Thy wee bit housie, too, in ruin! It’s silly wa’s the win’s are strewin!
Broken into three, for your greater delectation
1.
The Belfast man has a Leprechaun Skies Dublin-Kyiv flight seat in what is a tight squeeze on a small plane way up front on the right in Economy Class. But at least it’s next to the window, the way he likes. The plane is getting packed. A ruddy-complexioned fat man who immediately introduces himself in a gruff voice as Ed takes the middle seat, and this makes the squeeze for the four-or-so-hour flight virtually intolerable. Plus, Piper Nadine is emotionally overawed and completely exhausted. He just wants to get home to Kyiv. Piper can smell the fat man’s sweat.
God damn it, GODDAMNIT TO HELL!!!
And the New Nation Authority at the Atlanta airport lied – they didn’t put his baggage through to Kyiv; how could they, when they knew he was flying to Dublin and not London’s Heathrow but couldn’t possibly know how he would extricate himself out of the situation they’d put him in by twice cutting into and scrambling his flight plans to Kyiv.
It’s a good thing, Piper tells himself, his head beginning to hurt, that he’d had the perspicacity to claim his baggage in Dublin and then put it through again with Leprechaun Skies.
But now, oh, what’s this…?! He can’t believe it! It’s, it’s… Jennifer! Getting on the flight! It’s her, it’s her – as surely as he is the handsome co-owner of NAP Publishing Works, Piper Nadine (working in full and equal partnership with his scarecrow-faced sidekick, Sweaty Tank Top) – that fucking lying BITCH!!!
At the Dublin airport, he saw her turn and walk away! She’d told him on the Atlanta-Dublin flight that she’d be staying in Dublin – maybe for as long as a week! – visiting friends, before coming back home to Kyiv. And now – there she is!!!
Jennifer!
She makes believe she doesn’t see him and proceeds to move farther and farther toward the back, eying the numbers above the seats along the left-hand side.
Jennifer! J-JENNIFER!!!
She doesn’t turn around, but almost everyone else does, looking at the Belfast man like he’s gone mad.
Jennifer finds her row, as Piper Nadine contorts his torso and strains around in his own window seat up front to watch her take the middle seat in her row, big breasts bouncing – next to what looks like a shovel-headed Turkish guy in the aisle. The Belfast man angrily watches the Turkish guy stare at what she’s packing and break into a leer.
Is that what you’re gonna use that overbite and protruding mouth you can’t even close for, Piper Nadine asks. To give blowjobs to a greezy Turk?!
Earlier, on the trans-Atlantic flight, in his mind Piper Nadine had ridiculed her mouth, finding it kind of off-turning (until, of course, she took off her sweater), but now those open lips were the most beautiful sensuous configuration of differentiated flesh in the world – made by their Creator for the most mind-blowing…
Blowjobs! They’re mine! Those blowjobs are going to be MINE!!!
Piper Nadine thinks fast.
Fasten your seatbelts, please… We are getting ready for takeoff…
He suddenly befriends the fat man Ed and explains the situation:
You see, she… and I, we… traveling together… planning to be… supposed to get engaged… but they screwed everything up with the ticketing and check-in… and… and…
Oh, those Leprechaun Skies, commiserates Ed. Always with the screw-ups, always the incompetent…
Well, yeah, and, so you see, if you could, I mean if we can just, I mean…
And so Piper Nadine goes on and on, until Ed, in a generous spirit of helping his fellow man in a time of need combined with annoyance, finally gets the Belfast man’s drift, and slowly and elephantly undoes his seatbelt and, bracing himself against the armrests, rises shaking out of his seat and steps over his pooka end-seat neighbor into the isle – ah, that’s aisle – so as to let the Belfast man get in front of him and lead the way.
Ed, standing behind the Belfast man, is thinking he’s about to take the seat of this Jennifer this Piper Nadine is so crazy in love with, while she takes Ed’s old seat and her rightful place next to her sweetheart and fiancé, Piper Nadine, as Leprechaun Skies had fucked it all up, and that’s really unfair…
Jennifer has taken off her black-frame glasses and apparently replaced them with contact lenses, and the Belfast man is stunned by her eyes’ dark disarming beauty, which blink at him uncomprehending as he beseeches her, Please leave your seat and come sit with me (while good ol’ Ed here takes your place).
Next to Jennifer in the window seat is a large unwashed-looking woman with dirty brittle-friz gray hair parted down the middle. It is disgusting. Flooded by a blinding light from above, she’s squinting down through thick coke-bottle glasses reading a jumbo-print edition of “Manchild in the Promised Land”. She’s wearing a badge on her penumbral black-gray TV-static sweater that says, ‘Hi, my name is Hal Byron. I’m from the Neutral State of Arizona.’
