To be blessed
Three bar scenes, 2am lounge scenarios, backstage kitchen sink sets. Imported stench from the ghettos in perfumed candle or aerosol formats. A few blacks, spics, bubbles and micks around the place, strategically situated on bar-stools and banquettes, just to brighten up the setting and muddy the narrative, for the paradox that’s in it.
“You know that stumbling feeling?” Ted asks. “Like you’re falling over your own shadow in the dark or tripping on a small piece of conversation somebody left on the carpet in a corner of the room? That’s what being me is all about. The sex only helps with the physical stuff, and the alcohol is a waste of time if no-one recognises that the pain is there. You can mend a bird’s broken wing but it sure as hell isn’t going to fly the same again. A bird can’t fly with a limp and retain its grace, and the spirit of the people won’t be raised by a dictator speechifying with a lisp… even if he did come by it honourably, sir.”
And he’s right, the atmosphere just won’t sustain such things, isn’t dense enough. They feed you that garbage all around the world, everywhere you go and it doesn’t get any sweeter no matter where you hear it. So you create this hell, this whirlpool of claws and fangs inhabited and ruled by the Three Disgraces, WHODO, HOODOO AND VOODOO. And they do and we do and you do.
The old thing in its kitchen with its worn and torn dress and the slippers with the soles flapping as it shuffles and shambles all about. She’s always there, like the agent’s pullover or the wallpaper; there all the time, like the stale smell of the hall carpet, like his moods, piss-offs and depressions, and he doesn’t know why.
But it’s all way back when in the long gone and misty now. We live at night, denizens of the dark. Now we must take notice of the day and it doesn’t come easy. Maybe we just can’t adapt or perhaps it’s just that we won’t. Whatever. It seems the past will remain there, right there where it belongs, even though every bone, nerve and thought tells us that it’s been following us all right along, that it’s here right now in the present and will be all the way through to whatever future is waiting.
The dwarf hoists himself onto a stool at the bar and lights a cigarette, waiting for the pills to kick in. On a tall stool in a dark bar he is un-dwarfed. The muscles of his arms and shoulders are developed to a degree that creates the illusion that his head is of normal size. The shortness of his arms might betray the truth but he has his suits cut so that the sleeves are shorter than they would be were his arms of standard length. The protrusion of his shirt cuffs, fastened with gold and ebony links, further enhances an illusion of elongation.
He watches their shapes in the shadows. What he can’t see with his eyes he sketches in with his thoughts. Soon his whole being becomes Zimmerman’s tongue swimming luxuriously in the mucus of Crazy Carol’s mouth and a comet-trail of sequins of bar-room light explodes in his groin like a soft bomb.
Who can help but marvel at the simplicity of the workings of the mechanisms of hope? At the anticipation of comfort, of money, of buying a ticket to the pleasures and the peace of the big black? At the ecstasy of movement and the emancipation change promises, to develop, to become aware of displacement, to exercise, to feel that magic flow produce gestures that start from within?
Oh to be within touching distance of an understanding of the politics of transfer, to be blessed.
Filed under: Crime Fiction, Gangster stories, original fiction | Leave a Comment
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