Field Notes From The Void
Through the crack in the drawn curtains the pinkish amber rays of the last gasps of sunlight seek through into my dilapidated apartment. I had scored for us both as usual that was how it went in those days, me suckling on an eight pack of cheap continental beer, she was knocking back vodka. Around eight she left to go to a friend’s birthday celebrations. Eight hours slip into a vacuum of vacant procrastination, smoking to escape, drinking to escape, those gut churning crippling panic attacks of what lay beyond the empire of my four metre by two metre room. Fear of the outside, fear of the future, fear of remaining inside my own skin. Futile and impotent hypnotised by the neon screen of the computer.
Suddenly my phone screeches into life with its monophonic protest against technological advancement, it is four o’clock, it’s her. She in between teary gasps and snorts, talks with the petrified fear that are reserved for the dying and the damned. She tells of how she is trapped in the men’s toilet at a club, ironically called nirvana, and of how two men are attempting to rape her. Despite myself this kicks me into action and fills me with fire, I tell her to stay where she is, dress myself, find it on the internet, and run the mile or so, stopping to wheeze every two hundred metres or so, my battered asthmatic lungs burning and tightening at the prospect of sudden exercise. Due to the diabolical situation of my finances, I had neither the funds to ring her or to enter the club in order to find her. A couple of people lent me there phones, tokens of the ever advancing swathes of technology; mine looks positively archaic in comparison. No answer.
Pacing outside I slowly building the courage to approach the bouncers. plinths to steroidal advancement specimens of muscular abuse in their own right. I approach them and tell them my embarrassing predicament. One grunts the chuckle of bewilderment, and goes in. He returns after a period of gut wrenching suspense and informs me that she is not in the male toilets and gives me a look that suggests he simultaneously questions my sanity and pities my innocence. Only he knows the scenes of decadences and promiscuity he has witnessed over the years as doorman to a seedy cattle market of casual sex for the young and free and the unsatisfied trapped damned souls in meaningless monotonous relationships.
An hour or so pass in crippling suspense as the minutes crawl by, lazily as if they know they ultimately have to pass but may as well make a song and dance of it. My gaze does not move from the stairway for the entire period, watching like a deprived vulture waiting for a corpse to die. She stumbles down the stairs, the dress which I’d bought her the previous year’s birthday is draped around her stomach and one of her breasts lied in a dirty protest against society and its imprisonment of the body within materials, hanging out of her bra, make up smudged to the extent of resembling a suicidal clown who cant handle the shame of a lifetime of being a fool but can’t bring his life to end. Enter the Dog from hell in all her glory.
‘Phil!’ She exclaims in screechy tones, ‘what are you doing here?’ At this point everything comes into focus with the dramatic speed and urgency of the devout whom having died realises there is no god and that what a lot of time they have been wasting when they could of been having fun, the fact that all the urgency and fear which drove me here have been lost in the hazy sea of alcoholic blackout. Enter Hyde. She grabs my hand, and dress still round her waist drags me back into the club with her. One of the bouncers goes to stop me and sees the look of bewilderment and fear in my eyes, smiles at me with the eyes of an alpha male watching a lesser man being trampled under the feet of womanhood and sends me on my way. For my part I felt like a pussy whipped moron, and I suppose for my part I was. Let me take a moment to reassure you it wasn’t always like this, problems are of our own making. The truth that illustrious mistress, when you finally catch her, she is most definitely worse than you could have ever imagined.
Anyway, here we are, in the end the past is all we really have, the present well it’s never really here or there, and the futures anyone’s guess, the past is ours and it defines us and is ultimately all we have, damned to rest on our laurels like the fallen Olympians of Greece. She keeps trying to rob guy’s beers, causing all kinds of problems and near violence with these strangers, dragged into my life by her selfish whims. I apologise like the love crippled husband of the village whore, sheer humiliation; if only but not yet.
