Three Acts To Grind.

A True Story With Requisite Bathos to Confirm/Guarantee Verissimilitude.

1)

She came floating like a tank across jungle scrub, offered me a bag of polystyrene double helixes. I asked if they were stoked with monsodium glutamate. She pulled one out and cracked it between her head and shoulder like a walnut before massaging a squid-like emission from the helix down her throat in the idiom of an oystercatcher. She told me I looked down. I nodded in the affirmative. “It’s better to look up than down. That’s why mountaineers always start at the bottom.” A small blitzkrieg detonated in the foyer. Reuben’s hips sauntered briskly from ground zero and above them rested angrily the residual Reuben, cut up on tequila, boasting an eye-popping grin and an umbrella, whose parasol fabric had dissolved leaving a leaf skeleton of a thing dangling by those cherished coathanger hips.

2)

Neon gibbered in the periphery and smoke made The Gallows arid and tight. Soft-focus was the hitherto anonymous director’s choice; like any nightclub the mis-en-scene stunk of bad porn except here the protagonists were sheathed in smoke and drink-smashed perception; unto us a utopia is born. Hassan I Sabbah’s idyll of deceit; a musk hanging sweetly until the substances wear off and the piss-stains, tacky paint-job and overbearing squalor declares itself alive and well, present and correct, read it and weep. The orange bloater downed another synthetic oyster and gyrated horribly like a garbage can before it falls over. Sadly she didn’t follow through or I could have emptied the bag and left her out with the rest of the gutter trash lurking outside. Come Monday she’d be bundle into a truck where her viscera would be scraped, pulped and filleted; her mental bread hair cat’s cradled round fish-bones, dead cacti and orange cartons and the whole blancmange tipped into a rubble crater; kicked into rumours; like what happened to that vulgar fat whore? We haven’t seen her for weeks. I heard her acoustics engineer father grabbed her and sold her off to the Malaysian specialist porn industry where she sucks butt for empty, desperate bugs. Jeez, we all hoped she’d be bundled off in such a manner but true to the modus operandi of the truly annoying her shit just kept spreading like crunchy peanut butter across the crumpet of inifinity.

3)

One morning after the initiatory bout of dirty brawling Reuben and I hatched a scheme to get rid of this tiresome bitch and her look-at-me ker-azy foibles. We decided to abduct her, tie her up and leave her in our bath, end our tenancy and flee to somewhere undisclosed, leaving the landlord on his deposit reconnaisance to stumble on this fucked and starving grotesque. Instead, we were insufferably polite whenever we saw her, which was every night, for the remainder of our inconsequential, sultry lives at The Gallows. She’s trying to buy Reuben a drink but the barman pretends not to see her; a transparent ruse when the prospective customer is twenty stone and septic.

(1987)