The Carnage Begins
“I canna believe,” The incensed Highlander Slob is saying to a mortified Sweaty, “that you dunna do nothin’ ta that li’l squeakin’ oopstartin’ runt.”
Sweaty’s scarecrow eyes swim desponded into his beer. He is shamefaced, shocked, silent.
“I’m gang make ‘im cry like a garl, like a fookin’ Sheila. I’m gang ta make ‘im sook me wally!”
Still no response from Sweaty. He thinks: ‘What of the force of my terrible words; what of my authority?’
“An’ eet’s na wonder,” The Highlander Slob continues, adding pain to Sweaty’s humiliation and grief, “eet’s acause yar a fookin’ loser. Ye publish that fookin’ play rag* [see note below], but na, eet’s no’ enoof far yar deleecate ‘n’ unsartain eygo – na! Ye hafta put i’ yar blooody tupence wi’ yar fookin’ ‘Jus’ e Fookin’ Mina’ arditorial evry blooody week, eet’s ta same damned ting, lookin’ far evryman’s fookin’ approval, tellin’ o’ how full o’ success ye be, how fookin’ guid yar blooody life is, wi’ yar blooody drinkin’ an’ yar stupid kid an’ yar fookin’ wife, an’ dunna gang tellin’ me ‘ow fookin’ blooody byutful she be, ta fookin’ dog is jes ‘bout guid nuff far yar oogly meelted moog an’ tate li’l garl o’ yorn taint na looker either – jes ‘bout ta right resultin’ fro’ ta two a ye…”
CHORUS:
For see, The Highlander Slob
Strong-leaning arm, breaker of bars
Swearing oaths on his balls
He grabs through his kilt,
The other hand grasps his sword’s gnarly hilt,
In Sweaty’s ugly time- and drink-ravaged face,
Devastated the friend is by his friend’s cries,
As the rotting mind in his noggin swims
With no replies
Swept by the wrathful waves
Of booze and Hell
Swirling helpless in the roaring swell
The mocking fury of demon alcohol
The monsters have finally caught him up and come to call
In the belching breach and hooch
He’s thought till now, intoxication,
The safe liquid haven, the endless river
The gentle roll of whisky and the mellow flow of beer
The dull-willed stupidity of this asymmetric knob
Through which he, floating, has thought to steer
His life’s drunken little bark to its final coven
Never musing he’d drown,
And now, his head turns laboriously, the fucking clown,
Mouth ajar in shocked dismay at The Slob
His sag-skinned head can only nod, shake and bob
The crooked-headed pumpkin jack, the numbskull, the fool
Former Edinburgh used car parts hawker self-insinuated into Ukraine
Where he, now high-and-mighty, full of himself, condescending
Uses Kyiv like a tool
Face like a sop wrapped in cheesecloth soaked in curds and sour milk
The nauseating mug’s struck unsure,
Is this the drink talking, or his Highlander friend,
Sudden strange malevolent raconteur
Practically kinsman of a neighboring clan,
Sweaty thinks, can be he friend
This comrade, this mate
Who now slays him with all this hate?
The Highlander Slob: “Aye, far wha’ i’ fookin’ blooody he’ eez thees buzzin’ o’ comment-loike nature a-coomin’ fro’ ahind. Canna a man ‘ave a drink an’ spake ‘is blooody mind w’a soome fantastical choir-mob coom a-breakin’ inna ‘is loife?”
CHORUS:
Aye, yourself,
For, Highlander Slob
Such is life,
It comments on itself
Without your help.
Just say a word
And there is automatic judgment on it.
There’s nothing you can do about it.
Better attend to your own business
We each have our job
And leave the explaining to us.
The Highlander Slob: “I’ll comment o’ ye – I’ll fookin’ kill ye, pass me own judgment on ye an’ cancel yars o’ me!”
CHORUS:
No, we don’t think so.
The Highlander Slob: “‘Oo’re ye, damn ye ta he’, wha’re ye?!”
CHORUS:
We are fourteen Scotsmen and a Jew.
Meanwhile, as great and immeasurable swathes of time have passed, now dressed as a medieval English country yeoman, Sonny Boner performs as Dick Wagger, Mick Jagger’s forgotten and disinherited older half-brother. Shaking and strutting like a rooster in front of the microphone, he segues smoothly from “Get Off of My Cloud” to “Under My Thumb”, the seriousness of the act this time underlined by a backup band of flute, accordion, and fiddle. For some reason the fickle public likes it and they cheer.
At the stage-end of the bar, an enigmatic, edgy, martyred-looking thin white man of androgynous good looks calling himself Thomas Jerome Newton has sidled up onto the stool to the left of the dog-man and tries to sell him advanced technologies in exchange for the dog-man’s intriguing diamond tiepin, but the dog-man says, “Get ye to a station,” and goes back to reading his paper.
