The Life of Polycrates and Other Stories for Antiquated Children (22 page)

He smiled. Involuntarily. He was a tall, very good-looking young man with broad shoulders, dark blond hair and soft brown eyes. His features were symmetrical.

“
He has nice bone structure,” a woman had once said of him.

“
Well, you have always been fortunate,” his friend, Marcus Hunziker, said now—somewhat thoughtlessly, since fortune is something that is not only intensely subjective, but also almost impossible to understand or calculate.

The glasses of Prosecco were emptied of their last drops.

The two men separated. Each went his own way.

Dino looked up at the cloudless sky and felt sad, at the flowers in the park and felt repulsed.

III.

The fact is that nothing is more valued in this world than banality.

IV.

He caught sight of a stooping, pigeon-chested man, morphine-sedated, with a loose, flexible nose and ten fingers dangling to the ground. A hallucinating pedestrian. A shame, stinking like a urinal, hand now floating up, now extended to beg a coin.

Dino lay a five franc piece in that palm; wished it were his: grimy untrimmed nails and quivering digits; envied the ugly—bit his lip when he saw dwarves and felt intensely jealous of hunchbacks. Very short, balding men in baggy, ill-fitting pants fascinated him. Below average mammals. Hiccupping, stuttering idiots with social disabilities, cognitive dysfunctions, tumbling backward on the evolutionary scale.

V.

Some carnivorous fish; a city on fire.

VI.

He exercised as little as possible, purposefully stooped and went on a fried-foods diet; was attracted to women whose eyeliner was streaked along their cheeks; pleading psychological problems, day after day did not appear for work until, drawing his last pay-cheque, he was put on the unemployment roles, along with blind gardeners and women who scratched themselves as they mumbled about hard times.

VII.

The sky has the taste of disgust, screeching like an intoxicated cow or an old tyre.

VIII.

The colour of vomit.

IX.

Dreamed: a metal cylinder, pollution, blue lakes raped by clouds of smut, dead fish flopping listlessly on the shore.

X.

Gradually his complexion began to change—to grow pasty, unhealthy. His teeth went from white to yellow, from yellow to green, and his breath smelled like the oldest of Appenzellers. His past seemed distant—galloping away like a horse hurling itself into hell.

XI.

He developed a taste for the cheapest wine—those vinegary distillations the litre bottles of which are unmarked by date—the types of grape poor pensioners drink so as to send their memories paddling off on thrifty lagoons populated by drowsy toads and featherless water birds. After drinking a few bottles of that liquid which was the tint of mule blood, eating a piece of liver fried in peanut oil, he would stroll off onto the piazza, sniff around the dresses of German tourists, swagger through the cafés, snatching up handfuls of potato chips from the counters, visiting remodelled urinals and subsequently striking up conversations with deaf widowers or young women who had grown fat on alpine cheese and who would deal with his advances by making guttural sounds and displaying mouthfuls of staggered teeth.

XII.

His smile looked like bloody sheep fat.

XIII.

“
I am gaining ground,” he drawled, as he looked at himself in the mirror.

XIV.

He searched out beings to befriend, took a train to Milan, scavenged in the gutters, picked up tramps with oozing flesh and drank horrible pale liquids with men who played dice in alleyways. Later, he would wake up on the edge of town, in some ditch and, after picking the earwigs and beetles out of his hair, wander to some road-side bar where he would stand a round to truck-drivers and those whores who hunt on the outskirts, pot-bellied women with muscular calves from much walking.

XV.

Indeed, progress he was making. His friends had fallen away from him, at first one by one—and then
en masse
. If one happened to see him approaching on the street, they would be sure to hurry away in order to avoid him—avoid the evil smell that came from his person, the depressing atmosphere that surrounded him like a sea of miasma.

XVI.

Women no longer smiled at him and, if he smiled at them, their usual rebuttal was “Disgusting!” which filled him with a satisfaction difficult to explain, but one which is probably not entirely unknown to our readers, who undoubtedly have at times felt a certain pride in the stench spewed out of their underarms, a certain smugness as their bellies grow larger and drag closer to the earth, stuffed as they are with old grease and new wine—the rinds of some unhealthy bit of cheese, the scrapings of a fry pan, or a few bites of mealy apple, a half moon of fermented citrus . . .

“
Well, thank God for brothels,” he said to himself.

Because the friends you pay for are certainly better than those who sanctimoniously claim to offer themselves selflessly. The friends you pay for will twist themselves into almost any position, stand on their heads, apply their outdated lips to your knuckles as you stuff a few worthy banknotes down their brightly-coloured and disordered brassieres.

XVII.

He wiggled his soft, slimy body into a pair of tight jeans.

XVIII.

A roaring crowd of maniacs biting each other’s fingers off and afterwards drooling long strands of pink saliva which fall to the ground like webs as rockets go off overhead, lonely sparks expiring in overdoses of nausea.

XIX.

But everyone has their limit and it got to the point where even prostitutes of the lowest order refused to have him as a client—preferring starvation to his oily touch, to his demands which were too perverse even for those initiated in the darkest rites of fornication, and Dino, as passionate as any chamois or barnyard animal, was constrained to seek pleasure from knobby trees, sidewalk cracks and other inanimate objects of symbolic significance.

