Authors: Arty Nelson
The violation of my person puts a bounce in my stride. A
Reader’s Digest
version of
Midnight Express,
I think, and so like me to be overestimated. I shoot through the gates and eye up a row of tellys along the wall.
I don’t know what happened to Karen. I imagine she made it through customs and is already off in the corner of some library,
unearthing ancient trivia.The thought that I may never see someone again, even a total stranger, depresses me. I didn’t really
want to thank her, it’s just that I’m afraid I only get to meet so
many people in my life and I always wonder if I’ll know when I reach the halfway mark. When I’m not contemplating suicide,
I’m praying I’ll never die. I need a lot of time to come up with a good idea, or at least, a rap that everyone thinks is cool.
I need to see the world and I need to find home. I need to sleep with a million women and I need to find THE ONE, all while
deciding whether or not I even like women. I wanna be a starving artiste and I wanna be a rich pig-man. I wanna be real and
I wanna just sell out for the irony of it all. I wanna be the priest who marries Woody Allen and Axl Rose. I wanna be Madonna’s
flower girl when she finally marries… Herself.
Crafty me, with my Beatle boots and my Kool-Aid smile, realizes while standing in front of the telephones, that I don’t even
know what kind of cash the british use—something about “quid.” My deliberate naivete is beginning to be a pain in the ass,
already. Mister Open-Road can’t even make a phone call. The Crisis of Everyday Life. The thud of concrete anxiety circling
over me with its vulture wings, when an oasis appears before me in the shape of a currency exchange booth. I look up at the
charts and know that money, in my life, is a dying, howling
beast. My first of six twenties is snatched up in return for eleven pounds. I tell the nice lady that I need to make a phone
call. She takes back a single pound and gives me smaller coins. I thank her and she says, “Cheers.”
Each phone booth is a tiny hut, painted red with yellow trim. They invite me inside. A long ways from the grafitti-stained
piss-reeking cubes back home. This world is not real to me. The sounds, the smells, all different. My pulse quickens, things
to figure out. I call Doobe’s number, after three rings a female voice says, “Hello?” and I ask for Doobe.
“He’s on his way to get you,” it says, without offering a name. I thank the voice and hang up. I find a warm corner and strike
a pose—try to look pensive. I hate to wait.
Time passes, not much, and I see yellow bell-bottoms, a pillbox hat, a suede fringe vest, and big black bubble-top shoes—Helms.
I’m happy to see the guy, walking feet out like a proud duck with arms swinging high above his head. Not loving Helms is like
hating cartoons.
“Jimi!!!”
We jump on a train, Helms and I, sit down and start swilling on a pint of cheap scotch. My friends are my heroes, fuck Peter
the Great.
“I don’t know what I like more… This scotch, or those yellow bell-bottoms, Helms… They both remind me so much of how low I’ve
sunk.”
“It gets a lot worse, Jimi… You might remember this scotch like it’s CHAMPAGNE some day.”
The scotch is bad. I taste broken dreams in every sip. I can only hope it gets better as the night goes on—the saving grace
of all shitty booze. The train does a strung-out hula down the track, forcing caution on every futile gulp. Everything happening
to me is grounds to stop drinking, I think, as a missed shot rolls down my chin. I look at Helms with his silent-movie smile,
feel good about my childhood and think logic is as useless as denial.
“Jimi, we ride this train for ten more minutes or so and then we gotta hurry to catch Last Call over by my place.”
“Whattaya mean, Doober, ‘Last Call’… It’s early?”
“Last Call’s at eleven o’clock.”
The number “11” strikes me deaf with a dumb look on my face. I’m devastated. My european fantasy trip spills out of the gutter
and into a suburban hell before my shocked eyes. What has life come to? What was I thinking and why didn’t I ask such a vital
question? More importantly… Why didn’t Doobe warn me? My liver begins to sweat.
“Doober… What am I gonna do here? All I WANT to do is sit around brassy woody pubs and mooch drinks off newfound friends.”
“I thought you knew… And anyways, what does’t matter now?” he says with a slap to my insecure and manly cheek. “You might
have to actually DO something here other than sit around and get fucked up,” he chuckles.
“Helms, I LIKE to kill large chunks of time with a cool elixir in my hand. I have fun when I do that. If I wanted to go sight-seeing,
I would’ve stayed home and looked at fucking books! I didn’t come over here to get Zen-like, 11 o’clock, no wonder this fuckin’
EMPIRE fell!”
