Then I could die in peace.
(
BorisKarloff is in the back of the classroom forever,
Wed 2 Dec 2015, 21:30,
archived)
I'm wearing a Prada suit totally unaware of who helped me put it on and I'm positioned in one of the Dialogica chairs in the living room, playing with a lime-green tie someone chose for me. On the TV screen, with the sound off, reruns of "Cheers" followed by "Home Improvement" run endlessly on a tape someone stuck into the VCR. A PA hands me a book of notes that Bobby made, I'm told, especially for me. Continents are investigated, floor plans of the Ritz have been reproduced, an outline was printed from a computer of the TWA terminal at Charles de Gaulle, diagrams of the layout of Harry's Bar in Venice, handwriting experts preoccupied with verifying signatures are interviewed, entries from a diary someone named Keith kept concerning a trip he made to Oklahoma City, pages about plastic explosives, the best wiring, the correct timer, the right container, the best detonator.
I'm reading "Semtex is made in Czechoslavakia." I'm reading "Semtex is an odorless, colorless plastic explosive." I'm reading "Libya has tons of Semtex." I'm reading "It takes 6 oz. of Semtex to blow up an airliner." I'm reading a profile on a newly manufactured plastic explosive called Remform, which is made and distributed only "underground" in the U.S. and is still unavailable in Europe. I'm reading a list of Remform's "pros and cons." I'm reading the words Bobby has scrawled on the side of a page: More useful than Semtex? and then two words that I stare at until they move me to get up out of the Dialogica chair and walk purposefully into the kitchen to make myself a drink: "... tests pending...
On this much Xanax it's remarkably easy to concentrate solely on the making of a Cosmopolitan. You think of nothing else while pouring cranberry juice, Cointreau and lemon citron into a shaker filled with ice that you yourself attacked with an ice pick and then you're rolling a lime and slicing it open, squeezing the juice into the shaker, and then you're pouring the cocktail through a strainer into a giant martini glass, and back in the living room Makeup fixes my hair and I can't help but keep imagining what Jamie and Bobby are doing in their bedroom and I'm glancing up at the ceiling and while sipping the Cosmopolitan I zone out on the Paul McCartney and Wings sticker on the front of the notebook Bobby made for me.
"Didn't we hang in Serifos?" the hairdresser asks me.
"We didn't hang out in Serifos," I say, and then, "Oh yeah."
I attempt to read an interview in Le Figaro that Jamie gave on Wednesday but I'm unable to follow it, realizing midway through that I'm unable to speak or read French. I barely notice the hand grenade leaning against an automatic rifle on the table my drink is sitting on. Why this Paul McCartney and Wings sticker is on my notebook is a question easier to concentrate on. Crew members debate whether the latest U2 record really cuts it, until the director calls out for silence.
Bobby glides in. I look up solemnly from whatever it is I'm doing. "You look nice," he says.
I soften, smile weakly.
"What are you drinking?" he asks.
I have to look at the color of the drink before answering, "A Cosmopolitan."
"Can I have a sip?"
"Sure." I hand him the martini glass.
Bobby takes a sip, brightens up and smiles. "Great Cosmo, dude."
A very long pause while I wait for him to hand the drink back. "I... appreciate the compliment."
"Listen, Victor," Bobby starts, kneeling down in front of me.
I tense up, cross my legs, the copy of Le Figaro slipping to the terrazzo floor.
"I appreciate you watching Jamie and-"
"Hey man, I-"
"-I just wanted to let you know that-"
"Hey man, I-"
"Hey, shhh, chill out." He breathes in, stares intently up at me. "Listen, if I chastise you at times, if I seem to"-he pauses effectively-"warn you a little too harshly about where your place is in all of this, it's just to keep you on your feet." He pauses again, holding direct eye contact. "I really trust you, Victor." Another pause. "Really."
A long pause, this one on my part. "What's going to happen, Bobby?" I ask.
