One of Those Stories That Is Much Better When You Have Been Intoxicated By Some Substance. May We Re
One of Those Stories That Is Much Better When You Have Been Intoxicated By Some Substance. May We Recommend Wine, Psychedelics Or Love. They Would All Scream For Each One and For The Sins and Tragedies They Always Encountered Until We Found A Way To Make Them Sleep Everyday Of Every Week Of Every Year Of Every Life.
“In every first novel the hero is the author as Christ or Faust.”
Oscar Wilde
I lay in my flat, a rented studio on some side of the city that I never bothered to learn the compass-rose of, on a bed that is made up of a too-thin mattress with perfectly unmade sheets encasing just my feet, matted brown hair sitting like a halo under my head, the side affect from spending more time living than showering. Light seeped in through the partly-unshattered window forcing rent checks to shine and serotonin to sing. I moved to the window and peered out, the people leading meaningless lives caused me to think of the people at the park and more importantly her, who I have not had in what felt like a fraction of an eternity. What good is it to live each day if it’s as mournfully boring as the one that just passed?
With sauntered steps, I prepared for the day ahead of me as a vinyl of The Velvet Underground sauntered through melodic dissonance in the open air. As I put on jeans, a leather jacket and a scarf, Lou Reed put on a utopia that Andy Warhol’s drug-fueled-art movement would last centuries past. Neither knew what was really going on around them at the time; we were in a scene of a government that was edging to one-two punch it’s workers into a conservative submission with a dismay of unions with the left hand and then a quick right hook with the aid of oppressive police officers to leave revolution and dreams more bruised than my arm.
Satchel on the shoulder, I rushed out the door, not caring to lock it behind me and down the creaky wooden spiral steps and out the door again to be greeted by the urban bustling of people existing and breathing independent lives, all hooked together by the greater need to feed the Lady’s tin cap, all trying to feed dreams that could be ended in a few moments. A taxi driver sneezes, causing his body to convulse, pudgy hands on the wheel to turn it a sharp right as the two in unison dash recklessly, not caring to break for the woman wearing stilettos that was always debating if she should break free from the entire mess of concrete and live free. She runs out into the street just moments before, not realizing the taxi would take the path that it would and the two meet with the victor being the mechanical beast, leaving our poor maiden on the ground. It’s a mournfully depressing story. A quick pain in the stomach snapped me out of the delusion, a further motivator my travel to the park.
An occasional is overdose one of those few things that gives a person a new perspective; this day was a day when I was feeling the euphoria of each thing around me for what felt like the first time, a child just birthed from a labour of pain killers and pure Afghanistanian poppy. It was a depraved and decadent night with no real memories clinging to my brain, just a vague sense that it was wonderful. The park's perfectly tremendous trees hung in just what felt like arms length now and I could see a group of people on a patch of grass, laying like dogs in the shade. They were an eclectic group of people that ranged from the men who were in a band that was inspired by the political climate and to the women who looked like they were the saved gypsies from The Great War. We were all young and beautiful with no goals in life save the single goal, not ending up like the past. Cafes and bars were our homes, love and heroin were our drugs and the fear of ending up like the lost generation was our motivation to exist. We had everything and nothing all at once. They city was being rebuilt; the roads were a mixture of freshly paved from the bombs and centuries old from the tourists. The park was a safe haven, if we ever got lost, we knew we could find safety here, among nature, drugs and friends. We were the idealistic failures, narcissistic in every sense of the word but completely afraid of our own devices.
I stood just out side of the collective as an exchange of hellos, hugs and heroin were all given and I tuned into the conversation, led by Robert Romero, a lad I'd met during a night of absinthe at a cafe. He was Spanish if I remember correctly; he came here in the fog of the swinging days. He talked often, drank often and got in trouble often.
"It's good to see Peter here,” he said as he turned his skinny frame toward me and slapped me on the back, a gesture that nearly sent me to the ground. “As I was saying earlier, there is concert to-night for some new band over on the Northside and we will be at Beintôt before hand, so feel free to head there if you want to before hand.” His words were weak and uninformative to the groups ears, they looked around at each of the bohemian children around them as if expecting to see an answer in the space around them, the tension in the air was out of place so I fumbled to the ground and laid staring at the tree tops while trying to tune in to someone’s conversation.
“Your sister’s in the dark still?” a soft woman’s voice came from my left side, I was forced to turn my head to look at the woman in a red-as-rose gypsy silk dress with soft blue eyes that made my brown eyes jealous to display such a dull colour. Trinkets laced around each part of her, a brass clamp on her wrist with a green Chinese letter on it, golden rings on almost every single finger, diamond pendants htung from a head band that slept on her forehead and a blur of wires, string and rope hung from her neck, blurring the low neck line of the dress into something less reveling. She was speaking to another woman who was less glamourous in worn-in jeans and a black petticoat, the back of a head of brown hair blocking any real details of her.
