Two old men. A young kid. Columns of time. They ain't got two good eyes between them but the old guy on the left, the one with the one laughing eye, gets hurt every time the young guy gets into an unexpectedly deep conversation with the old guy in the middle.

And the young guy gets hurt if the old guy in the middle seems to be paying more attention to the old guy on the left than to him.

This set of circumstances has led to an uneasy alliance.

The barroom of the Helsapoppin' was their trading post and they sold a pile of bullshit to each other. And anyone who would listen. These were the good times you know. Each one of you looking out for the other to one degree or the other.

The old guy on the left didn't trust anybody. He had trusted the old guy in the middle for a long time. But he'd never worshiped him. He'd respected their friendship and that didn't involve trust. He never asked for anything other than that he was due. If you get my meaning.

The old guy on the left knew that he had one of the only two eyes in the room and the little, young, guy on his far right was causing that vision to be distracted.

And all this one-eyed junkie had left was his vision.

The cruelest thing you can do is distract a man from his vision - although leaving him to it can be just as bad.

And here are the three men who will play out at least part of this story.

The old man on the left with his seeing eye that is always laughing ... or crying. A waterfall of love. A pain that is disguised by a flicker, a cocked eyebrow.

What is that eye saying?

His whole face is like one of those flickering roadside signs. You look one second and the girl is smiling. The next second she is frowning. One message then another.

Then there is his blind eye. Now thereby hangs another tale.

This is the most hate-filled barroom in the world and all the malcontents, hipsters, thieves and thugs, megalomaniacs and liars, cheats, perverts, dog-fighting, ban-dog owning, shit-kicking fuckers gather there to get violently loud and uncoordinated on anything they know will damage their brains ...

... Over there against the fruit pastille slot machine is the ape. Ugly man, no class. Shoulders on him like a motorway bridge. Lice are speeding up and down them like they're wearing crash helmets and riding motorcycles. He's got no hair but for some tufts that look like horns.

Ugly guy. Thinks he's tough. Scared shitless when the old guy on the left had threatened him one time with a crowbar. But he acts tough whenever he gets into the old guy's line of vision: Starts shouting and laughing loud. Big mouth and stupid broken-nosed face. Flapping ears and a dribble of spittle on his chin ...

... A little skull of a guy was balanced on the bar. He grinned and raised his glass. He'd got big brown teeth and spindly glasses. Hair gone slicked across the white bone of his forehead. He chewed on his cigarette like it was matchstick. Dangerous as shit. A faded dandy. He'd worn that suit too often. A stain at the crotch like a layer of salt. Scratches at his leg until his strides rise and reveal the suspenders on his calves. Takes an olive from the saucer on the bar, sucks the pepper from it and replaces the skin in the oil.

A little dead squirrel of a man. Leigh wouldn't have pissed on him if he'd been on fire.

"Fuck him," he muttered.

Fuck him ...

The young guy took out a piece of dope like knuckle and ate it.

"Oh!" he let out an involuntary cry and poked his elbow into Geoff. "He jus' ate fifty pound's worth!"

"Naw," Geoff replied. "'Bout a tenner's worth."

"Fucking hell," Leigh sighed.

This truly was a baronial hall of helz-a-poppin'. Bowels were hanging from the beams, feeding the birds. Dead colleagues.

Over at another table Naughty Nigel is fidgety. Keeps looking over at Leigh - bad, slitty, tired eyes. Got a down on Leigh and Leigh don't know why. Dangerous man.

Dangerous man to know. You can't ignore him. Watch him all the time. Nothing more dangerous than a dangerously intelligent fool.

(Nothing new to report. Been out again today. Took a walk down to the red rec (red wreck). Saw nobody in particular - and if I had, I couldn't have thought of anything in particular to say - just a lonely old lady now. Smiled at the old lady hanging her washing out by the Druids Door. Noticed the old love wasn't there by the window of her road-side shack. Maybe she's died. Hair! Dyed my hair. Grew it long. Makes me look younger. Got me up in swively hips and stockings. But my hips were too fat. I'll go down to the shops next in a tiara. Tiara bum-de-A. Tee-ara bum-de-A. Ha ha ha.

