Collective Punishment (novella extract)

Chapter One: The Undemocratic Collective

© 2008

riverrun, past Eve and Adam’s … (ahem!) … A screaming comes across the sky …
(mumble)

Today would be different. For him, at least. He was the product of an exclusive
asphalt school, born with a silver plate in his head. Onto his itchy back he
rolled again, and, reluctantly, opened his eyes. He stretched out his swollen
ankles beneath the damp, mildewed sheets, sieving the twilit room through the
baleen of his drooping eyelashes.

His glottis snapped shut. Barred windows? Counting them, heartbeat by heartbeat.
Long shadows on the wall, rocking passengers — a red porthole, like the back of
his childhood Box Brownie. This train is bound for glory. Or the House of the
Rising Sun.

Idiot. Showing your bloody age, Phil. His ankles weren’t chained. Thoughts of the
fungus growing on the sheets made him peer up at the ceiling instead. The shadows
there recalled an adenoidal boy-scout buffing his boots on his calves (the two-
legged sort). Phil relaxed a bit, despite the echo in his head, the fur on his
tongue and in his arteries, the breathlessness of a starling attacked by a cat. It
must be in medias res, if not later. It was surely before the time his Ayn Randish
fairy godmother first packed him off to kindergarten at seventeen, dressed more or
less as a colander. Now he was a grown man, a mean mannish boy of fifty-something,
leader of a band, one bigger than Dick Trickle & the Trickledicks , or even the
non-touring Der Füffelsingers. Though, he thought ruefully, no energy for a pull.

He saw his blue sooty heart palpitate past itself, violating mathematical and
physical principles of identity, so that anything was now possible, or at least
permitted … the Pride of Erin with an oddly boyish, sweaty-palmed partner (the
P.E. teacher, one white sock invitingly in mourning), her breath the odour of
patchouli incense … the wheatfield he lay dying in with Van Gogh or R. Crumb
before either guy was famous … the brief gleam of insight, satori, of Absolute
Power … but his heart won this time. He was glad he was no gambler or the famed
Wagnerian composeur and roof-tiler Thaddeus J. Offenpiszt. Truth would prevail
(even on Wall Street), and they über Der Füffelsingers of Schloß Schnitzenpuffel!
Stalin was no one’s fool! he screamed in italics, totally out of breath, convinced
by a hasty re-reading of Darkness at Noon and The Trial. Of what, he had no idea.
No, just dreaming again. He slept. An incandescent lightbulb, that invention of
Joseph Wilson Swan, did not appear above his head. Nor an Andalusian Shepherd’s
Carillon.

Meeska Mooska Mouseketeer. Phil, who’d once had unnatural sexual relations with
Annette Funicello, was no ordinary musician. Rather, apart from being a
mathematical genius (useful, as Eartha Kitt put it, when counting his money), he
was a snappy bluegrass player in the style of Earl Scruggs. Another dream began,
Lumière et Son, December 28, 1895. Hoards of screaming fans, as of old, but this
time they were running away. But, this was war! Duelin’ banjos! Wagner and
Offenpiszt rampant! The fictive massacre on the Odessa steps! The beautiful, nay
phantasmagorical, bombing of Dresden , a model for state terrorist city-busting
ever since! (The military indeed seemed to abhor cities, having no doubt a placid
yearning for some sort of rural arcadia.) Neighbours turned into cinders and soup!
Revenge (he imagined) for Stalingrad. Not exactly the Summer of Love. And not what
the words meant but who was to be Master! Something he was concerned about. Except
that he generally dropped some plonk and soon forgot it all.

Philip Rumplestiltskin Groyne, this is your death.

