Aural Chemotherapy

I’ve been away for a while. Can’t specifically say why, but I can give the following scenarios, so take your pick:

a) Was in the middle of a shootout between rival drug gangs, getting nicked in the ankle by a stray round. Spent the last two weeks in hospital.

b) Sex game gone wrong with Kimba, involving a vice, a snake and a blowtorch. Spent last two weeks in the burns unit.

c) Tripped over a stray slipper left in local chippie. Broke my arm. Oul granny came back to retrieve the slipper. She leant over and laughed in my face when she saw the predicament I was in. Spent last two weeks in the fractures unit.

Ok, I’ll say. It was C. Don’t care though, still gonna tell people it was A or B.

While in hospital I got a visit by Sweeney. Sweeney has a number of hang-ups, which include, but are not limited to, germs in and around hospitals. He has a psychological 500 metre safety zone around ones that he’s approaching. On his way up the Lisburn Road he’ll don a dust mask and keep it on till he’s at least 500 metres clear of the building again when he’s left. He came in like this, with his dust mask on, wearing a pair of latex gloves. He’s generally freakapolooza when it comes to germs. Once I watched him in the reflection of my hall mirror taking a piss in my toilet. He got a bit of piss on the seat and instead of tearing off a couple of squares of bog roll he took the whole thing and dabbed it with that – then! put it back on the windowsill. And to my shame I never said anything, so perturbed was I.

Sweeney has a plan to start a band. The members he’s suggesting (Aloysius, Bogdan, Me and Kimba) cannot even play a tambourine between us. Sweeney says he’s aware of this, but that this band would be all about the ideas and the sound. Sound not music, he said. He asked for name suggestions. Aural Chemotherapy I suggested less than enthusiastically. Then, with more helpfulness, I said to him that if he were interested in a band that just was about ideas and sound we should start a clown troupe instead. He was not impressed.

Sweeney wanted to start a band before when we were in school. He wanted it to be a three piece, me, him and Joe Kelly. He was inspired by Nirvana and thought he were Kurt Cobain reincarnated. I’d to tell him then that this would have been an impossibility, whatever crackpot new age bullshit he were reading up on, as Cobain blew his ice-cream-for-brains all over the place 14 years AFTER he was born. Our band’s name back then was Infanticide. It were my idea that we print up T-shirts with the face of Dunblane massacre’er Thomas Hamilton on the front (on a side note, Dunblane had many weird facts attached to it, such as Hamilton being close to George Robertson (one of Blair’s poodles during the Kosovo war) and the files on Dunblane have been sealed for 500 yrs or something – plus Hamilton was a high up Mason who knew loads of political figures). The (later to be found out as) paedophile Mr Sadie pulled me up on the band T-shirt and give me a good spanking with his slipper. Which led me onto another brief peninsula of memory, which was how one day in his French class I had my headphones in with the pin that goes into the walkman in my mouth. I was bopping away.

“What’re you at, Pongo, you fucking halfwit?”

I took the pin out of my mouth and said “dancing to the voices in my head sir.”

“Don’t try and affect schizoid airs with me, you haven’t the talent for it.” How right he turned out to be.

That Carlos Ponce

...so I told Aloysius’s story second hand to Micheesha who by the end of it was as incredulous as I was about it all.
- That’s fock’in’ nansense – she said, v.annoyed, like she’d taken a personal affront to what I’d just told her, and that that was my fault.
This happens a lot to me and the likes of Bogdan. You tell someone a tall tale; usually to some dweeby wee scroat, and they get all flustered and reprimand you for trying to pull their leg. One geek, named Carlos Ponce, was particularly annoyed once when I told him my great aunt had a condition where pubes were growing out her scalp and that this was an internationally recognised medical condition called Pubis Headus; using Don King as an example.
- Don’t tell fuckin’ lies to me, Danny Pongo! There’s no way that is a real medical condition. It would’ve been the subject of a million jokes; and I’m sure I would’ve written 500,000 of them. I’m not been taken anymore on one of your joyrides of the imagination. – He fancied himself as a bit of a comedy writer that Carlos Ponce, whose fave song was this:

The story I basically told to Micheesha was prefaced hurriedly by what led up to this strange episode, which is talked about here, here, here, here and here.

