Technicolor Pulp Read online

  PUIP 22

  A group of people walk into the bar, point at Doobe and come towards us, even though he’s completely oblivious to their entrance. Three of them—two guys and a girl.

  “Helms, I almost bloody missed you while I was gone!” says a beanpole with freckles and a firebush coiff.

  “Donald,” Helms slurps. “This is my buddy, Jimi, from the States.”

  “You’re the bloody Yank who wakes me up at all hours of the morning ringing up Helms. I thought you’d be older the way you talk so bloody slow… Sound like you’re on your bloody deathbed when you call!”

  “It’s he-red-i-tary.”

  “Well, if that’s the bloody case, then I hope your parents don’t call while you’re here ‘cause I’m SURE they’ll call in the middle of the night and I’m sure they’ll talk even SLOWER! I got bloody bags under my eyes from you!”

  Everything is a crisis when Donald speaks—Woody Allen, but less anal and more snob. He forgets me and goes back to his counterparts, hands looping madly, eyebrows aquiver, voice jumping.

  “… So I’m up in the bloody tree and I’m hanging by one bloody arm and Mum is under me, picking up the fallen apples. ‘Mum, I’m bloody about to drop! I can’t hold on any longer!’ and she’s saying, ‘Just a minute, Deary. Let me gather up these last few.’ I couldn’t bloody believe it! I’m about to fall from God knows how many feet and Mum’s treating me like a bloody wanker!”

  Every once in awhile, he breaks from his story, “I’m so BLOODY DRUNK, MY GOD!” and goes on ranting. I get right into the flow of the story, drawn to the urgency, unaware of the details.

  With Donald come Linda and Louis. Linda, also a redhead, has a luscious, bursting pair of raisin-tipped breasts. A little on the heavy side, but no matter, her person nullified any shortcomings whatsoever. She sat next to me with a warmth that called my leather onto the back of my chair. If I didn’t need a showpiece arm trophy to feel like a man, I would’ve asked her to marry me on the spot. My LOVE is mercurial and my LUST paves the way. Linda looks at me and smiles with such honesty that I’m struck speechless, not knowing which of my personas to assume.

  “How ya doin’?” I stutter, in my best city-speak.

  “Fine, Jimi,” climbing over my oral shield. “You’re a cute boy, aren’t you.”

  That does it! BOY… CUTE BOY! Like a homing pigeon on my Oedipal G-spot! The romance begins to bloom in my head. Dinner at Her favorite London spot, hand-kissing walks along Henry Moore sculpture-dotted brick walkways. Inside my head roams a TRUE ROMANTIC. I just coat it with a fallen rock-god shell to fool myself.

  Louis stands up at the bar waiting for an ale, occasionally darting Liberace eyes over at my fidgety groin. One glance at his blood-colored riding suit, complete with leather crop and shaved head, and I feel like a 12-year-old runaway looking for Huck Finn in Times Square on a Saturday night, his dark chocolate skin only adding to the confusion of my deepest naughty slave fantasies.

  “Well, enough about me and Mum… Whatta ya say we go on outside and smoke this spliff?” Donald whistles, producing a bloated spliff.

  “I wish we had bloody X… That’s what I’d like for work tonight… Wouldn’t you, Helms?” my redhead vixen says.

  “I’d love X… I need something to pick me up,” he answers.

  “Helms, you didn’t tell me you had to work tonight,” I say.

  “I hadn’t thought about it in a coupla hours.”

  “Enough bloody talk about it, let’s go and smoke this bloody spliff I got before Linda and Doobe have to go in to work.”

  We walk out into the alley behind the bar. Louis follows, sipping a tall ale. “I’m going to get all wet in this rain!” He shrieks. The sweet smoke umbrellas us from the rain as much as we need it to. It’s still light out, but the day is in its final desperate encore. The city glows around its edge—a sad window into the past, a childhood I never let myself have, a first love I can’t remember, parents I ran from, a sister who didn’t like me because I was spoiled, a perspective I won in a lottery. I give it all back. I throw it away with every hit of hash that dances in my head. I get no family and all the fleeting support I need in return. When the spliff is gone, Doobe and Linda run off to wait tables and I return inside with Donald and Louis to have another beer. It’s decided that we’ll go and cop X while Linda and Doobe toss grub to theatergoers at Joe Allen—dramaland eatery that it is. I’ve never heard of the place, but then again, you don’t catch me sashaying down Broadway very often either.

