punk music 1978–83.
anal sex (aspirationally).
vodka (liberally).
cigarettes (nostalgically).
me (emphatically)
Bathroom
Well-established conurbations of four billion-plus, devastated by surprise attack of UK origin
Hallway
Name: Tova
Age: 24
Appearance: travelling girl
Philosophy: I want therefore I get
Source: Canada
Occupation: boat-hand/self-promoter
Manner: upfront and annoying
Liked:
sex.
travelling.
talking about sex and travelling.
rice.
yoga.
shouting in Spanish to her boyfriend, (who emerged, cockroach-style, as soon as she’d secured the ‘room’)
Name: Chico
Age: 34
Appearance: small, brown, hardened
Philosophy: Tova wants, therefore I get it for her
Source: Chile
Occupation: boat-hand and burger-flipper
Manner: benign or confused, maybe both
Liked:
sex.
travelling.
rice.
yoga.
his sister (they’d recently ended a long-term, live-in relationship)
Kitchen
Name: The miserable boy who lives in the kitchen
Age: c. 20
Appearance: lank
Philosophy: why?
Source: America
Occupation: lying on the couch reading academic books about torture, death, prostitution
Manner: limp
Liked:
fraternizing with the landlord’s arch enemy, which led to him being punched in the face, thrown out of the kitchen and chased up the street by the landlord, who was driving a truck
Utility nook
Name: Richard
Age: 28
Appearance: fuzz-headed loon with too many teeth
Philosophy: whatever, dude!
Source: Oregon
Occupation: skateboarder, thief
Manner: insane
Liked:
skateboarding
TV
pizza.
a sixteen-year-old girl whom he had to return – drunk, unconscious and splattered with her own vomit – to her grandmother.
yelling inanities
Our ‘landlord’ was also an official resident, and the most interesting of the lot. He was one of many parasitical entrepreneurs shot to power by the dot-com boom. As people fought for space and rents tripled, he moved in with his girlfriend and illegally sublet his dingy flat to the drifters, thieves and unemployed copywriters no one else wanted. It was a sort of for-profit charity. To ward off the usual avalanche of responses, he posted vacancy ads like this:
Small hallway available No Christians
The place was full of his crap, and every so often he popped ‘home’ to fuss about bills and pick up a volume of intellectual erotica. He’d caused a scandal at the art college with a performance piece involving an enema – a quick Google told me he’d found a student volunteer, got him to sign a waiver, tied him up, extracted shit from the volunteer’s backside, and then from his own, exchanged the faecal matter using an enema, fellated the volunteer and exited to a smattering of polite applause. Next he was expelled, and six months later he was still recoiling from the shock.
‘Honestly, Linda,’ he said, out of the blue, ‘he was into it at the time!’
I put down my sandwich. ‘Who was?’
‘That bastard kid!’
‘You mean the one you did the enema stuff to?’
‘Yeah! But when the story went national, they all changed their tune. He lodged a formal complaint against me, coz he was afraid of lookin’ like a pervert! Some sponsor got antsy so they used me as a scapegoat. They banned me from campus! I feel kind of betrayed, you know?’
The affair had turned him to drink, but it was hard to tell, as he claimed to be a professional wine-taster. Surrounded by charts of Italian grape regions, empty wine crates and magazine racks bulging with copies of Connoisseur, he liked to shoogle a huge wine glass, saying, ‘Mmmm …’ In fact, his experience was limited to two months on the till at Quoit Liquors, and he was currently unemployed. His identity in crisis, he made a big deal of his friendship with Steve Labash, a performance artist and high priest in the Church of Satan, whose best-known protest piece involved him being naked with a bottle of whisky:
1 Smash the neck off a whisky bottle.
2 Slash your skin with the raw edge.
3 Pour the rest of the whisky over your wounds.
But all the enemas, devil-worship and lit-porn in the world couldn’t conceal his darkest secret: he was nice.
A card had already arrived from home.