Hmm. I'm not even an eccentric old lady. Tsk! So I went down to the Billany ... to see all those lovely boys!)

And there were lovely boys standing around there. All too many of them. All of them had half-hards on as they rubbed up against the bar.

Now these guys used to bother Geoff and the young guy. But Leigh, he didn't mind them. They were kind of rudely exotic. Embarrassingly so, actually to a man who had to remain ultimately masculine.

Lemming's Pie

INGREDIENTS:

Take one broken man (it is best if he has been dropped, like a figurine on to linoleum, and he is shattered).

Take the pieces and place them before a beautiful woman. She must then smear all the jaggedy edges with the thick saline solution she dips her fingers into beneath her skirts.

Then he will be whole again.

So the cook must surmise.

Cook for however long in a chamber pot. Until the vile bubbles.

When it is candescant with ignominy - cast it aside and let it bake on the window ledge in the sun.

And when it is finally done - intuition will tell you the moment - you must cast it aside without a second glance.

Your meal must become as pigswill.

Like a dog's vomit on a rocky beach.

**********************

In a corner of this baronial hall was a place called Montellimare. Their's was a table full of dreams. A corner that everybody gravitated to, even though they didn't know it.

That corner of the room was a square like a handkerchief of snow. Tall, leaning and unpredictably unsteady, buildings, ladders of lights and curtains, surrounded it. These were almost all whorehouses.

In that white square dwelt a Chiquita of a boy. He had the handsomeness of David but he had honed it, deliberately, with abuse. He was a god whose eyes moved all the time seeking approval. His skin was olive, like a Pole, and his hair was slicked back like a Spaniard. His mouth was a ring of fire. even his shoulders moved from the hip. He was maybe thirty years old but he could have been fifteen.

He was sex at the flick of a switchblade. He had the kind of body anybody would have killed to touch.

And he jus' kep' flickin' those eyes across at tbe old guy on the left who lived in another world - and they both kep' sneakin' a peak into the other's world. And neither of them knew why. They just knew there was an attraction.

Montellemare. La Hombre, one bar said over the door. And all the streets went teeming by outside. Fast traffic in five lanes, swishing lights and honking horns. Rain coming down. Half a tramp on a skateboard whizzing along by the propulsion of his knuckles. He got rain in his eyes as it blows off the peak of his cap. He is heading for the underground where he can beg in the dry.

The old guy is going in there. La Hombre.

But as that Art Neveou door clicks shut again, you must remember that the man old man who is now flicking up a cigarette and ordering a glass of beer is only aware of one thing - he's lost everything that he ever pretended that he owned. And that is a profound thing for a man to have to face ... that the nothing he ended up with came out of the nothing he owned when he thought he had everything.

So he goes in to La Hombre, step by step.

The boy has a mouth like a salty cavern. It is deep and tastes of garlic, tobacco, beer and cheese. The metal in his teeth glints like diamonds. There are beads of sweat on his top lip. A string of saliva joins their parting kiss like a rope. The old man licked it away with his tongue and swallowed with some satisfaction.

He was a simple soul. Two and two made four to him - and nothing else.

And a kiss is just a kiss when there is no-one there.

His hand slipped into the shadows beneath the gnarled wood of the table and rested like a butterfly on the boy's egg. It squirmed like a turkey underneath his feather-light touch. It stretched its neck out towards him. The old man recognised that movement immediately from years of having his hand down the front of his own pants.

The Devil makes work for idle hands - no matter how you try to keep your pecker up. It's the way of the world. The old man's perversion was eroticism, make no bones about it. He loved to touch.

He felt his own bones go hard. What a beautiful feeling. A hardening from the arteries. Turned to stone by a feeling. The whole geography of your body is changed in a moment. All the mountains of your body are turned to granite. All those fallow fields grow instantly. Sprouting adornments, jewellery, a tinkling voice.

His car was outside and he would've liked to have taken the boy out to the back seat but he knew that his oil pressure was low and he might have wanted to drive him somewhere. He wouldn't use his car anymore than he had to. His oil pressure had been low for ages therefore he had to conserve whatever energy was contained in its power pack because one day he might have to escape.

