Un Amour de Rugger: Part Four
Yeah, perhaps you were right after all, DGR--perhaps I was (and please correct me if I'm overstating or distorting your typographical-void sayngwiching implication here) taking a dip in that notorious pop-psychological homophone of a celebrated North African, Deltic-terminating river in electing not to record the post-May-20 transactions of my lifeworld in straightforward chronological fashion. At any rate, I gots to admit that I'm having a whale's-cuntishly difficult time here getting started on the fulfillment of my commission to offer to your okies just such a chronology. There's just no getting round the fact that them were dark days, the days comprising that butcher's fortnight more or less evenly straddling the cunt of the May-June calendrical divide, days that I'd just as soon never revisit even in thought, let alone in song or story. TBS, I was in more than reasonably high spirits during the quadruple-hammered denouement of the tragedy itself--but what bloke wouldn't have been in those circumstances? Ten thousand apiece of jilting girlfriends, best mates, dogs and cars can't make up the sum (on the credit side) of a sense of being swept up in something big and important and public, a sense that I was positively intoxicated by from the moment when I re-entered the Milton after my abortive Ronnie-hunt, all the way through to the moment, a good three hours later, when I finally parted company with Jimmy on the pavement at the intersection of the High Road and Totteridge Lane--a convenient midway point between our two residences at which we'd instructed the driver of our Camden-Town-hailed cab to drop us off. So then: throughout the whole of this Biblical cinematic-epic-spanning interval, barring the obligatory Kenophobic rain-dance at the site of the former temporary resting place of the McGyvermobile, I made not a single reference or allusion to any of my misfortunes, not on account of any access of the kind of slack-lower-lipped stoicism you quasi attributed to me in the last post, DGR, but out of a sheer, unadulterated, unregenerate un-git-shivvingness vis-a-vis these selfsame misfortunes. Why then did Jimmy feel compelled, as I was shaking his hand good-night, to say to me, 'If there's anything you'd like to, erm, talk about, Rugger don't hesitate to give me a bell' [judifully thereupon dictating to me his mobile number]? Was it because I had, for all of the aforementioned prevailing Haitch-Esses, yet managed at some point or other along our way home to betray, at my utterly gormless insoo, and courtesy of some telltale phizzyonomical or so-called body-linguistic sign (say, a momentary moistening-over of the okies, or a subtle--albeit more settled--obtuseness of the shoulder-angles) a soup's son of a premonition of the spiritual cuntretemps that was about to overwhelm me? Or was it simply because he thought it was the decent, gentleblokey thing to say in the light of all the setbacks I'd just suffered, regardless of how well or poorly I was taking them? Either way, in the short-to-medium term, it turned out to be an offer wisely if (SPOILER WARNING!) gratuitously tendered.
TBS (2), for the full duration of the next day, I was still very much as Rainright as Laudon or Rufus at a Chinese takeaway--still basking in the adrenal afterglow of the night before, if you will; and still more than capable of fuel-celling that selfsame reservoir of adrenaline into a chrono-hoovering agenda of bachelorly high-jinks. I awoke at the arse-crack of bourgie dawn, miraculously un-govered and primed for the tube trip to Camden Town necessitated by my remission of the McGyvermobile from the council garage. First thing in the bohemian morning (ca. 11:00), I dragged my Thierry Henry punching doll up from the basement, where it'd been boxed up, safely out of sight of the most prying pair of Esmeraldan okies, for going on a full month; and betwixt the two walloping so-called cardiovascular workouts involved, respectively, in re-inflating the fucking thing and juking it out with it afterwards for an hour or so, come about 2:00, I was well knackered and feeling a mite peckish to boot. So, hopping on the blower, I rang up Pizza Express and ordered up an extra-extra large chicken tikka pie, which I spent the best part of the late afternoon/worst part of the early evening leisurely-ly devouring in tandem with the swillation of a butcher's- three-quarter-dozen of Hoegaardens and the spectation of my Best of the Randy Nannies of the Northern Line DVD (extras and all!). My last conscious pair of acts that day consisted in affixing to the lid of the pizza box (which, together with its offering of a single, full, untouched slice, I'd left at its original station on the coffee table, as a sacrifice to the maisonette's bachelorly penates) a post-it note, and scrawling thereupon the warning: 'DO NOT DISPOSE OF BEFORE 1/6/06!'
It was only on Monday morning, up in Potters Bar, that the whole shithouse-building-site's load of bricks comprised by Saturday's disasters finally hit me--for only then did I have to contend, for the first time, in all of my pathetic bereftness of moral support back home, not merely with the arid abstractions of matelessness, girl-lessness and doglessness, but with an all-too-concrete entity that was essentially, implacably at war with the very notion of my survival, namely the erect ten-inched schlong of Mike Ayhern, sheathed in a rawhide condom ribbed on the inside for his pleasure, and barbed on the outside for my pain.
'Oh, come now, MDF, surely you don't mean to say this chap literally buggered you.'
'Of course not.'
'Well, in that case you had best recast the sentence. For having paired Mr Ayhern's metaphorical membrum virile with a predicate--viz, all-too-concreteness--that is a veritable by-word of literality, you do rather leave yourself wide open (in a strictly metaphorical sense) to being construed as saying that the chap did in fact have one off with you over his desk on the morning of 22 May 2006.'
'Fine. For the sake of your hermetically waterproof logician's anorak (and, I might add, to the detriment of prosaic economy), let the last sentence read, from namely onwards: Mike Ayhern, who called me into his office first thing that morning to give me a right proper metaphorical drubbing in punishment of an entirely innocent error that he, with all of his characteristic cuntishness, had seen fit to construe as an index of my berkishness, gormlessness, and all-round professional incompetence and unworthiness of the title of Junior Accounts Receivable Associate at Proctologitex. The scene of the drubbing is worth dramatising in detail, if only for the sake of lengthening the nubbishly short shrift I've been giving to the Proctologitexical fifth of my existence in these pages for galloping donkey's months:
I entered Mike's office to find him not seated behind his desk, as per usual, but rather half-sitting, half-slouching on the front end of it, with his arms folded, not behind his head (APU2), but in front of his tits, against which he had a manila folder clasped in one hand, leaving the thumb of the other hand free for the spiritedly stroppy bout of nail-gnawing he was submitting it to. In discovering him in this pose, I knew straight away that I was in for something much more serious than the his stock-in-trade rhetorical rabbit-out-of-the-arse conjuring trick. I knew, in other words, that whatever misstep he was about to charge me with would be one that he, in his besotted imagination, actually believed me to have made; that it wasn't going to be a routine matter of his fabricating such a misstep for the sake of fobbing his own slackness off on to the next bloke in the chain-gang queue (i.e., YFCT). So I tautened my schphincter as best I could, twisted my gob into a suitable compromise between a coprophagic grin and a rictus of shame, and wished him a sir-punctuated good morning.
'Good mollning, McGyvelll,' he says, extracting his thumb from his mouth. Then, after taking a few seconds to tongue-gob out the residue of thumbnail shrapnel (a couple of fragments of which happen to land on my shirtyfront, doubtlessly by design), he unclasps his arms and tenders me the folder, holding it gingerly-ly, flatwise, betwixt thumb and forefinger, as if it's a dirty nappy. 'I'd like you to take a look at this document, if you would.'
I open the folder and, once I've scanned the front page of its contents, can discern no present dramaturgical mandate to forage any deeper into them.
'It wouldn't happen to look the least bit familiar to you, would it?'
'Yes. It's a printout of that report I sent you last Thursday.'
'Spot on! And what, may I ask, is the manifest subject of said report?'
'TOTAL REVENUES FOR PRODUCT NUMBER PT6467-stroke-nought-double-nine: ANISETTE TAMPON: FY06, Q3.'
'Bingo! And judged on its own merits, as a thing of its kind, it could not be more perfect--it's a report fit for inclusion in the anals [sic] of our training workshops. Why then, I ask, am I not congratulating you on a job well done, eh? Why the conspicuous dearth of champagne and cigars in this vicinity, eh? Eh?'
YFCT, after having subtracted the two supplied to me by my apparently gormless memory from the two of the perfect report: 'Because you...didn't ask me...to do a report on...revenues for...a-a-anisette tampons in the last f-f-fiscal quarter?'
'Kismet! I did not ask you to prepare for me a report on anisette tampons, i.e., a tally of the total worldwide revenues of that sole and specific product; I asked you, rather, to prepare for me a report on the Tampan's anisettes--which is to say, a tally of the total revenues of all of our anisette scented or flavoured products--tampons, suppositories, salves, ointments, lotions, douches, enemas, tents and shunts--billable to the account of one Steven Kosiba, chief purchasing agent of our main stateside distributor, which, you will of course recall, is headquartered in Tampa, Florida. Well, what have you got to say for yourself, McGyver?'
[YFCT, in all candour:] 'I thought it was an, erm...a G-g-gallicism.'
'A whaticism?'
'A Gallicism. I thought you were, erm, practising your French. You know, by pluralising the adjective, and putting it after the noun. I thought it was something along the lines of crêpes suzettes--tampons anisettes, that is.' (as, I rather assumed, my sporting rejoinder of Oui, oui, M. Ay-HERRN! made all too clear, but you know what they say about assumption [i.e., 'It ain't just a town in Illinois/'It makes an ass out of u and mption'.])
'McGyver,' he remonstrates sternly, whilst flashing each of his sweat-soaked pits at me in turn, by way of a pair of cuntishly smug body-builder's forearm-curls, 'do I look like the kind of guy who can afford the off-the-clock luxury of swotting up on dead [sic] languages, let alone the on-the-clock luxury of flouting [sic] his knowledge of said languages?'
'No, sir.'
'Indeed not--in marked contrast to you, who, based on your misinterpretation of my instructions, certainly look like the kind of guy whose spare time would wisely be devoted to a term or two of remedial courses in living English. They offer them up at Uof H, you know. And naturally, the company would reimburse your tuition. That's all by the by for now, though.' [Rising, circling back to behind the desk, collapsing into chair, planting both elbows uncharacteristically downwards on to the desktop, pressing the co-jones of each hand against their complementary okie-lid, exhaling wearily.] 'This little cock-up of yours has pushed me bum-flush against my deadline for presenting revenue estimates for FY07 to the CFO on Wednesday morning, and in relation to a market-cum-production-line-sector that I simply can't afford to play dumb about. You see, as of the close of FY05, the sale of anisette-flavoured-or-scented products accounted for a full third of our net profits, whilst the sale of products to the States across the board accounted for a full two-fifths. If the report I'd asked you to do had been on, say, the sale of chocolate-flavoured-or-scented products to Mexico (net profit contribution of our chocolate-flavoured-or-scented products in FY05: 1.4%, of our Mexican distributor in that same fiscal year: .8%), in its absence I could afford to fudge a bit (no pun intended). I could say to the CFO, We haven't got all the figures in yet; there are still a number of outstanding invoices (you, of course, know how those Mexicans are... [withdrawing fingers from okies, feigning to nod off, and snoring the word mañana into each of three or four exhaled breaths. Then, rousing himself, and assuming a mien of cuntish peremptoriness:] But as for the Stateside anisette revenues, the fudge factor there is effectively nil. I can't just traipse into the CFO's office and say, That's the total for FY06, give or take 10 or 20 millions. She'd hand me my walking papers sooner than she would a loo roll to stop the ensuing flow of diarrhoeah. Thus, my directive to you, McGyver, is, Get me that report by start of business tomorrow. I don't give a tinker's fuck about the means of execution--farm it out to the folks in accounts payable, hire a temp accountant on your own dime, just get it done, or else...'
[YFCT, hoping to secure a few curried brownie points by adverting to Mike's own idiom] '...My ass'll be grass...?' [But he evinces not the slightest appreciation of the fellationary effort, and closes up the ellipsis in an ominous whisper:]
'...No, this time round, that'll be my ass's privilege. This time round, yours'll be lucky to finish up as compost.'
