Once we lose connection with the efforts required to keep up a home, we become deluded.
The high flying salesman has a gorgeous home. His taxes are high, as are his car payments and insurance liabilities. When the board of his company decided that they were going to sell the company their first order of business was to eliminate the top salaries.
Within three months our salesman’s drinking has clouding his mind. This level of comfort he’s come to enjoy is becoming a burden. His salary requirements are so high that he can only market his salesman skills to select companies.
After just two interviews the salesman realizes that the career he’s been riding for the last 20 years is not translating to other companies. He’s quickly realizing that the secretary he relied upon all of these years is far more qualified for the job market than he is. Some of that time on the golf course may have been better spent reading that book on spreadsheets his secretary bought.
His kingdom is now a burden. All he has is his retirement funds. Once he starts touching that he knows he’s done. That and an insurance policy is the legacy to his three children
It was the third mortgage payment after the layoff that was first missed. One turned into three before he knew it and the foreclosure notice appeared by some guy looking like a pizza delivery man. The salesman grabbed a baseball size rock and nearly smashed the foreclosure server in the head. There would have been a great amount of immediate satisfaction in actually seeing that persons brains scattered on his front lawn. It would also serve as a warning to any others who dare try and unhinge his security. The one place on earth he had.
Everything he knows is wrapped up in this house, his family’s home.
This is how life really happens when that security is lost. We are totally reliant on a response or reaction from the world from our existence.
Without our jobs we have no income. No income leads to desperation. Some can ease slowly into that desperation to where they find security in it. It is where the homeless find their security, believe it or not. It is their norm and they learn to accept it. Just as the salesman is blind to the assumptions he’s made all of these years, the homeless person is blindly building upon assumptions in the same manner.
The thought of being homeless, the salesman thought, would only result in his ending it all,. His pistol has been all too handy these past several months. The suicide hotlines are jokes. Some idiot on the phone will tell me that it’s OK to lose my home? Well, that’s because they probably never had one.
How the salesman story ends is not clear. The attraction to alcohol he’s nurtured all of these years is not helping. It is only after a date is set for the Sheriff’s sale on his home does he finally succumb to the pistol.
…staggering across the room his feet drag in the heavy pile carpet, it almost labors his efforts. The steps to the desk across the room expanded in space and time. In what seemed like an instant when finally finished, the details and strain of the effort pained his being. Wanting what he wants without the waiting he struggles and as he does approach the desk, he swills down the final gulp of Cutty Shark. He spits the ice across the room as it dings off of the sliding door to the pool.
As he reached the desk, he slid the glass down, momentarily staring out at the pool, unfocused, in a distressed blank lapse, is hand instinctively grabbed the familiar metal mass, it’s size and weight fitting in his hand with familiar form…
With the sliding door left open, he started out to the back. A hiccup brought up some vile, he quickly swallowed it back down… as slobber ran off of his chin, he stumbled, and as he raised his arm to wipe his mouth with his sleeve, he lost his balance and tripped on the gray stone walk as he walked between the pool and the garage… The grass broke his fall as he yelled, mother fucker… As he rolls to all fours he stands in the common drunk fashion of a person who has done this maneuver before.
Beyond the garage e gazed, and reached out his right arm… and with the click of a single finger the car came to life, the doors unlocked, the interior lights came on and at that point instincts took over.
Had the cat not already been facing down the 140’ drive he would have never had made it as far is he did. But as it was, he was finally stopped by the large oak which sits midway down the drive on the left as the asphalt bends slightly left. An airbag in the face will always be an indication that something has gone wrong… he just wanted to die…
You must be logged in to post a comment.