Roll Out the Barrel

So here we are at whatever this is supposed to be, this assembly in the presence of the dead body which isn't actually a funeral service, or any kind of service. The body is on the other side of the wall. We're in a room with windows at one end. There are blinds on the windows, on the other side, but if we look through we can just about make out industrial fittings, pipes, whatever it is you would find at a crematorium.

She asked that only the Beer Barrel Polka be played at her funeral, and that song alone. Nevertheless there was a meeting at which the playlist was discussed, because there's a playlist, I suppose on the grounds that this isn't actually a funeral. It's just the six of us stood in a room at the crematorium with the mortal remains of someone we knew presumably going up in flames nearby.

The woman who took it upon herself to organise all of this, who called the meeting to discuss the playlist, stands with her smartphone held aloft so we can all hear the songs coming from its tinny speaker. I don't recognise any of them except for Roll Out the Barrel bashed out on a piano, the only one which means anything and which could be said to apply to the deceased. Roll Out the Barrel is preceded by four or five other numbers sounding suspiciously like Christian country, a genre I would gnaw through my forearm to avoid. The saccharine is so pronounced that I can feel my arteries harden as we listen, or rather as we are subjected to it. It actually feels like a violation. I move to the back of the room and take a seat so as to get as far as possible from the sound.

The woman with the phone wears a smile of priorities I cannot begin to imagine. Somehow, this death has been all about her.

I sit at the back with my head in my hands to blot out what is happening, and I think about the woman who died, and who deserved better than this.

My Year in the Avant-Garde

I was still sixteen in May, 1982, and things felt as though they were moving, artistically speaking, even if I wasn't quite sure of their direction. I'd produced my first cassette of formative industrial music made by hitting a bedspring with a pencil, then taping over the end with a sinister sounding television news report about a local man arrested for terrorising ducks; Rod Pearce of Fetish Records had told me that he would give my tape a listen, which I'm fairly sure he did because that was the last I heard from him; and I'd joined some sort of avant-garde band on the side.

The invitation had taken the form of a postcard pinned up in Renton's Records in Leamington Spa, which seemed to be the only place which stocked music by the Residents. Persons wanted, it said, for avant-garde band based in Stratford-upon-Avon. I'm paraphrasing but the request definitely specified avant-garde, which I'd recently learned referred to artists such as Karlheinz Stockhausen and myself. I phoned the guy, who told me his name was John Mullins. I said that I was a guitarist, roughly speaking, and he assured me that musical ability wasn't really a consideration.

My best friends at the time were Eggy and Graham, and Graham had an older brother named Martin, occasionally known as Peewee for reasons I didn't quite follow. I never saw much of Martin but regarded him as an elusive and mysterious role model. He had an amazing record collection comprising albums by Alternative TV, Cabaret Voltaire, Throbbing Gristle, Faust and others, and on the few occasions when he spoke to us, he always said something cool. Additionally, he played bass in the Abstracts, who were amazing and who impressed me most by being the first band I heard where the bass and the guitar seemed to be playing two entirely unrelated yet somehow complementary parts of a song. Just this year, someone on facebook shared a photograph of the Abstracts taken at the time, and it was kind of shocking to see three grown men with some little boy. The little boy had been Martin, and so at last I understood the nickname. This realisation brought with it the understanding that Graham, myself, and my other contemporaries must have seemed like foetuses to those older kids.

I mentioned the possibility of my joining the John Mullins band to Graham and he told Martin, and Martin was surprised because he knew John from school and knew him well. John Mullins, so I was told, suffered from epilepsy, which worried me because I didn't really understand what it was. What little information was passed onto me from Martin suggested I should proceed with caution for reasons which remained unspecified.

My dad dropped me off in Stratford-upon-Avon on Saturday the 15th of May, according to my diary. I bought some blank tapes, the 12" single of Temptation by New Order, and borrowed an album of Stockhausen's Stimmung from the local library, after which I went to meet John Mullins at his parents' house in quite a nice part of Stratford.

