El Pecho Izquierdo

This is gonna be hard for me to admit. I am, after all, an extremely awesome person who knows – deep down in the nether regions of his gut, right before the large intestines – before the literal shit – that someone out there thinks the world of me. Someone out there thinks I am the greatest person to ever walk the earth.

So why am I out here with a gun to my head, wishing it all would end?

But I digress. Allow me to introduce myself.

I am a highly successful television producer. The perks of my job include having a lot of money (which may or may not buy happiness; that is inconclusive at the moment), a stable job and the adoration – albeit indirectly – of millions of people around the world. Your favorite show? I had a hand in making it. So why, again, am I holding a gun to my head?

I guess this all started when one of the stars of one of my shows – I produce so many, I literally forgot which one – barged into my office asking for a raise and a new deal. She wanted a more flexible contract that allowed her to devote more time to movies, so she can improve herself and her career. Naturally, as is the case with most of my negotiations, I told her to fuck off. Her contract wasn’t up yet and, quite frankly, she’s been slipping (she hasn’t).

My composure at this point was at an all time high. This tween wasn’t gonna rattle me at all. Then she cried. Composure? Ha. What composure?

I quickly gave in to her demands, which prompted her cast members to barge in with the same demands. Again, I maintained my composure til they each unleashed a weapon I could no longer handle: tears. (One of them even blew me while crying. To say that it was a great blowjob would be a disservice to its epicness.)

The studio lost it. They told me to get my act together and renegotiate as soon as possible. This show was a ratings hit, but it was going to be too expensive to keep on the air with all those inflated salaries. I was in a position of weakness, a position that was foreign to me before any of this shit happened. None of the cast members would even agree to a sit-down and they all decided to band together against the studio, against me. “I made the deal,” they reasoned. “It’s time I owned up to it.”

Ashamed, I quit my job before they decided to fire me. The money I put in that show was quickly replaced, but the ideas weren’t. Those writers feared me, and without my constant haranguing of their work, the show premise went stale and viewers tuned out. Since this is television, that was the death knell. The show was canceled. Point, me.

You can see that I obviously still had a lot of power at this point, that many studios should be lining up to hire me to finance and develop their shows. Sadly, this was not the case. In my Hollywood, you’re only as good as you negotiate, and frankly, I was shit.

Now what? Now we fucking put a bullet in my head.

Here I am, standing alone in my study- my spacious, glorious study- with a gun to my head and nary a fear in the world. I was as good as dead. Suddenly, I had an epiphany.

I can rebuild myself, start from scratch. I’ve done this before, and God damn it, I can do it again. It’s not so hard. I know what it takes, what it needs.

What do you do when you have a bullet to your head? What do you do when you’re faced with a choice between life and death?

Die? Shit, that’s easy.

Live? Living is hard, but you know what?

It is so fucking glorious.

James Vance has lost control. He has seen the abyss, and he was struggling against it. This is what total helplessness is like. His daughter, Nora, was hurt.

A little backstory: Vance had just come back from Afghanistan after serving his second tour. He found out he had a daughter, Nora, and this was his reason to live- she was his light at the end of the war tunnel.

Nora just broke her leg. James just had his heart, broken.

He didn’t know what to do. He was always led by someone else throughout his life: his high school basketball coach, his drill sergeant, and now he was all alone, no one to help. No one to lead him through this. “This is on you, Vance. Your call.”

That’s not to say he didn’t have help. His girlfriend, Nora’s mother Emily, was sort of guiding him through the motions of civilian life. She was trying her hardest to get him assimilated, making him a contributor to the household and the community. From the day he walked into their lives, and into their neighborhoods, James Vance was welcomed with open arms.

But even with all that, there was only one thing that commanded James’s attention. His daugher, Nora. And now Nora was hurt.

James wasted little time and acted fast, taping up Nora’s little legs- her delicate left leg – and applying the needed pressure. This was step one, a step that was easily accomplished by the private. Step two would be easy still, but step two required patience.

James wasn’t too big on patience.

For Nora’s sake, and for his sanity, he had to be.

And so he was.

I’m a highly reactive person. It’s sad really. I jump to conclusions, assume the worst, and am just a downright emotional party. It’s fucking repulsive.

Knowing this about myself doesn’t have the logical conclusion that I must try to fix this or change it. It has the exact opposite effect. I rely on these deficiencies, revel in them. “I’m sorry, but this is who I am. This is who I deal with things,” is my logical response. And, boy is it illogical.

I am not an emotional person, generally. I tend to rely on my head in most situations. That is why I have managed to cultivate a somewhat healthy lifestyle for myself, relying on the defense mechanisms of wit and sarcasm to mend off attacks to my psyche. Where this mechanism fails, where it fucking explodes, is when dealing with matters of the heart.

