Brian Mortimer
Life as a battlefield
My...CV...or life as a battlefield...thought due to my innate luddism and not understanding most of what goes on the internet and that questionnaire... of likes... pathetic and irrelevant as never owned a tv or gamings systems (that correct pronunciation) or have anything to do with popular culture, as all of it oui in its retarded entirety a vile pox ridden anathema...went to velasquez exhibition yesterday took my breath away with his sheer eloquence....like to think was born a luddite and this machine writing on friend or fiend gave has a cracked screen and the fucker falling apart...whilst on le subject mechanisms.. first thing that hit me whence joined the ranks of 'the social media' was the abundance (shovelled down in tasty sized morsels)of advertising,as a refusnik who refrains from ever letting such garbage(avoid like the plague) crossing my path it a shock to le system, then again here like the rest of your entertainments (lives) owned gleefully by (here,s where you should curtsy and doff your cap) uber capitalist scum doing very nicely off your backs thank-you , must be naive to think could be any other way .. bolox to that...posses this posses tother... the latest 3D flick to salivate over...new patio doors (plastic of course)...a timeshare in the algarve... another new car (ejaculations optional) ...detergent that washes your whites whiter...a once a year(exquisitely packaged) holiday serfdomage might just might allow you to take anon anon anon...go on buy buy buy whilst clutching to ones palpitating breast better and betterer valued store cards traipsing in servile orderly lines to le nearest shopping centre the mew kubla khans of consumerism, xanadus where all your wants desires can be met ,where the only things of value are carried forth in carrier bags...does anyone really purchase prints online, why would you even contemplate owning the original (PROPERTY IS THEFT) premium my arse...primavuera anaesthetised more like.. its a el numeros game in which you should (and are) be ever so grateful for le privilege of being allowed to play..endless reciprocal preening of one anothers egos (i fav you..you fav me) look how many views i got ...that like-love made my day nay week nay (existence) i must be a jolly wunderbar artisto says so on my page... please pretty please give me more affirmations of my SOUL-LESS-NESS.. secondly where there,s a bit of tit on show or god (AINT ONE) forbid some vaginal action le viewing numbers rise oui out of all proportion to its artistic merit wonder why(could it be tinternet trawled by indeterminate aged lascivious men prematurely dribbling over verily verily aesthetically posed femmes..le youngerer le nicerer to behold nix wrinkles cellulite or blemishes hereabouts) thirdly there,s le serious artistos dotted around taking themselves mucho too seriously proselytising from their oh-so comfy mink-lined ivory-towers, ersatz elitists full to le brim with existential angst.. self-reverential self-aggrandising put your own word here.... tossers comes to mind...fourthly le pseudo rebels, mickey-mouse anarchists..middle-class reactionaries (si verily) residing in smeg bought likkle nirvanas, beautifully-decored-gadgeted-to-fuck-1.8-childrened-feng-shuied-citadels-to-taste plonked in le lovely setting of parochial suburbia, look not a cushion or ethnic throw out of place and those surfaces is that polished marblesque oui flown in especially for me and my neighbours all le way from tuscany...these perfecto oases where the only blacks espanics you,ll see are trimming their borders or licking their windows clean...don,t believe these pretendo punks and their anger (its anguish) what they really after is amour poured over every inch of their being (can never be enough) so don,t forget those hard to reach places their innumerable cracks fissures and holes need extra-special care and attention... lastly le preponderance of fantasy(fantasists mucho) le lords of le ringlets and harry potterites mobs must be here also, too affeared to look (illiterate putrid mush) of course its beneficial to read something, is it fuck better off twiddling ones toes, cartoons, animation is there a difference (nix want to pollute my brain with le right terminology merci) sci fi (their bestest chums joyously living on titan or one of le other moons thereabouts) R2fuckingD2,chewbacca... chew something if i got hold of that lucas cunt...could go on won,t as one digit writing with suffering somewhat...next week we,ll be discussing le merits of twatter fixedbook mcspace instagratification etal...anyway...
born leicester (shithole in miggle of angleterre)..claim to fame had the fattest man ever to reside in anglais 1860s......