So I cringe my way back to me cubicle, log on to the 'puter, crank up the Excel and start to work on the report--or, rather, try to start work on it. For, not to to try your patience, DGR, by going into the technical side of things to such an extent as would make last post's footerly digressions seem like a complete screening of the Emmanuel movies by comparison (nor to squander my own free time on the rehearsal of such work-related minutiae as won't ever see the light of utilitarian day in my private lifeworld [save, perhaps, remotely, vis-a-vis Arsenalophobic augury in the '06-'07 league season]), whilst the spreadsheet template I'd sworn by, and plied my bread-cum-butter with, for two years-con-cambio, was duly and efficiently keyed to performing client-to-product calculations, as well as calculations vectored along the axes of product and product attribute; it was utterly un-cut-out for squaring the client field with the product attribute one, as necessitated by Mike's commission. And so I was compelled to fret and fume away the remainder of the work day and then some rebuilding the fucking thing from scratch, which left the running, formatting and despatching of the report itself to be completed back at the maisonette in the great large ones of that evening and the wee small ones of the following morning. TBS, I'd taken work home scads of times before--CIP, for last week's running of the original, undesired AT report--but always for the sake of the sheer theatricality of the gesture, at the arse-end of eight-point-five leisurely hours of browsing and instant-messaging. This time round, as Mike had put it, the homework followed hard on the arse of nine-point-five hours of concentrated, schphincter-dilating workwork, which rendered its completion commensurately knackering. How often I yearned, during the first half of that lonesome midnight-oil-burning session, to hop on the blower with Esmeralda or Ronnie and kvetch to her or him, You won't believe what this cunt's put me up to! knowing full well and up front that the making of such a phone call was entirely out of the question. How often, and more pathetically, during the second half of that selfsame session did I pause, in the interval between a Hoegaarden run to the fridge and the re-ensconcement of my blistered arse-cheeks in my desk chair, to apostrophically address that selfsame plaint (i.e., YWBWTCPMUT!) to Esmeralda or Ronnie qua third wheel, only to trail off round about the second tee on realising that had either of them been present, he or she would more likely have gloated over my plight than sympathised with me in it. It didn't even occur me try giving Jimmy a bell, which, in arse-sight, I think is just as well [Ken take these unintended rhymes!]. True, strictoo sensoo, he did say I could ring him about anything, but I from the start I rather tended to construe that indefinite pronoun as shorthand for anything--and only anything--directly pertaining to the girl, the dog the best mate or the car; and, in any case, kvetching about any or all of those entities whilst I was immersed in the running of my report would have been about as pointful as inveighing against Hoegaarden or Marlboro during an all-day, bedridden 'gover...
...such as I would have submitted to by default on Tuesday, had I not already pissed away the full balance of my sick leave during the UEFA semifinals; and had I not, moreover, judged that a no-show following immejiately on the heels of my submission of the report (viz. at 11:48 Monday night) would inevitably count as an admission of defeat-cum-incompetence, if not as a de facto resignation, in Mike's rabid okies. As it was, come Tuesday morning, I had to make do with gulping down a pair of profin tablets and driving up to PB as per routine. Once there, I sat glumly at my puter and waited and waited for some blowerly indication, be it positive or negative, of Mike's appraisal of the report. But none was forthcoming on that day, or on the next. Finally, towards lunchtime on Thursday, I got an email from him that read, 'MY MEETING WITH THE CFO WENT, ON THE WHOLE, SATISFACTORILY. [Mike, BTW, prefers to compose his correspondence all in caps--presumably in cuntish emulation of the telex machines of newsrooms of yore.] SHE DID, HOWEVER, MAKE AN ESPECIAL POINT OF FLAGGING THE STATESIDE ANISETTE ACCOUNT "FOR FURTHER REVIEW". I WILL KEEP YOU POSTED AS TO WHETHER FURTHER INPUT ON THIS MATTER IS REQUIRED FROM YOUR END. M.A.'
Well, on the face of it, this was a classic Ayhernian communication, intended from the get-go to keep YFCT on tenterhooks by whatever cuntishly underhanded stratagem proved ready to hand (BTW [2], if any of you DGRs out there can be arsed to explicate for me the literal underpinnings of this metaphor of 'keeping someone on tenterhooks,' I should be much obliged to ye. The same goes for the etiologies of such equally commonplace and equally unfathomable idioms as 'red herring' and 'benchmark figures'. As you might well guess, I haven't exactly had the leisure of late to nergle 'em out for meself.). So the CFO had flagged the sector subsumed by my report for further review. What then? Who was to say she hadn't likewise flagged all 10,000-some-odd other permutation-lets of the FY06 revenues? It was only by the most wildly paranoiac stretch of Fanny Adams's imagination that this here CFO-fficial flag could be refashioned into a bandana or babushka tied snugly across the adam's apple of YFCT, ready-looped to serve as an implement of strangulation at a second's notice, courtesy of the most cuntishly understated of nods from the CFO to her henchman (i.e., Mike). But in the light of the unprecedentedly dire nature of the SOA to hand vis-a-vis both Mike and myself, I couldn't help but stretch my own imagination to such semi- or pseudo- or quasi-delusional limits. I couldn't help but think, you see, that if I actually had finally and definitively got Mike out of such an unprecedentedly tight squeeze, that at least a drop or two of the elation and relief precipitated by his escape would have spilt over into the supertext or subtext or just plain fucking text of the message bearing the intelligence thereof. That drop or two might have taken the form, say, of a digressive bit of shit-shooting or piss-taking on my perduring need for remedial English courses (qua running joke linked to our most recent cul-a-cul), or it might in equal likelihood have manifested itself under the laconic auspices of the one-word sentence Thanks. Granted, such an access of bargain-basement uncuntishness would have been completely out of character for the so-called Mike that I knew, but then these sorts of co-jones-to-the-wall sitches were ready-pneumatised to suck the milk of human uncuntishness out of the schlongs of the most cuntishly supercuntish of ingrates.
So, in short, on Thursday afternoon, I braced myself for the worst, and budgeted my time for the next day-and-a-half accordingly, swearing off all interwebbial commerce with the Randy Nannies and furiously trailing every lead I could nergle out of the verbal combination of employment, accountancy and Barnet; which combo eventually succeeded, at mid-morning on Friday, to the more desperate one of employment, service sector and Greater London, having in the meantime yielded nothing more promising than the homophonic namesake of the actor portraying the bloke who rode the Haitch-bomb down to its target in the penultimate scene of Dr Strangelove. Here again I found myself in a sitch in which Esmeralda's help would have proved indispensable, and to a much more tangible degree than WRT the first one. Long before--on the morning after our first date at Emchai, as a matter of fact--she had spoken to me of openings in the finance division of her company, and urged me to apply for one of them; but I would then hear nothing of it, not until our so-called relationship had jelled and I could assure myself of being able to work arse-cheek-by-face-jowl underneath her in the absence of any so-called hard feelings. Now that I was afforded the jubious treat of viewing the S-RC and my professional position under the same aspect--viz., at best, that of a cryogenically preserved corpse, at worst that of a long-since-worm-forsaken skeleton--I would gladly have swapped this position for that of a gainfully employed Esmeraldan underling saddled with a restraining order and alimony/child support payments for the rest of his natural.
Wellsir, as I've pretty much already intimated, my futile job-searching binge carried me clear on through to knock-off time on Friday, at which point I was much alarmed to find the usual end-of-the week combo of physical knackered-dom and mental-cum-spiritual hyper-atrophy replaced by a kind of organism-corroding, trans-PMS-ian dementia that could scarcely be put to rights by the ritualistic pre-Esmeraldan-era butcher's-half-dozen pints down at the Ape. And, in any case, as I dementedly pseudo-reflected during my white-knuckled, lead-footed commute back to Woodside Park, I couldn't very well show my ex tempore arse at the Ape without running the risk of happening upon Ronnie, and thereby commmitting myself to a second bout of shirtycuffs that I was in no fit state either to withstand or to impose. Eventually, back at the maisonette, at the probable instance of my third or fourth Hoegaarden, I recalled Jimmy's standing invitation to a chinwag; and subsequently realised that by cashing in that invitation on this very evening I might very well, or at the very least, be able to kill one bird with one telephonic stone. Which istersay that I realised that if Jimmy happened to be working that night, he'd be able to let me know whether Ronnie was, as they say, indahouse (bird #1); and that if Ronnie turned out not to be present therein, then perhaps Jimmy himself might be amenable to hanging out after hours with YFCT (bird #2), his orioles agape for the reception of gobfuls of obloquy concerning The Girl, the Best Mate and that new addition to the catalogue, The Boss (MA not BS).
But I finished up missing both birds. Mind you, at first, when Jimmy's Hello at the other end of the blower was attended by the usual pubberly background din of punterly shouts, groans and guffaws, I had no grounds for assuming anything was the least bit amiss. Only with his answer to the question of whether Ronnie was anywhere thereabouts did things started taking a turn for the shittier, by way of the twilight zony:
'Ronnie? Ronnie who?'
'Mr Ronnie Fucking Corbett. No, I mean Ronnie Livingstone, of course.'
'Why should he be here?'
'You might just as well ask why he'd be anywhere else on a Friday night.'
'What the..?' There follows a few seconds of speechlessness in which I'm mystified to pick up the sound of a drawn out, inarticulate and decidedly unhuman howl amidst the backgroundage. 'Oh, I understand now. Look, Rugger, I took the job at the Milton.'
The name Milton having entirely lost its extra-poetic bell-ringing capabilities, shay mwha, over the course of the past six days, I shoot back gormlessly, 'At where?'
'At the Milton in Marylebone, where we finished up after the competiton. I'm there right now, you see, and not at the Ape.'
(YFCT, understandably crestfallen, at least from my egocentric povey:) 'Oh. Well, then, I suppose I should let you go.'
(Jimmy, tray sympa, ATC): 'Yeah, I'm a frayed sew.' Then he breaks off to shout, off-blower, Hey, Arséne! [!] ARSÈNE! Get your lipstick out of Lady Mao's front bottom. There's a good dog. ['It's five days, max, into the gig,' I says to myself, whilst eavesdropping on this outburst, 'and he's already on a first-name basis with the canine clientele. Sic transit somethingorothera somethingi.'] 'Look, Rugger, I'm off next Wednesday. Why don't you ring me up then, when we can chat at length?'
[YFCT, massaging his lower lip into a due state of slackicity beforehand:] 'Oh, yeah, Wednesday, sure.'
'Cheers, Rugger.'
'Cheers-stroke-thanxalot, Jimmy.'
Well, I couldn't very well be sore at Jimmy for not having being available all along, round the clock, like some sort of one-man Ruggerian suicide hotline. Ken alone knew he had his own inverted cross to bear, the icey of the actual new bloke behind the counter being, after all, hewn from more or less the same strain of pinewood as the icey of the prospective new bloke on the pavement (viz. that of Potters Bar, out front of P-Tex HQ). Granted, if things turned sour at the Milton, Jimmy could presumably drag his tee between his ell back up to the Ape; whereas my only fallback option as of then (and now) consisted in the possibly mythical Greater Norwich Old Boys' Accountancy Network. But then again, I had to quiz myself, was frittering away one's late youth as an East Angelinan accountant necessarily a less enviable hemi-semi-destiny than that of frittering away one's early middle age (Jimmy, at 36, being a full decade older than YFCT) as a Central Londinian barman?