So now I get to the part about being in London for the first time. London, to me, was always just a big collage of bad plays
I saw on public TV growing
up—Channel 13, I think. A lot of capes and top hats, and people being witty in ballrooms. MANNERS. Dickens and poor people.
Little awnings on the houses. 200-year-old-looking signs on all the buildings. All that corny old nostalgic shit. Old men
with rotting teeth and their women with the heavy bottoms.
We jump off the train, cut through the station and hit the neighborhood drag—a small strip of shops, taverns and steps, a
lot of steps. It’s quaint, visions of
Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood.
Rows and rows of town houses with funny little cars parked outside of them—turn-of-the-century cutting-edge go-carts with
windshield wipers. Street lamps, all glowy every which way, perfect landmarks for my blurry eyes. Every house has odd-shaped
windows, all made to NO order.
“Jimi, there’s a pub here for every different brand of ale. The breweries own the pubs.”
“I fuckin’ love it! Um gonna roam these streets like a human camera—my heart in one hand and my cock in the other. Nothin’
but…”
“I’m not sure how the locals will feel about that camera stuff, but they’ll appreciate your enthusiasm I’m sure. Let’s just
take a second here, Jimi, and relax before we go in the door.”
We’re outside a pub at the top of Doobe’s street, which is now my street. Right in the center of town, there’s a bus stop
and benches and a little monument of a guy on a horse looking brave. I peek in the window. Even the pets hang together
in the pub. Homey, all wood and brass, just like I thought. There’s even a fireplace. A great place to spend a life, or a
day, or maybe just the better part of my twenties.
“Perfect, Helms. I couldn’t be happier. The whole fuckin’ trip was worth it for this moment! Something in this world is just
how I thought it would be!”
“Jimi… I’ll do the ordering when we get inside,” he says, with what really sublime and sophisticated writers would call HUSHED
TONES.
“Helms, you don’t understand, you Tom Cruise motherfucker with Dudley Moore hair and teeth! I love pubs! I’m not a club guy!”
“Easy boy, I know you do. Let’s just save the THAT’S JUST WHO I AM speech scene for a little later on.”
Maybe Helms is right, maybe the scotch’s hit me harder than I realize, maybe a nice beer would be in order. I follow Doobe
into the bar. We sit down, the pub’s noisy and I get the feeling that it’s almost over. The 11 o’clock thing is already fucking
with my life.
“Doobe, maybe Spain is the answer… Maybe we gotta go to Spain and chase bulls with big glasses of rum in our hands?”
“Let’s just celebrate your safe arrival, Jimi, cheers,” and we ching mugs. I sit back and let the room-temp suds swish around
in my stale mouth.
Families, laughing and drinking together, and I’m so far away from any kind of home. I hear all the children laughing, and
it makes me think that I was
once a child, that I am still a child… I need to get out of this rut… I need to get out of me… All the families, from Grandpa
to the tiniest babes, and I don’t want to do anything but sit or run, sit on a barstool or run away. I’m in a rut and I can’t
see it any other way… I only see the end… I’m blind to the beginning… I’m tired out when I need to be fresh… It all just started
and I’m already looking back on it.
“It’s good to see you, Jimi.” I peer at Helms through the cool amber of his glass. He looks so pretty. The bartender is shooing
us out the door, telling us to finish up. I see Helms and I see the children. I’m snapping pictures, sitting safe behind some
lonely filter, prisoner in my own TV. What would Jim Carroll do? I am not anything… I’m a bloated potpourri of other men’s
actions… I don’t do anything unless I think someone cool did it before me… I’m a follower trapped in a unique mouth… I’ve
never done any of this. I look around. They want me to leave. I should leave. I see Helms, all safe, drowning in amber. A
looking glass… I hide behind a looking glass… I’m a being, crucified on an antenna. Fuck You Jesus! I thought you did this
for me! I thought you did this already! My blood is your blood. I thought my blood was your blood. Looking through the cool
amber, all the voices once removed, talking to me, shooing me out the door. Telling me to leave, I’m hearing that I’m welcome.
We order a pizza from across the street and roll home. The “flat” is really a two-story town house with no furniture. Naked
lightbulbs dangle down, coloring each room. I meet Sonja and Loren. Donald, the last of the roomies, is off at “Mum’s” in
the country. They’re playing cards, and we sit down. There’s hash on a small tray—good black hash, and Helms lights a pipe.