10 months old...now you,ll have to bare with me as is an anecdote my papa tells anyone and everyone who,ll listen...tarted up a likkle as rubbish way he tells...he says everytime he smiled at me in my cot, although babies eyes have trouble focusing, that i always seemed to look him over rather disdainfully, this made him uneasy, he says he feared that one day in company i would sit up in my cot and speak, that i would engage his eyes appraise him and say...you prick.....
4 moved residence to nother shithole (london)....
6 forcibly removed from contentish abode and sent to live at catholic public school (you can,t imagine all le usual institutional cruelties calamities and vices)best to move on......
13 and a half...get expelled from my fourth and last educational establishment......
(complete hatred and abhorrence of all authority in all its forms)
14 ran away to gay paree... later same year wretchedness and woe avails me ( i know way writ in diary dramatic si muchas) got corralled into doing numerous filthy underage porn flicks one has to clothe and eat (still around somewhere in the ephemera) its not funny... got saved from that and probably from myself by my dear surrogate mum isabelle a fierce feminist marxist writer see in my paintings MEN ARE PIGS
thats the fine woman in her pomp pic sits above her hearth where she fed and educated me...sends me emergency literary parcels every month...books, proust of late/(keep thinking to myself why am i reading this cunt..then the fucker hits me with line after line of the most perfect prose imaginable) philosophical writings paintings must see anon anon anon anyhow we spend every bastille day week together drinking vino carousing and generally lamenting everything and everyone......
16 started my working life in barcelona then subsequently ibiza every summer since...after muchas licking all the right people in all the right places my summers piece of piss hence able to write this on my verandah with feet up and just my dog and le surf for company el bliss whilst getting paid muchas filthy lucre...the drawback have to book and talk to cunting artistos and mighty superstar DJs... muchas telling them of their undoubted genius and originality...bunch of wanks the lot of them......
as of 2 years ago spend my winters in belize where there is still a little virginal forest left.. conspiring with ex chavezians lefties of all persuasions and indigenous folk (poverty breeds radicalism) at ways to upset le applecart... writing (two thirds the way through book on french revolution been so for over a year) KILL ALL PRIESTS...KILL ALL POLITICIANS...el revolutionaries chant they knew a thing or two back then... painting stuff firmly in dadist camp fuck galleries and those who own them and believe me have conversed argued with many they almost exclusively bourgeois middle aged white males with as much life experience as my likkle toe...and most importantly learning to play bachs fugues badly .... along the way acquired six occasionally beautiful urchins 2 spanish 1 turkish 1 french 1 yank 1 israeli and one on the way...oui am a slut....anyway hope this more informative than said questionnaire thingy... leave you with bit of diary tarted up recently bout leaving gay paree on my way to sodom and gamorrah (le beautiful isle of ibiza) scuse my spelling diction spunctuation...lack of schooling thankfuck......
Paris
It was a long time ago, i was on a train i was travelling to the south, and even though i didn,t have much money i bought myself a first class ticket, i imagined that a comfortable seat would go a little way to soothing my broken heart, i had left my girlfriend in fontainbleu and i knew then though i did not want to admit it, although we had not parted on bad terms i would never see her again.. i was reading a book can,t remember what it was called just remember it was sad, i leant my head against the window glass and cried a little the pale blue of the sky the green gold of the late summer countryside blurred by speed blurred by my tears, my tears were silent but they wouldn,t stop...so i did not notice when the woman across the aisle rose from her seat as she must of done, i only noticed her when she came back from the buffet-car, where she must have gone, for on my table she set a cup of coffee an espresso, dense and dark laced with foam a breath of steam rising from the surface. she didn,t speak to me or even pause but sat right back down on her seat and when i turned to look at her she gave me a warm smile and went back to her le monde...she was a lot older than me she had dark hair and was elegantly dressed, i would not have called her beautiful but neither would i have said she was not...i didn,t really drink coffee in those days but i drank the cup to the last bracingly bitter drop life goes on said the taste in my mouth there are more adventures ahead....if you want to know what happened next, i,ll tell you... nothing...sometimes the beginning of a story can be enough a potential encounter as gratifying and memorable as the consummation of the flesh restraint as erotic as abandon............
