conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Give me the first three paragraphs for a book with the title 'Permanent Midnight'.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: Permanent Midnight
  I imagined, in my narco-dementia, that this three-foot furry TV star—no more than a puppet with attitude—could see right through the bathroom walls. Alf was out there, eyeballing all the blood I'd splattered on the mirror, on my fingers, into tiny, scarlet puddles at my feet. And he did not approve.
  People thought my story was funny, hysterical. And I was glad. Just because I'd kicked junk, after all, did not mean I'd kicked being a junkie. And junkies lie. It's their primary addiction. Not that I never skirted cerebral hemorrhage imagining a prime-time hairball pawing at the men's room knob while I geezed a speedball and tried to dab the bright red puddles off the floor with paper towels. That happened. But I wasn't laughing about it. I was staring in the mirror and squeezing back the worst tears in the world, tears that came out yellow because, by then, my liver was already telling me what my brain could not accept. I was dying. But not fast enough. I would have to live a little longer, to survive more horror. Which of course meant doing more heroin, the thing that made such horror endurable.
  See, it wasn't just the dope. It never is. It was the wrongness of the situation. I wasn't Chet Baker fixing behind the bandstand and blowing his heart out. I wasn't Johnny San Quentin, shooting in his jail tattoos and boosting stereos. I was Jerry Stahl, writing bad TV and hating it. Desperately trying to counter his shame at the loathsome squareness of what he did with the secret hipness of what he thought really was. Only he wasn't particularly hip. And he wasn't, it pains me now to realize, even close to being secret.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Give me four more paragraphs.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: That's what I'm thinking: Be calm. Until, like a blown boiler, I just explode. The words rip out of me like metal shards. "Fuck her! FUCK MY MOTHER...FUCK MY WIFE...FUCK ALL OF THEM...!"
  But I can't help it. I can't stay silent, can't protect anyone, anymore. Including myself. Most of all myself. I am a thirty-nine-year-old male human, and this is what I feel—even as I am ashamed for feeling it and ashamed for admitting that, too. Shame is, I know, what I was trained to feel, what I'm supposed to... That's why I am so good at it.
  But I am sick of sticking so close to my lessons. Sick of being the good little boy... I have done everything, from slashing my wrists to shooting heroin, to stay the good little boy. Because, I see now, on some cringing level, that's all being a junkie was.
  Forget being cool, forget being underground. It was a way of staying ashamed—of trying not to ever say the words that have, just now, come boiling out of me...
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Swap the first and the last sentence.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: . Until, like a blown boiler, I just explode. The words rip out of me like metal shards. "Fuck her! FUCK MY MOTHER...FUCK MY WIFE...FUCK ALL OF THEM...!"
  But I can't help it. I can't stay silent, can't protect anyone, anymore. Including myself. Most of all myself. I am a thirty-nine-year-old male human, and this is what I feel—even as I am ashamed for feeling it and ashamed for admitting that, too. Shame is, I know, what I was trained to feel, what I'm supposed to... That's why I am so good at it.
  But I am sick of sticking so close to my lessons. Sick of being the good little boy... I have done everything, from slashing my wrists to shooting heroin, to stay the good little boy. Because, I see now, on some cringing level, that's all being a junkie was.
  Forget being cool, forget being underground. It was a way of staying ashamed—of trying not to ever say the words that have, just now, come boiling out of me..That's what I'm thinking: Be calm.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Give me the last five paragraphs.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: In front of me, as if it had been there all along—which of course it had been—I spotted the coiled hose. I don't know how I could not have seen it. Perhaps I did not want to.
  I no longer worried about the neighbors. By now, I assumed, they had more to worry about than a mud-caked white man hosing off his own puke in the backyard next to them. It wouldn't thrill them, I am sure, but in the past few days, I reasoned, everyone has had to deal with fears they never before expected to have to deal with.
  So many Hells that were once potential were now fully realized. For me, in my peculiar lightness, this was incredibly reassuring. There was nothing else to fear. Because what I feared had already happened. I had made it happen. And here I was—relieved as only the dead can be.
  I suspected, for one strange moment, that I actually had died. And caught myself looking over my shoulder, back through the open door of the rank garage, into the shadows, just to see if my body was still in there. It would not have surprised me, either way.
  It didn't matter now. Nothing did. The scum had boiled to the surface and burned off, and what remained was all that had to remain.