“Yeah, she just doesn’t get it. The times kept changing and she never took a journey, she just sat cooped up in some fancy loft over the ocean with only money.” She spoke distraught of the situation. “I don’t see how someone can go that long without it, it doesn’t make sense.”
“We are not all so lucky to live in this age; she sits in another one, a dark one.” Her blue eyes looked over at me, “Need love? You look like you haven’t seen her for a while.” She crawled over to me and rolled up my sleeve of my jacket without me even answering. I let my eyes half shut, focused on her ring-holders as they moved the white scepter over to my bruises, as they dropped the bottom of the spike into my veins that were coloured black, as they pushed the top down, letting the liquid of life empty into me.
The feeling of euphoria is a quick one to occur; it feels as if all life that has ever been created in the past eons is rushing as quickly and beautifully as possible thorough your blood stream. Your heart skips a beat, your brain mellows out with a minute and you are encased in a feeling of pure seraphic devotion to you; nothing else matter, nothing else needs to matter. You are completely pulled in and you love her, she loves you and all is love. You feel what it is like to be the most beautiful person on earth, with her always by your side. You ponder of all of the men and women who have felt the same way in the decades and eons past. They were once alive and then they died. But you will never die, you are different. You two together are different. She is always there for you and you are always there for her when she calls. The relationship is the perfect love that bound-pages told you about when you were a child.
“Are you going to-night?” she said. “The streets seem less and less safe each day that goes, I wonder what is happening to this town.” The entire time words fell out of her red painted lips, I kept my eyes on her blue eyes.
“The police are rested, the people are restless and the crown is violent. Never a good combination.” I took a deep breath; each action was the culmination of forcing what felt like thousands of muscles to work when all they wanted to sleep. “What were you talking about earlier?”
“That? Oh, her sister had never tripped before. She is a fool on the hill that does not get what is going on anywhere except where money can be earned. L'amour de la bourgeoisie, non?” She paused. “Are we the fools or are they? Who is right in this whole thing? We are passionate about everything we do, we want to save people, show them the way and fix everything. But a man told me that we are just not adjusting to the times. Quelle horreur. Is it not he who is not moving with the times? People will work for the rich for so long; they can always break free from their chains, rise up with passion. At the point when they come to their senses, where will we stand then?"
"We won't stand then; we'll be long laying underground by then. Pessimism and realism go rather hand in hand, no? We'll always be east of Eden regardless of where we go. It's our fate. Gypsies du noir is what I heard one time all of these people called. They would journey and travel around but in the end of all things, their image and fate were always the same. Delusions of grandeur when they arrived and black nights when they remained there for too long."
She paused to meditate on the term or get lost in a foreign train of thought and I rubbed my arm, the dribbles of red from where the scepter found a vein began to give up their march while she still granted my brain a paradise of opium. "So, who are you exactly? What do you do? Vous êtes anglais?
"Peter, last names have gone the way of the buffalo I think, a tie down to a family and a way for someone to tie you down. I'm a professional failure. One would be amazed at the feats I have failed in. Ask me when tongues are looser and you'll get more stories than a soul can withstand hearing, let alone suffering. Oui, je suis anglais. La madame est française? Bien sûr!" We exchanged laughs. "The language I speak is purely controlled by the substance in me. Allow me a smooth tequila, Romero and I will speak of bullfights and Picasso, this that's in me now makes me wish about nomads and of deserts. But dear, allow me absinthe and I will speak in your tongue."
"Then shall we go Beintôt avec the others? They have continued in their Gypsies du noir ways as you said, the sun looks to be doing the same and I would like to discuss your profession." This of coursed caused me to look around and make me realize that time had apparently traveled much faster than I had realized, something that I was sure was not the effect of the wonderful drugs I put into my body. With that I rose and we walked back through the city blocks and buildings that must have been designed by mad men. Who else would let these beasts so close on top of one another? The ancient stone buildings broke out of their foundations and moved, stone walls were the side of their faces, the windows were their eyes and they bowed as we wanted to walk past them. We fed them; we gave the ears on the walls our memories and stories.
