“Don’t go there, don’t go near there,” said Ma Joad.
Where the answer was the barman and the new manager of the Moon City Hotel. If you do go there wear comfortable shoes unlike Nathan’s tight sneakers. Nathan’s arsehole reputation and his shoes were too tight and they preceded him like the cheap clothes he wore.
Nathan ordered his heart starter at the local pub which he had frequented for the past six months. A glass of red, of the cheaper variety, now that his bank account was empty. Pepperjack used to be his favourite wine and it started at fifteen dollars a large glass, along with the half packet of cigarettes to be smoked within an hour. Nathan would sit outside the pub on the footpath and drink and smoke happily in the Moon City Hotel until they put the fucking price up to nineteen dollars a glass for Pepperjack. So the cheapest of cask wines had to do…
Good old Skatt, the CJ Dennis barman who would betray himself at being unable to run a bar honestly. So sentimental about cut cocks he would pour Nathan just over the first line of the glass just below the top line if Nathan were to describe the measure levels of a wine glass. Or was it Nathan who was being sentimental about cut cocks… Who would give Nathan a break anyway?
“My cup runneth over,” thought Nathan and exchanged pleasantries with the guy who seemed to be generous like so few of them with the almost skint patronage that often dwelt there.
Too busy getting sucked off across the road at the school already on Red Planet, his legendary cut knob so much more fascinating to the girls than Nathan’s, Scatt was sensitive but not a Sentimental Bloke as it would turn out, once again in running a bar, except it wasn’t the type he had in mind. A disco ball perhaps, not a jukebox which was out of the question, but the impossible dream of a fucking disco ball.
Nathan had already suspected something was wrong. The couch was gone outside the pub now. And thus the new manager. The fact an attitude change at the Moon City Hotel had happened Nathan would realise as he relaxed drinking and smoking in the sunlight he had previously enjoyed along with the witchcraft of the lesbians who used to run the place. Their Red Planet was juicy, with runaway girls, nights watching movies and seduction and sensuality between the teens if they wanted it either way. They were Bilitis girls.
Only a day after the venom of Auntie Pandora, Nathan was faced with another moral dilemma. And that dilemma wasn’t just a simple one of another cigarette or another drink within pangs of boredom. What did he really think of this new management at the Moon City Hotel? This place where the chairs no longer matched once they had taken away the most comfortable couch there was in town to drink and smoke upon. All on that footpath near the BP and near the school. It was there Nathan had made love to men and women and teenagers on Red Planet as he spied the good looking Tallulah for a diversion who ran the petrol station along with her brawny husband. She would later part her black legs and a Tura Satana arse in glorious black and white which totally dismissed memories of any stultifying yawn Nathan had already shaken off that morning. The world was a boring place and Nathan needed excitement beyond puffing on a smoke and occasionally sipping a glass. Tallulah was in his mind’s eye. Woman central, wank essential. Blue eye’s, blonde hair, arse exceptional: Tallulah.
Beautiful Tallulah, blond and blue eyed, and she would sit just like Tallulah Bankhead with her Red Planet avatar in an office chair and smoke endlessly as she then waved her cigarette in the air counting her money. That laughter. She would laugh as though nicotine juice and honey dripped from her well worn tonsils much like the rocks on the shore and the cocks in the town. She knew love.
Which was beside the fucking point in terms of what Nathan thought of the new management across the street from Tallulah at the hotel! He made a bee-line for his second of two glasses of red in the lounge bar.
“Another glass?,” asked Skatt with a half filled long black in his hand, suddenly rushed off his feet with two customers at once and maybe four patrons in the front bar in toto.
“Yes, thanks a small red,” said Nathan, not really expecting another ‘large’ small glass of wine to be poured, as the bloody thing previously was meant to be a small anyway. Such was the small and tender mercies to be found in Nathan’s life.
Skatt pulled a large stemmed glass from the rack and put it on the bar and started to pour the extremely expensive Berri special cask wine. Sixteen glasses to the cask at a retail of ten dollars…
“By the way,” as he poured: “I only charged you for a small wine last time and gave you a large…”
Nathan was quizzical at first as the attempt to skim off the fucking top began to take hold like he would have liked to have grabbed him by his thin neck and strangle him like a cat. Not really. He had to make the point first that it wasn’t filled over or next to the top line and that he had already charged Nathan for a small. Skatt stood firm on his stance he was going to charge Nathan for a large and their was no way out. It definitely was that line and he had crossed it. Was it an old manager’s trick to raise the hackles? Nathan didn’t care. He had the unwritten moral high ground and felt a scruple as he was right in their world and he would let Skatt and everyone else know it. Fucking disco queen! If Nathan had disco queen balls dangling from his legs he would let Skatt know.