Suffice it to say, the philosophical thought-train paraphrased in the last paragraph offered scant consolation or distraction beyond the butcher's-dozen immejiately post-telephonic minutes it required to clear my brain's small intestine (the human brain manifestly lacking a large intestine, let alone a schphincter, unless the gob be taken for the latter); in its caboose it left a butcher's-odd-four-dozen hours that had perforce to be filled largely by less mentally-cum-spiritually strenuous activities. The remainder of Friday night was pretty much taken care of, as I'd already been half drunk when I rang up Jimmy; four or five additional Hoegaardens, consumed across three or four hours of televisual channel-flip-booking, carried me through to the point of comatosity. And, subsequently, Saturday day was equally prettily seen to by my having foregone the usual prophylactic regimen of two profins the night before, and thus encouraged myself to sleep away the ensuing gover through till dusk. But from Saturday evening onwards, it was a different story. Feeling peckish round about six, I walked over to Quadruples to pick up a sandwich, placing my order on-site, at the register (as against phoning beforehand), so as to hoover up the largest possible chunk of time in making the round trip--not that standing round watching the sedentarily obese mums, dads and tykes wolfing down their sandwiches in the dining room during the extra butcher's-dozen minutes did much more to raise my spirits than edging past the ambulatorily svelt couples, single blokes and single blokesses walking their dogs on the pavement had done on the way over, or would do on the way back (a backway interrupted, incidentally, by a Hoegaarden-refreshing pit-stop at Stora Market that I'd rightly written off beforehand as 110 per cent spiritual drag [there being axiomatically precious few more demoralising sitches than the SM-ial -inevitable one of being sayngwiched in a queue between, on the front slice, a pongsome toothless bloke telling out in small change his total for a shorty of Southern Comfort and, on the back one, a chirpy, wine-bottle-overladened pair of blokesses obviously bound for a poshocratic bacchanal to which you, in virtue of your boorish and loserly totage of a cargo of hops and barley, daren't dream of securing an impromptu invitation]).
As for the remainder of my inaugural full-on bachelorly weekend at the maisonette, the less said about it the better. I need only remark, itward-wise, that, in cuntishly perverse contrast to its typical counterpart in the pre-Esmeraldan days, on the Saturday nocturnal portion of it I was utterly bereft of my one infallible de facto source of spiritual consolation: viz. a televisual potential Arsenalic-arse-reaming. For the '05-'06 Premiership season, with its reliably recursive Saturday-evening arse-offs, was by now a distant memory, and the '06-'07 season was as yet but a twinkle even in the schphincterly brown okies of such cuntishly far-seeing cunts as Arsène Wenger. It could be argued, indeed, that the particular weekend I'd happened to pitch up on-stroke-into in my bachelorly singlehood constituted, indeed, the very epicentre of the Sargasso Sea of Rugger-friendly sporting, what with the World Cup still looming off on the horizon of the last weeks of the following month; as likewise loomed Wimbledon--which, I confess, I've always had something of a soft spot for, on account of all the grunting and heaving and knicker-flashing spectacularly evinced by its female combatants.
Thankfully, come the bohemian dawn of the new work week, fortune began, if not exactly to smile on me, then at least to scrunch up, YFCT-ward, the horizontal cunt of her gob on one side and the other and then back again, as if to say, 'This bloke's not quite done for yet.' First off, on Monday afternoon, Mike called me into his office to commission a fresh report on, as he put it, the liquid and semi-liquid component of our stateside anisette revenues, inclusive of douches, enemas, ointments, lotions and salves; and exclusive of tents, shunts, suppositories and tampons, due firstthing Thursday morning.
'So, th-th-then,' I stammer back to him, 'I take it my global report on st-st-stateside anisette revenues was s-s-satisfactory?'
'Oh yes,' he replies, okie-brows scrunched quizzically against okie-balls cast rightwards and downwards towards some conjectural second wheel (his daughter Brianna, to judge by the angle of contact). 'Yes, absolutely. I should have thought that fact had been made plain in the text of my email. You really,' he adds, rising and ushering me out of the room with one hand stretched threshhold-ward, the other resting on me right shoulder, 'ought to give serious consideration to this idearof mine of taking courses in remedial English at the University of Hertfordshire. The whole enterprise'd do you a world of professional-developmental good, I'm sure...' One of these days Mike, one of these days...Pow!--Right in the shitter [i.e., the poo-chute, not the gents' (Although, come to think of it, vis-a-vis the arse-footing in question, the gents would pretty much be the ideal venue, viz. a small secluded chamber, with no windows and a lockable door).].
Thus, from Monday afternoon onwards I was off the old Proctologitexan tenterhooks, and at leisure to affix my carcass properly, for the first time, to the
Esmeraldan ones; which promptly gave way in their turn upon my reflecting that if my girl had really, in all Sinatraness, wanted to be alone for a bit and only that selfsame bit, I would surely have heard from her by now. For, try as I might to extract the most whale-schlong-lengthed connotation out of this wee, ant-schlongesque word bit, canvassing every single one of its myriad 'ceptations--drill fixture and antique Yank unit of coinage included--I was unable to delude myself into making it do as a stunt-double for nine days and counting.
Hence, I was all but resigned to taking my fate as a newly prospective terminally celibate bloke in the arse, to regarding my terminally depressing itinerary of the previous weekend as a veritable template for the rest of my natural weekends; when, on arriving back at the maisonette on Tuesday evening, I was bemused and beflummoxed to discover the following message on the v-mail of my land phone:
Hi, it's...me. Listen: I heard about what you did the other night, about your...shirt-off with what's-his-name. And I have to say, I think it was rather brave of you, taking him on like that. Anyway, darling, give me a call if you're up to it. Bye.
I had to listen to a second time through to make sure it was from who I thought was from, and that it referred to the event I thought it referred to; that I hadn't misidentified the timbral fingerprints of the voice of the caller, or slept through her sales pitch for a Mallorcan holiday. But once I'd ascertained that all was as I'd taken it to be the first time round, there immediately popped into my gourdita the question, How the fuck did she learn about my abortive scuffle with Ronnie? Surely not from Ronnie himself (else why would she pay homage to my 'bravery'). And by a subsequent so-called process of elimination, that left only one other possible hog-snout as the medium of communication, namely--
--'I confess,' Jimmy said to me roughly 25 hours later: 'It was me wot done it.'
We were sitting in the so-called bar area of the 3 Oceans, a South Woodside Park-stroke-North Finchley restaurant that Jimmy had suggested as a conveniently-placed alternative meeting-site to the Ape, which each of us had his reasons for staying away from for the time being. In architecture and decor, the Oceans was--and is--a cookbook embodiment of the aesthetic known in not quite correct language as Eurotrash. The reader is doubtless familiar with the recipe: take a hospital waiting room or airport lobby of 1960s vintage, add a splash of potted greenery here to signify 'organicity', a lick of wood-panelling there to signify 'poshness', a flat-screen telly here and there to signify 'up-to-dateness' and you're ready for business. In the case of the Oceans, however, special mention ought to be made of the particular fixins of the bar area, as these impinged on--and ultimately rendered into hashed horse shite--my chinwaggerly well-being during the convo here digressed from. This here BA comprises a midgets'-dance-floor-sized patch of waxed concrete, cordoned off from the Valhallan remainder of the dining room in virtue of its uncarpetedness, and upon which the management have erected perhaps nine or ten wee schlongtail tables with top circumfrences exceeding those of so many pound coins by, say, a factor of two. Round these tables, in groups of three, are disposed ginormous padded chairs, each of whose arse-bearing portions is shaped and hued exactly like a decapitated chestnut or acorn (and hence, perforce, like a disembodied schlong-head), barring a vertical top-to-bottom incision just broad enough to accommodate the hips of a ten-year-old boy. The whole arrangement leaves sufficient residual floor space to make it a bit of a challenge to finger-fuck your neighbour at the far end of the next table whilst remaining seated. And to top it all off (in our particular case), the service was horrible: during the whole of our four-hour-long stint there, we were visited a grand total of three times by the barman. I gather the bloke was annoyed either by our squandering of our precious third chair or by our sticking to four-quid beers in preference to the 10-quid house schlongtails (or by both); in any event, it was clear from the get-go that he wanted us out of there as toot sweet as possible.
TBF, Jimmy appeared to be every bit as put off by the joint as I was; and, indeed, in his first confession of the evening, he conceded that he'd chosen it in preference to other Ape-proximate venues chiefly out of a sentimental attachment to its previous incarnation as the Torrington pub, which he described as 'a legendary London rock venue dating back to the early 70s, if not beyond.'
'You must have seen some kick-arse performances here in your day,' I said.
'Oh, yeah, did I ever!' he ejaculated, suddenly coming over all misty-okied. 'If these walls could speak...or sing, or play a musical instrument! I presume you're familiar with a certain stateside combo known as R.E.M.?'
'Of course. So you saw R.E.M. play here in...?--cor, it must have been '85 at the latest, in a place this small.'
'No, this was in '98 at the earliest. And it wasn't the Athenians themselves who graced the stage, but the next best thing: this top-notch R.E.M. cover band called, I think, the R.E.M. Traders or Raiders, or something like that. The bassist was a Tussaudian ringer for Mike Mills. And you should have been there for their version of "Strange Currencies"--it brought the house down and cleared the room in one go!'
It's really a good thing, I thought to meself just then, that Jimmy's finally getting out of the postcode with the new job of his.
But I digress from my digression. It's time to fast-forward back to the point in the convo where Jimmy has just made his confession of me-wot-done-it-ness, to which I am just about to rejoin:
'But why? And...how?'
'Well, you see, on last Monday week--coincidentally the antepenultimate night of my employment as barman of the Ape--your mate Manish stopped by.'
'I see. And then you told him, who told Manisha, who told Esmeralda.'
'Yes, well, ahem--certainly, in the case of the first link in the chain; presumably, in the case of the other two.' [I let my implacable silence do judy for the iteration of the W question.] 'Yes, well, ahem: let's just say that it didn't take me long to suss out that Manish hadn't simply stopped by on the account of his own hunger or thirst pangs, that he was on a mission of sorts, and again not on his own account, but on the account of another party or set of parties--'
'--Namely, Esmeralda by way of Manisha.'
'--That's right. And so, that set of cards being more or less face-up on the table, I felt rather obliged, on your account, for the sake of forestalling the assumption of the worst on the part of these other two parties, to tender a full and complete account of what had gone down at the Milton Saturday night after Esmeralda's departure--'
'--I'd greatly appreciate your skipping over the abstract, Jimmy, and proceeding forthwith to the full text of the article. What did Manish actually say? And what did you say back to him?'
'From front-door-arse-smack to front-door-arse-smack?'
'That's right.'
'Well, erm, let's see. As near as I can remember, it went something like--Hi there, Jimmy. Hi there, Manish. What can I do youffer? Well, says Manish, I'd like a pint of Boddington's, if you don't mind. Boddington's? I says. I wouldn't recommend it. We've just changed the keg, you see, so the first five glasses or so are going to be ten parts head to one part tail. Well, then, says Manish, howzabout a pint of Harps (sic)? Harp? I says. You should know better than to ask for that. We haven't served Harp here in donkey's months. Now there's this Yank beer name of Yuengling that I highly recommend as an alternative to Boddington's or Harp--'
[YFCT, Unstroppliy enough (I had, after all, asked him for a front-door-slap to front-door-slap transcript of the convo):]'--OKOKOK. Let's just skip ahead to the point when Manish is quaffing his first mouthful of Yuengling--'
'--Actually, he eventually settled for a Guinness.'
'Fine: "his first mouthful of Guinness" Hats off to you, Jimmy, for remembering that, as it adds an extra brush-stroke dipped in the shitty side of the palette to my mental portrait of Manish's character. But once he had his beer and you were on to the chin-wagging, fat-chewing session proper...?'
'...All right, then: at that point he says to me, I was rather hoping to run into Rugger or Ronnie here tonight. Neither one of them would have happened to stop by already, would either one of them have done? No, I says to him, I haven't seen either one of 'em all night. Note well, Rugger, that I said all night and not since last Saturday week. Which istersay that I supplied him merely with the precise quantum of truth solicited, as against the full quota of truth I had ready to rucksack.'
'Your discretion on that score is well noted and appreciated, Jimmy. Go on.'
'All right. Well, Manish says, after I've divulged to him the aforementioned minimum quantum, That's understandable, given that word of the existence of their so-called anti-Caledonian-pedipilular fraternity seems recently to have broached the lines and vertices of our inner triangle (by which inner triangle I assume he means Mr Sedule, himself and myself). Oh, is that so? I says to him. Yes it's so, says he to me. And don't play dumb, Jimmy: you were there when it happened. Oh was I now?, I says to him. Yes, you were, he says to me. Indeed, if eyewitness reports are to be credited, you were the very agent and factor of the broaching. Well, I says to him, whilst apparently utterly distracted-by-stroke-abstracted-in the task of wiping down the vacant spots on the bar, Eyewitness reports are, of course, notoriously unreliable. That's as maybe, says he. But when you come down to it, it's really all about the relationship between the eyewitnesser and the eyewitnissee, innit? And about the stake the eyewitnessee has in disabusing the eyewitnesser of whatever conclusions she--excuse me, he or she--has drawn from the witnessed events, conclusions that will perforce be founded not only upon the eyewitness's own firsthand acquaintance with those events, but upon whatever scraps of secondhand intelligence he-stroke-she has managed to garner from her counterparts in relation to consequent, incident, and subsequent events.'
