‘she fucked me so good i couldn’t recall my first name for a good 5 minutes. and when it finally came back to me, i kept mispronouncing it for a solid quarterhour.’
And when the browncoat turned seven and was old enough to sin and be thereby damned unknottably, his parents procured for him a large, classical two-person bed.
It was made of good Russian oak and when brownback rapped the wooden armature with the protruding bony parts of his fingers the bed would sing but the brownback was the only one who could hear its songs. And his parents told him the bed was his for keeps yes for keeps and when he would grow up and be his own man and have his own house, the bed would still be his and he would take it with him to the new house and find a good girl and marry her on the bed and have a family and raise his children also on the bed yes his very own children for him to educate and discipline and would they obey him in all yes they would they had to they were his children weren’t they all good children obey their elders in all. And so the boy browncoat thought the bed a very sensible gift even as he thought his parents tragic imbeciles, for (most) beds survive (most) marriages and in fact also (most) families and a solid majority of the human lies such institutions are predicated upon and the boy browncoat knew this.
And in his magisterial oaken bed the boy browncoat would rape himself awake in the mourning when all good little boys went to school and did not cry over their spilt sleep then laughed himself naked and thorny in the evening when all good little boys went to sleep and did not fuss over their domestication and their leashing under the lovely melodies of the prayer beads.
And each mourning the boy browncoat would leave his parents’ house with a large backpack glued to his unpretentious frame and he would walk on his little street that led to his little school, past the sleepy brasserie and the energetic bakery and the generous baroque fountain whose centrepiece depicted a marble demigod with his head decisively pushed halfway up a further marble demigod's ass. And often he would see his father’s car gently accelerating on the same street, frightfully late for work although his offices did not open for another hour and an half. And once he saw his dad stop his car when the lights turned red although the whole street was uninhabited at that hour and there wasn’t the slightest trace of any other car. And the only people on the street were some beggars who made their cyclical living accosting drivers who stopped at the streetlight and asking them for small pittances and anodyne mercies. And a legless beggar in a clumsy wheelchair approached his father’s car and his father rolled down his window and gave him twenty kopeks and was instantly myrrhed the greatest saint who’d ever trod this lonesome cemetery road or the world even for walpurga herself had never given him so much as a dried shit. And sensing the good mood percolating through the browncoat’s father and into the unwelcome chill outside his car – a good mood inexplicable at such an early mourning hour in most systemized realities – another beggarwoman ran up to his window and demanded her own minor succour. And his father had already produced another twenty kopek coin and was about to extend it unto the beggarwoman when he looked up and saw her face and asked her whether she was a gypsy. And yes that was exactly what she was a gypsy beggar and his father withdrew the coin and informed the beggarwoman that he doesn’t give money to gypsies and that she was not to bother him anymore and a bourgeois imprecation upon her wretched womb for perpetuating the agony of a sorry lineage forever damned and irreversibly unfit for living among the cements of modernity. And then the gypsy woman abandoned all solicitude and quickly produced a small ribbon smeared with putative blood – it looked like blood and both the browncoat from a distance and his father up close later swore it had been blood doubtless – and tried to tie the ribbon around his father’s rear-view mirror and screamed at his father that now she would mark him.
And his father sped off and rolled his window up and crossed himself and promised to remove his family from this putrid malevolent area but the gypsy beggarwoman was not there when he returned in the evening and she was not there the next morning either and she must have been afraid of the police most such entities are and so the browncoat and his parents did not move. But his father installed tinted windows on his unassuming car the very next day none the less, hoping the gypsy’s curses were as slow and blind as their wielder. And his father’s mornings subsequently became quite identical and no more beggars would approach him for his useless change at stops and streetlights for the word about him had spread and there went one of his father’s clearest springs of daily conversation and this made his father quite unhappy and he missed the gypsy beggarwoman almost instantly and his father’s misery was not long to reverberate in their erstwhile safely placid family life.
And school, as for ‘school’,
school
was for the boy browncoat just a way to cry inside a word. As were most things for the browncoat. But when he grew older he did not cry nor did he squeeze out teary freedom from any other word’s nutshell. And whenever the boy browncoat left his house he would always wrap his feet in thick old newspaper of acid Cyrillic ink and barbed wire before going out. For the dogs. He even did this most times he had to open his apartment door, to the milkman or the deliveryman or most times to his father.
