jurisprudent
07-26-2011, 12:37 PM
(Courtesy to Suede (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LGW7JghZ3A8&ob=av3e)for the title)
PART 1:
1.
Rohani was 18 or 19 and he met her at the disco just an hour after another girl he met there, Jane, had left the place. Rohani had black eyes and black hair, long and silky, a very slim body dancing with a glass in hand, under the spectrum of lights turning overhead, the globe hanging from the ceiling. She sat by him and said she was okay that day, since her cousin, Amritava, managed to graduate from his politics course and now was about to fly back to Karachi, where all of her relatives belonged. He shrugged his shoulders and said he was coming from a distant country, from city S. where Pakistanis where as strange as jungle monkeys. She laughed at the word “monkeys” and hugged him; he felt the smell of alcohol and cheap Chinese food. Yes, Alex nodded, and clung to her, but she pushed him and returned to the dancefloor, obsessed by the beat. At the end of the evening, she kissed his cheek, smiled and said, “can I come with you?” She was shaking, weak, the alcohol was rushing through her veins. He said that was alright and, holding hands, they walked down the 2 am street to the black cabs awaiting the horde of drunken teens coming out of the discos just by the time the clubs close.
They sat at the back, she kissed his lips, he kissed her neck, her ears, her cheek, she smiled with the devilish cheer of a Karachi girl from Mama Parsi’s school yard, and her hand got hold of his penis, yet flaccid, but steadily growing, while her tongue was exploring his mouth. She’s hungry like a monster, he thought, and left himself to the flood of sexuality that she released over him. The cab stopped, abruptly, he paid with a far bigger banknote, and they moved to his small room, on the last floor of the building, and there she put off her short red dress, her bra was red too, she unzipped his pants, kissed his penis, smiled devilishly again and pushed him, while he was watching her as if being a bystander, a victim of a violent force trying to rape him. But he submitted himself, lying on the bed, while she was approaching climax, moaning, her silky hair spread all over her shoulders. Then, as he sighed with a bit of relief, she pulled herself and came along him, laughed for a second and kissed his cheek. Listen, she said, I want this again. Alex sighed, this time, no relief, and said okay, but she noted he was flabbergasted and rose, supported by one of her arms and said she had no lovers back home in Pakistan, her parents were quite keen to keep her clean from sexual misbehavior and she was strictly attending each and every evening at home, from home – going to Mama Parsi’s school, then back home, so boys were not around. Last summer, at 16, she came to visit her cousin in M,. and then she found an English boy and slept with him. You are my second one, she laughed, and he thought she was too good for that, he thought her energy suited a prostitute. She added she loved to smoke but her parents would not allow her back in Pakistan. “That’s why”, she said, “when I finish school, I am coming here – I have to study, but I want to smoke, drink and ****.” After her tirade, she swung her head to the right, then to the pillow, and fell asleep.
On the next morning, she just put her bra, bikini and dress, all red, on, and with an air kiss sent to him, she waved goodbye, begged for his number so that they can meet when she comes back, and she called a cab and disappeared in the rainy morning. It was as if a tornado has been crashing his room for half a day since last night.
2.
He thought it was really boring to spent the summer in his room, while his friend, the one who dragged him to M. was studying for his exams, so Alex was wandering around the rainy and windy city, in his grey coat, watching the university buildings through the looking glasses, somehow attracted by the multitudes of students gathering each evening to talk and have a beer. He used to be a student, at home in S., when he was three years younger, but the time was tough and after he started not the best degree he would have liked, he had to look for a job and decided to quit the university. After some time at a bar and a speedy delivery company, he was lured by one of his friends’ talk about this foreign city, M. where he was studying and having lots of fun, so he decided it was okay to go for the summer and have a look around, especially for jobs.
But the student city, the campus, was the thing that really attracted him. He was striding down the grass alleys, in the evenings, watching boys and girls leave the library with big and heavy books, and he really wanted to go in and read. He was not a bookish person at home and he did not love reading fictional stuff or classy theories, but now he felt deprived of what many of his contemporaries had, and he really longed to be inside, to sit at one of the wooden tables, open a big book and read – about societies, cultures, peoples, time passing by, about difficult and uplifting things that would move his mind away from the four white walls of the small cheap room he was living, away from the memories of the decrepit block of flats he used to live in S. But the staff would not let him in unless he had student registration, so he simply sighed and walked to the next pub, a spacious place where he would usually have a beer and burger before heading off home where his friend was studying. Sometimes he would jump ahead into the craze of night clubs, the flashy discos of drunken boys and girls swirling under the massive electronic beats, and he still wondered how they could spend the days in libraries and nights – in clubs.
This evening he found the small white leaflet, swung by the rainy wind, where he read of the Wednesday meeting of a student, but still open to others, discussion club for the British Parliamentary debating style. He was quite astonished; his friend knew nothing of this and said probably it was a bunch of boring guys, with no women, arguing about the setting of the sun and the hunger in Somalia. “Get a girl and **** her”, his friend said, “go out tonight, have fun, forget the boring stuff, it’s summertime.” But Alex was still curious. He did not like to talk much, instead, he was the one to listen and listen again, to watch and observe, sitting by the wall, while all the people were taking part around him. Next evening, in his wet coat, he was striding right to the place of the meeting, with a small notebook in hand, and when asked about his occupation, he said, in a bit self-confident tone, that he was a philosophy student, and thus his name was written in the meeting registry book. The people around were so talkative and eloquent; he was listening, listening and watching, their faces, their lips, the style of their speech, the way they used words and pronounced words. Alex did not want to discuss the legality of use of force in Afghanistan even when asked about his opinion.
