Summer of Savile – Day 10: Qu’est-ce Que?

Jim fixed it for me – to be confused as fuck.

I always planned to post this next extract completely on its own, a lone swimmer clad in an Andy Warhold wig, drifting on a sea of equally crazed non-sequiters. With no context, I’d have suckled the maximum amount of comedy and confusion from Jimmy’s metaphorical teets and glugged it down until my bladder popped like a hot water bottle being inflated by a 1930s circus strongman. Read on.

On one of my trips to France I had walked into a shop to ask a price and there was a lady behind the counter. The counter was also the same height as my pelvic bone.

Honestly though, when you hear the rest of the story, it actually makes less sense.

Hands in trouser pockets I leaned foward to speak, bit before I could utter a word over-balanced and rocked back and forth, perfectly balanced by the hips. As I couldn’t get my trapped hands out of my trouser pockets I was well stuck, and the alarmed lady summoned her husband with loud Gallic cries. He levered me upright, but as I couldn’t speak French at the time, all I could do was smile like Charlie Chaplin and bow out.

I once read an account of someone who’d died on the operating table before being brought back. For 70 seconds, he was as dead as the boxes of bones at the cemetary. He said he’d seen the afterlife. It wasn’t a tunnel of light, and there were no long-passed relatives waiting on the other side with open arms. He said he’d found himself in a room where “…a ragged man with straw-hair and a pink beak rocked back and forth on his pelvic bone against a French lady’s counter.” I didn’t understand it at the time, but now it all makes a horrible kind of sense. There are more reports too, if you know where to look, all the same. Murderers, charity workers, the great, the good and the nothings inbetween, and what they saw when they straddled the bridge between one plane and the next. There’s no tunnel. There’s no clouds and harps and no lake of fire. There’s just him. Rocking back and forth on his pelvic bone, for all eternity.

God help us all.

~ by Stuart on July 9, 2009.