Christ, how I retropsectively envied Jimmy's patience! For all of mine own dire personal interest in the outcome of the convo thus recapitulated, towards the end of it, I could scarcely avoid drowning myself through involuntary nasal immersion in my pint glass. 'So what you're saying, Jimmy, is that, bereft of further testimony from yourself, Manish seemed to have gathered, or assumed he was at liberty to gather, that the reason neither Ronnie and I were to be seen at the Ape was that the two of us had eloped to parts unknown on some sort of open-ended holiday of mutual Arsenalophobic buggery.'
'Well, I can't say as I ever pictured it to myself so graphically, but yes--a reason to that effect.'
'And so you enlightened him as to the true circumstances that accounted for our dual absence, viz. that we'd come to shirtycuffs over Ronnie's insult to my Arsenalophobia by way of an imputation of overweening gynophilia.'
'That's exactly what I did; nae mair and nae less.'
'Are you absolutely sure? There's not a cunt hair's soup's son of a chance--and mind you, Jimmy, I'm not saying this is what you should have done--that you might have led him to believe that the shirtycuffs had been precipitated by a more classical catalyst of such shirtfests, viz. an insult to the lady's reputation?'
'No such...erm...shadow of such a chance. Cos as much as my sympathies lay and lie with you in relation to the whole contretemps, I certainly had no desire to risk the precipitation of a shirt-fest of my own with Ronnie by making him out to be a different sort of cunt than he'd actually been on that night.'
[YFCT, broodingly (at any rate, I was brooding at the time, any potential voco-cum-phiz-ionommical indicators to the cuntrary notwithstanding)]: 'No, no, of course not. You did rightly by both yourself and me. But I take it you see why I thought it worthwhile to hazard the conjecture that you might have queered the pitch of your story in a certain classical direction.'
'No, not exactly, Rugger...'
'Well, because, even if at the lamentable cost of rendering you retrospectively into the most pathetically heelish of Ruggerian fall-blokes, your admission that you'd done so would have furnished me with an infallible crowbar or skeleton key into the Esmeraldan psyche.'
'I'm still not following you, I'm afraid...'
'Well, for her to have verbally fellated me for having gone shirt-to-shirt with some bloke in defence of her honour--that would have made sense. Whereas for her to perform the same oral operation, as she has done, on account of my having, essentially, gone shirt-to-shirt with some bloke in defence of my under-devotion to her...'
'...Defies all reason?'
'That's putting it mildly.'
'Well, Rugger, in the first place, if only for pure formica's sake, you mustn't discount the significance of the fact that I'm but the first Chinaman on the whisper train. I can hardly vouch for what Manish might have said to whoever...'
'...Whoever undoubtedly being Manisha--'
'--undoubtedly, but not incontestably...let alone what whoever et al. might have said to Esmeralda. In the second place, speaking 36-year-old bloke to 26-year-old-bloke, under presumptive interblokial immunity to classical duel-challenges...'
'...Aforesaid immunity granted.'
'Well, let's assume Esmeralda did in fact receive a more or less full and true account of what went down at the Milton last Saturday week. In that case, what line or arc of the dye-cast template of the generic feminine psyche would preclude her behaving as she has done?'
'I dunno anyfing about this generic feminine psychic template whereof you speak, Jimmy. That's nottersay that I'm oblivious of the fact that, with regard to a given sitch, a given blokess will tend to behave differently than a given bloke will do upon immersion in a parallel sitch; it's justersay that, from a sort of LCD-ist, age-indifferent unisex povey--which istersay, after having walked the obligatory thousand-bison's-carcass-lengths in the trainers of Anyblokeorblokess Justaboutanywhere--I can't see how, if some person of either sex or gender undertook to smear the pavement with the shirt or blouse of some random third party in the name of a cause that I not only couldn't shiv a git about, but that I viewed with outright cuntempt, I would ever view the aforesaid shirt-or-blouse-fest as an occasion for crossing paths with that person again, let alone for soliciting a fresh interview with him or her.'
'Rugger, Rugger, you're appraising the whole situation far too rationally, too philosophically, even..'
'...So you're saying I should evaluate it more emotionally--'
'--More emotionally? Cor, what sort of gynocentric self-help pap have you been reading lately? Surely nothing published under the name of one Dr Phil?'
[TBF, I had given Mum's latest Christmas offering a toking leaf-through, if only to familiarise myself with the arguments of the enemy, a minion or exemplar of whom I'd (TBEF) been fearful of Jimmy's morphing into from the inaugural minute of our chinwag onwards, given its subject matter.] 'Erm...no...of course not...'
'I should hope not. Anyway, what I'm saying is that you should be evaluating the whole situation from what for convenience's sake I'll term an anthropological
perspective. Which istersay, you should be assuming that from her point of view, you and Ronnie are just plain blokes, and the whole Arsenal-basherly dimension of the equation is just so much irrelevant subterranean carrot-stalkage--'
'--But--'
'--Let me finish. I've chosen my metaphor carefully here: for the vehicle of the carrot has decidedly phallic implications; and whilst, presumably, across the milliennia many a milliard of uprooted carrots have been employed by the fair sex as so many makeshift dildoes, in its vital state the orange member serves merely as nutriment for the green vegetable flourishing in sight of all, above ground.'
'I'm afraid I've lost you, Jimmy.'
'Understandably, perhaps. My point is that whilst for you and Ronnie the cause of Arsenalophobia may well have amounted to some kind of test of your respective manhoods (i.e. a comparison of your respective subterranean carrot lengths), in Esmeralda's eyes, all that mattered, first off, was which of the two of you was the manlier bloke to begin with (i.e., which of you two sported the more luxuriant above-ground verdage) and which of you eventually proved the manlier of the two by way of the contest.'
'So her entire storming out performance, which was ostensibly occasioned by her discovery of our shared Arsenalophobia...'
'...Was just that--a performance. Oh, sure, she was undoubtedly put off by the glimpse she got of the stalks of your respective subterranean members, by the revelation of your shared Arsenalophobia. But if the concealment or outright absence of such subterranean stalkage were to count as a sine qua non of coupledom, who amongst us blokes should escape a lifetime of onanistic self-flogging?'
'I see. And has this general observation of yours been borne out by the particulars of your own experience of the sex?'
'Has it ever! What do you think my lifelong devotion to the art of last-order calling has been in the eyes of the women I've known, if not a whole passel or bushel of carrots. Cor! I could tell you some stories, Rugger...'
…As he thereupon proceeded to do. The first one was about this ‘bird from Birmingham’ he’d dated back in the late 80s, and who’d kicked him out of her flat for keeping her up all night with his so-called elocution exercises, only to invite him back in a week later on condition he’d have his practice room in the basement soundproofed with egg-cartons. The second was about this ‘chica from Colchester’ he’d dated back in the mid 90s, and who’d kicked him out her bungalow for keeping her up all night with his so-called larynx-toning routine, only to invite him back a week later on condition he’d have his treatment room in the garage soundproofed with ‘sheets of those pointy foam rubber thingies’. Naturally, me being my gormless self, I assumed at the start of tale number two that there would turn out to be some or rationale for his telling more than one story; that, for example, the fact that the girl was from a different town this time round and that he'd known her at a later period presaged some refinement or elaboration of his overall analytics of misogyny. But having duly noted, come TN2's end, not only the differences between the home burgs of the two girls and the historical time frames of the liaisons, but also between the layouts of the blokess's living quarters, the names of the respective last-orderly routines and the respective compositions of the soundproofing materials; and corollarily sussed out a curious and indeed uncanny correspondence between the profile sketched out by these differences and that of Fanny Adams, I elected at the prologue of tale number three (concerning the dame from Durham back in the early oughties) to spare myself such instruction as could be furnished by the knowledge that feminine lightning had struck not merely twice but thrice in the same hapless blokerly spot, by interrupting him thus:
'--OK, OK, Jimmy. Sorry to cut in like this, but our time together here is finite, and I think I'm at last beginning to get the point: you think that I should ring her back up.'
'Yeah, in a nutshell. But also--and what's more important--that you should sever once and for all every tie betwixt the notion of remaining attached to her and the notion of reconciling her to your Arsenalophobia. So long as those two notions remain intertwined, you'll be letting yourself in for a woild of hoit.'
And there our chinwag might have ended, barring my tendering of thanks to Jimmy for all of his sound bloke-to-bloke advice, &c., had it not been for the popping into my gourdita, at that very moment, of a full-fledged-and-formulated reservation as to the applicability of this selfsame advice in my particular case, a reservation that I dare say would not have had the leisure to mature had Jimmy not fatigued my oriole-flexing muscles beforehand with his teejiously pleonastic account of his amatory woes (for I gots to say I've long observed that these sorts of aural workouts, for all of their apparent futility whilst one is submitting to them, have a way of clearing out the shit-pipes of the mind, rather like a kind of mental Weetabix, and thereby making room for fresh ideas):
'But who's to say, Jimmy, that she mightn't have fallen out of love with me on account of my Aresenalophobia, or that she mightn't eventually and fully be reconciled to that Arsenalophobia; given that she fell for me in the first place on account of our shared enthralment to a parallel passion, namely Kenophobia?'
'Double-you-tee-eff-ophobia?'
TBS (2), for the full duration of the next day, I was still very much as Rainright as Laudon or Rufus at a Chinese takeaway--still basking in the adrenal afterglow of the night before, if you will; and still more than capable of fuel-celling that selfsame reservoir of adrenaline into a chrono-hoovering agenda of bachelorly high-jinks. I awoke at the arse-crack of bourgie dawn, miraculously un-govered and primed for the tube trip to Camden Town necessitated by my remission of the McGyvermobile from the council garage. First thing in the bohemian morning (ca. 11:00), I dragged my Thierry Henry punching doll up from the basement, where it'd been boxed up, safely out of sight of the most prying pair of Esmeraldan okies, for going on a full month; and betwixt the two walloping so-called cardiovascular workouts involved, respectively, in re-inflating the fucking thing and juking it out with it afterwards for an hour or so, come about 2:00, I was well knackered and feeling a mite peckish to boot. So, hopping on the blower, I rang up Pizza Express and ordered up an extra-extra large chicken tikka pie, which I spent the best part of the late afternoon/worst part of the early evening leisurely-ly devouring in tandem with the swillation of a butcher's- three-quarter-dozen of Hoegaardens and the spectation of my Best of the Randy Nannies of the Northern Line DVD (extras and all!). My last conscious pair of acts that day consisted in affixing to the lid of the pizza box (which, together with its offering of a single, full, untouched slice, I'd left at its original station on the coffee table, as a sacrifice to the maisonette's bachelorly penates) a post-it note, and scrawling thereupon the warning: 'DO NOT DISPOSE OF BEFORE 1/6/06!'
It was only on Monday morning, up in Potters Bar, that the whole shithouse-building-site's load of bricks comprised by Saturday's disasters finally hit me--for only then did I have to contend, for the first time, in all of my pathetic bereftness of moral support back home, not merely with the arid abstractions of matelessness, girl-lessness and doglessness, but with an all-too-concrete entity that was essentially, implacably at war with the very notion of my survival, namely the erect ten-inched schlong of Mike Ayhern, sheathed in a rawhide condom ribbed on the inside for his pleasure, and barbed on the outside for my pain.
'Oh, come now, MDF, surely you don't mean to say this chap literally buggered you.'
'Of course not.'
'Well, in that case you had best recast the sentence. For having paired Mr Ayhern's metaphorical membrum virile with a predicate--viz, all-too-concreteness--that is a veritable by-word of literality, you do rather leave yourself wide open (in a strictly metaphorical sense) to being construed as saying that the chap did in fact have one off with you over his desk on the morning of 22 May 2006.'