After the two hour long debate he was just about to leave when a tall blondish boy, one of the most eloquent ones, asked him to come to the nearest pub. So he shrugged his arms and said okay and followed the small group, around 15 people, to the spacious pub. He took a beer and sat on a sofa, while they were still talking of news, events and people he had never heard of. One lady with a green hair, Liz, who was apparently a Greenpeace volunteer, asked him if he would sign the petition against whale killing in the Pacific – and he did so, without a word. Liz smiled, nodded and urged him to speak and come to the meetings regularly. The blondish tall guy, Jamey, turned to be world’s debating champion, a mathematics genius writing doctorate on robotics applied to mind processes. Jamey tried to speak to him and they had a short conversation about his hometown, S., and why he came to M. He noticed that Jamey was staring at a short, auburn girl, with big boobs, and her name turned to be Jessica, a new member, who got spotted by Jamey. People, Jamey said, are a bit afraid of my reputation, so I insist on calling me simply Jamey, like the nice guy from the neighbourhood, nothing more. Girls are really scared by me, and I want to have a nice chat with her, Jamey said, and went to Jessica, she had a really nice ***, he had already added, and Jamey brought her to the bar for a drink, while they chatted.
So Alex was standing among this group, and while listening to all of them, he felt as happy as never before, as this was his wooden table with a big heavy book, his breathing library of a multitude of faces, and this was so consoling.
3.
After his friend’s exams were over, Alex thought about going back home with him, but this was quite a bad idea, he thought, as he found the city, M., far better place to spend the next several months. As he was skimming through some adverts, he thought it was time he found a decent job and tried to keep himself busy. Daytime jobs were boring, so he sought something that would give him the opportunity to meet people during the day and keep him away from clubs and discos, which were a bad distraction with all the teenage girls looking for a night stand and place to waste more than he could afford. And he wanted to know the city really well, to know its dark and far corners, which meant only one thing – that the best thing for him was to become a night taxi driver.
It was not what he had been dreaming of, but it was far better than the silly things he has been doing at S. years ago, and the job was paid well for his standards. The summer was over and he imagined that, if things were going well, he could take up a part time course at the university, while working at night in his black castle, as he could see it, the cab, the car. But the castle turned to be grey and very dull, he was not allowed to listen to music there, he could only drive and look straight ahead, into the darkness of the night city. The city – the one he was so eager to know and understand, was a breathing beast, covered by black fume, and he began to know that very soon, when his night rides were marred by the night dirt of the city.
In his rearview mirror he could watch the back seat and the multitude of people that were passing through his car, night after night, as if he was De Niro’s taxi driver on a quest through the guts of the city, stirring the filth and consuming the trash of its respiring lungs. Drunken and vomiting teenagers and students were the most common clients of his moving grey castle, rude and high all the time, with clothes ragged by subliminal twisting in beds and discotheques. He hated them but they were not the worst. He would often look at the nice girls that would stop the cab, hand in hand with a guy, usually a stranger, and he knew both were high or drunken, there was a flirtatious smell of sex around them, floating from their sweating skin, so that he knew very well where they were heading after leaving the cab. The really worst ones were the drug dealers indeed. Once, sitting at the back, one of them was talking to a girl, showing her two small pills, and then Alex, mutely watching the scene in the rearview mirror, jumped and started to shout –
“Go out, I don’t want this **** here, go out!”
“Take it easy, mate, we need a second”, the other replied, “and he jumped to his feet and cried, jump the **** out of my car.”
“Shut up, mate, they are watching you” – and the dealer pointed to a gang of boys waiting at the entrance of a disco, few metres away from the car.
“I don’t care, he said, you are going out right now!”
He opened the back door and pulled the dealer, in a black leather coat, out under the drizzling rain. The dealer shouted, are you crazy, but Alex pushed him next to a shop’s closed door and felt that the dealer was trying to hit him with a full fist. Then Alex turned, slapped him on the right side, kicked his leg, then his abdomen, shouted who the **** do you think you are, and pushed a fist in his perspiring face. The dealer, a black guy, about 25-26, fell to his knees and he kicked his in the face, right in his nose that instantly started bleeding. The rush within Alex’s head was slowly calming down, he turned to see the boys still watching him, a bit scared, a bit flabbergasted, and the girl from the car, really drunk, with wide open eyes, standing in her short green dress under the rain, saying “You are sick mate you are weirdo go check your brains weirdo….” shaking her blonde head.
He sighed, looked to the dealer lying on his back staring dumbly at him, looked to the car, and quickly jumped at the front seat and drove off into the distant blackness of the street, his fingers still pulsating with the energy and the fury possessing him during the fight. They are the sick, he was thinking, they are the dirty **** ups, this **** up, he knows she is over her head, she should not take that ****, she is already drunk and high. She is 17-18, 19 probably. She will be high and will get ****ed in the toilet of the club, with a ****ing idiot pushing his ****ing dick in her, and she’s a bit pretty though, she should take care of herself, damn it.
One his colleagues, a Pakistani driver, Rikin, was addicted to watching English girls on the night shifts. “I wish I could **** all of them, mate”, he would say, “I wish I could pull their panties, their white panties, mate, and you know, press their white skin; our girls do not have that white skin and white skin is so ****ing nice, I want nice white skin, shaved pussies, you know, not like our girls, the white ones are shaved and smelling of expensive stuff, perfumes, and they are all glittering, mate, you know them, with lipstick and beautiful dresses and haircuts, you know how they go out, and they are so drunk, I just want to pull one of them round the corner and **** her in her white tasty pussy mate. But, Rikin added, the bad thing is you can **** them, they are so flashy mate, but I can’t live with one of them, if I have to marry I want one of our girls, our nice ladies of Karachi, matey, white English girls for the ****, but nothing more, yep.”
At the end of the fourth month of a cab driver’s life, he decided to give up the job. It was tiresome, nervous thing, and he could not stand it anymore. He was sleeping all day long and every available minute was filled by watching “Taxi Driver”, freaking out, thinking of finding a childish prostitute and caring for her, in some dramatic twist of mind dictated by horrible visions caused by the movie. I’d better leave, he thought, and finally, when he resigned and went back home, in his small room, he felt a bit of relief, as if a stony weight was pulled off his shoulders and he could breathe far better. It was autumn, but the days were sunny and he could spend more time at the debating meetings where his only friends were.
