Untimely #22 – Won

Dinner was at eight, they came twelve-thirty for twelve the next month of the next century. “Appointments” are for pussy cats. Dressed head to toe in ermine with baby-seal-skin boots and more guns than the NRA.

Charlie brushes the menu aside, smashing a crystal punch bowl and feeling for his smokes. Tommy’s already been sober and drunk and sober again and then drunk again and now even drunker since breakfast. He growls hello and Charlie just nods, chewing on a cigarette and sizing up his tablemate as he licks flecks of tobacco from twixt his tiger fangs.

Hey horsefucker bring me a drink Charlie spits and the maître d’ scurries to the kitchen. From between its double doors come six liveried bellhops pushing an enormous oaken barrel on a trolley. Barrel so big you’d need a helicopter and a crane and a troop of volunteer boy scouts just to turn it upright. They leave it on the trolley and the maître d’ fills two flagons fashioned from the skulls of Viking chieftains with a liquid the color of molten steel. It smells like a jungle cat’s lair and tastes like a highway covered in lava and left for an ice age. Charlie pulls six skulls without a breath while Tommy inquires after the freshness of the prawns. Charlie’s lip curls so far into a sneer his left nostril flips right.

After dinner the waiters cover the table in three hundred pounds of tobacco leaf and set it alight while twelve serving wenches fan the flames with a giant bellows. The winners discuss their artistic principles:
“I’m not interested in what people believe, I’m interested in what I believe, and that’s the truth, that’s what rules me.”
“You put yourself in some kind of a trance in order to receive certain songs, you know it’s like setting a trap for a song, it’s like fishing or anything else, you have to be real quiet to catch the big ones.”
“I blinked and I cured my brain.”
“I think what I try and do is write adventure songs and Halloween music.”

While Charlie huffs, Tommy sings to him of the anger of Peleus’ son, a fourteen-hour epic chanted and growled and barked in dactylic hexameter. Six hours in he loses his place and starts again. Charlie’s eyes have glazed over and the only sign that he is still awake is the occasional grunt of harmony during choruses.

At dawn a gray sun creeps above the smoldering wreckage of the table, stippling, speckling, flecking the shards and assorted debris, cracked lights and crack pipes, tea rolls and obetrols. The sky darkens and lightens and flashes with the force of a galaxy breathing its last sigh, a long, slow hiss that builds to a deafening roar, a holy ghoster tornado, and then all is totally, completely and forevermore black. Gentlemen, goodnight.