Sweet Fancy Moses (and some others)

Elaine Benes: dancer extraordinaire and muse of many. When my life expires and I swap one land of long white clouds for another, Elaine will be there. Somewhere up there in the eternal paradise the good Christians promised us, between the Tuscan villas and the bouncy castles, there will be a huge, shimmering dance club. It will be called Post-Puddy and will pump out funk music all hours of the day and night. It is here that we will meet Elaine, grooving and grinding all over the dance floor with her eyes closed and a big, wasted smile on her face. The walls are stacked with chilled bottles of Bombay Sapphire and an elaborate lemon tree sprouts majestically in the corner. Beautiful people lie underneath it and make out.

An immaculately dressed barman, reminiscent of a young Jack Nicholson, smiles seductively and hands me a stiff gin & tonic. Elaine grabs my hand and pulls me in for a close one. ‘Brick House’ starts pumping over the club speakers. Ms. Benes shakes her ass and throws in a few ‘little kicks’ for good measure. The crowd cheers. ‘Single Ladies’ is on next.

The amalgamation of Bombay Sapphire and Elaine Benes is, of course, the inspiration for this blog and my life in general. Alcohol clearly brings out the best in her; I can think of almost no one else in the fictional universe with whom I would rather get my wasted face on. However, my mind cannot help but wander to the rest of the Seinfeld characters and the intoxicant it would be most fun to consume with each of them.

For Jerry, it would most definitely be cocaine. Blow would match his sneakers for one thing. There could be jokes made about nostril sizes and the Jewish faith which I’m sure he would find amusing. And Jerry’s already manic speed talking would go into overdrive after a few lines. He would pace around his apartment in a frenzy, muttering things like ‘if you want a joke, try some coke’ and scribbling them furiously down on a pad. He won’t stop talking for hours, his words getting closer together, especially when he discovers that the high he’s experiencing is known as the ‘superman syndrome.’ And eventually, he will put on some 80’s techno and start cleaning his apartment at double speed.

Taking an acid trip with Kramer would a mind-blowing experience. “Listen buddy” he’d whisper to you a couple of hours in, “don’t talk to loud but there are bugs running up the wall. They’re spies from the top, I know they are.” He’d swallow nervously and wipe the sweat from his brow. “THEY’RE FREAKING ME OUT!!!” He’d yell suddenly before rushing to the front door to spy on the invisible ninja robots through the peep hole. By the end of the day, you’d be pulling up the floorboards to make a protective moat around the living room, and filling it with bottles of ginger ale.

The thought of getting blazed with Newman is both hilarious and disturbing. The incoherent stories about the postal service would be a dream come true. We would tear open envelopes, cackling hysterically at the love letters and Christmas cards between puffs of smoke. And then, our stomachs rumbling with serious munchies, Newman would order twelve pizzas, all with extra cheese, and we would gobble them down, stopping only to praise the person who invented double crust with our mouths full of half chewed dough.

And then we get to George Costanza, and my mind goes uncomfortably blank. Getting drunk with George would be a depressing experience, reminiscent of the worst kind of Tom Waits song. The addition of weed into the equation would simply heighten the uncomfortable paranoia and low self-esteem that George lives his life by even at his soberest. And baby, let’s not even get started on the hallucinogens. There is little that scares me more than entering a warped, unstable parallel universe with George and his neuroses and plaid shirts. The only thing that could top it would be the inclusion of Frank and Estelle Costanza, yelling at each other like demons and sucking everyone around them into a black hole. All the orange juice in the world couldn’t get rid of that nightmare. With all this in mind, I guess George’s drug of choice would have to be Prozac. He seems long overdue for a serious dose. And perhaps get his parents on some as well.

And I’m sure that somewhere in the American Midwest, there is a balding, acne-scarred Mark Chapman-wannabe hunched over a computer in some basement. A photograph of his ex-girlfriend lies ripped to pieces on the linoleum floor. He stuffs another handful of Cheetos into his mouth, wiping the orange powder on his track pants. His sweat drips onto his keyboard as he types the final sentences of his morbid thoughts into a little blog titled Prozac & Costanza.

He is Bizzaro Telford.

What Nina said.