Beverley Hills
Your psychic clock needs time to adjust to beverley hills, to the sun, the wealth, the safety and the pool fatigue.. for the first forty-eight hours i felt i was going to be spontaneously arrested by the police for having such a relaxing time.....but officer-- what,s the charge?.... you,re way too relaxed, way too relaxed..... the truth was, of course,that i was,nt nearly relaxed enough....as i sprawled by my personal swimming-pool, dozed jumpily on my baronial-bed, idled edgily into town at the wheel of my sparking car...........
there is no sign of any work going on here...there is no sign of anyone who hasn,t got loads of money...the only black faces you see, you see through glass..trimming the borders, washing the dishes or licking your windscreen...there is no litter, there is no crime...a snatched purse in the shopping-mall would cause headlines and state-wide manhunts...there is only one activity in beverley-hills leisure..........
people talk obsessively about real- estate--partly i suppose, because its an informal way of talking obsessively about money......and brian i mean those are top prices...and i mean top, top, then i raised the money at 140 per cent of the asking price and i get it....... don,t you just love it ?
i was visiting my girlfriends parents average miggle-income beverley hills house and was being shown around by its droll hospitable owners.....from the point view of ostentation---well , the house had a monogrammed marble driveway, and went on from there....additional features included a phono-machine (that correct)-computing-system ( if you dial a certain number in the the living-room the curtains draw shut in the bedroom ) weather-control in the jungly courtyard, visual and aural monitoring of the sculpture infested grounds....in the quadruple garage is a$$900,000 custom-built clenet (i have some rollses out there too, and they ain,t bad) in the mae-west bathrooms there are jereboams of chanel no 5 and paco rabanne.... the lawn is like astro-turf, the carpets like bubble-baths. never in my life have i seen such clogged, stifing luxury.........
like all provincial elites the beverley hills beau-monde is both baffling and uninteresting, an enigma you don,t particularly want to solve.... names are mentioned with reverence, irony or contempt... some have an old-style confederate ring, others sound ersatz european .appropriately for america, the only monikers with an aristocratic twang are brand-names, perfumes, cars, domestic appliances...... there are occasional scandals..the loo-paper heiress has run off with the bra-strap boss! the deodorant queen has divorced the bath-salt giant! large partie are thrown under the cover of charity....you buy your own drinks and the money goes to a disadvantaged minority group, or to combat a fashionable disease.... i formed the impression that most of the entertaining consists of small but opulent pool-side dinner parties.. in which each hosting couple tries to out-Gatsby the other with the vintage of their wines, the poundage of their steaks the antiquity of their tableware, the multitudinousness of their servants...but there are other big dates on the calender too..............
the drama of diamonds!!..yes, diamonds apparently are a girls best friend...... this exquisite necklace ! a unison of noble gems, yours for a mere----1.25 million.....
this was the seasonal gucci party, given at the gucci arcade and fronted by the gucci C E O himself...don,t you love it ? he himself is a resplendently handsome maniac with operatic manners and impossible english....let us give thanks that god (ain,t one) has forgiven me this evening
and so on... swanky girls and jinkly pretty-boys modelled the latest creations....the maniac himself repaired to the minstrels gallery and, with tambourine in one hand and a microphone in the other, actually mimed to the latest massive hits being played by the sedative pop-group behind him..........
meanwhile i mingled with the clotted cream of beverley hills....the old men---these tuxed gods and molten robots, with silver-studded dress shirts and metallic hair, all doing fine, all in great shape.....how are you buck ? good dale, you ? i,m good,buck, i,m good...and the women, still going strong, prinked, snipped, tucked, capped, patched, pinched, rinsed, lopped, pruned, pared, but still going strong, and intending to be around for a very long time..................................