He also excelled at Flamenco-like frailing and the old clawhammer style, possibly
due to the fact that he’d sold his soul to the devil (cheap). His one flaw (save
duck-shoving) was that he could only play the instrument backwards while standing
on the very point of his head. He was ghastly on the guitar (despite forced
intakes of Manitas de Plata, Segovia, Paco Peña, Offenpiszt and Los Remeros while
drying out at Odyssey House) in either direction or position, positions worthy of
Bagram Air Base. Still, he was up to snap with this:

Hair OF THE DOG on the G-string.

© Phil. R. Groyne 2000

Adagio

1 e & a 2 e & a 3 e & a 4 e & a (etc..)

| | | | | | | | | |
| | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | |
E- 2——————————-|-2——————————-|
B- 3————————————|-3——————————-|
G- 2——————————-|-4——————————-|
D- 0——-0———————–|———————————|
A —————-4——-4——-|-2——-2——-0——-0——-|
E ———————————|———————————|

Possibly he needed a phrenologist or a cartographer. Yet he alone could front the

band as he had the face of an angel (lifted from Peter Frampton in 1968 and much-
lifted over the ensuing decades), and the long persimmon hair to frame it. This
lonely follicle had graced a hygroscopic museum in Jutland. Truly Art in the
Service of the [insert colour] Revolution.

He too — kind to animals when not eating them etc — was the one who thought of the
band’s moniker, The Democratic Collective, a concept not unlike that of cottage
pudding. They were an outfit of committed leftists who rose to fame (again) when
they played their 24 minute outpouring Propaganda to a police riot in Genoa. In it
they ignored the combined atrocities of capitalism from the Slave Trade to the
Holocaust, and the dreadfully violent Russian Revolution and its defeat of mild-
mannered artist Adolf Hitler, etc:

Wot, no Tylers? Shoot ‘em down like pheasants!

We wouldn’t be Hingalish if we wasn’t fucken peasants
Guantanamera aboard the Granma
Ev’body gotta rally rahnd ar banner!
Solution to dissolution is thuh Revolution …

Such was their eclecticism that it was impossible to tell what they actually
believed in.
Phil, having rid himself of a cheesy mathematical career in which he outshone
Gauss, Euler and Galois rolled into one (though his PhD — by distance education —
focused on dipsomania and lechery at the uni bar and several Lebanese brothels in
Cronulla), had always stood for a ‘sort’ of Prussian-helmeted socialism, but kept
his Stalinist sympathies — and, er, vitalist notions of the Motherland statue on
Mamayev Hill — to himself.
Except of course when making love to the anarchist, ex-jug band keyboard player,
Mandy the Whore of the Lane, indeed a walk down Mammary Lane, to whom he would
recite Uncle Joe’s little-known poems in which the great leader would apostrophise
tractors and heavy industry generally. They brought her off every time:

The rose opens her petals

And embraces the violet.
The lily too has awakened,
They bare their heads in the zephyrs
Of smoke from the chimneys
Of the tractor factory.
— J.V. Stalin.

