Here comes the awful thing.
It was stuck, but now it’s free.
Trapped in the silk.
The paper colony, wasted
A city of would-be men
In a crumpled page
Flush the city of worms
The tadpole manly things
Searching the U-bend
No eggs in there my friends
Death to the millions
That could be anything
Except people. Or much else.
The drama of life doesn’t start at birth. Nor does it start with your first love. No, the drama of life starts in your parent’s bedroom. That one glorious squirt that resulted (on this occasion) in the 42 year-old man before me.
Unluv – that was his name – a miserable, hateful, fuckup with all the compassion and charisma of a dead horse at a dressage recital.
It was Valentine’s Day, 2016. Me; a single female human with breasts and hair; lips, ears, all the trimmings; you know the sort of thing, a woman with little care for her own appearance. I had given up. 35 and dating weird wash-ups like this guy.
He looked at me over his steaming lobster. Not a stare. No smile. Just a blank face with two eyes in the middle of it.
‘Enjoying your lobster?’ I said. He looked down at it and then back up at me. ‘Okie dokie then,’ I said.
The waiter came over and offered for me to taste the wine. I nodded and smiled. The waiter poured a splash into my glass and Unluv shot his arm across the table and took the glass from in front of me and the bottle from the waiter. He poured a proper glass. I glared at him, although really, I kind of liked his fed-up with life attitude.
‘Fuck off,’ he said to the waiter.
We drank. We ate.
His whole name was Jason Tolstoy Unluv. He wasn’t Russian (so he told me) he said his parents were lunatics who dedicated their lives to fucking with him in as many ways as possible.
His name fit though. I wondered if it’s a coincidence that he’s completely loveless, and unlovable, or if his name has dictated his outlook on life in some way. Nominative determinism in action.
I began to find his total absence of being, his total lack of any kind of reality, his inhumane quietness, weirdly endearing.
He picked up his lobster with one hand and turned it. He looked into its face. The lobster was dead, but this action seemed to give the lobster more life than Unluv had. He put it back down again and with the same hand picked up his knife and stabbed it. He let go of the knife and it stayed there, sticking out of its back like a flag. He watched it mournfully.
‘More wine?’ I said.
He didn’t answer.
You know, getting fellas is not something I’ve ever been particularly successful at. I could go to a night club right now and wave my tits in some lads face and he would run a mile. I could even try a more subtle approach, but it would make little difference. Men are repelled by me. Maybe, if I want to get laid, I should start slinging snatch. You know what I mean? Like a gunslinger who shoots from the groin. The funny thing is no one in their right mind would fuck me just because I came on to them in a bar but if you tell a guy you’re charging they will not only give you that impersonal bang you’ve been gagging for, but pay you for it afterwards. That’s why most street hookers resemble alcoholic vending-machines in drag while that pretty girl at the bar is single. The human condition, at least in men, is in no condition at all.
I think a shag with Unluv, although not particularly appealing, is probably on the cards. It’s like he knows that to get in to a girls panties you must first dine them. So that’s what this is. That explains why he isn’t doing anything. It’s mechanical. He waits for me to feed myself, we go for a walk, he stands awkwardly outside my house waiting for the code word that means fucking; ‘coffee?,’ and up we go for some unpleasant wooden rutting.
He pulled the knife out of the lobster and dropped it on the plate. It made that awful clanging sound that makes my teeth want to escape into my scull.
I watched him pick the lobster back up and break it in half. I drank my second glass of wine – my lobster was already gone, cake is coming – and looked at him more closely. He had large shoulders and the possibility of a firm chest under his jumper. His jumper was green. An unflattering colour for most. Most things would be unflattering on Unluv. A brief image flashed into my mind of grasping those big shoulders while he pounds into me. I cross my legs under the table. He looks up at me and I dry up.
His eyes are strong. His hair is thick and matted.
He used his desert spoon to dig out the insides of the lobster on to his plate and then ate it with his big hands.
I leaned the wine bottle towards me and looked into it. I knew it was empty but we all know what these gestures mean. Hunched over his plate clumsily eating his white meat he watched me check the bottle with a movement of his brow.
He licked the butter from his fingers and stopped a waiter who was walking by.