4.
It was the day when Jamey and his new girlfriend, Jessica, were throwing a house warming party at their new place, where they had just moved in. Like all the rest of the debaters from the discussion club, he was invited as well, and the theme of the party was “old records”. Jamey was this weird guy, the fan of all vintage things, so he had bought a gramophone and was enjoying it so much, loud and proud of it. He had never been much into music craze, the music shops and TVs were really boring and meaningless to him, and the disco beats were a hypnotizing vibe reminding him of the drunk girls and boys dancing in the sound. Sometimes, in the cold nights of his days in the small room, in this really cold autumn, he could imagine he was a real music fan, he knew of nice ,music he would turn on and listen to while the rain batters the window, but he had never found one.
So this afternoon Alex took a walk down the alley in the neighbourhood he lived and reached the place for old and vintage stuff, where, on the lower ground floor, a guy behind the counter was reading a newspaper listening to some music on his player; the records, in their big cardboard covers, were all over the place, disorderly scattered on the tables, hanging from the walls, all around. He thought that Jamey would like some old stuff and spotted a Rolling Stones album with a picture of blue pants, “Sticky fingers (http://sleevage.com/wp-content/uploads/2007/08/rstones_stickyf1.jpg)”, but he did not like the image and moved on, saw Jim Morrison’s face on one record, Jimi Hendrix on another. Fixed his stair at The Smith’s “The Queen is Dead (http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_PZYScm1NuZ4/S-ClAUm4G5I/AAAAAAAAAkA/DVlbFNmtKJs/s1600/b000002l9j01lzzzzzzz.jpg)”, then moved to the writing man on Guns N’ Roses “Use your Illusion (http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_PQovAaKe3og/TDeIeWxYv6I/AAAAAAAAASs/AGlCYYdrjHY/s1600/Use-Your-Illusion-I-B000000OSE-L.jpg)”, before turning to Lou Reed’s painted face on “Transformer (http://www.musiconvinyl.com/fotos/66_foto1_product_groot.jpg)”. Too weird, he thought, and looked at the tomb on the cover of Joy Division’s “Closer (http://http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/6/64/Joy_Division_Closer.jpg)”. This is horrific, he thought, and grabbed the brown building on Led Zeppelin’s “Physical Graffitti (http://unrealityshout.com/files/images/led-zeppelin-physical-graffiti.jpg)”, next to it he saw the grey fantastic world of Yes’ “Relayer (http://images.wax.fm/yes_relayer-WEA10541-1289342405.jpeg)”. It’s unknown bull****, he thought, and while heading to the exit, a hand stopped him. It was the man behind the counter, now up on his feet.
“Looking for a gift?” He said.
“Kind of”, he replied.
“What’s like the person you are giving it to?”
Alex shrugged his shoulders, baffled. “Hard to say. Clever, strange. But a nice guy.”
“Try this one”, said the man, and gave him Pink Floyd’s “Wish You Were Here (http://www.progarchives.com/progressive_rock_discography_covers/364/cover_383971692009.jpg)”.
“Who’s that”, he wondered, and the main looked at him with big, gazing in wild desperation eyes, “You don’t know Floyd?” Alex shook his head. No. The guy smiled, “It’s time to check some nice stuff, mate, you’ve been too long on TV bull****.”
“I don’t have a TV”, Alex retorted, and the other man just stared at him, in numb desperation, as if talking with a complete idiot. “God, where do you live? On this planet?”
**** off, Alex thought, and said, “I hate when they try to sell me off some stuff I don’t like.” The guy nodded. “I see. The isolated type.”
“What type?”
“ Long story, mate. We’ll have a chat on another occasion. Come here again. And have a look at this stuff, Pink Floyd. Recommend it as a professional.”
Alex looked at him with bits of confusion – but the guy was fast to tell: “I sing and play the guitar. I love the Floyd, mate, since I was a kid, check this stuff. And this one – he put on a black cover with a rose on it, Depeche Mode’s “Violator (http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/31773C0MTBL._SL500_AA300_.jpg)”, saying “this is my other all time favourite, genius, mate, and take this one, a gift from me, my CD.” He took the disc and looked at its shiny cover, without a name. We do not have a name, yet, but I call us “The Blackouts”, it reminds of The Beatles, see, and has some strange neurodarkospheric what a ****ing word, Alex thought) feel, creepy, you know. Check my stuff as well and come back mate, we can have a chat over a beer. Come on, you need some schooling in music, you hate the TV bull****, I can give you stuff outside the TV.” Alex shook his head, a bit bored, but felt the guy was really sincere. “Okay, matey, I am coming back.”
“ Just a second”, the guy called as he was leaving, “my name is, remember, Scotty, Scotty Reaman.”
5.
The house party was in a dark and very far end of the city, a silent student quarter where PHD students were living with their families, amidst green grass alleys and oaks stretching naked autumn branches. Such a quiet place, ALex was thinking, I miss that, this quiet solace. He could imagine Jamey, with his short blondish hair and thick glasses reading his mathematical stuff and models, and Jessica, the one with the slick ***, fluttering all around him, making tea or coffee, reading books, in this quiet quarter away from the jungle of night clubs in the city centre. I miss all of that, Alex thought.
