FAR FROM ELEVEN:
THE POST-CASEY WORLD
By
Peter-James Dries
SMASHWORDS EDITION
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PUBLISHED BY:
Peter-James Dries on Smashwords
Far from Eleven
Copyright © 2012 by Peter-James Dries
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Adult Reading Material
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Thanks for downloading this free eBook. Share it with your friends, it’s free! But, please don’t share it with members of the clergy. Because it’s free this book may be reproduced, copied and distributed for non-commercial purposes, as long as it remains in its original form. You want to be a novelist, write your own novel.
This book is a work of fiction and any resemblance to persons, living or dead, or places, events or locales is purely coincidental. The characters are productions of the author’s imagination and used fictitiously.
Please note that I use New Zealand spelling throughout. You will see doubled letters (e.g. focussed), ou’s (e.g. colour) and ‘re’ (centre) as well as a few other differences from American spelling.
There are many thanks to be laid out for this book. The researchers, the readers, the inspirations, the people who actually live a life like this; you’ve made this possible. I’d praise you all individually, but I’m afraid mentioning your names would be far too incriminating. If you know you were part of the making of this book then I offer you my thanks and my gift to you is the knowledge that you were part of this book.
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FOREWARNING:
The people portrayed within these pages are not role-models. They’re not even real. They’re figures of literary imagination. Some of the things they do and say would cause them to get hurt, injured, killed, expelled or possibly deported. In other words don’t try this at home…
Who am I kidding?
You’re not going to heed this warning, are you? You’ve heard warning lines like this so many times the meaning has been sapped from it. It is as relevant as the copyright notice at the start of a DVD (If you download your movies you’ve probably never seen one).
If the consequences of these character’s actions don’t dissuade you from following the same course then you, my friend, are a fucking idiot.
Furthermore, if your vices include drugs, alcohol and cigarettes, look to your local phonebook (yes, they still print those) for your local quit lines. Quitting may be for quitters, but slowly dying alone, though glamorous, sucks more.
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Far from Eleven
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“What are you writing?”
“A novel.”
“What’s the story?”
“There is no story! It’s just… people. Gestures! Moments! Bits of rapture! Fleeting emotions! In short: The greatest stories ever told.”
“Are you in the story?”
“I don’t think so… But then… I’m kinda reading it, then writing it.”
-Waking Life
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Chapter One: the Post-Casey World
i
The master bedroom, with three walls of baby blue Gib and one of white concrete cinder blocks, was dimly illuminated by the February sun blazing against and through the inefficient white cotton curtains. Crepuscular rays fingered their way through the gaps and poked Jhonny Blackburn’s eyelids, stirring him from his lucid dream and bringing him back into a reality where his fiancé was still gone and he still couldn’t be fucked being alive.
He tried having a wank, but that didn’t help. The only image in his wank bank was the boy from the supermarket delicatessen’s squinting, pig-faced grimace as he jammed his turgid meat into Casey’s shaved, perfect, porn star pussy. He hoped it hurt.
He remembered times when she said she wished Jhonny didn’t put it in so far because it hurt when it hit the end. It was too much to ask for a reinforcing comment, like “your penis is too long.”
The girl was a princess, in constant need of being fed champagne, grapes and pick n’ mix lollies while swarthy Greek men fanned her with giant fern fronds. The image was a boner killer.
Tucking his flaccid cock back into the boxers Casey bought him last Christmas, Jhonny called out “Franc!” and downstairs Francis Miller, asleep while still wearing his shoes, stirred.
Not one for a morning mastie, albeit now the afternoon, Franc instead removed a Marlboro Red from Jhonny’s packet and placed it between his chapped lips, telling himself “you’re not having this cigarette until half-ten.”
It wasn’t unusual to be only just waking at two in the afternoon, upright on the couch, fully clothed, beneath a severed curtain for warmth, nor was mistaking two in the afternoon for ten in the morning.
