alcoholic conman

wasn’t even sure what I looked like anymore. Before I got sober, I remember staring at selfies taken on a Motorola Cliq. The grainy images blown up on an HP laptop. Black bags under my eyes, sallow flesh on a sad expression. Who even are you? You are gonna die. These other worlds, they’re gonna swallow you up, son.

I put the rabbit suit on to play acoustic noise guitar in front of the entrance to Bank of America on Halloween in 2012. I put it on again a week later, just to walk around Portsmouth downtown at night, sober, in this uncanny world I had created. I used it to pass through doorways into people’s lives who would have never thought to approach me as a mere mortal. I wore it for walks in blizzards that winter, and I wore it while recording the fiftieth album of Chimps 8 My Ears.

I became a super-hero of the absurd. I was interviewed by the local newspaper. The article sounded insane. I had been sober for about eight months and I was crawling out of my skin. Luckily, there was another skin ready for me to crawl into.

One afternoon I hawked beanie babies from a trash bag in Market Square with Big Mike. He was using the “proceeds go to help disabled veterans” line, which was only true because as far as I knew, he was a disabled veteran and an alcoholic conman