Lurkers Page 13

  ‘So...see? British jokes aren’t funny because they’re not even true.’

  ‘So, jewish jokes are funny because they are true?’

  ‘They’re not true either.’

  ‘So, you’re a holocaust denier,’ I said, ‘I didn’t see that coming.’

  ‘I don’t deny the holocaust; I just don’t think it’s funny.’

  ‘See: now you’re denigrating the holocaust,’ I said, ‘Where I concede that nothing’s funnier than the holocaust.’

  ‘You’re just sick,’ HippyGuy said.

  ‘You’re just nosy,’ I told him, ‘Stop talking to me anytime.’

  ‘You’re talking to me,’ he said.

  ‘I’m heckling you. Because you keep saying words.’

  ‘Just like you heckle the holocaust.’

  ‘I haven’t heckled the holocaust,’ I said, ‘Hell: Gramps died in a concentration camp.’

  ‘He did?’ HippyGuy asked.

  ‘He was a guard,’ I said, ‘He fell out of a tower. Tragic.’

  ‘That doesn’t surprise me,’ HippyGuy said, believing me.

  Hutch called: ‘Y’know, my grandmother actually did die in a concentration camp.’

  ‘Seriously?’ I asked.

  He nodded slowly.

  ‘Oh,’ I said. ‘Sorry. Didn’t know.’ And no one said anything for a few seconds. So I asked: ‘Any chance she died when a guard fell on her?’

  Chuck grinned massively at me.

  ‘And it’s always a joke,’ HippyGuy said.

  ‘Is it cool to joke about nazis?’ I asked.

  He shrugged.

  ‘You wouldn’t be offended if I joked about nazis,’ I confirmed.

  ‘Not if they were the target, I guess.’

  ‘Interesting,’ I said, ‘The nazis being both obviously national socialists and less obviously a subfaction of catholicism.’

  ‘No they weren’t. They were, like, the original neocons.’

  ‘The nationalsozialismus—the National Socialist German Workers’ Party—were neocons?’

  ‘Whatever.’

  ‘This is the problem with you idiots,’ I said, ‘You have no idea what your roots are. You join these meaningless quasipolitical raves and drive around in flowered up Volkswagen Beetles with no idea where it all came from. You know that the first Volkswagen Beetles were commissioned by Hitler? That Ferdinand Porsche made the People’s Car at Hitler’s request? So here you are: national socialists driving Hitler’s People’s Cars, whimpering about antisocialistic rich people, like lawyers and bankers, themselves historically jewish. That’s the joke. Badumdum.’

  FIFTEEN

  One in the morning.

  Historically, the place would have crested the midnight lull by now, the most persistent of diurnal lurkers remaining from sunset—loosely including myself—and those leaving the pubs early beginning to bottleneck in the lobby, waiting for an open table. Most immediately, I blame the lack of ashtrays which began this unfortunate trend a couple years ago; but there are other factors.

  The economy sounds easy to blame, though I’ve seen no evidence of that. After 2005, while the ashtrays remained in place, people drove here to complain at each other that petrol was three bucks a gallon—something I could never care much about, three per gallon being 75¢ per litre being maybe 35p per litre. Meaning that, until recently, Americans had been paying up to 15p per litre while predicting an economic armageddon any decade now. That unleaded had been selling in the more developed parts of Africa for around twelve bucks a gallon while it had hovered around a buck twenty-five after 1991 in the states was something they’d never been able to guess after, and certainly never bothered to find out. Even after 2008, when the economy crashing in March 2001 with the DotCom collapse really began to suck, the same people finding their ways to the restaurant—to any restaurant—still sat around complaining that coffee had magically jumped from 85¢ to $2.19, overlooking the fact that minimum wage had also jumped, from $3.35 to $7.25, in the same twenty years.

  What I blame more than the rest is the availability and price of XBoxLive and other chatrooms: to the extent that people used to hang out in restaurants because they had nothing better to do, most are now fragging each other in TeamDumbass2 from home, where they can blame their ineptitude on invisible distractions like cats and parents instead of conceding a debate or rumble out in the world due to their own shortcomings. We in GenerationX practised anarchy by stealing squadcars; the kids today threaten each other with being removed from a MySpace.com Top Eight. As Oligarch of the Universe, I intend to hire Doug Stanhope as an advisor, even if he, like Denis Leary, has reportedly quit smoking.