The contents of the round oversized coffee table beneath Francis’ steel capped work boots told a story of either a celebratory night of hard consuming or a night of trying to escape reality for one fleeting moment. Fifteen empty Haast beer cans, some with a mouthful of cigarette butt tainted beer left, were scattered in no discernable pattern around Franc’s feet. On the far side of the table was one suspiciously bent and burnt bourbon can, an empty blue Rizla pack and a pair of fluffy handcuffs, complete with a fake severed hand still restrained. Closer to Franc was Jhonny’s discarded half-pack of Marlboro Red 20s, a familiar headache and the crushing pressure of knowing that he had to go to work soon.
Another shout from above: “Franc!”
And in reply from below, a drawn out: “What?”
Fumbling hands searched under the strewn books and paper fragments on the couch for any kind of instant fire. Matches, Lighter. Either would do. Anything to light his damn smoke.
“Do you have the lighter?”
“Use the stove.”
“I’m not using the fucking stove…”
It was a risky proposition. Only last night, over a Bud spot, the pair had been discussing the story of their dealer’s friend who had fallen asleep during a spot and landed face first on the burning element. Francis was more careful.
Despite his lethargy he managed to get the smoke lit and run outside with it, sliding the last fifth of the way on the skateboard they kept in the hallway by the front door. Neither Francis nor Jhonny skated any more, but the board still sat there as a testament of where they’d come from and just in case the sudden urge to skateboard arose.
From outside on the drive Francis couldn’t hear Jhonny roll out of bed, but he could hear his epic groan and concluding expletive as he stretched the night off. Though consciously trying not to piss on his own foot as he emptied his bladder the stream inevitably hit the toilet seat, which Jhonny never put up to pee, and naturally his socked foot was in range of the splash damage.
Another expletive: “Fuck!“
“What?”
“Should we get some breakfast?”
“What do you want?”
“Fried Rice?”
“You sure?”
“What?”
“Stop yelling! I can’t hear you!”
“What!”
Jhonny plucked off the wet sock with the toes of his unsocked foot and flung it out the toilet door onto the inter-bedroom mezzanine.
The song of the week for Jhonny was Think Twice by Eve 6. He sung it every time he walked out of the toilet and past Casey’s almost two metre squared cabinet that occupied most of the three metre cubed mezzanine. He usually only sung it in his head, but sometimes he would belt out a few lines of the chorus as he dreamed of the day he would take a large wooden object to the cabinet and smash the Christ Almighty fuck out of it. Just totally gut the fucker. Just for the lulz.
Think twice before you touch my girl
Come around make you feel the burn
He told Francis that he liked the song because the Ginger being a Ginger in the music video cracked his shit up, though Franc had never queried why he liked the song because he too liked the song. It wasn’t an embarrassing song to like. The truth Jhonny was obscuring was he saw a little bit of himself inside that unfortunate Red-head and the song was an anthem from him to Casey and Deli boy.
Lucky for the impatient Francis, it never takes long for Jhonny to piss then put back on his rugged blue jeans, faded Marilyn Manson tee-shirt, black hoodie, new skate shoes and black Iron Cross cap. He found his neglected smoke pack on the downstairs table and left out the door to join Francis.
Franc was standing over the body of their recently re-erected, yet once again dislodged letterbox. Jhonny pinched the still burning butt of Francis’ cigarette from between his pursed lips and used it to light his cigarette before assuming a similar bent over position above the letterbox.
“Who do you think keeps doing it?” Jhonny asked, putting his hand in his hoodie pocket to check for his EFTPOS card and finding his Zippo and smokes instead. He found his EFTPOS card in the back pocket of his jeans and moved it to join his Zippo and smokes.
“How are they even backing into it? There’s heaps of room…“
“They’d either be backing out of our park, or backing out to drive towards the dead end. It doesn’t make sense.”
“And they could have gone this way and backed in...”
While the two stood emulating the paths of cars and considering the fate of their constantly dislodged letterbox, a burly Egyptian man, whose family occupied the adjacent unit, stands at his kitchen window watching from behind the net curtain. He wrings his arthritic gorilla hands, smiling with his eyes as he considers the next phase of his insidious revenge against the flat next door.
The rest of their four unit apartment block posed less risk when it came to the destruction of letterboxes and the theft of important mail. No one had seen the neighbours in the other two flats, but Francis envisioned them as young professional couples. Perhaps with small children. Not a baby though, no one had heard any crying. Not from a baby.
