A LIFE OF CRIME
CHAPTER ONE
Jim
It all started at school when I'd been told I couldn't attend the rock music concert. That sucked.
It was the only time that the musos got a chance to play stuff other than classical pieces, which while being - well - classic, bored the shit out of the average teenage boy who'd just discovered Hendrix and Zappa. No offence to Wolfgang and Ludwig and the various Johan Sebastians who'd penned many a fine tune - even Jimi and Frank would admit to that - but I used to think they'd have taken a different direction if they'd had access to a Stratocaster with a whammy bar rather than tinkling on harpsichords in musty drawing rooms hung with heavily draped brocade in burgundy paisley. But hey, who was I?
Fact was, I'd been framed. Just like one of those pasty-faced tarts in the paintings in said musty drawing rooms; bemused ladies with more petticoats than virtue, witnessing, with the same dispassionate expression, each musical recital or the music teacher rogering the eager pupil on the velvetine piano stool. If Leonardo had only done a full length portrait of El Giaconda I reckon he'd have been dubbed one of the earliest pornographers. You might think that's just down to my own twisted mind but I swear the Mona Lisa wore the same expression as my ex-girlfriend Mary Manson when I was diddling her pink bits with my snakelike tongue. Still, we'll never know unless they miraculously turn up his secret sketch book - the one he used to practice proportion and human anatomy - nudge, nudge, wink, wink...
Speculation aside, I was in the frame, snookered and fitted up.
Someone had been smoking in the boys' room and no one was owning up to the deed. No one was being freed up from class either for the first and spectacular high school rock concert starring our own budding virtuosos. And it would have remained a deadlock if old Gallbladder Gilbert, our Maths teacher hadn't received the crumpled note from an anonymous snitch.
He unfurled it with relish and as the ferrety eyes scanned the words before him, I could feel the perspiration trickling into my arse crack like an icy eel of guilt. Which is weird because I hadn't done anything to merit the discomfort. But there's something that tells you you're fucked even before the accuser makes eye contact with you or hisses your name which is precisely what Gallbladder did as the gnarled fist dropped to his thigh, telltale flashes of feint-ruled exercise paper pushing between the folds of flesh.
I heard my name spoken but I didn't register the implications of the sound as if someone was asking me for directions in a foreign language. It was only when it was repeated with the balance of the sentence - a command - that my synapses fired all at once like an anti-aircraft salvo on an average day in the Middle East.
"Jim Juno, come to the front of the class and bring your rucksack with you!"
"Sir?" I croaked. "Me, sir?"
It was pathetic but what could I do?
What was more demoralising? Being framed as a filthy smoker? Or having homo Pirelly filters planted in my rucksack?
Either way and both ways it looked bad and I had a good idea who'd done the deed.
Elizabeth Miller, troll bitch from hell's shithouse!
My discomfort was amplified by the weird dynamic experienced by most people when the Damoclean finger of guilt veers away from their own little personal bubble and condemns some other poor sap thereby creating a knee-jerk judgement in the exonerated whether the patsy is guilty or not. Analysis and logical thinking is eclipsed by relief. Absurdity takes over. "Glad it's him not me" kicks in. "He always looked a bit dodgy anyway...." is the thought pattern created in the regional collective unconscious of teflon, omnipotent peers.
All this energy exacerbates the situation and seeps into the demeanour of the accuser at some subtle subliminal level.
The pack of Pirelly being crushed by Gallbladder's knuckly digits was akin to digging a condom out of my arse in front of a lynch mob of homophobic psychopaths.
"Those aren't mine!" I said weakly. It was true but singularly unconvincing.
Gallbladder beetled his hairy caterpillar brows at me.
"This is, however, your school bag." It wasn't a question so much as the sword that severs the last sinew holding up the exhausted bull's head. Unlike the bull though - I had never been in a position to gore the embroidered performer in the pantaloons. I'd had the butcher's cutting schematic tattooed on my hide even before the matador had entered the bullring.
"Yes," I said.
"Yes was it, Juno?" the nauseating little fart mocked.
"Yes sir," I said. "It's my bag but..."
He raised a knobbled claw to silence me while pantomiming his speech to the class.
"Let me guess - someone planted the evidence then tipped me off to your crime... How am I doing, Juno?"
When it's presented in such a ridiculous parody of reality then you're on a hiding to nothing. People want to believe the bullshit. People love entertainment especially when it's at someone else's expense.
"I guess," I sighed. "I don't smoke those..."
I faltered as his eyes lit up like a slot machine hitting jackpot.
"So you admit you smoke - just not those?"
The slimy fuck was enjoying this and judging by the partially suppressed tittering, so was the audience.
Fuck it, I thought, I might as well get it over with.
"Yes sir," I said, "I smoke forty or fifty a day when I've got no doob or smack or can't get my hands on a half-jack of brandy. It's just that my home life as a sex-toy for sexually repressed homosexual maths teachers is so stressful that I have to do something to relax me. Is my latest Hustler magazine still in my bag too?"
I don't know why I did it but it was worth the single moment of awe that enveloped the classroom. The swing from miscreant to martyr was instantaneous from the peer perspective. The effect my little outburst was having on Gallbladder was even more gratifying. His complexion was shifting through a spectrum of colours that would have done tribute to a gay convention's paint swatch booklet. The chameleon impression was accompanied by bulging eyes, engorged neck veins, perspiration beads on a rumpled expanse of forehead and a deep rumbling from within his carcass, a sound not unlike a drain gurgling as it struggles to flush excessive effluent. It was truly beautiful.
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