Scene: Bedroom on one side and hallway with door on the other. Bedroom is in darkness while there is a light on in the hallway, illuminating the front door.
Phone rings. Light turns on in bedroom
Mercer: Hello?
Audience cheers as they realise actor is famous character actor Jonathan Mercer. Mercer smiles and gives a small wave to the audience before returning to a disgruntled face.
Mercer: Why wouldn’t I let them in? Are you coming up now?
Climbs out of bed in nothing but his underwear, audience whoops and laughs at semi-naked body. He opens the door and audience cheers again, realising it’s the famouse character actor’s brother, Michael Mercer (hence referred to as Michael). As he comes in two other men try to come in too and MErcer has to hold the door closed.
Mercer: What’s happening?
Michael: Just don’t let them in!
[audience laughs]
Door bursts open and two men fall in.
Rob: Let me see him!
Alan: No man, just lets go home.
Rob: I just want to fucking talk to him!
[audience laughs]
Mercer: Michael! Rob really wants to talk to you!
Michael: (offstage) Tell him he can fucking DIE!
[audience laughs uncontrollably. Actors have to pause whilst laughing finishes]
Mercer: I can’t let you in Rob, he doesn’t want to talk to you. You’ve been drinking and talking to him would be a bad idea at this juncture.
Alan: He’s right. Come on.
Rob: NO! I want to talk to him! I want to fix this!
Mercer: Rob, it’s 4am. I’m standing here holding you back in my underwear. I’m fucking shattered.
[audience laughs]
Rob: Just get him out here!
Mercer: What did you do?
Rob: I kissed Kelly alright! I want to apologise!
[audience makes that annoying "ooooooh" sound]
Mercer: Look, it’s not going to happen tonight. Just go home and get some rest.
Michael: (offstage) Tell that mother fucker to get OUT OF MY FLAT.
[audience laughs]
Mercer: Rob, get out. Seriously. I’m not letting you in any further, and if you don’t leave then I’m going to have to force you out with Alan.
[laughter]
Rob: Fine! Fine! Fuck it, I’m going! But I’m going to fix this! Tell him I’m sorry ok. Tell him I didn’t mean it.
Michael: (offstage) Go to fucking HELL Rob!
[audience: aww]
Mercer waves bye to Alan and Rob as they step out the flat. Offstage the audience can hear Michael pouding the walls with his fists. Mercer rubs his eyes with weariness.
Mercer: God, what a fucking night.
exeunt stage left
[audience claps and cheers and laughs. Curtain pulls closed]
Home is a sticky floor and pictures of a stripper spreading cream over the wall by slapping her ass. The faint smell of pizza and cigarettes. Weed and plastic cups strewn over tables and cocktails in the carpet. Home is the deep crevases of a familiar bed with soft sheets and clothes hid under the dusty frame. The countless sheafs of notes, letters, stories littering the desk, the lava lamp hidden in the cupboard, the fedora hat perched precariously on the edge of the bookcase.
Or is it?
Could it be that home is somewhere that is not, indeed, home? Perhaps home is within the base of an improvised chocolate cake, snugly squashed between the honey and maple syrup. Or maybe it’s between the cushions of a deep white couch with a delusioned budgie chirping human overhead. On a park bench, pondering future hispanic lovers, tragic car crashes and experimental lesbianism. No, wait. If it was anywhere then it’d be in the folds of cookie-crumbed sheets with fingers grasping whiter-than-white knuckles and faces falling gently asleep on shoulders.
Home seriously appears to be where your heart is.
There’s lots of things that get me depressed. Not depressed. Down. Lots of things get me down. Sometimes it’s only a little bit, but a little bit down is still down.
Like, for example, there’s this one person (person A) who used to know another person (person B). Now, A knew B before I knew B, and I knew A before I knew B too. And A seemed like a perfectly nice person (until I learned different) while B seemed like a perfectly fantastic person (and I still think the same). However, A had some nasty nasty things to say about B, really truly nasty things whose home should be in schoolyards, but I wasn’t deterred. B was awesome. So I stuck with B and soon lost A (a great move on my part), but now A is good friends with B, and they get along so magically that I find the hypocrisy hard to bear. So, as a result, I stay away from A and B. Which is a shame, because I really like B.
