It Was A Day So Awesome That Even Listening To 'Electro-Shock Blues' Cannot Blunt It
A non-fiction short story.
"It's true what they say, though, innit?" Michael mused. "Never judge a book by its cover. Someone who looked at me, Jazz and Faisal walkin' through town would think we're students. They'd never guess that I was on a four-and-a-half year sentence! Or Jazz was on a six-year sentence! Or Faisal was on a nine-year sentence!"
Actually, despite Jazz being convicted of the most serious offence - it involved supervising, though not being directly involved in, the "washing" of cocaine to make crack - I'd always put him in a separate category to the other two. Michael, you could perhaps have guessed was a prisoner - he still has a little of the wideboy, the wheeler-dealer about him. Faisal, I agree, looks more innocent, but you can quickly work out that he's up to no good, usually within three seconds of initiating a conversation with him.
Jazz, however, is different. He's a devoted family man with the first threads of grey hair coming through his tangled mop, thin as a rake, fey and feminine in manner. When I first saw him alongside Jimmy, a slick-haired, hulking, enormous man with a deafening laugh, I remember my incredulity that these two people could exist in the same room without cancelling each other out, like matter and anti-matter. Jimmy looked like a prisoner, or at the very least someone who'd lived. Jazz did not. Michael likes his booze and dope and Faisal likes his hookers, but Jazz's greatest indiscretions are the odd spliff with his dinner and the occasional indelicately expressed opinion on Monica Bellucci.
Maybe because of this, I've always felt a bit more comfortable with Jazz than Michael and Faisal. Michael will bend over backwards to make you feel welcome, but from his criminal record to his unshakeable self-confidence it's clear that he comes from a very different world to me. Faisal just creeps me out - period. But I tell Jazz a lot - I tell him about my friends and what they're doing, and I've mentioned this LJ to him. Perhaps more significantly, I've mentioned that I've mentioned him on this LJ, and it says a lot about the relationship between us that he didn't immediately become nervous about what, exactly, I've been saying.
"This'll be a good one for your journal, eh?!" he laughed as he heaved the bag of empty bottles down the stairs. Him and Michael had been sequestered in the attic for about an hour going through a fearsome amount of lager - I couldn't tell the brand, but it looked like wino strength stuff, the sort that they sell in this part of town.
"You're not gonna go down with that, man!" screamed Michael, split between hilarity and horror. But he was - Jazz's unbeatable masterplan for getting the empties out safely past the noses of his supervisors was to, erm, walk right past them with a clinking, clattering bag of empty beer bottles for the wheelie-bin. "I'd like to think Jazz knows what he's doing," I said, nervously. "I'm just not sure."
Of course, Jazz got away with it. Jazz isn't the most eloquent man, though his vocabulary seems to widen with each day I know him. What he is is very, very clever, and I dare say he uses his status as a well-heeled, well-educated Indian - Britain's "Model Minority" - to get away with some of the things he does. One other thing about him is that he does, as Michael observed today, have an iron stomach that brings defeat and shame to anyone who tries to outdrink him. Within a few minutes of disposing of the lager bottles, he'd ran out to buy a clandestine bottle of whisky, which he shared with Michael.
This is fraught with danger, not just because we're at work, but because Jazz, Michael and Faisal are of course on release from prison, trying to prove that they're responsible enough to be let out into the community once their release papers come through. One thing that Michael did not look s he collapsed into a giggling fit was "responsible". Yet, oddly, Jazz did. He downed half a bottle of Bell's in a second and went to take a phone call from a client without a pause. You just can't stop Jazz.
Or so I thought.
Jazz left us on a cliffhanger - he was going to arrange a time to go out for coffee with me before starting on the next bottle with Michael. Time passed, and I started to wonder whether even the most labyrinthine debt case could possibly justify staying away for this long. I looked through into the staff room. No sign of him there.
