Under the radiant overhead lights, the stainless-steel countertops in the kitchen of Don Marino’s Pizzeria gave off a dull reflection that regularly reminded the crew to bring sunglasses to work after a night of drinking. The countertops did not complement the red brick walls, which after years of neglected grease stains have taken on an brownish-orange color, as the many previous owners of this kitchen never deemed it important to wash or repaint the walls. They hadn’t even had the sympathy to install an air conditioner. 

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Greg knew this sweltering kitchen too well, having spent two full years tossing dough and spreading sauces in the confined space. Now it was almost midnight, and Greg was the last person left in the kitchen, getting ready to leave after almost an hour of vigorous dish washing. 

“This floor is so dirty I could eat off of it,” Greg said, his voice monotone. There were bits of cheese and splashes of sauce and toppings—from olives to sausage nuggets to banana peppers—left on the floor. He shrugged. The unforgiving lights stayed on inside of Don Marino’s Pizzeria, a gesture more symbolic to any potential thieves than the sign that read ‘smile, you’re on camera.’ While he made his way to the nearest bus stop, Greg thought about how the mess he left was going to smell and that his boss wouldn’t be happy about it when he came in the next day, but it was the morning crews’ problem now—he didn’t have to work tomorrow. By the time he boarded the bus, he only thought of one thing: vodka. 

 

Around 1:00 a.m. or so, Greg boarded his second bus of the night, this time with a quarter empty bottle of vodka. He had been taking gulps out of the bottle while he waited at the rusty sign for a bus that always seemed to show up right before Greg got there, making him endure the thirty-minute wait. As he took his seat toward the back of the almost empty bus, Greg watched outside the window with a scornful look on his face. He didn’t want to miss his stop, two blocks away from the scrap-wood shack he called home. The way he positioned his body towards the window made it seem like Greg actually wanted to jump.

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Greg hated almost everything about the bus and wanted nothing to do with it—except the forty minutes of walking it saved him twice a day. He hated the rattling sound that the intricately shaped handrail made, its metal tubes giving stability to the unfortunate souls who had to stand during rush hour. He hated how the lights illuminated all the wrong parts of his face and body, highlighting the fact that he’s an ugly wretch who wears the same dirty shirt every day, buys the same bottle of vodka every Tuesday night—Stoli—and carries the same angry demeanor no matter the circumstance. Worst of all, Greg hated how the emptiness of the bus reminded him of how lonely he was. 

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Alone with his thoughts, Greg reminisced about the past. He remembered the excitement in his voice when he was seventeen, as he read his letter of acceptance to DePaul out loud to his mom, dad, and sister. He remembered the train ride into Chicago, how he was eager to enter the next chapter of his life and excited to experience the city. Greg majored in business, hopeful to one day start his own company, and he remembered how hard he worked in school to achieve his goal. He remembered his girlfriend Ella, who he first met in a freshmen chemistry class, and fell in love with over the following summer working together at a hotel. He remembered the kisses they shared under the dark of the maintenance closet, and the thrill of risking getting caught. He remembered the dates they shared over the next two years, how he could always make her laugh and how she could always make him happy when he was feeling down. He remembered the little studio apartment he and Ella rented, small and expensive but allowing the couple the freedom to live together. Finally, he remembered his excitement when he read out-loud his confirmation email for the study-abroad internship program he was accepted for in France, and how Ella seemed apprehensive about the idea. Greg had been down this trail of memories before, and he always regretted it. He wanted this time to be different, he wanted to forget what happened, but he couldn’t make his mind leave it alone. 

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He remembered his twenty-first birthday where he and Ella stayed home and watched movies, enjoying their time together before Greg had to leave for France. He remembered how they drank, not much but definitely late into the night. He remembered going to sleep with Ella in his arms, thinking about how he was going to miss the love of his life in the name of his career, and how supportive of it she had seemed. Finally, he remembered being awoken by police the following morning, Ella with a fresh black eye, telling the officers how Greg had hit her for telling him not to go overseas. He remembered how shitty he felt hearing those cold words coming out of her mouth, how her sorry face looked as she lied. Worst of all, he hated how she almost made him believe that he had done it. 

 

By the time Greg made it off the bus, his bottle was near half empty, and he was drunk. Drunk and angry. So much so, in fact, that he didn’t realize until about a third of the way into the trek home that a dog had been following him. Despite his emotions, Greg knew he didn’t want to hurt the poor animal, but he also didn’t want it to follow him home and expect food. He turned around and said, “Go away dog,” in a gruff voice, while with one hand he performed a motion that said ‘shoo, shoo.’

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“You won’t get rid of me, Greg,” said the dog with perfect enunciation.

