A Pretty Sight (2 page)

‘Allen Gewalten zum Trotz sich erhalten’
‘
Despite all the powers closing in, hold yourself up
’

–
Goethe

After the war, he stays underground,

still wary of the necessary

horse trades and occupying powers.

Le Monde, Die Zeit, New York

Times
; Vietnam, Rwanda, Srebrenica:

years go by. In the stone arch of a busy

coffee house, Sophie is waving him over

past the billiards table, unfazed, looking

for all the world like she’s just

breezed in from 1933

and there’s no nightmare to come.

But the picture’s all wrong, her face

unaged, and where are Alex,

Willi or Christoph?

Sophie sighs, presses

a hand against her brother’s cheek.

‘Hans, it’s because we died.’

She describes the trial,

its forgone verdict, the bulbs

that burned all night in their cells,

the shared last cigarette

in the courtyard. Hans has turned

the details over again,

his memory tightening the blurs

like a Leica lens while the tension

in his face subsides

in the respite of knowing

at least they tried. They’re even laughing,

aping the parrot shrieks

of Friesler’s indignation,

gossiping over the Führer’s last pose,

Hans with a finger

cocked against his temple.

They order
café viennois
.

Sophie pokes at the dollops of whip

while ordered traffic crawls

past the painted glass

of the window. The newest papers

in wooden clips

fanned across

the billiard nap. Skinhead rallies,

latest dictatorships. Hans makes

another hopeless gesture.

Did everything change, or nothing?

Coffees done, they consider the years

like doors they never entered,

as if history’s just a lot

of people trying

to get from one room

to another. Outside, Hans

mounts the steps of a slowing tram.

Sophie ties her hair back

with an abalone barrette

as she turns

down Leopoldstrasse

and waves, looking for all the world

like she’s going to haunt it.

CHARACTERS

Socrates

Sid Vicious

SOC
.

Wait, stranger! Why the rush? This place

just turns upon itself, so to leave is only a step

to hurrying back. What’s the difference

if you pause and talk? Those scars

across your chest and face: did you once march

with spear and shield? I fought

at Potidaea and Delium. I’m Socrates, of Athens.

SID
.

Yeah, I’ve heard that bit. Righteous bastard

with all the questions. I must be dead,

to run into the likes of you.

SOC
.

Was it an accident? A sudden

fall from craggy heights? Or did you disturb

some starving animal in its sleep?

Who gave you those injuries?

SID
.

I did.

SOC
.

You?

SID
.

I cut my chest with broken glass.

SOC
.

And the scabs on the back of your hands,

were they not left by spear tips?

SID
.

That was just a laugh with a cigarette, some game

we’d play in the Hampstead bedsit.

SOC
.

What was the purpose?

SID
.

It was funny. It was supposed to give

them second thoughts about trying to smack me.

Show them that anything they’d try

isn’t half of what I’ve had already.

SOC
.

Who are they who’d seek to harm you?

SID
.

Suits and coppers. Punters in the audience. The fucking lot.

SOC
.

What were the reasons for their enmity?

SID
.

They didn’t like us. We were wasters

and fuck-ups who wouldn’t settle for what they

stood for: blind acceptance, apathy and moderation.

We pushed some buttons. Got kitted out in handcuffs,

leather, safety pins and razor blades. Nicked stuff.

Punch-ups. Three-chord songs with aggro-lyrics.

Style as revolt, arrogance over ability, violence

if the music failed. Like Rotten said, it’s worth

going where you’re least wanted,

since there’s so much more to achieve.

SOC
.

Were you an actor, or a rhapsode?

SID
.

A what?

SOC
.

A person skilled in reciting verse. Who takes the stage

at festivals with words stitched together so dramatically

that the rhythm of the music loads the crowd with feeling.

Years ago I met another rhapsode, who came from Ephesus.

I convinced him that the passion of his art passes through him

from gods into the audience; in effect he becomes possessed.

That when the beat and tone are right, frenzy builds,

and like the bacchants, he can momentarily lose his mind.

SID
.

Yeah, sounds about right.

SOC
.

When you look down upon the spectators

from the platform and see them weeping,

awestruck at the power of your tale, is it proof

you are a conduit between the gods

and the common crowd?

SID
.

Are you taking the piss?

SOC
.

What was the source of your enthusiasm?

SID
.

Speed. Heroin.

SOC
.

Are these some other, newer gods? What was their purpose?

SID
.

Purpose, mate?

SOC
.

Let me ask you this:

do you claim they brought disorder

into your minds, while still protecting you?

SID
.

Yeah.

SOC
.

Tell me, what is the meaning of virtue?

SID
.

Fuck off.

SOC
.

Remember, I was once like you, the stubborn

rube who stood against society’s rules,

then was put on trial for revering new gods

and corrupting youth. I too pulled faces

at the world, and shouted down

the ruling powers. Didn’t a jury find you

guilty of crimes against the state

and sentence death?

SID
.

I got fixed for good before they had the chance.

SOC
.

What was the vehicle of your death?

SID
.

Drugs. It was the drugs, mate.

SOC
.

Me, too. This was equally my fate.

SID
.

Oh yeah? What did you in?

SOC
.