  One in the morning. My watch beeped, echoing through the ruins of this extinct civilisation; planes fell from the sky; George thankalorded in my direction.

  ‘Still writing?’ Leslie asked, making little attempt to hide the real question: how much longer we planned to sit here, doing nothing.

  ‘Round here,’ I said, quoting Counting Crows, ‘we’re never sent to bed early, and nobody makes us wait; round here we stay up very, very, very, very late.’

  ‘The times,’ Chuck said, quoting Bob Dylan, ‘they are a’changin.’

  I flashed my TShirt at him, quoting nothing.

  ‘School’s out?’ he asked.

  ‘Generation landslide; close the gap between’em,’ I said, adding, ‘And I laugh to myself at the men and the ladies who never conceived us billion dollar babies; la-da-da-da-da.’

  Chuck squinted. ‘Wasn’t that more about the Boomers though?’

  ‘That’s sorta my point,’ I said, ‘In more ways than the obvious, GenerationX wouldn’t exist without the Boomers. The term itself, Billy Idol notwithstanding, was coined by Douglas Coupland to describe his generation’s progeny, defined as the first in recent millennia raised without theological ideals and given nothing much to replace the church and its moralistic prescriptions. What he didn’t necessarily predict was that we’d turn out okay enough to see the next generation fail to meet even our standards, insofar as we have any. Which then brings me to Alice Cooper, who made every attempt to terrorise the other boomers with the mutated vestiges of the baroque, from the sad fact that eighteen-year-olds in nineteen seventy-one were handed a licence to kill without yet understanding what life even was to an admonition in nineteen seventy-three that he was done playing nice, though that led mostly into a couple records about nightmares before ending up in a mental ward. Enter Marilyn Manson, at about the time Alice was trying to reach GenerationX with “Lost in America”, who noticed that, all hype aside, Alice had never really gone where we’d expected him to go after the early seventies; Manson took it to the next level, terrorising most of GenerationX, giving the Millennial Generation reason to think that, now, we in X are old and out of touch, just as we were given reason to think that the generation giving us Sid Vicious were old and out of touch.’

  ‘So, nothing’s changed,’ Chuck said.

  ‘Not overall. The kids today—and there are always kids today—misidentify the grownups as boring and unrealistic, because kids, while kids, tend to be retarded.’ I pointed to Leslie’s book. ‘Your guy there once mentioned that the sixties, while regarded as fictional by the kids today, did actually happen, and what we’ve heard about them was largely true. That was only ten years ago. And I get that. Because, today, YouTubeDotCom being the new MTV, archiving BonJovi and other surfacelevel shit from the eighties, no one under twenty—well, thirty, really—has any functional idea what it was like to be there for real. The kids today can’t imagine let alone remember the relief of hitting nineteen eighty-four without running into BigBrother. They think they’re afraid of Korea and the American government, but know nothing about seriously wondering whether a nuclear war will begin while they sleep.’

  ‘The Boomers had more to fear,’ Chuck said.

  ‘I know,’ I said, ‘That’s what I’m saying. The boring soccermoms of the eighties had stopped caring about the USSR afte
r about nineteen sixty-three. We didn’t get that. We certainly didn’t get that their parents had been those guys magically surviving hell in Monte Cassino. By the time we encountered any of these people, they were old and boring and had no idea how impossible the present was.’

  Leslie shook her head, confused. ‘So, my generation thinks things are worse than they really are, and yours thinks they’re better than they really are?’

  ‘More or less,’ I said, ‘Except that your generation, being young and stupid, could never guess after that; mine, having forgotten, no longer care.’

  ‘Some of us still care,’ HippyGuy intruded.

  ‘So what,’ I said, ‘You’re, what, twenty-one? Twenty-two?’

  HippyGuy shrugged, not bothering to say whatever.

  ‘You’re an idiot,’ I said, ‘And not in any generational sense.’

  ‘I’m an idiot because I’m twenty-one?’

  ‘You’re a genius because you’re twenty-one. You’re an idiot because you’re missing the whole point that your generation does still care; you’re trying to defeat my argument by agreeing with it.’

  ‘Whatever.’