I’m on the floor. I take a drag, and the pizza arrives with a bottle of white wine. I twist off the cap, take a swig and hope
for a sense of humor. Helms opens up the pie, which looks good except for one small but large detail. There’s an egg in the
middle of it. A beautiful big fat pizza, dripping with cheese and so much spinach, and there it is, smack dab in the middle—one
close-but-no-cigar chicken!
“What the fuck is THIS thing?”
“It’s an egg… Wha’does’t look like from where you’re sitting?”
“I mean… Yeah… It looks like a fucking egg, but what’s it doin’ in the middle of this pie?”
“Is this ANOTHER thing I should’ve warned you about, Jimi?… Well… I’ll tell ya now. You’re in London and they put eggs on
a lot of things.”
The girls are laughing, finding humor in my small-time dilemma. I look down at the egg, all yokey and drippy, polluting my
cheese. The cheap scotch gurgles in my stomach. More hash, it’ll take more hash before everything mixes up alright.
“You just toss that egg over my way when you run into it. I’ll eat it.”
“You’ll eat anything, ya fuckin’ vulture!”
“I don’t like to waste food, Jimi.”
“No, you’re a pig! That’s what it is! It’s got nothing to do with waste!”
I bicker helplessly for another minute, taunted by the girls’ laughter. I can’t take it when girls laugh at me. I got no choice
but to take a taste. Embryo on my nice pizza! Some things just shouldn’t BE in some places.
The girls are playing gin rummy, and we join for a couple of games. I don’t know how to play, so the game slows down. Doobe’s
trying to cheat and Sonja’s all over him. Off the face-up pile, over and over again he tries, and she never misses it. I don’t
either but I don’t care. Doobe always cheats. It’s part of his game and I can respect that.
“Bloody Helms! Put it back in the pile! You’re a damned cheat.”
“I got it from the pile,” he says, mouth agape, “you’re all watching, what could I’ve done?”
“You could’ve done just what you bloody did! Which is cheat!”
Sonja’s sharp, too sharp to be happy, and the hash doesn’t slow her down a bit. I’m beginning to
think I love her. Could she be the answer? Could her foreign loins be the launching pad of my tranquillity? Maybe I need an-other
woman? Her bored look, her strong calves, hips lost back in the fifties, all Marilyn-ish. She could be the answer. I start
to fantasize about a life with Sonja, my head wrapped in her cynical thighs. Every once in awhile my dream is interrupted
by the missus catching Helms in the act of cheating once again. He always argues his case before he replaces the misdrawn
card. And then, he’s always good for one more shady move. I float over to Loren. Dark-skinned with teeth of pearl—what a combo.
Sparkling pearls on a string running through cocoa skin and golden brown tresses. Hair pulled back to reveal a flawless face
wrapped in a constant smile. What a pair of women I now live with! Sonja, blasé, knowing and indifferent, taught by life not
to care, heart polluted by the sum total of her experience. Loren, laughing and smooth, nice enough to make me act like me.
Didn’t I just meet these girls? Is it the hash or am I seeing?
We play cards for about an hour, and then the girls go up to bed. Helms falls asleep watching the telly, which gives me a
chance to sneak up to his room and make for the bed. I deserve it after my stint on the pea-green vinyl couch. I lay awake
and think about my day. Being with Helms makes me think of Ray. I start to wonder what Ray thought about as he climbed to
the top of that bottomless mountain pass in the Rockies to string himself up
in a tree, waiting quietly to be found blue and lifeless and tragic the next day by people he called his friends in a note.
Maybe I didn’t even know Ray anymore by the time Ray ended. Maybe the guy I hung with was long gone. A lot can happen in a
year or two. A person changes, and then, I don’t know Ray anymore. I begin to think about the island, and then, of course,
it’s about Lindsey and I feel the adrenaline of self-hate burn through my veins. Feelings run through me, pouring out over
my chest like hot piss on cuts. Victimized by my past, by my part, swimming in black, and anger, and frustration… I don’t
want to feel at all… I want to forget… Forget the lesion that bubbles in the back of my brain… A little tumor swirling inward…
I go inward and I drown… Ray is dead and I’m left cursed. Should I be sorry? Was he sorry? Is it worth being sorry? I don’t
want to grow from any of this shit. I don’t want to have to feel all this shit! Let me fall asleep! If you love me, let me
fall asleep, Jesus, you motherfucker! Staring up at the ceiling, screaming in my head, needing something bigger than me, or
Ray, or life, or any of this shit. All of this shit!