If you are tough and put your lips to the grindstone, you are almost guaranteed to make it in some way. It’s all about perspective. Jimone, that guy works all day and night and swears he’s going to be an artist. He will die in a fatal fender bender that sends him careening off the cliffside into his city’s only valley. He will not die on impact. Jimone will sit in his car for eight hours, upside down, and will eventually die from his sagging, blood-filled brain putting too much pressure on his ostheoporotic skull. It will open like a soggy pinata and he will not feel any pain. It’s miraculous, actually. He just feels a warm tingling and his vision starts to fade as the his brain falls to the roof of his now overturned car, slowly taking his eyeballs with it.
But while he’s in the car upside down, he’ll think about all the late-night shifts he pulled so he could afford his apartment on the bad side of town (just the other day, someone got shot outside his front door and the city told him that he was responsible for cleaning up whatever remained. Not that he had to, just that if he wanted it to be clean he’d have to take it upon himself).
He thought about the time that his manager told him he was probably going to be stuck here for a few years but then make it out. His manager was alright. His manager liked his work. He showed his manager a painting once — it was this guy hanging upside down in his car, his head like a blood-filled baloon — and his manager said, “I’d probably buy it if it wasn’t by someone I knew. You know what I mean? You know how when a friend or acquaintance makes something great you kind of downplay it even if it’s really good? I think it’s jealousy or something, but anyway, yeah, it’s really dope.”
He thought about his mother, who he had to move back in with when she got fake-sick, and then he thought about the last time he’d seen her, when he baker-acted her for fucking up half of his life by making him take care of her when she was perfectly healthy. But then was she really healthy? I mean, she was fucking nuts, so maybe it wasn’t a waste. See? Perspective.
And in the last minutes of his upside-down escapade, Jimone spots an unopened bottle of 96 proof corn liquor, one that he’d just bought from Total Wine or ABC or one of those places (it’s hard to remember things when your brain has become filled with enough blood to gain telekinetic powers). He thought that it was such a beautiful bottle. It had a label on it that said “96 Proof, No Evidence.” So fucking funny. SOOOO fucking funny. Funny like ha ha funny not like when you scoff at something and then forget about it. He’d remember this for as long as possible.
He used his last remaining fortitude to open the bottle and tilt it, letting gravity take the reigns. And as it splashed on his lips, he realized that the mouth is like an incredible, wet vaccuum. How you can close it and compress everything inside so that it’s forced to go into your throat. There is no escape in the mouth of man.
Jimone’s funeral was attended by his manager. He is the only person that showed up, mostly because he wanted to see if anyone knew where he could get that “dope” painting of the guy upside down in his car with his head looking like a blood-filled balloon.