Please get back into your seats, sirs! We’re about to –
Yeah, yeah, yeah…
In the outside seat, the spatula-headed Turk takes charge. Throwing his flat head back and wagging it from side to side as he waves Piper Nadine off with faggoty wrist action, with the utmost infuriating brazen arrogance, says, Ze woman go nowhere. She stay perfectly here. Understand – no?
Suddenly, Jennifer’s hair does not seem to be greasy, as the Belfast man had earlier judged, but rather, sleeked back with an exotic hair balm. And once again that mouth – made by God for triggering hot orgasmic eruptions. And now he can actually smell her – again – and his heart jumps through his chest. Desire, longing, regret: Piper Nadine groans from the wrecked sanctum of his innermost being.
Sii-iirs!!! Please get back to your seats at once, or –
Yeah, going, going, yeah, yeah…
Right now, sirs! RIGHT NOW!!!
The Belfast man casts his eyes down, hunches his shoulders and turns, squeezing past Ed and makes his way back to his seat, leaving Ed standing in the aisle, naively and good-naturedly thinking the seat swap was a no-brainer and quite settled between all the players. But the spatula-skulled Turk hisses, What you are standing there?!
SII-IIR!!! I’ve already asked you to PLEASE take your seat, and if you refuse to comply, we’ll be forced to…
Stung, dumbfounded, humiliated, Ed turns from the flat-headed Turk’s vicious sneer – completely undeserved – and in lumbering, forward-tripping steps that bespeak his confusion and emotional pain, makes his way back to his seat next to Piper Nadine.
As he sinks heavily and resentfully back into his seat between the pooka and Piper Nadine, his Eire, uh, his IRA, uh, his ire rises, as he’s always considered himself a reasonable type who has spent a lot of time on self-improvement. As he fastens his seatbelt, he thinks what he did was not just a friendly gesture toward a complete stranger, but went well beyond the call of any duty he owed this, this… asshole, Piper Nadine. Face it, he says to himself, you’ve been made the fool.
Ed slowly and deliberately turns to the Belfast man, who is looking out his window as the plane taxis toward its runway and takeoff. Sensing angry eyes on him, Piper Nadine turns.
That was a rotten thing for you to do, Ed says through gritted teeth to Piper Nadine.
2.
Still thou art blest, compar’d wi’ me
The present only toucheth thee:
He is exhausted… exhausted… and drunk.
All those little bottles of Glenfiddich piling up on his tray – Piper Nadine can’t believe, never imagined, Leprechaun Skies, which he’d never heard of until today, served this precious elixir on their flights – for free!
Through the waves and wooze of his disintegrating mind, which, despite all of his liquoring up, builds torment upon torment and can’t fall asleep, the Belfast man is visited by the memory holding the moment he was showing his niece, Meelee (before he knew she had the big tits) a picture of his wife in the Kyiv Poster. Meelee and Piper Nadine are seated on a loveseat in the sunroom of the Gaywall Kansas home.
Piper Nadine, handsome though he is, especially in his tuxedo and scarlet vest with the fine paisley design denoting understated aristocratic elegance and sophistication, is not in the photo, taken by a Kyiv Poster photog during the Annual Charity Dinner and Ball of the Kyiv Chapter of the Legion of Eagles.
Pointing at the picture, Meelee is eager to ask the Belfast relative:
‘Is that your wife?”
“Yes, yes it is.”
“She’s very pretty,” Meelee says, as she points to the woman, who is up on a stage behind a microphone, with her hair pulled back and wearing a black evening dress at the gala event held in Kyiv recently, just before the Belfast man flew out for his Kansas visit.
But for some reason, Piper Nadine thinks, Meelee is purposefully pointing at his wife’s chest, which is hardly there under the black evening dress, thanks to a sudden cockamamie and delusional notion that she must lose weight to look like Audrey Hepburn. He remembers how angry he’d been with his wife for taking parts of herself away from him. Yes, Meelee is indeed pointing at his wife and ridiculing her; pointing at her flat chest and laughing at it!
“And who’s that next to her – in the pirate shirt and the Scottish skirt?”
She ponders Sweaty Tank Top a little too admiringly? ‘He’s an ugly fucking son-of-a-bitch,’ Piper Nadine wants to yell at her. ‘What the fuck do you see in him?!’
“Oh, ah, the Scottish skirt is called a kilt, Meelee,” is all the Belfast relative says. He adds mildly: “He’s my business partner – the one I own my company with 50-50. Sweaty Tank Top.”
“Wow – what a cool name!” Meelee exclaims. The Belfast relative’s back is up. ‘Why is she doing this,’ he wonders; ‘What’s with the stupid little bitch?’
