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“I’m tired,” I respond with a groan. Maybe it’s just time for me to die. I’ll never get married. I’ll never have a family. This is it for me… Jim Finnegan can look after the dogs.
“GET. UP.”
Jim puts his hands on me, which is just enough to knock some sense into me. I don’t need an old man like that making any efforts to lift me off the ground. I’m strong enough to handle my bullshit on my own. I’m meant to be on my own, anyway. I tried people – that shit didn’t work out for me in the slightest.
I roll over and then groan as I struggle to my feet. I smell like sweat and beer. It’s fucking awful. Every part of me feels red and sore. I can hardly move my lips.
“I’m fine.”
“You don’t look fine, boy. Let’s go inside. I’ll make you some tea,” he says. I can tell he won’t take no for an answer. I’m particular about everything in my life, including who I allow into my home. I hope I can chase Jim Finnegan away, but he has breached my fortress several times in the past. Thanks to my own stupidity, I won’t be able to get rid of him today.
“I don’t need your help, Mr. Finnegan. And I don’t drink tea. I’m an American. Coffee will warm me up just fine.”
He doesn’t mind that I’m a grouch. Every man alone out here turns into a grouch sooner or later. If you aren’t here for oil, you’re here to get the fuck away from people and eventually that gets to you too.
“Whatever. I’ll make you damn coffee. Just get your ass inside. Those dogs have been barking their asses off. Stop calling me fucking Mr. Finnegan. You know damn well my name is Jim.”
“Yes, sir. Yes, Jim.”
The wind must have blown my front door shut. I turn around towards the door and sure enough, Creed and Flurry are going fucking crazy.Great.I grunt and drag the door open. Jim isn’t subtle about shoving me through the door. The dogs leap up, putting their paws on me and acting all crazy like they thought I was gone for good. I hug them and pet them some, because I’m all fucked up for scaring them. And still too drunk.
I must be drunk if I don’t stop Jim from putting the coffee pot on. But I don’t stop him and the bastard fills the house with the scent of theFinger Lakes Coffee Company“Jamaican Me Crazy” coffee roast that my sister sends up from our hometown in central New York.
He brings over two mugs of coffee and shoves one into my hands.
“Drink up. And come on. I’m gonna use your computer.”
Since moving up here, I haven’t been one for technology. I’ve seen the way that cellphones and all that shit can destroy your life if you aren’t careful and I don’t want that to be the way I go out. No fucking way.
“What do you need the damn computer for, Jim?” I take the biggest sip of the coffee that my body can handle. It’s incredibly hard for me to handle more of Jim’s loud talking without more coffee. Creed and Flurry let out excited barks sensing more action than what I normally have going on this early on a morning after I’ve been drinking.
“I got a cure for your loneliness.”
My cheeks redden again.
“We arenotwatching porn together, Jim. I don’t care how many fucking years I live out here, I’m not taking my dick out in the same room as another man.”
Jim looks at me with utter confusion, as if he forgot his drunken proposition last Easter, a date which happened to fall on the anniversary of when his first wife left him for her personal trainer two decades younger than both of them. You know what? Maybe neither of us need to remember that.
“I’m not talking about that,” Jim says, continuing forward confidently. “I’m talking about the news. The website that just launched to help women pay off their student loans.”
“What the fuck are you talking about, Jim?”
Folks in Alaska venture on the conspiratorial. It’s a natural reaction to living out here alone in the deep winter and the darkness for months and months. Hell, the climate up here turned me into an unrepentant drunk who once went thirty-one days talking to nobody but the damn dogs.
But a website to help women pay off student loans… Ain’t that called Homeless Fans or something like that?
“This isn’t some pornography bullshit, right?” I ask Jim.
He laughs, no he fucking cackles, and that worries me even more.
“It’s something much better than porn, Augustine. It’s a second chance.”
Bullshit.Life doesn’t come with second chances. When you’ve gone through the shit I’ve gone through, the shit that could run you out of your home all the way up to middle of fucking nowhere Alaska.
“I don’t need a second chance at anything.”
“Well, I do. So I’m going on the internet to find myself a wife. I bet you can afford a good one. I’ve only got $20,000 saved up. But I bet you could afford a mighty fine wife with all the money you got…”
