Turn the shit into gold

The basement of the traditional grill bar was packed, Grace made little moans of pleasure, appreciating the interior decor. The waiter pulled out two chairs and handed us two menus. A fawning smile for Grace, a serious nod to me.

The menu had some pretty pictures to look at. Snails boiled to death in the blood of poisoned tomatoes. Cow organs reduced into little balls. Squid circles. Prawns annihilated in a blender and then fitted into peppers and piddled on by olive oil.

'Will you try and get the day off next Saturday too?' said Grace. 'It's so nice to have time together. Instead of just getting home to your dead corpse, ye know? The remains of the day, like.'

Her greedy eyes took in the menu while she spoke. She looked edible. Glossy chestnut hair, bright eyes, lips crimson. We kissed. She smelled of rosewater. 'I've got a surprise for you,' she said, '…later...'

Grace turned away, then turned the other way, blushing madly.

I went to the toilet. On a cardboard box there was a dead fly and two cockroaches, stuck together. They seemed to be mating. One of them was nibbling the dead fly.

The one cockroach was talking to the other. 'Your arse is quality,' he said, sniffing around behind the other one.

'You like it?' she said. The other cockroach.

'The stink of shit is like heaven,' he said.

'Well, it feels nice, so OK, but do NOT get me fucking pregnant. I don't wanna be running around with a gigantic eggsack at my age.'

'Have you ever seen termites fuck? They break each other's wings off. To symbolize they're a couple.'

'Ooh,' she moaned, 'that's good.'

'You're not going to eat me are you after are you, precious? Like a spider?'

'Keep doing that. Ooh. Oh, shit.'

'I'm going to stick it in,' he said.

'Just for a little while. Do not impregnate me, please!'

The two cockroaches carried on rubbing up against each other. Then the one stopped.

'Okay, you'd better stop now, 's he said, 'before we get stuck to each other.'
The other one carried on rubbing. 'Too late for that.'

'You're not stuck are you?' she cried. 'I order you to remove now. Oh, goddamit. It does feel good though. Oh...'

'Yeah, baby.'

'Ooh.'

'I met this termite once. He had two cocks.'

'Two cocks? Oh God, it's starting to hurt a bit now.'

'Everything's going to be just fine.'

'Oh, shit, it's starting to throb. Talk to me. Tell me about the termite with the two cocks.'

'So the termite had two cocks. And they were both as long as his body.'

'Why did he have two cocks?'

'Rub my dorsals,' he said.

'Okay,' she whined, 'but TELL ME ABOUT THE FUCKING TERMITE WITH THE TWO COCKS!'

'All termites have two cocks! That's what he claimed. He says it's a fucking nightmare. His cock's so long and fragile it can break off. That's why he's got one spare.'

'BUT THEN IF IT'S AS LONG AS HIS BODY, WHERE DOES HE KEEP THE OTHER ONE?'

'CALM DOWN! I DON'T KNOW WHERE HE KEEPS IT.'

'Oh God, this really hurts. Why did I agree to this? This is your fault.'

I stepped forward. 'Do you want me to help?'

'Who's that!' the female cockroach said.

'Can't you see me?' I said. 'I thought cockroaches had 360 degree vision.'

'Yeah, we got 2000 lenses in each eye,' said the male. 'It was chemicals. One of you lot sprayed us.'

'We can't see shite,' said the female. 'They sprayed me in the eye. And then I woke up next to him. Oh, when I get free of you I’m going to have my revenge, I tell you!'

'Well, do you want some help?' I said.

'Yeah, but be careful,' he said. 'I'm not an earwig. I don't have two penises.'

I held their shells between my fingers and pulled apart their bodies. Then I heard Grace's voice.

'Paul! Paul! Ye down here?' The tip-tapping of her cowboy boots got closer.

'Better go,' I said.
Grace looked upset. She leapt into my arms. 'Can we go?' she pleaded, 'Please?'

