's your career?"

     "My career? I'm an alcoholic. I'm passionate about it. I think about it every second of everyday. I slowly improve upon yesterday. Each and every day I think about, 'Where does my next drink come from?' and how can I get there?"

     I pursue my alcoholism every fucking day. 24/7. It's my passion. It's the one thing I give up everything else for. I have destroyed relationships, burnt bridges, lost jobs, ruined sex, killed my social life, fell out with family, been excommunicated, isolated myself, missed funerals, missed weddings, missed life for it. That's a career, that's my full time job. And I do it really well. I am dedicated.

     You ask what I do for a living and I'll tell my "9-5."

     You ask about my career, my passion? You'll run. This takes dedication, and quite frankly, I don't think you can handle it.

     Because deep down in my heart I know if I stop I will die. Not from withdrawal, maybe not even of suicide, but just of sadness.

     I should goddamn well be able to put that on my resume, but the references would be fucked.

• • •