A Devil in Hell: Notes on Coming Back To America

There are vicissitudes in everyone’s path to hell. After all, hell is often thought of as a solitary place in the realm of one’s own mind. And that is true.

But here at the beginning, the middle, and the end — everything happens simultaneously — as I scuff my green Converse sneakers in a Japanese airport.

I wrote those words and promptly forgot about them. I figured if I was going to write anything about my trip back home, the first one after being away for three years, it would have to come out unabashed and wholeheartedly. It couldn’t be forced…

Now, since the whole rigged economy and workforce are slowing down and the world heads for another penultimate economic crash, I am thinking of how I returned to the United States of America during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Mind you, I spent about 20 months in Vietnam. I’d arrived there from Malaysia, where I’d broken up with a Chinese girl who faked everything, including her feelings for me. First, we arrived in Kuala Lumpur where there were male and female dancers greeting us. She didn’t plan on needing a visa because she believed the entire world revolved around one thing: Her.

But I am not going to write about that. That was a different kind of Hell — capital H. And usually, in fiction or stories, there’s a capital H reserved for a Hero. But in this story, there isn’t one.

In fact, that’s the point of Hell. No heroes, no heroics, no fantasies, no gumdrops, no Mickey Mouse, and definitely no fortune cookie mottos to get you through another day. Hell no.

As I was saying, I’d traversed my way throughout Malaysia, down to Penang Island, and back up to Kuala Lumpur where I finished a whirlwind of a year traveling to 12 countries. At the end of the line, I drank many cans of beer and wilted on a couch while watching It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia. I wanted to understand the success of a TV show depicting people who only cared about one thing: Themselves.

Yeah, and that sentiment got stuck inside me — leaving for Vietnam again. Little did I know there’d be a global catastrophe that would shake the world to its core. I appreciated as well that beer was much cheaper in Vietnam than in Malaysia.

It was probably the most productive period of my life as a “writer.” I wouldn’t exactly call myself that. I preferred to be invisible. It helped for getting my work done.

After about two years, I ended up in a beachfront hotel during a city-wide lockdown in Da Nang. I soon felt like Anthony Bourdain, unable to connect with human beings, awash in the distant loneliness of a world gone awry. I had a balcony overlooking the sea and I remember at one point, I was drinking clear Chinese liquor just to get through the nights and mornings that didn’t matter anymore. My ex coldly ignored my emails and messages, instead electing to flirt with random strangers on the internet for attention and validation. So I messaged one of the only people I could, who might understand the plight and senselessness of human existence.

James.

In previous manuscripts, James was a central figure in my writings. For one of my many self-published books that nobody has read, he was at the beginning of the first of a trilogy, where we almost got pinched for doing key-bumps in Philadelphia at three o’clock in the morning. Those damned undercover cops.

James and I talked. I was in Vietnam. He was back in New Jersey. I hadn’t the slightest clue that he’d just returned or what he was doing there. He seemed to imply that things were going horribly wrong in America. That his new job was like eating a roast pig except all the meat was gone and the only thing left were the bones of a once beautifully delicious meal caked and drizzled in pineapple juice.

“It sucks here, man. Come on back, though. You can stay with me. You don’t gotta pay for shit.”

I knew what he was doing — he didn’t want to be alone. And since I couldn’t count on my parents for anything (my dad had recommended I go to Italy and enter into some socialist program and my mom ignored me on my birthday since I shared it with a psycho twin who acted as if he’d never left the womb) I decided that maybe I shouldn’t be alone anymore, too.

I booked an expensive ticket back to the U.S.

First, the plan was to join a Facebook group of people attempting to leave the country. Everything had been locked down for weeks. The government had basically tricked everybody into staying in their homes — without food, water, medicine, etc. That was how things were going to get better! That was the politburo logic. Either that or send all the COVID patients into camps. Yikes!

There were five of us total, from India, America, the U.K., and Indonesia. We took a 12-hour bus, overnight, from Da Nang to Hanoi, the capital. From there, I waited 11 hours to catch a flight to Tokyo. And then it was another long flight to New York City. It was the first time I’d touched U.S. soil in almost three years.

I welcomed the sights and sounds of people from all over the world. Out past the entry gates, people spoke English again — and also Turkish, Russian, Korean, Polish, and Hebrew. For my first meal back in the States, I ate a doughnut from Dunkin’ Donuts while I waited for James to pick me up. I hadn’t seen him in at least three or four years.

When he arrived, it was in a car that wasn’t his. He told me he was borrowing it from a work friend. It was a Dodge Charger, black, impending, and my sanctuary — James pulled up in front of the gate. I had my suitcase and bag. I stuck out one of my legs to imply that I was looking for a good time.

