“Films, not movies.” That’s the only thing I remember my friend Paul saying during the hazy year we spent hanging on each other, intoxicated by our own intelligence, drunk off whiskey. Nothing like dark liquor to give even the dullest of dolts a false sense of wit, sexual prowess, just an all around inflated sense of self importance, which may be why going through the world as a drunk day to day is generally discouraged.

Paul and I didn’t do much outside of watch films at the local indie theater and drink at any of the two dozen bars within striking distance. To us, that was a life. Only now do I see it for what it was: The past time of two boys pregnant with their own egos and afraid of the world, afraid to take anything in without a wry, condescending smile, without dumbing it down with alcohol. You try drinking like you have a death wish and tell me you don’t feel like the fucking king of the universe. Go try it, come back, and tell me you didn’t become a fucking rock star, if even for those few short hours that you couldn’t string a sentence together, remember your mom’s name, or eat a hot dog without getting your fingers in the mix.

A man gnawing on his fingers deserves no further wake up calls. That’s it. That’s the last one, and if you can’t listen to it, you just might be in for a double feature, if you will, except you can’t see it unfold, only others are privy to the horror your life has become.

We’d be two peas in a pod no matter what dive you’d place us in, but anywhere except the bowels of humanity, and we’d be found out for the absolute idiots we were. We could only hide amongst outcasts, lowlives, undesirables, and even then we ‘d stick out like to sore thumbs.

We’d walk into the bar, any bar, and while I wouldn’t say our reputation proceeded us, it certainly stuck around us like a bad, almost visible, odor. Without exception the barkeep would refer to us two as some variation of ingrate, or at the very least sneer at our unsightly appearance. Though our dalliance with what we construed as a bohemian lifestyle lasted less than a year, it was all it took to run its natural course, which, obviously, was inevitably mired with cliffs and dead ends.

The last time I saw Paul, at least the last time that I remember seeing Paul, was at what I gratefully accept as my rock bottom, and if it wasn’t his as well, then I don’t want to know what that ended up looking like for old Paul. By this time, we had started sleeping in the theater, which was probably the only place we kept our mouths shut enough as to not betray our obnoxiousness. Drunk, we sat rapt by the pictures coming into view from out of nowhere to move across the screen and exit back to nothing.

For a few days near the end, we’d go to the late night double feature, knowing that they wouldn’t clean it out until the next morning, and we’d stay, thinking it was the most ingenious caper anyone had ever pulled off, as if the novelty made up for the fact that we were two homeless bums with a sum total of zero between us. Zero money. Zero ambition. Zeros. Looking back, I can’t quite figure what we saw in one another. Maybe we found the excuse in one another that we needed to justify our lifestyle, the excuse that allowed us to do less than nothing and complain about our plight all the while.

Our little enterprise didn’t last long. We thought we had the operation figured out, but it turned out, as was often the case, that we knew less nothing. The staff must have been onto us, you can’t very well live in a fucking theater. One night, about a week into breaking in our new digs, they called the police. Rapping the bolted metal legs of our row of movie theater seats, the cop tells us “You can’t live in the movies, kids, get up!”

Drunkenly, Paul offered the officer a variation on waking up, looks in his direction and says “film, not movies, officer.”