“It is a sign that you are growing old,” said the old man, his voice soft with resignation. “Each year, the boys seem to get better. As if someone laced the ordinary—Big Macs, frozen pizzas, vending machine snacks—with something secret and sublime that improves a man’s sperm. A quiet alchemy that sharpens jawlines, brightens eyes, perfects the symmetry of youth. It’s not just beauty—it is evolution disguised as convenience. And I watch them pass, these boys, like living advertisements for a future I won’t inhabit. It makes me sad. And jealous. Not of their youth, but of the ease with which they wear it.”
Urban adolescent. Prowling the streets. Catching stares. Bringing himself to orgasm and waiting for one that will be.
Colvey is number one and will die before he is properly a man. He is angry and suspicious of everyone. Wary of his enemies and more so of those who say they are friends. (Know what I mean bro?) Some will argue that this streak of uncertainty gives him an advantage, but one day he will meet the person that will plunge a knife into him and then knowing who to trust and who not to will be irrelevant. One thing I do know is that it will be the person he least suspected.
Angry with everyone. Controlling the uncontrollable. Respect from those who have no idea what it means. (Respect bro!)
Until then, Colvey must control this unruly band of boys – tearaways, petty thieves, and miscreants – who cannot muster up a brain between them, and who idolise him because they are afraid of the consequences if they don’t. Look around the city and you will see the tags on shitty walls, doors and metal shutters that protect empty shops in rundown streets. Our territory, our ground, our space.
Grooming. A word that has become part of modern society. A bad word. A careless word. Colvey might be accused of grooming kids to swell his ranks. But it is something he started when he was a small boy who shit his pants in school.
Provincial demon. Misery. Mayhem.
Keep your enemy close to you and let him do your dirty work.
Mason is number two and must wait. Living under a shadow that must surely fade. It is one thing knowing those who will cause you harm, another when that threat comes from within. Catch these hands. Colvey knows this. (You’re my best mate bro). The dance of Caesar and Brutus. Fake and be friend.
I watch. I see. Tattletale, snitch, informant, telltale, squealer. Colvey’s bitch. The one person he says he can trust. The one person who could bring him down if I wanted to. But that ain’t gonna happen because I’ll be a good number two.
Secrets and lies. Scrawny and slim. Wiry. The violent sex. “You want to know something?” Colvey lies next to me. “I ain’t gay bro. I like pussy. This is only bud sex.” ‘I ain’t a batty boy either,” I tell him. Colvey kisses me. “This is sheesh. Don’t tell anyone that I like bussin’ you bro.”
“The Laurels Residential Care Home is pleased to announce that the Space Kids will be here on 8 June 2045.”
The pending arrival had been flashed onto the wall of every bedroom. Old people liked it when the Space Kids came. They came across the fields on Ducati Thrust Bikes, not a sound, and only the shaking of the hedgerows gave any indication that they had arrived. They gathered in the ChatGPT room and shouted for everyone to leave their pods. The Space Kids had brought holograms of dead stars and allowed them to mingle with the residents. Patrick Swayze and Kurt Cobain chatted with them, Prince and Amy Winehouse waltzed around the room, Bruce Willis cracked jokes, and Michael Jackson reeled off poetic verses from Thriller. But their favourite time was when the Space Kids fired up the ‘retro spectro disco’ where the likes of Pulp, Oasis and Take That got them all dancing. Towards the end, there were traditional food dishes like Big Macs, Nando’s Chicken and Pepperoni Pizza with Ben and Jerry’s Ice Cream to follow. It had an emotional ending when the Space Kids paid tribute to the home’s oldest resident who was treated to a Sid Vicious avatar singing a punk version of We’ll Meet Again. There wasn’t a dry eye in the place.
He sits like a ghost of last night, knees raw, boots scuffed, a slouch that says he’s seen too much for someone too young to carry it. The alley’s a graveyard of pallets and metal, the air thick with the stale breath of kegs that haven’t been touched since the last fight or fuck. The wall at his back don’t care who he is, and neither does the city — just another boy in borrowed clothes, dragging the hem of his story through concrete and piss. His eyes don’t beg. They dare. As if to say: I’m not lost — I’m choosing to stay gone. Everything here’s worn out —the barrels, the bricks, the boy. But there’s poetry in the ruin, and he knows it. He’s not posing. He’s waiting. For the light to change, for someone to look twice, or maybe just for the silence to settle in enough to sleep.
Alessio returned last night. I woke to find him standing in front of the window with the full moon behind him that made him glow turquoise.
“My friend, I have so much to tell you.”
“Is that really you, Alessio? The thing is, you are dead.”
I sat up in bed. Everything seemed real yet I knew it must be a dream. Alessio looked different. It was definitely him but he looked older and well groomed.
“Of course I am dead. There was no way I would have survived falling from such a great height and lived.”
Alessio stepped into the room but still had that strange glow about him.
“Why are you a funny colour?”
