The Seven Deadly Sins (23 page)

I do not really gamble that much anymore regardless, and not because I am afraid of losing but because it is what it is: a great way to let off some steam and put a little travel on the chain I keep my own greed on at all times. My one weakness, however, is the
Star Wars
slot machines at the Palms casino. I know that is not the toughest sounding game around, but I have fun, and Texas Hold 'Em has become so damn trendy I would not want anyone to see me playing it. Not to brag, but the last time I was at the Palms, I won $3,000 over the course of three nights on those slots. I only risked $400. It was fun: My gang and I were enjoying complimentary Jack and Cokes and yelling and screaming; we were attracting spectators who wanted to see what the hubbub was about, and at the end of my stay I basically paid for half the expenses I accrued in hotel lodgings. Fun is fun; compulsion is a disaster. But greed is not to blame. Everybody I know has addictive personalities. Greed is just one more leg for those personalities to stand on. You have to figure it out for yourself in the long run.

So I guess the question becomes how stable is your grip on yourself? People have been in the market for the bigger, better, now since the bitter, better, then. Greed has its roots in the hunter and the hunger in all of us. We have it in our user manuals to want and to acquire, to earn and to take. To me, this is the fire that originally got us all going past the boundaries of our minds. What is greed but the thirst for more? That sounds like discovery. That sounds like progress. That sounds to me like a little bit of everything, right? There is a sliver of greed in every step we have taken from medieval to medical, from superstition to science. The greediest minds wanted more than myth had to offer. The masters of our universe got a taste of something
significant. And even though the immensity of that knowledge made them feel a bit insignificant, it was enough to make them greedy for more. The depths of the human capacity are immeasurable, and greed makes our hearts voracious when it is bent on finding great things.

I have been greedy my whole life, but not in any way that would make me feel like a sinner or ashamed. I was greedy for intelligence, so I fed myself books and anything else I could to achieve it. I was greedy for life, so I did my very best to go out and live it. I was greedy for music, so I spent a lifetime sifting through sought-after albums and tapes, then CDs and MP3s to experience it. I was greedy for love, so I went after the most beautiful women I had ever seen, and even when we broke each other's hearts, we loved as hard as we could to feel it. There is greed in my blood. Hell, there is greed in your blood. The people who tell you otherwise are greedy for control of as many of your emotions as they can get. Maybe that does include me because I am trying to undo years of outside influence. People will think that is a very lofty statement and that I think very highly of myself. Of course I do. Why would I write a book if I were not going to attempt to change some minds? Why would I be doing this if I did not think I had a point? The naysayers are a hangman's jury of free thought and I am your lawyer. Fortunately, your lawyer has a case. No one should feel bad about their doubts especially if there are no honest reasons for feeling as such.

For now, we all go about our lives the same way we always have, with the guilt of the dead and anxiety for the unknown. Someone other than myself said that some shit, suffice it to say, just does not wash off. Maybe we are not ready to shed the stigmas of these quote-unquote sins. Maybe the decades we have spent immersed in the haughty sights of the repressed have left
us all a little less likely to flip the script right away. But my one flaw has always been my one strength: I see the potential in everyone. I know the world has what it takes to do what it takes. So I will wait patiently. I will not be greedy with your time or your decisions. I know good things come in due time. And I have time. I have all the time in the world. It just means more, more, more for me,
Me
,
ME
.

I have time for that.

D
id I ever tell you I used to live in a closet? True story.

I was living with my mother, my sister, my mom's best friend, her daughter, and whomever the two matriarchs happened to be dating at the time. We had rented a house outside of Waterloo, an old farmhouse on a plot of land that no one had bothered to work in years. It had a couple of out buildings, a silo, and a circle driveway I was forced to ride my ten-speed around for hours because we were not close enough to town for me to ride. Anyway, I had not had my own room since before my sister was born. So when my mom told me the new house would have a room for me, I was actually stoked to finally have my own fucking room. For the better part of four years I had been sharing a room with no less than four different kids, all of whom were younger than me. I was getting to the point at which I needed my own space. I needed a little privacy. They alluded to the fact that it was a lot smaller than I thought, but I heard nothing but
my and room. So as I packed all my stuff, I was preparing what I would do: I would hang my Iron Maiden posters on all the walls and set up my radio right next to my bed so I could listen to my George Carlin albums to go to sleep. Teenagers only feel good when they are alone in their own house. I was ready to get out of the romper room and into the high school confessional.

Imagine my surprise when I landed with both feet at the top floor, flung open the heavy door and found what my new digs were. Yeah, it was a closet at the top of a staircase with no light and no electrical outlets. So even if I hung my posters I could not see them. I had to buy batteries for my radio so I could listen to my music, and they were constantly dying. Plus I had to keep it down because everyone in the house could hear my radio seeing as I was at the apex of the house. There was no heat, no windows, and no end to the dust and spiders and smells that collected in that dark, fucked up place. It was stuff like that and a host of other reasons that made me restless and reckless. I got the short end of the stick so often that I just started staying away from home.

That was when I discovered the joys of speed and cocaine. I did not want to sleep and I did not want to go home. I just wanted to run forever. I was gone all the time, and I did not really care where I was or who I was. All I wanted to do was find the next party so I could forget and feel alive. Pretty soon, I weighed one hundred pounds and my eyes had darker circles than most cult members. I was living in dirty jeans and squats between bouts of laughing at life and crying over death. I was losing friends daily. I was losing my mind slowly.

