Sunday, October 11, 2009

Post 298eight - The Cheese Sandwich Epic Part 2w0 - the buttering the bread interlude



It's 3hree am on a cold Sunday Morning, some lost and damned point of late 1992wo. I'm standing outside a phone box, because boffins are still tinkering with the Internet and the only way I could find out whether Liverpool beat Sheffield Wednesday or Coventry or some other rival group of men in matching coloured shirts in a game that had epic importance some long ago time. It's raining, but I couldn't sleep anyway. I'd been laying awake listening to the rain thump down hard on the ground, looked out at my bare and empty room which was only adorned by a horrendous spongy and sparky carpet, and a Troll Doll I'd been given for luck, and been bitterly homesick. To this day I can't see a solitary troll doll on a garage sale table without feeling strangely alienated and miles from home, even if the table is just around the corner from my house. Unable to speak I had sprung from my bed, taken a regulation supply of Monte Carlo biscuits from the fridge, and walked around until I knew from the maths in my head that enough time had passed for a final score. Except it hadn't. Daylight savings. Damn it. So I sat on the fort for a while kicking bark from the top of the fort to the bottom while pools of water formed on the ground. I didn't really care about the football, I just need something to do to take my mind off things. There's a milkman across the way as the rain falls and I pull a coat over my shoulders, he's making slow deliberate steps through deep puddles on the ground, and he sees me sitting on the fort throwing bark on the ground in a thunderstorm. I don't like a bit poetic, just sad and depressed.

"Want some Milk?" he says, possibly the only thing you can say at a time like this. He certainly wasn't going to give me a hug and a backrub. Too weird.

I was kind of torn between accepting the milk and telling him where to go, since I had an image to maintain as a surly edgy Scottish loner who spent his time wandering from milk bar to post office. Then again, he was lucky he wasn't on the wrong end of an outpouring of conversational confession about how sad and depressed and homesick I was. I think I just took the milk and said nothing, which was the best of all worlds. Edgy loner be damned, I needed my calcium.

My girlfriend Vicki was in the queue for the phone with me. She knew where I was when the knock on the window failed to rouse me, either out the back of Mitre 10 sitting on a crate, loitering around the edges of the football ground huddled in the grandstand, or in the park. Luckily she lived near the park, so if it was the 3hrd option, it was a real time saver. Her parents were scholarly and concerned about their daughter. They both wore glasses and talked about Male oppression while their daughter smoked and ran out her window every night to hang out with kids in abandoned shops. Still, I wouldn't imagine the brochure involved hanging outside a phone box in the rain listening to tales about how Paul Stewart wasn't fit to wear a Liverpool shirt. She was understandably surly, and was openly argumentative about being forced to idle away her beauty sleep on some stupid game. And it was stupid. Very stupid, especially frittering away 5ive dollars in gold coins just to get a soccer score. I should have kno...

"You never take me anywhere!" she said, hand on denimed hips, while I fiddled with my Joe Bloggs hat, since I hadn't entirely committed to edgy lonerness, and was still at least partially wearing a hat that made me look like a member of Urban Hype.

I didn't know to be honest we were at the take each other places stage. "I take you to the Dial Arcade!" I said - and I did. I knew I shouldn't have introduced her to Tad. That's the band, but Tad the far more genuinely edgy loner who could grow a moustache wasn't helping either. He smashed windows, I just looked at them askance or took a wry sideways glance at them. I didn't help myself either by 1ne day, on a heady mix of cigar smoke, cheap cider and urban alienation in the middle of the park, I had the temerity to express, of all things, an enthusiasm. And not just for anything, for laser tag. I was quick to pass it off as irony, but it wasn't a good move. A few years later I could have steered the conversation back to Portishead, but we didn't have Kurt Cobain in Scotland, we had to make up our angst. Hard to be angst ridden watching Wogan 5ive times a night...endless "is there a little bit of you in the character"...it's a deep question, but not 5ive times a week...

There was a man in the phone box holding in our perpetual argumentative state. A man named Nigel from memory. He had big teeth, big illuminated teeth, and he was telling someone how much he loved them. He looked desperately out of breath and he had a cut on his hand that he was fiddling with in agitation. He looked at us standing in the rain and held his non bleeding hand up to the air. An apology of sorts, a stigmatic apology of other sorts. I was still drinking my milk and fiddling with my hat 1/2lf an hour later, by which point Vicki had flounced off to discuss the notions of patriarchy with her parents. She left in a burst of relatively foul flouncy language, most notably insulting my hat. That really hurt. The hat had done nothing to deserve that. I could tell that things were going wrong when she wasn't even interested anymore in my stories about fringe work at Atlantic 252, our supposed edgy radio in Scotland, and when tales of prank calling a member of Texas aren't winning friends...

Nigel apologized for his lady trouble. I said it comes when you cheat on your wife. He smoothed the edges of his tuxedo, having 1nce again made up some fake business awards night in Devonport as an excuse to see his paramour, a woman named Evie who sliced meat like a princess at the Cut Price Sams deli. He wasn't offended by my chiding, after all it's what edgy loners do. Chide. He offered me a smoke and explained patiently that the sex was great and he always left with the best off cuts of bacon. I didn't know if it was a Bottle Boys style entendre so I just quietly shared a smoke with him in the rain before putting my coins into the slot, and letting the magic of the camp bloke who read out the soccer scores on the Premium phone line hopefully deliver me some good news. Whatever the Arsenal score was though was obscured by Nigels plaintive parting greeting...

"It's alright for you though, being part of Penguins glamour couple!"

What was to come of this confused and distracted young boy was unclear, locked into so many different emotions even the writer of the Sons and Daughters theme was exhausted, but at least he knew where he had come from, and that, as they say, was somehow even more troubling...

We won by the way. 3-0. Cop that, idiotically shirted away team...

4 comments:

Kettle said...

I'm glad you had some Monte Carlos and milk to help balance out the storm and angst! I'm happy to be inside, dry and in my jarmies.

Jannie Funster said...

Hey, insult the man, his dog, his car, he home or his gal but lay off the hat. The hat is sacred. Everybody knows that.

Blue Bunny said...

i likes teh lady singing about having a war to fite, she is gud, eben if she neffer evin opined her eyes.

Miles McClagan said...

I know, they really helped! I was all leaping out the window, but I was really making sure I loaded up on tasty biscuits...what a dilemma! Angst sucks! Why not stay dry AND drink the biscuits right!

It was part of an outfit as well, a really tops one...it was such a nice hat. It'll be due back in fashion soon, then I won't be copping any dis-respect!


That's Beth Gibbons from Portishead mate - she is awesome! She is a moody minx though, so she keeps her eyes closed on most songs!