John was tall, distinguished, fairly handsome with floppy blonde hair and glasses. He dressed like a concert pianist or someone who had been to one of the better schools, which I suppose he had given that he knew Martin. He seemed intelligent and witty, someone who probably wouldn't respond to fart jokes, and I tried hard to avoid coming across like some immo - as was Mark Harrison's blanket term for the terminally immature. It was therefore probably fucking lucky that I'd chosen that day to check a record of Stockhausen rather than Blaster Bates out of the library.

Naturally we talked about music. I think he may have mentioned Cabaret Voltaire as a potential influence on the phone, to which I had responded favourably. Now I had to admit that I hadn't actually heard anything by them, although I was a big fan of Throbbing Gristle, of whom John had heard only very little. He played me The Voice of America, which I found electrifying. He'd just bought their most recent album, 2X45, but said he'd found it disappointing because they hadn't fed the drum kit through any special effects. This led directly to tracks from Soon Over Babaluma by Can. I'd never heard of them. I was impressed by the cover printed on some sort of foil, but I found their music underwhelming then as I do now. This, John suggested, was the sort of thing he was hoping we would play, something in this general vein.

As the morning swung around to noon, Andy turned up with Vanessa - whom I took to be his girlfriend. She was still at school and presumably the same age as me, albeit more emotionally developed, as seemed to be more or less everyone else in my age group. Andy was the other guitarist. Vanessa briefly left to retrieve Paul from the pub, and Paul turned out to be Paul Gardiner, the drummer from the Abstracts, which I found massively exciting. Paul brought someone called Henry with him. Henry was into Queen and Ted Nugent.

John directed us in a couple of extended jams, himself accompanying us with funky bass and prepared tapes of short wave radio noise. The first piece had a vaguely Latin feel, which we followed up with something in C major, which I noted in my diary without quite understanding what it was. My job was to agitate my guitar by scrabbling fingers across the strings like a spider, slowly allowing two particular high notes to emerge, to chime like a bell. It was all a bit of a racket and I found it hard to tell whether what we'd just done had been amazing or shite. I wasn't getting much feedback from the others, who possibly regarded my presence as puzzling - a sort of foetal scarecrow from one of those Deliverance themed towns on the way to Oxford. Anyway, John seemed approximately happy, or not actively displeased, and proposed another session on Tuesday evening.

He phoned me once I was home from school on the Tuesday and  said the session had been cancelled due to something about Andy being crap, but he would let me know as soon as anything else happened. This was kind of weird. I'd assumed that if anyone was crap it had been me, but Andy had apparently kept sneakily introducing tunes to our improvisations. Additionally he'd been playing in time with the percussion on the second track despite having been expressly instructed to do otherwise.

My diary records that John and I spent one afternoon in June messing around with reel to reel tapes, although I don't remember it.

Another few weeks after that, he let me borrow a stack of albums as clues to where he was coming from, musically speaking - Cabaret Voltaire's Red Mecca, James Blood Ulmer's, Are You Glad To Be In America?, plus Gruppen and Carré by Stockhausen. He told me he had a gig at the Green Dragon on Tuesday and that I should come along and see; so obviously I wasn't in the band, whatever it was, which was something of a relief as I still didn't really understand what John was trying to do. If he had some great vision, it wasn't anything I recognised.

I didn't go along, and Martin relayed that it had been a bit of a disaster with John pissed to the point of being unable to stand whilst hectoring the audience to vote Labour.

We didn't really speak to each other over the summer. I was too busy shitting myself over having left school, feelings of alienation, and all the usual stuff. I was feeling particularly alienated by Eggy who had taken to referring to my seemingly sophisticated friend as John Muggins. Eggy had become somewhat Cromwellian since leaving school and had delivered at least one speech in which he lambasted the sort of people who can record a piece of music which is just one note going on for a hundred hours and yet who don't know how to make a cup of tea. He wasn't naming names, but he didn't really need to. It wasn't like I was even listening to much Stockhausen myself, let alone forcing it upon him or going on about it; and I actually made a pretty decent cup of tea.