  ‘Okay, new rules: “whatever” means “I concede”. Got it?’

  ‘Whatever.’

  ‘Very good.’

  ‘It means you’re wrong,’ HippyGuy said, ‘and that I’m not gonna bother explaining why.’

  ‘Then you’re misusing it,’ I said, ‘Though it’s good that you’re not bothering to explain your doomed little position, since I didn’t want you talking to me in the first place.’

  ‘Then don’t ask me to explain things.’

  I stared at him for a second. Then I asked no one at all: ‘Why can’t anyone ever remember that I don’t start these things; idiots come to me, intruding on my table, preventing me from writing a book...the hell with it: I’m expecting too much from stupid people.’

  ‘If I’m so stupid—’ HippyGuy began.

  ‘Don’t care meaningless ’tard.’ I went back to trying to type.

  ‘You do kinda respond to them though,’ Leslie said.

  ‘Caught that,’ I said, typing, ‘Not doing it anymore.’

  ‘Thankalord!’ George called.

  ‘Yay,’ I said, trying to focus on the laptop.

  Out in the restaurant, Hutch made noises: ‘He does this all the time. You talk to him, and then he gets all angry that you’re bothering him.’

  ‘Sure,’ HippyGuy replied, ‘He’s writing a book nobody’s gonna read.’

  ‘I’ve read them,’ Hutch said, possibly honestly, ‘They’re good.’

  ‘I doubt it,’ HippyGuy said.

  ‘Well,’ Hutch said, ‘I think they’re good.’

  ‘If he’s so good,’ HippyGuy challenged through false dichotomy, ‘then why’s he gotta write them in a restaurant.’

  ‘Sign, sign, everywhere a sign,’ I muttered at the laptop.

  ‘Hmmm?’ Leslie asked.

  ‘Five Man Electrical Band,’ I told her, ‘“I took off my hat and said ‘Imagine that: me, working for you’”.’

  ‘Oh,’ she said.

  ‘Applied irony,’ I said, ‘Hippies maintaining that they had a right to be where everyone else was.’

  ‘Didn’t they?’

  ‘Sure. Forty years ago. Today, hippies are asking why I’ve got to write books in restaurants. They haven’t even got signs to point to.’

  ‘So, you’re not talking to me,’ HippyGuy said, ‘But you’re talking about me.’

  ‘I can write about you too. What’s your name.’

  ‘I’m not telling you that.’

  I shrugged. ‘I’ll just call you Melvin. You look like a Melvin.’

  ‘It’s not Melvin,’ he said.

  Typing, I announced, ‘At which point Melvin embraced Hutch, erupting with, “I’ve got to have you. Here. Now. On the floor. The whole restaurant can watch, for all I care”.’

  ‘Very funny,’ HippyGuy said.

  ‘Then,’ I recited, ‘Melvin’s head exploded from too much selfimportance in such a tiny space, and he never said anything again.’

  ‘I’m still talking,’ HippyGuy challenged, ‘Your fiction doesn’t change that fact. Do something about that.’

  ‘And Hutch fondly remembered the combative pacifist who’d abandoned his moral code to get all uppity in the face of the real world.’

  ‘Nobody’s gonna read this shit,’ HippyGuy lied.

  ‘Is Hutch me?’ Hutch asked, too happy, ‘You’re putting me in a book?’

  I looked at Leslie. ‘Maybe I’ll go back to the thing about the aliens.’

  She nodded.

  ‘Talk about fiction,’ HippyGuy said, ‘If the aliens are so warlike, why haven’t they destroyed the planet yet.’

  ‘The leprechauns told them not to,’ I told the laptop.

  ‘So aliens don’t exist?’ HippyGuy asked, ‘You really think you’re alone in the universe?’

  ‘I really think you’re alone in your stupidity.’

  ‘Whatever.’

  ‘Once upon a time, aliens existed; they evolved and flourished on their planet for ten billion years until their sun burned out; in all that time, they never finished searching an infinite number of galaxies, each a hundred thousand lightyears wide, in order to stumble upon Earth; the end.’

  ‘Short story?’ Leslie asked.

  ‘Not short enough,’ I said.

  ‘That’s stupid,’ HippyGuy said.