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All right, he was really drunk. Anyone who was watching would have known, if not by the way he was gesturing and talking to himself, then by the way he stumbled about in a manner similar to running, obviously attempting to get away from something that could only exist in his mind. Greg loosely followed the sidewalk along the road, occasionally spilling into a bondsman’s parking lot, then one belonging to a nail salon, and finally one where food trucks sometimes parked, before stepping over onto the five-lane road. Throughout this journey Greg fell down a few times, sometimes catching himself with his hands and knees, sometimes not. It wasn’t until he reached a large orange sign that read ‘Road Work Ahead’ that Greg stopped, realizing he had no clue where he was. More importantly, he’d lost his vodka bottle somewhere along the way. 

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For a moment Greg understood what he had to do: walk back the way he came until he reached known territory, and from there decide on a route that would lead him home. He stood there for a while contemplating whether or not he would head back and risk encountering that dog again, or if he would wait a little longer until he was sure the dirty mongrel found someone else to antagonize. Having not yet decided, Greg fell onto his butt and felt the full effect of the burn and ache in his muscles, the scrapes. Not long after, he was overpowered by nausea induced from the “running” he did and puked into his lap. Finally admitting defeat, he lay back onto the concrete and fell asleep almost instantly, no longer afraid of any talking animals. 

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Greg dreamed of the aftermath of the incident with Ella. He knew he was innocent, but he felt the guilt as if he had actually done it, actually hit her in the face. He had no idea why she lied to him, the police, all their friends, the company he was going to begin an internship under, their school: none of it made any sense to him. Greg lost the degree he was close to finishing, the career he was beginning to build, and the relationship he thought was perfectly healthy. He had reached a new low point in life after the accusations, and, defeated, went home to his parents, with no prospects in sight. Greg dreamed he was on the train back to his hometown, but no light came in from the windows. This train was going nowhere, only traveling from dream to dream with never a destination in sight.

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Greg awoke sometime in the early morning, not to the noise of traffic, not to the sun, but to a police officer nudging him with his foot.

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“Hey man, get up. Police.”

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“Where am I, what time is it?”

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“About seven. You been drinking? Live around here? You smell terrible.”

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Greg might not have been the smartest person, but he knew not to lie to the police: he answered his question with a simple nod and tried to get up. 

 

Greg walked along the road in his wet clothes, mostly cleaned of the chunkiest bits of vomit in a sink back at the police station. The afternoon sun was directly overhead, which not only illuminated his surroundings well but also reminded him of the mess he left at his job the night before. He didn’t really want to remember the night before. It was his only day off for the week, and he had already spent half of it trying to get out of public intoxication charges. He was still embarrassed about that event, only slightly fresher in his mind than so many similar events that had happened over the last two years Greg. Pitiful. He no longer had anything to drink, and just wanted to get home and enjoy the rest of his afternoon by himself. Greg’s TV no longer worked, and he stopped paying for the lights and air conditioning in his apartment, but surely, he could still find a warm spot near a window and read. The window, he only had one. 

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The walk home was a little embarrassing, but Greg could not stand even the idea of being on that bus in his soggy work clothes, putting up with the stares and sniffs of disapproving strangers. Greg wished he could think happy thoughts, but with how his day has been going it wasn’t looking up for him. Hell, with how his life has been going for the past few years, he didn’t believe that happiness would ever be achievable again.

 

Trudging along, Greg again realized why he always took the bus. The roar of oncoming traffic greeted him with harsh winds and the smell of gasoline. On the good side, the wind dried his clothes and gas was a better smell than day-old vomit, but the monotony of the trip made Greg think. He needed not to think right now. He thought about his parents, who after a year of supporting their jobless, depressed, and potentially domestic abuser of a son, kicked him out of his childhood home. Greg didn’t blame his parents for this – he knew he disappointed them. However, it certainly didn’t help him feel any better about himself. Greg took another train after that, this time not caring where it took him, just anywhere except Chicago. He thought about that train ride, how it had landed him where he is now, and how he was hired immediately by the pizza place he works at now, Don Marino’s. He thought of how, bored by the goings on of life in the city, he had begun drinking to pass the time.

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Greg was pulled out of his thoughts by the crinkling of something dry and plastic- sounding in his back pocket. The officer had given him a brochure, made out of the kind of paper that reminded him of his old college textbooks, for one of the rehab facilities in town. Greg wasn’t going to apply for it. He didn’t have a drinking problem; he just drank a little too much on occasion. He had tucked it away in his back pocket anyway, since it would have been rude to have thrown it away at the station, and then forgotten about it. By the time Greg got home, his idea of reading by the window seemed less and less exciting, in part because he didn’t especially like reading, but also because he had a throbbing, dull pain in his skull. Still, he was relieved to finally be home.

