Filth

The Rash

The next morning I shit on the hotel’s traylike bogs. A pile of chestnuts faces me, foul of Dame Judi, but yielding no signs of the alien monster. I know it’s up there though, inside of me, twisting and growing, biding its time, like an Arthur Scargill in the healthy body politic of eighties Britain, the enemy within.

I get out and visit another couple of hoors, one Thai, one black. The black one looked at my balls as if she had never seen white meat before. Maybe it’s the rash, it’s definitely getting worse.

Worse.

I put in another shift of afternoon drinking, Heineken and geneva, before I scored some good, gum-numbing cocaine fae a guy in a brown bar. Then I was back out on the piss. That’s the thing aboot charlie: gies ye superhuman drinking powers. No that I need them.

In one bar I have a bottle of Grolsch and I see that they are daein that space cake. I take one piece, then another. A wide cunt behind the bar tells me that I should watch that stuff and I just laugh and have another piece. I’m getting a good buzz in my head.

When I leave the bar it hits me and I feel really sick and nauseous.

The hippy cunts’ve tried to poison me, me a fuckin polisman. I’ll get ontae the Dutch polis and close the cunts down. I’m staggering around, too scared to cross the road cause these trams are coming from aw directions and the cunts on the bikes as well, and I’m too close tae the edge of the canal in this condition . . . these Dutch cunts . . .

. . . the EC should shut this fuckin place doon . . .

I get off the Damrak but I’m staggering down a narrow street and I bang into someone who shouts at me but I keep moving, it’s like a fucking nightmare where ye darenae look back. I’m hyperventilating when I get back to the hotel. Bladesey’s lying on the bed in his room, watching the telly. I head to the bog and shit again and I see that there’s something in my stools. I can’t look at it. I sit there for a while and calm down before I go back and face Bladesey.

His face seems to reverberate against the wall and all I can hear is that fucking actually voice. I don’t know how it happens but Bladesey’s giving me gyp. He seems to be three sheets and tells me that he met some Londoners and they got wrecked. The conversation seems to drift to music. I mention I like Motown; Marvin, Smokey and the like, or I did before I destroyed my albums realising that it was a sign of weakness to have coon music in the hoose.

Bladesey’s voice is a high, incessant squeal through drink. – How can you be a racist and like Motown? he’s whining, – I mean, how can you be a racist and like Marvin Gaye?

– Marvin Gaye was not a black man.

– How can you say that?

– He wasn’t a black man to me. The cunt that shot him, that was a black man. That was a fuckin nigger.

– But that was his father!

– Yes. A black man.

I can’t feel anything, there’s no sense of me standing up and moving over to him, but I have some sense of grabbing Bladesey round the neck and him shouting: – What are you doing Bruce? It’s me! It’s me!

But I know it’s him and I want to choke the living shite out of the cunt, just turn off his gas for good cause I detest the bastard and he’s just one of the cunts who’s got it in for me.

Can’t fuckin save them

The boy up the Bridges

You can kill them casually

why can’t you fuckin well save them so casually

stop them

stop him

The walls are reverberating and it’s out of my hands . . . his neck . . .

How did it make you feel?

He’s still on the bed as I leave, rubbing his scrawny pigeon-neck, gasping for air.

I don’t believe I attacked Bladesey. My mate. My travelling companion. Brother Blades. A stalwart in the craft. A brother.

I’m down the narrow stairs, staggering past the pouting blond guy on the reception. In the street, a ragged junkie hoor smiles at me from under a streetlamp, a remnant of a t-shirt Amsterdam which seldom resembles the more sanitised and regulated real life. I get into a bar and order a Heineken. I’m thinking of Bladesey, that sad little cunt who needs very little and who can’t understand what a grievous rage his attitude and manner induces in the rest of us for whom everything in the world could never, ever, be anything like enough.

My chest throbs as I sit on the barstool. My hands are tingling and voices are ringing in my ear, speaking a language I can’t understand, but there’s no mistaking their murderous intent.

Bladesey. I’ve got to get back to Bladesey.

Bladesey.

The longer our friendship has developed, the more the destruction and humiliation of this sad little creature has grown to obsess me. He needs to be confronted with what he really is, he has to feel, see and acknowledge his inadequacy as a member of the human species, then he has to do the honourable thing and renounce that membership. And I will help him.

First I have to drink off those fuckin hippy drugs.