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back The Rooster Crows At Midnight by Paul Garner, Peter Wilson Number of episodes: 10 Words of previous episode revealed to each author: all of story The car bounced wildly over suburban speed-bumps... rather than containing the youthful exuberance of the occupants, the futile constructions added to their fever. There was a damp, musty smell in the upholstery, which mingled strangely with the sharp intoxicating aroma of booze as the passenger took swigs from a bottle of Jim Beam. Half-empty mineral water bottles rattled around at his feet, and "Waterloo Sunset" by the Kinks blasted out of an old cassette on the stereo. "I had this dream last night man," he buzzed with fuzzy-tongued warmth to the driver, "I was on an aeroplane, like, a jumbo jet, only it can't have been jet propelled because, ah, like everyone in the window seats, they had oars: we were rowing this thing across the sky...! And, er, this guy in the seat next to me was talking away like he was a racing announcer, I can't remember what about..." They pulled into the supermarket carpark and the driver yanked on the handbrake as they accelerated into a parking space, but the tarmac was dry and the car shuddered and jolted to a halt rather than screeching and sliding. 8:22 - I woke up before the alarm. Now loathing consciousness, I miss the dream I was having. I just need some more sleep, but I can't now. My anxieties have kicked in and all yesterday's troubles come pulsing to the surface of my thought and attention. My throat aches. I look at my girl beside me, she curls up to me. She's warm and cat-like. Once inside they stumbled giddily around the aisles, revelling in the bounty which modern consumer society had laid out, just for them; fresh bread in different shapes and colours and sizes, cheeses from around the world, shelf after shelf of wine and beer bottles - a shrinkwrapped banquet under the pure white, saturated illumination of a hundred flourescent tubes, like they'd stepped through the automatic sliding doors of heaven and onto its freshly-mopped linoleum floors. The music of John Lennon and other angels floated softly through the air, coming from nowhere and everywhere at once, soothing, calming. 6:42 - I also woke up before the alarm. I could hear my flatmate moving about, up already. I made sure the alarm was set properly and took some long gulps of water from the glass by my bed. Always waking up thirsty! I'd like to say thirsty for life, but no, just dehydrated, barely able to resist the gravity of sleep for a little while longer, just a little while longer. I looked at the wall beside me and thought fondly of the previous night; out of my shell, soaking up the attention with a guitar and a smile... girls smile too. 6:54 - The sound of music woke me, a second time, from a hazy dream. I listened a while until the music cut out and I knew it was time to get up, then I waited a while longer, running the risk of falling asleep again and making myself late. But I didn't, I got up to face the day, perhaps even to make it to work on time. My clothes from the previous night smelled like someone else's ashtray, marinated in nicotine and blues, and my throat was sore. With a couple of bottles of bubbly, a dozen beers, some red wine, assorted cheeses and smoked fish, they were off - ready for an instant party, a beatnik picnic, and other such things they imagined might be a welcome disruption to friends' evenings on a Friday night. 8:37 - The bus on my way to work is full of schoolkids, 10 or 11-year-old boys. The ginger-haired lad in the seat ahead of me, all neat in his uniform, off to a 'good school' in an affluent suburb, is listening to some music on a Walkman. At intervals he hands one of the earpieces to his friend next to him, when his friend doesn't get too impatient and yank them out of his ear that is. "Check this out," he says to his mate, "It's about cocaine, back in the day." All I hear is the tinkle of cutlery beats. Somewhere behind me I hear another of them talking: "...we had to draw three witches for English." "Witches don't wear GAP jumpers," someone else chimes in. If only you knew, little boy! I feel calm, serene. There is a golden light in the air this morning that seems magical, special, but perhaps it's there every morning and I've just never noticed, normally taking the subway. The bus takes a roundabout route through suburbs I've never seen before, some of which are hilly and remind me of home. My spirits rise with the elevation as we wind through old buildings, a village now swallowed by the metropolis. At the end of the line I get off and the world seems quieter than usual, as if everyone and everything else is also enchanted by the golden glow that is touching