Johnny ran his fingers through his thick and tangled beard and let out a sad laugh at a distant memory. He was sitting on his worn couch in his cluttered little apartment in the city, staring at a crack that ran down the wall. A slow drip came down from the ceiling from the rain outside. It seemed it was always raining.
For most of his life Johnny Allen had lived in poverty. He grew up in run down houses with an alcoholic mother and an ill tempered father. They fought almost always. His brothers and sisters were given away to other families and grew up without ever knowing each other. Sometimes he still felt guilty that his parents had decided to keep him. Most times he decided that they got the better end of the deal.
His eyes fell on a worn broom that he hadn’t used in years. He remembered playing in his youth, strumming at brooms as though they were guitars. He remembered one of the rare moments of joy in his childhood as well, the day that his father gave him an old ukulele he’d found while cleaning out a garage. Johnny had strummed at the warped and out of tune little instrument non stop for the rest of the week. He laughed at how awful it had all sounded, and how his mother would make him go outside with it. The noise bothered her headaches.
He got up and began heading towards the kitchen for a bite to eat, running a soft hand across his bald head. Once his hands would have been rough and calloused, but now they were soft from disuse. He followed the path that he had for himself through the room, a room stacked with his past. Everywhere he looked there were memories, reminders of what he left behind. Sometimes he wondered why he kept it all.
He looked down as he walked, scanning over the top-most items of his stacks. He stopped at a picture of him and Billy from their army days. They were both smiling, but the brief time he spent in service was anything but smiles. He did what he could to get out, sleeping on duty and working slowly; after about a year they finally discharged him. To save pride he told some people that he’d broken his ankle, but the truth was he was never cut out to wear a uniform. He’d never been much for violence.
He set the frame down and took a shaky step forward, stepping awkwardly on the side of his foot and falling into an old box that crushed beneath his weight. His foot caught a stack of magazines with his face on it, his head landed in a pile of photographs, and his flailing arms took down the stacks of books on either side of him. It all came crashing down upon him like a ton of bricks, and what hit him initially was followed by the domino effect, piles and piles of oddments falling from above and pinning him down.
Fighting the urge to panic, Johnny tried to move his arms but found that he was trapped. His ankle hurt from the twist, his body hurt from the countless blunt objects that had hit him. He was being crushed beneath the weight of his past, much as he had been for most of his life.
He struggled to breath and squirmed and wiggled enough to free one arm and roll onto his side. His arm reached for a few items that pinned him down, but he didn’t have the strength to move anything. He felt the neck of an electric guitar, the strings worn and mostly missing. That would make it twice that music killed him, he supposed.
Johnny’s eyes fell upon an old black and white photo of an old girlfriend. Monika had been beautiful and he loved her more than any woman before. He both laughed and cried at how much she botched the story. She just couldn’t keep it straight. He’d died, she remembered that much. But the details around it kept getting confused in her head. Probably all the valium. Monika had a thing for pills.
Poor woman. She wanted out of the spotlight but the public would not let her rest. They questioned her over and over, confusing her, blaming her, some even calling her a murderer. It was supposed to just be an overdose. They had the pictures done, the coroner and the police paid. It was all so simple, but she kept changing the details instead of saying she didn’t want to talk about.
The night before he died, he kissed her goodbye and thanked her. Johnny didn’t think he could thank her enough to make up for the stress his death had brought to her. She was disgraced. But she kept the secret. She was a woman of her word.
A tear rolled down his face. He’d seen her once more some twenty-six years later, with no idea how she’d found him. One day she just showed up at his door and they stared at each other in silence for so long that it became unbearable. She told him that she still loved him, that she would always love him; and then she left. A few days later she was found dead in her Mercedes. She’d filled it with fumes and went to sleep forever. She killed herself rather than give up the secret.
He was sobbing at this point. She died to keep his secret. Died to protect him. And what had he ever given her in return? The money was nothing compared to what she went through for him. Sometimes he wondered why he didn’t just die back then. Die for real instead of putting on a show for the papers. Maybe there was another route he could have taken. God, he had been so young and foolish!
It was becoming harder and harder to breathe, his vision was beginning to grow dim. He thought about hanging on longer, waiting for rescue; but he didn’t see the point of it. He was already dead, really. Died forty years ago to the public, and today he would leave the world behind. He wondered if there was an afterlife after all. He wondered if the papers would realize who he was. He wondered if his secret would finally be revealed with this and imagined the documentaries it would inspire.
He laughed at the notion and closed his eyes forever.