lips and arseholes

I was Little John. He was Big John. Sometimes. He was also called Mad John.

He was a proselytising vegan. On our road trips, if somebody unwrapped a pork pie, scotch egg or Cornish pasty at the motorway services, he would darkly opine thus: "Lips and arseholes."

"What?"

"That thing you're eating: lips and arseholes. The sweepings from the the dirty abattoir floor".

"It tastes good."

"It will kill you. You will be killed by the lips and arseholes of animals you never even met."

"I don't want to meet them. I want to eat them."

"It will eat you."

"What will?"

"Cancer. Bowel cancer will eat you slowly. It will hurt and you will remember stuffing this pork pie into your face at a service station on the way up to some shitty nightclub."

"Oh fuck off."

The story was that he hadn't always been like this. Before a stint in prison he'd been just another sharp-suited, fully omnivorous bullshitter, into clothes, cars and fucking. After his few months on remand, there was something of the Charlie Manson about him. He enjoyed coming across as unpredictable and dangerous, but I never saw him actually hurt anybody. Not physically anyway. Not properly.

"How did you get through prison?" somebody would ask him.

"Acid," he liked to reply.

"Acid?"

"Yes, this mate of mine would sent me tabs or microdots under the stamp on a postcard. It's a piece of piss."

"Why did you want to be tripping in there? Anything could have happened."

"I just wanted to."

"Alright."

The two occasions I saw him roused to anything like real violence were both in and around Brixton, where I was living in a chaotic flat with a girlfriend who was fucking a shitty little homunculus named Ian and with a gaudily painted fright mask who was the girlfriend of somebody who used to torment me and everyone else at school.

One Brixton afternoon, the lunatic from downstairs decided to start some shit.

He was given to harassing us for alleged noisiness, usually kicking off his complaint session with a lusty assault on the buzzer and intercom. He drank all day and sat around waiting for somebody from our flat to return from work, college or criminal activity.

"Why is your buzzer going mental like that?" asked Big John.

"That's Mikey. He'll be saying that we're making too much noise."

"It's the middle of a weekday afternoon and all we're doing is cutting up coke and putting it in wraps. We're not making any noise."

"He will have seen us come in here. He's waited twenty minutes or so and now he can't wait to get started with his usual bullshit."

"Get rid of him."

"I'll try."

It wasn't easy. Mikey was not a rational person. Despite trying very hard to keep cool, I ended up annoying him by refusing his command to come downstairs. 

"I'm not going down there to talk to you, Mikey. You come up here if you're got a problem."

We heard Mikey thundering up the stairs. He pounded on the door.

"Get rid of him," said John.

"I said I'll try."

"Try harder - and don't let him in here."

I opened the door to attempt to reason with the excited Mauritian. Barefoot and wearing a grubby vest, he attempted to barge his way in.

I'm not a big bloke. Neither was he. I was able to keep him from crossing the threshold.

"You're not coming in here, Mikey. If you want to talk to me, you can talk out on the landing."

Mikey was all flailing arms and dirty words. John was laughing inside the flat.

"Who's laughing? Who's fucking laughing?" screamed Mikey.

John emerged from the living room and made himself known at the front door.

"I'm laughing," he told Mikey. "I'm laughing at you."

Mikey weighed up the situation. The younger man in front of him looked large and capable of causing harm.

"Why you fucking laughing?"

"I spend my life laughing at cunts like you."

Mikey exploded: a whirlwind of limbs and snarling curses. John gave him a shove in the chest. The smaller man staggered backwards and found himself at the top of the stairs. He thought for a moment and then pretended that the force of the shove had carried him further than it really had. He made a meal of rolling down the uncarpeted steps. He decided not to go further than the turn in the stairway.

"You pushed me," he screamed. "I'm calling the police."

"Are you, cunt?" smiled John. "Shall I call the immigration service?"

Mikey went quiet and I didn't hear anything from him for a few months after that.