"You'll be prepped," Bobby says. "You'll be told what you need to know. You'll be given just the right amount of infor-"
Upstairs someone slams a door and Tammy cries out and then it's silent. Someone stomps down a hallway, cursing. From inside Tammy's room Prodigy starts blasting out. Bobby flinches, then sighs. "That, however, is getting out of hand."
"What's the story?" I ask slowly.
"Tammy's conducting an affair that is important to us but shouldn't mean anything to Bruce." Bobby sighs, still on his haunches in front of me. "But it does. And that is proving to be a problem. Bruce needs to get over it. Quickly."
"What is"-I start, breathe in-"the problem?"
"The problem..." Bobby stares at me sternly. Finally a smile. "The problem really doesn't concern you. The problem will be resolved soon enough."
"Uh-huh, uh-huh," I'm saying, trying to sip the drink.
"Are you okay, Victor?" Bobby asks.
"As well as... can be"-I gulp-"expected."
"I actually think you're better than that," Bobby says, standing up.
"Meaning what?" I ask, genuinely interested.
"Meaning that I think you've adapted well."
A long pause before I'm able to whisper, "Thank you."
Bruce walks down the circular staircase wearing a black Prada suit and a bright-orange turtleneck, holding a guitar and a bottle of Volvic water. Ignoring both of us, he flops down in a corner of the room and starts strumming chords before settling again on the Bread song "It Don't Matter to Me," and the entire crew is silent, waiting. Bobby studies Bruce for a long time before turning back to me.
"Look," Bobby says. "I understand where you're coming from, Victor. We plant bombs. The government disappears suspects."
"Uh-huh."
"The CIA has more blood soaked into its
hands than the PLO and the IRA combined." Bobby walks over to a window, peels back a dark, lacy curtain and stares out at the other crew milling about on the street, just silhouettes whispering into walkie-talkies, movement in the mist, more waiting. "The government is an enemy." Bobby turns to face me. "My god, you of all people should know that, Victor."
"But Bobby, I'm not... political," I blurt out vaguely.
"Everyone is, Victor," Bobby says, turning away again. "It's something you can't help."
My only response is to gulp down the rest of the Cosmopolitan.
"You need to get your worldview straightened out," Bobby's telling me. "You need to get your information about the world straightened out."
"We're killing civilians," I whisper.
"Twenty-five thousand homicides were committed in our country last year, Victor."
"But... I didn't commit any of them, Bobby."
Bobby smiles patiently, making his way back to where I'm sitting. I look up at him, hopefully.
"Is it so much better to be uninvolved, Victor?"
"Yes," I whisper. "I think it is."
"Everyone's involved," he whispers back. "That's something you need to know."
"I'm just, man, I'm just, man, I'm just-"
"Victor-"
"-man, having a hard time having to, like, justify this and..." I stare at him pleadingly.
"I don't think you have to justify anything, man."
"Bobby, I'm an... American, y'know?"
"Hey Victor," Bobby says, staring down at me. "So am I."
"Why me, Bobby?" I ask. "Why do you trust me?"
"Because you think the Gaza Strip is a particularly lascivious move an erotic dancer makes," Bobby says. "Because you think the PLO recorded the singles 'Don't Bring Me Down' and 'Evil Woman.'"
Silence until the phone rings. Bobby picks up. Bruce stops playing the guitar. It's the film crew from outside and they're ready. Bobby tells them we'll be right out. The film crew inside is already packing it in. The director, obviously satisfied, confers with Bobby, who keeps nodding while staring over at Bruce. On cue Tammy, Bentley and Jamie walk down the circular spiral staircase, and outside the film crew shoots us three times walking from the front door to the black Citroen, the six of us laughing, Bentley leading the way, Jamie and Bobby holding on to each other "playfully," Bruce and I flanking Tammy and she's clasping our hands, looking at each of us happily, because in the movie the crew outside is shooting I'm supposed to be in love with her. Jamie has to take a black Mercedes to Natacha because she's wearing a dress that cost $30,000.
