The Taco Bell wrappers are scattered all over the floor. The smell is stale sweat and a heaping pile of unwashed clothes. Unread books and Playboy magazines are stacked like leaning towers in each one of the four corners as a collection of old sports pages from weeks passed creates a moldy ink smelling island in the center of the room. The walls are bare and between the mattress and the box spring of the frameless bed lies 182 dollars. Jay’s life savings. And he continues to breathe. And he continues to get up in the morning.

"I can’t believe this is happening to me," Jay says out loud to no one. He rubs his eyes and looks at his digital clock and plops his head down hard back into the pillow. He imagines a gun in his throat or saving children from a tenement fire. Five minutes later he turns back and forth violently, kicking and scratching at his decade old comforter, replete with holes and it’s own signature stink.

"Fuck, fuck, fuck," a familiar refrain.

He looks at the clock again, hoping for some significant change. The clock could talk to him perhaps, tell him how to live his life. The clothes could march to the washing machine and begin to wash themselves. He could have five million dollars between the mattress and the box spring and sleep with hookers everyday for a year. Then reality kicks in. He has decided to tattoo the words ‘status quo’ across his fucking forehead. His mother’s basement offers no reprieve. His life will not miraculously shift gears or die. It will just idle and drift and keep him in pain.

Jay walks to the shower, but sits on the floor in front of the basement bathroom first. This is the part of his day when he prays on his ass for a savior. I am not speaking of anything religious here. I am speaking of something highly unlikely, like a knock on the door from a rich person that wants to give money away to a complete stranger. He closes his eyes hard, as if the pressure will increase the likelihood of making it happen. He envisions scenarios with black luxury cars and well intentioned millionaires. He pantomimes a handshake or a hug and says he always knew he was meant to be rich. He mouths the words ‘what took you so long?’

Ultimately, Jay’s face needs inspection in the bathroom mirror as his mother calls down to wish him a blessed day. He curses God and says something under his breath about worshipping Johnny Cash or Anna Nicole Smith as he hears the upstairs door close behind his mother. He looks towards the toilet and the urine stained seat and wonders if his mother even cares about the fact that she’s bred a complete failure. He wonders if she ponders it at work between sips of coffee or shares his exploits with co workers who shake their heads and tell her ‘he’ll snap out of it.’

The mirror tells a story today for Jay. It tells the story of a man with a receding hairline he can no longer hide. It tells the story of growing crow’s feet at the corner of his eyes and yellowing teeth and nose hair that is coarser and more fierce than barbed wire. It tells the story of defeat and denial. The bloodshot eyes, the weak chin, the recurring pimple on steroids in the middle of his forehead that taunts him, it’s all there in plain view. He will carry this face like unwanted baggage today, like overloaded plastic sacks of groceries he won’t even enjoy. His face will follow him everywhere and remind him who he is and who he can never be.

Jay brushes his teeth and sees the blood in his saliva. Weak gums and the blood tastes metallic and he remembers briefly the last time he was punched in the mouth and how much it hurt and how much it bled. He wonders if pain is all bad. He wonders if feeling that punch in the face right this instant might make him feel more alive.

Jay’s hands shake. He has been off the sauce for a while now and his mother attributes it all to God. God has sobered Jay up. God has shown Jay the way. God has fixed her boy and she prays every single day that he’ll continue to bestow his mercy on her only child. Jay thinks it’s all a bunch of shit. His mother turns away at such declarations, banishes him to the downstairs called his life. Jay shouts "bullshit, bullshit", walking away and shaking his head. He knows he had no choice but to quit drinking. He knows that jail would have been the last stop. He sees the gun in his neck again, shakes his head until the thought is thrown from the front of his brain and gets in the shower.

The water is hot. "Fuck," Jay says as he fumbles with the knob. He feels less hair in his hands when he shampoos. He scrubs his face with the soapy rag hard, as if this will wipe the slate clean and create the opportunity to draw a new face where the old, useless face used to be. He turns his back to the shower head and feels the hot water hit his back and he envisions slaves being whipped and rain falling on bums without homes. He remembers what it’s like to not take a shower for days, drinking and stinking and worrying about where his next twenty bucks would come from so he could drink some more. He thinks about all the times he has stolen money from his mother and all the times she has pretended that it never happened. He lets the hot water keep falling on his back and he resolves right now to stop thinking about anything.