Istanbul
What will it be, then.. dinner jackets and romance, or shipwrecks on a barren coast? you can have your pick..jungles, tropical islands, mountains.. or another dimension of space thats what i,m best at ..
another dimension of space? oh really!
don,t scoff, its a useful address. anything you like can happen there, spaceships and skin-tight uniforms, ray guns, martians with the bodies of giant squids, that sort of thing...
you chose, flower says. you,re the professional.... how about a desert? i,ve always wanted to visit one. with an oasis, of course.. some date palms might be nice.. she,s tearing the crust off her sandwich. she doesn,t like crusts...not much scope with deserts. not many features, unless you add some tombs. then you could have a pack of nude women who,ve been dead for three thousand years, with lithe, curvaceous figures, ruby-red lips, azure hair in a foam of tumbled curls, and eyes like snake-filled pits. but i don,t think i could fob those off on you..lurid isn,t your style....you never know. i might like them.
i doubt it. they,re for the huddled masses. popular though.... they,ll writhe all over a fellow, they have to be beaten off with rifle butts....
could i have another dimension of space, and also the tombs and the dead women, please?
that's a tall order, but i,ll see what i can do. i could throw in some sacrificial virgins, with metal breastplates and silver ankle chains and diaphanous vestments. and a pack of ravening wolves extra.....
i can see you,ll stop at nothing..
you want the dinner jackets instead? cruise ships, white linen, wrist-kissing and hypocritical slop?
no. all right. do what you think is best. i light a cigarette..you,ll set fire to yourself, she says.i never have yet...
i look at her rolled-up shirt sleeve, white or a pale blue, then her wrist, the browner skin of her hand.. she throws out radiance, it must be reflected sun... there are other people around, sitting on the grass or lying on it, propped on one elbow--- other picnickers, in their pale summer clothing... nevertheless i feel as if the two of us are alone,. as if the tree we are sitting under is not a tree but a tent.,as if there,s a line drawn around us with chalk.. inside this line we are invisible..... space it is then.
with tombs and virgins and wolves--- but on the instalment plan.. agreed?
the instalment plan? you know, like furniture.. she laughs..
no, i,m serious. you can,t skimp, it might take months, years. we,ll have to meet regularily..
she hesitates, all right, she says, if mother will let me...
good i say...now i have to think.. i keep my voice casual. too much urgency might put her mother off...
Biaritz
Clever bugger aren,t we ?
she lay on the hotel rooms bed with me, twirling her fingers through my hair as i recited ,,ulysses,, for her.. the room was on a run-down hotels third floor and opened onto a deep verandah which--by cutting off all sight of the road beneath and beach opposite--gave us the illusion of sitting on the ocean, the waters of which we could hear crashing and dragging below.....its a trick, i said. like pulling a coin out of someones ear..
no, its not.. no, i said. its not, what is it, then? i wasn,t sure and the greeks, the trojans, whats that all about ? the trojans were a family, they lose.. and the greeks ?
violence, but the greeks are our heroes.. they win.. why ? i didn,t know why..
there was their trick, of course, the trojan horse, an offering to the gods in which hid the death of men, one thing containing another, why don,t we hate them, then? the greeks?
i didn,t know exactly why. the more i thought on it. the more i couldn,t say why this should be, nor why the trojan family were doomed.. i had the sense that the gods was just another name for time, but i felt it would be silly to say such a thing as it would be to suggest that against the gods we can never prevail... but at sixteen i was already something of a fatalist about my own destiny, if not that of others... it was as if life could be shown but never explained, and words--- all the words that did not say things directly--- were for me the most truthful......
i was looking past sophias naked body, over the crescent line between her chest and hip, haloed with tiny hairs, to where, beyond the weathered french doors with their flaking white paint, the moonlight formed a narrow road on the sea that ran away from my gaze into sreadeagled clouds. it was as if it were waiting for me.......
