The End Of Your Story Is More Important Than Ever

Gun battle with crooked cops in a whorehouse. That’s how I always pictured the end- smoke, shrieking hookers with big hair tear assing through terrible mayhem as I bring the hammer down on their wicked overlords. Flames, explosions, splattering fountains of red, and in the center one bent old man with two heavy six shooters blazing away in a final symbolic act- we are all whores with crooked overlords. I can still see this future. My suit is too big because I’ve been shrinking like old men do. My hands are gnarled and the last cigarette is no cigarette at all, but a cigar, one of those thin ones. I can taste the cheap whiskey. All the sound is muted because I threw away my hearing aid and I’m firing, firing, and then… A bright light! Blinding white! And then an antiquated telephone busy signal that fades…

That won’t happen. At 50 I know what will though and I’m 100% certain of it. The current end of life model for Americans is to live as long as you can outside the system, but eventually if you live long enough you’ll be forced into an old folks home until all of your financial resources are exhausted and then you’re transferred to the wards where you die an institutional death, drained and broke, a final, drugged morsel for the machine, consumed entirely. I’ll go for the gun battle whorehouse thing before anything as terrible as that, but what else is there? What is the end I predict now, here at the beginning of my 5th decade? What are the final pages in the last chapter of Jeff Johnson…

I’ll die in a stylish French prison. I just know it. Stone walls, no computers, guards with outdated uniforms. Still a prison, sure, but not the humiliating American death ward/final robbery variety. My brother will be there. We’ll play checkers. He’s mouthy, and as an old man he’ll lie almost constantly, so I’ll have a shank at the ready to keep the other cons from drowning him in a toilet. And I can see that life clearly- its winter and we play checkers outside in a courtyard with high granite walls. My sweater is gray and big, threadbare and comfortable. Every afternoon we get a tin bowl of white beans with a little sausage and a chunk of coarse rye bread with mustard. Someone has rum and we drink a little of that every day after dinner. My brother is older and he sleeps more, so after he climbs in his bunk I play poker with Pierre and Ernesto, sometimes late into the night if they have any of that rough red wine, and when the sky is clear I watch the satellites and the new activity transforming the moon. I can feel that cold night wind on my upturned eyes right now.

I think about this from time to time, not too often, but this morning it came up when a friend of mine, a first rate thinker in my opinion, told me about his end of life vision. It was so depressing, so empty and crapulent that I realized it undoubtedly colored his present in some way. Just as my vision colors mine. So this is my Sunday morning revelation- think of a good end to your story. If all you can envision is a bad one, as in stale, shitty and depressing, try harder because your story sucks.