‘Hello?’
‘Hey it’s Ioju’
‘Oh hi. How was your train ride home?’
I began to explain to my friend over the phone what had happened.
‘Really? You sure it was that girl from the bar we were in a couple of nights ago?’
Maybe. Now I wasn’t so sure. It looked like her but the brothel was about fifty metres down the road from the train station. I was looking through the train window on a rainy day. It could have been anyone but still, something inside of me knew it was her and that I needed to do something about this. Fill my role in her story.
‘Right, so apparently Catherine works at a brothel…’
I interrupted him.
‘She just walked into the place. I don’t know if she works there.
‘…quite a few hours away from the town where we met her.’
I understood the nonsensicality of it all. I also had no idea why I was feeling like I needed to do something about this. She was a stranger that we met on a big night out. What business was it of mine to find out more about her? Why was it that I was surprised about the apparent lies she said about what she did for a living particularly when I was the one not paying much attention to her that night. It made no sense and this irritated me to no end. I ended up agreeing that it wasn’t her to my friend to make sure that he didn’t think I was a complete loony. We also both made an agreement to never sleep in a car ever again.
By that stage I needed to go to work. I worked in telesales, selling portable fire extinguishes over the phone. The job was as good as it’s description. My boss Michael felt that he was doing himself a public service by preying on the elderly who are the only ones home during the day and pretending to be some bogus fire authority checking up on the fire safety of their respective dwellings. The pitch went something like this:
‘Hello?’
‘Hi this is Ioju calling from (towns name you were hitting on that day) Fire Safety Authority. How are you today?’
‘Oh… yes, quite fine thanks. How are…’
‘That’s great. We were just checking (towns name you were hitting on that day) residential fire safety today and we were just wondering how many smoke alarms you have in your home?’
‘Oh deary me… two actually. One in the hallway and one near the kitchen.'
‘That’s fantastic! And do you know when you changed the batteries last?’
‘Darl, we always check them when daylights savings changes over. That’s what they say we have to do. In fact little Bobby came over the other day to help us change them. You know it’s quite hard climbing up the ladder if you are an old lady like myself.’
You always knew they were going to mention that they were old in someway or the other during the phone conversation. That’s what old people like to do. I’m looking forward to doing it myself in a few more years’ time.
‘That’s great to hear that your following the recommended safety procedures in regards to your smoke alarms. Now, could you let me know how many fire extinguishes you have in your home as well?’
‘Oh… Well we don’t have any. We would just use water if a fire broke out.’
We would then break out the fear tactics.
‘But what if it was an electrical fire? Throwing water on an electrical fire would possibly kill you in the process! What would you do then?’
‘Well, I don’t know. I never thought about that have I! Oh dear. How much did you say your fire extinguishes were?'
‘Thirty dollars or two for fifty. Now I can get them sent straight out to you if I could just get your credit card number.’
‘Oh wait, I’ll have to ask little Bobby first to see if it’s the right thing to do.’
‘Mrs. Miller, I’m sure Bobby wouldn’t hesitate in the slightest to make sure that your safety is well taken care of. In fact, you could surprise him by buying two for that special price and giving him one as a present. I’m sure he would be most thankful.’
And there you have a sale. Highly unethical. Probablly illegal to claim you are representing a fake organization as well but it was my job and unfortunately, I was good at it. I was consistently on top of the sales ladder board and I never really had to try too hard. When you spend a few years working at a place, everything you do becomes a repetition of the previous day, the previous month, the previous year. My pitch was nothing more then an actor saying his lines in a stage show on a ten year run. Sure, audiences still love the actors portrayal of said character but the actor has no real thought process going on inside; the spunk that once carried him through the show, long gone. My greatest pride in my working day was to see how many squares and circles I could draw between the gaps of each phone number from the ripped out phone directory page we were working off. Sometimes it would be a work of sheer beauty.
I left work early because I had made enough sales that day and went to The Monkey House for a drink. The Monkey House was probably named after the novel of the same name by Kurt Vonnegut, but besides the name it was just your run of the mill drinking hole with football being played 24/7 on the television in the corner. It was normally frequented by tradespeople who were having a few drinks after work. You didn’t have to make an effort to be in here and I enjoyed that fact immensely. When I was younger I would go to fancy bars with overpriced drinks to be part of the cool crowd. To be in the scene. Amateur photographers from the local street press would ask for your photo if you were deemed hip enough and when the street press would come out, you would be hailed as royalty in your respective scene… for a week at least. I feel ridiculously sorry for the people that haven’t grown out of that stage in their lives and if you, the reader, are still in this depravity of social order, well there’s still hope you could get out as well.
