Two old men. A young kid. Columns of time. They ain’t got two good eyes between them but the old guy on the left, the one with the one laughing eye, gets hurt every time the young guy gets into an unexpectedly deep conversation with the old guy in the middle.
And the young guy gets hurt if the old guy in the middle seems to be paying more attention to the old guy on the left.
This set of circumstances has led to an uneasy alliance.
The barroom of the Helsapoppin’ was their trading post and they sold a pile of bullshit to each other. And to anyone else who would listen. These were the good times. Each one of them looking out for the other.
The old guy on the left didn’t trust anybody. He had trusted the old guy in the middle for a long time. But he’d never worshiped him. He’d respected their friendship but that didn’t involve trust. He never asked for anything other than what he was due.
The old guy on the left knew that he had one of the only two eyes in the room and the little, young, guy on his far right was causing that vision to be distracted. And all this one-eyed junkie had left was his vision.
The cruellest thing you can do is distract a man from his vision – although, of course, leaving him to it can be just as bad.
And here are the three men who will play out at least part of this story.
The old man on the left with his seeing eye that is always laughing … or crying. A waterfall of love. A pain that is disguised by a flicker, a cocked eyebrow.
What is that eye saying?
His face is one of those flickering roadside signs. You look one second and the girl is smiling. The next second she is frowning. One message then another.
Then there is his blind eye. Now thereby hangs another tale.
The Helzapoppin’ is the most hate-filled barroom in the world and all the malcontents, hipsters, thieves and thugs, megalomaniacs and liars, cheats, perverts, dog-fighting, ban-dog owning, shit-kicking fuckers gather there to get violently loud and uncoordinated on anything they know will damage their brains …
… Over there against the fruit pastille slot machine is the ape. Ugly man, no class. Shoulders on him like a motorway bridge. Lice speeding up and down them. He’s got no hair but for some tufts that look like horns.
Ugly guy. Thinks he’s tough. Scared shitless when the old guy on the left had threatened him one time with a gumball. But he acts tough whenever he gets into the old guy’s line of vision: Starts shouting and laughing loud. Big mouth and stupid broken-nosed face. Flapping ears and a dribble of spittle on his chin …
… A little skull of a guy balances on the bar. He grins and raises his glass. He’s got big brown teeth and spindly glasses. Hair gone slick across the white bone of his forehead. He chews a cigarette like it’s matchstick. Dangerous as shit. A faded dandy. He’s worn that suit too often. A stain at the crotch like a layer of salt. Scratches at his leg until his strides rise and reveal the suspenders on his calves. Takes an olive from the saucer on the bar, sucks the pepper from it and replaces the skin.
A little dead squirrel of a man. Leigh wouldn’t have pissed on him if he’d been on fire.
The young guy took out a piece of dope like a knuckle and ate it.
“Oh!” Leigh let out an involuntary cry and poked his elbow into Geoff. “He jus’ ate fifty pound’s worth!”
“Naw,” Geoff replied. “‘Bout a tenner’s worth.”
“Fucking hell,” Leigh sighed.
This truly was a baronial hall of helz-a-poppin’. Bowels were hanging from the beams, feeding the birds. Dead colleagues.
Over at another table Naughty Nigel is fidgety. Keeps looking over at Leigh – bad, slitty, tired eyes. Got a down on Leigh and Leigh don’t know why. Dangerous man.
Dangerous man to know. You can’t ignore him. Watch him all the time. Nothing more dangerous than a dangerously intelligent fool.
(Nothing new to report. Been out again today. Took a walk down to the red rec. Saw nobody in particular – and if I had, I couldn’t have thought of anything in particular to say – just a lonely old lady now. Smiled at the other old lady hanging her washing out by the Druids Door. Noticed the old love wasn’t there by the window of her roadside shack. Maybe she’s died. Hair! Dyed my hair. Grew it long. Makes me look younger don’tcha think. Got me up in swively hips and stockings. But my hips are too fat. I’ll go down to the shops next in a tiara. Tiara bum-de-A. Tee-ara bum-de-A. Ha ha ha.
Hmm. I’m not even an eccentric old lady. Tsk! So I went down to the Helzapoppin’ … to see all those lovely boys!)
And there were lovely boys standing around. All too many of them. All of them had half-hards on as they rubbed up against the bar.
Now these guys used to bother Geoff and the young guy. But Leigh, he didn’t mind them. They were kind of rudely exotic. Embarrassingly so, actually, to a man who had to remain ultimately masculine.
Lemming’s Pie
INGREDIENTS:
Take one broken man (it is best if he has been dropped, like a figurine on to linoleum, and he is shattered).
Take the pieces and place them before a beautiful woman. She must then smear all the jaggedy edges with the thick saline solution she dips her fingers into beneath her skirts.
