Book 3, Chapter 10 : The Jolly Smokers -------------------------------------------------------------------- People : ---------------------------------- Author : Alan Moore Text : ---------------------------------- THE JOLLY SMOKERS Den wakes beneath the windswept porch alone On bone-hard slab rubbed smooth by Sunday feet Where afternoon light leans, fatigued and spent, Ground to which he feels no entitlement Nor any purchase on the sullen street; Unpeels his chill gray cheek from chill gray stone Then orients himself in time and space. The roof’s a black-ribbed spine viewed from the floor With on one wall some obsolete decree Meant for the Cypriot community And at the near end an iron-studded door, A Bible-cover slammed shut in his face, Or that of some more academic tome. He struggles up onto one threadbare knee. Moved on by night, he’s slept instead by day Beneath Saint Peter’s covered entranceway Thanks to the shame of university And a conviction that he can’t go home, Can’t face his parents, ask yet more reprieves Of those who’ve done so much, left in the lurch Through furthering Den’s literary bent. He’s stopped attending lectures, blown the rent To shelter in this all but disused church, A sweat of monsters beading on its eaves, This sentry-box in lieu of an address. Yearning to write, he’s learned to teach from men With targets, goals to which they must adhere, Themselves regretting the proffered career That he’s let go. His failures pounce while Den Still fumbles at the latch of consciousness In this, his latest of unfixed abodes. Twenty last week and homeless, that’s the thing, Ambitions snuffed and dreams long since wrung out, A student loan he dare not think about Here in his hutch, its corners harboring Their soil and silver foil in abject lodes When all he’s ever craved is poetry, The fire that Keats and Blake and Ginsburg had. To be it, not to teach it. He can’t bear Chalk-dusted years of common-room despair Nor the reproof of hard-up Mom and Dad Who’ve gone without for his tuition fee. Thus one door closes, while another shuts Where Offa’s sons raised the communion cup. To doss in Saxon palaces and forts Might hold, he thinks, a poetry of sorts So with a sigh he stands and gathers up His bag as though it were his spilling guts, Recalling meanwhile that it’s Friday night With, just for once, somewhere he’s meant to be: Some bald guy who’s got drugs, up Tower Street way, Offering dreamtime and a place to stay. An unaccustomed surge of urgency Propels Den out into a tired rose light From the cramped hermitage where he’s been curled, Across worn flags that vandal time deletes Where names and mortal numbers disappear, Erasing status, sentiment, and year. Dead information sulks beneath these streets And Orpheus, stumbling, seeks his underworld Leaving behind an alcove sour with fate, The war memorial’s black memo-spike, Fleeing the chapel before twilight falls When nightmare faces trickle on its walls, Past flowerbeds Spring makes inferno-like Beside the path, out through a green-toothed gate Then over Marefair, observed with disdain By that short, tubby chap you sometimes see; White hair and beard, officious little sod. A garden gnome robbed of his fishing-rod, He smirks “Good evening” confrontationally As Dennis rattles by and up Pike Lane Towards a new low and a legal high. Why did he come here to pursue his goal? These firetrap shacks crouched in the Great Fire’s lair, Here to a town that nutted off John Clare Yet had John Bunyan christen it Mansoul. These are the yards where sonnets come to die As with the local poet he’d been shown, The giggling drunk in whose wry shipwrecked gaze He’d glimpsed his future, and abandoned rhyme. Rousing from reverie barely in time Den turns right at Saint Catherine’s house and strays Down Castle Street, that dusk has overthrown, To the halfway point and the ramp’s top end Between the shabby flats where it cuts through To Bath Street. Here, despite a scorched smell, he Must brave declining visibility Which conjures fiends from fencing, and into The shadowed valley of the psalm descend Through a despond of debt and canceled dole, The acrid scent worse further down the ramp. He hurries, flees this atmosphere of doom Only to misstep in the gathering gloom And on an ice-cream swirl of dogshit stamp The complex imprint of one trainer’s sole. He calls himself by an unflattering name Then slogs on among peeling Bauhaus slums, Making for where the high-rise windows glow From somber violet altitudes and so Child Dennis unto the dark tower block comes, Scraping one foot behind him as though lame And, too late, suffering anxiety About his bald host, whom he barely knows, Though someone called Fat Kenny