Scum

By Robert Gulassarian

Great authors have come and gone, leaving a legacy through their words and experiences. Gulassarian has made his mark with this work, presenting to us a world of aimless sex, joyless alcohol binges, and unanswered dreams in a city of decadence. He has lived it and he has described it best in “Scum”, giving us a close look at life at a cross-roads. What would you choose: freedom and uncertainty, or love and commitment?
An ordinary life is unsatisfactory for our hero, and the only thing that seems to bring any enjoyment is for him to lose himself in the liberties Amsterdam has to offer. There is, however, a woman that has been the reason behind his happiness, his pain, his joy, his misery. And though he engages in adventures to forget his past relationship, it seems to constantly creep back into his life.

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse
• Release date: Sep 21, 2010
• ISBN: 9781452076966

Robert Gulassarian

Robert Gulassarian was born in 1989 in Moscow, Russia to a piano instructor mother and businessman father. At an early age, his family decided to move to Toronto, Canada but his father remained back in Moscow on account of business for most of Robert's adolescent and teen years. He attended York University, and on his exchange to Amsterdam he began and finished his first major novel. His various experiences with unavailable women and his inability to remain fixed in one location became the leading influences in his writing. He was passionately involved with writing in all forms. From screenplays to short stories and novellas to novels, and he took his interests to the next level when he directed an independent short film. Amongst his greatest influences are Hunter S. Thompson, Charles Bukowski, Ernest Hemingway, Mikhail Lermontov, and Fyodor Dostoevsky. He is currently in the process of migrating to Paris, France.

Book preview

Book One:

Your Honourable Hero

Chapter Uno

I’m back to normal now. It’s been an unsettling decade and I’m finally back to writing and drinking and having myself a life I can relate to. Finally, the confusion is gone and the angst is back. But just like they always say, it’s better to show, not tell, and that’s what I’m going to do for you people. I will show you my life, through my eyes, through my thoughts, through my words, and through my fucking great power of conviction.

I take a swig from my cup of rum and coke on ice and go over to my laptop. I bought this machine two months ago and I felt like a monkey trying to learn how to eat with a fork and knife. The typing wasn’t difficult, since I was used to a type-writer, but the whole internet thing boggled my drunk mind when I first tried it out and it still does to this day. But enough of that, let’s take this outside. Let’s take it to the grimey streets.

*           *           *

I saw a woman crossing the road and I thought I had noticed her glance my way. But it didn’t matter. She looked like she’d be a good fuck though.

I’ve been living in Amsterdam for just over a year now and my third bicycle had gotten stolen just last week and I felt it was time for an upgrade. I had some money left over in my savings from the last time I had a job and now I wanted something with an engine. Through some acquaintances I was able to find some guy who was selling a 70’s hooligan bike for just over a thousand Euros. He showed me the picture and the thing looked like it had quite a fight left in it. No need for tune-up or any changes. All taken care of. Just get on it and ride until your next oil change, he told me. I loved Amsterdam. Everyone spoke English. This entire time I’ve lived here, I still haven’t learned how to formulate a proper Dutch sentence. Not like Dutch was that important of a language, anyway.

On my way to the guy’s garage, I stopped by a shop to pick up a carton of tobacco and a can of beer. After rolling one up, I walked by the canals, smoking and drinking and looking at the hookers in the windows, the coffeeshops, bars, smartshops, casinos, and the various sex shows. It seemed like there were more live sex show theatres than normal film cinemas. This city was just a big ol’ funhouse. Great place to live, fall in love each night, and wake up with a huge hangover and empty pockets to remind you that love came at a very specific price: fifty Euros. After the first month though you begin to look at these attractions as nothing more than local businesses.

I don’t know if my mind’s GPS was fucked or what, but I couldn’t find that fucking motorcycle shop. I finished drinking my beer and lit up another butt. I stood around, looking here and there, but I just couldn’t find anyone selling any bikes.

Bah, I thought, and my frustration quickly turned into weariness. I needed some real good sleep. But a drink would do me a lot better. I was in Amsterdam, so a drink was always a meter away. It wasn’t like back in Canada where I would have to find certain places for drinks. Here, I’d be able to go to the local market and get myself a bottle of Jäger. And then I’d mix it with a cheap imitation of Red Bull called Blue Bear and have a great fucking time.

Weed always made me feel like shit. I’d get paranoid and feel an out of this world sensation and that would scare the shit out of me. My current life already felt alien to me and any drugs that made me feel even more unattached just made me feel undesirable. I knew I needed some wine, Jäger, or absinthe, and then I’d go to sleep.