(The ending was a bit like a fart from a corpse.) Apart from Phil and Mandy
(Benny, the so-called ‘Sixth Democrat’, had left the group in ’62 after being
banned from the Reeperbahn for his sexual excesses), the other three members were
the Pablo-ite non-drinking be-ringed Lesbian Lily White (a greater guitarist than
Phil, an alleged expert on tablature and object of his artistic jealousies and
racism), gay gas & water socialist Bruce (the wizened, lipsticked and chain-
smoking drummer) and guild socialist Tom, the bass player. Tom was also a Yellow
Socialist poet of the Yellow Press ranting about the Yellow Peril, tall, taciturn
and supernally boring, as an ex-Australian Book Review critic had put it. He
insisted on writing all their lyrics while wearing horn-rimmed black glasses and
little else.
Bruce modelled himself after Ginger Baker, and was about the same age. He’d learnt
all his ‘chops’ off by heart. In between bouts of binge-drinking, ocarina soloing
and rather cosmic DTs he managed to keep time but the bouts were getting longer
and tended to stuff up their performances.
“I wish you wouldn’t pass out on stage so much.” Phil growled on more than one
occasion, sometimes hitting him with the bloodstained bust of his other hero, Sir
Arthur Travers ‘Bomber’ Harris, who’d rendered Hamburg a hamburger. His own
addictions had long been held in check by weekly meetings of Alcoholics Anonymous.
“Fuck off! The audiences love it.” Bruce would respond like the nancy-boy he was,
rubbing his pockmarked Gogolian nose and picking strands of rotten banana out of
his unkempt red locks. “How many other drummers have had cirrhosis of the liver
for forty years? The ‘only justifiable war in history’ is ‘the war of the enslaved
against their enslavers’.” he added, but that was lost on Phil, who this time
smashed his ocarina over his head.
Phil (who played the viola on the (left) side but detested the infamous violinist
Benny Goodman whom he’d never met but who had made hysteria in 1938 at Carnegie
Hall, along with that rhythmic rapscallion Gene Krupa — fuck Theodor Adorno, bei
mir bist du shayn, he fancied them Andrews Sisters of Mercy and Liver Salts — was
about to get back to his daydream bombing of Dresden again (for humanitarian
reasons of course, take off the roofs with H.E. and send in the firesticks) — and
who really wrote Shakespeare’s plays — Mandy had her theories but he plumped for
Samuel Beckett — better than Dylan Thomas in Tape’s Last Crap, look you — when the
alarm exploded and he thought for une móment that he might be in Grozny. But he
knew they were staying in a shabby temperance inn on the outskirts of pristine
Chelyabinsk, still called the ‘Hôtel de Ville’ after the Paris Commune of 1871.
Their Russian tour had been a total failure: instead of rocketing up the charts
again as in their halcyon days they were reduced to existing on hot borscht, or
that home birther’s delicacy, placenta stew, cooked up by Lily and advertorialised
on her Al Jazeera cooking programme (so much more civilised than Bomber Harris’s).
(Better than the quicklime they’d had last week, thought Phil, completing another
unit of his KUBARK correspondence course on Enhanced Interrogation with the School
of the Americas.)
“Bloody Russian crap. I hate b-<belch>-borscht. If only Comrade Stalin were still
alive.” he would mutter amid dreams of a new and greater kakistocracy. (Along with
his fantasy of living in a traditional Japanese paper house with no shortage of
toilet tissue.)
O Dnepropetrovsk, I salude your jimneys … he whispered sensually to Mandy, but she
snored all the louder, her sizeable breasts lolling out of her cheap Thai
nightgown in a most un-Soviet manner. So this was globalisation. Despite her lack
of a bath since the death of Elizabeth I she smelled like a rose to Phil.