He spoke sternly and to the point. If he had ordered the waiter to kill for him he probably would have done it.
When the waiter returned he had two portions of chocolate cake and another bottle of wine. Chocolate and white wine together is essentially disgusting but we managed it.
When the cake was crumbs and the wine was gone Unluv stood. He dropped a few notes on the table and pulled his jacket off the back of the chair. I got the message.
Outside, the sky was black and clear. There were only three stars and the moon was absent. It was cold. Unluv walked half a pace ahead of me. I held my jacket tightly around me as I hurried along after him.
He turned into an off-licence. The bell rang his entrance. He bought 20 cigarettes and a bottle of vodka. Not Russian my arse.
He lit a cigarette and left it in his mouth. I had never seen anyone smoke a whole cigarette without taking it out of his mouth before. When he was done he either swallowed it or spat it out, I didn’t see it happen so I can’t be sure, but his hands remained in his pocket the whole walk back. I watched him as we walked, me lagging slightly behind. He had a broad back and a walk that told the world to back the fuck off.
We stopped outside my house and he looked at me under his heavy brow.
‘Coffee?’ I said.
He walked up the steps to my front door and tried the handle. I walked up and squeezed in front of him and unlocked the door.
In the kitchen I got two glasses out and he filled them with vodka. He lit another cigarette and picked up the glasses. He watched me. I would say expectantly but it wasn’t. He just watched me. Even so, I took his base body language to mean, ‘We’re drinking these in your bedroom.’
Valentine’s day; for the single woman you feel like a Jew at Christmas. It’s shit and depressing. If you were Jewish and people wished you a happy Christmas regardless of your fake sideburns I bet you’d wish you could stab them with you seven candled Menorah, and shout, ‘Happy Hanukkah you fucking moron!’
There should be a Valentine’s Day for single people. It should be called Sunday (this year at least).
We fucked. He squirted. Nine months later I gave birth to a lump of wood with a granite face. Happy Sunday you fucking morons!
Charlie Hillman set off one day
He had nothing but a song and his own good name
He had no money, no house and no car
Just a road and an old guitar
His feet was saw now and the road was long
Three more steps and the sun was gone
He stood alone on an empty road
Nowhere to sleep and the night was cold
But Charlie was determined and wise and sure
He camped in the doorway of a local store
He slept while his fingers strummed a riff
It was a song about strife and defeating the rich
The sun was up now and Charlie was gone
A man silhouette against the heat of the sun
A one way journey to deliver his song
For in his jacket was concealed a gun
And in an office not far away
A meeting of suits was underway
“The profits are up now by 6 percent,
And we only had to fire thirty men”
The men they laughed and smoked cigars
They had nice suits and brand new cars
But in worn out shoes, not far away
Was a man who had nothing but something to say
Charlie arrived at the big HQ
The building was tall and it ruined the view
The receptionist said, “Hey, who are you?”
And Charlie said, “Nobody, just some dude.”
“Could you help me out, miss, where’s the lift?
I got some urgent business.”
She said, “I’m sorry, sir, you’re not booked in.”
He said, “Well, listen, you better call their next of kin”
On the top floor executive lounge
Men in suits just hung around
They seemed to be finding something quite funny
They’re pockets were full with piles of money
And there stood Charlie Hillman
He said, “I’ve come to kill you, you starved my children.”
“But before I do,” he said kinda sly,
“I’ll play you a song, it should explain why.”
She tipped her hat against the wind and squinted through the rain
Her life was a novella of pulp in a moonlit motion picture of class
Her high heels kicked through puddles that reflected street lights
The book in her bag was damp from intruding weather
Her coat held closed, her umbrella shielded her lipstick from the thunder
The lightning flashed, silhouetting her shadow against the passing cars
A busker stood against a wall emptying water from his guitar
A bottle of wine stood safe on her kitchen counter
The coke in her bag gave a clue to her hurried trot through the streets
The dwindling spring in her mind was racing to indulge some more
Men in pubs behind her spread rumours about her allure
Her legs were food for their hormonal hunger
At last she arrived home and discarded her twisted umbrella in the garden
She fished for her keys with dripping hands and unlocked the front door
Inside she fell against the wall and stumbled into her lounge
She paid the babysitter and put on a record
She carved out her last lines on an old record sleeve. It was a Bob Dylan vinyl
She laid back on her couch and fumbled with her backie to roll a cigarette
With no money left she used a straw to snort the last particles of white
She kicked off her shoes and pulled off her dress
Sprawled naked in the bath she let the hot shower rinse off her soiled elegance
A wine glass toiled between her fingers. She hummed a half remembered tune
She had the sense of mind to towel before she crawled to bed
She slept for an hour before her daughter cried her awake.