the morning. "Lazy old river, must you keep rolling, rolling into the night." Ray Davies' distinctive inflections flooded the car. Interrupted by the chink of bottles in the back seat as they zipped around corners and roundabouts. He looked over at his partner in planned disruption, Friday night malfunction, his shopping hombre and comrade in spontaneity. He was asleep. A bottle of wine and countless swigs of Jim Beam, it was no surprise. Driving slower now, he just hoped to get him home without him throwing up. He was saying something. Slurring heavily: "Heyyy Man, just slow doowwn, not soooo faaast-p!" "O.K, O.K! I'm only going seventy!" "Stop, gusst sloop!" "I can't I'm on the motorway, fuck, what do you want to stop for?" His answer was visual, a thin stream of vomit oozing down the half open window. 10:56 - work may be giving me more motivation to write stolen moments of pleasure but I am not working twelve hours a day sleeping on the subway home getting blotto on the weekend crawling out of bed on Monday morning having semi-conscious somnolent conversations with my friends falling exhausted into bed with no time for my girlfriend or in a PC Room thinking this is a twenty first century eqivalent to an Opium den watching the automated movements of the Koreans next to me like a response trigger mechanism in the Pavlovian sense a giant pixilated spider appears on the adjacent monitor off to nowhere nothing bliss of no-self just trigger response flashing icons and mouse clicks... The latex dream stretched, glossy and black, blank. He awoke awkwardly on a couch, where his friend had eventually managed to coax him, zombie-like, after lying passed out in the car for a couple of hours. His eyelids rubbed unpleasantly against dry orbs. "What?" An all-encompassing question. Surprisingly, no traces of vomit had found their way onto him, not that he remembered the events from the journey home last night. There was a dry heat in his nose and everything in his mouth seemed gummed together, brain a couple of sizes too big. Feeling around he was glad to discover a glass of water on the floor. It looked rather unsavory, as he could see hairs from the carpet stuck to the bottom of the glass as he drank, but the chlorinated, flouridated tap water was like an elixir of life. He gulped greedily and shambled off in search of more. The morning was beautiful. Sky blue pink, the colour of freedom and love. Is there freedom in love? Time waited behind the wall, ready to pounce, a blind pariah inflicting mortality on all who passed by. 10:53 - There had been dancing on tables down at the jaundiced oasis and remembering it I felt happy, alive - always more so when I'm looking the other way. I returned to the present. Every surface in the room seemed covered in gauche, idiotic patterns. The jumbled-beige, embossed canvas-effect of the wallpaper couldn't hide the coffee splashes painted across it. The scored, scratched-in texture of the fake wood surface of my desk didn't match the illusion of veneer underneath, which itself didn't really resemble any wood I'd ever seen. It looked more like the banded, spinning clouds of Jupiter rendered in biscuity, almond tones. The door and the carpet were similar, but different, shades of green. I marveled at the strangeness of their colours; neither were natural, foliage greens - unlike any plant - nor were they bold, pure, modern, man-made greens. They were... insipid, ugly, hideous in their very blandness. The bright red wastepaper bin was the only highlight, but even that was suffocating within its prophylactic liner. Desperate for any distraction, but finding none, I camped out inside my head. The sour lemon in the sky puckered up my eyes, as clouds of meringue drifted by. I must be hungry. I blinked and the sky was a flat, even grey once more. Grey trucks drove by, in front of grey houses with autumn roofs. Giddy and helpless In a swirl of monotony I just want a little comfort Staring back At the screws and wrinkles in the wall I make plenty money And I still need more Yet all I want Is less The ridiculous biscuit looked up at me with a grotesque, inanely grinning face. I bit through its insubstantial outer sandwich, which shattered into a thousand crumbs, to the sticky red centre which clung to my teeth long after the unnourishing morsel was gone. “Peel me to reveal my sticky base,” said the fluffy desk widget, also red. “Take me back to Texas,” I thought. A lonesome hobo against the watercolour sky, outlined in shirt and tie, in the stark light of fluorescent tubes, without all that much to lose. The fountain outside looked miserable as usual, perhaps because it didn’t flow - all that was left for it was to reflect the saddening sky. As he sat on the couch recouperating slowly, sipping a