I feed off feedback. That is such a retarded thing to say, I know, but I tend to require constant reminders of what I am doing right or wrong. I need to be babied is what I’m saying. This obviously rubs people the wrong way. There’s just a threshold for the amount of shit they are willing to take. I tend to skirt that line, sidestepping it on more than a few occasions.

I realize that outlining my faults in blog form is not exactly a great way to deal with anything, really. I’m just brain dropping, vomiting my thoughts on to the page. It doesn’t seem to solve anything really. It just adds to whatever it is I’m feeling, and what I’m feeling right now is fucking shit.

But I digress. Back to my original thought, which is mainly, I suck. I do. I’m not telling you this to make you feel sorry for me; I’m just simply stating facts. The amount of leeway required to deal with my shit is astronomical. Again, I know all of this, which is why I try to encase myself in a bubble.

That bubble is slowly bursting. I am trying to mend it, slowly put it together, but to no avail. In fact, every time I try to fix it, I end up breaking it even more. Just fucking it up to a more astronomical level that I can see no way of coming back from. This fucking irks me, and drives me insane. I know I should stop trying, just let the chips fall where they may, but it’s against my nature.

How do you beat nature?

Throughout his life, Private James Vance has known only one thing, one factor, one constant that has taken him through his life: sports.

Sports were everything to this man. He took his vacations around sporting events, set his alarms according to matches; heck, he even cut his dates short to watch the ends of games. They were the one constant in his life, he reasoned. Why should they take a backseat to anything?

Then James, an average athlete – he lettered in baseball and was the point guard of his high school’s basketball team – and a less than stellar student, had his options cut from under him. He only had one option really, and that was to enlist.

James enlisted in the army and was sent off to Afghanistan right off the bat. This was 2005, and the clamor for more Americans to enlist was at an all time high. The United States was involved in several wars on several fronts and they needed all the help they could get. The bodies, as the song went, were gonna hit the floor. Hard.

James finally found his footing as part of a sports enthused battalion stationed near Kandahar. They weren’t a hot bed for action- there weren’t a lot of kills nor thrills heading their way – so they found other ways to entertain themselves. Naturally, they turned to sports.

The group bet on everything, taking prop bets on football games to meaningless wagers on curling. If you had cash, and wanted some of that action, this battalion was the one to see.

James was the de facto leader of the gambling operation. As a point guard in high school, he knew how to command the attention of everyone, knew how to keep everyone on point. Under his tutelage, gambling ran smoothly, and the money was being raked in. Life was grand.

Pretty soon, though, the pressures of war got the best of them. Bodies – lots of bodies – hit the floor. Gambling – and sports – were by now trivial pursuits to Private Vance. He, like Dante in the Divine Comedy, has abandoned all hope. He was destined to die, as were all mortals.

Only one thing kept Vance going. He didn’t realize it at first, but sports were very much his lifeblood, his raison d’etre. He’d glance at the papers and find out that it was the first Monday of April, and that the NCAA national championships were on. He’d find a way to watch that. Two hours was not such a long time in the grand scheme of the war. Patience – and a great satellite connection – was indeed a virtue. Time wasn’t of the essence.

There was another reason for Vance’s survival, a reason more important than sports, although he didn’t realize it at the time. You see, unbeknownst to him, Private James Vance was the father of a little girl, the apple of her mother’s eye. Little Nora was mere fiction to James, but every so often, he’d get a letter from Nora’s mother, a little reminder. A nudge. “Your little girl can’t wait to see you, so don’t go dying on us, you hear?”

And with that, James would soldier on, fight for his life. Sports and Nora, the greatest one two punch of all time, better than Ali’s jabs or Mike Tyson’s vicious right. Those punches ended lives, sports – and more importantly, Nora – preserved them.

Two years would go by, and James’s tour of duty would be finished. He made it out alive. He had sports – and Nora – to thank. He got on the plane, and set out to the plains of Iowa, where Emily Berger Vance – and little Nora – were waiting.

As soon as James saw his little girl, he know it was not all for naught. There was a reason for all of this, a reason for the bloodshed and fighting. Although he didn’t necessarily agree with the killing of innocent lives- nor did he see any reason for these wars, to be honest- if those wars were meant to ensure Nora’s safety, then by God, those wars were just. For now, right in front of him, was the embodiment of reality- his reality.

What was it Red Smith once wrote? ”Now it is done. Now the story ends. And there is no way to tell it. The art of fiction is dead”?

Nora, that fictitious figment of his imagination just a few years ago, was there, in front of him, in the flesh. The art of fiction was dead.

Long live the real.