'Fine. For the sake of your hermetically waterproof logician's anorak (and, I might add, to the detriment of prosaic economy), let the last sentence read, from namely onwards: Mike Ayhern, who called me into his office first thing that morning to give me a right proper metaphorical drubbing in punishment of an entirely innocent error that he, with all of his characteristic cuntishness, had seen fit to construe as an index of my berkishness, gormlessness, and all-round professional incompetence and unworthiness of the title of Junior Accounts Receivable Associate at Proctologitex. The scene of the drubbing is worth dramatising in detail, if only for the sake of lengthening the nubbishly short shrift I've been giving to the Proctologitexical fifth of my existence in these pages for galloping donkey's months:
I entered Mike's office to find him not seated behind his desk, as per usual, but rather half-sitting, half-slouching on the front end of it, with his arms folded, not behind his head (APU2), but in front of his tits, against which he had a manila folder clasped in one hand, leaving the thumb of the other hand free for the spiritedly stroppy bout of nail-gnawing he was submitting it to. In discovering him in this pose, I knew straight away that I was in for something much more serious than the his stock-in-trade rhetorical rabbit-out-of-the-arse conjuring trick. I knew, in other words, that whatever misstep he was about to charge me with would be one that he, in his besotted imagination, actually believed me to have made; that it wasn't going to be a routine matter of his fabricating such a misstep for the sake of fobbing his own slackness off on to the next bloke in the chain-gang queue (i.e., YFCT). So I tautened my schphincter as best I could, twisted my gob into a suitable compromise between a coprophagic grin and a rictus of shame, and wished him a sir-punctuated good morning.
'Good mollning, McGyvelll,' he says, extracting his thumb from his mouth. Then, after taking a few seconds to tongue-gob out the residue of thumbnail shrapnel (a couple of fragments of which happen to land on my shirtyfront, doubtlessly by design), he unclasps his arms and tenders me the folder, holding it gingerly-ly, flatwise, betwixt thumb and forefinger, as if it's a dirty nappy. 'I'd like you to take a look at this document, if you would.'
I open the folder and, once I've scanned the front page of its contents, can discern no present dramaturgical mandate to forage any deeper into them.
'It wouldn't happen to look the least bit familiar to you, would it?'
'Yes. It's a printout of that report I sent you last Thursday.'
'Spot on! And what, may I ask, is the manifest subject of said report?'
'TOTAL REVENUES FOR PRODUCT NUMBER PT6467-stroke-nought-double-nine: ANISETTE TAMPON: FY06, Q3.'
'Bingo! And judged on its own merits, as a thing of its kind, it could not be more perfect--it's a report fit for inclusion in the anals [sic] of our training workshops. Why then, I ask, am I not congratulating you on a job well done, eh? Why the conspicuous dearth of champagne and cigars in this vicinity, eh? Eh?'
YFCT, after having subtracted the two supplied to me by my apparently gormless memory from the two of the perfect report: 'Because you...didn't ask me...to do a report on...revenues for...a-a-anisette tampons in the last f-f-fiscal quarter?'
'Kismet! I did not ask you to prepare for me a report on anisette tampons, i.e., a tally of the total worldwide revenues of that sole and specific product; I asked you, rather, to prepare for me a report on the Tampan's anisettes--which is to say, a tally of the total revenues of all of our anisette scented or flavoured products--tampons, suppositories, salves, ointments, lotions, douches, enemas, tents and shunts--billable to the account of one Steven Kosiba, chief purchasing agent of our main stateside distributor, which, you will of course recall, is headquartered in Tampa, Florida. Well, what have you got to say for yourself, McGyver?'
[YFCT, in all candour:] 'I thought it was an, erm...a G-g-gallicism.'
'A whaticism?'
'A Gallicism. I thought you were, erm, practising your French. You know, by pluralising the adjective, and putting it after the noun. I thought it was something along the lines of crêpes suzettes--tampons anisettes, that is.' (as, I rather assumed, my sporting rejoinder of Oui, oui, M. Ay-HERRN! made all too clear, but you know what they say about assumption [i.e., 'It ain't just a town in Illinois/'It makes an ass out of u and mption'.])
'McGyver,' he remonstrates sternly, whilst flashing each of his sweat-soaked pits at me in turn, by way of a pair of cuntishly smug body-builder's forearm-curls, 'do I look like the kind of guy who can afford the off-the-clock luxury of swotting up on dead [sic] languages, let alone the on-the-clock luxury of flouting [sic] his knowledge of said languages?'
'No, sir.'
'Indeed not--in marked contrast to you, who, based on your misinterpretation of my instructions, certainly look like the kind of guy whose spare time would wisely be devoted to a term or two of remedial courses in living English. They offer them up at Uof H, you know. And naturally, the company would reimburse your tuition. That's all by the by for now, though.' [Rising, circling back to behind the desk, collapsing into chair, planting both elbows uncharacteristically downwards on to the desktop, pressing the co-jones of each hand against their complementary okie-lid, exhaling wearily.] 'This little cock-up of yours has pushed me bum-flush against my deadline for presenting revenue estimates for FY07 to the CFO on Wednesday morning, and in relation to a market-cum-production-line-sector that I simply can't afford to play dumb about. You see, as of the close of FY05, the sale of anisette-flavoured-or-scented products accounted for a full third of our net profits, whilst the sale of products to the States across the board accounted for a full two-fifths. If the report I'd asked you to do had been on, say, the sale of chocolate-flavoured-or-scented products to Mexico (net profit contribution of our chocolate-flavoured-or-scented products in FY05: 1.4%, of our Mexican distributor in that same fiscal year: .8%), in its absence I could afford to fudge a bit (no pun intended). I could say to the CFO, We haven't got all the figures in yet; there are still a number of outstanding invoices (you, of course, know how those Mexicans are... [withdrawing fingers from okies, feigning to nod off, and snoring the word mañana into each of three or four exhaled breaths. Then, rousing himself, and assuming a mien of cuntish peremptoriness:] But as for the Stateside anisette revenues, the fudge factor there is effectively nil. I can't just traipse into the CFO's office and say, That's the total for FY06, give or take 10 or 20 millions. She'd hand me my walking papers sooner than she would a loo roll to stop the ensuing flow of diarrhoeah. Thus, my directive to you, McGyver, is, Get me that report by start of business tomorrow. I don't give a tinker's fuck about the means of execution--farm it out to the folks in accounts payable, hire a temp accountant on your own dime, just get it done, or else...'
[YFCT, hoping to secure a few curried brownie points by adverting to Mike's own idiom] '...My ass'll be grass...?' [But he evinces not the slightest appreciation of the fellationary effort, and closes up the ellipsis in an ominous whisper:]
'...No, this time round, that'll be my ass's privilege. This time round, yours'll be lucky to finish up as compost.'
So I cringe my way back to me cubicle, log on to the 'puter, crank up the Excel and start to work on the report--or, rather, try to start work on it. For, not to to try your patience, DGR, by going into the technical side of things to such an extent as would make last post's footerly digressions seem like a complete screening of the Emmanuel movies by comparison (nor to squander my own free time on the rehearsal of such work-related minutiae as won't ever see the light of utilitarian day in my private lifeworld [save, perhaps, remotely, vis-a-vis Arsenalophobic augury in the '06-'07 league season]), whilst the spreadsheet template I'd sworn by, and plied my bread-cum-butter with, for two years-con-cambio, was duly and efficiently keyed to performing client-to-product calculations, as well as calculations vectored along the axes of product and product attribute; it was utterly un-cut-out for squaring the client field with the product attribute one, as necessitated by Mike's commission. And so I was compelled to fret and fume away the remainder of the work day and then some rebuilding the fucking thing from scratch, which left the running, formatting and despatching of the report itself to be completed back at the maisonette in the great large ones of that evening and the wee small ones of the following morning. TBS, I'd taken work home scads of times before--CIP, for last week's running of the original, undesired AT report--but always for the sake of the sheer theatricality of the gesture, at the arse-end of eight-point-five leisurely hours of browsing and instant-messaging. This time round, as Mike had put it, the homework followed hard on the arse of nine-point-five hours of concentrated, schphincter-dilating workwork, which rendered its completion commensurately knackering. How often I yearned, during the first half of that lonesome midnight-oil-burning session, to hop on the blower with Esmeralda or Ronnie and kvetch to her or him, You won't believe what this cunt's put me up to! knowing full well and up front that the making of such a phone call was entirely out of the question. How often, and more pathetically, during the second half of that selfsame session did I pause, in the interval between a Hoegaarden run to the fridge and the re-ensconcement of my blistered arse-cheeks in my desk chair, to apostrophically address that selfsame plaint (i.e., YWBWTCPMUT!) to Esmeralda or Ronnie qua third wheel, only to trail off round about the second tee on realising that had either of them been present, he or she would more likely have gloated over my plight than sympathised with me in it. It didn't even occur me try giving Jimmy a bell, which, in arse-sight, I think is just as well [Ken take these unintended rhymes!]. True, strictoo sensoo, he did say I could ring him about anything, but I from the start I rather tended to construe that indefinite pronoun as shorthand for anything--and only anything--directly pertaining to the girl, the dog the best mate or the car; and, in any case, kvetching about any or all of those entities whilst I was immersed in the running of my report would have been about as pointful as inveighing against Hoegaarden or Marlboro during an all-day, bedridden 'gover...
...such as I would have submitted to by default on Tuesday, had I not already pissed away the full balance of my sick leave during the UEFA semifinals; and had I not, moreover, judged that a no-show following immejiately on the heels of my submission of the report (viz. at 11:48 Monday night) would inevitably count as an admission of defeat-cum-incompetence, if not as a de facto resignation, in Mike's rabid okies. As it was, come Tuesday morning, I had to make do with gulping down a pair of profin tablets and driving up to PB as per routine. Once there, I sat glumly at my puter and waited and waited for some blowerly indication, be it positive or negative, of Mike's appraisal of the report. But none was forthcoming on that day, or on the next. Finally, towards lunchtime on Thursday, I got an email from him that read, 'MY MEETING WITH THE CFO WENT, ON THE WHOLE, SATISFACTORILY. [Mike, BTW, prefers to compose his correspondence all in caps--presumably in cuntish emulation of the telex machines of newsrooms of yore.] SHE DID, HOWEVER, MAKE AN ESPECIAL POINT OF FLAGGING THE STATESIDE ANISETTE ACCOUNT "FOR FURTHER REVIEW". I WILL KEEP YOU POSTED AS TO WHETHER FURTHER INPUT ON THIS MATTER IS REQUIRED FROM YOUR END. M.A.'
Well, on the face of it, this was a classic Ayhernian communication, intended from the get-go to keep YFCT on tenterhooks by whatever cuntishly underhanded stratagem proved ready to hand (BTW [2], if any of you DGRs out there can be arsed to explicate for me the literal underpinnings of this metaphor of 'keeping someone on tenterhooks,' I should be much obliged to ye. The same goes for the etiologies of such equally commonplace and equally unfathomable idioms as 'red herring' and 'benchmark figures'. As you might well guess, I haven't exactly had the leisure of late to nergle 'em out for meself.). So the CFO had flagged the sector subsumed by my report for further review. What then? Who was to say she hadn't likewise flagged all 10,000-some-odd other permutation-lets of the FY06 revenues? It was only by the most wildly paranoiac stretch of Fanny Adams's imagination that this here CFO-fficial flag could be refashioned into a bandana or babushka tied snugly across the adam's apple of YFCT, ready-looped to serve as an implement of strangulation at a second's notice, courtesy of the most cuntishly understated of nods from the CFO to her henchman (i.e., Mike). But in the light of the unprecedentedly dire nature of the SOA to hand vis-a-vis both Mike and myself, I couldn't help but stretch my own imagination to such semi- or pseudo- or quasi-delusional limits. I couldn't help but think, you see, that if I actually had finally and definitively got Mike out of such an unprecedentedly tight squeeze, that at least a drop or two of the elation and relief precipitated by his escape would have spilt over into the supertext or subtext or just plain fucking text of the message bearing the intelligence thereof. That drop or two might have taken the form, say, of a digressive bit of shit-shooting or piss-taking on my perduring need for remedial English courses (qua running joke linked to our most recent cul-a-cul), or it might in equal likelihood have manifested itself under the laconic auspices of the one-word sentence Thanks. Granted, such an access of bargain-basement uncuntishness would have been completely out of character for the so-called Mike that I knew, but then these sorts of co-jones-to-the-wall sitches were ready-pneumatised to suck the milk of human uncuntishness out of the schlongs of the most cuntishly supercuntish of ingrates.