third glass of water, his friend came out of the bathroom, evidently having had some kind of tussle with a razor blade, eventually emerging wounded but victorious, mopping up the blood with a towel. "You spewed in my car." "Bullshit!" "You did, man." He paused to think. "Nah..." "Then you wouldn't get out of the car when we got home, so I left you there." "I thought I'd just dozed off for a mo'." "You didn't manage to get the window down in time..." "Oh god... so what, it's like all over the inside of the car?" "I've cleaned it up now." "Man! I don't normally spew. Sorry man." Sundays like this were nice. Time flowed slowly and smoothly, neurotic worries had been flushed out by fermented poisons, themselves co-opted, broken down and digested by the robust, adaptable chemistry of Life. "Let's go get something to eat." 12:19 - My moods are so reliant upon the weather. Today the air is almost warm, patches of happy blue in the sky. I don't get enough sun in this hemisphere. The razor had got the better of him. Blood dripped seemingly unstoppably from a nick on his chin. He felt stupid. He'd been shaving almost ten years and still hadn't got it right. This normally happened when he was tired, he thought to himself. And man, was he tired. He had spent the previous night driving around aimlessly with his drunk friend, and then his mate had spewed in the car. He didn't really mind. He didn't really even mind cleaning it all up. Strange, he thought, perhaps I should. But he didn't. Anyway it was partially his fault, egging his friend on to drink another one, to drink more and more rapidly. Why? he thought. He didn't know. He had several theories, but these were basically penny-psychologies. The blood had almost stopped. Why did it flow so? He had often pondered this, why the blood seemed to never stop when he cut his face. Were there more capillaries there? Or was is just that he fixated on it. He was tired. He wanted to lie in half the day like his friend. But as usual his obsessions, anxieties and compulsive urges had gripped him. Every morning, he thought, he felt them dripping into his consciousness, then a flood. Then there was no choice but to get up. He couldn't drift off to sleep, wonderful unthinking sleep. They called his condition OCD, Obsessive Compulsive Disorder. Not one of those people who want things in perfect order and are incredibly anal, that's OCPD, Obsessive Compulsive Personality Disorder. But more of a highly stressed, phobic and intricate neurotic. Anyway it's just another label, he often thought. He fancied that he'd reached a level of understanding and awareness that he was beyond the simple event, judgment, action thinking of everyday humans. And sometimes he was. But at the same time he was very much one of those everyday humans. Victim of the same impulses urges and chemical fluxuations people call their moods. Ask someone why they did something, why they do something. A lot of the time if they look inside themselves humbly and honestly they won't be able to tell you, they won't know. Or they'll give you an answer (and maybe realise themselves) that is based in habit: "It's what I do." Or social conformism: "It's what you do." "It's what you're supposed to do." Or this old red herring: "It's the right thing to do." To which the philosophical needler replies: Why? For Who? or When? This can be a barrel of laughs for those who fancy themselves as something or something, a new wave or intellectual paradigm. It also makes good bar room conversation, although it usually ends in "Fuck it, let's have a beer, Hoooeee!" And rightly so. It was a confusing scene in the heads of monkeys, upright junkies. Not everyone likes to talk about it. 11:52 - There was a platinum glaze in the air, sun fighting on through saying, "Maybe this is a hint of Spring," and all connected with the trees. It was warm enough to have the window open, nice to suck air from a wider pool. I kept having a nagging feeling I should call her, but I didn't know why. Or more precisely I knew several reasons why not. I hate the ends of things and lost opportunities, as groups of friends expand and contract organically. Everything gets covered in dust. The washing machine had left dark stains and soap residue on my shirts yesterday but I couldn't think of anything to do about it except run them through again. Awake, sleeping world, and examine yourselves! Forget about living for a second and think about Life... that was the cry. And what do you see? Sometimes a mirror, sometimes a murky pool. Treasure the distractions that sparkle. The moment that he saw her he felt something. That chemical throb, the gravity of her. She was his kind and he knew intuitively, unconsciously the first time. It was several months before he got past his