‘Come Dance! Come Dance!’ She shrieks like the harpies of Greek legend, wild from male attention and cheap vodka. I stand opposite her, awkwardly shuffling from side to side like some impotent thunderbirds puppet, another lost, confused, rhythm less white boy in a sea of style and lust, shipwrecked on the shore insecurity and cold blunt fear. She is rubbing against me, really working it. The glint of promiscuity burns through her hazelnut eyes with the intensity of lit magnesium. Awkwardly I gaze around with the bewilderment and anger of the fallen emperors and kings, at those who see me for the spineless fool I am, and more importantly for those who were in the toilet.
‘Let’s go, you said you’d be in by two.’ I say, God, I sound like a depressed man squashed under twenty years of marriage and compromise.
‘Don’t be show dry, I never get to go out.’ She retorts, putting me back in my place like a misplaced side mat.
‘You’re a disgrace; I’m ashamed to be here.’ This exclamation of defiance surprise both of us, I stand there for a second intoxicated by the petty power I have mustered.
‘Fine! You ruin everything!’ She recovers quicker than I do and reasserts her mastery.
We leave the club, she stumbles down the steps diffusing the effect completely of her last utterance, I support her down the steps in order to stop her falling over her own heels, in the way sedated horses stumble over themselves fighting against the sedative until it takes hold and they flop limp to the ground. She produces a superking, lights it, takes a drag and exhales in that tantalisingly beautiful way that only a woman can, making you forget everything briefly and lose yourself in the beauty and lust of the moment. I ask for one.
‘You’re such a fucking excuse of a man, you don’t even have fucking cigarettes, what kind of a fuck up bag head are you?’ I shrug, reality resumes and the truth of my life as it is becomes clear again, the dilapidated vehicle it has become driven into oblivion without a map. She reluctantly gives me a cigarette and we sit in a urine stained alley, smoking.
‘Why aren’t you like normal guys? Normal guys are horny’
‘I dunno’ I reply weakly with all the energy of a used condom.
‘This guy was kissing me and fingering me and sucking on my tits. I like that kind of attention, he told me I was a dirty bitch, I loved it. A real man, finally. You’re just pathetic.’
We sit in silence for a moment after that barrage. She springs back into life, jumps up;
‘Where’s Darren? Where’s Darren?’
‘You didn’t care about him when that guy was fingering you’ I spit with the sadism of the damned.
‘You’re just jealous he could turn me on!’ She spits back in the manner of a coiled, cornered snake. I get to this point, and I just want to be back in my four metre by two metre empire, with a beer, a spliff and some painkillers, alone, and slip into unconscious oblivion. To forget the reality my life has become, this self made biotic prison. To forget it all for a few hours, complete shutdown.
We begin walking down the street; the canopy of neon yellow lays its orange glow on the Edwardian constructs and dilapidated pubs, the juxtaposition of English decline, the high definition beauty of the inner city early morning. Oh Liverpool, city of fortune indeed.
‘Where are my cigs?’ She panics detaching from my support, stumbling to the floor, and frantically begins searching her bag on all fours resembling a ravenous dog devouring the Sunday paper.
‘We finished them you threw the box away back there.’ Where this seeming endless supply of patience comes from is beyond me, but even that resource is running thin, the repressed anger building up like surge water behind a dam.
‘You bastard! You Fucking Bastard! You smoked my last cigarette! You’re pathetic! You can’t even afford cigarettes!’ with that she picks herself back up, and begins stumbling towards a taxi, continuing the hail of screamed insults. The taxi driving hearing this, wisely decides he does not get paid enough to get involved in this bullshit, locks his doors and drives off, the fumes of the taxi hang lazily in the dew heavy air of early morning.
Suddenly my phone screeches into life with its monophonic protest against technological advancement, it is four o’clock, it’s her. She in between teary gasps and snorts, talks with the petrified fear that are reserved for the dying and the damned. She tells of how she is trapped in the men’s toilet at a club, ironically called nirvana, and of how two men are attempting to rape her. Despite myself this kicks me into action and fills me with fire, I tell her to stay where she is, dress myself, find it on the internet, and run the mile or so, stopping to wheeze every two hundred metres or so, my battered asthmatic lungs burning and tightening at the prospect of sudden exercise. Due to the diabolical situation of my finances, I had neither the funds to ring her or to enter the club in order to find her. A couple of people lent me there phones, tokens of the ever advancing swathes of technology; mine looks positively archaic in comparison. No answer.