And before the boy browncoat had ever been sent to school for the first time, he had gone out into his courtyard and found it to be summer. And he had never cared much for summer because after all it wasn’t so very different from the end of spring or the beginning of fall and his parents never went anywhere during the summer and so the boy browncoat never went anywhere either and so summer had been of no importance to him. But that day he found many other children in his courtyard, and some lived nearby and so were entitled to play in the courtyard, while many others had drifted from outside the browncoat’s block and were therefore intruders. And the browncoat and the native children regarded the other children in silent suspicion, until one of the other children came up to the tallest boy in the native group and this was the boy browncoat and suggested a game of football since the children were well divided in tolerable fairness among the two groups and each group had just enough girls and younger boys with their fingers in their mouths and their fingers down their summer shorts to play in goal and in defence so the other boys could have fun going forward. And the browncoat knew this was a sound suggestion and that this could mark the beginning of a famous tournament of skill and right of bragging among the two competing neighbourhoods and that a first victory in this sure to become legendary serialized clash of native kids and intruders would provide a nodal psychological impetus to carry on the winning tradition-to-be-established in future iterations of this war of conquering and destruction of territorial pride. And before the game could start one of the browncoat’s neighbours did not at all like that he had been relegated to defensive duties with the girls and the younger boys despite being almost two months older than the browncoat himself but the browncoat had said it was that or reserve goalie and the neighbour boy acquiesced but he hated playing defence as does everyone with half a brain and in his wrath and unspoken desire to challenge brownback for leadership of the local pack he picked up a clump of dirt and threw it at the back of the browncoat’s head.
But the neighbour boy was an idiot and the clump of dirt missed the browncoat completely and hit the impromptu captain of the intruder side in the face and blew up as it hit the intruder captain’s face and his face was left brown and well scratched for the dirt was well coagulated and dry and tough. And the intruders howled at the provocation and the boy browncoat tried to negotiate a truce so as to identify the malicious thrower of dirt and punish him collectively but the intruder captain was incensed beyond dialogue and he picked up a clump of dirt of his own and tossed it at the browncoat’s head. The boy browncoat moved to the side and one of the other local boys received the dirt in his face. And of course there was no point in attempting to control the explosion of hostilities and the browncoat and all the local children armed themselves with clumps and fists of rock-hard homegrown dirt and battered the intruders, who were visibly and painfully disadvantaged because the dirt in the foreign courtyard did not know them and did not trust them to wield it with rectitude and movement and honor and desire and so the intruders suffered injuries and pain and a great many small boulders of hard dirt to the face. And to prevent utter humiliation and salvage the intruding neighbourhood’s reputation, or perhaps no such tactical thinking was involved and the boy concerned merely acted out of a preconscious impulse to preserve his own physical safety, one of the foreign boys picked up a rock similar in size to the clumps of dirt being thrown all around him and tossed it as hard as he the foreign boy could toward the biggest of the local boys he could see. And for all the foreign boy’s hurt and desire to hurt the throw was weak and inaccurate and its target the local boy saw the foreign boy taking aim and throwing badly and knew the projectile would hit him in the chest, an area of comparative invulnerability, and so the local boy stuck out his chest and grinned at the foreign artillerist in anticipatory triumph and just as the local boy was yelling to the foreign boy that the he the foreign boy was an irrepressible cunt he was hit in the chest by the large rock and his cunt was knocked off his lips and the local boy grabbed his chest and fell over. And the foreign boy was giddy with triumphant jubilation and picked up two more large rocks one in each hand and threw them both at the nearest locals he could see through his tears of uncorrupted joy. And naturally his coördination of the simultaneous throws was weak especially since he was far from a notable marksman in the first place and the rocks landed with an unpleasant screech on the cement next to the two intended victims. And seeing that the other side were fighting dirt with stone the local kids were outraged and such cowardice they had never encountered and the other side knew nothing of street warfare and escalation was imminent and the local kids invoked their tribal wargods and armed themselves with local rocks and the local rocks whistled and sang in the air as they drew their hypnotised targets nearer and arms were crushed and bones were rattled and chests were flattened and feet were swept and the boy browncoat cried out in feral joy under the hiss of the sun-obscuring volley and picked the biggest loveliest roundest smoothest throwable rock he could find and picked the loveliest pinkest handsomest most unblemished intruder boy he could identify within reasonable range and threw his perfect rock at his perfect victim as hard and as accurate as he would ever throw or do anything in his chronological life and the flight of the perfect rock was immaculate and virgin and the victim’s chest was to have its pretty flesh crushed and snapped and maybe even peeled off and the browncoat grew wild-eyed and tremulous but the throw was not to be for one of the local girls, the daughter of brownback’s closest neighbours and his secret best friend with whom he spoke