As of the last post, your humble narrator was conquering North America and being smug about it.

He even had the audacity to use the word 'conquering' when the verb should really be something closer to 'inspecting.' Or perhaps it was North America which was inspecting him. There was sex, drugs and a whole lot of Greyhound buses filled with crackheads and the occasional saint. There was Jews and stuffed crust pizzas and seemingly endless art galleries which your humble narrator stumbled through, feeling overwhelmed and mostly dumb and wishing all the while that his Art History-themed friends were there to slap him around a bit.

And then, after three plane rides and all the duty free alcohol my tired arms could carry, I collapsed back in my beloved New Zealand. A faction of the Mills clan met me at the airport; their smiles too wide to be taken sincerely. They kept up the facade all afternoon; the younger siblings clawing for presents, the older ones eyeing up the Duty Free. Exhausted, I caved in at about 9 o'clock and with one last bout of thank yous, they clutched their precious treasures to their chests and went about their various strands of their busy lives: school, sport, op shopping, breakups, Facebook.

And so your narrator, more humble than ever, found himself back to pre-Japan square one. And in typical square one style, he again began working at Unity Books; Wellington's premium independent bookshop and employ of Liberal Arts graduates. It is a wonderful, gleaming place. Like a gay bar, it's almost impossible to get anything done. But oh, if only gay bars were as full of rich pickings. "Pick me" the books whisper one by one as I begin my early morning rounds. "I'll keep you up all night and give you a good go again in the morning..." The fiction wall is particularly awful, especially during long, hot afternoons around the A to F section. The Faulkners and the Easton Ellises pant heavily, shelves apart. "ohhh, just the first paragraph" they moan. "We were maaaade for each other...." I swallow heavily and swing back into the Film & Music table which is an even bigger mistake. Big, glossy encyclopedias pledge life commitments, happy to sit submissively in my bookcase for decades, so long as I promise to pull them out for a bit of fun on the occasional rainy day. Most days, I leave the store exhausted, with my brow sweaty and my pants half undone.

At Unity, it is important to 'fit in.' This means having a favourite David Bowie album, and unless it's Low, it doesn't count. This means preferring cheap red wine to expensive white and using the phrase "Coetzee-esque" without batting an eyelid. It means reading The Lovely Bones ironically and rolling your eyes at anyone who buys Eckart Tolle. Being in a band helps, being an aspiring poet helps more. It's wonderful but frequently difficult to keep up; whether The Smiths are a valid band changes on an almost weekly basis. As a group, the Unity Staff with their quirks and passion for soap-opera-indie-kid lifestyles fall somewhere between Black Books and Empire Records. They wish.

Then there are the customers. Last week, an old man stamped his foot in a rage after discovering we didn't have any books about crop circles, furiously crying "what kind of book shop are you?" There was the frustrated housewife who couldn't find any kids books for her two year old with an extended reading level because none of the smart ones were 'pop up-ey enough'. It took all my all of strength not to yell at her "Margaret! Margaret!" I doubt she would have understood. My favourite customers are the Narnians. These are the middle aged men (in the closet, another literary pun, geddit?)with red faces who spend a good half an hour browsing the biography section, easing closer and closer to the Gay & Lesbian table as if by accident. Once finding themselves here, they glace quicky around and whip a paperback edition of erotic man tales (usually Up the Back Passage or Daddies) off the table before darting back to biography. They turn up at the counter ten minutes later, eyes averted, the offending text momentarily hidden under a small stack of Evelyn Waughs. I smile and flush everything quickly into a brown paper bag, forcefully mentioning the weather and watching the relief spill over their face. The other end of the scale is the nineteen year old boys in singlets and dyed blonde locks. They take a few fertive glances at the queer table and might even pick up a book or two, but they never make it to the counter, never able to meet the eyes of the knowing bookseller who stand behind it. Worry not my readers, they'll be back.

The sun sets across the bay, a glass of chardonnay sits beside me. Nick Lowe, Junior Boys and Lady Gaga crank it on the itunes. Life is good. The future is bright and the tepid wasteland of Urakawa is far behind. Somewhere in the back of my mind, a little alarm bell rings the word "future" over and over again. But that's for next week.