His car was actually the most important thing he possessed. And if the truth was known he didn't want any young boy's naked arse sliding across his hide.

He had to legislate against all these things because it was all unreal and on the day he came back to reality he would not be allowed to have any tell-tale stains anywhere.

The young man sucked an oyster and pointed his lips at the old man.

But the touch had been enough.

Leigh went back into the baronial hall. He put on a brave face but inside he was falling apart with fear.

Too many people knew too many things about his secrets.

When he was drunk he'd always had the knack of admitting things he didn't want to admit. But he wasn't special in that particular proclivity. All drunks, drug addicts and perverts had this particular problem - a potent mixture of insecurity and exhibitionism. The only benefit to being this way was that it kept your stomach knotted and flat. So tight with anxiety that you couldn't eat.

Still, that was okay for the times you had to appear naked before your fellow man.

Head-on-`is-mmmm. Hmmm. Dirty boys.

This was one of his secrets:

In a back room of La Hombre, up a dark passage, he was lying naked on a cold slab like a white fish, his thighs were parted and his thin sinewy calves were over the sharp edge of the stone and his feet were flat on the bare floorboards. His preposterous proboscis stands out above his belly like a frozen eel. It feels as if it is a yard long and sweats as it cries for attention.

Now he feels so naked that the hairs round his nipples are as lively as the tentacles of a jelly fish.

An arm covered with black fuzz reaches up from the darkness between his thighs. It becomes a ribbon of smoke and it buffets along his body until the gentle hand rests, finally, on his breast. It squeezes. His feet do a little involuntary tap dance and he moans suicidely. It is his ideal bedtime story.

A man between his legs. A Gee-man. The hand caresses him. The hand has the touch and he feels so lean with a little, renewed, muscle definition. He is worth touching. On the wall of the room, through his liquid slits of eyes, he half focuses on a doily that belonged on the table of a barroom at the festival of the Day of the Dead.

Sadly, that had some meaning for him too. It was an unfulfilled pleasure. A knowledge. Somewhere he'd meant to go to one day, the Day of the Dead. The one and only day when there is no tomorrow. The day of total abandonment. The day of the Blessed Abuser who is handing out rewards like penitencies.

Here, at the hands of the Blessed Abuser, we have no satisfaction. An orgasm that the heart finally gave out on at the vinegar stroke. Pursed lips forever. Self-satisfied inconclusion. A Devine failure. What a way to go!

Dissatisfied.

He likes this hand. It's the hand of an unknown friend.

And then there is the kiss in his most secret place.

And how can you kiss a man there when he has no secrets?

His feet dance and he writhes on the cold, smooth, slab. Ready to be skewered and sacrificed on his erotic altar.

There is a fishy smell coming up from the floor and he knows that the guy has a hard on. He realises that the guy between his legs, like him, hasn't bathed for a while.

That's when he saw the guy's red hair in the dim light. It outshone his own pubic hair.

What was about to happen next would be so beautiful.

Oh God, he is hallucinating. His temperature has gone through the roof. He is sweating salt. His bed is a swimming pool. He sees tall people, small fat people. He is burning up.

These men are jolly and stylish. Wicked thoughts and so sexy.

He needs a doctor, he knows. But, somehow penicillin would kill it all off, wouldn't it.

Gosh, his thighs are raised as if he is about to give birth and he feels a tongue licking him into readiness.

Yes.

Yes.

Yes.

Yes. He's ready.

He is engulfed in a ritual for the lost and the lonely. Spunk is the ambrosia of heroes. `Show some spunk lad!' he used to hear the real men cry when they wanted him to carry out some act of bravery on the school football field. `Show some spunk lad!'

Outside this room it is the days before Christmas and everybody is consuming everything to excess. Snow is falling in a grey-white shower. A girl with thin legs wrapped in spangled leggings plays a fast flute. She has a ring through her nose and ten in her ear. Her face and her hands are grimy. She raises a thigh and twirls on one leg as she plays. her fingers flicker up and down the length of the shaft altering the shape of the air she is expelling.