So, in short, on Thursday afternoon, I braced myself for the worst, and budgeted my time for the next day-and-a-half accordingly, swearing off all interwebbial commerce with the Randy Nannies and furiously trailing every lead I could nergle out of the verbal combination of employment, accountancy and Barnet; which combo eventually succeeded, at mid-morning on Friday, to the more desperate one of employment, service sector and Greater London, having in the meantime yielded nothing more promising than the homophonic namesake of the actor portraying the bloke who rode the Haitch-bomb down to its target in the penultimate scene of Dr Strangelove. Here again I found myself in a sitch in which Esmeralda's help would have proved indispensable, and to a much more tangible degree than WRT the first one. Long before--on the morning after our first date at Emchai, as a matter of fact--she had spoken to me of openings in the finance division of her company, and urged me to apply for one of them; but I would then hear nothing of it, not until our so-called relationship had jelled and I could assure myself of being able to work arse-cheek-by-face-jowl underneath her in the absence of any so-called hard feelings. Now that I was afforded the jubious treat of viewing the S-RC and my professional position under the same aspect--viz., at best, that of a cryogenically preserved corpse, at worst that of a long-since-worm-forsaken skeleton--I would gladly have swapped this position for that of a gainfully employed Esmeraldan underling saddled with a restraining order and alimony/child support payments for the rest of his natural.
Wellsir, as I've pretty much already intimated, my futile job-searching binge carried me clear on through to knock-off time on Friday, at which point I was much alarmed to find the usual end-of-the week combo of physical knackered-dom and mental-cum-spiritual hyper-atrophy replaced by a kind of organism-corroding, trans-PMS-ian dementia that could scarcely be put to rights by the ritualistic pre-Esmeraldan-era butcher's-half-dozen pints down at the Ape. And, in any case, as I dementedly pseudo-reflected during my white-knuckled, lead-footed commute back to Woodside Park, I couldn't very well show my ex tempore arse at the Ape without running the risk of happening upon Ronnie, and thereby commmitting myself to a second bout of shirtycuffs that I was in no fit state either to withstand or to impose. Eventually, back at the maisonette, at the probable instance of my third or fourth Hoegaarden, I recalled Jimmy's standing invitation to a chinwag; and subsequently realised that by cashing in that invitation on this very evening I might very well, or at the very least, be able to kill one bird with one telephonic stone. Which istersay that I realised that if Jimmy happened to be working that night, he'd be able to let me know whether Ronnie was, as they say, indahouse (bird #1); and that if Ronnie turned out not to be present therein, then perhaps Jimmy himself might be amenable to hanging out after hours with YFCT (bird #2), his orioles agape for the reception of gobfuls of obloquy concerning The Girl, the Best Mate and that new addition to the catalogue, The Boss (MA not BS).
But I finished up missing both birds. Mind you, at first, when Jimmy's Hello at the other end of the blower was attended by the usual pubberly background din of punterly shouts, groans and guffaws, I had no grounds for assuming anything was the least bit amiss. Only with his answer to the question of whether Ronnie was anywhere thereabouts did things started taking a turn for the shittier, by way of the twilight zony:
'Ronnie? Ronnie who?'
'Mr Ronnie Fucking Corbett. No, I mean Ronnie Livingstone, of course.'
'Why should he be here?'
'You might just as well ask why he'd be anywhere else on a Friday night.'
'What the..?' There follows a few seconds of speechlessness in which I'm mystified to pick up the sound of a drawn out, inarticulate and decidedly unhuman howl amidst the backgroundage. 'Oh, I understand now. Look, Rugger, I took the job at the Milton.'
The name Milton having entirely lost its extra-poetic bell-ringing capabilities, shay mwha, over the course of the past six days, I shoot back gormlessly, 'At where?'
'At the Milton in Marylebone, where we finished up after the competiton. I'm there right now, you see, and not at the Ape.'
(YFCT, understandably crestfallen, at least from my egocentric povey:) 'Oh. Well, then, I suppose I should let you go.'
(Jimmy, tray sympa, ATC): 'Yeah, I'm a frayed sew.' Then he breaks off to shout, off-blower, Hey, Arséne! [!] ARSÈNE! Get your lipstick out of Lady Mao's front bottom. There's a good dog. ['It's five days, max, into the gig,' I says to myself, whilst eavesdropping on this outburst, 'and he's already on a first-name basis with the canine clientele. Sic transit somethingorothera somethingi.'] 'Look, Rugger, I'm off next Wednesday. Why don't you ring me up then, when we can chat at length?'
[YFCT, massaging his lower lip into a due state of slackicity beforehand:] 'Oh, yeah, Wednesday, sure.'
'Cheers, Rugger.'
'Cheers-stroke-thanxalot, Jimmy.'
Well, I couldn't very well be sore at Jimmy for not having being available all along, round the clock, like some sort of one-man Ruggerian suicide hotline. Ken alone knew he had his own inverted cross to bear, the icey of the actual new bloke behind the counter being, after all, hewn from more or less the same strain of pinewood as the icey of the prospective new bloke on the pavement (viz. that of Potters Bar, out front of P-Tex HQ). Granted, if things turned sour at the Milton, Jimmy could presumably drag his tee between his ell back up to the Ape; whereas my only fallback option as of then (and now) consisted in the possibly mythical Greater Norwich Old Boys' Accountancy Network. But then again, I had to quiz myself, was frittering away one's late youth as an East Angelinan accountant necessarily a less enviable hemi-semi-destiny than that of frittering away one's early middle age (Jimmy, at 36, being a full decade older than YFCT) as a Central Londinian barman?
Suffice it to say, the philosophical thought-train paraphrased in the last paragraph offered scant consolation or distraction beyond the butcher's-dozen immejiately post-telephonic minutes it required to clear my brain's small intestine (the human brain manifestly lacking a large intestine, let alone a schphincter, unless the gob be taken for the latter); in its caboose it left a butcher's-odd-four-dozen hours that had perforce to be filled largely by less mentally-cum-spiritually strenuous activities. The remainder of Friday night was pretty much taken care of, as I'd already been half drunk when I rang up Jimmy; four or five additional Hoegaardens, consumed across three or four hours of televisual channel-flip-booking, carried me through to the point of comatosity. And, subsequently, Saturday day was equally prettily seen to by my having foregone the usual prophylactic regimen of two profins the night before, and thus encouraged myself to sleep away the ensuing gover through till dusk. But from Saturday evening onwards, it was a different story. Feeling peckish round about six, I walked over to Quadruples to pick up a sandwich, placing my order on-site, at the register (as against phoning beforehand), so as to hoover up the largest possible chunk of time in making the round trip--not that standing round watching the sedentarily obese mums, dads and tykes wolfing down their sandwiches in the dining room during the extra butcher's-dozen minutes did much more to raise my spirits than edging past the ambulatorily svelt couples, single blokes and single blokesses walking their dogs on the pavement had done on the way over, or would do on the way back (a backway interrupted, incidentally, by a Hoegaarden-refreshing pit-stop at Stora Market that I'd rightly written off beforehand as 110 per cent spiritual drag [there being axiomatically precious few more demoralising sitches than the SM-ial -inevitable one of being sayngwiched in a queue between, on the front slice, a pongsome toothless bloke telling out in small change his total for a shorty of Southern Comfort and, on the back one, a chirpy, wine-bottle-overladened pair of blokesses obviously bound for a poshocratic bacchanal to which you, in virtue of your boorish and loserly totage of a cargo of hops and barley, daren't dream of securing an impromptu invitation]).
As for the remainder of my inaugural full-on bachelorly weekend at the maisonette, the less said about it the better. I need only remark, itward-wise, that, in cuntishly perverse contrast to its typical counterpart in the pre-Esmeraldan days, on the Saturday nocturnal portion of it I was utterly bereft of my one infallible de facto source of spiritual consolation: viz. a televisual potential Arsenalic-arse-reaming. For the '05-'06 Premiership season, with its reliably recursive Saturday-evening arse-offs, was by now a distant memory, and the '06-'07 season was as yet but a twinkle even in the schphincterly brown okies of such cuntishly far-seeing cunts as Arsène Wenger. It could be argued, indeed, that the particular weekend I'd happened to pitch up on-stroke-into in my bachelorly singlehood constituted, indeed, the very epicentre of the Sargasso Sea of Rugger-friendly sporting, what with the World Cup still looming off on the horizon of the last weeks of the following month; as likewise loomed Wimbledon--which, I confess, I've always had something of a soft spot for, on account of all the grunting and heaving and knicker-flashing spectacularly evinced by its female combatants.
Thankfully, come the bohemian dawn of the new work week, fortune began, if not exactly to smile on me, then at least to scrunch up, YFCT-ward, the horizontal cunt of her gob on one side and the other and then back again, as if to say, 'This bloke's not quite done for yet.' First off, on Monday afternoon, Mike called me into his office to commission a fresh report on, as he put it, the liquid and semi-liquid component of our stateside anisette revenues, inclusive of douches, enemas, ointments, lotions and salves; and exclusive of tents, shunts, suppositories and tampons, due firstthing Thursday morning.
'So, th-th-then,' I stammer back to him, 'I take it my global report on st-st-stateside anisette revenues was s-s-satisfactory?'
'Oh yes,' he replies, okie-brows scrunched quizzically against okie-balls cast rightwards and downwards towards some conjectural second wheel (his daughter Brianna, to judge by the angle of contact). 'Yes, absolutely. I should have thought that fact had been made plain in the text of my email. You really,' he adds, rising and ushering me out of the room with one hand stretched threshhold-ward, the other resting on me right shoulder, 'ought to give serious consideration to this idearof mine of taking courses in remedial English at the University of Hertfordshire. The whole enterprise'd do you a world of professional-developmental good, I'm sure...' One of these days Mike, one of these days...Pow!--Right in the shitter [i.e., the poo-chute, not the gents' (Although, come to think of it, vis-a-vis the arse-footing in question, the gents would pretty much be the ideal venue, viz. a small secluded chamber, with no windows and a lockable door).].
Thus, from Monday afternoon onwards I was off the old Proctologitexan tenterhooks, and at leisure to affix my carcass properly, for the first time, to the
Esmeraldan ones; which promptly gave way in their turn upon my reflecting that if my girl had really, in all Sinatraness, wanted to be alone for a bit and only that selfsame bit, I would surely have heard from her by now. For, try as I might to extract the most whale-schlong-lengthed connotation out of this wee, ant-schlongesque word bit, canvassing every single one of its myriad 'ceptations--drill fixture and antique Yank unit of coinage included--I was unable to delude myself into making it do as a stunt-double for nine days and counting.
Hence, I was all but resigned to taking my fate as a newly prospective terminally celibate bloke in the arse, to regarding my terminally depressing itinerary of the previous weekend as a veritable template for the rest of my natural weekends; when, on arriving back at the maisonette on Tuesday evening, I was bemused and beflummoxed to discover the following message on the v-mail of my land phone:
Hi, it's...me. Listen: I heard about what you did the other night, about your...shirt-off with what's-his-name. And I have to say, I think it was rather brave of you, taking him on like that. Anyway, darling, give me a call if you're up to it. Bye.
I had to listen to a second time through to make sure it was from who I thought was from, and that it referred to the event I thought it referred to; that I hadn't misidentified the timbral fingerprints of the voice of the caller, or slept through her sales pitch for a Mallorcan holiday. But once I'd ascertained that all was as I'd taken it to be the first time round, there immediately popped into my gourdita the question, How the fuck did she learn about my abortive scuffle with Ronnie? Surely not from Ronnie himself (else why would she pay homage to my 'bravery'). And by a subsequent so-called process of elimination, that left only one other possible hog-snout as the medium of communication, namely--
--'I confess,' Jimmy said to me roughly 25 hours later: 'It was me wot done it.'
