Untitled Short Story (unedited)

I am a social liability. I am inside everything like a God of alcohol. I am pehaps a physical being, restored to the point of destruction - and the voices ringing inside outside the greasy ear of mine call 'all the best boys,' and a rhythm of continual bathing in society begins. It's a chilly night... he has lost his voice... he has become the very thing he couldn't believe that when he cannot speak he cannot live. When he has no voice I can speak for him. 'Two bottles of Scotch, my friend.'

'Two?'

'What are you? Counting them out? Yes, two.' I say to the side, 'cheap son of a bitch.'

When every ounce of pleasure has gone we go to get some more. Pleasure measured in ounces is hard to come by.

There are now three of us. We have been talking around a table for 3 hours. An aging man of social responsibility hates the flag. A girl coughs behind me. Sounds of electric buzzing periferate the atmosphere below thin wafts of smoke from the sly cigarette before someone gets kicked out. I am an automated, never-before-seen man of destruction. A God machine.

'Have to get to church in an hour,' I say.

'Didn't take you for a church-goer man.'

'I'm not - '

'He's not.'

'I'm not. I just have to meet someone. I'll be back here if you want to wait for me.'

'We'll go with you.'

'No. You're pissed off your faces.'

'Nooo... We'll go in and... hail Jesus!'

'... It's praise isn't it?'

'I'm a Buddah.'

'No your not.'

'Yes I am. How would you know?'

'I know you. You don't do anything to be Buddhist.'

So we walk in the torso of the night and it's killing to be in this cold and everytime I'm thinking of selling myself some exquisite social idea brings me to the next place, but walking the mile down the road freezing in our psycho societies, we're shouting, we're burnishing our voices, we're trying to be giants.

'None of us can.'

'Look at them.'

'Who?

'None of us.'

'Those girls - gone down there now...'

'We're going this way.'

'We can't even get in at this rate.'

'Where?'

'The church.'

'Eer... you aint comin in... your too drunk...'

'So... I'll show that Jesus!'

Laughing I tell the other one, 'Don't let him come in. Please.'

Laughing, he does, and they leave me and my Jesus. Inside the exquisite corpse hung up, the son of lamb a walking disease too skinny and stiff up to his armpits. And where is my Buddah? And where is Mo and the the others. I don't know but I feel like I'm in a pool of blood, up to my knees, and this poor Arab eyes staring at me like a homeless man begging for change and my friend at my left begging me to sit down and I do.

The sermon went on for an hour. I left. 'I have to go. I'll see you tomorrow,' is what I said when I left and I ran back to South Road and the frosty air clamping down on my knees turning my bones to ice and icicles like swords protruding from my eyes. I am running like a barbaric man ready for meat. The sky is dark but almost the colour of gherkins and I turn a corner, running and panting like a sick dog, and I get home... I mean I get back to the pub and there they are. And one shouts, 'Here he is! Son of Man! The man himself!'

'Shut up you fucking pisshead.'

'Bar's closed.'

'Shit.'

He offeres me his Guinness and it tastes of metal like drinking blood and I taste it on the back of my tongue, and my tongue turns metal and my insides turn metal and veins to copper wiring with that red and blue plastic coating, electric soul and all fantastic sexual fantasies are metallic, a bad reaction to the beer I'm having a terrible social erection; what's more painful is we're more or less unchanging unless fighting for some cause.

'I don't have one.'

'One what?'

'A cause.'

'Did you know the onion is a natural aphrodisiac?'

'No I didn't.'

Weeds that smell of onions grow between inch-thick iron and Frankenstein bolt, shit-coloured rust and swollen obscene torsos shaped like guns when bent over. Nurse figures playing on the mind, shoving thermometers that don't read any temperature, my finger on her trigger. And on my own.

'What you need is something special, my friend. Your getting uptight.'

I feel like I'm screaming through my nose and through inches of steel and iron and the taste of rust is like scabs. It's gonna be alright. Society has taken me for a ride and it bled on my metal. I see fleshy atrophied lightbulbs gripping thin-bodied pallid celing, Wah-Wah sound in dead of night, un-living eyes staring down at me behind a million echoes of 'Get him him up, quick.'