Ezra, Nails, Harry, Justy. Four boys who had worked hard to excavate names quite so unusual. Yet these deltoid deities are America’s most sovereignly feared relay team. Did you ever look at them? Of course you didn’t, because they are mere creations that must turn to dust. It’s just unfortunate they do so before page three. While they do pant, I do rant. If I feel them they must exist, for their electrons can only exist because of my electrons. If you get my drift, time-shift, feeling miffed.
Here we are in the splendiferous stockbroker suburbs of Boston, an alliteration never previously used because it is so try-hard, die-hard. These boys feel all powerful, twitch, twitch twitching as Coach Rims glib jib annoys their senses with his muttering mumbo-jumbo before they transmute compute into hellion gazelles. They step on the gas and flatten the grass.
“Sex is good,” says Eliza inconsequentially.
“I am a model of humanity,” lobs Ezra.
“I AM a booze-infested fury,” counter-top-spins Eliza.
“I am the perfect fiasco,” smashes Ezra.
It is the terrible dialogue of an angst-ridden demagogue, but Eliza and Ezra are immune because nothing can impugn their love. They do not know yet what it is like to be 50 and to feel their bodies sway with decay. I indulge my desire to fire my lyre, with scenes from an underworld, where billions of animals are needlessly electrocuted, executed, and to wander through the wood where I am most understood.
My sylvan trance that is not in France because it is in Boston that is more than a feeling is interrupted by the arrival of the four boys who are on a run that would have been fun had it not been. They espy an old hobo who lives in a shoe. “What do you do?” they ask as one. “I might have been a pervert perverting the course of justice when I was young,” the hobo Romeo half-volleys, “but then again without a stain I may not.” With a lash and a crash, the four boys kill him. Why did they do it? Perhaps you should ask them.
Though it is too late now to ask Harri because his mother has also just sighed and died and in his grief he swallows his teeth and as the adrenalin of Benylin shivers and quivers through his skein of veins, he realises that he too has choked and croaked. Ezra, Nails and Justy are all quite sad, mad, not bad, at the glacial coldness of the mega-gnarly cave-dweller that Harri’s decaying body has become, and Coach Rims had found another brother to join their team. A boy called Dibbs who didn’t tell fibs.
Ezra has a thought that makes him fraught. A woman called Elizabeth Barbelo has told, let unfold, that the body of her young son who was murdered by college Dean Isaac has been buried in the hood near the wood. Ezra, Nails and Justy all think this is bad karma yet cannot stay calmer as they uncover the body.
“What shall we do?” they say. “Run like a dream before you scream,” backhands Coach Rims. It is Dibbs who drops the baton, falling flat on his nose, the race lost in repose.
“Margaret Thatcher, the Queen, the Nazis, Ronald Reagan, Bonanza and all the other fascists who don’t understand me,” dropshots Eliza.
“Those are my tropes, so why don’t you slope, off,” backspins Morrissey. “It is me who is waitan for Satan.”
Ezra visits Dean Isaacs. “Why it’s Ezra Pound who has come around,” the Dean returns. Ezra is confused, bemused. No one has yet told him he is a famous poet. What could be worse than speaking in verse? “You’ll never prove a thing that I did with my ding-a-ling,” Dean powers cross-court. Nails and Justy, perhaps too trusty, those two young bucks have even less luck, as elderly Dean felderlies both of them with the shove of a shovel. It is getting hard to recount the full body count as the ifs and stiffs are swallowed by earth, as surely as readers swallow their mirth.
“At least we will still be alive when America decides to nuke Japan again,” says Eliza, catatonically, gnomically, at the very moment of torment when a drunk driver smashes, crashes and whiplashes her body into atoms of bust dust. Ezra is still alive, a-jive, waiting, grating, hating for something he cannot grasp in his feeble clasp. To grow old or cold with kindness?
Digested read digested: Coming to grief with self-belief.