By September I was at the South Warwickshire College of Further Education in Stratford retaking all of those 'O' levels I'd messed up. Happily this meant occasionally bumping into John at lunchtime, going for chips, or maybe just a pot of tea in the second hand bookshop at the end of Henley Street. We talked about music, or he talked about politics while I listened. We both seemed to understand that our band was never going to happen and was therefore not worth discussing. Being politically naive, I'd heard somewhere that Tony Benn wanted to abolish private property, which obviously upset me given how long it had taken me to build up my collection of twenty albums, not to mention all of those back issues of 2000AD comic.

Our conversation therefore ground to a massively awkward halt when I told John I wasn't too sure about that Tony Benn. Strangely, he didn't set me straight, which was either down to his good manners, or that it didn't seem like I'd yet developed the brain capacity necessary for any sort of understanding.

Our phone calls and random encounters became more and more infrequent, eventually reducing to just a series of anecdotes. He was living in London. He was working as Peter Tatchell's secretary in the run-up to the Bermondsey by-elections. He was dead, an alcoholic, or had been almost incapacitated by his epilepsy. While I remain ignorant of his eventual fate, I can entertain the thought that maybe things worked out well for him, because he was a nice guy and I wish we'd known each other better. We may not have much more to discuss now than we did then, but he made my teenage years a good bit more interesting than they otherwise would have been, even if I still, to this day, don't really understand what any of it was about.

I hope he found whatever he was looking for.

Feud

Since moving here, I've done more or less all of the Texan things which establish oneself as part of the San Antonio landscape. I've eaten chicken fried steak. I've experienced the music of both Selena and George Strait. I've been to a Spurs game, even though I found it massively underwhelming. The only thing left seemed to be feudin' with hornery types, and now I've ticked that one off the list as well.

It was a routinely horrible morning at the beginning of 2020, routinely horrible because the year didn't really get off to a great start with three deaths amongst friends and family, one relative sent into something of a tailspin by the same, the demolition of the house in which my wife used to live - apparently because the new owner just wanted something in a different colour - a traffic citation, and the aforementioned wife suddenly finding herself obliged to work from home because the company decided it could make great savings by giving the office space to someone else. Then, as I take out the trash I happen to notice Squidward out in his yard.

'Good morning,' I call.

I won't remember the reply but it's something testy about how he's engaged in the activity of gathering turds produced by our cats which have been deposited upon his property, or at least his landlord's property.

Okaaay, I think, and get back inside.

Squidward has lived here since before we moved in. He used to star in a popular children's cartoon series and I believe he worked in seafood retail but is now retired.

Ten minutes later he rings our door bell.

'Sorry about the snide comment,' he says, 'but you've got to understand my problem. I'm asking nicely, so what are you doing about all the cats?'

We have a number of cats, although not all of them belong to us. Most of them are feral or stray cats which we feed because someone has to. The population is fluid, more than ten, but not too much more. Some of them roam into Squidward's garden from time to time because they're cats and it's cruel to keep them cooped up inside.

We work with people from the San Antonio Feral Cat Coalition, which is recognised by the Animal Control Services of the city council, to make sure all of our ferals and strays are spayed or neutered, which usually reduces the nuisance factor unless you just plain hate cats. I've told him this before, suggesting I'm fine with him hosing any that wander into his yard so as to deter repeat appearances. I bought him a bag of something called Silent Roar, which is also supposed to deter feline incursions.

I've heard his objections before and I still don't know what he wants me to say. Maybe he wants me to concede and get rid of them or have them all put down in accordance with what is presumably his idea of a good neighbour.

'I mean I wouldn't mind if it was just one or two,' he says, and I immediately recall that he clearly did mind when it was just one or two. He's been at us since we moved here, not often but just enough to form a pattern built up from just about every conversation I've ever had with the man.

