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Big Ross finally reached my hospital bed. I could make out his bear voice as he talked to the nurses over the hum of machines which fed me, wrapped in crinkly pink plastic. The dark instruments flickered and stretched upwards with dime-diameter plastic tubing. I was this strong little sapling being fed nutrition from iron roots, my blood was oil, my heart churned diesel. And when Big Ross squeezed my hand twice (which meant stay with me), I had to look into his big blue eyes and smile. Even though the blood was climbing the gaps between my teeth I had to laugh. There under the yellow buzz of fluorescence with his quarterback hand in mine, I could almost feel the envy pushing through his knuckles and the grace in his big belly. Come on brother, stay with me.

I finally had my midtwenties crisis, hours ago (at twenty-three).
It came on suddenly with a drip trickle on my ribs, the sweat from my armpits. Everything got one hundred degrees and the last thing I remember was blacking out at the copy machine. First came acute tunnel vision, like at a college huff party (less visual) and then beady little stars appeared in my peripheral. From the carpet I was lifeless with a tie and my office looked so much more interesting. I was your modern day post-grad white collared Jesus.
A midtwenties crisis starts slowly in your belly. Y’know, the feeling that everyone from elementary school is successful and satisfied except you. For two weeks leading up to the big breakdown I was consuming a lot of Latte, up to six cups a day from a little artsy coffee shop on Bourbon (where everyone writes haikus on laptops and talks to me about obscure films, while I NOD).
For two weeks I had this ache in my sternum and I couldn’t quite place it, I craved nicotine but I never touched cigarettes and after work I always ended up slumped over at a dim bar like Frankie’s or Ducci’s.
My best friends and I used to pick fights at bars, now I spilled my nostalgic guts to barroom strangers. All of my best friends were getting successful and I always said, “I’d rather die doing something I love then live doing something I hate”, so on a Monday afternoon in my cramped cubicle I felt the big breakdown churning and bubbling. It came up like bad coffee.
I experienced the tunnel vision of panic and the sinking feeling like a never ending Sunday night.
My lower back began to sweat and I started to hate everyone. I fell into it like a fever.
Somewhere, I remember Big Ross saying:
“Rough night last night?”
He laughs and smacks my back with his burly hands.
My disassemblable workstation feels so cramped. I steady my payless shoes in the office carpet. Steady.
I grit my teeth because I am a child of the eighties and I feel very alone at this point. I had never been in love, and I had a stinging feeling that the only worthy moments of my life were memories.
“The Now” was my plaqued graduation certificate accenting my cheap furniture.

Falling, I am Kevin McLaughlin and I really need a drink.
At twenty-three I was only alive with a condensing pitcher of golden booze in a smoky pub.
From Fridays dusk until 4am Saturday morning I was a ghost at Decatech.
Plus, being a barroom hero was a perks only affair. I met bikers, authors, struggling musicians, ex-bullies, high school wrestlers (turned addicts), suicidal housewives, gay husbands with kids, and every time we’d chat I’d feel like less of a mess.
We all had the same questions and no one had the answers: what now? I put it in my fucking chips, I played my hand, I went to school and I got my degree and I’m more lost and desperate then I ever was.
We are still afflicted with a malignant angst that grips us when we see the success of others. We continue to drown in alcohol like underpass junkies because it is the only way to express the injustice we feel.
Together in this dark bar we will lose ourselves.
Our baggage will melt with every sip. It will melt with every shot that you take and our problems will bleed into a ball of healing energy that will connect us as we dance and sing. This healing blue light is not Decatech, it is not my job or your addiction, your child support or your abortion or your bulimia. It is absolutely not my alarm clock or Sunday nights or your overdoses. This blue light of strength is me stumbling over to you, blonde stranger (with the disorder) and we can dance and sing in this crescendo of perfection. And I know you will hold up my hair for me if need be, and I will balance you, dear, on your high heels as you vomit into the trash.
And at that culmination of glory, the bar will cave-in on itself. The jukebox will break the silence with our song while my tie flies behind me like a cape. I will slur some romantic things into your gaudy earrings, your nails will dig into the back of my shirt and for those short few hours we will be alive.
Where did that go? And where did that come from? What happened to being twelve and riding bikes? (I am the tragic figure, falling in slow-motion.) The sleep overs? (About to be sprawled out on Decatechs new carpet like a Warhol Christ.) The public pool high-dive? (A splash of my super-latte comes crumbling down with me, spreading along from my fingertips and collecting like blood.) The high school cliques? (This looks like a target market murder scene, as I collapse dramatically.) What happened to life? (The CSI will desecrate my death pose with a wheel of white receipt tape and seal off my corpse and outline my modern day Jesus figure with fast-food grease.) I am the millennia martyr.
Ah yes, I always wanted to be the hero of sorority girls and the working class.
If my collapse in Decatech is the elephant, then mind-numbing jobs are the china-shops.
As I feel my legs give out and my chest cave in and the room plummet, I’m thinking: I want girls to swoon. Maybe a snapshot of my Banana Republic corpse sprawled eagle, blown up at print to fit a throw blanket or ceiling poster, available to buy and mount in frat houses everywhere. I want my comatose body to be the God of struggling, confused young people of…everywhere.
“Fuck work.”
Maybe next net year will see altered work conditions, more ventilation. More windows? Maybe.