Monday, March 31, 2008
Sunday, March 23, 2008
Dunhill Red
It was twilight by the time we got to the train station. I was to catch an overnight train back home that would take approximately eight hours. My friend parked his car on the side of the road, said his goodbyes and off he went. I had about an hour to kill before I had to jump on the train and as I was out of smokes my first point of call was going to be a tobacconist. The train station was surrounded by a small number of timber-clad stores that were built around the station back in the late 1800’s, when this town struck gold. Eventually the gold ran out and today it was nothing more then a town that you pass by in dispositional belief, before you arrive to your port of choice.
There were three open stores within its eleven-store precinct. One was a small corner store, one was a shoe store and one was a brothel. The other eight vacant stores had seemed to be deserted for some time. One, whose sign was surprisingly still hanging strongly displayed, ‘Jack’s Rubies’. This store was situated next to the brothel and I couldn’t help but wonder whether Jack was actually the man who ran the brothel, as well as the one time jewelery store with a name like that. Perhaps not, but sometimes that’s the way Ioju’s mind can work.
I walked into the corner shop to find a middle-aged man with a thick beard going through one of the dirty girly magazines. I walked straight past him to get to the counter and asked for my favourite tobacco to the elderly shopkeeper.
‘Nah, we don’t stock that one’
‘Oh, could I get some Drum then thanks’
‘Got none of that either’
I couldn’t see any packets on the shelf so I was beginning to wonder if he actually did have any tobacco at all. Normally when a proprietor of a store tells you that they are out of something, they normally give you a recommendation for an alternative product, which then, hopefully, produces them a sale. Not this guy. He was just looking at me with dead eyes that have seen too many days without any care in the world. For a brief moment I wondered how a person could get this way and that if I would get that way if I was doing the same monotonous tasks, day in and day out for the majority of my life, which saddened me a little. I needed a smoke more then ever.
‘So, what do you stock then?’
‘Dunhill Red’
‘Uh huh…’
‘That’s it. Just Dunhill Red’.
Just Dunhill Red! He only had one brand… wait not only one brand, one strength from one brand and he still kept on looking at me with those dead eyes of his not looking too perturbed by this incongruous situation. I looked around to the other items on sale in his shop to come to terms with this bizarre circumstance. One item on his dusty shelf amongst the cat food was an old tomato sauce dispenser from the 50’s with the tag line, ‘No Muss, No Fuss, No Cuss’. I looked back at the shopkeeper and noticed his blue name badge for the first time. Jack.
Since I knew that today was my payday, I asked Jack if I could buy his tomato sauce dispenser and a pack of Dunhill Reds. I gave him a twenty-dollar note and told him to keep the change. He seemed delighted at this and thanked me kindly, so much so that he then took out a packet of his own Dunhill Reds and offered me one. He lit his cigarette using a match, which he then shared with me. God only knows how old that cigarette was but along with the benzene, formaldehyde and rat poison that they pack those tailored cigarettes with, it tasted fucking dreadful.
We smoked in silence for a while not really knowing what to say to each other. Normally I would have left as soon as he had lit my cigarette but I wanted to find out if my previous thought about Jack being a brothel owner was true. His dead eyes had found some life ironically whilst having this cigarette and seemed up for a chat. I still didn’t know what to say to him. I had finished half of my smoke before I had the courage to say anything.
‘So Jack, how long have you been in this shop for?’
‘Oh, about, ohhh, let’s see… three… five… twenty one years.’
He nodded in agreement with himself. I was waiting for the old man to continue talking about the good times, the hard times, the war; the old man ramble; but Jack was not a rambler. I figured that I was going to have to work very hard if I was going to find out anything about this old man.
‘What were you doing before that?’