Then he will be whole again.
Cook for however long in a chamber pot. Until the vile bubbles.
When it is candescant with ignominy – cast it aside and let it bake on the window ledge in the sun.
And when it is finally done – intuition will tell you the moment – you must cast it aside without a second glance.
Your meal must become as pigswill.
Like a dog’s vomit on a rocky beach.
****
In a corner of this baronial hall was a place called Montellimare. Theirs was a table full of dreams. A corner that everybody gravitated to, even though they didn’t know it.
That corner of the room was a square, a handkerchief of snow. Tall, leaning and unpredictably unsteady buildings, ladders of lights and curtains surrounded it. These were almost all whorehouses.
In that white square dwelt a Chiquita of a boy. He had the handsomeness of David and he had honed it with abuse. He was a god whose eyes moved all the time seeking approval. His skin was olive … like a Pole. His hair was slicked back … like a Spaniard. His mouth was a ring of fire.
Even his shoulders moved from the hip. He was maybe thirty years old but he could have been fifteen. He was sex at the flick of a switchblade. He had the kind of body anybody would have killed to nuzzle.
And he jus’ kep’ flickin’ those eyes across at the old guy on the left who lived in another world – and they both kep’ sneakin’ a peak into each other’s world. And neither of them knew why. They just knew there was an attraction.
Montellemare La Hombre, a sign said over the door. And all the streets went teeming by outside. Fast traffic in five lanes, swishing lights and honking horns. Rain coming down. Half a tramp on a skateboard whizzing along by the propulsion of his knuckles. He got rain in his eyes as it blowed off the peak of his cap. He is heading for the underground where he can beg in the dry.
The old guy is going in there. La Hombre.
But as that Art Deco door clicks shut behind him, you must remember that this old man, who is now flicking up a cigarette and ordering a glass of beer, is only aware of one thing – he’s lost everything that he ever pretended to own. And that is a profound thing for a man to have to face … that the nothing he ended up with came out of the nothing he owned when he thought he had everything.
So he goes in to La Hombre, step by step.
The boy has a mouth like a salty cavern. It is deep and tastes of garlic, tobacco, beer and cheese. The metal in his teeth glints like diamonds. There are beads of sweat on his top lip. A string of saliva joins their parting kiss like a rope. The old man licked it away with his tongue and swallowed.
He was a simple soul. Two and two made four to him – and nothing else.
And a kiss is just a kiss when there’s no-one there.
His hand slipped into the shadows beneath the gnarled wood of the table and rested like a butterfly on the boy’s egg. It squirmed like a turkey underneath his feather-light touch. It stretched its neck out towards him. The old man recognised that movement immediately from years of having his hand down the front of his own pants.
The Devil makes work for idle hands – no matter how you try to keep your pecker up. It’s the way of the world. The old man’s perversion was eroticism, make no bones about it. He loved to touch.
He felt his own bones go hard. What a beautiful feeling. A hardening from the arteries. Turned to stone by a feeling. The whole geography of your body is changed in a moment. All the mountains of your body are turned to granite. All those fallow fields grow instantly. Sprouting adornments, jewellery, a tinkling voice.
His car was outside and he would’ve liked to have taken the boy to the back seat but he knew that his oil pressure was low and he might have wanted to drive him somewhere.
His car was actually the most important thing he possessed. And if the truth was really known he didn’t want any young boy’s naked arse sliding across his hide.
He had to legislate against all these things because it was all unreal and on the day he came back to reality he would not be allowed to have any tell-tale stains anywhere.
The young man sucked an olive and pointed his lips at the old man.
But the touch had been enough.
Leigh went back into the baronial hall. He put on a brave face but inside he was falling apart with fear.
Too many people knew too many things about his secrets.
When he was drunk he’d always had the knack of admitting things he didn’t want to admit. But he wasn’t special in that particular proclivity. All drunks, drug addicts and perverts had this particular problem – a potent mixture of insecurity and exhibitionism. The only benefit to being this way was that it kept your stomach knotted and flat. So tight with anxiety that you couldn’t eat.
Still, that was okay for the times you had to appear naked before your fellow man.
Head-on-`is-mmmm. Hmmm. Dirty boys.
This was one of his secrets:
In a back room of La Hombre, up a dark passage, he was lying naked on a cold slab like a white fish, his thighs were parted and his thin sinewy calves were over the sharp edge of the stone and his feet were flat on the bare floorboards. His preposterous proboscis stood out above his belly like a frozen eel. It felt as if it was a yard long and sweated as it cried for attention.
Now he feels so naked that the hairs round his nipples are as lively as the tentacles of a jellyfish.