Then, when I was sixteen years old I woke up in a dumpster with no shirt and blood on my face. I was missing my shoes and I was twelve miles away from my house. I had no money, no
ride, and no clue how I had gotten there. I guess that is what a cocaine overdose gets you at a party where you do not know anyone and they do not know or want you—dumped, abandoned, and bloody. The sun was blaring in my face, sending me signals that I had done something idiotic the night before. I was pale and weak. I suddenly knew how Béla Lugosi felt. So I lay in the garbage for a long time just getting my collective shit sorted before I even thought about going home. I was wrapped up in shame like a narcissistic Christmas present, praying to whomever was listening not to open me the night before. Shortly after that was when I made the decision to move back to Des Moines. For a young, fucked-up little addict, there is no better wake up call. When you try to describe addiction, I guess there is no better word than gluttony.

Now I know popular usage dictates that gluttony is mainly connected to eating and consumption. But for me, gluttony hovers somewhere between overindulgence and OCD on all levels. From hoarders to “seat smellers,” the range on the gluttonous topography is a lot more widespread than I had thought when I started working on this chapter. But when you think about it, I guess it makes sense. Buffets are for gluttons. Lotteries are designed for gluttons. Stamp collectors are ubiquitous gluttons. That silly little creature in your brain that craves making every whim come true and every want become sated is gluttony. Whether it is food or drugs or material items or just comfort, you can find yourself being a glutton even if you think you are the most even-keeled person on the planet. I think we are all gluttons on the inside, but on the outside you would not catch any of us being so quote-unquote “petty.”

If you were to look up the definition of “gluttony” in the dictionary, you would be surprised by how simple the answer is:
excessive eating or drinking. But if you felt like opting instead for “glutton,” an interesting little subtext comes to light. The definition for “glutton” reads: 1. one who eats or drinks in excess; 2. a person with a voracious capacity for something; and 3. wolverine, in Europe. So a glutton is trying to fill a void with something, anything. Metaphorically speaking, a glutton is most likely trying to keep a beast at bay by feeding it whatever will leave it feeling satisfied. But that is the rub: A glutton is never really satisfied. No wheat or wine will fill the gargantuan pit of emptiness in the gluttonous confines of the human soul. It is in all of us. It is as universal as blinking. It is not a sin, but it is serious enough that you must handle it with caution.

Honestly, I have never been a fan of cold, totalitarian definitions anyway. I prefer thesauruses: different choices synonymous with the source word. I am definitely a little more prone to finding the 360 about anything. If you do not come at something from several angles, you will never see the overview, the 3D delicacy of everything. Whereas man—or humankind, if you want to be PC—has searched for the truth for aeons, I am more interested in finding the path first. If you do not know where you are going, how the fuck will you know where you are when you finally get there?

So gluttony for me is a lot of different things. It is compulsion and capitalism. It is sadism and masochism. It is abuse with a revolving door. It is peanut butter and chocolate on a Friday and a binge-drinking whirlwind the Saturday after that. If you are voracious and tenacious enough, you can overload your system with so much stimuli that you will crash and burn just to feel the sensation. A glutton is a pig and a pigeon. Look in the mirror, friends, a glutton looks a lot like you and me. We are a million strong and a billion counting. We are the generation that
can never get enough. Why not? We are also the ones dealing with guilt trips to the past, present, and future. No one trusts the next shift, so they take their coffee and mug home after work. No one trusts a neighbor who is doing better than they are.

In all fairness, the American wet dream comes with a commercial saturated in gluttony, urging us on toward the limitless warehouses of excess. From all-you-can-eat buffets to 99-cent stores, we have made a promise to every burgeoning pack rat and strung-out sucker that anything worth having is worth having ad infinitum and with very little cost. The only problem is that you get a bill you cannot afford much later, with an interest rate that will kick you while you flounder. You can wait for fate to make its presence felt, but by that time the hunger has moved on, seeking refuge in something else. Gluttony looks like a sunburn and feels like the bends. If greed is more, then gluttony is extra. That may not make sense, but it is true and poetic: We glut until our stomachs and minds are distended. The feast is for the body and soul. If our eyes are bigger than our stomachs, then how fucking big does that make our stomachs?

I have got to be honest: There is no other sin, whether a part of this deadly list or otherwise, that is more American than gluttony. Look around you. People from the United States are some of the fattest in the universe. The world wonders why California is falling into the sea. It is because it cannot take the weight. Americans have a serious weight problem, more than any other country on Earth, which is very ironic seeing as no other nationality worries about its appearance more than Americans. We are gluttons for food, but we are devoted followers of infomercials and handy home gym equipment. You see, the thing I have realized is that sins make people stupid, not deadly. Stupid
Americans are fat, lazy, indignant bastards, but god forbid you call them fat and lazy. Americans are also, by and large, the most obsessed with amassing wealth and power. We make promises across oceans and airwaves that anything is attainable if you want it. It really explains a lot about this country.

Here is something I just realized. There are so many quirky names for gluttons, which just shows you how entrenched gluttony has become in our culture. From attention hog to ball hog, it is almost an unconscious way of accepting the fact that we are all gluttonous, wretched fuckers. We make light of things to help us forget how heavy they actually are. The thing that puts the sting in this behavior is the selfishness: You have got to be very into yourself to want to stuff yourself full of bullshit or surround yourself with a multitude of things you do not need. Once again, it is a question of getting yourself to believe the Big Lie, which is that everything you do is noble and selfless. This could not be further from the truth. We are all dirty little coffers waiting to be rammed full of our hearts' desires. So if we are all going to glut on the fruits of labor, why stigmatize the feeling? I say we all embrace the beast and move on. But nobody listens to me—my lips do not move when I think. I cannot be trusted.