my purpose holds to sail beyond the sunset, and the baths of all the western stars until i die,
why do you love words so ? i heard sophia ask..
c,mon brian. why? she dragged a finger up my thigh...
after i became afraid of enclosed spaces, crowds,trains, priests and mother, all things that pressed me inwards and cut out the light. i had trouble breathing, i heard her calling me in my dreams.......
boy, she would say, come here, boy.
but i would not go. i always on purpose failed exams.. i read and reread ulysses.. i boxed and played rugby searching for light.. the world i had glimpsed by the sea....until i had beaten everyone, until i was captain, until i could get away from them all, until i was lying in bed there in that hotel with sophia, watching the moon rise over the valley of her belly.. i read and reread ulysses....
the long day wanes.. the slow moon climbs.. the deep moans round with many voices, come,my friends tis not too late to seek a newer world, i clutched at the light at the beginning of things....
i read and reread ulysses
i looked back at sophia.
they were the first beautiful things i ever knew.................
Vienna (cell)
Happy new year !!, glum gloomy,... i write a couple of pieces, indulge in three flights of fancy... its the end-of-the-pier-show and i,m the entertainer... i look at my face surrounded by exposed lightbulb and archie rice looks back. could it get any worse... i certainly don,t feel like making anyone laugh or cry or emote in anyway..... deep in the small-hours through unopen window i hear fuck you! fuck you! fuck you!....in the morning i found a single blood stained sock in the showers....................................
London (m25)
The motorway, its wastes looping london...the margin,s scrub-grass flaring orange in the lights, and the leaves of the poisoned shrubs striped yellow-green like a cantaloupe melon. four o, clock light sinking over the orbital road, teatime in hoxton, night falling on shepherds bush....
there are nights when you don,t want to do it, but you have to do it anyway, nights when you look down from your stage and see closed stupid faces..messages from the dead arrive at random...you don,t want them and you can,t send them back...the dead won,t be coaxed and they won,t be coerced..but the public has paid its money and it wants results.....
a sea-green sky...lamps blossoming white..this is marginal land..fields of strung wire, of treadless tyres in ditches, fridges dead on their backs, and starving ponies cropping the mud.....
it is a landscape running with outcasts and escapees, with afghans, turks and kurds...with scapegoats, scarred with bottle and burn marks, limping from the cities with broken ribs...the life forms here are rejects, or anomalies...the cats tipped from speeding cars, and the heathrow sheep, their fleece clotted with the stench of aviation fuel....
i see my profile against the fogged window...in the mirror my face is set...in the back seat one of the dead stirs, and begins to grunt and breathe...the car flees across the junctions, and the space the road encloses is the space inside me. the arena of combat, the wasteland, the place of civil strife behind my ribs...heart beats, the tail lights wink..dim light shines from the tower blocks, from passing helicopters, from fixed stars. night closes in on the perjured ministers and burnt-out paedophiles, on the unloved viaducts and graffitied bridges, on ditches beneath mouldering hedgerows and railings never warmed by human touch......
night and winter......but in the rotten nests and empty sets, i can feel the sign of growth, intimations of spring...this is the time of le pendu, the hanged man, swinging by his foot from the living tree. it is a time of suspension, of hesitation, of the indrawn breath...it is a time to let go of expectation, yet not abandon hope, to anticipate the turn of the wheel of fortune...this is my life and i have to lead it..think of the alternative.....
a static cloud bank, like an ink smudge..darkening air.....
its no good asking me whether i chose to be like this, because i,ve never had a choice..i don,t know about anything else,i,ve never been any other way.........
and darker still..colour has ran out from the land...only form is left..the clumped treetops like a dragon,s back..the sky deepens to midnight blue..the orange of the street lights is blotted to a fondant cerise...in pastureland, the pylons, lift their skirts in a ferrous gavotte............