Our first encounter was him welcoming his new neighbours across the chain link fence which divides our respective yards. The welcome was a detailed account of how terrible the previous tenants had been, three young guys who partied hard all of the time. This one always puzzled me because the mail we still get for the previous tenant is all addressed to Maria Ramos, a young single mother who lived on her own with just her kid. This is how everyone else in our street remembers her. No-one remembers the three party dudes. Not even the landlord was able to remember the three party dudes, because we asked when we bought the house from him.

Then Squidward wanted to know whether we were leaving food out for vermin - raccoons and opossums. We weren't, but he established the theme of the great interest he takes in what happens in our yard, the one we now own. I find this odd because generally I've never given a shit what other people do in their own yards, so I find it difficult to imagine that sort of mindset.

Yet here he is again.

He tells me that he's just sold one of his three cars - which I presume would have been the one with the personalised licence plate. The buyer complained about the paintwork having been scratched by cats. Online research suggests that this is actually impossible. Cat claws lack the necessary density to make a mark on automotive paintwork just as I'm unable to scratch the paint of a car with my fingernail, excepting obviously shitty paint jobs where some hillbilly has brought a can of emulsion back from the hardware store in hope of recreating the vehicle from The Dukes of Hazzard. Casual scratch marks left upon vehicles almost always turn out to be from trees, so it is generally believed.

As we have our conversation, such as it is, he takes a call from the disgruntled buyer so I have to stand and listen, wondering if he actually does want me to promise to have them all rounded up and euthanised. He clearly believes it's an option.

The city of San Antonio has a no kill policy regarding feral or stray cats, instead having opted for TNR - trap, neuter, vaccinate, and then return them to wherever they were found. The policy was adopted on the basis of it being better to manage stable cat populations which aren't going to produce a ton of kittens, for without stable cat populations, unstable cat populations tend to move in, bringing with them all the fucking, fighting, disease, and territorial marking you get with un-vaccinated, un-neutered cats.

Squidward gave me a heads up as I was heading out on my bike about a year ago. 'Hey, just a heads up,' he said. 'There's been an Animal Control truck seen in the area. They've been picking up any cat they find and euthanising them on the spot, so you might want to keep your guys inside. I'm telling you this as a friend.'

Even at the time it sounded a little like the five-year old who has definitely just seen a real dinosaur.

More recently he suddenly had a daughter who was going to get rid of her two beautiful cats after ten years, and did we know anyone seeing as how we're obviously cat people and all?

It was a weird question. The daughter was living hundreds of miles away, and it seemed odd that someone in San Antonio had been picked as the potential solver of this apparently knotty problem. It seemed odd that she somehow lacked the ability to seek adoption in her part of the country; and the description of beautiful cats sounded very much like the words of a man trying too hard to impersonate someone who has no problem with cats. It felt as though the answer he was rooting around for was, hey - we'll take them, we love cats, we need as many cats as we can possibly get our hands on.

The thing is, we actually don't want that many cats but here they are, and there were at least five already hanging around when we moved to this street. When it's practical we find homes for them, as we have done over and over. We didn't bring the raccoons or opossums with us either.

Back in the here and now, he ends the call and says the same stuff all over again. I still don't know what to tell him. We can't do anything we're not already doing.

'That guy who lives next to Donna shot someone in the head a few years ago, right inside their house,' I tell him. 'You remember that? I mean with all due respect, while I'm sure we're not the most amazing neighbours in the world, I don't really see how we can be the worst.'

'I think very highly of you.' He seems slightly stunned and is pulling back, trying to be the nice guy again. 'We're very fond of the both of you,' he adds to no obvious purpose, then leaves.

A few days later we get a letter from Animal Control Services. Someone in our neighbourhood has registered a complaint about property damage and nuisance animals, but it's a form letter naming no names, adding that we should ignore it if it doesn't apply to us.

