Help Me I Am In Hell

Timothy Atkinson on Literature's Agonies

Dear Republic,

On this beautiful July day, we ask ourselves: when better to be reminded of the miseries of life and of literature?, as Timothy Atkinson’s coruscating piece does for us. This piece is an excerpt from the novel Help Me I Am In Hell, which one lucky member of The Depot will soon have the opportunity to review.

-ROL

HELP ME I AM IN HELL

I wake at 3am to the deepest blackest despair in the pit of me. A despair of no thing in particular. The worst kind. The kind that cannot be understood by reason. It tangles my organs and veins into a tightening wet mass of dejected misery. There is a brief moment where dream rocks back and forth upon the precipice between sleep and reality before slipping away finally over the edge into unconsciousness. Not remembering what caused the terror, the terror remains, unaccounted for. I am left with it.

Up on the roof of my building I light a cigarette and guzzle from a putrid bottle of Rolling Rock that someone has left sitting open on the ledge. It’s flat and cold like everything else. I look out over the city thinking about the century-old architecture and how far back it stood there before me and how much longer it will continue to stand after. Then I look at the moon and the stars and think much the same thoughts but on grander scales.

I often wonder how many great works of art or literature were never realized because the person who might have created them succumbed to bitter despair and suicide before they could plant brush to canvas or pen to page. There is that myth of the mad artist, the alcoholic, the drug-abusing womanizing madman whose very madness is the source of nourishment for his genius and makes it manifest. There is the belief among those who aspire that deep in their morass of loneliness and dejection and stark mortal terror that if they sink low enough and fall hard enough they will discover their muse waiting for them at the bottom of the abyss. I think of the sad dark man in his sad dark cell, all alone, shoulders hunched before his empty page in consideration of what is worth spending a squalid lifetime of struggle and rejection on only to discover at life’s end that he has failed, because he could not for one single second allow himself to loosen his cold hard grip on the bottle, the needle, the pipe or the powder. I imagine myself an old man with chronic liver disease and dementia and the page is still blank except now I can no longer see its blankness, for I have gone blind. I think of the men and women the world over unwilling to rise up out of the muck of their own desperate lives, each with the singular goal of seeing how far they can destroy themselves, how completely they can obliterate their minds, their bodies, their entire existences in the hope that they will find inspiration at the very core of their own negation.

Thinking about it all gets me going.

I arrived here from the Midwest in a battered 1987 Buick Lesabre after a three-day ride through the desert. I remember my look exactly—ripped jeans and a torn yellow t-shirt, worn-out tennis shoes with grungy, tattered laces, my hair long and bedraggled, scruffy face, reeking of American Spirits and cheap beer.

The Buick broke down the moment I exited the freeway and landed in Hollywood, and I sold what was left of it for five-hundred bucks, which I used as a deposit on a cheap downtown hundred-and-fifty square foot bedbug-riddled sarcophagus that didn’t even have a kitchen. It was exactly what I was looking for.

I had decided during the drive that when I got into the city I would hole myself up in a gritty motel room somewhere and write the greatest novel ever written in the history of humanity. It would be greater than Dostoyevsky, even, than Nabokov, Pushkin, Chekhov or Gogol (at the time I was hung up almost exclusively on the Russians). I chose to keep myself poor on purpose, living in the images of my great heroes. The ones who survived off a slice of bread a day in Skid Row flop houses writing tirelessly whilst trading crabs with 50-year-old cocktail waitresses.

It took five years to finish my unwieldy 850-page avoirdupois. Five awful years of blood, sweat and come, toiling in obscurity whilst imagining the dazzling future that awaited me. It was never the prospect of riches that drove me, but greatness. I wanted to be admired widely and remembered hundreds of years after my demise. I worked many different jobs to make ends meet, never putting much stock into financial affairs, making just enough to pay my rent and have a little food to eat. I had occasional flings with mean, ugly women I met on the internet, or on the streets, or in dive bars, but nothing serious. I masturbated incessantly and endlessly, wishing to spoil the need for real live pussy, because I felt terribly insecure in the company of women, especially ones I wanted but couldn’t have, whose lives were going as they’d always hoped and planned for and were therefore happy and well-adjusted and had fulfilling careers they enjoyed, but it only caused the need to grow more poignant and severe. The only women I could get were the left-over dregs that had long been spit out and whom no one else would have, unless they were desperate, like me. And there were many desperate men. I got to know a few of them.