Pacing outside I slowly building the courage to approach the bouncers. plinths to steroidal advancement specimens of muscular abuse in their own right. I approach them and tell them my embarrassing predicament. One grunts the chuckle of bewilderment, and goes in. He returns after a period of gut wrenching suspense and informs me that she is not in the male toilets and gives me a look that suggests he simultaneously questions my sanity and pities my innocence. Only he knows the scenes of decadences and promiscuity he has witnessed over the years as doorman to a seedy cattle market of casual sex for the young and free and the unsatisfied trapped damned souls in meaningless monotonous relationships.
An hour or so pass in crippling suspense as the minutes crawl by, lazily as if they know they ultimately have to pass but may as well make a song and dance of it. My gaze does not move from the stairway for the entire period, watching like a deprived vulture waiting for a corpse to die. She stumbles down the stairs, the dress which I’d bought her the previous year’s birthday is draped around her stomach and one of her breasts lied in a dirty protest against society and its imprisonment of the body within materials, hanging out of her bra, make up smudged to the extent of resembling a suicidal clown who cant handle the shame of a lifetime of being a fool but can’t bring his life to end. Enter the Dog from hell in all her glory.
‘Phil!’ She exclaims in screechy tones, ‘what are you doing here?’ At this point everything comes into focus with the dramatic speed and urgency of the devout whom having died realises there is no god and that what a lot of time they have been wasting when they could of been having fun, the fact that all the urgency and fear which drove me here have been lost in the hazy sea of alcoholic blackout. Enter Hyde. She grabs my hand, and dress still round her waist drags me back into the club with her. One of the bouncers goes to stop me and sees the look of bewilderment and fear in my eyes, smiles at me with the eyes of an alpha male watching a lesser man being trampled under the feet of womanhood and sends me on my way. For my part I felt like a pussy whipped moron, and I suppose for my part I was. Let me take a moment to reassure you it wasn’t always like this, problems are of our own making. The truth that illustrious mistress, when you finally catch her, she is most definitely worse than you could have ever imagined.
Anyway, here we are, in the end the past is all we really have, the present well it’s never really here or there, and the futures anyone’s guess, the past is ours and it defines us and is ultimately all we have, damned to rest on our laurels like the fallen Olympians of Greece. She keeps trying to rob guy’s beers, causing all kinds of problems and near violence with these strangers, dragged into my life by her selfish whims. I apologise like the love crippled husband of the village whore, sheer humiliation; if only but not yet.
‘Come Dance! Come Dance!’ She shrieks like the harpies of Greek legend, wild from male attention and cheap vodka. I stand opposite her, awkwardly shuffling from side to side like some impotent thunderbirds puppet, another lost, confused, rhythm less white boy in a sea of style and lust, shipwrecked on the shore insecurity and cold blunt fear. She is rubbing against me, really working it. The glint of promiscuity burns through her hazelnut eyes with the intensity of lit magnesium. Awkwardly I gaze around with the bewilderment and anger of the fallen emperors and kings, at those who see me for the spineless fool I am, and more importantly for those who were in the toilet.
‘Let’s go, you said you’d be in by two.’ I say, God, I sound like a depressed man squashed under twenty years of marriage and compromise.
‘Don’t be show dry, I never get to go out.’ She retorts, putting me back in my place like a misplaced side mat.
‘You’re a disgrace; I’m ashamed to be here.’ This exclamation of defiance surprise both of us, I stand there for a second intoxicated by the petty power I have mustered.
‘Fine! You ruin everything!’ She recovers quicker than I do and reasserts her mastery.