  “I’ll get you a pint, Honey!” giggles Louis when I cry a fake poor. I’m tempted to ask “of what,” but refrain, seeing potential in the relationship. Donald and I grab a new table while Louis grabs the pints and Donald resumes telling me about his stay with Mum. The crowd has begun to thin out in the pub.

  “We’ll drink these down quick and go over to Robyn’s house. She’s got good bloody X and if you catch her in a decent mood, she’ll bloody give it to you!” Donald confides. Louis returns with fresh pints from the bar and I turn the head back on autopilot.

  PUIP 23

  The rain’s gone home for the evening, leaving behind a chill. We walk through the streets. I feel at ease in these anonymous streets watching and listening to Louis and Donald. The lamplight’s warm. Faces hurry past, flickering out of the shadows only for an instant.

  “Hurry up now, Honey! He walks just like he talks… Slow, heeheehee,” Louis says to Donald, up in front of me. They turn the corner, I speed up, following their chatty heads as we cut through Leicester Square.

  “Robyn’s flat’s just on the other side of the square,” Donald says, with a long arm pointing at a small building. There’s a fortune-teller’s half-mooned shop on the ground level and a man holding a baby while talking on the phone in the window up above the flower boxes, in between white wooden shutters.

  “Christian… Oh Christian, my love…” Louis yells up at the window. “… He’s almost as cute as you, Jimi.”

  “He IS a real looker isn’t he,” I squirm, half sarcastically, half jealous. The door next to the shop buzzes open. We wind up a tight staircase and into the flat.

  The flat’s painted gold with a dull black ceiling and there’s industrial music playing loud. Christian holds the baby in his arms while he argues on the phone and circles the entire flat. We sit down in the living room and Donald pulls out another spliff. The beat of the music cuts through the room—a mix of power tools, synthesizers and chemical anger. Mannequins, painted all different colors, hang from the ceiling—black ones, blue ones, ones with glitter. The walls are filled with paintings and sketches all of the same model.

  “Oh that’s Robyn… She’s a real Madonna fan, heeheehee!” Louis says, noticing that I’m drawn in by the similarity of all the pictures. Robyn has a sexuality about her. I don’t know if it’s the artwork or the premise but the point gets across. I sit back, take a hit of the passed spliff while she watches me from all over the room… Purring… Secrets from another lifetime. She’s OF some other century… I guess would be the best way to imprison her in the written word. More a damsel than a woman. It would be alright to tell her what I really thought and felt. She would know it anyways. The old man once told me that french women were as old as their country, not as their cunts, and I can see the story of England etched into Robyn’s oil-base eyes. Not brash and new, like American bitches, all attitude and no wisdom. But pools of sin, deep and warm, her eyes tell me. The kind of sin that stands above judgment, quietly commanding respect.

  “This Robyn chick already HAS everything Madonna’s got.”

  “… And more, heeheehee!” Louis and Donald both sing.

  Christian and the baby now stand in front of us.

  “Robyn’s due back any minute.” He walks back out of the room into the hallway. The baby looks at us over Christian’s shoulder with silent eyes. Christian’s striking, with hard angles and olive skin like some Apache or something. One of those weird postmodern model types. The baby
looks like it could be his. Donald gets up and walks into the kitchen, returning with 3 pints of ale. We all take swigs and sit drowning in the pulse and bang of the technogrunge muzak. The flat spooks me… Drug vibe… I can taste the bad energy in the beer. This place’s got a black soul. I’m uneasy and restless even though I’m drawn to all the Robyns.

  “Robyn broke that bed buggering Christian with a bloody strap-on,” Donald says, pointing to a broken-down bed in the corner of the room.

  “Didn’t you, Christian?” Louis chirps.

  “What?” He looks up from the phone, irritated, the child ducking behind his shoulder.

