Rocky and the New Rebels

He had the idea to start a group called Rocky and the New Rebels. It was just an idea that came to him one day, like others that rubbed against his brain and then flung themselves out into the world like a magician’s pigeons. In fact, his brain was a veritable volcano of rebellious ideas. For instance, while he was working at McDonald’s he would sometimes greet his customers with subersively mangled idioms. To one he would say “the early turd catches the worm” and to another “a fool and her fanny are soon fucked” and once “the tenner is mightier than the turd” when a young sales professional paid for his Big Mac with a ten pound note.

It’s not that he actually intended to change the world or tried to kick against some regime or his parents or society. In some ways he was too happy for that. And it’s not that he was simply eccentric either. You could say his rebellion was against reality itself, against the inability of his surroundings to be impressive and satisfying in and of themselves. Of course, all rebels pay a price – James Dean died young and so did Sylvia Plath, and Ali got Parkinson’s. The curse is different for each one. In Rocky’s case his reality started to fulfill his wishes by turning his fears into reality.

The first time it happened he was talking on his mobile. It sounded like a breaking signal, a crackling hum in his ears. When he cut off the connection and dialled again his mother picked up, but this time a giant fly the size of his fist was sitting on his mobile’s arial, fluttering its wings. He dropped the phone immediately. Even greater was his surprise when the fly spoke to him: “Fly with me, fuckface”, it said. Then it took off with a buzz and swivelled out the window in a wavelike motion. Rocky was totally startled and ran next door to his friendly Swedish neighbour Katrina.

Katrina had just been fingering herself and was in no mood to eject from her fantasy of meeting the handsome yoga coach in a warm, bubbly jacuzzi at the gym. As a result Rocky was greeted by a rather dour-faced girl who barely responded to his story of a giant fly on his mobile.

“Come in”, she said, “I am just about to make some coffee.” Although Rocky was a pretty ordinary-looking bloke, she wondered whether he could somehow compensate for the intrusion upon her private pleasures. “I wish I could meet a giant fly right now …” she thought, but didn’t say anything.

“Do you want to be in my new group, Rocky and The New Rebels?”, he asked Katrina when they’d settled down with a cup of coffee on the sofa. “I just thought about it today.” He rifled his fingers through his gelled hair and, for a moment, felt like someone he’d seen on TV once. The feeling passed and Katrina said: “Is it a band or something?” “Yea, kind of, except we write stories.”

“OK”, she said.

Then it happened again. Katrina turned into a huge, hairy gorilla. First her face blurred and became woolly, then her whole body started to look more muscular and furry. The gorilla got up from its seat, slurped the last of the coffee in an animalistic way, then proceeded to bear upon Rocky like a hungry predator. Rocky was way too petrified to move. He had once learned in a self-growth book that you should face your fears before you can move on and develop personally. He hung onto this thought as the gorilla, who turned out to be astonishingly female, shoved him to the ground and unbuttoned his trousers to have sex with him.

"Is this rebellious, or just plain rude?", he wondered before his mind got swept into a swirl of brusque urges and occasional pleasures.

quitting him

hosed-down, hosed-down, quitting him
chamfered places pleases him
what concrete cleaned-up crate a herm
dare frame chamfered another time?

who waits and pales and farrow crates
then switches off the pump-iron?
what upstanding here elsewhere?
red work my head light there?

who's hosed-down brightly burning him?
whose concrete chamfered pleases him?
what concrete cleans up crates aherm
and dares to frame a fearful time?

who waits and pales at farrow crates?
whose words switch off, disintegrate?