In Francis’s mind those flats were clean inside and the carpet was always vacuumed. There were rugs, graffiti-less couches and plush cushions and the autumn-like scents of expensive odour eating air fresheners. They were the type of heaven where everyone used a coaster under their hot and cold beverages and the table wasn’t used for mass storage.
There were ten units between Jhonny and Francis’ flat and the road. Parked in the middle, between comfort and freedom, a Police car was illegally parked, the occupants elsewhere. The sight of a brightly marked Holden was always panic inspiring, even during the daylight hours. Jhonny put the visit down to socioeconomic and ethnic-induced domestic violence in the house that smelt of boil-up and puha.
Francis noted in his reckoning that the cop was parked outside the well-tended, fenced-off garden six units from the road, four from their own. The unit was assumed to belong to a retired couple. A small piece of land to wait out their dying days. The neighbours in the apartment next door to the couple would no doubt find them dead in their respective paisley lounge chairs one cloudy Sunday afternoon after a period of uncharacteristic sustained silence and a musty smell comparable to the stench of the sun-drenched garbage pyramid forming out the back of Franc and Jhon’s unit.
“You actually got out of bed today.”
“I feel like I’m still dreaming.”
“Did you dream about a police car?”
“Na. I was dreaming about Tawnee Stone.”
“Who’s Tawnee Stone?”
“The chick from the Sex on Waterbed clip you got from your Dad.”
“How is she related to a police car?”
“It’s not about the police car. Don’t you ever feel like you’re still dreaming after a lucid dream? Like life is a dream?”
“I feel like that when I’m drunk. I don’t really lucid dream. There was this one time…”
“Fuck, bro. Look.”
“What?”
At the end of the driveway, just within Jhonny’s field of blurred vision and Francis’ span of attention, the Egyptian neighbour’s 16 year old daughter was leaning against the front fence of the Aspen Court compound, texting off her father’s phone. As the pair drew closer she slid down the wall into a supported squat position, still texting, and showing no acknowledgment of the duo’s approach.
The sight of her legs opening to support herself and her miniskirt sliding up her thighs was too much for Jhonny. Stopping short of singing “hallelujah” he nudged Francis, urging him to look. Francis averted his gaze to the approaching cloud above and commented “I think it’s going to rain…”
From the safety of the street, Jhonny looked back over his shoulder in a last attempt to catch a glimpse of the daughter’s concealed snatch.
“Would?”
“Wood?”
“Would you, bro?”
“Would I...?”
“Would you fuck her?”
“Uh. No.”
“What’s wrong with her?”
“I didn’t see her. Oh, and she’s like 14.”
“She is not. Fuck, I hate school holidays! I just want to go home and wank.”
Jhonny repeated his sentiment once they got into the CBD. Waiting in front of Jhonny and Francis at the first set of lights a group of three school girls; two of them made up like the sluttiest eighteen year olds in the Highflyers pub on a Saturday night, and also their designated fat friend, dressed the same. Their belt-like skirts did little to hide the curvature of their developing asses, which for the one with the excess baby fat, hung out beneath the tight white denim.
Finding the scenery too distracting, Jhonny abandoned his wait to cross and walked across the other crossing in front of the stopped traffic. It took a moment for the cloud-gazing Francis to notice Jhonny was missing, and by the time he started following Jhonny the red light was green and two lanes of cars were honking at the lethargic Goth in their road.
“Did you look, bro?”
“I thought it was still red.”
“No, at the bitches!”
“What?”
“Fuck, I hate school holidays!”
“Is it still okay to say that? We’re like two years out of high school.”
“You’re always nay saying… I need a smoke.”
When you travel frequently by foot and smoke habitually you start to measure trips in cigarettes. It was half a smoke to work. Less than that if you went down Dahlia Street, which was the preferred route when late.
It took two smokes to get to Khmer Noodle House on Broadway, the source of the daily Fried Rice. Khmer was a shit hole. The dull white, food-stained walls and dirty linoleum floor were a reflection of the city out the grimy, unwashed windows. But the food was cheap and the fried vegetables gave it the illusion of healthiness so it was the perfect place for every meal. Not only that, but it was only $7.50 for triple the portion of any other takeaway food in the CBD.