I finished my novel on a Tuesday morning. I’ll never forget it. I was exhilarated. It was the high point of my life, one that would never again be matched. To celebrate I obliterated myself beyond all measure, which I remember well, actually, because the next day when I went to the library to use their computers so I could begin compiling a list of agents and publishers to query I was so hung over that I puked twice in one of the giant Yucca plants nearby the water fountains. I was absolutely delirious, high off my own idea of myself. But success eluded me. Flickers of doubt crept into my soul, and the more I doubted the more I drank to forget my doubt, until eventually, without ever really deciding to, I ceased sending out my novel and forgot all about being a writer. Now the reality of who I was, not how I’d fashioned myself, but the real, unadulterated me, finally penetrated deep into the heart of things. Not all at once. But a little at a time. Like a dead body drifting to the bottom of the sea. I asked myself well then if I am not a writer, what am I? I could only come up with a single answer. I was a bum. An abject failure. A loser of the highest order. I was not Hemingway. I was not Bukowski. I was definitely not fucking Dostoyevsky. I was a punk. I didn’t know whose fault it was but it definitely was not mine. It was god’s fault maybe, the bastard.

I knew at once that life had something awful in store for me, and the only thing I could do was wait for it.

*

I finish my cigarette and toss it over the edge of the building and come back inside. I still tell people I’m a writer because it’s easier than the truth. Dressed in all black everything with hood pulled tight around my head so only an oval-shaped space (my Overton window) around my eyes is visible, hands stuffed deep in my pockets, chin lowered, I watch my breath manifest itself physically before me as I drift through the streets like a seed carried by the wind searching for the perfect place to land and take root. A completely different person from what I was back then when I had been exuberant and full of life.

I pace up one street and down the another, thinking about it, watching the late-night crowds thin and dissipate. What would it be like to waltz up to one of them and smack them in their stupid faces? Knock out a couple teeth, maybe, or blacken an eye. Crush them under the weight of my quiet unmanifested rage. I almost see it happening. I can nearly feel myself participating in the act without hesitation or thought of consequence, eyeing the cute overly made up model-looking ones in their short short skirts and furry little boots and shivering goose pimpled chicken legs with their thick, broad and beefy male protectors who I imagine later will be tossing them onto beds in their respective boudoirs, reaching between thin thighs and tight asses to rip away tiny lace thongs before ramming their giant cum-filled cocks up little assholes, she thrashing and clawing at the sheets for purchase, begging him to give it to her, don’t stop, oh yes right there, give it to me, baby, oh you’re so big, etc etc.

I take a seat on a concrete pavilion nearby the emergency room lobby, light a cigarette and sink back into my darkness, watching those that pass. How do they do it? How do they do what I cannot no matter how hard I try? How do they manage to overlook the fact that someday soon they are all going to die? It will happen when they least expect it too and when they are alone with no one to help them.

The cherry of the cigarette eating its way into my fingertips sears me back to reality. I flick it away and look around. I have no idea how long I’ve been sitting here. The streets are emptier. It’s become slightly misty and the streetlights are blurry. Mr. Sun will be up again soon. But I would rather not see him, not today. I am too ashamed. He sees everything, Mr. Sun does. His light shines into the darkest corners and if he is ever allowed to see unobstructed into those places I’m afraid he will never want to shine on me ever again.

Timothy Atkinson was born and raised in Kansas City, MO where he attended the Kansas City Art Institute before moving to Los Angeles to pursue a career in filmmaking. He lives in the East Hollywood area of Los Angeles with his wife and two children. His novel is Help Me I Am In Hell. He maintains a Substack called

Transgressive Typewriter

where he writes about all things transgressive.