An arm covered with black fuzz reaches up from the darkness between his thighs. It becomes a ribbon of smoke and it buffets along his body until the gentle hand rests, finally, on his breast. It squeezes. His feet do a little involuntary tap dance and he moans suicidely. It is his ideal bedtime story.
A man between his legs. A Gee-man. The hand caresses him. The hand has the touch and he feels so lean with a little, renewed, muscle definition. He is worth touching. On the wall of the room, through his liquid slits of eyes, he half focuses on a doily that belonged on the table of a barroom at the festival of the Day of the Dead.
Sadly, that had some meaning for him too. It was an unfulfilled pleasure. A knowledge. Somewhere he’d meant to go one day, the Day of the Dead. The one and only day when there is no tomorrow. The day of total abandonment. The day of the Blessed Abuser who is handing out rewards like penitences.
Here, at the hands of the Blessed Abuser, we have no satisfaction. An orgasm that the heart finally gave out at the vinegar stroke. Pursed lips forever. Self-satisfied inconclusion. A Devine failure. What a way to go!
Dissatisfied.
He likes this hand. It’s the hand of an unknown friend.
And then there is the kiss in his most secret place.
And how can you kiss a man there when he has no secrets?
His feet dance and he writhes on the cold, smooth, slab. Ready to be skewered and sacrificed on his erotic altar.
There is a fishy smell coming up from the floor and he knows that the guy has a hard on. He realises that the guy between his legs, like him, hasn’t bathed for a while.
That’s when he saw the guy’s red hair in the dim light. It outshone his own pubic hair.
What was about to happen next would be so beautiful.
Oh God, he is hallucinating. His temperature has gone through the roof. He is sweating salt. His bed is a swimming pool. He sees tall people, small fat people. He is burning up. These men are jolly and stylish. Wicked thoughts and so sexy. He needs a doctor, he knows. But, somehow penicillin would kill it all off.
Gosh, his thighs are raised as if he is about to give birth and he feels a tongue licking him into readiness.
Yes.
Yes.
Yes.
Yes. He’s ready.
He is engulfed in a ritual for the lost and the lonely. Spunk is the ambrosia of heroes. `Show some spunk lad!’ he used to hear the real men cry when they wanted him to carry out some act of bravery on the school football field. `Show some spunk lad!’
Outside this room it is the days before Christmas and everybody is consuming everything to excess. Snow is falling in a grey-white shower. A girl with thin legs wrapped in spangled leggings plays a fast flute. She has a ring through her nose and ten in her ear. Her face and her hands are grimy. She raises a thigh and twirls on one leg as she plays. Her fingers flicker up and down the length of the shaft altering the shape of the air she is expelling.
The redhead rises slowly holding the old man’s legs in place on his shoulders. The boy smells musky, like a skunk. He leans forward to kiss the old man’s chest, deliberately folding him into a position of complete servility.
He was a beautiful youth, tall and Y-shaped with a kicking cock. While he carried out these acts he kept his eyes shut, making it all the more mysterious for the old man to behold.
The youth had a tattoo on his right hand and his torso was sweating. He hadn’t a natural blemish. He was perfect perversion.
The woman who had become an old lady and no longer trusted her swivelly hips slipped through the door into the bar. She’d come looking for her son. (She knew she could find him in the backroom, if she looked. Something made her didn’t look. It wasn’t that she minded what he was doing, it was more that he looked like an old man now and she didn’t want to be associated with him on social occasions. He made her look old. No swivelly hips and a queer old man for a son. Oh Veh, she wished she knew how to swear properly in Yiddish, it sounded so much better than these English curses)
Geoff let onto her and sent the young guy to the bar to supply her with drinks. She liked Geoff. Kep’ n eye out for her queer son.
She hitched herself up onto a stool and coughed phlegm, masking her mouth with a drip-mat: “Ooohoooh, it’s such a vile nighttt… thank Go-efff for me won’t you.”
She slipped the powder from a sleeping pill into her glass of beer and whizzed it around with a flick of her bony wrist.
That was her second sleeping pill powder and her third beer. She felt her mind get mixed up. So, she got serious.
“You see, with my son,” she told the fat man at the bar: “W’en ‘is mind gets mixed up, he just thinks it’s funny … but when my min’ gets mixed up, I thin’ it’s a very serious business.”
The fat guy moved away like a slug.
She laughed vacantly at this vast room of people whom she pretended to see as no threat.
“Len? Len?” She sounded distracted and waved her arm out behind but felt nothing.
The little old lady accepted another beer and realised that the last one had gone down too quickly.
Some thoughts should never be spoken. That’s what Len used to say. Funny man, she often thought what it was she first saw in him, because she never saw anything in him again. He’d looked like the strong silent type on a cold dark night, fists on him like hams, buttoned his big black coat up right though, black unruly hair and vacant eyes.