doesn’t sound Like the most selfless altruist around. Still, on through a dim pocket-park Den goes, Up Simons Walk, with no apostrophe, But glancing back across breeze-ruffled grass Through tromp l’oeil murk he struggles to make sense From brief illusion, a great cog of night That smolders and revolves then fades from sight. He frowns and, finding the right residence, Raps on the door twice, knucklebones on glass, Whereat, light scattered in the frosted pane, His benefactor shimmers into form. “Hello … Christ, what’s that smell? Has something died? Oh yeah? Well, take ’em off. Leave ’em outside.” While Den complies, allowed into the warm, His shoes, like orphans, on the step remain Unlaced and in disgrace. The pungent hall Leads to a worse front room. “Fancy a joint?” Den takes an armchair, Kenny the settee Where books on psychopharmacology Are strewn, the rolling highlight a bright point On his shaved skull, as with a billiard ball Or plump freshwater pearl. Eyes Rizla-red Fat Kenny licks, tears and at last succeeds In fashioning tobacco, skins and drug Into an origami doodlebug Then lights the stout white paper fuze which leads To his smooth, spherical cartoon-bomb head That explodes into giggle, gab and cough. Passed back and forth the spliff ghost-trains their mood, Stills time with rearing basilisks of smoke And Kenny asks him, almost as a joke, If in return for lodgings, dope and food Dennis might be prepared to suck him off. “Or sling your hook. I’m not a charity. I’m offering pizza and me special stash. This hooker wanted some. Said I could do Her up the ass, but no. I’d promised you.” Dazed, Denis blinks, and in an arc-light flash Sees his new life in pin-sharp clarity, All the hard bargains that it will entail Keeping on the right side of a front door. He nods. Kenny suggests that it might save Time done while waiting for the microwave To cook their pizzas. On the kitchen floor Den kneels, unzips his host’s distended snail And puts it in his mouth, fixing instead On Wilde or Whitman, striving to ingest Such poetry as might be had among The rancid piston’s movements on his tongue, Attempting to maintain an interest In De Profundis while he’s giving head But failing to recall a useful quote. Den, lacking panthers, feasts with porcine things Whose world, arrhythmic, will admit no rhyme Save chance events acted at the same time: Just as the heartless oven-timer pings Fat Kenny’s semen sluices down his throat. They eat in silence. Den discovers he Can still taste his aperitif and hence Does not enjoy his entrée. When they’re done The Happy Shopper Buddha-featured one Announces that it’s now time to commence With their ethno-botanic odyssey And shows Den the datura he has grown, Its bell-like blooms white as a wordless page, With the Salvia Divinorum which Is Den’s. It’s made clear in Fat Kenny’s pitch That while they’ll both share the diviner’s sage The Angels’ Trumpets are for him alone. “I’ve got a greater tolerance, you see. I’ll chew the salvia with you then smoke The other later.” They both masticate The leaves. “Hold it beneath your tongue, then wait.” So, leaving the sublingual wad to soak, Den gulps and swallows apprehensively. He pales, as if at the approach of some Fierce, underlying pandemonium. Time squirms, its measure lost beyond recall So that how long he’s sat he does not know. The dismal room has undergone no change Save that its cluttered details now seem strange To him, and meanwhile simmering below His tongue the bitter vegetable ball Steeps in his spittle, makes green venom run Into his belly, past the teeth and gums To curdle in his bloodstream, bowel and bone. Den writhes and struggles to suppress a moan As he by subtle increment becomes Uncomfortable in his own skeleton And catapults up from his seat to pace The room, thus to assuage his restlessness While Kenny shifts his outsized infant bulk Upon the sofa, clearly in a sulk At the delay, this possible to guess Through study of his well-upholstered face Or gist of his dyspeptic monologue. “Fuck this. If it’s not gonna do the biz I’m gonna smoke the other stuff.” Den stares, Circling an endless rug between the chairs As, barely knowing where or who he is He wades in a dissociative fog Alone, the lights on but nobody home, Where looking down he finds he can’t avoid The fact he’s now wearing the clothes and hat Of Charlie Chaplin, somebody like that, Some little tramp on crackling celluloid Strutting a stage of sudden monochrome, All color fled. Fat Kenny, dressed like Den In antique garb now waddles through the gloom Beside him, white faced, black clad. They don’t talk, Their gait resembling the Lambeth Walk While in the upper corners of the room Are gruff, gesticulating