Monday, July 30, 2007

C'mon Baby, Light My Fire

Mikey was always willing to acknowledge that some things in life are bad (they can really make you mad) whilst other things they make you swear and curse. Listening to Soho tell him to quit smoking and live healthy was a really kicker for proof of this. She was sprawled on my couch, drinking scotch on the rocks, pregnant, and repeatedly saying “you’ve got to take care of your body Michael”. But Mikey was just whistling, trying to chew skittles while puffing on a badly rolled cigarette and typing one of his now-famous winding wordy letters to his maternal grandmother back east. Granny Hume remains perhaps the only person ever to actually see Michael and maintain that he treated his body well. True, she last saw him at age ten, and those e-mails weren’t exactly geysers of honesty, but I’m merely pointing out the two facts that Mikey was fairly reckless and elderly relatives are fairly gullible.

“I’m not so sure my delicate constitution will survive this mighty pilgrimage,” falsettoed Mikey across the room to me, clutching at his chest. “In fact, I think this very cigarette is… oh no van Burenberg! …this cigarette has caused me to abuse my bodily temple! Something’s growing inside me, is it cancer? No! Is it a plane? No! It’s … Unwanted Pregnancy Man! Na-na-na!” He launched himself backwards across the room on his wheely computer chair, fist and chin thrust forward like a Golden Age superhero and rammed into the table where I had spread road maps and motel guides in the hope of actually reading them. Soho was looking furious but well and truly put in her place, as Mikey began the Batman song replacing the pronoun with the words “fat camp!” and patting his belly. I really did want to find at least one place name for us to head towards, so I tried to shout him down, but that just led to the usual question to which I didn’t have a good answer: “Well what’s one good reason I haven’t already considered and dismissed as to why I should quit smoking?” I’d gotten halfway into explaining I loved smoking and just wanted him to shut up when Maya walked in and did the job for me.

“Because it’s a phallic symbol and every time you smoke you make me think of you sucking dick.”
Well I personally don’t think Mikey ever looked more like a fish. Maya smiled with that swishy charming just-plain-better-than-thou smile of hers, leant over and took the rolly out of Mike’s agape mouth. If you wanted a good idea of what a perfect circle looked like, Mikey’s eyes were like a dictionary definition as she took a long, slow drag on that crumpled rod of patriarchal power. Well, he dropped back into the chair like Superman had discovered Lois Lane was wearing a Kryptonite g-string and started furiously lying to his grandma to make up for it. Maya laughed and blew a smoke-ring at Soho’s belly, and I just sat, chin in my hands, and tried to think about anything except the word “dysfunctional”.

“I’ve noticed we’re not actually going anywhere, oh captain my captain.” Maya’s smokey fingers traced the winding red and yellow lines that marked the bitumen rivers running out from the mountain of our city into the wide sea of freedom. It was unfortunately true. We had stagnated back into drinking and hanging around reading out particularly fundamentalist letters to the editor. Something in the drunken fire of the fear and lust to escape our problems and boredoms had been doused by the light of the next few days, and Mikey’s repeated need to “tie up loose ends” wasn’t helping. Without his money we were powerless and the longer we remained in a constant state of packing the more we doubted everything about ourselves. Something about packing your things does that, it’s like a foreshadowing of your re-arrangement. But we were so down this moment. It was like we didn’t even have the energy to bicker hilariously and cynically amongst ourselves anymore. We were wading through our own honey.

There’s a rule when telling tales, and I suppose it should go for all conversation, that your characters should always be doing something. The fact that they’re talking about doing something is inadequate, with the two notable exceptions of Hamlet and anything written by Ayn Rand. If our story was any kind of real narrative at all we’d have been mighty fucked on this one. I got a text message from Sleepy saying he’d just bought a new hat and wanted to try it out, could he come over. I had no idea what he meant so I just sent back a blank screen deciding that not talking about doing something might find a loophole in the literary law. Just to place the others, for any voyeuristic peace of mind, Johnny had gone ‘bowling’ with Sleepy (which used to be a euphemism for pretty much anything we didn’t wanna tell each other about until Johnny actually started to get quite interested and good at bowling so now no one knew anything about sincerity, just like the rest of the world really). How Sleepy’d ended up with a new hat was anyone’s guess. Flo was asleep in my bed or maybe asleep just beside my bed because she tended to roll off the mattress onto the floor wrapped in eight layers of linen and end up sleeping contorted in the floor corner. Mikey always threw any spare coins at her whenever he saw this just to remind her that while my house wasn’t an inner-city bus station she was a big contributor to the elimination of all major differences. Flo loved this because spare money was an oxymoron to all of us but Mike. We had to stop this.

Which I guess neatly brings me to my own idiotic misunderstanding. Our man Sleepy did not buy himself a new cap, as his message distinctly spelled out, but a new car, as that message distinctly mis-spelled out. A new second-or-third-or-fortieth hand Jeep which Michael would later name Sin Souci in what might have been the cleverest, wittiest amphetamine high of his life. And suddenly, in one fossil-fuel munching moment, all thoughts of smoking, grandmas and sleep leapt from our minds to make room for the one thing that has defined our species for almost a hundred years now. Our unit had become mobilized by the auto.

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