Late evening, Vincent’s little mobile starts chirping like a little baby bird, it’s his reminder alarm, the message reads: Remember to set your alarm clock for the morning. So, Vince gets up from his potato couch walks through to the bedroom and sets his alarm clock for 6:55 a.m., which is the time he has to get up to get ready for work in the morning. Just as Vince sits down again to continue watching ‘Death Hospital’, in this episode a man is being treated for bowel cancer and could possibly spend the rest of his life wearing a colostomy bag, the telephone rings. Vince groans. He lets it ring five times before answering.
‘Hello…’ Vince sounds ghosted, sleepy, and indifferent, it’s his Father.
Enthusiastically, his Father asks: ‘How you doing pal…?’
‘Fine…’ Vince is curt.
‘Had your dinner?’
‘Yes.’
‘Cliff round…?’
‘No’
‘OK, pal, well, talk to you later.’
‘OK…’
Vince is a man of few words. Some thought he was an idiot. Some thought he was simply socially illiterate. Others thought he was a tiny little Buddha with the patience of a spider. Vince sat back down on his couch. His mobile alarm chirped again: o that little artificial carrier pigeon, carrying its messages. Another reminder…You see, Vince always sets his reminder to remind him of everything that needed to be remembered. The alert said: Lost in Outer Space is on at 8…Member to watch it.
Then the buzzer rings. Someone is at the door. It will be Cliff. That boy is a clock. You could set your watch by him. He has the precision of a robot but yet the organisational skills of an ageing drunk. Cliff smoked hideous amounts of dope and had a mind like a sieve. Cliff comes round almost every night to Vince’s flat. They sit in the living room and pass words between each other. Smoke crudely constructed joints until the air is thick with acrid smoke. Sometimes they would sit in utter silence and watch television, letting it do all the thinking. They were two little pea pods, two little amoebas, two little short sighted folk in need of some almighty optometrist.
Cliff comes in, sits down on the leather couch. Vince sits down on his couch. Cliff pulls out a bag; he always carries a bag, filled with books, papers, music and nonsense. Cliff then pulls out a pair of bongos. Vince clocked them and in his head thought: Jesus Christ, not the bongos, I hate bongos, they sound like a man falling down the stairs with a bucket on his foot. Cliff gives a big ray shady shine of sunshine smile, as though the bongos are answers, the best idea he had ever had, he smiles not witnessing the clear look of indifference on Vince’s face.
‘You cool if I play some of the bongos?’ Cliff asks eagerly as always.
‘Well, I was going to watch the rest of ‘Death Hospital’ and ‘Lost in outer space is on at 8’ and after that ‘Exact murder investigation’ is on and after that ‘Burn City Burn’ is on and then, ‘Hot Property’.
Well, um, ok, maybe I can hit them between breaks or between joints…Y’know I need to practice…’
‘Na, I’m watching this shit, practice at your own place…’ Vince was setting his rules down.
‘K’ Cliff chirped without protest. You can’t come in as a guest and take over someone’s house.
Cliff sat back and fingered through his bag pulling out a book ‘Why everything is shit in today’s culture!’ He flicked through it absentmindedly. Who gives a shit? He then got out all the utensils needed to construct a joint. Rolling papers, tobacco, weed – he pulled them all together with the ease of a child in arts and craft class. He lit the fat head of the crown – it sparked like some holy crown – the rocks roasted harsh and it tasted good. Both stared goggle eyed at the television and ate its messages, two snowmen of flesh, smoking their minds into dough, cooked like bread and then sliced up and eaten, by feeling, by indifference, by waste.
They mumbled words, half thoughts, half pleas, half understood. The silence could last for hours – so it felt. Time stretched, Vince lay silent, dumb, and indifferent. Cliff fidgeted, was desperate to say something, to trigger conversation, interaction. It wouldn’t happen. If it did it would be like asking a rock for blood. Time passed, programmes changed, Vince needed to go to bed, and Cliff had to walk home, the night ended without any miracles.
Couple of days later Vince’s doorbell went again. It was Cliff. They said hello, sat down in their places and began to construct miraculous joints. Weed was compulsory these days. No one seemed to be able to get by without a little chemical release – to escape the confines of consciousness – everybody had a short attention span, everyone was trying to open the doors and the young were completely insane, at the whim and mercy of giant forces they could never understand. Cliff and Vince sat and talked.
‘I wonder how many gallons of water are used in this block of flats every week.’