The redhead rises slowly holding the old man's legs in place on his shoulders. The boy smells musky, like a skunk. He leans forward to kiss the old man's chest, deliberately folding him into a position of complete servility.

He was a beautiful youth, tall and Y-shaped with a kicking cock. While he carried out these acts he kept his eyes shut, making it all the more mysterious for the old man to behold.

The youth had a tattoo on his right hand and his torso was sweating. He hadn't a natural blemish. He was perfect perversion.

The woman who had become an old lady and no longer trusted her swivelly hips slipped through the door into the bar. She'd come looking for her son. (She knew she could find him in the backroom, if she looked. Something made her didn't look. It wasn't that she minded what he was doing, it was more that he looked like an old man now and she didn't want to be associated with him on social occasions. He made her look old. No swivelly hips and a queer old man for a son. Oh Vai, she wished she knew how to swear properly in Yiddish, it sounded so much better.)

Geoff let onto her and sent the young guy to the bar to supply her with drinks. She liked Geoff. Kep' n eye out for her queer son.

She hitched herself up onto a stool and coughed phlegmily, masking her mouth with a drip-mat: "Ooohoooh, it's such a vile nighttt... thank Goeff for me won't you."

She slipped the powder from a sleeping pill into her glass of beer and whizzed it around with a flick of her bony wrist.

That was her second sleeping pill powder and her third beer. She felt her mind get mixed up. So, she got serious.

"You see, with my son," she told the fat man at the bar: "W'en 'is mind gets mixed up, he just thinks it's funny ... but when my min' gets mixed up, I thin' it's a very serious business."

The fat guy moved away like a slug.

She laughed vacantly at this vast room of people whom she pretended to see as no threat.

"Len? Len?" She sounded distracted and waved her arm out behind but felt nothing.

The little old lady accepted another beer and realised that the last one had gone down too quickly.

(I can maintain this standard of writing if you can sustain the standard of thought. Fuck you if you don't think I'm good. I almost abandoned this book because of you. My thought processes aren't pretty - but then neither are yours. The difference is I'm proud of mine. I understand mine. I'm comfortable with mine - so I don't have to pry into your's, like you like to pry into mine. You're sick.)

Some thoughts should never be spoken. That's what Len used to say. Funny man, she often thought what it was she first saw in him, because she never saw anything in him again. He'd looked like the strong silent type on a cold dark night, fists on him like hams, buttoned his big black coat up right though, black unruly hair and vacant eyes.

Well, when she got to know him a little better she realised - secretly - that he was all of those things. Built like a brick shithouse, never said anything unless he considered it to be either funny or cruel - truth attacks as she excused them - and he was practical despite his ungainliness and sadly he was vacant.

Still to an intelligent woman that wasn't necessarily a drawback, it was actually an opportunity.

It was actually an opportunity to mold out of this Neanderthal jerk some kind of perfect man. She might as well have chosen to go carve a mountain.

The first thing she worked on was the donkey in him. He was sullen and lazy but he was capable doing a lot of heavy work. She persuaded him to become a labourer and right away they had money, not a lot but enough for her to indulge in her aspirations.

She found a house. He bought it and she decided it was time to work on the artist in him. Now this was her first real failure, there just wasn't an artist inside him, Still, she got the house decorated and it now looked bright and clean and inviting.

She viewed it as her own creation.

She married him, not as a thankyou but as another acquisition.

Then she had to `make lav' to him. From that day on she always had this insane fear of being murdered in the dark by some maniac lost to a stabbing frenzy.

Stab stab stab stab stab. Ah!Ah!Ah!Ah!AH! Stab stab stab stab stab stab.Ooh!Ooh!Ooh!Ooh!OOH! Stabstabstabstabstab. EEEEeeeeEhhhHHA! Stab stab stab stab stab. No! No! No! No please! Stabstab stab stab ... stab. Please. You must stop! Stab. Please. I'm sorry. But I can't. Stab stab. Nooo! Sta ... bub. Oh please. I can't! Stab.

He respected her from that day on.

And he learned self-control.