“Ah,” he said, “it is the colour of oro and is quite normal. It fades after a while.”
“What are you doing here?”
“Relax my friend. Don’t be frightened. I have something exciting to say. When we were young boys we were taught that God created this beautiful planet that spins. But I have found out something remarkable. The earth that you see from space looks to be one planet, but everything is not as it appears. To our eyes it appears as one, but that is not the case because there are really three worlds superimposed over one other..”
“Alessio. Wherever it is you have come from, I see that there is an abundance of drugs for you to take.”
“Hear me out. God was a multi-tasker and didn’t create one world, but created three – the past, the present, and the future. He was a genius. The reason that the earth spins is because it allows the past, present and future to rotate together. Sometimes each of the worlds moves faster, sometimes slower, but each spins unknown to the other, but occasionally they slip into each other and voila, you end up where you aren’t supposed to be. I am testimony to that. Right now I’m in a controlled time slip. I am a ghost standing before you, and you appear as a ghost to me.
“The exciting thing is that you are in the present and when you die you will cross over, and without knowing it, you will be reborn into the past or the future. It’s a potluck where you end up. When I died I moved into the future where I grew up to be a wonderful scientist, part of a secret AI team that discovered this amazing shit, and right now I’m part of an experiment that is communicating with the past, or should that be the present? I might not remember anything when I return, but, so far so good, I know why I’m here, and came knowing nothing about you, but immediately remembered who you were and everything that happened between us. Bad boys always recognise bad boys.How are you, by the way?”
“It’s a lot to take in,” I stuttered. “Does that mean there isn’t a heaven? Or hell for that matter?”
“On the contrary my friend. Heaven is where you might perceive hell to be. Three lifetimes and we all go to heaven. It’s a place that no living person can ever go to, but tomorrow, when the sun is high in the sky, think about why it is that the sun is so hot. It is what is behind that fiery facade where the answer to your question lies. And, by the way, there is no hell, and if there is, we’ve yet to discover it.”
“This is bizarre,” I told him. “This is the weirdest dream I’ve ever had.”
“Think of it as a dream if you like.” He looked at his hand. “My oro is almost gone so I must return. But remember what I’ve told you, and if you care to tell anyone then I am sure that they will think you are quite mad. Goodbye Lucio. It has been good to see you again.”
Shades of teen. We flicked through pages of photographs hoping to find one to use. The task had become tiresome because there were only so many images of scantily clad guys that you could absorb, and there was a risk that we might choose the wrong one. But we kept looking, thinking that the next page might reveal something better than the one before. “It is like watching gay porn,” said Charlie. “You start watching a video but move on to the next one because you think it will be more exciting but never is.” His reaction caught me by surprise. “This is hopeless,” he continued, snapping the photo album shut, “and why do they all seem to be called Luka?”
Francisco said that I must see him perform while his circus was in town.
The last time I’d been to a circus there were galloping horses, lumbering elephants and ferocious lions. A bit like Mr Galliano’s Circus, written sixty years before, but there was still a connection.
This ‘new circus’ was different, a theatrical performance with circus skills, dance, music, and storytelling. And there were lots of clowns which made it difficult to pick him out. But he’d reserved a seat on the front row and knew exactly where I was sitting. I recognised his skinny frame when he bounced over in full clown regalia.
The boy with the big dick and a smudge of eczema on his left buttock stood before me and placed his hand where his heart should have been. Then he put something into the palm of my hand.
It was a ceramic egg with a clown’s face painted on it. I stared at it, unsure as to whether I should give it back or not, and then I saw that it was Francesco’s clown face on the egg.
When I looked up he’d gone, lost amidst the chaos, still fooling around, and not taking life seriously.
They said he was a prodigy, and I didn’t doubt it. Pour le piano. He played notes that were delicate and haunting. But those gentle sounds had meaning and showed that he recognised beauty but didn’t know what to do with it, and this was the cause of his torment.
He peered from underneath a baseball cap, sad frightened eyes, that looked at the door behind.
“When Debussy died on March 25, 1918, in Paris, it was being bombarded by the Germans….” He stopped playing, “ … “and it was raining.” I’d heard this line before but couldn’t remember where.
He walked towards the bookshelf and pulled out a pack of Marlboro cigarettes that were hidden behind Patti Smith’s A Book of Days. The holy egoism of genius. He blew smoke into the air. “I am repaired, reconstructed, remodelled, remixed, rethought, reimagined, reinterpreted, rekindled, reactivated, but not rebooted!”
***
Almost everything here is inspired by Art of Noise
Do you fall for the defective man-boy, someone who is devious and dangerous? And you believe that you can change him? The challenge becomes exciting. You know it is a mission that will fail, but the swelling in your pants sweeps aside any shred of common sense.
“The role that concealment plays in the eroticism of underwear calls attention to the body beneath. But at this moment, there is so much writing on the waistband of your Calvin Kleins that I need to make sure that there isn’t a warning attached.”
Perfectly Hard and Glamorous 