I listen to the beeping machines pumping fluids.
I look up into Ross’s big blue eyes and think: healing light.
I remember the sex in the bathroom stall with the Oxycontin housewife.
I remember her nails digging into my back and the clinging of glasses.
Her apartment smelled of mothballs and knock-off perfume and I could still taste the bitterness.
“All men want is sex”, she announced as she stirred my drink. My laughter echoed through her dingy apartment. I was half naked and buzzing.
She asked me how it felt to know her husband would be home in five minutes, how it felt to know I would be the one to send him back to jail and how it felt to be drugged and still have all of my limbs (which she implied, I would soon lose). I stared at my drink that she had kindly fixed me, smiling because I didn’t know what else to do. Even though it stung my throat and made my eyes tear, I drank to melt this new baggage, looking for that light. There was no jukebox, just the rumble of a Harley pulling up in the street five floors below us and a beautiful opera tune humming from huge speakers throughout the room. She danced like a spirit, stumbling in her heels. Her blonde hair was pin straight, and I couldn’t help but wonder if she remembered me holding it back as she dry heaved at the bar.
I stared at the floating ice cubes and I was twelve again, trembling on the high dive. I was twelve guiding my bike through suburbia with my best friends, sneaking out in the early morning when the grass was still wet and dark.
“I have to go”, I said curtly and placed down my drink on the provided coaster.
“So soon? But the party’s just begun.”
“Yes, well you met me at a really awkward moment in my life.”
“..and?”
“and I’m using you.”
And with that oddness I grabbed my khakis, with tears rolling down my cheeks, and ran through the white washed hallways to the elevator. As the doors converged I caught a glimpse of the husband biker I had shared many a drink with, we had spilled our baggage together on more than one Friday night.

Big Ross squeezed my hand twice and I awoke.
With my eyes still shut I whispered, “Resurrected - I’ve been resurrected.
I’ve been dragging my feet through life, looking for answers -
when the answers were right in front of my face.”
An azure tear from his oceanic eyes falls on my cheek.

I open my eyes and he’s gone. I lay in an empty room with floor to ceiling green tiles. I look down at a gaping hole in my chest with plastic tubing sprouting like wildflowers. Next to me are cold metal instruments covered with my muscle and bone. I look over to my life support and it’s still packed up in its pink plastic. They never even had to turn it on.
It took four doctors and a security guard to hold Ross back as I was hauled away to intensive care.
They would later tell him that gamma butyrolactone was the prime chemical used to poison and sedate me the night before (a household floor stripper mixed with draino) and it took nine hours before my body turned these chemicals into the fatal combination of Gamma hydroxy butyrate (or Gamma hydroxybutyric acid). My temperature had risen so high at work that my body ceased to function. I was pronounced dead at 11:17 AM, the exact moment I hit the carpet at Decatech.

Yellow lights pass me overhead, and I can still taste the bitter pitcher beer, I can feel the embrace of strangers all looking for answers in the wrong places. I can see the healing light that we all tried so hard to see but that was all bullshit. Every second of everyday, we always had the healing light within us. We didn’t need booze or a dreary bar to see it, but we thought we did. Depression had clouded our minds to make us act this way, and our depression was just our reluctance to live in a society that we believed was backwards. And even if it was, so what? I wish success for my elementary school friends, I want to see them in the after life with their shiny Corvette’s driving down a motionless superhighway. I am post-mortem and all I want to do is float down, grab these post-grad tragic figures by their slumping shoulders, and show them that they have an entire life to live within them.
Big Ross ended up quitting his flag football team on the weekends to educate other lost twenty-somethings who all dragged their feet through life. He took an old photo of me in my college years, doing a perfectly vertical kegstand, and had it blown up to poster dimensions. He handed out fliers and soon college girls talked about me and how I would have been in bed.
In a dark enough bar, when the jukebox gets tired, you’ll hear my name whispered like legend.
At a wild enough fraternity bash, you will hear the drunken cries outside, the ritual chant penetrating the night sky: “McLaughlin, McLaughlin!”
Sometimes when she’s all alone, the blonde dances in her heels to opera and thinks of me.
And on walls of dorms and frat houses the world over, in between John Belushi and the Kiss, is me: Kevin McLaughlin. I’m the new age college James Dean. I’m a campus legend because I died for the man, died in an office as a slave to the grind. But I want young people to remember me as someone who could have made the right choices, but opted not to. I want to be the reason you pursue your dreams. Forget about money, do what you love to do. Be happy and poor, because there is so much more to life than worrying about what other people think.