‘Ahh I was the last of the miners before they closed shop here. We were goin’ under and comin’ up with nothin’. Thems suits had enough and went off to Africa… Asia… or somewhere like that. Don’t know. No good with all this geography stuff. Had some cash so I bought this little place. That’s it. I’ll be sixty three in ten days times and I reckon in ten… twenty years time, I’ll still be here selling this stale Dunhill Red smoke to lads like you. Say, what are youse doin’ here in this little town of ours?’
I told him about my train ride home and that this was the closest station from my friend’s house.
‘Hmm, that’s all peoples come here for these days.’
Sensing that this conversation was going in the wrong direction, I thought I’d jolt it by going straight for the jugular. No point in procrastinating the issue more when my train was about to arrive.
‘So I noticed that the only other establishments here are a shoe shop and a parlour.’
I ended that sentence there to see how he would react. He began to laugh.
‘Lad, there are a few necessities in life for men. Two of those happen to be keeping your feet from getting bloodied from the ground and women. Even for a small dying town like ours, both these stores… no establishments, do very well for themselves. Look, how long till your train ride comes? I’m sure if you have fifteen minutes you could walk in for some relief, yeah?’
Ioju needs to clarify one point here to you. I have no opinion about people who frequent these establishments or who work for them. It is the oldest profession in the world so who am I to judge. It did make me wonder why Jack all of the sudden was pushing the towns services. Maybe I was correct after all.
‘I’m OK thank you.’
‘Yeah, sure you are. Look, I hear a quick blowjob is only twenty bucks if your in and out in ten.’
He was smiling at me with the notion that he had been there before, his two gold teeth shinning cunningly. Now I know what I have just told you, that I have no opinions of people who go to places like these, but the thought of this old man either running this place or just frequenting this place disturbed me. For all my inquisitive nature I found myself now not wanting to know anything. I told Jack that I was sure I was OK, left the store and lit another one of those stale cigarettes to put my mind off things. It began to rain lightly.
I walked towards the train station passing the shoe store, which was now closed and the brothel. Two men exited the brothel as I walked by. They were dressed in cheap rags and talking about how they were going to steal a greyhound, from someone called Chris, by using industrial strength pliers on it’s chained collar. If the dog was going to be any trouble at all, they were just going to use the pliers to smash the dogs face in, either way, they were going to get their payback on Chris.
I didn’t want to hear anymore and I needed to get away from this town NOW. I put my iPod on random as an attempt to clear my mind from everything and hopped on the train. Lou Reed’s, ‘Take a Walk on the Wild Side’ started playing and as the train departed slowly, I looked out of the window. I noticed a person in the distance walking in to the parlour, someone familiar. It was Catherine.
There were three open stores within its eleven-store precinct. One was a small corner store, one was a shoe store and one was a brothel. The other eight vacant stores had seemed to be deserted for some time. One, whose sign was surprisingly still hanging strongly displayed, ‘Jack’s Rubies’. This store was situated next to the brothel and I couldn’t help but wonder whether Jack was actually the man who ran the brothel, as well as the one time jewelery store with a name like that. Perhaps not, but sometimes that’s the way Ioju’s mind can work.
I walked into the corner shop to find a middle-aged man with a thick beard going through one of the dirty girly magazines. I walked straight past him to get to the counter and asked for my favourite tobacco to the elderly shopkeeper.
‘Nah, we don’t stock that one’
‘Oh, could I get some Drum then thanks’
‘Got none of that either’
I couldn’t see any packets on the shelf so I was beginning to wonder if he actually did have any tobacco at all. Normally when a proprietor of a store tells you that they are out of something, they normally give you a recommendation for an alternative product, which then, hopefully, produces them a sale. Not this guy. He was just looking at me with dead eyes that have seen too many days without any care in the world. For a brief moment I wondered how a person could get this way and that if I would get that way if I was doing the same monotonous tasks, day in and day out for the majority of my life, which saddened me a little. I needed a smoke more then ever.
‘So, what do you stock then?’
‘Dunhill Red’
‘Uh huh…’
‘That’s it. Just Dunhill Red’.
Just Dunhill Red! He only had one brand… wait not only one brand, one strength from one brand and he still kept on looking at me with those dead eyes of his not looking too perturbed by this incongruous situation. I looked around to the other items on sale in his shop to come to terms with this bizarre circumstance. One item on his dusty shelf amongst the cat food was an old tomato sauce dispenser from the 50’s with the tag line, ‘No Muss, No Fuss, No Cuss’. I looked back at the shopkeeper and noticed his blue name badge for the first time. Jack.