“I bet Sweaty Tank Top can kick your ass!!!” Bobby, Meelee’s younger little-prick brother, taunts the Belfast man at some point later during his visit.
Yeah, yeah, kick my ass, you little fucking prick, the drunken and airborne Belfast man is now thinking. Sweaty fucking Tank Top – blaaahh… Sure he can, you little fucking punk. How’s your mother going to feel the day you lug that submachine gun into the house and tell them all where to sit? In the big room. Maybe shoot them all up – by mistake…
Piper Nadine breaks a sudden sweat in panic.
I’ve got to get my Meelee out of there, for fuck’s sake, I’ve just got to! I will, I will! I don’t give a damn what my wife, or anybody – I don’t give a fuck; I don’t give a good goddamn… I…
But now the memory of Meelee and her justified mockery of his wife fade and segue into what he can only describe as a dark vision set against an aura of radiating light, for a dream or a nightmare it cannot be, as Piper Nadine knows he is awake – drunk though he is.
In this vision, Piper Nadine sees a silent giant rook making love to his wife, Lava Encole, holding her spellbound with an eye, and he wonders if the rook’s big cock is covered in a jet-black feathery plume, or what it might look like at all. As a result of the encounter, overnight the wife fills out again into an even better plumpish but sexually curved version of her former self, with her modest breasts bigger than he’d ever seen them before. She also inexplicably finds herself the next morning not only back in the offices of the recently defunct What’s Off entertainment rag (which in its last issue gave as the reason for its shutdown a bad economy in the midst of a war) where she’d been cast into the role of chief editor through a loving act of nepotism by her publisher husband, Piper Nadine, but sitting at its very helm, with both Piper Nadine and Sweaty Tank Top, formerly the magazine’s equal co-owners and publishers, locked out of its ownership structure. Speaking of whom, the Belfast man now sees Sweaty Tank Top walking through the What’s Off offices as if in a daze, unable to account for his being there, and sensing he owes his allegiance to a new and ominous power. Piper Nadine sees Sweaty Tank Top coming upon his wife Lava Encole, espying her through the glass panels of a meeting room as she stretches back in a chair with her feet up on a conference table or desk, smiling with closed eyes as she feels and kneads the renewed contours of her body, the improved mounds and swerves of her flesh, clearly enjoying herself. He is so overcome by the sight that he loses control over his faculties and, throwing himself at her on his knees, grabs either side of her with both hands. He has completely lost cognizance of her being Piper Nadine’s wife, or that he has his own ugly one sitting at home. Disgusted, shocked, and enraged, but also pleased, Lava Encole takes off one of her flat ballet-slipper shoes and whacks Sweaty Tank Top across his mouth, splitting his lower lip as she yells – SWEEEAA-TYYY!!!
The hazy cloud bursts, and the vision disappears.
Fuck this shit, Piper Nadine blurts out loud – for no reason, and to no one in particular, as drunks are wont – and takes out the letter Ned Davies – or so he called himself – had asked him to deliver from Jeb Davies Gramps Himself to one Josh Davies, presumably in Kyiv. He looks up at the letter and sees the dense black writing through the envelope, which has barely been sealed and he flicks the flap open with an inserted pinky.
He pulls out the contents and unfolds the letter, but what had been a number of lined pages covered in a dense black handwritten script is just a single piece of stationery from a Holiday Inn in Atlanta with a message in large goofy letters that says: Hi There!
He only now notices that the fat man, Ed, who had first sat next to him, is gone.
He looks over at the pooka – minding his own business, apparently, with a headset on, watching a never-filmed James Bond movie based on a book Ian Fleming never wrote.
And then behind him he hears:
Hey, hey, dude – heh – if you turn around, you’re really paranoid…
Piper Nadine turns around. Except for all the passengers, he sees no one there – no one, that is, who is directing any comments at him. He turns back to his seated position.
Heh, I told you you’re paranoid if you turn around, and it looks like you really are, heh-heh-heh But I never said so…
That came from directly behind him, Piper Nadine thinks, and he turns around quickly to accusingly eye the subsequent row but only sees, in the aisle seat, a samurai intensely watching a Japanese neo-noir flick in Gaelic translation, a Zulu warrior in the middle seat, and an Edwardian Briton in the window seat directly behind Piper Nadine, reading a traditional English broadsheet of yesteryear and drinking tea.
Without any provocation from Piper Nadine (at least Piper Nadine thinks so), the man lowers the paper and glaring over it at the Belfast man through flitting spectacles, says, I beg your pardon…
Piper Nadine turns back around. The pooka is still watching his movie.
A moment later, another voice, thick with lament, Wales, ah, that’s wails, My credit cards are all maxed out!