Amsterdam
I'ts five thirty in the morning and i,m walking up the gelderse kade canal towards amsterdams central station, skirting the red-light district which at this hour is quiescent...the ebb of last nights trade washing against this mornings..hobbling on the leaf-plastered cobbles is a surinamese woman, obviously a drug addict. she,s wearing a bilious velour tracksuit and begging in a desultory fashion, proffering her upturned claw of a hand to each indifferent face as she passes. for once, the expressions of the chinese gamblers, wending their way home, live up to their racial stereotypes, they are inscrutable...
for me this woman is a point of strange orientation. the previous evening i had seen her further up the same canal. again panhandling, this time outside a traditional amsterdam bar.the kind that sells mostly shots of jenever, the dutch gin, and wittebeer the light lemony vile beer favoured by dutch drinkers...two dutch indigenes sporting long fair beards and the tattered colours of he amsterdam chapter of the hells angels, had grabbed her and were administering punches and kicks to her arms and legs..
this wasn,t the kind of work-out her tracksuit had been intended for, i knew them slightly i intervened....it was a beautiful evening, and the canal looked unbelievably picturesque, with its tip-tilted houses.their high gables like fretwork against the sunset...........
Heathrow (new york)
Make no mistake about it, first class flying is the heroin of travel. A few flights might not give you a bad yen, but push it too far and you,ll never, ever escape the consequences. Your metabolism will alter at a cellular level, you,ll have to become rich---or a whore. Fuck it i,ve only had one hit of this shit and i,m still swaddled in its velvet paw ten days later....
But---ah, how did it start ? i mean, did someone give it you, or what....?
Its like this, i,ve been up all night at the fag end of a rolled--up 72 hours of misled obligations,street corner burns and tiffs with desk clerks. My face is a kind of impasto of willed disintegration and i,m checking in for the saturday p.m. virgin flight to New York. I,ve spent the last twenty four hours spreading myself around town like some kind of new, err......spread. Pulling the carriage of my body into bar--after--bar--after--bar on those most exiguous of rails, the ones just thick enough to get you to.....the bar. I,m feeling my gusset---its feeling me, I,m also sensing the airport as a gusset---soiled of course. See those baggage conveyors, how they yaw and grab at the airs damp perinium---I,m all fucked up. Its not funny....
Theres a gusset in front of me for the mid--class check--in except they don,t call it that anymore. Its called something like ' priority class '. They,ve euphemised the shit out of it. The gusset in front of me is wearing brown terylene trousers and the body of a largish asian man. Ahead of him an old gusset is buying a ticket, its taking several millenia. I start to study the staff behind the desk. They are wearing beautifully neat uniforms in bright, bright primary colours. they are young and shapely. Their faces are not willed impastos of disintegration. The last rail they rode on was Network South East. Their pants are uniformly gussetless. They look like heavenly extras in a remake of A matter of life and Death. I approach the white--clad senior angel and cough up some sort of gurgle of discontent. She beckons me round to the Upper--Class check in and then it starts, the plunger is pressed home, the slippery descent into bliss.....The desk clerk slaps and tickles the machine, his lovely brow furrows, he can,t hack it. He looks up and say ' i,m sorry, mr mortimer, we have no mid--class seats left, we,ll have to bump you up to Upper--Class. ' He,s sorry! i do nothing but splutter, and stand there while he goes on slapping and caressing the moulded plastic for about twenty seconds real time. I attempt to run off in the direction of the aircraft, until called back to get a boarding card .................
Then i,m clunking through something called ' fast track '. Not as i hoped, a kind of super--rail running incandescently ahead of my stooped membranes, but really a taped--off extra lane along which the rich limp, burdoned by their responsibilities. It has its own metal detectors and security staff, and apparently its own immigration officials. Truly wealth is another country........
Then ahead of me stretch more wavering, vibrating gussets, giant black gussets along which the passenger gussets yomp. My gate is so far away that i may have to take on bearers. I,m flagging, when another virgin seraphim appears driving one of those little rubber trolleys. ' virgin atlantic sir ? I ascent. ' hop on '. And we,re off. I.m prematurely aged to this extent being carted around Heathrow like some thyroid case on a fork--lift. The faces of the healthy, as we pass them, register amusement and contempt. But i don,t care, i,ve lanced into an Arcadia of the idle. We approach the gate, the seraphim says ' have your boarding card ready, please '. And then we almost drive onto the plane. I totter off the trolley, the cherubim at the door examines my boarding card and directs me all of eight feet to my seat..........