And at Natacha MTV's filming a party upstairs where the girls are all wasted and beautiful and the guys are looking their hunkiest and everyone's wearing sunglasses and waiting for assistants to light their cigarettes and there's another party downstairs where Lucien Pellat-Finet is hanging out with the hat designer Christian Liagre and Andre Walker shows up on the arm of Claudia Schiffer who's wearing a feathered jumpsuit and has a red pageboy and Galliano's wearing a little black trilby hat and Christian Louboutin plays "Je T'Aime" on the piano with Stephanie Marais by his side singing the Jane Birkin part and we're receiving fans at the table we're slouched at, people flocking around us, whispering things, the prerequisite number of oohs and aahs, caviar sitting untouched on silver plates in front of us and it's all really youthquakey and the mood is light until Ralph and Ricky Lauren show up and tonight's theme is the unbearable lightness of being and everything is ubiquitous, the smell of shit rising up faintly from somewhere and floating all over the room.
"Victor," Bobby warns, after someone's handed me a packet of cocaine, reminding me of my assignment tomorrow. "And hey Bentley, pay attention."
Bentley's glassy-eyed from spending most of the day in a tanning bed and he's spacing out on good-looking teenage guys in muscle Ts. My foot has fallen asleep, the tingling moving slowly up my leg, my eyes glancing over at my name on tonight's invite. Photographers are taking pictures of our table. Tammy gazes away, her mouth caked with Urban Decay lipstick.
"He's madly in love with that busboy." Jamie smiles, lighting a cigarette.
We all turn our heads.
"I read an article about good-looking busboys in Time magazine." Bentley shrugs. "What can I say? I'm easily influenced."
"We're not going ahead with the Venice project," Bobby says loudly, over the din of the party.
"Harry's Bar?" Bruce asks, turning away from Tammy.
"No." Bobby shakes his head while waving to someone across the room.
Idly, without asking, I realize this means Harry's Bar will not be blown up.
In the darkness downstairs at Natacha an MTV camera crew interrupts Bobby's discussion of something called the "Band on the Run" project. A VJ begs Bobby and Jamie and Bentley to move closer together so the camera can get all three of them in the frame. Happily, they comply.
"It's about attitude as lifestyle, "Jamie's saying.
"You're starting to sound like a Calvin Klein ad, baby, and I don't like it," Bobby growls.
Jamie waves playfully at the camera until Bobby's asked about his involvement with Amnesty International. I turn away, notice Dennis Rodman striding confidently around the room in a loincloth, a giant pair of wings and a diamond nose ring. When I turn back to the table the VJ is asking Bentley how he likes Paris.
"I love everything but the Americans," Bentley yawns, being vaguely entertaining. "Americans are notoriously inept at foreign languages. My idea of tedium? Listening to some nitwit from Wisconsin try and order a glass of ice at Deux Magots."
From behind me I hear the segment director say to someone, "We're not running that."
"You should let people proceed at their own pace, Bentley," Jamie says gently, leaning in, plucking an unlit cigarette from his hand. "Don't have a tizzy."
"What are you all wearing?" the VJ asks, lights and a camera swinging around to the rest of us. "Just go with it."
It's freezing in Natacha, everyone's breath is steaming and we're waving away flies, the floor littered with piles of confetti, and the smell of shit is even more pervasive after I do a couple of hits from the packet of coke that I reluctantly hand back to Bentley. Markus Schenkenberg, who thinks he's my friend but who is not, pulls a chair up next to mine, another photo op, another black snakeskin jacket to show off, another chance for him to tell me, "We're not infallible, Victuh."
"Is that on the record or off the record?"
Markus yawns as Beatrice Dalle catwalks by, then glances back over at me.
"He's a terrorist," I tell Markus, motioning to Bobby.
"No," Markus says, shaking his head. "He doesn't look like a terrorist. He's way too gorgeous."
Reject the hype, girlfriend," I sigh, slouching deeper into my chair. "That guy's a terrorist."
"No," Markus says, shaking his head. "I know terrorists. That guy doesn't look like a terrorist."
I want to be very clear – there is no place on b3ta.com for bullying of any sort, from any side of the debate. It flies in the face of everything I believe and everything I stand for.
