It’s meat market time and all the pretty boys and girls are out to trade. Come and get it. Special offers. Free Flesh. On the counter. On the slab. Stale breath and stale sweat perfume the streets. Urine and diluted wine coloured kebab vomit add their aromas to the sordid atmosphere too. Yellow sodium lights broken glasses shattered bottles strained voices and forced laughter. You’ve got to laugh. The pretty girls squat down between parked cars and the boys lean against the walls, heads supported on their forearms, mouths open, splattering the paving stones, cigarette ends, their shoes and trouser bottoms with it all. Getting down and dirty. The noise, the darkness, the alcohol and drugs, the lights the beats, the great anesthetics. Clock stopped. The ugly become bearable, the beautiful beaten down. Neither the stupid nor the intelligent can be told apart. Clock stopped. No, wait. One minute fifteen seconds of tongues fingers and fumbled sex nicotine flavour in a toilet that hasn’t seen disinfectant in months, condom machine behind the door, various fruit flavours. Smoke.*1 Graffiti scratched in nicotine brown spittle stains. Graffiti like sex done fast and desperate cheap and nasty. Come and get it. Free flesh. Oh, oh yes, the drama of it all. No, time doesn’t pass, there’s nothing to worry about. No future. No growing up. No risk. No battles won or lost. Nothing learnt, just the deafening drone of gossip in shouted noise. Imagination assassinated. Come and get it. Oh yes. Outside, the blonde girl is on all fours in the pools of piss, soaked fag ends spilt drink spittle shattered shards of glass and sawdust, sawdust in her head, hair dragging in it all, but there are real beauties, pearls, dashes of pure colour in a dull monochrome landscape, but you can’t really make them out most of the time in all the rush to be a part of it all, part of this oh, oh so majestic drama. The Ringmaster is there taking notes, big smile all across his face, and the Priest. The girls cry because they’ve lost the plot and life is just all too much and it’s oh, so dramatic and they just can't bear it any longer, can no longer coordinate legs and head and stay vertical, and there’s no sparkle in their eyes, no clean flashes of lightning and no one can wait for next weekend's dramas (Mean Time Between Failures, seven days) so they can stop time once more and be empty again and it’s still only Saturday night and the blonde girl gets dragged home, her arms held over the shoulders of a couple of complaining girlfriends, their trouser bottoms drinking poisonous mush from the street, and the handsome boys are nowhere to be seen, gone like a curl of smoke goes, but their stink lingers on.
Mr Cerebrum, the Ringmaster, is bouncing around the bars taking notes. He does this with a certain malicious glee, politically incorrect cynical humour, a lot of vice and advice and a genuine heartfelt roar of a laugh.
I’ve been shadowing him for a while and I have developed an affinity, a kinship with him. Our eyes met once, outside the ubiquitous groups, so now I can read his mind and see what he sees. A fellow traveller. A man fit to share conversation with us Johnsons.*2
He looks around at the devastation and I read what he thinks and there’s a sparkle in his eyes, a clean flash of lightning,
“They don’t understand that they don't understand because they have no imagination left. I can imagine the possibilities.”
Now, that felt like it was aimed directly at me, and I read on in his thoughts and follow his eyes as he looks across the bar at a blonde, her lights most definitely out,
“If it’s that empty baby, and you don’t fill it, it’ll get filled for you!”
Report compiled by Peter Johnson, 12.53, May 17, 2007, submitted shortly thereafter.
*1 SMOKE
*2 “The Johnson Family” was a turn-of-the-century expression to designate good bums and thieves. It was elaborated into a code of conduct. A Johnson honors his obligations. His word is good and he is a good man to do business with. A Johnson minds his own business. He is not a snoopy self-righteous, trouble-making person. A Johnson will give help when help is needed. He will not stand by while someone is drowning or trapped under a burning car.
William S. Burroughs, foreword to “The Place of Dead Roads”, 1983.