Though it was colloquially called Fried Rice by the boys they never ordered Fried Rice. For Jhonny it was always Pad Thai Fried Noodles, with peanuts and lemon. For Francis it was Green Curry, or as it was called by the menu board and Cambodian waitress “23, green with beef.”
Last week Jhonny had been skint from buying two tinnies, not at the same time mind, but $40 was enough to rob you of one last $7.50 meal before pay day. Francis had stepped in to buy the lunch. Casey had bought her own. This time, being the day after pay day, it was Jhonny’s turn. They both knew that. They didn’t have to talk about it. It was their sort of silent honour system.
The customers were all Asian. Three tables of them. The seven at the table closest to the counter were chatting in Cantonese with the middle-aged Cambodian couple who ran the store while trying to feed their infant Fried Rice. Closer to the door a pair of high school-aged boys looked deep into their bowls of Wonton Soup as they slurped noisily, fishing for the wantons with their ceramic soup spoons. In Jhonny’s regular seat was an Asian replacement, complete with Cap and Hoodie, and in Casey’s, the replacement Asian’s girlfriend. Franc’s seat housed the couple’s baggage; two over the shoulder satchel bags and a black plastic bag from the Asian bargain store up the street. It was the busiest Khmer had been in recent times.
“Where do you want to sit?”
“Don’t care. What do you want?”
“Don’t care.”
Francis went to the counter with Jhonny to collect a jug of warm stale water and some cups. He chose the table closest to the counter to save the server the walk bringing them their meals.
There was usually time to read a section of the newspaper each before the order came. Jhonny was always quick to get the current events section, being the one who remembered to get the paper off the counter. If he was lucky Francis would be left with the Television pull out, but usually got the sports section, despite his hate for any kind of competitive exercise. He reasoned the hate didn’t stem from laziness, which was the deduction of his sports teacher at school and his parents. The hate for sports came from a general lack of giving any kind of fuck about anything competitive. The only good things about the sports section was it also contained the daily Dilbert, the hilariously bullshit horoscopes and the tragic classifieds.
“Oh, Dilbert…”
“Why do you like that shit?”
“It’s funny. Everyone’s so incompetent… Reminds me of KFC.”
“Why do you have to talk about work…”
“Pad Thai?”
“Yep.”
“Laksa Soup?”
“Um…”
“Yep.”
“Enjoy.”
“You got me Laksa?”
“You looked hungry…”
Franc sniffed the bowl. It smelt like a discarded Sardine can.
“You got me Fish Laksa?”
“Yeah.”
“Ok…”
“You haven’t tried it before…”
Franc used a chopstick to swirl the coriander into the bright orange soup, curious to see what debris was pushed up out of the murk.
“I did not realise fish came as balls”
“What else is in there?”
“I believe this is a piece of tentacle…”
“What does it taste like?”
The texture between the teeth was like Surimi but more dense, and warm, and the flavour was… there was no real flavour. Francis still chewed it cautiously, just in case the tentacle was infused with some sort of fish-like liquid.
“It doesn’t taste like anything.”
“What else has it got?”
Francis dredged deep with his chopsticks. At the very bottom, beneath the noodles, beneath the reheated frozen veges and beneath the various pieces of fake fish, Franc could feel a thick silt layer. He slid the chopstick through the muck, forcing a trench and hoping to pull up some of the mysterious substance. Stuck to the emerging end of the chopstick was a sample of the silver-brown sludge, which at first sniff was possibly the source of the fish in the Fish Laksa.
“I think it’s Tuna?”
“Eat it!”
“It kind of freaks me out…”
“Just eat it, man!”
After one more sniff with a screwed up nose Franc brought out his tongue and wiped the chopstick across it. The minced scales glistened silver beneath the restaurant’s fluorescent lights. Franc slowly retracted his tongue, hoping the meat would hit his lips and fall back into the soup. It was instead spread out in a line over his tongue. More surface area to taste the rotten mix of fish guts and bone. Franc’s face formed a grimace as he tried to swallow. But there was no saliva. He tried to wipe the substance off his tongue using his teeth, his palate, his gums. The taste didn’t dull, even after the last traces of grainy mush were gone. His entire mouth tasted like a can of stale Tuna.
“Is it good?”