You know when you lose your TV remote and it drives you crazy. You look everywhere. You search frantically, chucking the pillows off the couch and lifting it up to look underneath. You check under newspapers and lift up the rug. How can it have disappeared? It’s a TV remote! After looking everywhere you finally give up and sit down, defeated and dejected. After your internal tantrum has abated, after you’ve mentally blamed everyone and everything that could have caused it to vanish, including the cat, you finally calm down and look up at the TV. And there it is. Right in front of you, on the TV stand. Of course it is. It’s obvious now. The thing you were looking for was right there in front of you the whole time. For fuck sake.
I have that feeling. I have it all the time. The problem is, that moment of sitting back and finally finding it hasn’t come. I don’t even know what is missing.
It is that feeling that makes you want to travel. The urge to explore. You don’t know what it is you expect to find but you’ll be damned if you’re going to stop looking before you find it. But it’s not just that. And it’s not just travel. It’s everything. You don’t just want to explore new lands, you want to learn everything. You want to try everything. All the food. All the music. All the booze. All the knowledge. Time is being pulled from our veins with each passing minute. Aging us. Every day that passes, every second that tics, every Christmas that zooms past; we are being killed by the calendar, one day at a time. Fill those days before they are rudely taken from you.
You don’t have to pack up all your shit and spend the rest of your life travelling. That would be a form of hell for some. It is a feeling that surrounds everything. You wish you had learned how to play the piano when you were younger. You can buy a second-hand piano or keyboard for £20. Get one. Learn how to play it. You will love it. Want to write a book? It costs nothing. Just start typing. It doesn’t matter if you know what you want to write about. That will come. Just start slinging words together and see what happens.
People have no urgency. People don’t seem to want to do anything anymore. They are content dedicating their life to a career. Have a career, why not, I have one, get promoted, do good work, but be ready to put your foot down and leave work early to go to your kid’s school play. Let your job pay for the things you love. Don’t miss out on life so you can get more money. You want that money so you can have a better life so what is the point if you are giving up on life to get it?
I write because I’m going to look back tomorrow and release that yesterday was thirty years ago and I have left nothing solid to justify the wasted years. I write so I can trap time and keep it there.
Withered and wicked was the prince of the skunks
God damn his reputation in the pubs of the drunks
They knew him locally as the holder of the bar
His legend ran deeper than the depth of his scars
For which he had many
On the stage at the piano he pressed his keys
One by one, black and white, a fucked-up melody
Bewildered and confused, he was the minor freak
He used every musical quip to defend his sheep
For which he had none
Hat covering his eyes, stage light shielding nothing
Lyrics full of lies causing lips taught from bluffing
His life was far weirder than his fingers could say
But not one man could know what he loved or why
And neither could he
He sings to old whores, broken strings, and beaten lyrics
No shoes, the mad artist spoke in vitriolic polemics
People in the pub followed the movement of his jaws
But had no idea what a fucking vitriolic polemic was
Not one word
He coughed and laughed in the face of the gods
Beer in his veins and static in is heart
The breakdown of reason
Where are my shoes?
What is this mess?
Fuck.
Once upon a time, is an overused trope. There are many established and recognised ways to tell a story. This is not one of them. There are accepted literary rules that must not be broken. Speaking directly to the reader is one such rule. You are embarking on an experiment. It might become tedious. Maybe it won’t. But before we start, here is a quick writing tip; you should never begin or end a sentence with the word “but”. But there we are.
This story is a fairytale about a drug addict. And it begins (also, you should never begin a sentence with the word “and”) in a magical forest just outside of Boscombe.