and played and listened to Caruso more than with anyone else any boy any living being no contest, flew across the field of battle chasing one of the younger intruder boys who had still not extracted his hand from his summer shorts and the girl stopped the rock in dead flight and assaulted the perfect flight of the brownback’s perfect rock by interposing her left cheek and the rock met with soft resistance and still hoped it could still be overcome so the rock slid upwards and pressed on in scribbling fury up the local girl’s left cheek and the cheek was not interminable no valley is and the rock ascended to the girl’s eye and although the girl had closed her eyes glued with instinct as the rock pushed her back the eye’s pupil was a thin curtain and the rock feared no flesh for it saw no flesh and it burrowed up into the girl’s socket and dug deep into the dark and displaced the submissive orb it found there and finally discovered there was to be no more flight and lost its will and slid down from the girl’s empty socket onto her blue blouse and down her unstockinged foot and the local girl was frozen in marble shock in the middle of the field of battle and luckily she was just a girl and not very tall and thus not the proudest scalp but still she was hit in the head and in the blades of her shoulders by a few residual rocks small and utterly without ambition mostly thrown by intruder boys with arms too numb to attempt longer throws across the field and into worthier targets from the native camp. And the boy brownback saw what had occurred and looked around and none of his lieutenants were paying much attention to the girl focused as they were on repealing a nascent but anæmic counterassault fanging up from the intruders’ side and the girl herself now kneeling on the ground between the two camps was not looking around searching the field pencilling in funereal coaldiamond gray the Athena to her Teiresias but simply bleeding downwards trying to ensure with her last eye that she did not get blood on her blue blouse and she was so small and wrinkled in the middle of the field that no one even tried to hit her anymore no proud martiality in it or perhaps no one even saw her small and huddled on the field and the boy browncoat hoped she would simply melt and root herself down into the ground or the cement and threw a couple of tentative small rocks at her but she wouldn’t melt down and so there was not much else to be done and the browncoat yelled for his mother as hard as he could and hearing this the other local boys decided it was now acceptable to summon the most indurated of reinforcements and they too yelled for their mothers employing their carefully tuned victim voice and at first the intruder boys laughed at the host cuntry’s cowardice and who are the cheating cunts now ye transparent bastids but soon one mother and then another and yet another assumed their offensive positions on porches and balconies and some advanced toward the field and the intruders tried to scare off the mothers by throwing dirt encrusted rocks at their mostly pristine aprons but the bestial mothers shrugged off the challenge and marched on and the intruders saw this was no joke and scattered and bled out into the environs of the browncoat’s small neighbourhood. And the mothers immediately noticed the huddled girl and ran past the victorious cheers of their enraptured offspring and they took the girl in their arms and their clean rough domestic clothes grew dark spots where the girl’s head rested and one of the mothers yelled out who did this and the native children only now noticed their gravest casualty and they looked around and they looked at each other and they blinked with incomprehension and the mothers were inflamed by their children’s obliviousness and ran after them with shaking fists and fluttering aprons between their legs and the native boys too scattered before a force mightier and more elemental than their own although like the intruder boys before them they too attempted to scare away their mothers with a mostly inconsequential volley of hurriedly scavenged rocks to the mothers’ heads and although some of the mothers were hit and recoiled in defeated indignation most only wintered up their chase and the local boys had been defeated utterly and the boy browncoat ran the fastest although his mother did not appear to have come out to investigate like the others and the boy browncoat ran the farthest he ran a good six minutes to the nearest stadium where the native boys would have played the intruders had there not been such volcanic history at play earlier that morning. And the tallest boy and farthest warrior grew scared and hunchbacked and trembled for he seemed overtaken with fear over the immediate safety of his small and generally irresilient person and he looked around and it wasn’t even a real stadium just a dusty field of tolerable flatness with many small and not so small rocks sprinkled on it boys called the strings of larger rocks the obstacle course and these rocks guarded one of the goals and so whenever the native children played there one team would have to navigate these symplegades for the defending team would roll and throw the large rocks at the attackers’ faces and feet and the teams argued over who would get the fortressed goal and such fights experientially ended with the taller and stronger team scoffing at the hard-line beggars that such tricks would only make the drubbing they were about to inflict on the other ladies so much more unbearable and real men feared no rocks but willed the rocks into submission and calculated flight and dead cathedral and there was by now in all probability no one pursuing the boy browncoat but he knew nevertheless that his mother or his telepathically summoned to the scene of violation father or the girl’s father who did not work but mostly stayed at home and read cheap books at their low window so everyone could see him reading as opposed to the girl’s mother who worked all day and mostly all night and was hardly at home and only showed herself in the low window to challenge her husband’s choice of reading and to demand dinner