When Aloysius entered the city with the madly tall skyscrapers he promptly fell asleep again, hypnotised as he was by the unfathomable heights of those monolith gleaming steel and glass edifices. When he came to he was being wheeled along a corridor that ran along the glass panelled side of a large long laboratory. When he got to the end of the corridor he was abruptly turned left into a small felt padded room with a Formica counter running round the edge. Here there was a man in dark glasses and a dark polyester suit who was standing tapping away at a computer keyboard that was situated at waist level. When this man noticed that Aloysius had entered he turned round and motioned to him to get up out of his wheelchair and to step forward. In a nutshell the man told Aloysius that Greg the Torturer had been tracked for a long time re his Internet usage and that he was building up a regular addiction to child porn. An anonymous message had been sent to Gregory and he was threatened to desist from his pursuit of Aloysius, his pal, and pal's ex or else the proper authorities would be notified.
Aloysius then told me that he and the man in the shades had a long discussion about it and they decided that Gregory the Torturer deserved to die anyway because of his online viewing habits. So the agency the man in the shades worked for sent Gregory another package, which contained a Dyonaskin Leaping Frog, which, when attached to your skin, will rub in a deadly poison. It transpired in their conversation that They had tried to kill Gregory in the past, because of his brutal paramilitary torturing techniques, but the Frog got him in the eye and Gregory survived, which explains the patch. This time they said they’d definitely get him, cos this time they said they were going to pack two Dyonaskin Leaping Frogs and that that would defo do the job.

It was at this point Micheesha cut me off.
- Gregory the Torturer’s not dead – she squealed, unable to take the stream of unbelievableness I’d so far talked on.
- Gregory the Torturer’s alive and well. I saw him buying milk in the Mace this morning. And that eye patch he wears? A fuckin’ frog didn’t jump into his eye. He hit himself up the gub with a pool cue when he was torturin’ some cunt and knocked his eye out.
- Maybe he was a ghost that you saw in the Mace – I timidly offered.
- Fuck’ah – grumbled Micheesha.

...murkier and murkier.

'mockin's catchin''

Micheesha came over today with my e’s. She walked in with big coconut shell earphones singing Crimson & Clover

- Crimson and Clover durgh-ner-ner-ner-ner-ner/ahhhhhhh/but when she comes walking over/I’ve been waitin to show her/ crimson and clover/ over and over//

She came into my hall and started spinning round and round in little circles like a fuckin eejit. When she stopped she tilted her head right back and then she began bobbing her head, very slightly, like she were having a slo-mo fit. She rolled her eyes back and her mouth, open wide, hung loosely.
It were as if she were going for the spectacular gaunt look the ‘scene girls’ have, like they’ve spooned ketamine into their coffee. She looked like one of those poor-unfortunate Romanian orphans you see every once in a while on the TV news rocking back and forth in their crib.
- Stop that immediately! - I scolded. – it’s like you’re mocking the afflicted when you get on like that. And you know what ma says, ‘Mockin’s catchin’. So watch out!’
- How is the auld cunt? –
- Don’t say that! She’s alright, apart from I think she’s starting to get the menopause.
- Ahh right. So she’s gonna be a even more of a melter for the next 6 months, then?
- Aye – I said.
Micheesha handed over the e’s. They were in a big jiffy bag. I held it up and looked inside it at them all.
- You gonna sell em? – she asked
- Some – I replied – the rest are for me. –
- Well take it easy on em – she advised. – remember last time, you went on a downer for ages. Remember a week into your blue I caught you pissin’ in the sink all over the dinner plates? –
- Aye, but so? What’s one thing got to do with the other? Depressed as you could ever be why would you piss in the sink? I was watchin the boxin. I didn’t wanna miss it. –
- Nah, nah, nah. You were so down you couldn’t tell the sink from the toilet. You were fuckin spasticified, man! –
- Don’t think so. Think your confusin bein depressed with bein blind.
- Nah. Remember the mornin after when you got in an' you told me you’d never take e’s again, then you took oneie ma's ladles and started drinkin outta the fish tank with it?
- How’m I meant to remember that. I was bingoed. Anyway I’ve a story to tell you that Aloysius told me. I can’t really make sense of it, but in tellin you it it might start to become clearer to me... -