He smiled, in a white collared shirt. (He said he had to attend a funeral in Maryland later that night.)

I got into the passenger seat after dumping my belongings into the ride. He hit the gas and we were off.

It wasn’t long, however, before he was cursing Joe Biden for this and that, insinuating that all people were useless and stupid, ridiculing passers-by for their license plates, yelling in the car for them to go back to where they came from. I sensed endless hostility, grievances that would never get resolved, and pure anger, hatred, and a feeling of futility. I knew then that I was back in New Jersey. And that I had made a grave mistake.

The blue license plates made me shudder inside. It felt like I’d entered a volcano that was just getting ready to erupt in full force — and without any mercy whatsoever.

After a bit, we decided to get out at the first rest stop. “Yeah, I’m dyin’,” he said. (He’d been talking about whiskey.) “I’m startin’ to shake!”

We parked, and when we got out of the car he immediately went to the trunk and as it opened he pulled out a bottle of whiskey and took a swig.

The first thing I did after voiding some urine was to buy some scratch-offs. I’d been writing about gambling for two years, and since it was illegal in Vietnam, I figured that if I was back in the States, in New Jersey — the epicenter of gambling in America, other than Vegas, here was my chance to strike it rich!

James laughed at me when he got out of the bathroom. We got back into the car and aimed right for the nearest liquor store by his apartment.

We got a few six-packs, and he bought another bottle of whiskey. Again, in the parking lot, he took a hearty swig, handing me the bottle.

“Welcome back to America,” he said, nearly belching. He stuck a cigarette in his mouth, lit it up, and I passed the bottle back to him. He drank from it again and then put it back into the brown paper bag.

He didn’t have much time, he said. James was always like that. And if he was resounding in a frequency of holding still, it was unnerving just being around him. He was like a walking earthquake that might erupt at any moment over the smallest spark of nothingness and whenever it finished — he went right back to vibrating internally with something else that might cause him to spaz, choke, spit, curse, kick, scream, lash out, punch, or laugh hysterically in evil cacklings at the slightest misfortune of somebody else.

When he left the apartment, after showing me his four guns: a shotgun, pistols, and an AR-15 — I felt dizzy with not knowing if he was psychotic, deranged, dramatic, or totally fine. Except not. That seemed to be the essence of America upon my arrival. Also, he’d put on some weight.

Plus, his apartment was a pigsty, I noticed. There were containers of half-eaten food on the stove and counters in the kitchen. The coffee maker had cold coffee in it with white mold just sitting there. The carpets were dirty, the bathroom hadn’t been cleaned, and the table in the dining room area was covered in bills, receipts, and piles of junk mail. I sensed I’d entered a hamster’s cage only the hamster had gotten rid of the wheel and replaced it with semi-automatic weapons and a dozen empty bottles of cheap whiskey.

The apartment was also strewn with packs of cigarettes James hadn’t thrown out. Almost like he wanted to be reminded of the hollowness of his everyday life — forgetting to live, forgetting his dreams, ambitions, and enlightened brain (James was one of the most intelligent people I’d ever encountered), replaced by forgetfulness, jaded aplomb, fear, sadness, and chagrin. Before long, he’d no longer hide the blatant alcoholism in front of me. In the mornings, before he’d curse and leave for a job he wholly despised, he’d rip a whiskey bottle out from a brown paper bag, removing the plastic with desperation and total indifference, and he chugged it in front of me. By then, I was barely sleeping on his couch because each night he’d come back to the apartment in such a desultory mood, often enraged to the point of psychosis — and completely drunk — it gave me this terrible anxiety that any moment, he might be capable of anything — including violence. Not only that but there were some moments in the next few weeks where I sensed that he might be glad I was starting to become almost afraid of him. Before, in previous years, James could be gentle to the point of it being absurd. And on one night when I returned, he got that way. But only because he’d brought a few people home with him, co-workers, and they were clearly stoned, coked up, and drunk. He cornered me in his dark bedroom, and as I’d shunned the whole episode, he tried putting his arms around me and saying softly, “You’re my brother.”

There were also moments of obscene laughter, on my first few nights back. I relayed some of the best stories to him, ones I’d accumulated “On the Road.” He laughed to the point of tears, grabbing his belly, and finally letting his guard down. He could reminisce in perpetuity. It was sometimes all he cared about. Other than pretending like he had it all figured out — if he wasn’t bitching about the pointlessness of his livelihood.

