Continued.

The ambulance left without him. He was sober enough to tell them he couldn’t afford it.

A beat cop found him and wrapped up his hand and brought him here. Now I’m up to speed.

“I was just trying to—”

“I know.”

His jacket has blood on it.

“I can’t afford this. If I bail you out I don’t eat this week.”

He looks at me like I’m his father saying “No.”

“They’ll at least feed you here for a few days.”

I win contests. That’s how I feed us. You know those contests that are always on TV? Or in the paper or something? The ones that want you to tell them your “most embarrassing moment”? I win those. I make up some story about a kid shitting himself onstage during his big monologue and not being able to walk off stage because if he does the crowd will see what he did splashed across the inside of his thighs. I tell these television stations and newspapers that that kid was me, and they give me money for it. They give it to me for having suffered. For being laughed at. I don’t know why they give it to me. It never did happen to me, but if it did I wouldn’t want to be rewarded for it.

But that’s not all I do. I write to Brides’ magazines and tell them about the sickeningly romantic ways I’ve proposed to people. I photoshop “I Love You” onto pictures of clouds above mountains in places no one will visit in real life and send them in with these stories I write. These magazines pay you a lot when you win their contests. They think that they’re helping to finance a wedding. If you get five grand from them you caught them on a slow day.

I write to the food bank about my halfway house that never has enough food to feed the guys that come through it. I tell them about how a lot of them end up stealing again just because they can’t be provided for there at all. They send gourmet food. They send a year’s worth of Kraft Dinner. They send carrots and peas and other things I don’t like, too.

You do, however, have to keep in mind that all this stuff doesn’t always work. There are real causes competing with mine that often beat me out. If I don’t keep up with writing these kinds of places, and I start to not pull in any winnings, we get months like this one.

Teddy and I get hungry, too. Just like my guys in the halfway house.

And now I have to pay for his bail.

I’m thinking about how I can’t write anywhere fast enough to get him out. Most of the time the contests run for months. I can submit one of my pieces and not see anything back from it until six or seven months after the fact. That’s why I have to keep up with them.

And nobody has contacted me lately. No one’s called to tell me that my hilarious, heartwarming or tragic tale has especially caught their editor’s eye. No one thinks my bullshit smells like roses right now. It was easier before Teddy came to live with me. Now I have to write for two. I have to tell bigger stories. Bigger tear-jerkers. Get better laughs. I have to pull heartstrings for two now. And fuck is it hard.

First off, I have to find these contests. I subscribe to pretty much every paper in the country that will send it to me. I go online to the ones that won’t.

I have to write to every one of these places. One out of maybe twenty will ever respond. Maybe I suck at being pathetic. I don’t really think so, but hey.

Right now I’m thinking about Teddy and his meals that get slid under the bars.

Well, that’s probably not true, since he’s just being held for bail. They probably open up the cell and give him whatever pizza they didn’t eat from Domino’s. He’s fine.

But I don’t like the idea of him there.