A few weeks later he made a decision for himself and he became a self-employed handcart pusher. She wasn't impressed, but the money improved. He pushed for the local builder, he pushed for the market people, he pushed for the grocer. He pushed for the mills. Up the cobbles, down the dales, over the hills. He just kept on pushing. A thick man getting stronger by the minute.

He acquired a taste for soft boiled eggs and scotch and started to keep his suits under the mattress. When he went out at night - which she didn't object to because all he did was drink - he took to wearing a slouch hat.

Then they got old and he died.

She still reached out for him, every night, in that barroom.

"Len? Len?"

Cold red nights in the bar, looking for the son she didn't want to see, reaching out for a dead man.

Over there on the right is a voice laughing over the growl of drunken voices and the clashing of glasses.

She is a lonely lady with a black Jaguar purring outside. It will wait for her. She appears to be confident. She isn't.

She comes to this bar just like everyone else, because she is lonely. Sometimes she allows one of the boys in the bar to take her home. She believes that they save her from her dreams, them, guilt and alcohol. She created her own nightmares and her conscience is never truly clear.

This is a wicked world inside there. Inside a dome of vileness. So much unhappiness. But do these people deserve anything else in reality?

No.

Geoffrey crossed to the circular edge of the dome and looked out through the glass. He could see nothing except the blackness and the dancing reflections of the activities inside. The young guy stood at his side but Geoffrey knew that he had his eyes closed and wasn't even trying to see.

If he did, he wouldn't understand anyway. He didn't have the eye. The eye that Geoff needed was in the back room.

If you can't do the time don't do the crime ... that was a phrase that Geoff thought had a touch of genius. If you can't do the crime don't do the time. But sometimes the time comes upon you.

in one compartment of the room - people knew but didn't do anything - a girl of sixteen years old was being set on fire. They'd shaved off her hair, butted out cigarettes on her head, pulled out two of her teeth wid pliers, cut her and cleaned out the wounds with bleach, played music into her head on headphones: "Burn baby burn."

Then they poured petrol over her head and threw lit beermats at her. The one who made her whooosh! was the winner.

Nobody paid any notice because they were watching Marjorie. The woman with lights inside her vagina.

Now there was a hard-working con-woman.

She was a beautiful woman who operated in the dark. She was the daughter of a tailor who'd had an unhappy first marriage.

She only did one show a night. Her show was a deliberately tactile and aural extravaganza.

It all started revealingly enough. A series of bells hidden in the eaves of the dome would begin to tinkle urgently, like an early warning of an earthquake. (To understand this, you have to be at least aware of the relevance of sensation in a séance. This woman was a superb show-woman who understood

the ethereal quality of bells, the tinier and more abundant the better.)

They tinkled through the eaves and then a horn blew. Marjorie appeared from a point in the crowd. She was naked except for a cloth around her waist that covered her hips and tops of her thighs. The manacles on her ankles made her walk with a quick gait (designed to allow her to keep the tops of her thighs pressed together and her internal muscles tense so that the `ectoplasm' carved from liver and lights stayed in place inside her, pseudopods, she called them) and her arms were pulled taut behind her back by chains attached to large hooks and eyes of toughened steel. Both her elbows and wrists were captured. Her hair was bobbed and she wore no make-up. She was slim and looked innocent.

Her naked and manacled appearance was always sexually exciting to the crowd.

 But nobody dared touch her or even comment. Everybody was afraid of Marjorie. They held her in awe.

She hobbled through the crowd until she reached her dark tent of curtains. There she would enter, followed by as many people as could be reasonably expected to gather in such a small and confined place.

She sat on a simple milking stool and her porters placed a tall three section screen at the back of her. Marjorie closed her eyes and the head porter asked two men from the audience to sit at either side of her, placing hands on her knees and on her shoulders.

Let the show begin!

The tent of curtains was plunged into blackness. The bells began to tinkle again, very far off now, barely audible. Slowly they would advance from wherever they came, gradually getting louder and more insistent until they rattled above the tent.

"Walter? Walter?" She'd whisper.