Ebeneezer Goode And Me

Today my sister Micheesha telephoned. She told me she had someone with her and she wanted me to speak to them. She put this wee spidey cunt on the line then:

- Ai’ite – he said.
- Hello – I replied.

- Here, Micheesha wants me to tell you what happened to me on Saturday night, mate. I was at a party down on the Pass and this wee girl told me if I licked out her Jack Russell she’d gimmie 50 e’s and a blowjob.
- Did you do it? – I asked.
- Oooh’aye. –
- And did she come through for you? –
- Sorta. She gimmie the e’s alright but the blowjob was a wee bit sore on my cack. She’d just got braces fitted. It felt like I’d stuck my cack in a blender, HowhHowhHowh. -
- How’d lickin’ the dog’s bollocks work out? –
- Wasn’t as bad as I thought it’d be, believe it or nat.
- What’d it feel like? What’d it taste like.
- Felt like fuck all. I just closed me eyes. Felt like I was flickin muh tongue over a big puffy nipple. Tasted like nathin’. –
- Did the dog come? –
- Nah mate. I don’t think he liked it to be ‘anist. –
- Gimmie the phone back, Slug, - said Micheesha who took the phone back off Slug. I held the phone away from my ear in the loud short muffled exchange.
- Did you hear what he said? – Asked Micheesha.
- Yes – I said. – so what? –
- So Slug doesn’t know what to do with ‘em. Asked me if I’d sell ‘em for him. Was wonderin’ if you wanted some thrown your way for you and your weirdo mates.
- Sure, - I said, before hanging up.

So Micheesha is coming over tomorrow with some e’s. Some for me that I’ll take, and some I’ll sell to my pals. Was never really big on e’s. I mean I took them weekends, nearly every weekend for 6 months, but I wouldn’t go mad like some of the ones I know, like Bogdan or Sweeney, who used to bang up to 15 a night. My limit was 3, then the cotton mouth started to worry me and I’d get it into my head that I’d had one of those mini-strokes. I’d go home then and put on this tune (every time)

and smoke a rocket so as to put the buffers on the come down – prevent breaking up on re-entry. The beginning of the end was one night when my arms began to disappear. They just disappeared into thin air, like a cloaking device had been activated. Cloaking device would be more accurate as a matter of fact. Because my arms didn’t really disappear – become totally invisible. More they went like the Predator and blended into the background. I remember holding both my hands out in front of me and being able to make out the pavement below through this swirly outline of both my forearms, rainbowing madly like a soapsud slick. The end – the final time I took an e in that long regular cycle - came a few weeks later in The Network. It was a club on North Street that stayed open to 6am. You couldn’t get any drink but there was always a U.D.Ah’er (or Womble, depending) standing in the shadows somewhere who’d be slinging e’s like a Burberry clad Pez dispenser with an infinite supply. The night in question I was sold a coupla duds and as soon as I felt that rush when they hit the system I immediately thereafter felt a strange hollow sensation like I’d been drained of all but my basic instincts, not in the Sharon Stone/Michael Douglas way, but like all I was capable of doing was breathing and walking. I left early, getting in a taxi with no plates. The driver wasn’t all there. I asked him to go to the Donegal Road and he ended up taking me on a mystery tour up round Black’s Mountain and all over North Belfast. When I got back he charged me 20quid and made me buy a sachet of ‘Liquid Viagra’ off him for 15quid. He had a lucrative night, the big dangly lipped retard that he was.

And that was that with me and e’s. Course I have indulged the odd night between then and now and I think with this batch I’m gonna have myself a good time too, (and make myself some coin as well!)