Since I knew that today was my payday, I asked Jack if I could buy his tomato sauce dispenser and a pack of Dunhill Reds. I gave him a twenty-dollar note and told him to keep the change. He seemed delighted at this and thanked me kindly, so much so that he then took out a packet of his own Dunhill Reds and offered me one. He lit his cigarette using a match, which he then shared with me. God only knows how old that cigarette was but along with the benzene, formaldehyde and rat poison that they pack those tailored cigarettes with, it tasted fucking dreadful.
We smoked in silence for a while not really knowing what to say to each other. Normally I would have left as soon as he had lit my cigarette but I wanted to find out if my previous thought about Jack being a brothel owner was true. His dead eyes had found some life ironically whilst having this cigarette and seemed up for a chat. I still didn’t know what to say to him. I had finished half of my smoke before I had the courage to say anything.
‘So Jack, how long have you been in this shop for?’
‘Oh, about, ohhh, let’s see… three… five… twenty one years.’
He nodded in agreement with himself. I was waiting for the old man to continue talking about the good times, the hard times, the war; the old man ramble; but Jack was not a rambler. I figured that I was going to have to work very hard if I was going to find out anything about this old man.
‘What were you doing before that?’
‘Ahh I was the last of the miners before they closed shop here. We were goin’ under and comin’ up with nothin’. Thems suits had enough and went off to Africa… Asia… or somewhere like that. Don’t know. No good with all this geography stuff. Had some cash so I bought this little place. That’s it. I’ll be sixty three in ten days times and I reckon in ten… twenty years time, I’ll still be here selling this stale Dunhill Red smoke to lads like you. Say, what are youse doin’ here in this little town of ours?’
I told him about my train ride home and that this was the closest station from my friend’s house.
‘Hmm, that’s all peoples come here for these days.’
Sensing that this conversation was going in the wrong direction, I thought I’d jolt it by going straight for the jugular. No point in procrastinating the issue more when my train was about to arrive.
‘So I noticed that the only other establishments here are a shoe shop and a parlour.’
I ended that sentence there to see how he would react. He began to laugh.
‘Lad, there are a few necessities in life for men. Two of those happen to be keeping your feet from getting bloodied from the ground and women. Even for a small dying town like ours, both these stores… no establishments, do very well for themselves. Look, how long till your train ride comes? I’m sure if you have fifteen minutes you could walk in for some relief, yeah?’
Ioju needs to clarify one point here to you. I have no opinion about people who frequent these establishments or who work for them. It is the oldest profession in the world so who am I to judge. It did make me wonder why Jack all of the sudden was pushing the towns services. Maybe I was correct after all.
‘I’m OK thank you.’
‘Yeah, sure you are. Look, I hear a quick blowjob is only twenty bucks if your in and out in ten.’
He was smiling at me with the notion that he had been there before, his two gold teeth shinning cunningly. Now I know what I have just told you, that I have no opinions of people who go to places like these, but the thought of this old man either running this place or just frequenting this place disturbed me. For all my inquisitive nature I found myself now not wanting to know anything. I told Jack that I was sure I was OK, left the store and lit another one of those stale cigarettes to put my mind off things. It began to rain lightly.
I walked towards the train station passing the shoe store, which was now closed and the brothel. Two men exited the brothel as I walked by. They were dressed in cheap rags and talking about how they were going to steal a greyhound, from someone called Chris, by using industrial strength pliers on it’s chained collar. If the dog was going to be any trouble at all, they were just going to use the pliers to smash the dogs face in, either way, they were going to get their payback on Chris.
I didn’t want to hear anymore and I needed to get away from this town NOW. I put my iPod on random as an attempt to clear my mind from everything and hopped on the train. Lou Reed’s, ‘Take a Walk on the Wild Side’ started playing and as the train departed slowly, I looked out of the window. I noticed a person in the distance walking in to the parlour, someone familiar. It was Catherine.
Sunday, March 16, 2008
Neon in the morning
It was early Sunday morning when we awoke with the sun blaring through the small empty gaps in the semi undercovered car park. My toungue felt like sandpaper and my breath was pushing the upper spectrum of offensiveness. My mind was hurting and was screaming at me that it needed some water. My friend woke up at the same time and in the exact same state. I took it upon myself to go hunt for some sport drinks from the local shops down the road. Anything to pick us up from where we were at.