Jamey greeted him like an old friend, Jessica kissed his cheek, and he smiled, it was so comfortable in this very tiny space of the house, shared with one more couple, students again. Jamey had invited about 20 to 25 people, all of them bringing old records. As he had already listened to the albums, he could talk with Jamey about Pink Floyd and Depeche Mode, and Jamey turned to be a real fan of the bands. But another girl, Fran, one short and very nice, cheerful one with tanned skin and big boobs, sitting cross-legged on the floor, was very eager to talk about music and he sat by her and started sharing his opinion on Martin Gore’s lyrics and the electronic vibe of “Violator”. She was smiling, a glass of white wine in her hand, and nodding, she was listening with glittering friendly eyes, staring straight into his face, but instead of moving his eyes from her, as he usually would do, Alex was fixed on her face and felt so comforted by these brown and calm eyes. She turned and took Miles Davis’ “The Birth of Cool” from the heap of records, recommending him some jazzy stuff. He took the one and looked at Miles and his trumpet, feeling as if stepping into a new universe of names and images he had never heard of. She said it would be nice to see him at her house, she was living nearby, writing her thesis on sociology of religious sects, so he felt uplifted when she stood up - he was staring at her skirt, slowly moving from left to right, covering the sacred sanctuary of her body - and she turned and kissed his cheek, saying it was late for her and she should go home, so she waved for goodbye and her big brown calm eyes disappeared from the room full of people.
Jessica sat next to him, with the devilish smile of a love matchmaker, and said it was time, time to meet some nice girls. “You’re a nice guy, don’t be alone, come and have fun with all of us.” He nodded, it was the time for him, the best time, as he was slowly feeling as a member of this small student community, with his own stake in it, with a voice to be heard at debates and parties, as a stranger no more, and this drove him to think he should not hesitate and find a place at the university, some nice thought provoking course, that will make him as eloquent and intelligent as all the people around him in the room, in this small community.
6.
Past midnight, a cold glass of white wine, the night was of a full moon and calm cool wind in the naked branches of the trees along the alleyway; Alex was sitting, with Fran - her full name was Francesca, with an English father and Italian mother - and they were sitting on the floor, surrounded by candles flickering in the dim darkness, hand in hand, listening to Pink Floyd’s Echoes, in an atmospheric mood. He was staring at her short auburn hair, her brown blouse and black jeans, her red fingernails holding the glass, as she was speaking. There was a big Max Weber volume next to her, open and left upside down; she was talking of her research of Protestants in a nearby church in M. She found out that people define religion as something taking about 10% to 15 % of their time and interests, which she thought was a radical shift proving the fall of religious devotion and rise of secular thought in contemporary Western civilization. He was nodding, listening to her and staring at the brown gleam in her eyes, while she urged him to choose a social sciences course at the university. No, he said, I am good with numbers.
“Then take a combined one, something social with maths, you know.” She was a bit of a mother, a bit of a sister to him, she was a Pygmalion modeling somebody new out of Alex.
They were sitting here since 2 pm, when he came to see her, and then they had a chat over almost everything, she was excited to show him her collection of books and records, and he was listening and nodding, being slowly pulled 200 leagues under the surface of the ocean by her sweet and quick talk, her tongue uttering thousands of unknown names of places, people, events that he was yet to discover. As if he had been living in the Dark ages, secluded like a monk out of this world, and locked into another, boring and grey one. Past – he had no past, he would never talk to her about the time he lived back in S. his hometown, the dull place where he had no friends, no ambitions, nothing. Now Fran was a whole new galaxy standing next to him. He did not want to touch her, as if she was a spirit bound to disappear on the second of making a physical contact with her.
She was quite bemused by this strange man, not talkative but handsome, refrained, a little kitten hiding from the downpour under the roof of a decrepit house, and found by a caring child. She was that one, the caring one who really wanted to cultivate and civilize the tribal savage, to drive him to the glorious path of the civilized work where “Pink Floyd”, “Marx”, “Woodstock” meant a whole universe of symbols and associations. A kind of seduction, but she was keen on seducing, it gave her bits of comfort and control, like being a guide to a newcomer, laughing at all the new things he was wondering about. Seduction, of course did not have only an intellectual side to it, it had a physical one as well, and she kissed him first, wrapped him with her long and tanned hands, pressed her lips to his, to his cheeks and forehead, and felt the pulse beneath his skin, something virgin not in a physical but other sense, and this was the luring feeling of poisoning a well.
After having sex, while they were still naked, she went upstairs and brought a small box. ‘What’s that”, he asked, and she shushed and told him to wait. “Some weed”, she said in the end, and handed him the cigarette, a plump white thing he took; he hated cigarettes since he was a little boy and just refused it. Alex recalled his parents’ bad habit of smoking too much, destroying their health and this was a part of his dim past, the whirlwind of things drowned by family hate, abuses, scandals, all covered by tons of cigarette smoke, a dark shroud falling over these times as carved in his mind.
“No”, she said, “it’s something different, we will get high, high my dear.” She waited until he decided to give it a try, and then lit it, the smell of marijuana fluttering in the air around them, they were smoking one and the same piece of weed, and he was lying next to her, naked, in the dark atmospheric, gothic as she said, vibe that was embracing them.
“It’s okay”, she said, “it’s not like cocaine or ecstasy that will drive you insane, it’s not the club thing that you hate, it is like being pulled in a boat through the misty waters of river Styx, like being under the sun, then above the sun”, and she turned the music on, listening to Primal Scream’s “Higher than the Sun (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YHjVIBDYgXg)”. Bits of hallucinogenic mood were piercing the centres of Alex’s mind, a dream of wide furry wings was flying all around him, and she started kissing him, her mild and warm skin pressing his, two bodies collapsing into one shape and form, into the dark sea of psychedelic sensations. The weed is very good, she muttered, very strong, it’s taking us away, can you feel the earth shaking as we leave it, as we rise, dear, we fly, we are heading for the moon, for the centre of the night sky, dear, hand in hand, we are up, we pass over this house, dear, darling, we fly above the alleys of oaks, above the city, look at the glitter and the million lamps below us, look at the cars that go into the back nothingness, we are in the troposphere, no, we are touching the Jupiter of dreams, the Saturn of lucidity and calmness, we will land there in our sweet embrace…
He was listening to her nice words whispered in his ears, his mind was being transformed, his spirit was transmigrating, his soul was holding her soul and they were somewhere he did not know, location of no demarcation, out of time and place, in the numbness of unknown pleasing sweetness. Kisses, kisses one after another, kisses bridging the gaps of darkness around them in the room, and the smell of flames and candles wafting; both them were somewhere else, on the other side. He was happy without even understanding this was happiness.