Another example would be another person (lets call this one C) who, many many moons ago, read a private and confidential notebook that was under my bed. Now, this wasn’t an accident mind you. C was in my room, all by herself, and C decided to search around for it. And when she found it she read it cover to cover (which didn’t take long, seeing how I had just started it) and claimed it was ‘bedtime reading’ which cracked me up something awful when she decided to tell everyone the horrible acts I had partaken in. Of course, C never really told anyone how she came across this information, she just told it and let everyone feel sorry for her and evils against me. Of course, I didn’t say anything. I rolled with the punches and stayed smug enough to shake it off, knowing what I know.
A fourth person (D) about a year ago tried to seduce me before exclaiming to the world what a bastard I was - a side effect of ‘just saying no’.
E thought she knew me and tried to use that information against me. But she didn’t know me, so I found myself wounded and lonely.
F used to tell me secrets that were for me and me alone, but he told everyone else them too.
G keeps me at an arms length (as does B, for that matter).
H and I are stale to me.
J is never there although she pretends to be.
K, I never see anymore.
L is losing herself in the worst possible way. Ah well.
M asked me every time I saw her if I was ok because once when I saw her I wasn’t smiling. I had good reason not to smile mind you, but she asked me why and I said it was nothing. And nothing continued until she stopped, and now I feel bad for not telling her.
I’ve said in a previous entry that I sound depressed because there was nothing good happening in my life worth reporting about. All the good things were too little to report, so nothing sounded good. But now I have many good things. Last night I wrote so much on my novel that I thought I was going to explode with happiness. In the morning of the afternoon I received a wake up call that has frankly made the rest of my day. Yesterday I saw a film that has made me change my definition of ‘noise’ into ’sound’. There are all these little happy things shining their way through, but at the same time there’s this half-alphabet, and then some, of things that are getting me down. And the result is a feeling of neutral emotions where happy and sad have combined to give nothing nothing at all and all you can do is sit and get by without any strong feelings until something really really good or really really bad comes along and skews your emotions enough for a happy drink or a sad drink and then soon things are right back where they were and the song and dance starts all over again.
Though, it occurs to me now that I could save so much grief and so much money if I just stuck to my life of solitude that I enjoy oh so much. But then there would be less happy to mingle with less sad.
It is indeed a horrible conundrum
The blind vagrant calls and screams but no one hears. Those higher up only in their minds take no heed and on this day the cold steel of betrayal sinks into their exposed and fleshy red backs. There’s no anger, no hate - not yet - only the most devastating feeling of surprise. And the last flutter of thought behind those royally wronged eyelids is one of foreshadowing, one of someone told you so. Some poor guy knew this would happen, and it has.
Beware the Ides of March, the vagrant yelled. Beware the mother fucking Ides of March.
Heaving bodies join on a liquid floor, two people so consumed by the bass that their bodies refuse to stop their marionette swings as they cannibalise each other. By their feet a girl dies with her eyes watching her brain and a strike across the cheek. Feet slide and arms wrap round stomachs as bodies are worn away by grinding, perfume leaks into noses and kisses escape down necks. There’s the eyes closed, head back terror of becoming lost in everything and being momentarily free. Gone is the body, gone is the mind, gone is the requited lonliness that these two things nurse. All that’s left is sweat and a pulversing bass line that abolishes all forms of thought and feeling. There’s all that freedom in a void.
All that horrible horrible freedom.
There’s an empty bowl on my bedside table and a cup of coffee growing on my desk. Tags litter the floor, overlapped only by frills of black and white. The peanut butter is almost gone and the eggs are out of date. There is little tea to speak of. The bed sheets (unchanged) lie rumpled and folded in the smallest chance that memories could escape.
Come home.
It’s just one of those things isn’t it? Anonymity lets you get away with anything. I used to be anonymous, and yeah it was fun. I could say whatever I wanted to whoever I wanted and fear no repercussions (apart from the occasional underhanded comment to my make-believe self). I don’t know what you write when you’re being anonymous, as I don’t read it, but I bet it’s liberating. A way to really really empty yourself of everything that you’re too afraid to say in real life.