We were sitting in the so-called bar area of the 3 Oceans, a South Woodside Park-stroke-North Finchley restaurant that Jimmy had suggested as a conveniently-placed alternative meeting-site to the Ape, which each of us had his reasons for staying away from for the time being. In architecture and decor, the Oceans was--and is--a cookbook embodiment of the aesthetic known in not quite correct language as Eurotrash. The reader is doubtless familiar with the recipe: take a hospital waiting room or airport lobby of 1960s vintage, add a splash of potted greenery here to signify 'organicity', a lick of wood-panelling there to signify 'poshness', a flat-screen telly here and there to signify 'up-to-dateness' and you're ready for business. In the case of the Oceans, however, special mention ought to be made of the particular fixins of the bar area, as these impinged on--and ultimately rendered into hashed horse shite--my chinwaggerly well-being during the convo here digressed from. This here BA comprises a midgets'-dance-floor-sized patch of waxed concrete, cordoned off from the Valhallan remainder of the dining room in virtue of its uncarpetedness, and upon which the management have erected perhaps nine or ten wee schlongtail tables with top circumfrences exceeding those of so many pound coins by, say, a factor of two. Round these tables, in groups of three, are disposed ginormous padded chairs, each of whose arse-bearing portions is shaped and hued exactly like a decapitated chestnut or acorn (and hence, perforce, like a disembodied schlong-head), barring a vertical top-to-bottom incision just broad enough to accommodate the hips of a ten-year-old boy. The whole arrangement leaves sufficient residual floor space to make it a bit of a challenge to finger-fuck your neighbour at the far end of the next table whilst remaining seated. And to top it all off (in our particular case), the service was horrible: during the whole of our four-hour-long stint there, we were visited a grand total of three times by the barman. I gather the bloke was annoyed either by our squandering of our precious third chair or by our sticking to four-quid beers in preference to the 10-quid house schlongtails (or by both); in any event, it was clear from the get-go that he wanted us out of there as toot sweet as possible.
TBF, Jimmy appeared to be every bit as put off by the joint as I was; and, indeed, in his first confession of the evening, he conceded that he'd chosen it in preference to other Ape-proximate venues chiefly out of a sentimental attachment to its previous incarnation as the Torrington pub, which he described as 'a legendary London rock venue dating back to the early 70s, if not beyond.'
'You must have seen some kick-arse performances here in your day,' I said.
'Oh, yeah, did I ever!' he ejaculated, suddenly coming over all misty-okied. 'If these walls could speak...or sing, or play a musical instrument! I presume you're familiar with a certain stateside combo known as R.E.M.?'
'Of course. So you saw R.E.M. play here in...?--cor, it must have been '85 at the latest, in a place this small.'
'No, this was in '98 at the earliest. And it wasn't the Athenians themselves who graced the stage, but the next best thing: this top-notch R.E.M. cover band called, I think, the R.E.M. Traders or Raiders, or something like that. The bassist was a Tussaudian ringer for Mike Mills. And you should have been there for their version of "Strange Currencies"--it brought the house down and cleared the room in one go!'
It's really a good thing, I thought to meself just then, that Jimmy's finally getting out of the postcode with the new job of his.
But I digress from my digression. It's time to fast-forward back to the point in the convo where Jimmy has just made his confession of me-wot-done-it-ness, to which I am just about to rejoin:
'But why? And...how?'
'Well, you see, on last Monday week--coincidentally the antepenultimate night of my employment as barman of the Ape--your mate Manish stopped by.'
'I see. And then you told him, who told Manisha, who told Esmeralda.'
'Yes, well, ahem--certainly, in the case of the first link in the chain; presumably, in the case of the other two.' [I let my implacable silence do judy for the iteration of the W question.] 'Yes, well, ahem: let's just say that it didn't take me long to suss out that Manish hadn't simply stopped by on the account of his own hunger or thirst pangs, that he was on a mission of sorts, and again not on his own account, but on the account of another party or set of parties--'
'--Namely, Esmeralda by way of Manisha.'
'--That's right. And so, that set of cards being more or less face-up on the table, I felt rather obliged, on your account, for the sake of forestalling the assumption of the worst on the part of these other two parties, to tender a full and complete account of what had gone down at the Milton Saturday night after Esmeralda's departure--'
'--I'd greatly appreciate your skipping over the abstract, Jimmy, and proceeding forthwith to the full text of the article. What did Manish actually say? And what did you say back to him?'
'From front-door-arse-smack to front-door-arse-smack?'
'That's right.'
'Well, erm, let's see. As near as I can remember, it went something like--Hi there, Jimmy. Hi there, Manish. What can I do youffer? Well, says Manish, I'd like a pint of Boddington's, if you don't mind. Boddington's? I says. I wouldn't recommend it. We've just changed the keg, you see, so the first five glasses or so are going to be ten parts head to one part tail. Well, then, says Manish, howzabout a pint of Harps (sic)? Harp? I says. You should know better than to ask for that. We haven't served Harp here in donkey's months. Now there's this Yank beer name of Yuengling that I highly recommend as an alternative to Boddington's or Harp--'
[YFCT, Unstroppliy enough (I had, after all, asked him for a front-door-slap to front-door-slap transcript of the convo):]'--OKOKOK. Let's just skip ahead to the point when Manish is quaffing his first mouthful of Yuengling--'
'--Actually, he eventually settled for a Guinness.'
'Fine: "his first mouthful of Guinness" Hats off to you, Jimmy, for remembering that, as it adds an extra brush-stroke dipped in the shitty side of the palette to my mental portrait of Manish's character. But once he had his beer and you were on to the chin-wagging, fat-chewing session proper...?'
'...All right, then: at that point he says to me, I was rather hoping to run into Rugger or Ronnie here tonight. Neither one of them would have happened to stop by already, would either one of them have done? No, I says to him, I haven't seen either one of 'em all night. Note well, Rugger, that I said all night and not since last Saturday week. Which istersay that I supplied him merely with the precise quantum of truth solicited, as against the full quota of truth I had ready to rucksack.'
'Your discretion on that score is well noted and appreciated, Jimmy. Go on.'
'All right. Well, Manish says, after I've divulged to him the aforementioned minimum quantum, That's understandable, given that word of the existence of their so-called anti-Caledonian-pedipilular fraternity seems recently to have broached the lines and vertices of our inner triangle (by which inner triangle I assume he means Mr Sedule, himself and myself). Oh, is that so? I says to him. Yes it's so, says he to me. And don't play dumb, Jimmy: you were there when it happened. Oh was I now?, I says to him. Yes, you were, he says to me. Indeed, if eyewitness reports are to be credited, you were the very agent and factor of the broaching. Well, I says to him, whilst apparently utterly distracted-by-stroke-abstracted-in the task of wiping down the vacant spots on the bar, Eyewitness reports are, of course, notoriously unreliable. That's as maybe, says he. But when you come down to it, it's really all about the relationship between the eyewitnesser and the eyewitnissee, innit? And about the stake the eyewitnessee has in disabusing the eyewitnesser of whatever conclusions she--excuse me, he or she--has drawn from the witnessed events, conclusions that will perforce be founded not only upon the eyewitness's own firsthand acquaintance with those events, but upon whatever scraps of secondhand intelligence he-stroke-she has managed to garner from her counterparts in relation to consequent, incident, and subsequent events.'
Christ, how I retropsectively envied Jimmy's patience! For all of mine own dire personal interest in the outcome of the convo thus recapitulated, towards the end of it, I could scarcely avoid drowning myself through involuntary nasal immersion in my pint glass. 'So what you're saying, Jimmy, is that, bereft of further testimony from yourself, Manish seemed to have gathered, or assumed he was at liberty to gather, that the reason neither Ronnie and I were to be seen at the Ape was that the two of us had eloped to parts unknown on some sort of open-ended holiday of mutual Arsenalophobic buggery.'
'Well, I can't say as I ever pictured it to myself so graphically, but yes--a reason to that effect.'
'And so you enlightened him as to the true circumstances that accounted for our dual absence, viz. that we'd come to shirtycuffs over Ronnie's insult to my Arsenalophobia by way of an imputation of overweening gynophilia.'
'That's exactly what I did; nae mair and nae less.'
'Are you absolutely sure? There's not a cunt hair's soup's son of a chance--and mind you, Jimmy, I'm not saying this is what you should have done--that you might have led him to believe that the shirtycuffs had been precipitated by a more classical catalyst of such shirtfests, viz. an insult to the lady's reputation?'
'No such...erm...shadow of such a chance. Cos as much as my sympathies lay and lie with you in relation to the whole contretemps, I certainly had no desire to risk the precipitation of a shirt-fest of my own with Ronnie by making him out to be a different sort of cunt than he'd actually been on that night.'
[YFCT, broodingly (at any rate, I was brooding at the time, any potential voco-cum-phiz-ionommical indicators to the cuntrary notwithstanding)]: 'No, no, of course not. You did rightly by both yourself and me. But I take it you see why I thought it worthwhile to hazard the conjecture that you might have queered the pitch of your story in a certain classical direction.'
'No, not exactly, Rugger...'
'Well, because, even if at the lamentable cost of rendering you retrospectively into the most pathetically heelish of Ruggerian fall-blokes, your admission that you'd done so would have furnished me with an infallible crowbar or skeleton key into the Esmeraldan psyche.'
'I'm still not following you, I'm afraid...'
'Well, for her to have verbally fellated me for having gone shirt-to-shirt with some bloke in defence of her honour--that would have made sense. Whereas for her to perform the same oral operation, as she has done, on account of my having, essentially, gone shirt-to-shirt with some bloke in defence of my under-devotion to her...'
'...Defies all reason?'
'That's putting it mildly.'
'Well, Rugger, in the first place, if only for pure formica's sake, you mustn't discount the significance of the fact that I'm but the first Chinaman on the whisper train. I can hardly vouch for what Manish might have said to whoever...'
'...Whoever undoubtedly being Manisha--'
'--undoubtedly, but not incontestably...let alone what whoever et al. might have said to Esmeralda. In the second place, speaking 36-year-old bloke to 26-year-old-bloke, under presumptive interblokial immunity to classical duel-challenges...'
'...Aforesaid immunity granted.'
'Well, let's assume Esmeralda did in fact receive a more or less full and true account of what went down at the Milton last Saturday week. In that case, what line or arc of the dye-cast template of the generic feminine psyche would preclude her behaving as she has done?'
'I dunno anyfing about this generic feminine psychic template whereof you speak, Jimmy. That's nottersay that I'm oblivious of the fact that, with regard to a given sitch, a given blokess will tend to behave differently than a given bloke will do upon immersion in a parallel sitch; it's justersay that, from a sort of LCD-ist, age-indifferent unisex povey--which istersay, after having walked the obligatory thousand-bison's-carcass-lengths in the trainers of Anyblokeorblokess Justaboutanywhere--I can't see how, if some person of either sex or gender undertook to smear the pavement with the shirt or blouse of some random third party in the name of a cause that I not only couldn't shiv a git about, but that I viewed with outright cuntempt, I would ever view the aforesaid shirt-or-blouse-fest as an occasion for crossing paths with that person again, let alone for soliciting a fresh interview with him or her.'
'Rugger, Rugger, you're appraising the whole situation far too rationally, too philosophically, even..'
'...So you're saying I should evaluate it more emotionally--'
'--More emotionally? Cor, what sort of gynocentric self-help pap have you been reading lately? Surely nothing published under the name of one Dr Phil?'
[TBF, I had given Mum's latest Christmas offering a toking leaf-through, if only to familiarise myself with the arguments of the enemy, a minion or exemplar of whom I'd (TBEF) been fearful of Jimmy's morphing into from the inaugural minute of our chinwag onwards, given its subject matter.] 'Erm...no...of course not...'