(
drimble he'd been white, he'd been black,
Wed 2 Dec 2015, 21:40,
archived)
Now that's funny!
(
BorisKarloff is in the back of the classroom forever,
Wed 2 Dec 2015, 21:41,
archived)
Did I ever tell you about the man who taught his asshole to talk? His whole abdomen would move up and down you dig farting out the words. It was unlike anything I ever heard.
This ass talk had sort of a gut frequency. It hit you right down there like you gotta go. You know when the old colon gives you the elbow and it feels sorta cold inside, and you know all you have to do is turn loose? Well this talking hit you right down there, a bubbly, thick stagnant sound, a sound you could smell.
This man worked for a carnival you dig, and to start with it was like a novelty ventriliquist act. Real funny, too, at first. He had a number he called “The Better ‘Ole” that was a scream, I tell you. I forget most of it but it was clever. Like, “Oh I say, are you still down there, old thing?”
“Nah I had to go relieve myself.”
After a while the ass start talking on its own. He would go in without anything prepared and his ass would ad-lib and toss the gags back at him every time.
Then it developed sort of teeth-like little raspy in-curving hooks and started eating. He thought this was cute at first and built an act around it, but the asshole would eat its way through his pants and start talking on the street, shouting out it wanted equal rights. It would get drunk, too, and have crying jags nobody loved it and it wanted to be kissed same as any other mouth. Finally it talked all the time day and night, you could hear him for blocks screaming at it to shut up, and beating it with his fist, and sticking candles up it, but nothing did any good and the asshole said to him: “It’s you who will shut up in the end. Not me. Because we dont need you around here any more. I can talk and eat and shit.”
After that he began waking up in the morning with a transparent jelly like a tadpole’s tail all over his mouth. This jelly was what the scientists call un-D.T., Undifferentiated Tissue, which can grow into any kind of flesh on the human body. He would tear it off his mouth and the pieces would stick to his hands like burning gasoline jelly and grow there, grow anywhere on him a glob of it fell. So finally his mouth sealed over, and the whole head would have have amputated spontaneous — (did you know there is a condition occurs in parts of Africa and only among Negroes where the little toe amputates spontaneously?) — except for the eyes you dig. Thats one thing the asshole couldn’t do was see. It needed the eyes. But nerve connections were blocked and infiltrated and atrophied so the brain couldn’t give orders any more. It was trapped in the skull, sealed off. For a while you could see the silent, helpless suffering of the brain behind the eyes, then finally the brain must have died, because the eyes went out, and there was no more feeling in them than a crab’s eyes on the end of a stalk.
(,
Wed 2 Dec 2015, 21:41,
archived)
This ass talk had sort of a gut frequency. It hit you right down there like you gotta go. You know when the old colon gives you the elbow and it feels sorta cold inside, and you know all you have to do is turn loose? Well this talking hit you right down there, a bubbly, thick stagnant sound, a sound you could smell.
This man worked for a carnival you dig, and to start with it was like a novelty ventriliquist act. Real funny, too, at first. He had a number he called “The Better ‘Ole” that was a scream, I tell you. I forget most of it but it was clever. Like, “Oh I say, are you still down there, old thing?”
“Nah I had to go relieve myself.”
After a while the ass start talking on its own. He would go in without anything prepared and his ass would ad-lib and toss the gags back at him every time.
Then it developed sort of teeth-like little raspy in-curving hooks and started eating. He thought this was cute at first and built an act around it, but the asshole would eat its way through his pants and start talking on the street, shouting out it wanted equal rights. It would get drunk, too, and have crying jags nobody loved it and it wanted to be kissed same as any other mouth. Finally it talked all the time day and night, you could hear him for blocks screaming at it to shut up, and beating it with his fist, and sticking candles up it, but nothing did any good and the asshole said to him: “It’s you who will shut up in the end. Not me. Because we dont need you around here any more. I can talk and eat and shit.”