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His apartment wasn’t very nice. It had a living room, a bedroom, a bathroom, and a walk-in closet. The only light he had was from a plug-in lamp, which he stripped from its pole and hung the bulb from a thin metal pipe he had installed, going across his living room near the ceiling. Greg never bothered with furniture, since he never expected any guests. All he had in the living room was a small TV-stand that was there when he moved in, his broken TV, and his bean bag chair. In his bedroom was the only window, along with a mattress to sleep on and a dresser half full of clothes. The bathroom held all his essentials, a toothbrush, a bar of soap, and some medical things under the counter in case of an emergency.

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Having given up on the idea of enjoying a comfortable evening at home during his only day off of work, Greg angrily plopped down onto his mattress, lying on his back. His head ached, and his stomach hadn’t been fed since he last worked. He planned now to sleep off his troubles and to hopefully enjoy a comfortable night’s sleep, however early.

 

It was probably 10:00 pm when Greg began to doubt his decisions. He couldn’t sleep, and so decided to do something about his headache. It started as a simple plan: go out, buy something to drink that would put him to sleep, and sleep like a baby. When he got to the liquor store, habit took his feet straight to the Stoli. It took quite a lot of willpower for Greg to bring himself to buy something else, as his goal wasn’t to drink himself into another puddle of vomit but to find something smooth to help him rest easily. With this in mind, he went with a fancy- looking bottle of red wine, one with a cork to make sure he waited until he got home to start drinking.

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By the time Greg was home, he was angry with himself again. His headache was mostly gone already, and he realized he didn’t have any glasses at home. Drinking out of the bottle was not at all like the pleasant dream Greg had envisioned, where he would sip his wine in a robe he didn’t have, out of a glass he didn’t own, and sleep in a bed he couldn’t afford. It would have to do, considering the circumstances, but he still didn’t like it.

 

Greg realized that night he could be a sad drunk. For him, stopping once he started drinking was usually defined by whether or not the bottle was empty, and the more he indulged the harder it became for him to care about whether or not he would be hungover going into work tomorrow. Soon the bottle was empty. How could he have drunk the whole thing already? Why hadn’t he bought two? Greg was unwilling to accept this turn of events and prepared to head out the door for yet another liquor run. It wasn’t until he made it outside and realized the moon, a tiny toe-nail clipping shaped sliver of light, was directly overhead, and that he should probably check the time before he left. He stumbled back inside, looked at the clock, and realized it was 2:20 am – too late to buy alcohol.

 

He was finally going to do it. Greg decided that night, he was going to hang himself. It was already so hard for him to admit that he had a problem drinking, but this proved it: he would never get better unless he took drastic action. Greg paced back and forth in his lamp-lit living room, contemplating the how and why, consequences and repercussions of his actions. Whatever dreams he had as a teenager were gone. Whatever future he thought he was going to have with his girlfriend, that was gone now too.  If he hung himself tonight, how would his parents find out about his death? Would they? Would they even care? Would Ella, one day regretting her actions, look him up just to find that he had killed himself three years after she tried to destroy him? Because she had tried to destroy him. To try to keep him from pursuing his dream. Did she think he would forgive her for what she did? That idea strengthened his resolve. He would never give her the chance to apologize for what she’d done; they were well beyond that point. 

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Greg realized that he didn’t need to think any longer. He’d been in this position before, and he’d thought these thoughts countless times. The only difference was that now he was going to be a man of action. No more would Greg chicken out: killing himself was the only way to fix his problems, and he’d dealt with them long enough. He didn’t have a stool, so he grabbed his bean bag, pulled his lightbulb’s cord taut, and threw the bulb around his neck, hoping that it went around enough times to support his weight and not unravel. He took one deep breath, as if it would sustain him in the air longer, and jumped off his bean bag, holding his legs in such a way that his knees were pointing down and his feet were touching his butt, hoping that it would give enough room for gravity to do its job.

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The scene that followed was hilarious. Greg, somehow expecting the cord of a standing lamp to hold his weight, found himself landing knee-first onto the carpeted floor, the thin metal pipe that he used to hold up his lightbulb landing on him from above, hitting him in the face but not causing any pain. The cord around his neck loosened almost instantly, but the lightbulb shattered under his body, leaving the living room in complete darkness.

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“Guess I gotta go in for work tomorrow,” he said to the dark. Defeated and drunk, Greg fell asleep on the floor in the same position he’d landed. 

 

When Greg awoke the next morning, he scratched his forehead, wondering why he was sleeping on his living room floor, why he was cuddled up with a long metal rod, and why an electrical cable was around his neck. He felt pain coming from his lower half, and when he reached down to scratch his butt, he found a piece of plastic-like paper in his back pocket. He didn’t quite remember what it was or how it got there, but he would read it as soon as he found out why his lightbulb was unplugged.