We leave the club, she stumbles down the steps diffusing the effect completely of her last utterance, I support her down the steps in order to stop her falling over her own heels, in the way sedated horses stumble over themselves fighting against the sedative until it takes hold and they flop limp to the ground. She produces a superking, lights it, takes a drag and exhales in that tantalisingly beautiful way that only a woman can, making you forget everything briefly and lose yourself in the beauty and lust of the moment. I ask for one.
‘You’re such a fucking excuse of a man, you don’t even have fucking cigarettes, what kind of a fuck up bag head are you?’ I shrug, reality resumes and the truth of my life as it is becomes clear again, the dilapidated vehicle it has become driven into oblivion without a map. She reluctantly gives me a cigarette and we sit in a urine stained alley, smoking.
‘Why aren’t you like normal guys? Normal guys are horny’
‘I dunno’ I reply weakly with all the energy of a used condom.
‘This guy was kissing me and fingering me and sucking on my tits. I like that kind of attention, he told me I was a dirty bitch, I loved it. A real man, finally. You’re just pathetic.’
We sit in silence for a moment after that barrage. She springs back into life, jumps up;
‘Where’s Darren? Where’s Darren?’
‘You didn’t care about him when that guy was fingering you’ I spit with the sadism of the damned.
‘You’re just jealous he could turn me on!’ She spits back in the manner of a coiled, cornered snake. I get to this point, and I just want to be back in my four metre by two metre empire, with a beer, a spliff and some painkillers, alone, and slip into unconscious oblivion. To forget the reality my life has become, this self made biotic prison. To forget it all for a few hours, complete shutdown.
We begin walking down the street; the canopy of neon yellow lays its orange glow on the Edwardian constructs and dilapidated pubs, the juxtaposition of English decline, the high definition beauty of the inner city early morning. Oh Liverpool, city of fortune indeed.
‘Where are my cigs?’ She panics detaching from my support, stumbling to the floor, and frantically begins searching her bag on all fours resembling a ravenous dog devouring the Sunday paper.
‘We finished them you threw the box away back there.’ Where this seeming endless supply of patience comes from is beyond me, but even that resource is running thin, the repressed anger building up like surge water behind a dam.
‘You bastard! You Fucking Bastard! You smoked my last cigarette! You’re pathetic! You can’t even afford cigarettes!’ with that she picks herself back up, and begins stumbling towards a taxi, continuing the hail of screamed insults. The taxi driving hearing this, wisely decides he does not get paid enough to get involved in this bullshit, locks his doors and drives off, the fumes of the taxi hang lazily in the dew heavy air of early morning.
Phil Jackman
Some people gave us a bio... Phil Jackman gave us this:
This god damned article, here have your words and be done with me deadline. Your Regime of fear over me is over, you will no longer stand over me like that fucking Gestapo thug, who got bullied all the way through the Weimar years, and suddenly found under the newly formed Nazi party that there were plenty of worm sized holes for exactly that kind of slimy, spineless downtrodden runt, to manipulate as a means to make the rest of society pay back every wrong he received in blood and tears. Well unlike the incredibly obedient German populace who in the extreme majority not only stood and let it happen, but in fact partook on various levels; right down to the sick train conductor who sold the Jews one way tickets to their death it the east, who later claimed ‘I was just doing my job, I didn’t want my family to suffer.’ I am going to stand up to you deadline and say no, you will not have me live in fear another day.
This god damned article, here have your words and be done with me deadline. Your Regime of fear over me is over, you will no longer stand over me like that fucking Gestapo thug, who got bullied all the way through the Weimar years, and suddenly found under the newly formed Nazi party that there were plenty of worm sized holes for exactly that kind of slimy, spineless downtrodden runt, to manipulate as a means to make the rest of society pay back every wrong he received in blood and tears. Well unlike the incredibly obedient German populace who in the extreme majority not only stood and let it happen, but in fact partook on various levels; right down to the sick train conductor who sold the Jews one way tickets to their death it the east, who later claimed ‘I was just doing my job, I didn’t want my family to suffer.’ I am going to stand up to you deadline and say no, you will not have me live in fear another day.