'What's wrong?'

Her ringed hands clung tightly to my arms. 'The waiter's a letch. When you went to the toilet he asked me if I'd like to go to dancing with him.'

'OK,' I said, 'let's get out of here.'

In the nightclub she tugged me tight to her and said, 'Do you know how much I care for you? Do you know how much I love you, baby?' The lights cascaded over her head and her face was cast in total darkness. The bodies bobbed around stupidly. This kind of house music is absolute flabgash. People were turning their caps, waving tattoo-filled arms and clinging onto each other to keep from falling over.

Grace emerged from my body and reappeared on the dance-floor. Her eyes were starting to fly away with the lights. 'I'm going to sit down somewhere and drink this,' I said. 'I'm going to find the girls, OK?' she mouthed. 'Up there.' She pointed at a bar on the next level. 'Will ye come and find me, please, in a bit?'

'I will,' I said.

An empty booth beckoned beside the dance-floor. Girls with endless legs and surgery faces were dancing on a platform like orphaned gazelles. A Scottish guy I knew vaguely called Michael was blowing his saxophone up at the roof. The DJ winked to Michael and pretended he had a gun and was shooting him. He had a peaked hunter's cap turned to the side and a question mark tattooed on his solar plexus.

Question. What made me a better man than any of these twats? Answer. I was too tired to join in.

It was time to slink away. I went to look for Grace and couldn’t find her anywhere. I searched downstairs, the bathrooms, upstairs, the top bar. I was feeling weary. I couldn't find Grace.

Home on the bus I dozed and thought of magdalenas and pate. At home I got the magdalenas out and some pate. I was thinking of brushing the crumbs away and removing the tin of pate from my stomach but instead I fell asleep.

In the morning Grace wasn't there. I went to work at the bar. Not a lot happened. Moshe didn't say much, which meant he was angry about something. I supposed it had something to do with the Slovakian.

On the way home, the booth called out to me like a Danaian syren on clifftops. At first, I resisted, like Odysseus tied to mast as the boat carried him senselessly through the choppy waters of moral danger. But the lights of the shop held me entranced. I generally splashed about €7 a day on 15 minutes of erotic fantasy and degradation. 128 channels of it. A chair, the comfyness dependent on the quality of the establishment, two handrests, paper towels, a bin, remote control, citrus hand refreshers and 128 channels. 128 channels of:

man on woman,
woman on man,
woman on woman,
man on man,
many upon one,
and one upon many,
and, of course, one upon none.
dog on girl,
man's best friend,
licking his girl,
girl wanting to hurl,
shitting and pissing,
oral and anal,
spitroast or spatchcock,
frost on bums,
cum on buns,
and coating gums,
and finding its way onto hair,
SPERM GENERALLY FLYING THROUGH THE AIR,
whipping and spanking,
smoking and caning,
and (ouch) even cheesegrating,
girls with dicks
and guys with tits
and lots of unlikely fiddly bits
Ah, it was moving stuff.

My great ambition was to fall in love with a booth cleaning lady. We would make love only in the booth to the smell of bleach and citrus hand towels. It would be a stirring Rachmaninovian kind of romance. The romance of the booth.

Seven Euros and fifteen minutes and a citrus hand towel, not to mention artless pumping sounds later I was back on the street, walking home, with a ham, cheese and guacamole bocadillo on the brain.

When I got there, Grace wasn't home. I was trying to simultaneosuly drink a carton of orange juice and wipe avocado off my shirt when I heard the tic-tac of her boots outside the door, the key, the cleeak open and the boyoyoing shut. Tic-tac-tic-tac. Tic.

'Hello.' Guilt. It was eminent in her greeting tone. Then she took the front foot.

'Why did you leave me?' she demanded. 'Where did you get to?'

'I tried to find you,' I told her. 'but I couldn't, so I went home.'