little men In similar attire, homunculi Who swear and spit. Floorboards somehow replace The ceiling and through chinks the ruffians call Their taunts, where dirty gray light seems to fall As from some higher mathematic space Or proletarian eternity Of endless grudge. Its noisome undertow Seizes them both. Perspective is askew, The jeering imps made large as, by degree, Den and his colleague rise towards them. He Has the sensation as he passes through Of fusing with the drab planks from below, Emerging on their far side in insane Conditions, chest-deep in the warping floor To nightmare. He discovers that his skin, Now naked, is that on a manikin Grown from this attic of the charnel poor With joints replaced by pins and pores by grain, Whose screams are creaks, whose tears are viscous gum Slow on his lathe-shaved cheeks. Den gapes, appalled, As his host, wood-fleshed and immersed like he In floor, is seized by the fraternity Of tipsy ghouls who sing while Kenny’s hauled Up to inebriate Elysium: “The jolly smokers we, a cheery bunch Here in our half-world, half-real and half-cut, Enjoy that good night out without the wife Pursue an after-hours afterlife And want for nothing save a head to butt Or Bedlam Jennies for our Puck’s Hat Punch.” Aghast at what seems Happy Hour in hell Den flails, embedded, glancing up to spy The Guinness toucan smirking from tin plate, Its touted goodness decades out of date, Then with a wide and panicked wooden eye Surveys the chiaroscuro clientele Of smoldering reprobates who swirl and curse About him as he struggles there beneath Their knees. One, waistcoat-draped with bowler hat Wipes from his chin the remnants of a rat While all his pockets boil with vicious teeth, Though some of his confederates are worse. There’s one whose features crawl about his face, Mouth above nose, ears where his eyes should be. Another, a raw-knuckled harridan With smile as threatening as any man Sways to an air that falls conspicuously Flat in that strangely dead acoustic space, Less tune than tuning up. Den cranes and strives To find its source, soon managing to spot The revenant musicians, bass, horn, drums, Who twiddle amplifier knobs or thumbs Disconsolately, yet perk up as what Appears to be their ringleader arrives To ragged cheers, a rotund titan who With belly, beret, beard and steely eyes Rolls through the reeling wraiths. Den gets to view Him, if but briefly, noticing that two Ghost-children shelter at his oak-thick thighs, One memorably fair though lacking hue And wrapped in tartan bathrobe. Den calls out But draws the mob’s attention with his cry That grind their boot-heels on his wooden crown, Jesting as they attempt to tread him down, His careful lyric ear affronted by Their hateful voices everywhere about. “He’s formed wi’ woods like Cloggy Elliott’s leg, Or malkin, frightenin’ stargugs on a farm.” Fat Kenny, in his wooden birthday suit, Is held down by the leering female brute Who’s carving her initials on his arm Despite his squeaking-hinge attempts to beg Or plead. Den, trampled on by dead men’s feet, Hears the round minstrel’s stern, stentorian shout As Den’s stamped down into the splintery mire, Resurfacing to hear the bard inquire If Freddy Allen’s anywhere about, Told in reply that he’s just down the street, At which the children leave. The cackling throng Redouble now their bestial, boisterous ways. They kick Den harder as the band begin, They gouge the shrieking Kenny’s puppet skin And as the joyous, tumbling music plays These slurring shades raise up their glaze-eyed song: “Named for this inn, the jolly smokers we, Up here near fifty year now, man and boy! Pale in our great beyond, beyond the pale, So drink up, down the hatch, hail, horrors, hail! Leave us dead men and empties to enjoy Our pie-eyed paralyzed posterity!” And plunged in quicksand pine Den twists like some Half-landed fish pinched in between two planes, Target for every last ethereal thug. Forgotten, now, the taking of the drug. Not even memory of his name remains Nor life prior to this warped delirium Of boots and threats. Nearby, Fat Kenny’s squeal Competes now with the music’s weave and wail As the two writhe in what appears to be A pissed-up paradise or purgatory Where bygone barbarisms still prevail And the perpetually present poor are real, Not metaphor. Thus, long, cruel eons pass Before distraction having the semblance Of a ghost-tramp storms through the hoodlums, Frog-marching there before him as he comes A mangled man whose babyish countenance Is set with inlaid gems of broken glass; Whose breast is concave ruin. Tankards chime And voices raise. “What’s ’e come up ’ere for?” The vagrant phantom loudly now decries His captive’s