What does that mean, Piper Nadine thinks: to say that your credit cards are all maxed out? What does that mean, maxed out? It’s so stupid… maxed out, maxed out… what the fuck does it mean?!
But then, farther back this time, he hears that other voice again, that first, underhanded, insinuating, rasping little turd voice – which, for reasons still murky he can’t yet quite grasp, is growing hauntingly familiar – except talking to someone else…
Heh, heh, I don’t know, I don’t know… don’t make me do it…
That’s answered by an even raspier voice that Piper Nadine, somehow also uneasily and familiarly, associates with a depraved but insistent perverted old man, aggressive, desperately determined, relentlessly forward-driving, though stupid, whom he strangely imagines looking like a bald-headed fireplug-shaped kiddie ice cream street vendor with sickly glowing pink Christmas-card cheeks:
Touch it, nyug, nyag, nyaaaooo… Touch it! You like it and I want you to touch it…
Yeah, heh, no, I don’t know if I like it or not, maybe, heh-heh, anyway, I never told you that.
Naxerpri regzhits – you did.
Heh-no, you never heard it from me…
Ackafras touch it! Kashatorleewolp touch it, I say, touch it!!!
Unable to bear it any longer, Piper Nadine turns around to the whole plane:
Has everyone gone crazy?! HAS EVERY SINGLE ONE OF YOU COMPLETELY LOST YOUR FUCKING MIND???!!!
But no one pays any attention to him, except he looks down to Jennifer’s row and makes out her right breast bouncing out of her blouse as if in laughter while the Turkish shovel head grins at him demonically and tears to pieces what look like the business cards Piper Nadine had forced on Jennifer the flight before, throwing them demonstratively and erratically into the aisle and among the rows – no one appearing to mind.
3.
But, Och! I backward cast my e’e,
On prospects drear!
An’ forward, tho’ I canna see,
I guess an’ fear!
A whisky-stinking Piper Nadine, handsome, prematurely white-haired co-owner of NAP Publishing Works, as opposed to his ugly sidekick Sweaty Tank Top, against whom he is now filled with a rising anger and hatred, finally gets through Passport Control at Kyiv’s Boryspil Airport and falls over himself tearing wildly toward the baggage claim in a desperate attempt to chase down Jennifer and the flat-headed Turk. He saw the two having somehow gotten to the front of the plane for debarkation far ahead of him even though he had been far ahead of them in the seating. And he saw how tenaciously the Turk was keeping Jennifer close, even going so far as to clamp his hand around her forearm – something which she didn’t seem to mind. There’s no way, Piper Nadine sees the Turk saying to himself, he’s going to let her get away.
And there’s no way, Piper Nadine says to himself, he’s going to let that Turk get away – with Jennifer!
Outside on the concourse, just before the exit out the terminal, he miraculously does catch up and staggers boldly and angrily toward them. He tries to interpose his body between Jennifer and the Turk, and begins covering Jennifer with raw inebriated supplications, his breath and flesh stinking of booze.
But the Turk is even bolder, and with his lifted-back flat head wagging, taps Piper Nadine forcefully away with the pressed-together fingertips of his right hand, saying, eh-eh-eh-eh-eh…, causing the Belfast man to wobble backward and nearly fall over his suitcase.
The Turk and Jennifer make a hasty but jovial retreat out the automatic sliding glass doors to hail a cab, while just then, lumbering toward Piper Nadine is none other than his business partner Sweaty Tank Top, big stupid grin, who has come to the airport to pick him up. Through swimming red eyes Piper Nadine immediately notes Sweaty Tank Top’s split lower lip.
And the first thing Sweaty says is, You missed yar fookin cue at the Minotaur Conference, moit, e’en thoo Oy pooshed eet beck for ya by tyoo houren…
At which Piper Nadine rounds a wild haymaker packing rage and drunken wrath with the knuckles landing squarely against Tank Top’s mouth, felling him and making a wider, deeper crimson gash out of his split lower lip, now dripping blood on the collar of his white pirate shirt.
Wha’ th’ blooody fook –
You fucking stupid asshole, Piper Nadine growls, why didn’t you get up at the conference and speak in my place yourself?!
Piper Nadine runs tripping out the terminal to see if he can still catch the Turk and Jennifer, leaving his bags surrounding Sweaty.
Thou need na start awa sae hasty,
Wi’ bickering brattle!
I wad be laith to rin an’ chase thee,
Wi’ murd’ring pattle!
I’m truly sorry man’s dominion,
Has broken nature’s social union,
An’ justifies that ill opinion,
Which makes thee startle
At me, thy poor, earth-born companion,
An’ fellow-mortal!
Filed February 28, 2015