Now, Jazz was not a ground floor person, so I quickly ruled that out. He could only have gone up to the attic. But why? All the case files he needed from up there today were already down in the case room, and if he was drinking some more lager it seemed very unlike him not to offer to share with Michael and Faisal.
I checked in the filing room. No sign of him there. I pushed open the door to the records room.
Oh fuck.
There he was, slumped over the desk, his face squashed against the wood, making no sound nor moving any muscle. I came back downstairs, ashen-faced. "Where's Jazz?" asked Michael.
"He's up there," I whispered, "fucking flat out!" Michael's face, rarely far from an impish grin, set into stone.
About five horrible seconds later, the telephone rang. It was Tony, the reception manager.
"Alright Graham, is Jazz there?" he asked.
"Jazz, Jazz, Jazz. I'll just check," I bullshitted. Walking out of the room, I bumped into Leona. "Where's Jazz?" she asked.
I couldn't lie. I knew Leona. She did a very good impersonation of a dizzy blonde, but she used it to hide a genuinely formidable meticulousness. "He's upstairs," I whimpered. "He's not well."
She looked concerned, and went up the stairs. It was just a few minutes before Mick was up there too, and they were trying vainly to nurse him back to health with comforting words and black coffee. Michael was speculating about what was going on up there with me; interestingly, we got it the wrong way round. We thought Leona would think he was genuinely ill and Mick, our pragmatic boss, would figure him out immediately. We fell into that familiar trick of underestimating Leona, and besides, as Michael later reasoned, "Mick's drunk all the time anyway."
Eventually, he couldn't hold his clients off any longer. The scene as he tried, still some way away from coherence, to talk to someone he's meant to be representing in a couple of weeks at an Incapacity Benefit tribunal, was worthy of Curb Your Enthusiasm. "Hello! Are you alright? Yeah, I'm fine. I'm fine. I'm fine. Yeah. Fine."
At the end of the day, a slowly sobering Jazz looked at his watch. "Half three," he tutted, incredulously. "Where did the day go?"
"Would you like me to remind you?" asked Michael.
"It's true what they say, though, innit?" Michael mused. "Never judge a book by its cover. Someone who looked at me, Jazz and Faisal walkin' through town would think we're students. They'd never guess that I was on a four-and-a-half year sentence! Or Jazz was on a six-year sentence! Or Faisal was on a nine-year sentence!"
Actually, despite Jazz being convicted of the most serious offence - it involved supervising, though not being directly involved in, the "washing" of cocaine to make crack - I'd always put him in a separate category to the other two. Michael, you could perhaps have guessed was a prisoner - he still has a little of the wideboy, the wheeler-dealer about him. Faisal, I agree, looks more innocent, but you can quickly work out that he's up to no good, usually within three seconds of initiating a conversation with him.
Jazz, however, is different. He's a devoted family man with the first threads of grey hair coming through his tangled mop, thin as a rake, fey and feminine in manner. When I first saw him alongside Jimmy, a slick-haired, hulking, enormous man with a deafening laugh, I remember my incredulity that these two people could exist in the same room without cancelling each other out, like matter and anti-matter. Jimmy looked like a prisoner, or at the very least someone who'd lived. Jazz did not. Michael likes his booze and dope and Faisal likes his hookers, but Jazz's greatest indiscretions are the odd spliff with his dinner and the occasional indelicately expressed opinion on Monica Bellucci.
Maybe because of this, I've always felt a bit more comfortable with Jazz than Michael and Faisal. Michael will bend over backwards to make you feel welcome, but from his criminal record to his unshakeable self-confidence it's clear that he comes from a very different world to me. Faisal just creeps me out - period. But I tell Jazz a lot - I tell him about my friends and what they're doing, and I've mentioned this LJ to him. Perhaps more significantly, I've mentioned that I've mentioned him on this LJ, and it says a lot about the relationship between us that he didn't immediately become nervous about what, exactly, I've been saying.