'Yeah, well, you could have stuck around, you know. Made a bit more effort. Then I wouldn't have ended up in an orgy! With a load of weirdos!'

'You went to an orgy? I CAN'T BELIEVE you went to AN ORGY!' I said. 'MY GIRLFRIEND went to AN ORGY…!?'

'I thought you'd left me there in the Paloma,' she sobbed. 'What was I to think? You might have gone off with another girl. Oh, baby, it was horrible. There were all these weirdos there. They said anyone who wanted to stay at the party would have to take their clothes off. One of them tried to kiss me! I'd fallen asleep and woke up and he was kissing me. Keira ended up in the shower with this guy and before she knew it, there were three more of them in there with her. All naked.'

I sparked up a cigarette.

'I left you on your own for a moment and you went to an orgy.'

'What about you and the booth?' she accused. 'You go virtually every day. I know you do, don't deny it. You told me you weren't doing that anymore. Do you think I like you doing that? It's dirty. Look, I went to an orgy, but I didn't do anything wrong and I only went because you left me on my own. On a pill. You know what I'm like when I'm on a pill. Keira wanted to go because she liked this guy and then all of a sudden they're all saying let's take our clothes off and then Keira's in the shower with all these guys sucking them off.'

I laughed, imagining the seizing of the opportunity of the Keira scapegoat persona in Grace's mind.

'Where were you at this point?'

'How dare you! Why, I was asleep. Keira told me afterwards. That's all. But you know what she's like, she's a bit of a flooze, allright. That's Keira for ye.'

'Yes,' I agreed, laughing. I opened a bottle of wine.

'Will you talk to me? Say something tangible, please,’ said Grace. Her furry eyebrows truffled.

I called her a ‘Gaelic trough attendent.'

Her eyes were staring startled into mine and I knew something had happened. I didn’t know what yet. I followed her eyes downwards. Her hand was in a little fist on my stomach. Then I felt it. I looked up again, at her eyes. Kiss her. No, maybe, don’t…

‘I stabbed you,’ Grace said, breathing into my mouth. Looking good, feeling good. I slid a strap off her dress. Something dropping to the floor, a metallic sound on tiles. She pulled me down to the floor with her, or maybe I collapsed and she followed. She put me in bed and dabbed the wound, crying out little apologies.

When I woke up the telephone was ringing. She was not there and I was surprised to find I was lying in bed. I touched my stomach and winced with the pain, and felt a bandage. The telephone was ringing.

‘Shut up,’ I said into the receiver.

‘Hi, it’s me. How do you feel?’

I didn’t have a great deal to say. 'Where are you? At work?'

‘Yes, between classes. Shall we meet? I thought we might go see a film.’

‘You stabbed me,’ I reminded her.

‘Only a bit,' she contested. 'I’m sorry.’ Her voice went very quiet. ‘I get so mad with you.’ There was silence and then she said, ‘Could we go to the cinema, maybe?

‘What do you want to see?’

‘Jodorovsky’s The Holy Mountain is showing at the open air theatre.’

‘You have to turn the shit into the gold?’

‘Exactly the one.’

Before the film I had to go to work. I had a new job in a bar. Luis Maria Lopetegui was one of two co-owners.

‘THE WHORE MOTHER!’ he blew out. He was perched on a high stool, trying one of my cocktails. ‘Why did Jesus die at 33, Paul, WHY?’ He thumped his hand on the bar and placed a foot on the fridge, an elbow on his thigh and a chin on his palm. ‘These are the things you must consider as a thinker! Why did Jesus Christ die aged thirty three? This is the number that someone chose! Careful! This is literature we’re talking about. This is NOTHING TO DO WITH GOD.’

‘The trinity,’ I said, revolving a Cobaio between my puffing lips.

He started drawing one of his diagrams. When he got hot under the intellectual collar the man liked to draw diagrams.

33, he wrote, and 1 2 3 4.