Hemlock.

SID
.

Where’d you get it?

SOC
.

It’s brought by ship from Crete or Asia Minor.

SID
.

Must be good.

SOC
.

The effect is satisfactory. Your legs feel heavy,

then retreat from feeling anything,

as if a cold blade went tickling up your thighs

to snip and trim off portions of your body

with a thousand nipping cuts. It leaves a chill,

a glaze that frosts toward your heart,

pinching off your breath. It was the punishment

they prescribed, all because I asked

too many questions and failed to compromise.

Ever since, I’ve been cited as an example

of how to live the good life. You see the paradox?

SID
.

Listen, geezer, fuck right off. I wasn’t

looking for a dialogue, just the karzy.

But if all this tripe you’re laying out

is meant to serve me up as some stunned muppet

for your logic to outsmart, I’ve got a few words

you might need to chew on first,

since I’d hardly time to write some weepy memoir.

All that’s left of who I was

are press interviews, Pistols footage

and video of me in skids, scarred and junkie-thin,

dancing to an Eddie Cochran song in the sheen

of a scuzzy mirror. When I came on the scene,

I was just naive, then turned volatile;

they shoved me in the spotlight, stitched me up

with all the drugs and hype, then threw me to the wind.

I couldn’t get my head right, and never surfaced.

Since you’re so keen on painting

you and me as being two bin bags from

the same rubbish, I’ll tell you what: the question

isn’t virtue, but how you exercise it.

You can’t know if a wheel rolls till you nudge it

down a slope. So where was all that search

for virtue’s definition when the pro-Spartan Thirty

lodged their regime in your democracy’s agora

and started topping the opposition?

Suddenly, you were keeping mighty quiet.

Remember Heraclitus:
ethos anthropos daimon
?

You got yours, didn’t you?

SOC
.

Are you suggesting I deserved to die that way?

SID
.

No, mate, I’m just saying you must have seen

it coming, like I should’ve, coppers everywhere

and the tabloids predicting the end of the world.

Backing slogans like ‘No Future,’

I had to go the distance, didn’t I? Once the Pistols

imploded, I’d have been a pretty sight, in silk

and power tie, tugging a handgrip on the Tube,

counting off the platforms on the way to the office

and some thicko with a Green Day T-shirt shouting,

‘Hey, weren’t you Sid Vicious? Yeah, you did it

your
way, looks like!’ I think I see that now.

This afterlife must be the best detox going:

a clear head and all this time to wonder

what I think, now there’s time to think it over.

SOC
.

You speak as if the person you refer to

were someone else, a completely other soul

than the one you’ve left behind.

SID
.

Look, I don’t know. There’s no fucking logic

in it, right? How can we know ourselves?

We change. We backpedal. We try again.

One of you blokes once said the soul’s

an activity, not a state. That would give me hope.

That way, I could’ve worked through the trap

of being me forever. What a laugh.

This still isn’t you or me talking anyway,

just proxies in a poem. We never got to play

our parts; you’d your man Plato spinning

yarns about how ridiculously smart

and virtuous you were, while I got Gary Oldman.

So what’s one more tosser playing puppets

with his hand up our collective arse?

SOC
.

So who are we?

SID
.

A monkey’s tea party, for all I know.

Counterweight to the comfortable

and approved. A fishbone in the throat of those

who never bothered asking

whether wealth and power were such

gasping pursuits. But what’s a better way

to go than making one unholy noise

when you’ve got the world’s ear?

You might’ve been an annoying prat,

but I’d back you every time, even while

you were turning blue across a mattress.

At night, I hear feedback so constant

I think I haven’t dreamt it. There’s

no wind here, no sky or streets,

not even a proper pisser,

and I’m with my mind all the time.

‘I was amazed to watch everyone dance. What were all those
people doing, bouncing, stuck to one another, enclosed in a box
of smoke?’

–
Osel Hita Torres

An older, more informed friend of mine

said, ‘It’s easy, step to one side

and sway, then turn to the other, like that …

Lift your arms, and for fuck’s sake, don’t
count
.

Snapping your fingers is okay. C’mon,

break it up a little, not once and once

and once then once to each side, you trout,

try a few moves between.

It’s like a trance.’

I was terrified in junior high

as the cool kids shuffled in orderly rows

under the eyes of our teacher chaperones.

Prism shards sluiced off the mirror ball.

I escaped to the halls, toing and froing

the next hour away, the clues

dawning on me that being a teenager

was just a field test on an alien planet,

for seven years, to experiment with alcohol.

What
were
we doing, sneaking mickeys

in jean legs, risking a tab of acid,

slipping out to cars? No instructions,

no prescribed numbers of downs or yards

were set to measure our progress.

In back seats, sweat squeaky on vinyl, trying

to syringe pleasure into each other’s skin,

results rarely startling or sacred, but like

meditation, a worthwhile erasure of the self.

I tried sitting in lotus position once, but kept

thinking I could use a drink. A short-term

escape from the pain we earn, these

games we play to get out of our heads.

You roam El Raval’s archipelago of bars

while debating Cassavetes and Kurosawa

with some girl or boy who’ll break your heart,

the hurt with street cred now, framed

in a long shot you learn to hold.