To be continued:...
PART 1:
1.
Rohani was 18 or 19 and he met her at the disco just an hour after another girl he met there, Jane, had left the place. Rohani had black eyes and black hair, long and silky, a very slim body dancing with a glass in hand, under the spectrum of lights turning overhead, the globe hanging from the ceiling. She sat by him and said she was okay that day, since her cousin, Amritava, managed to graduate from his politics course and now was about to fly back to Karachi, where all of her relatives belonged. He shrugged his shoulders and said he was coming from a distant country, from city S. where Pakistanis where as strange as jungle monkeys. She laughed at the word “monkeys” and hugged him; he felt the smell of alcohol and cheap Chinese food. Yes, Alex nodded, and clung to her, but she pushed him and returned to the dancefloor, obsessed by the beat. At the end of the evening, she kissed his cheek, smiled and said, “can I come with you?” She was shaking, weak, the alcohol was rushing through her veins. He said that was alright and, holding hands, they walked down the 2 am street to the black cabs awaiting the horde of drunken teens coming out of the discos just by the time the clubs close.
They sat at the back, she kissed his lips, he kissed her neck, her ears, her cheek, she smiled with the devilish cheer of a Karachi girl from Mama Parsi’s school yard, and her hand got hold of his penis, yet flaccid, but steadily growing, while her tongue was exploring his mouth. She’s hungry like a monster, he thought, and left himself to the flood of sexuality that she released over him. The cab stopped, abruptly, he paid with a far bigger banknote, and they moved to his small room, on the last floor of the building, and there she put off her short red dress, her bra was red too, she unzipped his pants, kissed his penis, smiled devilishly again and pushed him, while he was watching her as if being a bystander, a victim of a violent force trying to rape him. But he submitted himself, lying on the bed, while she was approaching climax, moaning, her silky hair spread all over her shoulders. Then, as he sighed with a bit of relief, she pulled herself and came along him, laughed for a second and kissed his cheek. Listen, she said, I want this again. Alex sighed, this time, no relief, and said okay, but she noted he was flabbergasted and rose, supported by one of her arms and said she had no lovers back home in Pakistan, her parents were quite keen to keep her clean from sexual misbehavior and she was strictly attending each and every evening at home, from home – going to Mama Parsi’s school, then back home, so boys were not around. Last summer, at 16, she came to visit her cousin in M,. and then she found an English boy and slept with him. You are my second one, she laughed, and he thought she was too good for that, he thought her energy suited a prostitute. She added she loved to smoke but her parents would not allow her back in Pakistan. “That’s why”, she said, “when I finish school, I am coming here – I have to study, but I want to smoke, drink and ****.” After her tirade, she swung her head to the right, then to the pillow, and fell asleep.
On the next morning, she just put her bra, bikini and dress, all red, on, and with an air kiss sent to him, she waved goodbye, begged for his number so that they can meet when she comes back, and she called a cab and disappeared in the rainy morning. It was as if a tornado has been crashing his room for half a day since last night.
2.
He thought it was really boring to spent the summer in his room, while his friend, the one who dragged him to M. was studying for his exams, so Alex was wandering around the rainy and windy city, in his grey coat, watching the university buildings through the looking glasses, somehow attracted by the multitudes of students gathering each evening to talk and have a beer. He used to be a student, at home in S., when he was three years younger, but the time was tough and after he started not the best degree he would have liked, he had to look for a job and decided to quit the university. After some time at a bar and a speedy delivery company, he was lured by one of his friends’ talk about this foreign city, M. where he was studying and having lots of fun, so he decided it was okay to go for the summer and have a look around, especially for jobs.
But the student city, the campus, was the thing that really attracted him. He was striding down the grass alleys, in the evenings, watching boys and girls leave the library with big and heavy books, and he really wanted to go in and read. He was not a bookish person at home and he did not love reading fictional stuff or classy theories, but now he felt deprived of what many of his contemporaries had, and he really longed to be inside, to sit at one of the wooden tables, open a big book and read – about societies, cultures, peoples, time passing by, about difficult and uplifting things that would move his mind away from the four white walls of the small cheap room he was living, away from the memories of the decrepit block of flats he used to live in S. But the staff would not let him in unless he had student registration, so he simply sighed and walked to the next pub, a spacious place where he would usually have a beer and burger before heading off home where his friend was studying. Sometimes he would jump ahead into the craze of night clubs, the flashy discos of drunken boys and girls swirling under the massive electronic beats, and he still wondered how they could spend the days in libraries and nights – in clubs.
This evening he found the small white leaflet, swung by the rainy wind, where he read of the Wednesday meeting of a student, but still open to others, discussion club for the British Parliamentary debating style. He was quite astonished; his friend knew nothing of this and said probably it was a bunch of boring guys, with no women, arguing about the setting of the sun and the hunger in Somalia. “Get a girl and **** her”, his friend said, “go out tonight, have fun, forget the boring stuff, it’s summertime.” But Alex was still curious. He did not like to talk much, instead, he was the one to listen and listen again, to watch and observe, sitting by the wall, while all the people were taking part around him. Next evening, in his wet coat, he was striding right to the place of the meeting, with a small notebook in hand, and when asked about his occupation, he said, in a bit self-confident tone, that he was a philosophy student, and thus his name was written in the meeting registry book. The people around were so talkative and eloquent; he was listening, listening and watching, their faces, their lips, the style of their speech, the way they used words and pronounced words. Alex did not want to discuss the legality of use of force in Afghanistan even when asked about his opinion.