  “I said didn’t YOU and Robyn break THAT bed with nasty toys?” Louis repeats, pulling a huge black strap-on dildo out of a table drawer. “Have this tagged and marked as a divine weapon, heeheehee!” he titters.

  “Put that bloody thing away, would you, Louis! I got a sore backside just looking at it!” Donald says. Christian is out of sight by now, off in the kitchen. I sit with this twisted Laverne and Shirley and wait for the X-Damsel. The music marches on with the clang of hammers, the shrieks of tortured keyboard, and every once in awhile, a vocal comes on and says something like, “… You are not alone… I cry… We fuck!” I love industrial music. It captures something in me that I can’t quite grasp alone in a bathtub… It really does. Sitting in this apartment listening to the theme song of the death row chain gang moving through a toxic jungle after an acid rain, banging and building a road to hip-hop nowhere, running alongside a pair of tittery London Paul Lynne sound-alikes.

  Sounds from the street fill up the front window. Every once in awhile, a cry earns the right to be part of the tribal mega-symphony—loud enough and angry enough to filter into the picture. Searing horns, nursed by double-decker engines straining, muted cries, footsteps fast and hard, keep time true down in the square. Dinner’s calling for everyone, including my trio. We’re holding out for the chemical option. I take another drag off the spliff. I’m still not used to the tobacco mixed with the hashish. It makes me uneasy. I’m rushed. The couch is too soft and I’m sinking into it, drowning in the lint of a thousand drug deals. I look around for a wooden chair to save me. I jump up and begin to circle the room, pretending to study the acrylic veneer of the mannequins, checking the frayed nooses that secure them into the ceiling.

  No one in the room is speaking. Music rules any conversational attempts there might be. I pace silently, tied down and tortured in my cerebral sofa. A single chirp runs the industrial gauntlet and I look up at a tree that runs alongside the window, a lone blackbird jumping about on its skeletal limbs. I walk over to the glass as other birds begin to congregate on the limbs of the tree. They’re chirping, looking into the flat. They look at me and babble on. Are they compelled to swarm this fucking distorted den? Do they yearn to stroke this evil? I look at Donald and Louis, staring off—blank pages. Christian moves in and out of the room like a two-legged cock priming a cesspool… Needing a taste of the bitter… To be part of the ceremony of lifeless mannequins and golden walls and the music… I’m in a trance. The birds shriek and scream. I look at the baby slung over Christian’s shoulder, helpless, looking at me, silent. I’m afraid to look back up at him. The night is black by now and the streets are dying down except for an occasional scream. Only the birds. It’s all the fucking blackbirds.

  “CHEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE…CHEEEEEEEEEEE

  EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE…CHEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!”

  Wrenching me, every muscle coiling on my neck with each scream! Gathering still. No one in the room looking at the window but me. The birds know, they know about the drugs and the sodomy. They smell it and they love it. They smell us. We smell it and we love it. I smell it and I love it and I hate myself for it. Deep down, I can’t take it. I hate the rooms where I live! Unfocused and drawn into the void. Music shouts under the birds, careening off every wall, off every chair, invading me and raping every ritual mannequin. Laying them down on their sides and fucking them. The sky above the tree, deep red, crying yellow and orange tears. The birds drawing ropes around the muted face of the sky and landing back on the withering tree. I take it all personally, so stupid to think it’s my world and they’re making me feel wrong. Not letting me breathe… Or smile… Or laugh anymore! The birds begin to grow in front of my eyes. Each bird swelling, feathers shedding for scales, teeth surge under cracking beaks. Shrieks turn to howls and finally, growls. Lindsey… My anger turning outward and rising up in flying beasts. Coming down to me, crashing in through the window. Time stops, Donald and Louis frozen, Christian and the lost babe gone from my sight. Ray’s corpse drawn up into the sky by vultures of guilt, swooping and diving. Virus… Rotten apples falling down, being grabbed up by lovely children… I’m a victim… I’m a villain… No relief in either… Ringing… Raging… Burning… Hissing… The birds and my nightmares marry… On an altar of my hate… Ill-fated gifts awarded on lechery… Fucking birds… And death… Virus… And AIDS. Words ring off Lindsey’s lips in memory as she wonders. Where are the pirates and princesses of my silly baby dreams? All the places and all the wondering? Am I growing up or am I dying? Were the birds a message singular, taken the form of many? A rush creeps over my body, pulling at my cock and grinding my face into a mass of blood and shredded flesh… Seeping… They want me… I’ve done the walking and then want to fly me the rest of the way… Hissing and… Dying….