After that he began waking up in the morning with a transparent jelly like a tadpole’s tail all over his mouth. This jelly was what the scientists call un-D.T., Undifferentiated Tissue, which can grow into any kind of flesh on the human body. He would tear it off his mouth and the pieces would stick to his hands like burning gasoline jelly and grow there, grow anywhere on him a glob of it fell. So finally his mouth sealed over, and the whole head would have have amputated spontaneous — (did you know there is a condition occurs in parts of Africa and only among Negroes where the little toe amputates spontaneously?) — except for the eyes you dig. Thats one thing the asshole couldn’t do was see. It needed the eyes. But nerve connections were blocked and infiltrated and atrophied so the brain couldn’t give orders any more. It was trapped in the skull, sealed off. For a while you could see the silent, helpless suffering of the brain behind the eyes, then finally the brain must have died, because the eyes went out, and there was no more feeling in them than a crab’s eyes on the end of a stalk.
the man who taught his asshole to talkvery much sums up beeter dot com
(,
Wed 2 Dec 2015, 21:42,
archived)
Have I told you about Squatter and the ant? drimble he'd been white, he'd been black,
Wed 2 Dec 2015, 21:45,
archived)
Well, Squatter, Squatter was in a terrible position.He was in Bahrain, which is a pretty bloody place to be. And there was this ant, which had only one leg and only one eye, and it was about two miles away from Squatter. So, a pretty bloody menacing position for Squatter, who was equipped only with, erm, you know, a hydrogen bomb, erm, six grenades, and, erm, a few rifles.
And this bloody ant, one eye, one leg, was advancing towards Squatter at about-, oh, I'd say at about, er, a mile every century, you know. Really speeding up. I think the animal was on drugs. Or heat, yes, as you may say. And Squatter, with his extraordinary calm, took it very smoothly. And do you know what he did?
Nothing.
He immediately did nothing.
And this stupified the ant. Stopped in its tracks. Didn't move an inch for about, um, three and a half years, yes. But still Squatter was very much aware of the problem of the ant, with all of one leg and all of one eye, advancing towards him. So he took up, you know, a strategic position with about five thousand men on one side and seven thousand men on the other side, all equipped with, er, various kinds of guns and so on. The ant was, er, fairly pinpointed. But what was odd was the ant understood Squatter. The ant realised he was up against somebody as good as-, as good as he was. Equals in their struggle, yes. So Squatter, with a tremendous display of courage, put up his hands and surrendered.
And the ant, five years laters, yes, five years laters, crept into the, er, hole, and Squatter was gone.
And this is the extraordinary thing about Squatter: he was never there when he was wanted. And Squatter told me later that, ah, he'd gone because he'd had to go.
That sums up Squatter for me.
(And this bloody ant, one eye, one leg, was advancing towards Squatter at about-, oh, I'd say at about, er, a mile every century, you know. Really speeding up. I think the animal was on drugs. Or heat, yes, as you may say. And Squatter, with his extraordinary calm, took it very smoothly. And do you know what he did?
Nothing.
He immediately did nothing.
And this stupified the ant. Stopped in its tracks. Didn't move an inch for about, um, three and a half years, yes. But still Squatter was very much aware of the problem of the ant, with all of one leg and all of one eye, advancing towards him. So he took up, you know, a strategic position with about five thousand men on one side and seven thousand men on the other side, all equipped with, er, various kinds of guns and so on. The ant was, er, fairly pinpointed. But what was odd was the ant understood Squatter. The ant realised he was up against somebody as good as-, as good as he was. Equals in their struggle, yes. So Squatter, with a tremendous display of courage, put up his hands and surrendered.
And the ant, five years laters, yes, five years laters, crept into the, er, hole, and Squatter was gone.
And this is the extraordinary thing about Squatter: he was never there when he was wanted. And Squatter told me later that, ah, he'd gone because he'd had to go.
That sums up Squatter for me.
drimble he'd been white, he'd been black,
Wed 2 Dec 2015, 21:47,
archived)
Did he also teach it to type?By any chance, was he suffering from diarrhoea at the time?
Are you that asshole?
(Are you that asshole?
RRNot is a miserable sinner,
Wed 2 Dec 2015, 23:10,
archived)