There Once Was A Poodle Who Thought He Was A Cowboy...

I do so fucking hate getting a wash. It was though, unfortunately, a complete necessity today as after getting my haircut a load of wee jaggies had gone down my back causing a frantic blur of itching on the bus on the way home. To others on the bus (delivering odd and morbidly enquiring looks) it must’ve looked like I were suffering from some sort of mental illness that manifested in extreme histrionics mostly.

So I was glad to get back into the house, and once settled the jaggies didn’t cause half as much annoyance as when I was out, walking around. So I procrastinated and procrastinated for two and half hours altogether. I watched The Searchers twice and had a wank over John Wayne, something I always end up doing when I watch one of his flicks two times in a row.

Then after smoking my 7^th rollie and loudly sighing at my lack of brainpower in conjuring another diversion to keep me from the bath, I roused myself to get up when my telephone rings.

It was my mother.

-         It is your mother calling, - she says with her clipped accent.

-         I know it is. Your name came up. I have you listed as ‘mum’.

-         Comfortable. Good. Well, I need you to come round. I broke my hand trying to swat a fly.

-         How in the name of fuck did you do that?

-         Not my whole hand, mind you, just my pointing finger and my fingering finger –

-         Ah! No! Don’t…! Don’t use rhetoric like that with me!

-         Why not? Its natural.

-         No it is not! Not natural. Talking to me, using those descriptions, it’s akin to incest!

-         Ahh! Get away to hell!

-         Tell me, how’d you do that trying to swat a fly?

-         I was chasing the thing round the kitchen all afternoon when it landed on your cousin Donatello’s face, forehead to be precise about it, as he sat on the floor doing a Thunderbirds jigsaw. And I smacked it flat as a pancake with the palm of my hand. But poor Donatello thought I was giving him a smack for no good reason, and grabbed my fingers and squeezed till he broke them. Strong as oxen are those ones with Down’s Syndrome.

-         Yes, - I went.

-         But that’s not all. Donatello went screaming out of the house like a Loony Toon with a mashed up fly all over his bake. So I’ve sent your sister Micheesha and Stupid Peter out to find him. I want you to come over here and make my dinner for me. I can’t do nathin with two broken fingers.

-         Right.

-         And bring me some bourbon.

-         Will do.

So I went over with her bourbon and made her Birdseye burgers, which I quartered and served to her on crackers with cheese melted on. She loves this and it is all she eats.

Later we stood by the big kitchen window birdwatching. She let me drink a bourbon, too. I put this track on her cassette player to keep the mood of he moment going.  


  

Kill Me Now Or Pay Me Later

It turned out Stevenson had personally brought round the summons for my court appearance to be done for blasphemous vandalism.

Inside, Kimba sat at the kitchen table glugging rotten Maxwell instant.
- Vandalism and breach of the peace, - I said reading the summons out loud.
- What’d he bring it right round here for? – said Kimba, trembling.
- I don’t know, - I said. – I don’t think he’s right in the head. You’ll not be right in the head if you keep drinking coffee like that and shaking. You’ll shake your skeleton out your hole.
Kimba laughed her coffee out her nose then boked on the floor.
- Clean up, - I said, handing her the mop.

Put off my toast and Satsuma by Kimba’s bad manners I skipped breakfast and decided to go see my mum instead.

My mum is not long out of a psych ward after her doctor, a Dr Styrm, mistakenly believed she’d tried to cut her own throat, while in actual fact (as everyone from me down to my Down’s Syndrome cousin Donatello will tell you) she cut herself by accident while shaving.

It turned out, as she told me over a hot whiskey, that she enjoyed the pace of the place so much that she acted the eejit in order to stay in a little longer. I realised then she’d been there for 2 months when she was initially only meant to stay for two weeks.
- And not one visit from you or Micheesha! – she scolded.
- I’ve had other things on my mind. I don’t know about Micheesha.
- I can’t rely on my family any more. Just as well then I made some new friends in the hospital. One nice man, named Maurice, explained to me all about the ‘end days’ and that the age of the Anti-Christ is nearly upon us. He told me that the United Nations are going to act as a platform for this Anti-Christ...and he told me to listen to this song to help me understand it all a bit better.
She took from her pinny then a cassette with the words “AXIS ’67 PART 1 – BOBBY CONN” scribbled on the label and put it in her crappy old 80’s stereo.

Out of politeness I tapped the table and nodded my head in time to the number, all while keeping a close eye on her. The notion occurred to me that she had not been acting the eejit on the psych ward but was, in the opinion of the doctors, someone not ‘ready for the outside world yet’, something I’d long suspected.

Somewhere after the two minute mark of the song when it gets heavier she got up and started dancing around, - throwing her hands up in the air and leaping about like a mentally challenged Southern Baptist minister trying to do a star jump during one of his raucous epiphanies.

On hearing the hubbub cousin Donatello ran in then and give me one of his ‘strong hugs’ that I’d warned him about before. Then the two of them joined hands in the middle of the floor and went round and round in circles chanting over and over: Pretty Vacant, The Way Of The Lord’, but I’m not too sure that’s the way the words went though...