After the two hour long debate he was just about to leave when a tall blondish boy, one of the most eloquent ones, asked him to come to the nearest pub. So he shrugged his arms and said okay and followed the small group, around 15 people, to the spacious pub. He took a beer and sat on a sofa, while they were still talking of news, events and people he had never heard of. One lady with a green hair, Liz, who was apparently a Greenpeace volunteer, asked him if he would sign the petition against whale killing in the Pacific – and he did so, without a word. Liz smiled, nodded and urged him to speak and come to the meetings regularly. The blondish tall guy, Jamey, turned to be world’s debating champion, a mathematics genius writing doctorate on robotics applied to mind processes. Jamey tried to speak to him and they had a short conversation about his hometown, S., and why he came to M. He noticed that Jamey was staring at a short, auburn girl, with big boobs, and her name turned to be Jessica, a new member, who got spotted by Jamey. People, Jamey said, are a bit afraid of my reputation, so I insist on calling me simply Jamey, like the nice guy from the neighbourhood, nothing more. Girls are really scared by me, and I want to have a nice chat with her, Jamey said, and went to Jessica, she had a really nice ***, he had already added, and Jamey brought her to the bar for a drink, while they chatted.
So Alex was standing among this group, and while listening to all of them, he felt as happy as never before, as this was his wooden table with a big heavy book, his breathing library of a multitude of faces, and this was so consoling.
3.
After his friend’s exams were over, Alex thought about going back home with him, but this was quite a bad idea, he thought, as he found the city, M., far better place to spend the next several months. As he was skimming through some adverts, he thought it was time he found a decent job and tried to keep himself busy. Daytime jobs were boring, so he sought something that would give him the opportunity to meet people during the day and keep him away from clubs and discos, which were a bad distraction with all the teenage girls looking for a night stand and place to waste more than he could afford. And he wanted to know the city really well, to know its dark and far corners, which meant only one thing – that the best thing for him was to become a night taxi driver.
It was not what he had been dreaming of, but it was far better than the silly things he has been doing at S. years ago, and the job was paid well for his standards. The summer was over and he imagined that, if things were going well, he could take up a part time course at the university, while working at night in his black castle, as he could see it, the cab, the car. But the castle turned to be grey and very dull, he was not allowed to listen to music there, he could only drive and look straight ahead, into the darkness of the night city. The city – the one he was so eager to know and understand, was a breathing beast, covered by black fume, and he began to know that very soon, when his night rides were marred by the night dirt of the city.
In his rearview mirror he could watch the back seat and the multitude of people that were passing through his car, night after night, as if he was De Niro’s taxi driver on a quest through the guts of the city, stirring the filth and consuming the trash of its respiring lungs. Drunken and vomiting teenagers and students were the most common clients of his moving grey castle, rude and high all the time, with clothes ragged by subliminal twisting in beds and discotheques. He hated them but they were not the worst. He would often look at the nice girls that would stop the cab, hand in hand with a guy, usually a stranger, and he knew both were high or drunken, there was a flirtatious smell of sex around them, floating from their sweating skin, so that he knew very well where they were heading after leaving the cab. The really worst ones were the drug dealers indeed. Once, sitting at the back, one of them was talking to a girl, showing her two small pills, and then Alex, mutely watching the scene in the rearview mirror, jumped and started to shout –
“Go out, I don’t want this **** here, go out!”
“Take it easy, mate, we need a second”, the other replied, “and he jumped to his feet and cried, jump the **** out of my car.”
“Shut up, mate, they are watching you” – and the dealer pointed to a gang of boys waiting at the entrance of a disco, few metres away from the car.
“I don’t care, he said, you are going out right now!”
He opened the back door and pulled the dealer, in a black leather coat, out under the drizzling rain. The dealer shouted, are you crazy, but Alex pushed him next to a shop’s closed door and felt that the dealer was trying to hit him with a full fist. Then Alex turned, slapped him on the right side, kicked his leg, then his abdomen, shouted who the **** do you think you are, and pushed a fist in his perspiring face. The dealer, a black guy, about 25-26, fell to his knees and he kicked his in the face, right in his nose that instantly started bleeding. The rush within Alex’s head was slowly calming down, he turned to see the boys still watching him, a bit scared, a bit flabbergasted, and the girl from the car, really drunk, with wide open eyes, standing in her short green dress under the rain, saying “You are sick mate you are weirdo go check your brains weirdo….” shaking her blonde head.
He sighed, looked to the dealer lying on his back staring dumbly at him, looked to the car, and quickly jumped at the front seat and drove off into the distant blackness of the street, his fingers still pulsating with the energy and the fury possessing him during the fight. They are the sick, he was thinking, they are the dirty **** ups, this **** up, he knows she is over her head, she should not take that ****, she is already drunk and high. She is 17-18, 19 probably. She will be high and will get ****ed in the toilet of the club, with a ****ing idiot pushing his ****ing dick in her, and she’s a bit pretty though, she should take care of herself, damn it.
One his colleagues, a Pakistani driver, Rikin, was addicted to watching English girls on the night shifts. “I wish I could **** all of them, mate”, he would say, “I wish I could pull their panties, their white panties, mate, and you know, press their white skin; our girls do not have that white skin and white skin is so ****ing nice, I want nice white skin, shaved pussies, you know, not like our girls, the white ones are shaved and smelling of expensive stuff, perfumes, and they are all glittering, mate, you know them, with lipstick and beautiful dresses and haircuts, you know how they go out, and they are so drunk, I just want to pull one of them round the corner and **** her in her white tasty pussy mate. But, Rikin added, the bad thing is you can **** them, they are so flashy mate, but I can’t live with one of them, if I have to marry I want one of our girls, our nice ladies of Karachi, matey, white English girls for the ****, but nothing more, yep.”
At the end of the fourth month of a cab driver’s life, he decided to give up the job. It was tiresome, nervous thing, and he could not stand it anymore. He was sleeping all day long and every available minute was filled by watching “Taxi Driver”, freaking out, thinking of finding a childish prostitute and caring for her, in some dramatic twist of mind dictated by horrible visions caused by the movie. I’d better leave, he thought, and finally, when he resigned and went back home, in his small room, he felt a bit of relief, as if a stony weight was pulled off his shoulders and he could breathe far better. It was autumn, but the days were sunny and he could spend more time at the debating meetings where his only friends were.