The mood would become more tense and she could feel the nervousness in the clamminess of the palms of the men at her side. The horn sounded and the ashes of leaves began to float down onto the crowd.

"Walter? Walter?" She allowed a certain urgency into her voice: "Walter? Walter? He is almost here."

The head porter broke in at this point and explained for the thousandth time in a deep and sonorous voice: "Walter is Marjorie's spirit guide. He is unrested because he was the first man in the world to be officially cremated. They could burn his flesh but the flames could not extinguish his soul. How cruel this is you can only imagine. But his is a soul condemned to the purgatory of a soul afire for the rest of time. The ashes of his flesh are falling among you now. Close your eyes! Close your eyes and take only shallow breaths, he must not be allowed to enter you or his fire will begin to wander in you."

"Walter? Walter?"

At this point her ethereal search for Walter would become too much and with a gasp she would fall forward in a state of collapse. Her body was trembling and the men could feel the sweat break on her flesh. She moaned and her head would roll from side to side (facilitating the grasping between her teeth the colourless string that hung from the hem of her loin cloth)

The porter again: "Her agony is of fire as she is entered by Walter. He is burning and searing into her - making her insides bubble like a cauldron. But only in this way can Walter have any relief. And Marjorie understands this and is willing to allow him for a few seconds of every day to cool himself in her eqsuisite pain. For here in these moments she is repaid by experiencing - and sharing - the true miracle of terror!

"You are about to witness the most beautiful display of teleplasm and telekinesis in this or any other world. But beware!"

The tent fell silent. The bells stopped.

On cue Marjorie screamed in agony and flung herself backwards, pulling the string to lift up her skirt, until the she lay across the stool with the back of her head touching the floor and the tent was bathed in a dull red glow. The screen suddenly took off into the air with a flapping motion.

The horn joined in again but this time with an inssant bleating noise.

Marjorie allowed her thighs to fall apart she deliberately relaxed her muscles - the blue-ish and red of the ectoplasm exuded from her vagina and slowly writhed across the floor in the shape of a head and twisted body. The porter used his skills as a ventriloquist to through a roar in its direction.

The tent was plunged into darkness again.

The show was over. The crowd filled out.

**************************************

The old writer is here too, in this bedlam. But all he is here to do now is record. Not for him are the excesses of this domed world - although if it involves opium, then he still will be excessive, if he can afford it.

No, now his station in life is that of the Recorder. He watches all these things going on, and he relates to them. And then he relates them.

The old writer believes that he is a man of faded elegance. That is how he choses to see himself. An animal of the night, he rises when people pass his table and shakes their hand politely, passes a joke or two, shows himself to still be quick-witted, ever-ready to make a deal, quick of thought and quick of tung, as people say. Tung. He is a quick old man. He writes down everything he sees, in his mind. Makes a note, makes a sketch. Doodles around it, fantasises ... and then comes up with reality. This is why writers are popular. Because they turn fantasy into an attainable reality.

You should ha' seen this place. Everything was there that he needed to be there. Julie was there. Worked for the cops.

Julie was the old writer's last gasp. But he preferred that the old man on the left made a fool of himself with her, so he wrote it that way. That way he could feel everything he wanted to feel out of the relationship but he never had to actually experience anything anymore. He'd experienced enough. And he didn't want to share anything with anyone any more. His internal experiences had ended as far as he was concerned.

Oh, but there was so much sunshine around the old writer ... and he could feel it! No matter how much he tried to bury it!

Sunshine! Eye gel. Fallen on rocky times. Get ya hair done up neat. Eye gel.

Directions: Apply with fingertips to delicate areas.

Use as part of daily skin care routine.

Yeh, a boat-full of opium, a tank-full of beer, a day-full of stress, and a little bit of eye gel. Perfect skin. Look young for your age with dyed hair. Slim body with an after-taste of decay. Good times. But if these aint the good times, then what are? Being dead in your grave.

Jesus, the old writer had realised fairly recently in his career that he probably wasn't even going to make Per Laichaise.

Another fifteen lines of shit jus' got writ.

Tryin' too hard now, to be cool.

  © 2000, Leigh G. Banks