That’s one thing I could never fathom in Damon. His pornography of violence. How he could be both inside the brutality and also outside preserving it for posterity ? I used to think that you just had to have yourself think like a man to unravel that stumper. But unfolding before my very eyes, I am presented with empirical evidence to the contrary. Every day I am compressed behind the cordon sanitaire, transfused directly into the heart of the contagion that is my people abroad and away from home. An epidemic that used to be just about held in check back in Blighty by flimsy anti-rabidity restrictions, but now unleashed here under grant of charter holidays. Disposable income, disposable attitude to other people. Across the Square from me, right over there, is the sort of cut glass they don’t show in the tour brochures.
Normally about this time they catch the sun’s rays and put on a spangling floor show. But not today. The lustre has probably been dulled by the vermillion glaze lining it. Boys and girls making out from here and straight into Casualty. And for what ? A bonk ? A shag ? What the hell is a bonk ? A bank that’s gone wrong ? Like a liquidity crisis or something ? A bonk. Sounds like a gentle prang at two miles per hour, rather than a full head-on collision. I’ve heard of a bunk up, when space was at a premium. Where there was no privacy. When there was no alternative but to do it on a street bed of glass, but no one should need recourse to it anymore. Especially in this flush neck of the woods. And I thought shag, was either a type of pile, or pipe tobacco. As in carpet burns or pubic hair getting caught in the teeth like, well, pipe tobacco.
Rumpy-pumpy, there’s another one. What on earth is one of those - or a pair - when it’s at home ? These words mean nothing to me. I am only acquainted with them, since nightly they are trumpeted at the top of screeching lungs along the Strip (large ‘S’, yet mean spirited), by the girls ! Gaggles of female press gangs, impressively transacting non-pecuniary pledges. And then I realise, these terms have been instituted by my fairer sex. Softer, gentler words to replace the workaday terms like nailed, banged, laid, screwed, drilled, pumped, balled, or poked. The doing words. Grindstone honed, that building site of our bodies, upon which was erected the bailiwick that our manual trades-men built. Work and play, mutual and reciprocal, to the exclusion of their spouses. So I am moved to silently applaud. Admiring the reflexive litheness of our language. Cheerleading the wresting back of a vestige of control. Since before you can put yourself in the position of a man, you have to have some conception of being a woman.
But as I peer closer at the clinches, they are just girls, or girlies after all. At play, or playing at it. Judging by the preponderance of faux bridal veils. While caricature devil horns and angel wings, further undermines any cogency they might credit they possess. Though they may brazenly take to the street in crop tops and bikinis, still as they walk they hug their own elbows or shoulders. Forearms threaded across their midriffs, as if to reconceal all exposed flesh. As if they are trying to hold themselves together entirely. Their self-esteem is all shot. Their salty swagger peppered with the shrapnel of anxiety. They are not laying any foundations of conscious change. Not ladette so much as laddered. Tight. With their demure paunches and their chary beer-bellies. Binge drinking is just bulimia for those too squeamish to put their own fingers down their throats. Hanky-panky, now we had that one back in my day (as I’m saying it, is ‘my day’ finally over ?) Only now, hanky panky is a willowy white slip, raised in utter submission. A wispy cotton-brief lowered in abject capitulation. Bonk must stand for bonkers, a boozey out-of-their-mindedness, bankable sure thing. While the only fibre that is shagged, is their resistance. The bars of their inhibitions jemmied apart by Jim Beam or Jack Daniels. Or a baby-fucking-sham (the very designation of empty sex) ! No jiggery, just pokery entailed. The boys are back in town and I’m old enough to be their mother.
They can’t quite carry it off. Not like me. Back home, I was more self-possessed and more blokeish than any of these prim whims. I’d lived it for real. Rode the bucking bronco, steered the raging bull, muzzled the untamed mustang. Bareback, not sidesaddle like these prissy missys. I’d broken bread with the Minotaur and demanded my slice of tribute too. But it was cos part of me was feminine and weak, hankering after some true emotionality back in the real world, that it all unravelled. And it took a bent-as-a-nine-bob-note Theseus to come and pull me out of there. Pre-fall Eden is mind-crushingly humdrum and graceless, be it lording over terrified toadies in London. Or being serenaded by wastrel wraiths out here in paradise. Each entails a paucity of feeling.
See, I certainly know about alcohol and I know all about making dangerous love too. Christ I’ve spent a good chunk of my life being boned on the edge of a knife. And over there, broken glass and all, that’s not it. That’s sex for sale so cheap, they’re giving it away. The bottom’s dropped out the market. A perfect knicker-elasticity of supply and demand. So much so that when it’s served up on a plate, ungarnished, it mocks me with its bilious mouldering. See Tantalus, since it was in front of you every day, you should have just abstained. Then you would have observed through its decay, that it just wasn’t worth it in the first place.
This kid, one May it was, early in my season, late in his. In fact some football showpiece final. He couldn’t believe he’d got his dates wrong and flown out on holiday before the FA Cup had been played out at Wembley. Never missed one yet he claimed. Still, neither was he coy at all about the chance to get all coital. And here I was offering him the chance to make the beast with two backs, rather than watch a couple of flat-back fours. He protested that the match was more like a tradition with him, so if I could just see my way to sitting on the love bench for ninety odd minutes plus extra time if necessary. Sure why not, the pace of life out here was slow enough, (Greece’d lightning it is not), that you're always waiting for something. Even if it was only one’s own expiration. I held out for what seemed like an eternity, but was in fact only til just after half-time, before deciding to spring his off-to-one-side trap with some defence-splitting ball control and some keepy-uppy.
But as we fought each other into a bore-draw stalemate, our post-match analysis concluded that it had only served to detach him from the experience of the game. While in turn, the game had detached him from the blow by blow sensations of the blow-by-blow job. He could remember the result but not the goals. And while he could recall peaking, he could not recollect whether he’d Jackson Pollocked my face or Jasper Johns-ed the back of my throat, (my phraseology rather than his, which was somewhat less decorous). The real condemnation lay however, in that since he was committed to neither team, nor as to me, he scarcely registered irritation at forfeiting the passions of any kind of partisanship. For as he postulated, chips are beezer and bread can’t be bettered, but a chip butty was a monstrous sacrilege of both (again I paraphrase, for though certainly abstracted, he lacked the means of even rudimentary expression). But what really relegated him to a notch below a notch, was when he said the whole thing could have been worse. He could have Jackson Pollocked that nice David Beckham on the telly. In your dreams mate, when we’re talking about his focus being glued to a giant-sized screen mounted above head-height. Even if a portable had been strapped to the end of his flaccid prick, he couldn’t have pushed the on button.
So, I’ve had my fill of glacé eyed, maraschino cherry pickings. Under-ripe I might have expected, but I was appalled to discover that, despite the callowness of their youth, necrosis has already set in. The wormwood gall of woodwormed aspirations, it colo(g)n-ises my perspiration every day out here. I blend in perfectly. That’s why I languish on their side of the cordon insanitaire. Besides, I know it’s for my own protection. Never mind eh, nil desperandum. But moreover, definitely not nil by mouth. Rather, omnis ver mouth, a salute to omnia vincit amor. A ver-mouth drink, therefore, must now be apposite. English Rose or a Creeping Death. Which is it to be ?
