ON THE WAY DOWN
Chapter 2David "Gordo" Gordon rolled over and opened his eyes, then squeezed them shut again. Damn that bright light. He got up and stumbled over to the window of the tiny bedroom, yanked the shade down, then flopped back down on his bed. After a few minutes of stretching and yawning, he finally got up and walked the ten steps it took to get to the kitchen.
"What the hell possessed you to want to be a director?" he muttered to himself, staring into the near-empty refrigerator. "You should have known you'd never make it."
He sat down in the dilapidated recliner he'd bought from a garage sale six years ago and stabbed his fork into the carton of lo mein noodles. There was no use in trying to turn on the television; the cable had been cut off the week before and he wondered briefly how long it would be before they turned off his electricity, then evicted him.
Directing was a profession in which money came with the success of your work. In the five years since he'd finished college, Gordo had directed a handful of low-budget films, all of which had less than mediocre success, and the last one had been six months earlier. The small amount of money he'd earned from it was all but gone, and he doubted his bank account held enough to pay the rent that month.
The phone rang a little while later, much to Gordo's surprise. "Miracle they haven't cut it off yet," he mumbled, getting up and retrieving the handset from it's cradle on the kitchen counter. "Hello?"
"May I please speak to Mr. David Gordon?" came a pinched, nasal voice. Gordo winced.
"You're talking to him. Can I help you?""My name is Lois and I'm calling on behalf of Covington Financial Corporation about your Platinum Visa card. Our records show you have an outstanding balance of ten thousand, nine hundred thirty six dollars and eighty-two cents. Your last payment was received on October 28th, 2003."
Gordo glanced at the calendar hanging nearby. June 9th, 2004. Shit. "Shit," he repeated out loud. "I forgot all about it," he lied, "I'll have you a check in the mail tomorrow." He hung up the phone quickly and sighed.
It wasn't that he hadn't tried to find other work. The only college education he had was a degree in directing, and that was absolutely useless in Jacksonville, Florida. Moving somewhere else wasn't an option, however, so he'd been forced to look for oddball jobs.
There was minimal success, though. He wasn't qualified for most of the jobs he found in the classified ads in the newspaper. Everywhere he looked, there were no openings for someone like him. He couldn't even find a grocery store that needed a bag boy.
Gordo was almost to the point where he'd have to sell a lot of his belongings to be able to pay the rent if something didn't come up soon. The phone rang again, but he ignored it. No one called him aside from bill collectors anymore. No one cared. He grabbed the morning paper off the doorstep and flipped to the classifieds as he'd done every day for the past three months.
He let out a sigh, uncapped a pen, and began to scan in hopes of finding something new. "Oh, who the hell am I kidding?" A grey and white cat, his only companion, jumped up on the arm of the chair and settled down. Gordo ran a hand over the cat's rough fur and scratched behind his mutilated ear.
The cat had shown up on his doorstep a few months before, looking five seconds away from death. He'd obviously been attacked by some other animal, with patches of fur missing and a chunk taken out of his ear. There was blood on his matted fur, dried in some places and fresh in others.
Gordo had immediately taken him in and done his best to clean the cat up. Once the blood had been washed from it's fur, he gave it a bowl of water and a few bites of the chicken he'd made himself for dinner. It wasn't much, but the cat appeared grateful, and since then had refused to even poke his head outside of the apartment. Gordo began to worry when the cat nestled himself down on the arm of the chair. He couldn't afford to buy himself food, much less feed the cat, too. Something had to be done, before he was in even deeper shit.