4.
It was the day when Jamey and his new girlfriend, Jessica, were throwing a house warming party at their new place, where they had just moved in. Like all the rest of the debaters from the discussion club, he was invited as well, and the theme of the party was “old records”. Jamey was this weird guy, the fan of all vintage things, so he had bought a gramophone and was enjoying it so much, loud and proud of it. He had never been much into music craze, the music shops and TVs were really boring and meaningless to him, and the disco beats were a hypnotizing vibe reminding him of the drunk girls and boys dancing in the sound. Sometimes, in the cold nights of his days in the small room, in this really cold autumn, he could imagine he was a real music fan, he knew of nice ,music he would turn on and listen to while the rain batters the window, but he had never found one.
So this afternoon Alex took a walk down the alley in the neighbourhood he lived and reached the place for old and vintage stuff, where, on the lower ground floor, a guy behind the counter was reading a newspaper listening to some music on his player; the records, in their big cardboard covers, were all over the place, disorderly scattered on the tables, hanging from the walls, all around. He thought that Jamey would like some old stuff and spotted a Rolling Stones album with a picture of blue pants, “Sticky fingers (http://sleevage.com/wp-content/uploads/2007/08/rstones_stickyf1.jpg)”, but he did not like the image and moved on, saw Jim Morrison’s face on one record, Jimi Hendrix on another. Fixed his stair at The Smith’s “The Queen is Dead (http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_PZYScm1NuZ4/S-ClAUm4G5I/AAAAAAAAAkA/DVlbFNmtKJs/s1600/b000002l9j01lzzzzzzz.jpg)”, then moved to the writing man on Guns N’ Roses “Use your Illusion (http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_PQovAaKe3og/TDeIeWxYv6I/AAAAAAAAASs/AGlCYYdrjHY/s1600/Use-Your-Illusion-I-B000000OSE-L.jpg)”, before turning to Lou Reed’s painted face on “Transformer (http://www.musiconvinyl.com/fotos/66_foto1_product_groot.jpg)”. Too weird, he thought, and looked at the tomb on the cover of Joy Division’s “Closer (http://http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/6/64/Joy_Division_Closer.jpg)”. This is horrific, he thought, and grabbed the brown building on Led Zeppelin’s “Physical Graffitti (http://unrealityshout.com/files/images/led-zeppelin-physical-graffiti.jpg)”, next to it he saw the grey fantastic world of Yes’ “Relayer (http://images.wax.fm/yes_relayer-WEA10541-1289342405.jpeg)”. It’s unknown bull****, he thought, and while heading to the exit, a hand stopped him. It was the man behind the counter, now up on his feet.
“Looking for a gift?” He said.
“Kind of”, he replied.
“What’s like the person you are giving it to?”
Alex shrugged his shoulders, baffled. “Hard to say. Clever, strange. But a nice guy.”
“Try this one”, said the man, and gave him Pink Floyd’s “Wish You Were Here (http://www.progarchives.com/progressive_rock_discography_covers/364/cover_383971692009.jpg)”.
“Who’s that”, he wondered, and the main looked at him with big, gazing in wild desperation eyes, “You don’t know Floyd?” Alex shook his head. No. The guy smiled, “It’s time to check some nice stuff, mate, you’ve been too long on TV bull****.”
“I don’t have a TV”, Alex retorted, and the other man just stared at him, in numb desperation, as if talking with a complete idiot. “God, where do you live? On this planet?”
**** off, Alex thought, and said, “I hate when they try to sell me off some stuff I don’t like.” The guy nodded. “I see. The isolated type.”
“What type?”
“ Long story, mate. We’ll have a chat on another occasion. Come here again. And have a look at this stuff, Pink Floyd. Recommend it as a professional.”
Alex looked at him with bits of confusion – but the guy was fast to tell: “I sing and play the guitar. I love the Floyd, mate, since I was a kid, check this stuff. And this one – he put on a black cover with a rose on it, Depeche Mode’s “Violator (http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/31773C0MTBL._SL500_AA300_.jpg)”, saying “this is my other all time favourite, genius, mate, and take this one, a gift from me, my CD.” He took the disc and looked at its shiny cover, without a name. We do not have a name, yet, but I call us “The Blackouts”, it reminds of The Beatles, see, and has some strange neurodarkospheric what a ****ing word, Alex thought) feel, creepy, you know. Check my stuff as well and come back mate, we can have a chat over a beer. Come on, you need some schooling in music, you hate the TV bull****, I can give you stuff outside the TV.” Alex shook his head, a bit bored, but felt the guy was really sincere. “Okay, matey, I am coming back.”
“ Just a second”, the guy called as he was leaving, “my name is, remember, Scotty, Scotty Reaman.”
5.
The house party was in a dark and very far end of the city, a silent student quarter where PHD students were living with their families, amidst green grass alleys and oaks stretching naked autumn branches. Such a quiet place, ALex was thinking, I miss that, this quiet solace. He could imagine Jamey, with his short blondish hair and thick glasses reading his mathematical stuff and models, and Jessica, the one with the slick ***, fluttering all around him, making tea or coffee, reading books, in this quiet quarter away from the jungle of night clubs in the city centre. I miss all of that, Alex thought.
Jamey greeted him like an old friend, Jessica kissed his cheek, and he smiled, it was so comfortable in this very tiny space of the house, shared with one more couple, students again. Jamey had invited about 20 to 25 people, all of them bringing old records. As he had already listened to the albums, he could talk with Jamey about Pink Floyd and Depeche Mode, and Jamey turned to be a real fan of the bands. But another girl, Fran, one short and very nice, cheerful one with tanned skin and big boobs, sitting cross-legged on the floor, was very eager to talk about music and he sat by her and started sharing his opinion on Martin Gore’s lyrics and the electronic vibe of “Violator”. She was smiling, a glass of white wine in her hand, and nodding, she was listening with glittering friendly eyes, staring straight into his face, but instead of moving his eyes from her, as he usually would do, Alex was fixed on her face and felt so comforted by these brown and calm eyes. She turned and took Miles Davis’ “The Birth of Cool” from the heap of records, recommending him some jazzy stuff. He took the one and looked at Miles and his trumpet, feeling as if stepping into a new universe of names and images he had never heard of. She said it would be nice to see him at her house, she was living nearby, writing her thesis on sociology of religious sects, so he felt uplifted when she stood up - he was staring at her skirt, slowly moving from left to right, covering the sacred sanctuary of her body - and she turned and kissed his cheek, saying it was late for her and she should go home, so she waved for goodbye and her big brown calm eyes disappeared from the room full of people.