'I should hope not. Anyway, what I'm saying is that you should be evaluating the whole situation from what for convenience's sake I'll term an anthropological
perspective. Which istersay, you should be assuming that from her point of view, you and Ronnie are just plain blokes, and the whole Arsenal-basherly dimension of the equation is just so much irrelevant subterranean carrot-stalkage--'
'--But--'
'--Let me finish. I've chosen my metaphor carefully here: for the vehicle of the carrot has decidedly phallic implications; and whilst, presumably, across the milliennia many a milliard of uprooted carrots have been employed by the fair sex as so many makeshift dildoes, in its vital state the orange member serves merely as nutriment for the green vegetable flourishing in sight of all, above ground.'
'I'm afraid I've lost you, Jimmy.'
'Understandably, perhaps. My point is that whilst for you and Ronnie the cause of Arsenalophobia may well have amounted to some kind of test of your respective manhoods (i.e. a comparison of your respective subterranean carrot lengths), in Esmeralda's eyes, all that mattered, first off, was which of the two of you was the manlier bloke to begin with (i.e., which of you two sported the more luxuriant above-ground verdage) and which of you eventually proved the manlier of the two by way of the contest.'
'So her entire storming out performance, which was ostensibly occasioned by her discovery of our shared Arsenalophobia...'
'...Was just that--a performance. Oh, sure, she was undoubtedly put off by the glimpse she got of the stalks of your respective subterranean members, by the revelation of your shared Arsenalophobia. But if the concealment or outright absence of such subterranean stalkage were to count as a sine qua non of coupledom, who amongst us blokes should escape a lifetime of onanistic self-flogging?'
'I see. And has this general observation of yours been borne out by the particulars of your own experience of the sex?'
'Has it ever! What do you think my lifelong devotion to the art of last-order calling has been in the eyes of the women I've known, if not a whole passel or bushel of carrots. Cor! I could tell you some stories, Rugger...'
…As he thereupon proceeded to do. The first one was about this ‘bird from Birmingham’ he’d dated back in the late 80s, and who’d kicked him out of her flat for keeping her up all night with his so-called elocution exercises, only to invite him back in a week later on condition he’d have his practice room in the basement soundproofed with egg-cartons. The second was about this ‘chica from Colchester’ he’d dated back in the mid 90s, and who’d kicked him out her bungalow for keeping her up all night with his so-called larynx-toning routine, only to invite him back a week later on condition he’d have his treatment room in the garage soundproofed with ‘sheets of those pointy foam rubber thingies’. Naturally, me being my gormless self, I assumed at the start of tale number two that there would turn out to be some or rationale for his telling more than one story; that, for example, the fact that the girl was from a different town this time round and that he'd known her at a later period presaged some refinement or elaboration of his overall analytics of misogyny. But having duly noted, come TN2's end, not only the differences between the home burgs of the two girls and the historical time frames of the liaisons, but also between the layouts of the blokess's living quarters, the names of the respective last-orderly routines and the respective compositions of the soundproofing materials; and corollarily sussed out a curious and indeed uncanny correspondence between the profile sketched out by these differences and that of Fanny Adams, I elected at the prologue of tale number three (concerning the dame from Durham back in the early oughties) to spare myself such instruction as could be furnished by the knowledge that feminine lightning had struck not merely twice but thrice in the same hapless blokerly spot, by interrupting him thus:
'--OK, OK, Jimmy. Sorry to cut in like this, but our time together here is finite, and I think I'm at last beginning to get the point: you think that I should ring her back up.'
'Yeah, in a nutshell. But also--and what's more important--that you should sever once and for all every tie betwixt the notion of remaining attached to her and the notion of reconciling her to your Arsenalophobia. So long as those two notions remain intertwined, you'll be letting yourself in for a woild of hoit.'
And there our chinwag might have ended, barring my tendering of thanks to Jimmy for all of his sound bloke-to-bloke advice, &c., had it not been for the popping into my gourdita, at that very moment, of a full-fledged-and-formulated reservation as to the applicability of this selfsame advice in my particular case, a reservation that I dare say would not have had the leisure to mature had Jimmy not fatigued my oriole-flexing muscles beforehand with his teejiously pleonastic account of his amatory woes (for I gots to say I've long observed that these sorts of aural workouts, for all of their apparent futility whilst one is submitting to them, have a way of clearing out the shit-pipes of the mind, rather like a kind of mental Weetabix, and thereby making room for fresh ideas):
'But who's to say, Jimmy, that she mightn't have fallen out of love with me on account of my Aresenalophobia, or that she mightn't eventually and fully be reconciled to that Arsenalophobia; given that she fell for me in the first place on account of our shared enthralment to a parallel passion, namely Kenophobia?'
'Double-you-tee-eff-ophobia?'
'Kenophobia: our shared fear, contempt and hatred of the first and current mayor of Greater London.'
'This is news to me, Rugger [as, I just then realise, it would have to be, seeing as how the name of the Thrice-Accursed-One had not once been dropped by either Esmeralda or myself during those scant butchers'-quarter-dozen hours we'd spent with Jimmy]. 'Do tell on.'
And so I tell him the story of my inaugural chin-brush with Esmeralda up at Redford's, of the ensuing Mad Ken Lib game, of her impeccably well-planned seduction of YFCT at night's end; cramming (I note with no small amount of pride) the full length of the yarn on to a time spool roughly half the width of that required for one of Jimmy's own girl tales. By yarn's end Jimmy is, if not flummoxed, at least mildly stumped:
'It's a poser, I'll admit: the apparent intensity of this girl's hatred of Mr Livingstone. Rare indeed is the woman who can be arsed to get her dander up on account of a specific person (her own bloke or a potential female rival for his attention excepted). Of course, when it comes to the pursuit of an abstract cause, your average woman can easily match us toof for toof and nail for nail, especially if the cause in question can be linked to preventing some bloke somewhere from enjoying himself on his lonesome, in the absence of some member of her tribe.'
'Oh, come off it, Jimmy! Now your woman-hating has clearly taken a turn for the delusional. Do you really mean to suggest that Esmeralda hates Ken simply because he's a bloke?'
'Of course not. In fact, I didn't mean to suggest anything at all in particular. I was just thinking aloud, as they say. And I dare say no matter how long I'd gone on thinking aloud, I shouldn't have pitched upon a more definite or positive suggestion than the following: Don't assume, just because you and Esmeralda both hate Ken Livingstone, and your shared hatred of him brought you together; that, at bottom, the two of you hate him for the same reason.'
'With your permission, Jimmy, I'll assume as much as I fucking well like. The reasons, which I've already enumerated to you, are twofold, and as plain as the bare bottom of a newborn babe: 1) that Ken's a bloody tyrant, and b) that he's incapable of making a public statement that bears logical scrutiny.'
'All well and good for now, Rugger. But who's to say some third and more fundamental reason won't eventually come to light--on your end or hers--and put paid to your cosy illusions of two hearts beating as one Kenophobic organ. You must think, if you will, of your respective Kenophobic axe-grinding agendas as standing in relation each other as do the body and soul in the metaphysics of Renny Descartes. The body says, "I'm peckish", the soul says, "I'm stroppy", and the two of 'em are in incidental agreement that a fish 'n' popper combo will satisfy their divergent ends--the one to be full, the other to be chipper. But from this incidental agreement, we ought not to gather that hunger and stroppiness are identical phenomena--it's only because the two of them are contingently in synch with one another, like two clocks set to the same hour, minute and second--'
'--Speaking of clocks, Jimmy,' I say, mindful now more than ever before tonight of time's schlongèd chariot, 'would you happen to have the time?'
'Yeah,' says Jimmy, flipping open his mobile (I having deliberately left mine at home, in evident overrating of the prospective uninterruptedness of our chinwag): 'It's exactly 11:07. Cor! 11:07! And we're both still sitting here drinking--'
'--Just barely,' I say, okie-ing the warm tenth of a pint of Hoegaarden at the bottom of my glass. 'The barman has been cuntishly neglectful of us all night.'
'I'll say: of us and of a certain basic barmanly duty that should have been attended to...oh...some 22 minutes ago at the latest.'
'You don't mean...?'
'...Yes, I do. And as he hasn't seen to it, I must, regrettably, take the law into my own hands.'
'Please, Jimmy, don't. Have you done any preparatory research on this place? If not, have you stopped to consider the possibility that...?'
I trail off on seeing that Jimmy is entirely deaf to my entreaties. Indeed, as of the beginning of my second question, he's already on his feet, hands cupped athwart each side of his gob and calling out:
'LADIES AND GENTLEMEN! MAY I HAVE YOUR ATTENTION, PLEASE? NOW, I SHOULD ADMIT UP FRONT THAT I DON'T ACTUALLY WORK HERE, BUT FEAR NOT: I AM A LICENSED BARMAN. AND IN THAT CAPACITY, AND OUT OF A TOTALLY DISINTERESTED CONCERN FOR THE LEGAL WELL-BEING OF THIS ESTABLISHMENT--A CONCERN ODDLY BUT EVIDENTLY ENOUGH NOT FELT BY ITS PROPRIETOR--I HAVE TAKEN IT UPON MYSELF TO INFORM YOU THAT WE (OR, RATHER, THEY) ARE NOW CLO-O-O-O-Y-Y-Y-SED!'
It's hard to tell whether the diphthongization of the vowel in that last word is occasioned more by the sudden, unlooked-for materialisation, behind Jimmy's back, of our waiter, or by the latter's immejiately subsequent ministering of a few well-aimed forefinger prods to ye olde Vulcan nerve-pinch zone, the hollow between Jimmy's collarbone and shoulder muscles. At any rate, the bloke succeeds in cutting him short and bending his ear to a few whispered sour nuffinks to the presumptive effect of We've got a fucking 24-licence, you git! And even supposing we hadn't got one, you've got one heck of a lot of huevos, upstaging me like this--I've a mind to have your arse disbarred from the fucking guild. Then Jimmy turns all contrite, mutters a few treacly nuffinks into the bloke's ear to the presumptive effect of I never would have dared if I'd known, and I never should have dared, in any case; and please don't have me disbarred, sir! I'll make good my infraction, just you wait and see; and, addressing the crowd once again, declaims:
'SORRY, LADIES AND GENTLEMEN--I STAND CORRECTED, AND LEAVE YOU IN THE MORE THAN COMPETENT HANDS OF MR--'
[The barman leans earwards to whisper his surname.]
'--MR WEXLER. DRINK TO YOUR HEARTS', WALLETS' AND PERSONAL CALENDARS' CONTENTS, AND TIP HIM WELL.'
[A collective groan to the indubitable effect of Is this fucking git for real? percolates up from all corners of the room, to the waiter's immeasurably apparent cuntsternation.]
'YEAH,' Jimmy resumes, oblivious alike of the crowd's and his colleague's discontent, 'I KNOW WHY YOU LOT ARE GROANING: IT'S COS YOU THINK TIPPING IS UN-BRITISH. WELL IT MAY VERY WELL BE THAT--BUT IN TANDEM WITH THE USHERING IN OF THE NEW LICENSING LAWS HAS COME THE USHERING IN OF A NEW ERA OF FEDERALISM, OF DISTINCTIVELY ENGLISH AS OPPOSED TO CLONISHLY BRITISH CUSTOMS, AND THAT MEANS BYE-BYE TO THE PENNY-PINCHING FOLKWAYS OF OUR N**GARDLY NEIGHBOURS NORTH OF THE TWEEE!ED--'
Again comes the old Vulcan nerve-pinch, followed by the peremptory proffering of one of those fold-up leatherette thingies bearing our bill, which amounts to as unambiguous a way of saying GTFOOH(YFC) as a boot to the arse or a touch of the triple-nines to a mobile keypad. It was, TBS, an ignominious end to an otherwise edifying evening. Still, you've got to look at the silver lining, haven't you: if Jimmy hadn't made such an ass (sic) of himself, we might've been left sitting there till bourgie dawn waiting for our next pint, to say nothing of our bill; whereas, what with our being thrown out of there by a quarter-past eleven, I got home in plently of time to make my Phipps-sanctioned phone-call to Esmeralda. The relation of the particulars of this call are, of course, best poned to the kick-off of the next post.
Labels: Esmeralda, Manish Shah, Manisha Asha, Mike Ayhern, Proctologitex
posted by Rugby McGyver | 4:34 am
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