I say seat, but really its a terrible misnomer. It is,nt a seat, its a bed . Another chore--whore appears and sort of tucks me into this thing. ' champagne, orange juice or bucks fizz '? I opt surprisingly for champagne, and she brings me an entire bottle of Tattinger Brut. This i cradle protectively, a child safe with its teddy bear in its cot, as we lumber along the runway and take off .......
Take--off is always a big dissapointment for me of course, there is always the sensation of being wrenched from the earth as if the plane were Gods (aint one) friction toy, and he a child determined to break it. This is never entirely vitiated by the fact that modern 747s are bigger than Chartres, with whole transepts and choirs full of gussets playing Grand theft auto 247 or reading novels by Jeffrey Arche
I know the sublime is still out there.
During take off i often console myself with imagining how John Martin the 19th century apocalyptic painter (see Plains of heaven and The fall of Babylon in the Tate ) would deal with the depiction of the interior of a virgin 747 as its nose rammed into some reservoir in Staines at 32ft per second/ per second. The buckling of entire phalanxes of ftse 100 CEOs, mortgage brokers and hedge fund traders could only really be satisfactorily acheived using oils............... Thick thick oils.
I,m mature enough to understand that air travel has to be rendered thus, from check in, through terminal, to the aircraft itself, a kind of illimitable boredom of corporate design. The point being that flying--- even in 747s is intrinsically so exciting, that everything must be done to make it dull. Thats why there aren,t full--length windows, or transparent floors. Thats why the steward (esse) don,t wear Buck Rogers--style uniforms and shout wheeeeee ! during take off.
Then we,re airborne. We level off (i say that advisedly). I,m at 22,000 feet and i,m drinking in bed. A senior sort of putti appears. In a New York accent, she asks me if i would like a cocktail. Asks me by name. Asks me as if my welfare really concerns her..... And not just my current welfare. I feel she knows my whole poignant history intamately, just from the tone of her voice. I feel as if she was with me in the playground when those older boys took the piss out of my zip--up suede ankle boots, and safety--pinned red trousers, and when i called them out on it, they beat me to an unreasonable pulp. I whimper, choking back the appelant 'mummy'. that i would like a bloody mary. ' is that with tobasco sauce and celery salt, mr mortimer, or would you prefer a more worcester sauce--oriented version.'? I like it here...................................
I,m going to crash soon. I can do that here, i,ve got a window seat but theres enough space between my bed, and the aisle bed, so that i can walk around the end of it, without getting near the feet of its occupant. The guy in the next bed is so far away that i can have one of my full--scale jacobs ladder--type nightmares, complete with armthrashing and convulsions, without him even noticing. Theres that and theres the blissful absence of video screen machines as well. They,ve been stowed somewhere in the interstines of the bed for take off, and need never be taken out again. Thats fine by me. I,ve never been able to cope with those little machines or any full size ones for that matter, even on terra firma...........................................
When i awake, we,re beginning are descent. Mummy appears next to my bed and says 'Diddums haveums a nice sleepums ?' Touch down is as slight as a repressed homosexual vice--cop putting the cuffs on a rent--boy. I swing my feet out of bed and stroll off the aircraft, waving goodbye to my close, close virgin freinds. I,m through immigration and customs with indecent haste. Why ? Because i,m the first fucker off the entire plane........
I,m in a cab, jolting along the Van Eyck Expressway, watching black kids shoot loops outside frame houses. Its all been such a painless progress that i cannot beleive i,m actually in New York. Until the cabbie (who,s a Haitian or some such), seeing me writing this. Enquires with great seriousness 'say, that thing called " writers block ". Does that really exist or what '?