XX.

Passing by that stooping, pigeon-chested man; that stinking urinal, whose hand was extended for a few coins.

“
You need to give to
me
now,” Dino said.

“
Eh?”

Dino began to ply through the man’s pockets, located six or eight francs in change. The other was too high to offer resistance and our hero went off and spent the money on two glasses of beer at the Bar Apache and spoke to an old woman whose language he did not understand.

XXI.

Sometimes, when a tooth fell out of his rotting mouth, or he noticed how quickly he was growing bald, he would explode in tears of joy.

XXII.

When he walked, he made his way in unpleasant rhythmic waves, like a lingering camel.

XXIII.

A hunched over creature waddled down the street, a twenty cent cigar protruding from his loose, greasy lips, an aroma of the sewer hanging about his person

XXIV.

Everyone is vulgar.

Peter Payne

Tell zeal it wants devotion;

Tell love it is but lust;

Tell time it metes but motion;

Tell flesh it is but dust:

And wish them not reply,

For thou must give the lie.

—
Sir Walter Raleigh

I.

A true crowd had gathered in front of the Tropicana Casino, upright livestock; harelips, evil odours, voices hatchet the air.

They were all packed against a temporary barrier like those used by police to keep back rioters. Red, white and blue banners hung from the light posts. Twenty-one white stretch limousines were parked side by side in the emptied section of the parking lot, ramps marking them off at either end like book ends. A stage had been set up, a big banner stretched across it saying in gold lettering:

KAPTAIN PETER PAYNE

*

A voice roared out over the speakers, “Ladies and gentlemaaan! —Kaptain Petaaar Paaayne!!!”

The crowd cheered. Several whistles were audible. A tri-coloured motorcycle spangled with stars buzzed past, the rider waving. He wore a white leather outfit, gold stripes jetting across. Men held small children on their shoulders for a better view. The motorcycle turned around, buzzed back, picking up speed, the rider popping a glorious wheelie that made the crowd go wild. At the end of the run the bike fishtailed, turned back, front tire jacking up, him going the whole length of the parking lot, all the while keeping only one hand on the bike while he waved with the other. He road past, one foot on the seat, one hand on the handle bars, the other limbs outstretched like an acrobat (like Dennis Hopper in
Easy Rider
. . . Paul Newman in
Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid
). People were stirred, wanted this. They smiled, wagged their heads enthusiastically and cheered.

“
He sure can ride,” said a man, cowboy hat obscuring his shrunken head.

A little girl stared at the spectacle with wide, impressionable eyes.

Several young men covertly sipped cans of beer, talking in low voices, their shoulders hunched.

Peter Payne whined up to the ramp several times, testing the logistics. Finally he gave the thumbs up. He would jump. The crowd became silent. He rode back a couple of hundred yards. A small man in a mechanic’s jump-suit ran up to him. Everyone could see that they were talking. Words exchanged. Gestures vehement. The small man jogged away as Peter Payne revved up his bike. He waved and then buzzed toward the ramp, his motorcycle picking up speed. It hit the ramp and shot into the air. He let go of the handlebars, threw his arms over his head, quickly grabbed them again and he was on the other side. Cameras flashed. Sound issued from open mouths.

II.

Peter Payne was born in San Angelo, Texas. His father worked as a ranch hand. The family moved around, from Texas to Colorado, Colorado to New Mexico, then on to Nevada, Utah, Wyoming, Montana. His dad was a jack-of-all-trades, getting work where he could, drinking too much, getting fired, going straight, getting steady work, then hitting the bottle harder than ever. When he had money he spent it quickly, buying Peter and his older brother Jack whatever they wanted, even if it meant not paying the rent and bills. Mom bore with it, resigning herself to the wild ways of her man, Preacher.

He could hear his father outside howling at the moon, deep in liquor. Years later he would remember this with a kind of sacred awe, at the time he lay in his bed wide awake, his brother’s breathing sounding out a comfort (their blood being the same) that could only be effaced by death.

The light shafted across the room and he lay on the night, TV going low in the living room, Mom's pretty hair streaked with early grey. Preacher out there sitting on the tailgate, sipping Kentucky whisky, happy in the clean expanse and drink and speaking to those lavish stars.

III.

“
Get your butt in that door!” Pete hissed.

Blaine sulked his way through the broad doors. The family found seats together in the sixth pew next to a very blond husband and wife with a teenage daughter yellow as straw.

Old women sat, gripping purses and bibles tightly, faces dry, pious, globs of hunger and senility and protuberances of pain. Some newlyweds pressed close together, the man staring with animal satisfaction at his mate’s swollen belly. Humbled fathers stared at the Aryan Christ before them, their eyes pink from Saturday night’s twelve pack. A dirty-faced boy murmured obscenities under his breath, Satan pricking within him, effing obsessive effs as the sanctuary filled its gut.

“
Aren’t they ever gonna start?” muttered Blaine. Virginia, Peter’s wife, grabbed the boy’s hand, squeezing it tightly so it hurt like hell.

“
You kids need to learn a little religion,” said Peter in a low voice. “When I was a boy I enjoyed church.”

He lied.

“
These days all these young people act like God forsaken atheists,” commented the blond husband next to them.

Virginia nodded her head.

“
Lizards,” she mumbled.