*           *           *

Laughing throughout the day, dancing throughout the night. This is all out of my grasp. Behind the window, people are bright and people are moving. Their hearts are in their head and their minds are filled with a cavity of ideas that I will never be able to fathom. I want to breathe their air and smell the flowers of their garden, but at the same time their adulterous fantasies and indecorous anxieties is what I fear most. All I am is a crippled child. Someone who has grown up physically but was destroyed mentally. And with each glass of scotch on ice, my life and theirs merge into a neutral zone of interwoven delight, delusion, and despair. Cadaverous whores, dissolute junkies, corrupt cops, loyal criminals, and of course the drunkard writers. All put into their place, neatly laid out in the hierarchical cabinet.

So where was I? I started with the smiles, that’s right. My story is simple. My story is an expression of you. An expression of your life. Put down the remote controls, the fat-free salad dressing, and look up. Look at those thin strings pulling you and tugging at your hands to cover your eyes. Pick up the flicker and get back to your microwaved meal, because you’re entering a danger zone and your imagination may expand too much for you to handle. Sit back down on your sofa, not hearing your coins drop out of your pockets, and close your eyes. You’re obviously not ready to continue. You’re obviously free of any desire of ultimate knowledge. Your door of perception is shut and infinity is nothing more than a meaningless word. Can life really be impressive and can perpetual continuity be exciting after all these years with a simple stimulation by the jingle of a few coins?

Sleep isn’t the cure. The cure isn’t in a bottle. The cure isn’t in a fuckfest that comes each night and disgusts each afternoon. The cure is in the words we utter. In the communal tricks we develop and articulate to the rest of our social brothers and sisters. But it is in this desire for the cure that we begin to smile. The ones without desire see the truth. The cure may stop the pain, but it does not bring forth any meaning. The wine, the reckless sex, the sleep is left only for the ones on my side of the window. The seekers aren’t welcome here. The cured aren’t welcome here. Only the ones who don’t stand for anything and only borrow your words and images to create and destruct. To obliterate everything you hold dear. Your sentiments are useless to us. Your empathies, sympathies, your wretched will to help then steal. Your poisonous tactics, your consequential sorrows, and your meaningless apologies. That is what you stand for, this is the world you have constructed. The good fight was over and lost. And the biggest pity was that it was only a fight and not a war. There weren’t enough troops to even rise up and fight for it. The good fight lasted at least half a century, but no real war was ever ignited. And now all of our fighters are dead and gone and scratched out of the history books.

We’re moving on now. Back into my world. Look through my eyes, breathe through my lungs, and fuck with my dick.

I stopped typing and pulled out a pack of tobacco and some rolling papers from my jacket pocket. I laid the stuff in front of me on the table and lazily rolled myself a cigarette. My head was throbbing from last night’s alcohol binge and the full night of reckless fucking. The crazy she-devil had just left my place and I told her we shouldn’t see each other anymore because her boyfriend may get suspicious. I didn’t give a fuck about her boyfriend in all honesty, I just didn’t want her to think she could jump ship. I wasn’t ready for any relationship nor did I think I could handle one. Soon after she left, I went over to my laptop and put on Slow Day by Kristin something and my heartache for my past love from my past life set in. I still had a full cup of absinthe mixed with water and sugar on my nightstand and I took a swig. I had spilled red wine on my bed covers last night. The nameless she-devil told me that I fuck like I live. That I was the most arrogant and most insecure person mixed into one she’s ever met. She didn’t even know how it was possible, but it just was. I’ve had that told to me before. Except instead of arrogance and insecurity, the words extremely high ego and extremely low confidence were used.

I hated cuddling after sex. Cuddling was too much for lovers and my heart was empty for any such thing. I had saved my heart from getting hurt so long that one day I made a fatal mistake of giving it as a whole away to a single woman. She took care of it and the summer of ’08 alone was worth living a whole life of misery for. The woman who had my heart was a married one. She told me she loved me though and I believed her. How I believed her. I wrote stories for her. We had our own song, we had name tags made out with special engravings for each other. We were a real couple, besides the element of her husband. But I think every woman I’ve fucked except for a few were already taken. For that reason I stopped believing that women and men could ever be friends without ending up in bed. And that’s also the reason why I had no respect for capricious bitches. But who was I to judge? Cheating is innate.

I grew some balls after downing the cup of absinthe and decided to give my beloved ex a call, if you can even call her an ex—as I said, she was married. I haven’t talked to her since she had told me that she was completely over me and she had found herself someone new. She lived in a different city and hung out with classy people. She never loved her husband, was a big fan of his money, but word got around that she was thinking about a divorce.

I was heading over to her city in under a week just for one day as a stop-over before I headed on further with my travels. Amsterdam, Vienna, Moscow. Then back to Amsterdam in five days.