On nights like that, it got awkward. When I returned, I’d given him a hundred dollars for picking me up at the airport. He acted offended and tossed it on the dining room table. “We’ll use that for beer or whiskey or something.”

Instead, he wanted to use it at a restaurant in Philly. He knew the owner or the head chef. And after the meal, he whispered for me to give him the loot. Then he used it for the tip, for the servers, bartenders, etc. That was his way of showing them, I realized, that on the surface — everything was fine. But underneath that facade, everything was a total shitshow.

Most of the time at the restaurant in Philly, too, he talked about how much he hated his new job, how there was no creativity, it was just a soulless corporation that stilted and stifled his ingenuity. Of course, nobody dared to ask him what he was going to do about it. That was verboten.

Later, when we got a ticket in the mail (“we”) for James's park job that night, I paid the fine. Because James by then had no tolerance for caring about anything other than his own misery.

Other nights, after we went out somewhere, if he’d been holding something in, he’d park the car, and then he wouldn’t move. He’d stare far off out through the windshield with a preamble that began with a vocable and sullen defeat.

“I dunno, man,” he’d say. “I feel like giving up.”

I’d known James since we were teenagers. The first thing he ever said to me was, “Myers, whenever I see you, I feel like I should be drinking a beer.” The implication was that I was an alky or that I was careless, light, free, etc. And he wasn’t. So I loosened him up. Never did he stop to think that I got anxious, depressed — and if I did, that was a tragedy in its own right! How dare Myers get upset about anything. Look at him just sitting there. Is he ever going to get his shit straight? It never occurred to him that we were just totally different people, but with similar desires, interests, and jocularity. By the time we were in our mid-thirties, it was clear that the divide had become like the Grand Canyon, where before it had been like we were brothers.

I’d grown tired of his doubts, his dysfunction, his dreadful outlook on being alive unless there was a moment of clarity — fleeting as it could be. Many times throughout knowing him, he’d declare that he was “in a dark place.” It never entered his brain for too long that he’d been the one who’d steered himself there. Thus he could get himself out.

But he didn’t want Out. He wanted misery, he wanted despair, and he enjoyed it. That was why I said nothing. What would be the point? What is one to say to somebody who enjoys his own misery?

On another night, I’d asked to take some of the mushrooms he’d kept in his room. A friend came over, a girl — and I am skipping over parts of when I saw others for the first time — and for most of the night, we talked and talked about James. How angry he was, how he’d been to a therapist and even she’d been afraid to help him. And as the mushrooms kicked in, I felt like a savage freeloader as James poured his heart out to Noelle who sat cross-legged on the couch, I pictured her as an Egyptian goddess with ultimate wisdom, and as James admitted to being beyond help, I’d never seen him so pathetic and vulnerable. He was so hopeless, so woebegone, that in the next few days I struggled to understand why he even bothered to continue. I never saw anybody so pointless, I internalized. It wasn’t a very nice thought, either. That I knew, all too well — I did the only thing I could do.

I started to clean the apartment, every day vacuuming and straightening the bills on the dining room table (I saw big restaurant checks from bars and I saw his bank statements, and I figured out how he blew his money like it was nothing — like it didn’t matter), and I straightened his room, did his laundry, made sure to cook as much as possible so every night he came home he had something to eat that wasn’t fast food. And at first, he welcomed it all. But it wasn’t long before he’d go into his self-same spiel about hating this, hating that, this person was an idiot, that person was a useless imbecile, etc — ad infinitum. These were tirades I’d experienced from just knowing him for decades. It was nothing new.

Then the abuse began, where he’d intimate that I was the stupid one. That I was useless. That I was nothing, beneath him, and if I couldn’t offer any solace or bubbly repasts, if I couldn’t take him by the hand and offer warm condolences of mirth and focus on him, his thoughts, needs, wants — I was like a worm, and nothing more.

I grew despondent.

And after getting two vaccine shots spread apart by a few weeks, I waited the final 14 days to escape. I’d planned to go to Mexico. Instead, I took the first plane I could — to San Juan, Puerto Rico.

When James found out, he only wanted to know what I’d done with the laundry key. The one he rarely used, since I’d started doing his laundry after the nearby laundry room had been broken — I’d told him one morning before work. He said he’d talk to the front office. He of course never did because it didn’t impact him — only me.

“I forgot I had the laundry key in my pocket,” I told him. “And then I threw it in the trash.”

His response went something along the lines of “Never talk to me again.”

It was the easiest thing in the world he could’ve asked of me.

The palms waved in the breeze at dusk. The sand on my feet felt like heaven on Earth.

I was free.