  ‘This is why I hate morons,’ I told Leslie, ‘They ignore the fact that humans are, to our knowledge, the most advanced species, after a hundred and sixty thousand years of culturebuilding, ever to occupy this planet which is uncommonly protected from extinctioncausing asteroids by Jupiter, and which is only now in the twenty-first century beginning to develop the technology required to even film other planets and nearby starsystems and galaxies; but aliens, while mathematically probable, necessarily hail from planets which didn’t waste four billion years evolving species exterminated by asteroids which did get through and impact, and have therefore been flying planet to planet since about five minutes after the big bang in their dedicated search for a rock ninety million miles from a tiny star in an indistinct arm of one galaxy among vigintillions.’

  ‘So, aliens exist,’ Leslie said, ‘but can’t find Earth.’

  ‘Mathematically probably,’ I said.

  ‘Makes sense to me,’ she allowed.

  ‘But you can’t rule it out,’ HippyGuy whined.

  I told Leslie: ‘Which allows morons to presume that, being not ruled out, aliens and deities and intelligent hippies, which might exist, therefore necessarily do.’

  ‘Right,’ Leslie said.

  ‘Which of course is stupid,’ I concluded, ‘To the extent that we can even ascertain the probability that aliens might exist, in any form, possibly but not certainly evolved beyond a monocellular state, even if that probability were ninety-nine percent, it wouldn’t promote hypothesis to fact; it would totally fail to show that these potentially multicellular aliens were traipsing about the universe, looking for inhabited planets; add specifics, like having found Earth, whatever their warlike intentions, and the odds we haven’t got yet tend to plummet even further.’

  ‘Whatever,’ HippyGuy said as though he were part of the conversation.

  ‘I’m gonna write a book called “Whatever”,’ I told Leslie.

  ‘Sounds boring,’ she said.

  ‘It will be. It’ll be a selfhelp manual on how to lose a debate without retaining that pesky feeling of failure.’

  ‘It would probably sell,’ she said.

  ‘Yeah: whatever,’ I dismissed.

  She smirked.

  I looked at my watch. It was ten after one. ‘I’m gonna go smoke for a minute,’ I said, clicking the laptop shut.

  ‘Oh,’ she said, looking at her cigarettes.

  ‘Go ahead,’ Chuck said, ‘I can watch your stuff again.’

  She smiled and grabbed her smokes, fol
lowing me outside. Once she’d lit one: ‘You do kinda encourage these people, you know.’

  ‘Not really,’ I said, ‘Not...if I’m sitting in a booth, doing something, not talking to anyone....’

  ‘You do talk to them though. Even if they talk to you first.’

  ‘Yeah. I’m in my booth, and they intrude. If I were at home, writing a book, and someone came into the house and started talking to me, uninvited, and I didn’t just shoot them for it, it wouldn’t be encouraging them to stick around if I asked what the hell they were doing there.’

  ‘That’s not what you’re doing though. If you just told people to fuck off, that would be one thing; that you respond to their admittedly intrusive babble is another.’

  ‘I do tell them to fuck off. In Hutch’s case, literally. It doesn’t stop them.’

  ‘I guess.’

  ‘I do get it,’ I said, ‘That I bother to explain why their statements are stupid is unnecessary when all I have to maintain is that their statements are uninvited. Like with the aliens: that idiot wants to discuss their intentions without bothering to establish that they know about Earth, or really even that they exist at all. By the same token, he wants to argue that he’s not an idiot without bothering to establish that I care whether he’s an idiot: I don’t wanna talk to these people at all, let alone about the minutiae of their boring little makebelieve.’

  ‘So don’t talk to them,’ she said, ‘Don’t respond. That’s easy.’

  ‘Not really. And you’re kinda new here. I’ve tried that before. If you just ignore them, they get more insulted, come over, and try to scare you into acknowledging them.’

  ‘Probably,’ she said, ‘But, that being illegal, it gives you a case. If they wanna take their importance from trying to talk to you to trying to scare you into talking to them, that’s assault. Isn’t it?’

  ‘Talking to me at all is assault. But yeah: poking me to make sure I know you’re there and annoying me is battery.’

  ‘So wait for that. And then call the police.’

  ‘Yeah, hi, police? Would you mind dropping everything and hurrying over here to arrest a stupid person tapping me because I don’t wanna talk to him? Cool. I’ll wait here.’