‘M, yeah…lots I imagine…’
Cliff asked these sorts of questions, unprovoked unwanted as they were, but he asked and Vince took time to consider, never really caring what the answer was. Death was the final answer, as far as Vince cared. So they sat and smoked and laughed at some comedy on television: men in bowler hats trying to climb street pavements lying down with ropes. It was absurd. It made a lot of sense. They laughed at the follies and victims on television – one woman having an epileptic fit, a man falling victim to bag snatching, a ratty child screaming at its mother as a psychologist tried to re-educate her in the ways of child rearing. It was all completely insane. So they sat smoking in a thickness of smoke that would kill their lungs one day. Vince’s phone alarm sang out: Remember to make sandwiches for work. Vince prepared sandwiches, time lapsed as the T.V. boar through the senses, and time passed, Cliff left Vince went to bed.
It was Friday night. They decided to get drunk. Cliff went out and bought bottles of white wine, Buckfast, beer more beer. He got back and Vince was smoking a giant tube of a grass joint, its pollen sense was heavenly potent, Cliff took a few drags and breathed out the blue smoke like a dragon. Vince jumped up to get his wine and as he walked out of the living room he whacked his knee of the door.
FUCK! Vince screamed the block of flats down. Vince lived on the second floor, neighbour above and below would wonder what the hell was going on. They always did. The neighbours below played life safe, they were professionals, they were married, they had the future to think of, they had the benefits of maturity and mortgage lending. Vince was rolling about the hall way holding into his knee, half in pain and half giggling in stoned stupor. He composed himself stood up and went to the kitchen to get wine, playing dead soldier.
Vince and Cliff had known each other for years they had worked in the same office, and moved in similar circles since high school. They got on well. They shared thoughts. They sat with each other smoking their minds out. Woman had treated them badly. They had treated woman badly. Both thought they knew what was best for themselves, every man does, most men are seldom right.
Women had slept with them and cheated. Women had spun giant webs of love and eat the fly and left. Women had them like putty in their hands. They had treated without due care and attention. Vince thought women were always playing mind games when in reality Vince was playing the mind game. Women thought Cliff was cute. Woman thought Cliff was simple. Woman thought Cliff was crazy in the head for taking out his penis and waving it like a flag of peace.
Both sat with drinking and joint in hand. Vince switched on the computer and loaded up his music programs. He had saved several thousands songs on to it. They listened to every form under the sun. One day people would have access to so much music and information that it would be impossible for them to understand anything in their short life span. They listened to music and talked about the music business, its falsity, its commercial profit, its bankruptcy of the spirit of youth, its conforming non conformity, all the bullshit that people listened to, all that bullshit we feed ourselves to keep ourselves alive. We turned the music up LOUD. We coughed up ball of phlegm. We opened the window and looked out into all the other blocks of flats facing us, with there little window boxes, chicken coops, we all lived mash together, in fields of quiescent concrete. We laughed out loud bellies filled with alcohol and joy. The door bell went later on. It was Charley. Charley was a wiz kid. He knew all about computer programming and the inner logic of machination computation. Charlie had a bottle of Vodka. Charlie laughed with us when he arrived. Charlie laughed in pain – Charlie had arthritis since he was 14. Charlie was small and nimble and bespectacled.
We smoked more weed. We talked through the air about the soul, about God, about incomprehensible ideas that none of us really understood. We drank a fine whiskey that didn’t burn the throat. We learned that Southerner Comfort was made with peaches. We learned to spell the word ‘transmogrification’, which meant, the process or result of changing from one appearance, state, or phase to another, we liked the word, it seemed true, to be part of the Truth of the thing. Time passed, music droned, talk talked and eyes bleary and sleepy fell shut.
Saturday – Cliff is back drinking again. Charles’s on his way. The African neighbours upstairs are playing guitars and bongos and singing sweet songs which mean nothing. It was good. Truth is Cliff and Vince had been spared many a burden by life. There parents had scaled the giant social ladder and came out good and had given their children full bellies, and objects and love and all the things that people in a culture need to live, express and consume. They were still young mid twenties. Life was on the horizon still. Paths were still to be chosen, failures waiting to be failed. They got drunk, got high, ate their ant brains and fell asleep sitting upright with the T.V. on singing songs of Holy Heaven while no one was listening.
4 in the morning, everything was silent and dead, the trees were motionless, and the clouds hushed by travelling to America or Canada or Lapland. The morning was swollen black. The cars sat still like derelict museums. Birds sang and discussed what was important in bird speak. The room lingered with a thick smoke, pray for the lungs, pray for them all. They dozed and moved in their sleep and dreamt some dreams that would not be recalled in the morning.