‘I only understood,’ he continued, ‘when I myself reached 33 why the writer chose it for the death of Mr. Christ. Do you think that when A DEVOUT OLD WOMAN, a devout old woman thinks of the saints, she imagines them how they would really have been? No, Paul, careful! Cunt! She looks at a statue made of stone.’

‘We’re looking at sacred things through the eyes of others,’ I said.

‘EXACTO.’ Cigar smoke blew out of his hair-stuffed ears. ‘Magic doesn’t interest me. Magic is what men make. Who makes what. For what reason. THAT’S WHAT CONCERNS ME, HOLY WAFER!’

The cigar pointed at me.

‘When you reach 33 you will understand, IT IS NOT MYSTICAL, CUNT, IT IS LOGICAL. He looked up at the fools-gold panelled ceiling and then down. 'IT IS A THING OF COMMON SENSE.’ The pen was scribbling away on the paper again:

MYSTICAL

He crossed out the word mystical and drew a bubble around common sense.

What I especially liked about his diagrams were how bold and pointless they were. What was common sense to him was a mystery to me. Before I could tell him, he produced one of his ‘Lopetegui-special’ farts, sent flying in all directions by the whirring fan.

Suddenly everyone in the bar was chuckling away. An Argentine man with winky eyes, was particularly jolly. Every thirty seconds his eye cracked off three or four winks in a row, directed at different people. He had a ginger moustache and a jolly, raw face like a slab of goat meat.

One customer, however, was not looking chucklesome. He looked displeased, like a man who'd just taken a shot of mouldy cabbage juice. He was holding one of my cocktails. ‘This cocktail’s no good,’ he said. I shrugged. A high voice shouted down from upstairs. The other co-owner of the bar, Moshe, was calling me into his office.

Bending under the tubes of aluminium foil hanging from the ceiling, I stumbled into his computer area, but he wasn’t there. Then he appeared, coming out of the freezer with a box of lettuces.

‘HOW GOES IT, MY FRIEND!’ He positioned himself an inch from my face. ‘FUCKING SIT DOWN!’

He sat down, put his feet on the desk and pulled out a cigarette. ‘WANT ONE? FUCKING HAVE ONE, NO PROBLEM!’
I fucking took one.

‘So, British, I hear good things about you already. My spies tell me you are very fucking rude!’ He looked pleased.

‘Rudeness, my friend, is what my customers expect. It sells beer and makes all the pussies wet. This could be the beginning of a beautiful partnership. Just make sure you don’t drink the bar dry. I know what you British are like. You drink like the fucking fish in the sea. We Israelis, we can’t drink. But we’ll smoke you into a fucking coma.’ He stopped, a lunatic, semi-moronic, but very charming grin etched onto his glossy face.
‘Anyway. Anyway. I wanted to tell you something about myself. Something about myself because it’s pretty fucking interesting subject. Are you interested? Good. Now when I was 12, just a stupid kid in Haifa, I worked for my father. He had one of those kiosks. Newspaper. Sweets. Cigarettes.

‘One day my father leaves me on my own to take care of the kiosk and these two motherfuckers, these two gangsters, or what you say, hoodlums, turn up asking for my father. ‘Where’s your daddy, kid,’ they say. ‘We’ve come for the payments.’ Ah, he’s not here, I say. You’ll have to come back. ‘When will he be at the kiosk.’ Tomorrow, I tell them.

‘So that night, I have dinner with father and tell him about the two men and he says to me, Moshe, I’m going to tell you something very important now. These people are worthless. They are gangsters. Scum. Tomorrow I will show you how to deal with these people.

‘The next day I see the two men coming to the kiosk and I tell my father, ‘look, that is the two men I told you about.’ My father, he picks up this tub of petrol and throws it all over them. Then he calmly strikes a match and throws that. –That-, says my father, -is how you deal with scum-. Now, get downstairs to the bar. Yellah!’