"This'll be a good one for your journal, eh?!" he laughed as he heaved the bag of empty bottles down the stairs. Him and Michael had been sequestered in the attic for about an hour going through a fearsome amount of lager - I couldn't tell the brand, but it looked like wino strength stuff, the sort that they sell in this part of town.
"You're not gonna go down with that, man!" screamed Michael, split between hilarity and horror. But he was - Jazz's unbeatable masterplan for getting the empties out safely past the noses of his supervisors was to, erm, walk right past them with a clinking, clattering bag of empty beer bottles for the wheelie-bin. "I'd like to think Jazz knows what he's doing," I said, nervously. "I'm just not sure."
Of course, Jazz got away with it. Jazz isn't the most eloquent man, though his vocabulary seems to widen with each day I know him. What he is is very, very clever, and I dare say he uses his status as a well-heeled, well-educated Indian - Britain's "Model Minority" - to get away with some of the things he does. One other thing about him is that he does, as Michael observed today, have an iron stomach that brings defeat and shame to anyone who tries to outdrink him. Within a few minutes of disposing of the lager bottles, he'd ran out to buy a clandestine bottle of whisky, which he shared with Michael.
This is fraught with danger, not just because we're at work, but because Jazz, Michael and Faisal are of course on release from prison, trying to prove that they're responsible enough to be let out into the community once their release papers come through. One thing that Michael did not look s he collapsed into a giggling fit was "responsible". Yet, oddly, Jazz did. He downed half a bottle of Bell's in a second and went to take a phone call from a client without a pause. You just can't stop Jazz.
Or so I thought.
Jazz left us on a cliffhanger - he was going to arrange a time to go out for coffee with me before starting on the next bottle with Michael. Time passed, and I started to wonder whether even the most labyrinthine debt case could possibly justify staying away for this long. I looked through into the staff room. No sign of him there.
Now, Jazz was not a ground floor person, so I quickly ruled that out. He could only have gone up to the attic. But why? All the case files he needed from up there today were already down in the case room, and if he was drinking some more lager it seemed very unlike him not to offer to share with Michael and Faisal.
I checked in the filing room. No sign of him there. I pushed open the door to the records room.
Oh fuck.
There he was, slumped over the desk, his face squashed against the wood, making no sound nor moving any muscle. I came back downstairs, ashen-faced. "Where's Jazz?" asked Michael.
"He's up there," I whispered, "fucking flat out!" Michael's face, rarely far from an impish grin, set into stone.
About five horrible seconds later, the telephone rang. It was Tony, the reception manager.
"Alright Graham, is Jazz there?" he asked.
"Jazz, Jazz, Jazz. I'll just check," I bullshitted. Walking out of the room, I bumped into Leona. "Where's Jazz?" she asked.
I couldn't lie. I knew Leona. She did a very good impersonation of a dizzy blonde, but she used it to hide a genuinely formidable meticulousness. "He's upstairs," I whimpered. "He's not well."
She looked concerned, and went up the stairs. It was just a few minutes before Mick was up there too, and they were trying vainly to nurse him back to health with comforting words and black coffee. Michael was speculating about what was going on up there with me; interestingly, we got it the wrong way round. We thought Leona would think he was genuinely ill and Mick, our pragmatic boss, would figure him out immediately. We fell into that familiar trick of underestimating Leona, and besides, as Michael later reasoned, "Mick's drunk all the time anyway."
Eventually, he couldn't hold his clients off any longer. The scene as he tried, still some way away from coherence, to talk to someone he's meant to be representing in a couple of weeks at an Incapacity Benefit tribunal, was worthy of Curb Your Enthusiasm. "Hello! Are you alright? Yeah, I'm fine. I'm fine. I'm fine. Yeah. Fine."
At the end of the day, a slowly sobering Jazz looked at his watch. "Half three," he tutted, incredulously. "Where did the day go?"
"Would you like me to remind you?" asked Michael.