shyness, several months until he had a real conversation with her, not just a "Hello, how are you?" or the cool discussions of their work. 15:37 - I feel nothing. Holes in the shoes of my soul: Rock and Roll. Given time, I wait, stray muscles ache. Cool, tainted water soothes. I lost myself somewhere on the long drive. We drove all day, in the sticky heat, broken fan providing no relief. Windows down, blowing hot air around the car. We talked awhile, listened to music; some of mine, her Billie Holiday. Eight or nine hours, perhaps more, there was only so much to talk about. And it didn't matter. She slept awhile, or just lay back and closed her eyes, one foot dangling out the window, the wind gradually edging her light summer dress along her leg. Tinkling the petals of her ankle bracelet. She was beautiful, a little mysterious and... out of the blue. I'd only met her a couple of days ago, now here she was... here, so relaxed and trusting. I wanted to touch her. Where does such beauty come from? It's in the eye of the beholder, they say, and yet she existed apart from me, just out of reach. Each moment felt alive with new possibilities and new frustrations, handed to me by sweet and sour chance. I was doomed. 17:05 - Brown tinted clouds extend diagonally to the horizon, strange, oblique. Always too eager to confess every weakness to an intimate stranger. That's not dancing, playing the game. Too honest, too soon... premature. She was crazy anyway. We spent the afternoon like winos, ending up happily drunk, on a wharf by the mighty Mississippi, as the sun went down, eating spicy pistachio nuts. She kissed me. The memory is a warm, crimson haze, tragic: I feel like she's dead now. Inexperience is a lack of pain. People who haven't made stupid mistakes, premature confessions and shown naive honesty have not opened up their pain. Let it lay there on your chest, the roots around your heart. Know thy-self. 11ish? - I washed them away with flaming fancy and free Jim Beam and Amaretto cocktails. "Would you like a soul with that?" Giving it all to the rock n' roll either your heart's underworked swimming in oil, or the tank's empty, like an autumn leaf falling, Giving it all to the rock n' roll the music in my soul won't let me down, like you, like you, like all you people. I woke up drunk on an outlying island, wondering how I let myself drift so far. I know, I know, that you won't understand. Give it all to the trash compactor, make a photograph or a paperweight. My life, my life, is a sit-com. You laugh, you smile, but I'm not smiling, thinking 'bout better days, thinking 'bout anything. I know, I know things will evolve themselves out. Uncommon and intense castles, eroded by the high tide. - He was walking down the same alley he walked down most days. He was reading a book, laughing. Better watch out for those farm boys, he thought, chortling out loud.
About one out of five boys who live on farms or else visit one during summer vacation have intercourse, or attempt it, with animals. Only one or two out of a hundred boys who live in cities practise such behaviour. Any of the farm animals may become a sexual object - ponies, calves, sheep, pigs, even chickens or ducks. Dogs are also commonly used, but cats rarely. Intercourse with animals is usually infrequent among those boys who practice it, but there are some who build up a strong emotional attachment to a particular animal and will have intercourse with it on a regular basis. This behaviour is against the law, severe penalties could be imposed for violations, not to mention the social ridicule which accompanies its discovery. Technically, intercourse with animals is known as 'bestiality'. It is also called 'sodomy', although that word can also mean both homosexual intercourse and anal intercourse with a woman. I have known cases of farm boys who have had a loving sexual relationship with an animal and felt good about their behaviour until they got to college, where they learned for the first time that what they had done was 'abnormal'. Then they were upset and thought of themselves as some kind of monster. If this kind of behaviour should ever happen to a boy he would do best to keep knowledge of it from other people so he will not be ridiculed, and at the same time feel secure in his self-knowledge that he is not a monster, no matter what society's attitude may be." she may be dead but there's still the chickens and they may get mad about the extra competition the rooster crows at midnight but no-one's home Bibliography - Peter Wilsons parts Pomeroy, Wardell, B. 1968 "Boys and Sex", Middlesex England, Penguin. Written between 2 March and 12 March, 2002. Thanks. back © All work herein copyright the stated authors. |
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