Downstairs, I poured beers while some Brazilian lady was telling me how it is, in Spanish. ‘You British are like very cold people. When you go north, people more cold.’ It was a very tired comment and her Spanish was crap.

‘We are people very hot. Brazilians are, how to say, alegre.’ The girl was looking about as alegre as a Saxon factory lady half way into a twelve hour shift at Data Plastics Limited.

‘Alegre?’

These cultural silouettes with their bright ideas. Show me the truth in your ideas! Don’t just sit there explaining how alegre you are. Fucking show me.

Then a bit later, a dumpy girl said, ‘Any chance of a free drink?’ She was draining the dregs of a mojito. Curt was my response, for no other reason than being unreasonable. ‘No chance.’

‘Can you carry me upstairs,’ she said. I noticed the leg in plaster and the crutch. ‘I need the toilet,’ she said.

That same dumpy girl hobbled over to me later and said I was a cool guy and she liked me. ‘You’re so fucking funny,’ she said.

‘TIME!’ I shouted. ‘GET THE FUCK OUT!’

When I pulled the shutter down and faced the street there was a girl there waiting for me. I had no idea who she was. She had her hair wrapped up in one of those gypsy scarves fashionable Swedish ladies are so fond of.

‘Hi, I, er, thought we might carry on that chat from the other night…’

My face no doubt conveyed the blankness of my neuronal response. ‘I…you know…’ she billowed, ‘…in the Pipa club.’ It was difficult to place her accent. She had a prominent collar-bone.

Seven minutes later we were in the Pipa Club and I wasn’t going to the open-air cinema to watch Jodorovsky’s Holy Mountain..

Two glasses of wine were passed over the counter and I fell into the green felt material of the lounge room sofa, while she placed herself neatly into the corner and aligned her glass with the mat. No time was lost on restoring us to the apparent glories of our previous conversation, and my memory was sent jogging through embarrassing quotes attributed to me by her. It had been an eight o’clock in the morning affair with joints for props, and her chosen subject was human behaviour: moral standpoints.

Apparently I had been sprouting some worthless shine about people should be judged only on the quality of their last action. She believed this couldn’t be, arguing that this gave people a license to act as they pleased and be forgiven over and over. She picked holes in my belief and was close to proving I didn’t know what I was talking about.

Most probably I was wrong, an absolute buffoon, and she was right. More interestingly, she was totally confused, and I wasn’t at all, cue Lopetegui-style diagram:

CONFUSED V WRONG, with accompanying Lopetegui flatulances. I would most certainly rather be wrong and not confused. Nothing’s really about truth anyway. Or understanding. Everyone talks in riddles. Everyone has thoughts they wouldn’t even claim as their own.

The girl went home with burgundy lips and confusion wrapped up in the gypsy headscarf.

Railings, fluttering emerald leaves, gargoyles, a man upside down on a stairwell visible in the apartment block over the road, a capped and bearded beggar helping the poor businessman with his smudged suit to his feet. I can see the betrayed, sad diginity through my binoculars. A pink, flab-ravaged lady scrubbing the windows of her balcony. A group of Catalan intellectuals and their well-contrived mullets and visible sense of autonomous regional self-government ethics and their visible nervous energy, like beings that were planted on the human race a hundred years ago. All this and more, is the kind of stuff you see when you walk home, post-bar shift.

I thought of how those women- the ones that can defeat you- when they’re not physically there, your bond with them gets more powerful. Relationship autopsy. Magic. Damn it, there were people like Lopetegui and that Scandiwegian girl, and there were people like me, in infinite variables of the ridiculous.

People- family members, schoolteachers, women and the like- have made the mistake of accusing my like of being irreverent, which is untrue. If we, not God, were totally responsible for this state of affairs it would be a grizzly realism all the way, punctured by the occasional laugh, violence, and these days, shopping. That's not the whole lot of it. There is magic lurking under the surface of everything. Things fall into place, meanings usurp material, patterns grow out of the apparent chaos.