Jay dries off and says "Man, I’m late", then realizes he isn’t working today. He has had the same job for almost a year now, working at a furniture store in the warehouse. He has been taking night classes at a junior college as well. Jay thinks about his two B’s last term as he leans naked on the bathroom sink. He thinks about being 35 years old with nothing and he smiles that yellow teethed smile. He remembers a carnival with his mom when he was nine. He got lost and he had no idea he was lost until his mother found him. She was crying in hysterics and the carnival music was playing in the background and the ferris wheel was spinning and clowns were laughing and bells and whistles were banging and zooming everywhere. Only when he looked into his mother’s eyes and felt the urgency of her hug did he realize he was lost. And then he began to cry as well. So they held each other and cried, either happy or sad, Jay couldn’t remember. And he felt that feeling now, standing naked in his mother’s basement, late for work on a day he doesn’t have to work.

Jay sits down on his bed and picks up a Playboy and tries to masturbate, but his heart isn’t in it. The room is a mess, his thoughts are scattered and he isn’t feeling sexual. He wants to masturbate, wishes he was aroused and pretends the girl on the page in front of him is sitting right next to him, but it doesn’t work. It’s contrived and fake. Jay tosses the magazine on the floor as the cover girl stares amorously back at him.

Moments swirl as he sits naked staring at a blank wall. His hands shake and his toenails need cutting. He counts Taco Bell wrappers on the floor. He peruses a sports section that is three weeks old. He wishes he was nine years old again. He wishes his mother could save him one more time.

He reaches for the money between his box spring and the mattress; his life savings, 182 dollars. He runs upstairs as fast as he can and places the money on the kitchen table, where he is sure his mother will see it. He walks briskly to his mother’s room and opens the top drawer of her dresser and reaches underneath a stack of blouses for a pack of cigarettes. She quits and she starts and she quits and she starts and she swears God will help her ‘kick that habit for good, forever’ one day. He takes two and puts the pack back where he found them.

Back downstairs he lights the first smoke with a matchbook he got at the bar he frequented for a decade and stares at the white wall of his bedroom. He remembers playing catch with his mom on the weekends in the yard. He remembers the awkward throwing motion she had, the worst girl throw motion in baseball history. He remembers his dad telling him he didn’t love his mother anymore and that there was nothing he could do to change that. He remembers the smell of his dad’s aftershave and the scouring pad abrasiveness of his beard as it rubbed against his baby face when his dad hugged him goodbye and never returned. He takes a long drag of his cigarette and remembers his dad’s green eyes. He remembers the ambivalence. Then back to the memories of catch with mom and the smell of a wet leather glove after it rains.

The second cigarette has an acrid taste, lit from the ash of the first. Jay remembers how he used to chain smoke when he drank at Freddie’s, just a couple miles west of his mother’s place. He remembers meeting Linda there and buying her drinks every night and how she lied to him about everything and he didn’t give a damn. She talked to him, she feigned interest in him and on rare occasions she touched him in ways he hadn’t been touched all that often in his life. She was only the third woman he had ever slept with. Actually the first ‘woman’, the other two were girls. Linda moved in a way Jay had never experienced. She was passionate and angry and hungry and motivated by something unseen. She was blatantly disingenuous and he ignored that. She drank with him and she laughed at the jokes he stumbled through telling and she made love to him. She wore purple nail polish the night he told her he had to stop drinking. She laughed at him and asked him for a loan. He smiled his yellow teethed smile and handed her twenty dollars and the memory vanishes. The second cigarette has been smoked.

Jay reaches under the mattress again and pulls it out. He isn’t scared. He doesn’t believe in God and he is sure he won’t feel the pain. In the neck, it has to be in the neck. And in the last montage his brain will ever create, he sees a lost boy and a yellow teethed smile and a dark brown leather baseball mitt and the back of a blue Ford.