“So that means…” as a temper tantrum of rage was about to ensue, trying to suppress the injustice that he knew would be meted out…
“This means I will have to charge you for a large even though you get a small.”
Now, Nathan’s bank account meant he wasn’t a philanthropist and the ire he felt was not as low as his balance. The twisted smile inside was about to erupt in anger. The so-called brotherhood of Red Planet cut cock nothing but a sham of trickery and thievery…
“Go and get fucked,” he told him straight as a fucking arrow. And it resonated. The roll of the dice was now thrown or the die cast so to speak.
“Well… well,” he said in faggot style beneath his manly demeanour as he or she tried to control himself and went on to show Nathan the door with a motion instead of pulling out his lPet Shop Boys collection or a shotgun. Nathan realised he had done something wrong. The tables were now forever turned at the Moon City Hotel. And Nathan knew there was no turning back.
“Get out of here… We don’t want you here.”
“You’re a faggot CJ Dennis barman,” thought Nathan aloud this time of the cerebral riddle he probably left about the legendary writer and his poor queen on a slow weekday morning bar skills. Fuck yeah that felt good, for Nathan anyway. And then it would perhaps feel bad… It did.
Nathan was still angry and he hadn’t spat enough venom yet but he bit his tongue as Skatt spoke his mind about his hatred and jealousy of Nathan and the fact he didn’t want him in his hotel ever again Thus he wanted to be the queen of Red Planet without any blight named Nathan haunting his hotel. Such were his dreams and they were about to be achieved.
“Get out of here!” And the manager moved to the door to usher him out.
Was Nathan wrong to speak his mind? Or was management a cunt? Perhaps faggot was too nasty a word to use for a first offence. He would realise later that queen fit the bill.
So before the police could be called Nathan left the hotel. Certainly Nathan sat outside in protest for a moment and smoked as he collected his thoughts once more, scratching his head somewhere in the vicinity of where the comfort of the couch had all but evaporated. Would he sit there every day and smoke with a cup of coffee just to spite his so called brotherhood or sisterhood of cut knob? No.
Only a look at Tallulah’s arse as she peered over her Red Planet shoulder, sweeping her teenage blonde hair at the creep with the cigarette and staring momentarily at Nathan, hot gossiping about the incident… Who’s that wanker, she was probably asking, thought Nathan. But which wanker? The fucking empty bladder of the cask at 80 cents a glass wholesale or less and the wanker who lurked within who would dare charge or who would dare defy such blatant thievery. There it stood in his hand dangling… Fucking $2.50 was all he wanted. All over an extra two fucking fifty for that imaginary extra measure.
Should Nathan expect him to come outside and apologise to a semi-regular? But no, he already hated Nathan and always did. That was the feeling at the time. He sat there… pondering the head which had once poked out the door earlier to see who was out on the street.
Bon appetit. The food was ordinary anyway and legendary for it and now this Pet Shop Boy sucked off by the girls at school across the road wore a “Boy’ hat in Nathan’s mind… or would in future; one with devil horns. Would he deconstruct him so the queen could reconstruct himself and become a hero in Moon City? So that his business could thrive without the scum of the Earth walking through the door to spoil everything. Not that Nathan meant to do it, that is deconstruct people. These people just came to him and asked for it for some reason. Their nut must be transmitted he thought like some outer space movie about souls in torment or something. Anyway the queen with a baby girl and wife or not, former Christian with a past or not, gay lifestyle or not. Love Comes Quickly… his favourite song or not. Thus was this queen on Red Planet on a day full of repercussions which Nathan didn’t really want to face without another drink since it was just senseless bitchiness and bullshit. Whatever. Just to get the picture of another gay personality.
Skatt had tasted Nathan’s bitter venom and wrath when he should have known better. He probably did. All for a good reputation for the hotel which he and the place didn’t have anyway… And now it would grow like the daffodil Nathan so wanted to insert or plant into Skatt’s hydroponic arsehole oh so very fucking delicately. The urge to shit then overcame Nathan as he stood on the footpath and finally he went home and crapped and washed his hands in an echo of that unwritten rule the barman had broken by charging too much for a finger of gut rot. Washing his hands of the Moon City Hotel, he heard Tallulah laugh in the background holding her endless cigarette with her guttural laughter as he thought of her again… and her Red Planet words as she walked past Nathan outside the bar after the incident: Wanker.
Let’s deconstruct the prophecy of Nathan walking through the fucking door..
Cult Film Alley 