Boscombe was a magical (another thing you should never do is repeat the same word twice in near proximity, i.e. “magical”) place in the south of England. It is a small province in Bournemouth. Boscombe is famous for stabbings, alcoholics, a booming drug trade (they were lucky enough to have the first crack factory discovered in England!) and a happy-go-lucky 30 year-old pisshead called Trev.
Trev was enjoying a peaceful slumber under a sick-looking oak tree just down the path from that tatty little mini-golf course in Boscombe gardens.
“Urgh,” he moaned, stirring from a terrible hangover. He began to cry. Crying in your sleep is a talent one acquires after much practice and hardship.
A squirrel watched him from a branch above. He had a look of trepidation in his eyes. He sniffed the air and twitched his nose. Quietly, and slowly, he scurried down the tree and landed softly on the ground. He crept up to Trev and looked him over carefully. (By the way, if you are reading this and are a writer in the making please do not do as I do. I am making no attempts to avoid adjectives. Avoiding adjectives is very important).
The squirrel sniffed Trev’s nose and took a tentative nibble. “Could this mysterious thing under the tree be a giant nut?” the squirrel thought. Probably.
Trev was startled awake. His eyes opened wide. In his mad half asleep state he perceived the squirrel as some kind of small fury monster. He screamed. The squirrel panicked. Trev reacted without thinking and slammed his fist heavily down on the beast. He punched the poor thing into the ground. It lay still, sunken into the dirt. Blood seeping from its ear. It twitched and then vomited. (Jesus Christ. This is a horrible fairy tale. If you haven’t stopped reading by now there is something really very wrong with you).
It is said that every time the fourth wall is broken, and the writer addresses the reader directly, the illusion is destroyed and any kind of drama or suspense built up is shattered. If you decide to address the reader directly, in your own writing, you should make sure it pays off and has at least some relevance to the story. If you are writing in the first person it can be used as a way to give a quirky insight into the narrator’s mind but it is rarely done well and normally just pisses people off. What I’m doing now is just self-indulgent and awkward for both of us.
Trev pulled himself to his feet and brushed bits of twigs and dirt from his clothes. (A quick note about adjectives. I could have just said, “Tev stood up. His clothes were dirty.” But “dirty” is an adjective, and as I said earlier, they must be avoided. It’s all about showing and not telling, so they say. Building a picture for the mind’s internal cinema to follow).
Fuck. I can’t remember what this story was going to be about. Princesses maybe? Drug addled princesses. I don’t know. That will do. Fairy tales should have villains shouldn’t they? Yes!! (Exclamation marks, let’s talk about that. They should be used sparingly, and never more than one, ever). Right, let’s get a villain on to the scene.
A shadow fell over Trev, our prince. Trev looked up at the figure standing over him, shielding his eyes from the bright sun that was eclipsing around the figure, causing him to appear as a featureless silhouette.
“What the fuck do you want?”
The figure leaned forward revealing his identity. “Ello, ello, ello,” he said, stereotypically.
“Good morning Constable.”
“You just murdered that squirrel.”
“I want to marry your daughter.”
“Well, well, well,” said the constable (who had a recognisable trait of often repeating words three times just because the author doesn’t have the adequate skills to create a more distinct character and wants to avoid saying the words “he said” by letting the verbal tick do the work for him), “Doesn’t that add an interesting depth to our relationship. You’re nicked.”
Trev was taken to the police station and the author decided to wrap things up because this whole thing, whatever it is, is pointless and stupid.
The constable’s daughter beat her teenage fists on her dad’s manly chest and begged him to let Trev, her lover, go. He agreed and the teenage couple had sex resulting in an unwanted pregnancy. They got marriage even though they barely knew each other because Trev wanted to prove her dad wrong, and is a bit of a dick. They lived happily on benefits ever after.
The End
Epilogue.
The squirrel that Trev punched survived but due to an unusually warm winter, making it easier than usual to find food, got fat and was killed by a cat because he couldn’t get away quick enough.
Tom Waits was a man with a voice like burnt gravel and the mannerisms of Heath Ledger’s Joker. He sounded like Louis Armstrong when he sang. You don’t expect that voice to come out of him when you first glimpse this thin, junky like, haggard man on the album cover of Small Change. That voice comes out like a parody of Armstrong. So strange to hear it from this thin white tramp, stinking of booze and cigarettes.