She answered the phone and recognized my voice instantly. She wasn’t a bit surprised I called and I was quite happy about that. I got straight to the point. Skipped the chit-chat. Well, of course, I was polite enough to ask her how she was and what was new, but didn’t continue the conversation too long. She confirmed the hearsay about her upcoming divorce and I asked her how her new relationship was going.

Great, she said. My life changed a lot.

I knew she was over us, but hearing it directly from her made me wish I had never called.

Did you get my message? I asked.

Yes, she responded, I just don’t know if I’ll be here or in Paris on the day you arrive. I’ll message you back when I find out for sure. But in any case if I’m not here I can tell my friend to show you around. You know who I’m talking about. The tall, blonde one.

Sure I knew, but I didn’t want to see any tall blondes. I wanted to see for myself if any chance of our love was still left in her soul.

It’s alright. I don’t want to be a bother. I’ll look around the city for myself, it’s no problem, I told her.

Oh, don’t worry, it’s not going to be a bother. But anyways, I’ll let you know sometime later today or tomorrow for sure, she said.

I wished her luck and hung up. I knew I wouldn’t be getting a message that I’d be happy about and that she almost surely wasn’t going to be in Vienna when I’d arrive. But I still had hope. That’s all I’ve ever had in life. At one point I had lost even that, but my move to Amsterdam and the constant drinking ignited a new hope, which would always diminish in the morning, when I’d be feeling like a complete fucking asshole with no real ambition and no real respect for anything in life.

Let me tell you about the heartache and the loss of God.

I put my life into words. I put my pain into words. I put my soul into those fucking words. With each word I put on paper, another one was born in my mind and another and another, until my soul was fully speechless and searching for comfort in something new, but I always had to return to the bottle and the words. The pain it carried was too great of a burden for any man to handle and words is all I really had in the end of it all.

I needed to clean my bed covers. I remember that after I spilled the wine on the bed and floor, I used the girl’s pants and socks to wipe it up off the floor. She got offended in the morning, but apparently I was too arrogant to care. I had a to-do list, because I knew my life would consist of three simple things if I’d never have a to-do list. There would be the constant boozing, the occasional fucks with random women I’d find in the bars, and the jotting down of the words that would flow out of me whenever I’d get around to writing something comprehensive.

But before anything, first thing first, I needed a fucking shower to wash the whore-filth off my body. Walking by my kitchen always put a dent in my mood. The dishes were unwashed, the floors were dirty, I’d only wash something when I needed it and then back in the sink it’d go until I’d need it again. The women that came over didn’t even offer to clean. They came over, drank, fucked, and headed back to their untainted world of boyfriends, relationships, book clubs, and weekly nail salons.

I checked the fridge and all the beer was finished. An empty six pack carton was left in the fridge, but the empty bottles were all around the apartment. I needed beer and condoms and I knew that this would be prioritized above cleaning my sheets, or anything else for that matter.

I opened my top kitchen cabinet and reached for an oatmeal pack. I had enough oatmeal for at least another month. I ate oatmeal daily, and it felt like the only healthy thing I was doing. Mom always said oatmeal was good for me so I followed that tradition. But lately I’ve been feeling like the oatmeal is what would end up killing me.

I boiled some water, tossed the oatmeal into a bowl and poured just enough hot water to wet all of the oats. I mixed it with a spoon, waited a gruelling minute and went over to the table in my bedroom. I remembered to make some tea as well and I drank that with honey instead of sugar.

Arrogant yet insecure. Egotistical yet unconfident. These words wouldn’t leave my mind. Bah, I knew this shouldn’t matter to me. It’s just women trying to put me in a box, trying to understand me and put tags on what kind of person I was. If I don’t even know what I’m thinking or imagining half the time and feel like I’m on the brink of madness on a daily basis, how could a drunk woman I met at a pub define me with just three consecutive nights of sex?

I slowly ate my oatmeal and enjoyed my tea. I wished I had a slice of lemon in my tea, but I knew my kitchen was empty of any such delicacies. I pressed some buttons on my laptop machine and another song came on. Some Ray Charles. I needed to get some more writing done. I hadn’t produced a good piece of literature in quite some time. I began writing something a few months ago about how I met my past love and how it all escalated and all that good shit, but when word got around to me that she was seeing someone new and moreover, that she was in love with him, I tore those pages apart, threw them in the shitter, and defecated on them. One bitter sonofabitch, wouldn’t you say?

I rolled another cigarette and lit it up. I didn’t feel inspired to write even though I had ambition to finally get something down. After thirty minutes of not being able to get a single sentence I was happy with typed, I decided it was time to head out.

I removed my black wifebeater and put on a black t-shirt. Grabbed my pair of jeans off the floor and put them on. The bottoms of each leg were ragged from me constantly stepping on them with my boots when I walked. I rolled them up a little and then went over to my bed. As I sat down, I let out a deep sigh.