“I think I’ll just eat the rest and leave the bottom alone…”
“What was it?”
“It tasted like Satan’s Asshole.”
“Speaking of Satan’s Asshole…”
Out the window, the direction Jhonny’s gaze indicated, was the familiar sight of one of the city’s homeless population and the worst one at that. The money for the bus Maori had terrorised Franc since the day he appeared on the city streets, asking every passer-by for $2 for the bus.
It was the principle. Franc knew that fat bastard wasn’t off to catch a bus. He never left Broadway. It was the principle and the time Francis saw him standing over an Intellectually Disabled woman who was just looking for a spot in the sun. He had asked the same question “Can I have $2 for the bus?” and the Disabled woman had handed him a $50 note from her fluorescent pink bum bag.
“You’ve got to be fucking kidding me…”
“It’s your mate.”
“Why! Why the fuck does he have to sit on the bench right outside this fucking shop?”
“He can smell your fear! Look at him. He’s staring right at you!”
“Ah fuck!”
“Excuse me. No swearing. I have children.”
The seven Asians were staring at Francis. The Asian infant, too young to appreciate the power of the fuck word continued grabbing handfuls of sticky Fried Rice and dropping it on the floor. The Asian mother’s chopsticks were paused halfway between her mouth and bowl. The noodle slid out from between the sticks and dropped messily back into her bowl of soup.
“I’m sorry I did not realise you have children.”
“Look bro, he’s coming up to the window.”
“You’ve got to be fucking kidding me…”
“Hey! Please. No swearing!”
“We’ve got to get out of here before he comes in!”
“What about your soup?”
“Fuck the soup!”
“Hey! I told you Don’t talk like that!”
“Whatever!”
Grabbing his black dress jacket off the seat Franc made for the door, Jhonny in tow. He built up speed, so as soon as he pushed open the door he would be power walking in the opposite direction from the scum, and unfortunately the opposite direction from KFC. Nothing a quick detour through the Downtown Shopping Centre wouldn’t fix.
“Remember you’ve got to look him in the eyes and just punch him…”
“I’m not going to punch him.”
“Just look him in the eyes and tell him to fuck off…”
“Do you have $2…”
“No, I don’t have $2 for the fucking bus!”
“Fuck you! You’re a Asshole!”
“See you should have punched him! He called you an Asshole.”
Jhonny had a way of throwing people deeper into situations. He had no patience for pussy footing around and was partial to watching people fuck themselves up by listening to his erroneous advice. He was the kind of guy who made someone jump straight into the cold river instead of wading ankle deep for a good hour. His previous advice had included:
“Just go fuck her, dude!”
“Just fucking rip at it, bro!”
“Just light it in your hand!”
“Just fucking jump down, man!”
And there was always an assurance:
“At worst she’ll say no!”
“Nothing’s going to happen!”
“It won’t hurt!”
“It’s not that high!”
It was fine for Jhonny to say. He’d never try any of his suggestions. He would probably succeed with minimum effort, but Jhonny being Jhonny he needed to laugh at a guinea pig first. Franc being Franc, something would always go wrong. The chick he was talked into fucking would either be a psycho or a dude, and he could imagine worse things than her saying no. Like her boyfriend being black and huge, or her birth certificate proving she was two years too young. Ripping at the table would involve a rusty nail passing through Franc’s work boot and puncturing the sole of his foot. Lighting the firework would result in burns to his hand, face and torso and scorch his beautiful shoulder length black hair. Jumping down from the cliff into the river would result in a broken elbow that would never be treated and whiplash from the bellyflop. Franc had learnt this all from experience the last summer at Horseshoe Bend, a small clearing and swimming hole in the bush out of Tokomaru.
Downtown Shopping Centre, the second largest shopping centre in Palmerston North, was the hangout of the jailbait street-rats, the ignorant brunette hoedies and the dirtiest of the daylight scoundrels. Though not the prime beef of the Palmy meat market, there was a rustic beauty to the broken toy dollies that frequented the glorified corridor.
For Franc the appeal was their fucked fashion; fissured fishnets on hands and legs, tight black shirts, open for lack of buttons, and high black boots. They were more Punk than Goth, but Francis still felt some kind of connection, as if these wretched soulless shells were somehow like him.