I bring this matter up now because, unlike you, I am not anonymous. People know who I am, and these people can finger wag and tell me off for saying whatever I want, and can in fact judge me for saying it. This means that when I am writing here I have to keep some sort of decorum. I need to keep in character to those who know me and those who think they know me, which is frankly a bit of a pain. It means that I can’t say what I really feel and what I really want as I am perched on the edge of my bed with wet socks and cold feet. If I did say what I wanted, then they would think less of me than I am now.
For example, if I were to write here that I miss you, they would smile and look at me slightly kinder. If I were to write that I think about you almost every minute, that you run rampant throughout my mind with your nimble fingers hanging on to every thought, they would utter an “aww” and think of me of an old romantic. I write that I want your body next to mine, arms wrapped round shoulders on cold nights and noses nuzzling wet foreheads and chins, they let their hearts flutter at the cuteness. I write that your lack of touch drives me crazy at night and I sometimes lay unable to sleep staring at the spot where you should be, and they wonder when I’ll stop being so open. I write that I wake up in the middle of the night grabbing at the sheets wildly until I realise that you’re not actually there, and they avoid me. I write that when I think of your naked body against mine my lungs burn and my heart pounds itself into a bloody pulp, and they pretend they don’t know me. I write that I want you and need you wholly so much that it physically hurts, and they never want to see me again.
But fuck what they think.
Things are going well. Holidays are mercifully in sight and I am finally catching up on all the sleep I lost earlier on in the year, but sometimes to strange results. For example, I now occasionally wake up with my hand clutching the hall-phone and my finger holding down the buzzer that lets people into the stairwell of the building. It then leads to an awkward conversation when the postman/woman/person delivers a parcel and I’m standing in my PJ’s with a confused look strewn across my face.
Christmas is in a couple of days, which is always a laugh despite how financially crippling it is (ohdeargodI’moutofmoneywherewilligetmoneyohi’mohsohungry). I received a shirt off my friends that lovingly reads “Team Jonathan!” and sports a small cartoon character looking loved up and happy. It’s a good present, I’ll admit, but I don’t think I’ll wear it again. Other people tend to get nervous when faced with inside jokes that they are not inside on. It’s all unsettling.
Anyway, Christmas is in a couple of days, which means the traditional Chinese food for dinner and the habitual argument where my family are forced into the same area for more than an hour.
But it’s not Christmas that I’m excited for! It’s afterwards that’s the real treat. The day after boxing day I get to saddle up with my huge orange Salamon bag and embark on the 5 hour epic journey down south to visit Charlotte – who I have not seen for just over a month. My skin is vibrating with excitement and nervousness. Excitement that yes, finally, thank FUCK I can finally see her again after such a long stretch without. She is like the drop of pure bottled water to my harsh, gambling desert, or the eagerly anticipated orgasm to my lack of sex.
However, during my ten day stay at casa del Charlotte, I will be shacking up with a number of other guests too; namely almost the entirety of Charlotte’s out-of-country family. I have the haunting image of German aunts tottering up to me and squeezing my cheek in a ‘oh, look at him’ kind of way while the uncles sit and softly mock me for my preference of Corona over Koppenburg and ask me of Scotland and where my kilt is. I, in turn, will think about asking them where their sausages are, or even their lederhosen, but I will not. It’s better if they like me methinks. Means there’s more places to stay if I find myself randomly stranded in Germany.
– Tangent –
I find that I do that a lot it seems. I have made good friends with many people from around the world – most of them to the extent that they’d be willing to let me crash on their couches for a couple of nights. These people range from Canada to Oregon to India to Norway to Australia to Russia to Singapore. I’m all set for a round the world trip one day.
– End Tangent –
I cannot wait to see her though. Despite the various cousins weaving in and out and the endless hours of small talk to endure, it’s all worth it to see her technicolour smile. There’s just something about her that makes my vocabulary fall short. It’s when she smokes, you see. There’s this devious little look behind her innocent face as two smooth fingers arc a brilliant burning ember to the shadow of her licked lips, and how that look is momentarily obscured by the drift of smoke that leaks from her mouth.
Ah, I should stop thinking that. Not is my vow of abstinence taking a beating with those thoughts, but also my temporary hiatus on smoking. Due to a lovely drunken bet, I am smoke free until Saturday and thus far I have lasted three days without a cigarette.
By my God I want one. And Charlotte. Maybe even together, at the same time.
But that could cause burning. One after the other. But, the question begs, which one first?