deeds and whimpered alibis Though Den, just then pressed down beneath the floor, Cannot discern the nature of the crime Yet sees its punishment. For his offense The prisoner, stripped of his torn attire, Is made to kneel, unsure what to expect, While Kenny, wooden phallus teased erect, Learns that the roughneck revelers now require An act unnatural in every sense. As both performers start to moan and bleat In their abrasive coitus they enthrall The spiteful, spectral spectators, who sing “We’re jolly and we smoke, but here’s the thing. There’s some stuff that we care for not at all And serve rough justice here above the street Where all the assholes of the ages meet, Thereby democratizing Milton’s fall With Satan overthrown and mob made king!” Den feels as if he may be settling Back to a real world almost past recall Through spit and sawdust at the phantoms’ feet Into an intermediary zone. As from some party in an upstairs flat He hears the rosy-cheeked man’s howl of pain, Forced to do that which goes against the grain, Then sinks back to Fat Kenny’s habitat, In darkness with the lamp-bulb clearly blown And finds, now the experience is done, His host slumped on the couch; him in his chair. The jumping up and pacing, it would seem, Were merely part of his unearthly dream. Exhausted, leaving questions in the air, He slides into a kind oblivion, Knowing, as all thoughts into shadow pass, The dead to be a literal underclass. Out of gray nullity to consciousness He comes, reluctant, one fact at a time, Aware of self, of where he is and when, His body in the chair. Eyes slitted, Den Notes, after the stark, solarized sublime, That there is color, though not in excess Nor well-distributed. The sun, discreet, Leans through the curtains to bestow a kiss On Kenny’s slumbering paunch. Beneath Den’s tongue He finds and spits out the exhausted bung Of salvia then, needful of a piss, Rises unsteadily to his bare feet To navigate that unfamiliar place, The hallway with his bag, Fat Kenny’s coat, Then up loud, bare-board stairs to find the loo. Fully awake now he peers down into Stained porcelain, the filthy toilet’s throat, Its exhalations lifting in his face As memories rise too, sharp as a knife: The porch of Peter’s Church, his student loan And, oh God, did he suck Fat Kenny’s prick? He’s overwhelmed. It’s all too much, too quick. Den retches and with a despairing moan, In its entirety, throws up his life For some few minutes, doubled in a crouch, Then flushes. In the rattling pipes, trapped air Bellows in anguish like a minotaur. Mouth wiped, Den clumps back down to the ground floor And the mauve gloom of a hushed front room where Fat Kenny still sleeps, supine, on the couch, Extinguished pipe clasped in one pudgy hand. Though keen to leave, Den feels it only right To say goodbye. “I’m off, then.” No reply. He notices a flat, green-bellied fly Orbit the still, shaved skull and then alight But though he sees he does not understand Why his host shows no sign of coming round. “I said I’m going.” Den begins to feel Uneasy and as he steps closer spies The motionless breast and unblinking eyes. With realization comes a shattering peal Of sudden dreadful and incessant sound, A circling and swooping banshee roar That shivers glass and sets dogs barking but Appears to have no source save him. Den screams, An improvised Kurt Schwitters piece that seems Expressive although inarticulate And backs in the direction of the door Which, unlocked, yields at once and opens wide Whence dazzling rays pour through the gaping hatch To blind him. Crumpled sleeping-bag forgot And slammed door ringing like a rifle shot, Den takes off without bothering to snatch His shit-smeared sneakers from the step outside Or to look back. In truth, he doesn’t dare. The grass is cold and wet – Den has no socks – As he sprints past the tower blocks – nor a plan – But then in Crispin Street he spots a man Whose pale blue eyes and thinning flaxen locks Are oddly reminiscent, but from where? Upon Den’s lips unspoken epics burn And seek release, drugged visions that might be As those of Coleridge, Cocteau, Baudelaire. By now he’s reached the guy with sparse blond hair Who eyes the gasping boy uncertainly And asks “Are you alright, mate?” with concern Made clear. Is Den alright? Aye, there’s the rub, He thinks, one with De Quincy and Rimbaud, Preparing for an image-jeweled account To spill forth as though from some Bardic fount But all he can come out with is “Yes. No. Fuck me. Oh, fuck me, I was up the pub. That’s where I’ve been all night, up in the pub.” His mouth won’t stop. “They wouldn’t let us go.” Won’t pause. “Fuck me. Fuck me, mate, help us out. It was a pub”, as if that were in doubt, Language