Apparently reacting to the Sonny Boner-Dick Wagger rendition of “Let’s Spend the Night Together”, the androgynous thin white man suddenly grows melancholy, pensive and moody and orders a gin. It’s clear he has begun to think that maybe he’s in the wrong story.
The Rat, still groveling on the floor under the stool to the right of the dog-man is suddenly approached by a drunken Bill Publowsky. Publowsky is extremely upset, and he approaches The Rat with his large meaty arms out as if he’s preparing to do The Rat harm. Sliding his beer-soaked lips over each other almost uselessly, he struggles to speak, and slurring his words finally says something like, “I thought I killed you.”
But as Publowsky’s about to take The Rat into his death hold, The Rat bites off his head.
The man-dog looks over his newspaper and laughs: “Khe-khe-khe-khe…”
Sickened by the gratuitous violence, the thin white man drains his gin, gets up and leaves.
The dog-man laughs again: “Khe-khe-khe-khe…” and goes back to reading his paper.
At a table against the wall in one corner of the bar sit Andrew Plumb and Boss Lard’s Ego.
They are exchanging competing stories on how they killed Boss Lard. Plumb insists he stabbed Lard in the neck with a poniard, while the Ego tells of how he had been playing cards with Lard in Lard’s office, where they ironed out their differences and came to some sort of understanding, “following which,” the Ego explains, “I invited Lard to take a walk with me up to the roof, which invitation he for some reason naively accepted, at which point I brought him to the edge, ostensibly to view the panorama of the city spread out before him, and said, ‘Now, Boss Lard, all this can be yours if you simply forsake everything and follow me,’ and wailing like a lunatic, pushed him off the building. And don’t you think that’s a lot more interesting than your stabbing him in the neck? I mean, come on, Plumb, that’s so blasé…”
Toward Sweaty, Plumb’s erstwhile entertainment rag employer, Plumb’s attitude is, ‘I’ve risen higher, so I can use your dump and leave my money here,’ whereas Sweaty’s attitude is, ‘You never became a writer, so go ahead, pay me money and indulge in your delusions of success.’
But suddenly grabbing Plumb’s attention sitting at a table at the extreme other end against the same wall is Welsh Losser, who is not aware of Plumb’s presence and therefore oblivious to any possible danger.
At table with Losser is the long-unseen Doctor Wu. He has placed Losser’s Venus baby, revolting with a depraved lascivious beauty which is a kind of perfection on the table explaining to Losser how the baby is his, saying:
“So you see, Welsh Losser, after unraveling the baby’s genes and running tests on your virtually useless seed abundantly available from the sperm bank, and doing a lot of reading on the Internet, as well as the key prophetic texts of William S. Burroughs, I have come to the conclusion that this child is yours! But for that to be true, you must have had contact of an irresistible trance-like neck-breaking kind with the alien – a green boy/girl, a colorless vampire creature from a land of grass without mirrors. You must admit, Welsh Losser, that you visited the sewage deltas of Venus!”
Terribly flattered as well as astounded by the fact that the cosmos had finally deigned to make him a father (although he is nagged by the notion that the devils who recently tore up his contract with The Infernal One would take the credit for arranging this Venus baby for him too), Losser says something like, “Oh, ah, erg, nyug-nyag… let’s have a look at the little tike – nyuk-nyunk-ny…”
But as Losser stretches out his arms to reach the baby, the effort painful due to his freshly twisted and deformed back, The Rat – deranged, smitten and crazed by memories of intimate moments with Welsh Losser – scurries over in a crazed hobble, Publowsky’s blood dripping from its fangs, the beanie propeller spinning madly on its head, and opens its ferocious jaws to eat it.
Just then, a massive otherworldly arm thrusts itself out of the air and sweeps the baby off the table, disappearing with it back into the invisible ether.
Meanwhile, The Highlander Slob, brandishing his unsheathed sword, has begun to pursue, around and around the bar amid panicked and screaming clientele, the fifteen-man CHORUS, comprised of fourteen Scotsmen and a Jew.
I’m not done yet.
Filed by Jack Step, reporting live for Everyone’s a Writer Extravaganza – including their mother and the kitchen sink, January 14, 2014
* Kyiv-based What’s Off entertainment weekly (although the ads are enough to keep its little coterie of condescending hacks sufficiently smug and high on the hog to wolf out in the town’s snazziest eats, take frequent trips abroad, and rumble over the country’s broken motoring infrastructure in expensive SUVs, which they like to crow about, using their little two-bit glossy as the mouthpiece for their vanity, rubbing the have-nots’ noses in it) remains, nevertheless, flatulent, banal and dyspeptic.