"200 Hay's Mews! I have told you the story of a lonely lad and his travel on a island that was forced to constantly celebrate?" It swung open its mouth, the door knob clattering a rhythm that formed words that told me that 200 Hay's Mews had yet to hear such a tale. "The natives were truly restless; they could not ever find a time to call their own. When the boy arrived, he could not understand the need for such sadness. 'Can't you see how wonderful this all is?' he cried to the people, 'You are always joyous from sunrise to sunset, sunset to sunrise again, a pattern of never ending!' 'My boy," they would say, 'We did not choose to live like this, a man who found us decided we must! We listened to him and we were forced.' The boy was sad and cried back again, 'Why is that? How did have that power over you?' 'Well,' the man dressed in an attire the boy would remember forever, 'he named us Easter Island.'"
The windows on Mr. 200 Hay's Mews clattered forever, or at least until we passed.
***
I heard a voice shouting at me. It echoed and hurt like the first needle shot a child gets, that searing new pain that feels like everything that has one experienced to that point, all placed in one it. "Mother of Jesus Peter, are you alright?" It was Romero, it was inside of the cafe and it was late.
"Did 200 Hay's Mew get her too?" I looked around for the woman from before. I saw her in the candle-lit illumination; she was there in the seat next to mine, Romero to my left and a glass of Absinthe in front of me. We were in a decadent cafe, the air was stale, the wood on the ceiling was painfully placed on top of some aged material "The walls had ears but the entrance had a tempter, no?"
"You were screaming of Easter para una hora, amigo!" Romero cried.
"No Spanish right now Romero, this is a French drink, we should speak the same as we drink."
The green liquid poured into our mouths and we celebrated in honour of the never occurring fin de siècle, the never occurring fin du monde and fin de everything-else-that-could-justify-another-drink. We took turns speaking to the green fairy that flew around us, no one wanted to give in to the temptation of trying to subdue her. We had seen her and we would see her again many times before we would meet our fin in whatever manner life had chosen for us. We all knew this and we celebrated it every chance that we could, knowing that each time we would meet in roof tops to watch the city lights dance, we would hear another story of a friend passing away from something that we all did. It was challenge to keep sane in these times and it would be an endeavour to keep alive. My thoughts were put on hold by the shouting of the people around me.
"Izabella here said you were a professional failure," shouted the comfortably dressed woman who spoke with the silk-dressed lady who was apparently named Izabella, "You absolutely must tell us the stories."
"If I absolutely must," I said in a somewhat mocking tone, copying her posh-New York accent to the greatest degree I could, "then I must. Be warned, the events all happened, except for the ones that didn't. My first job as a professional failure, also my most frequently revisited, was a writer. When I was young, that is to say, not the age I am now, I would venture across the nine seas, seven bodies and six continents. The people that I met were amazing but the ones I actually talked to were disappointing, almost as disappointing as the words I put on the paper. For some reason, people do not respond well to the truth written about them. And for some reason, the truth does not respond well when accusations are made by the people who are accused of it.
"So with more people out to kill me than even Wilde would lie about, I took up my next profession as a bull fighter. Let not the stories you hear deceive you, while a bull puts up a strong fight, a Spaniard puts up a stronger one when the bull gets loose in a bar. What value they put in bottles de vino y las señoritas! It was a riot to watch until a riot takes you out of town. From there, I failed at many things. To fail at a taxi driver is as easy as taking the taxi they give you in America, a cultural lesson in truth."
They reveled in the stories and I grew nervous as the night went on as I thought about what would happen if the life style we lived became impossible to live. Luck seemed to follow certain people around and the lack of luck seemed to haunt certain others. It was a mournful thing to watch. The government and the time was changing with each day, and I began to feel helpless. I felt as if I missed out on all of the other explosions that happened throughout my time by being too young or too drunk, the very two things that are varied by everyone around me. Izabella would rattle her charms and play with her long brown hair from time to time, not speaking much for whatever reason. Finally Romero broke the exchange of languishes, laughter and liquor by informing us that we should really be heading off to the show at Northland by now.
I stood up, ran my hands through my hair and began to feel the green fairy haunting me in a dramatic way. The drunkenness grabbed Izabella by one hand and a bottle of cheap apple wine in the other and we marched off to the other side of the city and exchanged drinks from the German bottle. At this point, my tongue was heavy and began to stumble over borders and idioms. "Je suis the marchand and tu is la belle, non?" I cried to Izabella as I took her by the hand and spun her around, beautiful gold jewels lifted up off her crème de la crème crème skin as it made a halo around her neck with a halo of brunette around her beautiful eyes. "La Belle et la Bête of the ballad of dystopia."