The local cafes had begun to fry up their eggs for the early morning rush. It was 7.30am and the smell of fried eggs almost made me throw up with each and every café I walked past. I must have looked like death walking through those quiet and quaint streets, a look of disgust from each of the local passer-byes. We were in the posh end of town and dishevelledness was not the normal around here. I didn’t care though. I needed my sport drink.
I walked and walked peering into all the coffee shops to look for that magical blue, green or orange fluid in their small bar fridges with no success. It was clear that this town was empty of sport drink. What’s with that? I sat down on the kerb to ponder this and somewhere along the lines of looking at a 4WD Mercedes being parallel parked and the sun sneaking through it’s windshield, I passed out.
I dreamed about the girl that I saw at the Art Deco Festival. She was young, maybe sixteen, wearing a red dress and busking with her violin on the street corner. I didn’t think much of her when I first saw her earlier in the day. I walked straight past her to go visit the local bookshop and to find a quite café to hide in for the rest of my day. Then after finishing a delightful dinner at the local Lebanese institution I went for another walk and she was still there, busking away. She looked at me perplexed.
A local fruiterer whose shop was just opening woke me up. Apparently he wasn’t interested in having a man sleeping on the front of his gutter on a Sunday morning. He was also speaking a language that I didn’t quite understand so I wasn’t about to have an argument with him, although we did exchange some hand gestures. I remembered that I was on a mission of extreme importance and my friend was relying upon me to return to the car with some goods so I picked myself off the ground and off I went.
Bright fluorescent lights were slowly diminishing with the early morning sun but I could just make out in the distance that some of those lights were coming from a supermarket sign. I smiled and then laughed maniacally. This mission was coming to an end! After a five-minute walk I came upon my goal; this life mission; where x marks the spot; gold, jewellery, treasure! To my utter dismay it was closed.
This place really had something against me! First Vietnamese mint, then this! Why? What I had done to them? It was at that point that I aborted my mission; the resignation of pathetic defeat; such a simple task unaccomplished. There had been times that I had been lower in my life but at that exact moment I remembered none of them. I wished the fruiterer would pass me by with a shovel for me to start my own dig.
I know it’s pathetic but I just realised at that point that water would pretty much do the same thing as a sport drink. Don’t ask a visitor to a strange land for some kind of common sense for he would be to busy looking at a bright light in the distance and skipping towards it singing, ‘Sports drink, here it comes, just for me, none for you’. Ioju knows that you have done it yourself so don’t judge.
I walked into a café and ordered two bottles of water, again trying not to throw up. Who eats eggs for breakfast for crying out loud? I grabbed the bottles and ran away from the shop with haste, for I had realised that I had been away for some time, and my friend would be getting concerned. Not that it mattered. When I found him he was snoring away in the front seat of the car. I sat on the bonnet and waited for a while painfully listening to the evil sounds hundreds of birds can make. He finally woke up ten minutes later. I recalled my story to him and he grunted something incomprehensible to me, which somehow seemed to sum up the mood quite nicely. We started to drive back to his place. Not many words were said to each other on the drive home. There were a few grunts though.
The local cafes had begun to fry up their eggs for the early morning rush. It was 7.30am and the smell of fried eggs almost made me throw up with each and every café I walked past. I must have looked like death walking through those quiet and quaint streets, a look of disgust from each of the local passer-byes. We were in the posh end of town and dishevelledness was not the normal around here. I didn’t care though. I needed my sport drink.
I walked and walked peering into all the coffee shops to look for that magical blue, green or orange fluid in their small bar fridges with no success. It was clear that this town was empty of sport drink. What’s with that? I sat down on the kerb to ponder this and somewhere along the lines of looking at a 4WD Mercedes being parallel parked and the sun sneaking through it’s windshield, I passed out.
I dreamed about the girl that I saw at the Art Deco Festival. She was young, maybe sixteen, wearing a red dress and busking with her violin on the street corner. I didn’t think much of her when I first saw her earlier in the day. I walked straight past her to go visit the local bookshop and to find a quite café to hide in for the rest of my day. Then after finishing a delightful dinner at the local Lebanese institution I went for another walk and she was still there, busking away. She looked at me perplexed.