bereft of any metered flow With words recurring, echoing like Dub Through burned-out ganglia. The stranger’s stare Is quizzical. “Hang on, you’ve lost me, mate. Was this a lock-in, then, this pub they kept You at all night?” Although Den’s barely slept He knows the man is trying to judge his state Of mind. “Which was it, anyway? Up where?” “Up there. Up in the roof. I mean the pub.” Den babbles, but the blond man nods his head. “Up in the roof? Yeah, I’ve had that”, and then He mentions, in the corners, little men. Den strains to comprehend what’s just been said, Brain washed, or at least given a good scrub. “Yeah. Up the corners. They were reaching down.” Seeming to understand the man takes out Some cigarettes and offers one to Den With calm acceptance bordering on Zen Then lights both. Den squints. What is it about This quarter of the unforgiving town That brings such things? His savior tells him how He isn’t mad but will take time to mend; Provides more cigarettes; offers a tip On where to rest, suggesting a small strip Of grass with trees at Scarletwell Street’s end, Adding “They’ll be in blossom around now.” With syllables become a syllabub Den calls his benefactor a good bloke And thanks him, starting to walk off downhill But looking back to find the stranger still Observing him. Den, brunt of some cruel joke, Calls helplessly “I was just up the pub”, Then carries on down the long slope again, Barefoot, skirting jeweled spreads of powdered glass, To the T-junction at the bottom where A single house stands near the corner there Amid a great amnesia of grass, Its presence making a stark absence plain Yet with no clue as to whose residence It is, its windows with closed curtains hung. Beneath trees further on he takes a seat, With freight-yards making the dressed set complete, Where hunkered on damp grass he picks among The lyric rubble of experience In search of rhymes. The solitary abode Stands punctuating the erased street’s end, Closing a quote since lost to a mute past. Lighting his cigarettes each from the last Den lives and breathes and tries to comprehend The dead man in his house just up the road, That wonderstruck and milky gaze. He strains At the idea of it; cannot begin To analyze nor even quite define How jarringly abrupt that end-stopped line. Life’s sprawling text shall not be bound within The whale-boned Alexandrine or quatrain But finds instead its own signature tread And sensibility. Den’s narrative Thus far, he sees now, lacks maturity, A consequence of inability To put forced stanzas by and only live His language, though it goes unread And unrewarded. No more self-deceit. He’ll go home, face his folks, work in a shop, Pay off his debt and wait for the day when He’s had a life to write about. Just then A scuffed blue Volkswagen grinds to a stop At the round-shouldered curbside up the street. A dreadlocked woman climbs out to assist Her passenger, a thin girl of mixed race, The younger of the two and yet more frail With bandages in lieu of bridal veil Surmounting her exquisite, battered face And wedding flowers clutched in one trembling fist To emphasize the matrimonial air. Their car left at the corner of the block One helps the other slowly up the hill Out of Den’s line of sight, though he can still Hear their muffled exchange before they knock The door of the lone house that’s standing there, This summons answered after a long pause. There’s conversation too hushed to make out Before the women, minus one bouquet, Return to their parked car and drive away, A striking vignette which leaves Den in doubt Regarding its effect, still more its cause, But then, the world won’t scan as poetry. Ass chill with dew he reconstructs his night, The things he’s done, the dreadful place he’s been, Crowned with the first dead man he’s ever seen: A stripped-down attic statement, still and white, Without a trace of ambiguity Or adjectival frills, that can’t allude To anything. Den needs a modern voice As had Blake, Joyce, John Bunyan or John Clare, Words adequate to these new ruins where We may describe the wastelands of our choice In language that’s been shattered and re-glued To suit these lives, these streets. He thinks he’ll sit For one last cigarette then phone his mom. Somewhere uphill behind him sirens wail Diapasons of disaster and yet fail To mar his sudden equilibrium, The snow-globe moment’s placement exquisite In time’s jeweled action, where future and past Shall stand inseparable at the last. From : TheAnarchistLibrary.org Events : ---------------------------------- Book 3, Chapter 10 -- Added : January 24, 2021 About This Textfile : ---------------------------------- Text file generated from : http://revoltlib.com/