In interviews his wit was so quick you wondered if it was planned ahead of time. The man was just sharp. One interviewer said to him, after Tom pulled a bottle of wine from nowhere and started drinking, “It’s kinda strange to have a guy sitting here with a bottle in front of him.” And without pause Tom said, “I’d rather have a bottle in front of me than a frontal lobotomy.” This man was quick. That same wit, that odd poetic sense of humour, finds its way into his lyrics.
Small Change came out in 1976. You can put that record on and immediately find yourself transported to a world that maybe never even existed outside of fiction. A world of Beat Poets. Smokey bars. Dimly lit stages. You’re at a small table near the front of the stage. You can see your own distorted reflection in the side of the grand piano. Hunched over the keys, with smoke drifting up from his cigarette, is Tom Waits. His slow ragged voice singing, “The piano has been drinking…”
Normally artists easily find themselves categorised away in your mind with similar artists. But Tom Waits doesn’t fall in with Bob Dylan, or Leonard Cohen, as you might expect. He’s on the pile with Charles Bukowski, Jack Kerouac, and William S. Burroughs. All writers. And his influences are as deeply bound with comedians like Lenny Bruce and Lord Buckley as they are with the jazz that feeds his music. Tom Waits was a wit-inflicted Beat Poet with a piano.
Small Change was his fourth album. The opening track, Tom Traubert’s Blues, is a twisted version of Waltzing Matilda. Although Written in London while on tour there the song is about an earlier time. The songs subtitle, Three Sheets to the Wind in Copenhagen, sums up the nature of the narrative.
But track two, Step Right Up, is where the album kicks off. Tom takes old clichéd advertising slogans and stitches them together in this humorous musical rant. “Step right up. You got it buddy: the large print giveth, and the small print taketh away.”
Every track has something worth hearing, a great lyric or grim scene (like, “Crawling on her belly, and shaking like jelly, and I’m getting harder than Chinese algebra.” From the dirty but brilliant song, Pasties and a G-String), but the stand-out track is My Piano Has Been Drinking (not me). A nonsense song about a singer in a bar. A drunkard passing blame to his instrument and voicing distain at everything around him. The piano is played with disregard. It’s like an act. Tom Wait’s playing the drunk. While drunk. As for the words, there will be no lyrical spoilers here, it’s worth waiting for.
I won’t go into the rest of the album, some things are worth discovering for yourself.
This is a poem.
Don”t believe me?
Prove it.
That’s the whole poem. Clever isn’t it? (he said sardonically). I was just going to upload the picture and that’s it but it didn’t seem like enough, so now I’m writing more words. Do you see them? Wow, that was a metaphysical question. Can you see these words? You wouldn’t know a question was being posed if you couldn’t could you? The question answers itself simply by the act of being asked. But, well… Poems.
I even wrote the poem again right after the picture just in case you didn’t realise that was the whole blog post. But now there’s too many words and I’m not sure how to stop because I have nothing to actually say. I’ll tell you what, this poem stuff is pretty fun isn’t it? I haven’t shared any of them on facebook so none of my friends or family know I’ve written any (I think I would get lynched at the pub if anyone found out I was doing something so unmanly).
What I really need is friends that read. Or have some sort of interest in culture or art. I’m on my own out here. With my dirty rotten soul.
Anyway, while you’re down here, getting distracted by my bullshit;
This is a poem.
Don’t believe me?
Prove it.
It occurs to the Ignoble Poet that all things are shit
We are many; us word beating priests of piss.
Cracking verse on a smoke ridden page
Death to all flower poems, and words about birds
Deftly we abandon the traditional iambic
The pentameter of ten can crash and burn
Structure will not decry our view
Of a world in need of absolute horror
We are many, as we have said. Poets
Against structure. Sadness has needs
Get drunk dear reader, or give up now
We care not for your worthy goals
Life is the same for every man, eventually
We die. Nobody will remember rhyme or verse
It must be clear by now that the rules are gone
In the new form of bollocks and honesty.
We give a fuck enough to be sincere.
Andrew Chapman / Author and Screenwriter 