***
We arrived after what felt like a short walk but the sudden lack of warmth from the evenings air hinted to again, a lack of colour to the nights thermometers and the scene was not as we were expecting. The Victorian era hole-in-the-wall dive was haunted with a wall of people shouting and screaming. I moved in closer to try to figure out what was going on but wasquickly overwhelmed by the chaos that enthralled me. I turned to Romero and asked what was going on, using my intoxicated state as an excuse for not risking my neck.
"The police shut down the club. Something about drugs or the music being too loud." I didn't quite get what was so wrong with that. "And now the policemen are annoyed and calling for the riot vans." His eyes glistened with an idea. Or with liquor. They both seem to have the same display in the eyes of some. He turned towards the group and began waving his bottle of wine around in the air as he screamed. "Let's use this as a good chance to make memories. Dios Salve a la Reina!" He took one overdramatic drink from the bottle and then sent it through the air towards the police as we all scattered.
***
I gazed into her enthralling eyes as we threw Molotov cocktails at the impromptu-set-up police cars. As the refilled wine bottles sailed though the air in an awe-inspiring arc, our eyes caught again. It was the first moment all night where I felt like time had almost stopped and I was assaulted with a barrage of scents and colours. The flowery sweet smell of her perfume accented the petrol and the ash in a way that will forever cause me to associate fields of lilacs, lavender and lilies with sulphor, sin and pseudo-righteousness for the rest of my entropic existence. As she wrapped her cold hand around mine and pulled me, I stood still, mesmerized by the brilliant hues of orange and yellow on pillars of fire that erupted a holocaust of The Crown’s cars. Plumes of grey smoke danced intertwined with it’s lover and creator that torched all that it touched as little blue figures danced around it, licking its side with tools we thought man mastered ages ago. Equally entranced by the poetic picture in front of me and by the sapphired eyed girl who was pulling my hand, which surely still levied the aroma of la vin de pommes and petrol, a push and a shove and my banhus was tugged off to the entrance of an alleyway; a stone gutter and a Vauxhall blocked the riot from our faces. The scene around us continued down an amazing path. We watched it as it expanded from a skiffle with the men with the funny hats against the kids with the funny clothes to years of history erupting in flames.
A van flew around a corner in front of us, stopped on the seat and began to pour out middle-aged men from its middle aged chest carrying brand new truncheons by their chests. They belted out orders at one another like "get him", "arrest him" and "have you been drinking, son?" with rhythmatic beatings of their sticks against the bodies and heads of the stylish people around them. It followed a perfected pattern; the police man would grab a young man with his clean black leather glove by the man's new jacket that he got to impress the band and the scene and raise his stick up in the air, sending it down with force to the fellow’s body. This would, in turn, would send his body into a sharp convulsion, blood came of his mouth in slow motion as his back became crooked but was straightened out by the law in order to meet the next blow. I saw in awe watching this happen everywhere, not noticing the objects being thrown some family's poor car in front of me that quickly let it join the brigades of the other cars. The family now has something in common with the Queen, what joy they'll share over breakfast.
"I know just the spot Izabella," I cried as I ran ushering to her follow me. Fight or flight was overpowered by liquor and amazement as we made only a single stop on our way to our destination. It was to grab another group of Molotov cocktails and allow the city to be drunk. Each bottle was cold and the rag was wet but it wasn't much of a deterrent. We brushed the rags up against a police car that was set aflame. "Best wishes! May you join your friends, give them our best regards and that we are sad to see them so far away." With a blessing, a laugh and a toss we allowed the four we had to be fireworks in the riot. There was no watching to see where they landed as I turned to Izabella and kissed her, listening for the shatter and the screams that the earth would give us in exchange for our presents.
***
"Beau, non? I wonder if Romero and the rest are okay," Izabella said as we took turns plunging the needle into each other's arm as we sat on a roof top that was older than anyone that we knew. The city was brighter now than we ever thought it could be. "This must be how fireflies feel" Each lantern was a building and each match was a dissatisfied youth. Orange, yellow and red were the palates that the heroes painted the streets with. A boy wearing a t shirt would add a touch of orange to a van, bringing the night just one step closer to the day in brightness. While this would happen, a man in a leather jacket would add a touch of red by disobeying the men who were pressing laws upon him. A girl would get tossed into a van and then the vehicle would receive then officer against its side panel, letting the women free.
Nous embrassâmes again and again. Her red lips painted mine the same colour and our cheeks quickly matched the colour again. The fire crept in the buildings all around us and the city was our own personal candle. It would go out when it was done but we didn't want it to be done any time soon. Sirens played our music for the night, a change of pace for the both of us, while our mutual love, both chemical and emotional melted through our veins. Our matted hair was tangled together as l'amour took us to sleep.