  Christian comes back into the room, irritated.

  “Look… I don’t think she’s coming back… And I gotta leave. So can you guys just take off?”

  I don’t even so much as look at Louis or Donald.

  “Yeah, good to meet you. I gotta go anyways,” and stumble out the door. “See you guys later; thanks for the pints.”

  I run through the square, lost for about twenty minutes until I find a tube station and jump on a train back to Southfields where the Helms’ flat is. Sweating and chilled on the train, feeling good as long as I’m moving. Still hearing the birds, hoping they’re only a memory. Not wanting to face anything those fucking birds brought out in me. Just riding the train. Just riding a train through London….

  PUIP 24

  I’m sitting in the flat, drinking a cup of Drano-strength tea, looking at Sonja and Loren while they play more cards. I stare at their beautiful faces, faces from other ends of the world. Faces of women. Deep in my most primal recesses I need them, and yet, I act as if I could care less. It’s my only and weak defense. As if I need a defense, as if they wait for me to like them. Needing the sex, the violence of the act, remembering mostly the beauty. Orgasms abrupt, a shower of lava, soothing, draining rage and frustration. Looking for her to cleanse me. I need to come. It isn’t about wanting. I’ve never had a fucking choice in my life. It’s got nothing to do with me. It’s him. It’s fucking him that isn’t satisfied! Lindsey doesn’t understand. It’s not always about candles and fucking Bolero. Scream comes from the hollow, echoing out, lost and crying. I need them.

  I listen to the girls talking. Voices delicate, laughter. The way they smoke makes vice an art. Soft between the lips, dangling, then out between thin strong sexy fingers. Fingers that control. I can watch a woman smoke for an hour. I’ve done it sitting in Washington Square Park with a dollar in my pocket. My last dollar. Listening to the comics and the musicians, deciding who gets the last buck. Who’s the greatest artist on New York’s streets that day. Watching the girls smoke with gloves on, with hats on. Little berets… Watching… Staring through sunglasses… Watching secretly… Watching Loren with her pearly smile.

  “So what are you going to do after you take your little holiday?”

  “That’s a good question, Loren, maybe you could give me an equally good answer as well.”

  “I’m serious… I mean I don’t… I’m not prying, I mean to say. I was just wondering.”

  “I know… Um… I don’t know really. After school, I bounced around the States working shitty jobs and basically, I decided that I was tired of working shitty j
obs in the States, so I came here.”

  “That’s what we’ve been doing here for three years. I wish I could give you my job,” Sonja adds.

  “Yeah, I met Sonja three years ago and we were only going to be here for a summer,” laughs, “I’m finally leaving, in a month,” laughs, “a five-month safari through Africa. It’s taken forever to get out of this place.”

  “I don’t think I’ve been in a place or a job that I didn’t eventually hate… And for all the same reasons I hated the job just before it. Routine’s just a long spelling for RUT.”

  “Only four telly stations in this town makes it even tougher.”

  “Cable TV just prolongs the suffering… You’re not missing anything over here.”

  “I can’t wait to be in a bloody Land Rover surrounded by huge bloody gorillas!” Loren’s always smiling even when she’s complaining. Doobe told me that a buddy of his from Greece, Teo, had been hanging out with Loren and that she was still mad about him. Apparently, Teo was one of those guys who could hit a broad in the head with a rock and be fucking her ten minutes later. Loren has one of those double smiles. It’s the eyes, like a mirrored looking glass.

  So we all agree we’ve worked too many shitty jobs. Or are we just alive? Is this what had Ray so worked up? He saw his life as an indefinite stint ringing Big Macs up at the local Mickey D’s and said, wait a minute? Maybe he wasn’t afraid of gods and churches? Maybe he thought of them as banks with lots of benches? And guilt-ridden child molesters with bad tailors?