A local fruiterer whose shop was just opening woke me up. Apparently he wasn’t interested in having a man sleeping on the front of his gutter on a Sunday morning. He was also speaking a language that I didn’t quite understand so I wasn’t about to have an argument with him, although we did exchange some hand gestures. I remembered that I was on a mission of extreme importance and my friend was relying upon me to return to the car with some goods so I picked myself off the ground and off I went.
Bright fluorescent lights were slowly diminishing with the early morning sun but I could just make out in the distance that some of those lights were coming from a supermarket sign. I smiled and then laughed maniacally. This mission was coming to an end! After a five-minute walk I came upon my goal; this life mission; where x marks the spot; gold, jewellery, treasure! To my utter dismay it was closed.
This place really had something against me! First Vietnamese mint, then this! Why? What I had done to them? It was at that point that I aborted my mission; the resignation of pathetic defeat; such a simple task unaccomplished. There had been times that I had been lower in my life but at that exact moment I remembered none of them. I wished the fruiterer would pass me by with a shovel for me to start my own dig.
I know it’s pathetic but I just realised at that point that water would pretty much do the same thing as a sport drink. Don’t ask a visitor to a strange land for some kind of common sense for he would be to busy looking at a bright light in the distance and skipping towards it singing, ‘Sports drink, here it comes, just for me, none for you’. Ioju knows that you have done it yourself so don’t judge.
I walked into a café and ordered two bottles of water, again trying not to throw up. Who eats eggs for breakfast for crying out loud? I grabbed the bottles and ran away from the shop with haste, for I had realised that I had been away for some time, and my friend would be getting concerned. Not that it mattered. When I found him he was snoring away in the front seat of the car. I sat on the bonnet and waited for a while painfully listening to the evil sounds hundreds of birds can make. He finally woke up ten minutes later. I recalled my story to him and he grunted something incomprehensible to me, which somehow seemed to sum up the mood quite nicely. We started to drive back to his place. Not many words were said to each other on the drive home. There were a few grunts though.
Thursday, March 6, 2008
It's somewhere that way
We are not alone my friends. You are not alone for you have me, your humble narrator for this, my ongoing adventure. I am glad you could have made it.
She said it didn’t matter…
You see I was in this little town for a week, sheep a plenty. A town where if you had the television and radio switched off, you could almost feel like you were back in the 30’s. Pastille coloured art deco buildings lined the streets along with visitors from far and wide to appreciate this town’s festival, which was happening this very weekend. A festival where the prerequisites, apparently, was to frock up in your finest tuxedo with suspenders whilst the ladies gowned up to show off to no one but themselves. A swing band was playing in the amphitheatre whilst children threw volcanic sand at one another on the ocean shore to the annoyance of their mothers. It was there I saw her.
Everyone talked funny in this town. It was similar but jaded. A lacklustre attempt at pronouncing their i’s. It wasn’t enough to make you think you were in another country but definitely enough to make you think you were an outsider. Not that I cared mind you. They seemed nice but really, who where they? What was their purpose? I came to this thought when I was trying to buy fresh mint from the local supermarket. All I could find was Vietnamese mint, not your normal run of the mill variety. Great for a spring roll, sure, but not in your favourite golden rum waiting to be drunk, alone. It was at that point that I became suspicious.
On the second night I drove down to one of their larger towns, a few hours drive from where I was staying. I went to a gig there to pass the time. The band apparently had been going strong for decades and decades but their lead singer seemed to defy the age of age and looked like he should have been attending his first year of college. This confused me.
To compound this already confused state, Ioju, your humble narrator, was sitting down in a bar with his friend, after the gig, discussing out of all things the nature of bird flight paths when a girl came up to us for a chat. She said that our apparent relaxed nature invited her to join our conversation. We said that that was fine as long as she understood that the only way to join the conversation was to be able to intellectually contribute to our banter about the flight of birds. We had had a few drinks by this stage. She laughed as if we weren’t being serious and introduced herself as Catherine.
Catherine liked to talk about herself. She was very good at it too. I found out that she recently tried to be a journalist but found the going tough so she fell back to her old job as a financial consultant. She advised me that she made oodles of money and she liked to dabble with cocaine here and there but she was definitely not an abuser of it. It just made her feel better about herself from time to time. She found out nothing about myself.