Phil woke again to ‘Juliet’, as he called the sun. (Hello, Our Juliet. You’re up
early.) He threw the silent Xinhua alarm clock (emblazoned with 100 floral nooses)
into the dry spittoon. The ‘red porthole’ was a glowing cigarette end on the
single floorboard.
Draining his wine, he struggled out of the flea-infested cot, tucked his singlet
into his underpants and set about making himself a saucer of weak tea.
(Unfortunately he had not quite mastered the samovar (or a flea circus) and there
was soon a cheery puce fire in the middle of the room, Hey Rube!) He stood
thoughtfully warming his skinny white legs in front of it, filling the squalid
hotel with high explosive in the form of his own personal methane, famous
throughout the galaxy and proof he felt of life on other planets. Then (unlike
Nero) decided to put the fire out by pissing on it. Indeed, a woman might piss it
out.
It (a versatile word) might also be wise to do a bunk, he thought, like the Duke
of Tintagel and Igraine.
He tried to bring the cigarette butt into the line of fire with his bare toe, but
it vanished through a crack.
“Fuck!”
The alarm clock made a gurgling noise and the others began to wake and complain
about the rain.
It was six a.m. They had been playing all night to an audience of three people, an
unemployed ex-Commissar, the local Orthodox priest, and Tatiana the Town Bike.
The Village Idiot had also made an appearance under the impression (due to Bruce’s
syncopated pink tights) that it was a performance of the Bolshoi Ballet, but had
not lingered. (They later found that all the proceeds had been lifted by the
Russian Mafia.)
Mandy stirred amidst her Janis Joplin (Phil hated all that late-60s shit) and
Dolly Parton-filled blue-teared nightmares of screaming tractor factories running
flaming and naked down the Seven Bridges Road during the Great Patriotic War — a
thorough waste of time perhaps, considering — and after much yawning and belching
eased her fleshy form out of the soiled bedclothes with the aid of a bottle-
opener. The hushed town could be heard breathing in the dreams of some Russian
successor of Dylan Thomas, though not without an emphysemic wheeze of the
sepulchral squalor that opens The Autumn of the Patriarch. She took a belt of the
Gorbachev® vodka she had almost completely consumed last night.
“Aaaaaaaaaaah. That’s better. I would of preferred a Tia Maria but.” She coughed
paroxysmically and rubbed both her needle-tracked arms as it was freezing. The
picture of Boris Yeltsin on the label winked through the smoke.
“Our DVD’s in the Top Ten.” sprayed Phil, sipping his flea-infested tea as he
pored over a purloined 20th century laptop locked onto the Iridium System. He’d
lent Lily $500,000 won on a whippet and she’d bribed all their fake fan clubs to
bulk-buy it and even upload it onto the ‘Golden Record’ on each of the Voyager
spacecrafts. (He’d thought of acquiring more fame by faking his own death, but had
been assured that he was already closer to it than James Dean and Janis Joplin. He
was already on Find-a-Grave.)
“Where? In D-neper-petrovsk?” snorted Mandy Rice-Davies, as he thought of her,
igniting a black cigarette to go with the coke. She quoted from The Rime of the
Ancient Mariner but he wasn’t listening. He’d done his best to strangle her
intertextual genius in its infancy and for the rest of its bloody life.
“No, London!”
“Well let’s get back there then.”
“Wiv what? We’re skint in’ we?” he said, affecting an East End accent. He felt a
sudden itching over his whole body and sucked out the dregs of the cask.
“Fuck you. Capitalism, Ariadne couldn’t find her way out of you.”, she declaimed
to the fanciful shadow on the ceiling. “Shoulda heard you talkin’ to yourself
earlier on. And what have you been smokin’?”
“Money.” he grinned. The smoke was so thick he was tempted to chew it. Mmm, roast
flea.
“Parasite. Well, you would of. Your ‘money’ your oxygen or your life. You value it
more than your life. Want mine back you mathematical shitbag. Sell that bloody
thing Phil the Dill. ‘Fix the clock’ again. For money, bits of paper trail I will
later set fire to like King Arthur … you have sown the wind and you are going to
reap the whirlwind …”
She began to choke and cry and sneeze all at once, but coughed up several cheap
varieties of phlegm. “Outhouse of the Patriarse! O Lord won’t you buy me a Volga
Boatman or the ricepaper trumpet we all swallow once a summer. And the Scholastic
Constitutions of the Untidy Strays of America going down the toilet while trying
to take it over the torch above the Golden Door and of the Union of Soviet
Socialist Republics, 25 million dead, Mother of All the Battling Fuckers. And shut
that fucken window! ’s coolin’ me borscht.”
“The phone won’t work properly then.” Ricepaper trumpet? She was going.
“Anyhow, can’t you just ring the fucking record company?”
“I’ll try.” he sighed.
As Mandy stripped naked in front of the open window (she had noticed the crumpled
Commissar watching from the bushes opposite), Phil angled the Tidbinbilla-sized
dish, twisted the cat’s whisker and managed to contact Dung Recordings. Charles
Sumner Tainter and Ezra Gilliland hadn’t invented the phonograph in Russia for
nothing.