Freddy Benson in Amsterdam
Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?

I change shapes just to hide in this place
but I’m still, I’m still an animal
nobody knows but me when I slip, yeah
I slip, I’m still an animal

(1)
Freddy was in trouble with his mother because the preacher said
he had a cheeky grin, but that photograph was taken five years ago
in high school and his mouth had changed shape significantly since
then.  It was the year little sister pulled a teapot off the table and he
developed a fascination with watching skin come off in sheets. On
television a pop star said if you want to be famous you should live
like you are being filmed for a documentary about your life;  so
everywhere he went he dodged imaginary dollies and refused to
look anyone in the eye, in case they were a camera – a good actor
never looks at the lens. He circumnavigated that age where mental
illness seems attractive by being actually unattractive and more
than half insane to boot. Not content with the standard fare of
decapitating playthings, his formative years influenced by a gang
of neo-Nazi skinheads; and he spread his mental illness like a virus,
head stomping causing brain injuries in more than one of his victims
he was certain. Same reason I bet that undercover cop is eyeballing
me on the met, ticket, passport in order – hell if it’s the crossed out
swastika badge on my backpack… -it’s crossed out! I thought the
French invented irony?

That, and tentacle sex (or was that the Japanese?)

And then they met, instantly at ease in silence.

(2)

Weeks, or maybe years later…

He intoned —whole fields there, waiting for harvest, vast swaying
un-navigated… to which she, half asleep replied, sunk in a narcoleptic
mist —huh?

Kind of slouched back, on a couch with terrible upholstery feet on the
table leafing through a copy of Tales of the Fantastic – A Children’s
Treasury – in Dutch and English: the afternoon was now long stretching
through the curtains and dappling your cheek. You never look at me anymore.
I feel like a terrible thespian, or maybe a great comedian playing a retarded
character, like Freddy Benson. Other-days I feel like that guy who shot himself
during The Watchmen, like an octopus in a tank of lobsters. I know, not as bad
as your stepfather selling you into prostitution, or the Matron of the orphanage
offering you to Ministers as payment to keep secret her predilections. I never
meant to write your life into a social satire – who was it that said —you seek
your own Death, and your failed acts are the most successful. You’ve written
your own Mein Kampf while in the asylum, but you must want to live, as I held
you under you continued to struggle.

(3)

I miss her magisterially delivered evaluations on free to air television broadcasting.
I miss the look in her eyes when cutting pumpkin. I miss the way she would sometimes
pretend at rowing a boat when laying in bed, and her favorite poem was one found on
a tram, written on a racetrack tip-sheet:  it went –

T3ntacle 53x commix 4Sail

LOLWUT sum1, nufag RAAAGED 0n h1z mash33n
= BAAW – 0! Nose buzzt3d brah gaha ha, clayms
hes umfrend waz a 5tr1pa ROFLOL24HRS  in b4 404

…

(4)
I am sure the author was a bum we called Racing Man who lived on benches in
stinking greasy antique tweed with a tattered guide and a dilapidated radio wrapped
in plastic. Once an air-guitar champion, or so I’ve heard. He’s my Krueger
sometimes, he’s mowing the lawn off in the distance on a Sunday afternoon during
re-runs of the winter Olympics – a fly in your ear as you drift into sleep.

(5)
I watched you get a tattoo that says dedicated flesh rebels against the virtual class,
a homage, nostalgia for the passed past of remaindered entrails – and then I watched
you become like that dead junky we found, in a disused hat factory as kids. (If you
imagine a tepid green swamp in a tropical forest with crocodiles all round the edges
and weird trees pushing up through reeds and sort of sighing as they droop into the
water – except you are in an old warehouse and there is a dead guy who has rotted,
a lot, and he’s lying in a pool of stinking gore and because of the heat strange puffs
of orange fungus have sprouted up through the floorboards and there are rats eating
the blooms.) Who said –the poacher that shoots at rabbits scares big game away?

Was it Lawrence Jamieson or was it that dancer in the red-light in Amsterdam?
I don’t remember  —What does it matter anyway, she said, in her penthouse suite,
dragging her hand along the edge of the broken piano, that look in her eyes the gaze
of an animal, a prophet, or an indifferent rockstar getting head from another groupie,
shouted something like —don’t black lung me bone-horn - and then jumped from
the hotel balcony.

As Freddy stuck his cock in the mess Lawrence would have said —Ruprecht,
do you want the genital cuff?

She squealed —my clitoris does not look like a parrots tongue!

Or, at least that’s how I imagined it, that French model in the Pijp district, high on fly
agaric – at fifteen her agent gave her wings, like Angelina needs another mirror, a
million dollar deal with a glossy magazine – fell naked still in heels, a last curtain call
for the voyeurs on the street.  It’s all fun and games until someone has to get another
skin graft. Occasionally an aspiring Vogue operative stops by in designer jeans to pay
her respects, flowers wilted on the desolate empty desk and the concierge says she’s
—departed has left no addresses and they leave with one of the guys who hustle the
corner, Freddy I bet… And we loved to dance… we wanted to be professionals, isn’t
that silly?  He is saying this as they walk away.

(6) When the time comes that I can be no longer convinced there is any point to
living the remedy is this. Score some heroin, get a drill from the hardware store, steal a
boat, row out to sea, tie weights to my legs, bore a small hole, shoot up. Eternal sleep.

Goodnight Freddy – you were too beautiful for this world.

(7) Someone finds a cassette of an old lecture given by an Anesthetist, at a university, somewhere in the world (it’s in English). Beauty, redacted in the cannibals fridge. Midway through a monologue on the properties of propofol, almost as though offering refreshment (and it was like coming out of the ocean when the sun has gone compared to finding yourself perpetually stuck upside-down in a hole) he broke into a speech about how (I think, the audio tinny) the Homeric Hero became an everyday man, with flaws. And these flaws became endemic, excessively perverse, the ambrosia quaffed now literally vinegar. Fractured, reeling like a shot eagle, thrashing smashed on a boulevard in Paris. No lesson learned, some obliterated, others with broken bones; the few with only dust don’t retreat, instead they aim for the heavens. And on he droned about surgery and enslavement, artificial intelligence and emigration to the moon… until, out there somewhere in the empty spaces ignored by creation, a rocket man realized that he doesn’t know what  he is.

Let us examine the negatives implicit in this conjecture – Beauty is a defence mechanism of nature,
- Romantic Love : Deceased
- Chemistry : Dead
- Image : So many gorgeous women, more for the power hungry.

That afternoon on the balcony, light refracted by a cheap plastic curtain
a bird got caught in the beads. The household cat tearing it to pieces.

————————-

© Brentley Frazer 2010