My friend at that stage started walking away which made me anxious. You see, the one thing that I hadn’t told you was that we were planning to sleep in my friend’s car that night since both of us were too broke to afford the $30 hostel dorm prices. I had $20 and no one was going to tell me that I wasn’t going to be spending it at the bar. The problem with my friend walking away was that I realised I had no idea where I was. If I lost him, it would have been an arduous task telling a cab driver, ‘It’s somewhere that way’, pointing straight ahead of me, thinking that that would be north which was my only clue to where the car was. I had had many many drinks by this stage. I was thinking about this as my friend started drifting away and as Catherine came in for the kill to fuck a boy for the night, that boy being your humble narrator. I panicked, shoved her aside and went to find my friend who just went around the corner. I found him pissing in the alleyway, which made no sense to me when we were in a bar that obviously had facilities. Once asked, he looked at me in puzzlement and admitted that it made no sense to him either. The rest of the evening was uneventful and blurry. We caught a taxi. We found our car. We got in and I slept a dreamless sleep…
She said it didn’t matter…
You see I was in this little town for a week, sheep a plenty. A town where if you had the television and radio switched off, you could almost feel like you were back in the 30’s. Pastille coloured art deco buildings lined the streets along with visitors from far and wide to appreciate this town’s festival, which was happening this very weekend. A festival where the prerequisites, apparently, was to frock up in your finest tuxedo with suspenders whilst the ladies gowned up to show off to no one but themselves. A swing band was playing in the amphitheatre whilst children threw volcanic sand at one another on the ocean shore to the annoyance of their mothers. It was there I saw her.
Everyone talked funny in this town. It was similar but jaded. A lacklustre attempt at pronouncing their i’s. It wasn’t enough to make you think you were in another country but definitely enough to make you think you were an outsider. Not that I cared mind you. They seemed nice but really, who where they? What was their purpose? I came to this thought when I was trying to buy fresh mint from the local supermarket. All I could find was Vietnamese mint, not your normal run of the mill variety. Great for a spring roll, sure, but not in your favourite golden rum waiting to be drunk, alone. It was at that point that I became suspicious.
On the second night I drove down to one of their larger towns, a few hours drive from where I was staying. I went to a gig there to pass the time. The band apparently had been going strong for decades and decades but their lead singer seemed to defy the age of age and looked like he should have been attending his first year of college. This confused me.
To compound this already confused state, Ioju, your humble narrator, was sitting down in a bar with his friend, after the gig, discussing out of all things the nature of bird flight paths when a girl came up to us for a chat. She said that our apparent relaxed nature invited her to join our conversation. We said that that was fine as long as she understood that the only way to join the conversation was to be able to intellectually contribute to our banter about the flight of birds. We had had a few drinks by this stage. She laughed as if we weren’t being serious and introduced herself as Catherine.
Catherine liked to talk about herself. She was very good at it too. I found out that she recently tried to be a journalist but found the going tough so she fell back to her old job as a financial consultant. She advised me that she made oodles of money and she liked to dabble with cocaine here and there but she was definitely not an abuser of it. It just made her feel better about herself from time to time. She found out nothing about myself.
My friend at that stage started walking away which made me anxious. You see, the one thing that I hadn’t told you was that we were planning to sleep in my friend’s car that night since both of us were too broke to afford the $30 hostel dorm prices. I had $20 and no one was going to tell me that I wasn’t going to be spending it at the bar. The problem with my friend walking away was that I realised I had no idea where I was. If I lost him, it would have been an arduous task telling a cab driver, ‘It’s somewhere that way’, pointing straight ahead of me, thinking that that would be north which was my only clue to where the car was. I had had many many drinks by this stage. I was thinking about this as my friend started drifting away and as Catherine came in for the kill to fuck a boy for the night, that boy being your humble narrator. I panicked, shoved her aside and went to find my friend who just went around the corner. I found him pissing in the alleyway, which made no sense to me when we were in a bar that obviously had facilities. Once asked, he looked at me in puzzlement and admitted that it made no sense to him either. The rest of the evening was uneventful and blurry. We caught a taxi. We found our car. We got in and I slept a dreamless sleep…
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