or all three of them were right there behind him maybe watching him from behind a building or street corner and waiting to trap him in a trap of no escape and all three of them like an halitotic hydra would impose on him physical punishment of a systematic cruelty that would be at the very least equal to the cruelty of what the girl had suffered and unlike the girl who incurred her scar on the battlefield where such things come and go and laugh at you he the boy browncoat would be executed by a court of law and not in an equal or random fight and he hated the law so much both now and always and the browncoat knew then that there had been a breaking a final irreparable rupture and the consequences and he had reached a point a positioning that was not to be reached no not even contemplated in the safe distance of the horizon in the raging epicentre of the horizon and there was but one remaining solution and namely run away from home which he had already accomplished so that was a good clean start and avoid his parents and the girl and the girl’s vindictive father for the rest of his the boy browncoat’s natural mortal life which was of course easilier panicked than done and for lack of more constructive ideas he hid himself in the little underground passage that ran around the great hospital to which the dusty football field belonged and the underground passage was quite deep and almost fully covered there was but a little space for an underweight drunken adult to fall through and dark so people could not really see anything in it from without and the brownback fumbled and groped his way not to the deeper part of the passage because that was where most footballs inevitably ended up five or six times every game when the native boys played there and as incredulous as the thought made him now he knew that someday in the distant future the local boys and maybe other boys as well would eventually be allowed to play football again and they were likely to do it here and they would lose the ball to the underground passage and the least popular smaller boy on the team that had lost the ball would descend into the passage and look for the ball and the supreme gesture of infantile altruism one could perform was to go down and recover the ball even if one had not been the one to allow the ball to slide into the passage and even if one was not the smallest and weakest boy on the team. So the browncoat did not go to the deeper part of the underground passage where all footballs always ended up but to another part of the passage away from the pitch and that part was about two meters deep still more than generous apt to hide the browncoat thoroughly for at least another ten years of natural growth but the dark would stunt it so even longer fifteen good years even and if he was willing to duck or kneel for the rest of his natural existence he had no more worries on the invisibility side of the problem and the browncoat suspected that his current shelter was where the flows of urine charted by the neighbourhood’s incontinent alcoholics and the older kids who played on the hospital pitch and were not so afraid of the dark or wanted to prove they could scare off the dark by pissing in its face but still kept at least half their bodies in the well-lit parts of the passage when they urinated anyway this where the browncoat was currently crouching was where the flows of urine all converged and also where the neighbourhood’s many drug addicts would come and use their needles and their syringes and lie down and sleep it off and then wake up and trail off sometimes in the middle of the boys’ game which the boys found amusing to high heaven so amusing in fact that they often kicked their ball at the junkies top points for getting them in the head and dash off to retrieve their football and round the reeling junkie and run away and regroup when it was
safe and there was no imminent danger not really because the junkies were too dazed and too slow and generally had no recollection when they sobered back up so no retribution was to be expected and so what someone’s balls got to the junkies’ head and there were balls in their face eh but the browncoat did not have to worry too much about stepping on needles and the like because despite their confused state upon waking up the junkies rarely failed to collect their needles for later reuse they must have had emotional value or were kept as souvenirs so needles were not going to be a major problem over the next ten to seventy years of the browncoat’s impending underground life. At least he would hear the native boys play once in a while and cheer for the stronger team and laugh whenever one of the weaklings would get knocked off his feet or slapped in the face or received a small rock to his head to distract him and get him to lose the ball if he was any good or skilled at dribbling the little ones tended to be irritating dwarfish untouchable fucks. So the browncoat’s principal objective was not to be found judged and condemned which entailed disappearing from the scope of the parental planet and so he armed himself with demoniacal patience and clutched the dirt-smudged bottom of his shirt and grit his teeth and spent in the underground passage a period of time that struck him as being equal in duration to all the epic battles between Beowulf and his endless parade of giants and dragons and to any Titanomachy or any sum and combination of Herculean labours and as expected in reality it had hardly been an hour and the boy browncoat hammered life to be too long and crawled out and in this hour although he did not fixate in his memory the flux of his tortured consciousness he later proclaimed himself convinced that he had managed to blame the entire world starting with the idiot world and the idiotic and cruel representatives of unfairly founded parental potency and of course it was only natural that he thought it extremely unjust that his promising haha and youthfully ebullient existence would have to end because of a game that had slipped out of control and in the end of ends how and why the fuck did they expect a fucking pipsqueak who could barely spell