Monday, November 27, 2006

One for trawler John

Typical Friday night at the smoky brown café; the table layered with many backgammon games, blonde beers and soul searching talks. How humans long for communication with the inner or outer self, while thoughts fast forward and rewind themselves at the same time. This is philosophy happy hour in the booze palooza, every round of wisdom is one’s shared kingdom of the mind. A lone person had difficulties finding a table to join and a group to cling onto, for he was lavishly ignored by the dignified bobo’s, ah bless such everexisting cuntism pssssh. Open spot at our table; no rules, no judgements, just mindspeak and the visitor accepted the offer. John introduced himself as a 61 year old homeless person and living with the salvation army since the early 90’s. There lay no shame in the details of his storytelling, his life had followed certain paths down to his own near destruction and his calm acceptance of this was comforting to listen to. Painful tales went on about friends who died of overdoses and AIDS, even those who were not in his same junkie-realm. The burned skidmarks on his face and the disfigured nature of his flesh revealed his heroin addiction and the multiple times that it caught fire. The topic moved onto a movie in Dutch cinema’s about the life of Herman Brood, a dutch drugged rockstar who perhaps could be vaguely compared to Mick Jagger and Andy Warhol into one body minus the intellect. John was muttering about the movie, it not portraying Herman’s life as the non-fairytale junkie lifestyle it was. John said he knew Herman personally quite well back in the 80’s when they both were each other’s junkie buddies and went on car radio hunt together night after night to feed the monkey and boy was the monkey hungry, always. He did however express that they never used violence in their theft thrifts, with no hesitation is his voice audible. He got off the heroin by himself when he was in a hospital 15 years ago and he has been clean ever since ''It's all between the ears boys", he proudly proclaimed, with a minor contempt for junkies who could not kick off themselves. We had to leave John in the sullen agreement that we would meet another same time, same place in a week. Continued?

Songs for John, weeping oldie beauties...........

Frank Hutchison - Worried Blues
Fa So La Singers - I'll Stay On The Right Road Now
McGee Brothers - The Tramp

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

What a sweet and flattering man he was! And what a tragic yet admirable story...

SebCatLitter said...

hey aly, yup that handkiss was his gesture. the question is; will he be out our table tomorrow?