by
David Keenan
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What are you reading at the moment? he asked me. Vanity of Duluoz by Jack Kerouac, I said (I fluffed it). Bullshit, he said. Don’t tell me, he said. Charles Bukowski. William fucking Burroughs. Patti fucking Smith. Jim fucking Thompson. Hermann fucking Hesse (Bullshit von fucking Bullshit). Try this on for size, he said (and he pulled out a copy of Diary of a Madman by Gogol from his rucksack). Read the Russians, he said. And forget satire, he said. And forget metaphor, the Russians have no truck with metaphor. And forget time, they have no truck with time, either. When you read Gogol it’s neither yesterday, today or tomorrow. You ever heard John Coltrane? he asked me. I have Kind of Blue, I said (he’s on there). Bullshit, he said. You need to listen to Ascension. You need to listen to Meditations. You need to listen to Interstellar Space. You need to wake up to now, my friend. He stubbed out another cigarette. I need to get to sleep, he said. You have no idea the weight of my brain right now. I told Samantha. We have a visitor upstairs (I said).
cute
[...] she was an artist, that’s how she saw herself, an artist that used sex and her body and gender and stuff like that – though she never talked about it in those kinds of terms, that wasn’t her style – and so early on we began doing music together where we would record ourselves having sex, she would get into the zone, there would come a point where she was so turned on, you can hear the moment it clicks on the tape when the voice would come out, this new voice, this automatic kind of voice, not always using words but sometimes, words that you wouldn’t expect, words like exhibition and tournament and procession, words that always seemed too long to suit a gasp of passion or an orgasm, words like calculation and expression and verification, sexy words, it seems to me even now and back then, my god, it was all I could do not to blow my load as soon as she began talking these words, these magic words that were like passwords to a whole other kingdom of passion, on her knees in front of me, sometimes with a single thin silver belt tied around her waist and a pair of heels, those eyelashes curling up, nothing else, and next to my penis a microphone so you never knew which one she was going to suck and which one she was going to talk into [...]
lol
[...] honestly though, things had been coming to a head in terms of Vanity’s career anyway, she had peaked too young, she said, all the other girls had held back, they hadn’t done girl-on-girl right away, they hadn’t done anal or double penetration, and so they were able to demand higher fees and gradually move up the pay scale, but Vanity had been doing it all from day one, she wasn’t a goddamn businesswoman, she was a passionate artist, and here she was paying for it while all of these cynical bitches, who couldn’t even take a cock up their ass without going cross-eyed, were moving up the ranks, truth was she had nowhere left to go, no special trick to turn or ability to unveil, she had given it her all and that was her mistake, at least in the eyes of these maggots.
Her name was Ginny; I still remember her. She was lying with her legs spread on the bed with one hand holding onto the brass bedhead while wearing stockings and next to her this panty drawer was open and spilling over with lingerie. Oh my god, I said to myself. I looked between her legs and it was like two worlds colliding and it was like lingerie was the highest pinnacle of civilisation; everything we had been fighting for; in Gor and in Middle-earth and in reality. It was a profound moment of worship and afterwards I walked back through to the living room and it was like walking onto the command deck of a spaceship. I told them how great it was, that they should try masturbating on acid, and one by one – all except Findlay – they took their turn in the bathroom so that the magazine was soaked right through and I had to wrap it in a plastic bag and throw it in the bin in the morning. After that it was inevitable that we would form a band.
Someone had given the description of a person with blue hair and who was dressed like a schoolboy fleeing the scene. The band needs to split up, Alan said. We need them to go into hiding. We had a meeting at Duncan’s parents’ house; the four of us sat on the bed with a single bare light bulb illuminating the room and dirty clothes piled everywhere. Duncan’s dad came into the bedroom, he wasn’t quite drunk yet, just moderately sauced, and he asked us about the killing of the Chinese. I heard he was hit over the head with a paving stone, he said. Who is even strong enough to lift one of those, never mind bringing it down on some poor bugger’s skull? We shook our heads and tried to picture the scene and the superhuman effort involved; all except Alan, who just sat there with his head in his hands. Things escalated from there. I demanded to see the dolls, they were kept in boxes in the basement of Findlay and Alan’s house, and I insisted that we break them out and examine them. What for? Duncan asked. Are you looking for bloodstains? Maybe, I said. I might be. He looked at me like he was caught in the teeth of something; like a great mouth had opened up behind him and he had felt that first pressure on his flesh; that frisson just before the tooth penetrates the skin; which is the prerogative of young bodies, I realise now; that expectant shudder where doom itself seems like a fair exchange and more worthy of jaw-dropping awe and complete and utter surrender than total weeping despair. I felt like I was pregnant with every idea in the world and that none of them mattered.