Jessica sat next to him, with the devilish smile of a love matchmaker, and said it was time, time to meet some nice girls. “You’re a nice guy, don’t be alone, come and have fun with all of us.” He nodded, it was the time for him, the best time, as he was slowly feeling as a member of this small student community, with his own stake in it, with a voice to be heard at debates and parties, as a stranger no more, and this drove him to think he should not hesitate and find a place at the university, some nice thought provoking course, that will make him as eloquent and intelligent as all the people around him in the room, in this small community.
6.
Past midnight, a cold glass of white wine, the night was of a full moon and calm cool wind in the naked branches of the trees along the alleyway; Alex was sitting, with Fran - her full name was Francesca, with an English father and Italian mother - and they were sitting on the floor, surrounded by candles flickering in the dim darkness, hand in hand, listening to Pink Floyd’s Echoes, in an atmospheric mood. He was staring at her short auburn hair, her brown blouse and black jeans, her red fingernails holding the glass, as she was speaking. There was a big Max Weber volume next to her, open and left upside down; she was talking of her research of Protestants in a nearby church in M. She found out that people define religion as something taking about 10% to 15 % of their time and interests, which she thought was a radical shift proving the fall of religious devotion and rise of secular thought in contemporary Western civilization. He was nodding, listening to her and staring at the brown gleam in her eyes, while she urged him to choose a social sciences course at the university. No, he said, I am good with numbers.
“Then take a combined one, something social with maths, you know.” She was a bit of a mother, a bit of a sister to him, she was a Pygmalion modeling somebody new out of Alex.
They were sitting here since 2 pm, when he came to see her, and then they had a chat over almost everything, she was excited to show him her collection of books and records, and he was listening and nodding, being slowly pulled 200 leagues under the surface of the ocean by her sweet and quick talk, her tongue uttering thousands of unknown names of places, people, events that he was yet to discover. As if he had been living in the Dark ages, secluded like a monk out of this world, and locked into another, boring and grey one. Past – he had no past, he would never talk to her about the time he lived back in S. his hometown, the dull place where he had no friends, no ambitions, nothing. Now Fran was a whole new galaxy standing next to him. He did not want to touch her, as if she was a spirit bound to disappear on the second of making a physical contact with her.
She was quite bemused by this strange man, not talkative but handsome, refrained, a little kitten hiding from the downpour under the roof of a decrepit house, and found by a caring child. She was that one, the caring one who really wanted to cultivate and civilize the tribal savage, to drive him to the glorious path of the civilized work where “Pink Floyd”, “Marx”, “Woodstock” meant a whole universe of symbols and associations. A kind of seduction, but she was keen on seducing, it gave her bits of comfort and control, like being a guide to a newcomer, laughing at all the new things he was wondering about. Seduction, of course did not have only an intellectual side to it, it had a physical one as well, and she kissed him first, wrapped him with her long and tanned hands, pressed her lips to his, to his cheeks and forehead, and felt the pulse beneath his skin, something virgin not in a physical but other sense, and this was the luring feeling of poisoning a well.
After having sex, while they were still naked, she went upstairs and brought a small box. ‘What’s that”, he asked, and she shushed and told him to wait. “Some weed”, she said in the end, and handed him the cigarette, a plump white thing he took; he hated cigarettes since he was a little boy and just refused it. Alex recalled his parents’ bad habit of smoking too much, destroying their health and this was a part of his dim past, the whirlwind of things drowned by family hate, abuses, scandals, all covered by tons of cigarette smoke, a dark shroud falling over these times as carved in his mind.
“No”, she said, “it’s something different, we will get high, high my dear.” She waited until he decided to give it a try, and then lit it, the smell of marijuana fluttering in the air around them, they were smoking one and the same piece of weed, and he was lying next to her, naked, in the dark atmospheric, gothic as she said, vibe that was embracing them.
“It’s okay”, she said, “it’s not like cocaine or ecstasy that will drive you insane, it’s not the club thing that you hate, it is like being pulled in a boat through the misty waters of river Styx, like being under the sun, then above the sun”, and she turned the music on, listening to Primal Scream’s “Higher than the Sun (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YHjVIBDYgXg)”. Bits of hallucinogenic mood were piercing the centres of Alex’s mind, a dream of wide furry wings was flying all around him, and she started kissing him, her mild and warm skin pressing his, two bodies collapsing into one shape and form, into the dark sea of psychedelic sensations. The weed is very good, she muttered, very strong, it’s taking us away, can you feel the earth shaking as we leave it, as we rise, dear, we fly, we are heading for the moon, for the centre of the night sky, dear, hand in hand, we are up, we pass over this house, dear, darling, we fly above the alleys of oaks, above the city, look at the glitter and the million lamps below us, look at the cars that go into the back nothingness, we are in the troposphere, no, we are touching the Jupiter of dreams, the Saturn of lucidity and calmness, we will land there in our sweet embrace…
He was listening to her nice words whispered in his ears, his mind was being transformed, his spirit was transmigrating, his soul was holding her soul and they were somewhere he did not know, location of no demarcation, out of time and place, in the numbness of unknown pleasing sweetness. Kisses, kisses one after another, kisses bridging the gaps of darkness around them in the room, and the smell of flames and candles wafting; both them were somewhere else, on the other side. He was happy without even understanding this was happiness.
To be continued:...