this is so funny
I barely remember the rest of the night to be honest with you. The concert was good, they came up with this song where Lucas enumerated, is that a word, e-num-er-ated all of the subjects of songs, I can’t remember exactly how many there were but there were songs about falling in love and songs about being pure enamoured and songs about meeting and songs about falling out of love and songs about being all tore up and then there were songs about despair, complete despair (I may be making that one up myself, I can’t remember), songs about God, songs about existential lifestyles, songs about the seasons, about autumn leaves and flowers in the springtime, songs about animals, about wanting to be an animal or acting like one, songs that were more like social commentary, trivial songs, songs about memory, songs about the past and about the future and songs that would bring the two together, songs that were written out of guilt alone, songs that were meant to salvage guilty feelings or salve guilty feelings, one or the other, the PA was cheap, who knows, songs about time, like when will you or what have you or if you or now you or can’t you, songs about songs, singing about singing, which isn’t singing at all if you ask me, singing about plants growing up or the vagaries of weather, is that a word, vague-ar-ies, and there were more songs, for sure, he listed them all, or it seemed as if he did, and then he had this whole thing where he acted as if he had exhausted songs, he shrugged and he shivered and he cried – it was like rockabilly to me – and then he went into this thing where he started spouting nonsense, like he was having a conversation with himself and talking rubbish, just crazy stuff that made no sense and that’s when it struck me. He’s singing about nothing. Fuck me. He’s writing a song about nothing. It’s the only thing that songs haven’t been written about. D’you get me? And it was like a love song, it was like he was singing a song to something that was so lacking in love that even the mention of its name would bring it back to life and we would all notice it and fall in love with it like a prom queen or a movie star. Oh god every bit of nonsense was like a poem to nothing from the depths of his heart to the depths of his heart. It’s all nonsense, I said to myself, it’s all bollocks, then I imagined Lucas lifting me up in his arms, I imagined the pure freezing rivers running through his veins, I thought of his feet, pure writhing like fish out of water.
I’ve fallen in love, he told me. We met for a Chinese at the weekend; we used to order from the Lucky Star in Forrest Street in Airdrie and then take it to a park further along the road where no one ever went and where I still return to in my dreams, even though it doesn’t exist any more, and in the summer we would lie in the grass and eat our meals with chopsticks out of foil containers and drink cans of beer and debate the future and novels. We set ourselves courses, we had our own club, like, you know, for instance we would listen to all of John Coltrane’s albums in order, one a day, until we had gone right through his catalogue, or we would assign ourselves novels, say all Russian novels, Gogol and Turgenev and Dostoevsky and Tolstoy and Bulgakov (The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov is my favourite book of all time but just so you know you have to read it in the Michael Karpelson translation never the one that Diana Burgin and Katherine O’Connor did where it was like they were making things up for a modern audience really it was sacrilege I couldn’t believe it so the message is: avoid) and Chekhov and Pushkin and Lermontov, and then we would discuss them on our Saturday afternoons, which would inevitably turn to evenings and late nights and sleeping in the park. His wife was a real bitch, she didn’t care, though she was good-looking, I’ll give her that, which was odd, you know, as in what on earth were they doing with each other, and this particular Saturday we had been reading Chekhov, inevitably, and that’s when he told me that he wanted to stop reading, that he had no further need of reading, in fact. I’ve stepped into a novel, he said. I might as well be Rimbaud going off to Palestine. Are you really going to go? I asked him. I want to be adventurous, he said. I want to live. Books aren’t living, he said. Music isn’t living. Staying alive isn’t living. Chasing a twenty-year-old-girl halfway round the world and setting up shop in a war zone: that might be living. It was hard to argue with him, even though I knew full well that books were alive and music was alive. [...]
love this
When the rest of the group heard about it, well, at first there was a big hoo-ha but when Remy suggested getting Mary Hanna in they started coming round to the idea. Patty said, yes, let’s continue, but with no drums, that way when they ask us what happened to our drummer we’ll just say he ran away to Palestine, he left his wife for a twenty-year-old and now he’s somewhere on the West Bank, precise location unknown, and he’s a better drummer for it. It beats dying or going off the ball or being told to pack it in by your wife. He remains a member, Patty said. In fact he’s more important than ever.
It was an early-morning flight. Lubby had arranged everything. They were to stay with a friend who lived in a suite in a hotel on the shore at Tel Aviv and from there they would make contact with a humanitarian organisation and relocate to a distribution hub on the Gaza Strip; though when I looked at them both in the rear-view mirror they looked more like Jackie O and JFK on their way to Dallas. She was wearing these big dark glasses and a floppy hat so you couldn’t really see her face, which was a blessing, in a way, because it was true that she had the kind of dark eyes that would bring out the high diver in everyone and who knows I might have ended up in Israel myself.
The next day we visited Goosey in the hospital. It’ll be wigs from here on out, lads, he told us, that’s what they’re saying, and secretly I thought at last we can have some coherence in this band but then I felt bad, his head was mangled, he looked like a skinned beetroot. We’ve located Mad Mary, I told him, we’re meeting them down the glen for vengeance and for a handover. Don’t do it, he said, don’t get involved. Let’s just call the police, we did nothing wrong. You’re forgetting something, I said. I may have killed someone. None of us have any idea if the guy I stabbed is dead or alive.
lmao