We talk to Susan from the Feral Cat Coalition. She works with Animal Control and warns us that we should expect a visit, and also that Squidward has filed a claim against us with the small claims court for property damage, a claim which didn't go anywhere due to lack of evidence seeing as he'd already sold the car, despite it having apparently been reduced to scrap by cats.

We spend a couple of days shitting ourselves. We've all seen Animal Cops Houston.

Animal Control turns out to be one young woman who turns up in the truck. She's a cop and actually very helpful. The city is mainly concerned that strays are subjected to the TNR process, which all of ours have been, and that we're demonstrably making efforts to reduce potential nuisance - for example leaving sandboxes around the yard to draw the production of cat poo from adjacent properties, which we do. Having been satisfied that we're not the sort of people who end up on episodes of Animal Cops Houston, she leaves and puts in the necessary good word by which we are able to apply for a cat colony license. This means that providing we TNR and otherwise stick to the established rules, we can have as many cats as we fucking well want.

I never had a strong opinion regarding Squidward, beyond thinking there was something a bit unpleasant about him. Now, however, he's pretty much revealed himself for who he is behind the unconvincing nice guy persona. Donna has told us he once called the cops on her son who was playing his radio too loud, so loud that the walls of Chez Squidward were apparently quite literally shaking. Everything about him seems fussy, suggestive of a privileged upbringing which failed to segue into the riches and status he probably believes to be his due, which is why he's reduced to living around here. He'd clearly rather live in Terrell Hills surrounded by doctors and dentists, prissy older women with face lifts, a better standard of person, people who touch base or give you a heads up, somewhere with a neighbourhood association to prevent scumbags such as ourselves moving in.

I've seen our cats in his garden, but they mostly stay away, and I find it difficult to believe in the hundreds of steaming turds with which they supposedly bespoil his beloved driveway on a daily basis. I suspect it's more likely that he simply hates cats and is too finely attuned to how others may impact upon his existence. Anyone living in a town or a city will probably have neighbours, and one has to make allowances for the same or else fuck off and live on a private estate with a high wall around it.

Our cats are all neutered, excepting the Wombat whom we have as yet been unable to catch. There's not much fighting, not even much bird destruction going on - contrary to the received wisdom - and not much, I would argue, to get all snitchy about. It's not like we have a fucking meth lab in the garage.

The next day, a tiny grey cat turns up on our door, a living skeleton who has been seen up and down the street for weeks, getting  more and more emaciated by the day. We haven't been able to get near her, but hunger has evidently overridden her fear, and here she is. We get her to eat, although she can't handle much at first, and over the next couple of days she gets stronger and begins to fill out a little. Once she's up to it, we'll get her neutered and take it from there, maybe see if we can't find a good owner as we've done with previously rescued kittens. Once inside our home, she's friendly, and too friendly to have been just a stray. Most likely she was dumped by some arsehole.

I've never been the sort of person who can simply walk on thinking fuck it - someone else's problem, and I don't understand anyone who is, at least where animals are concerned. I don't understand anyone who sees a cat, raccoon, opossum, stray dog, or any form of wildlife, domesticated or otherwise, and whose first thought is that had better not shit in my yard. On days such as today I tend to think such persons lack empathy and are as such incomplete human beings who probably shouldn't be allowed to raise children.

I am resident in America thanks to a green card and my whole life is here. I'm reliably informed that criminal convictions of any kind don't look great when reapplying for a green card, or even seeking citizenship, and I live next door to a man who calls the cops because he can't get along with others.

I don't think I'll be having much to do with him for a long time.

Robot Monster

We've been given a pitch at Robot Monster; we being my wife and myself, and Robot Monster being a record store on St. Mary's, next to El Milagrito. Robot Monster is named after a b-movie from 1953, itself named after its central villain, an alien being resembling a man in a gorilla suit wearing a space helmet. Robot Monster is often recalled as having been one of the worst movies of all time, a status I doubt given other supposed worst movies of all time which I've actually seen, and which are usually just a bit cheap, and which generally piss all over the majority of contemporary tat, regardless of budget. Anyway, Robot Monster the store seems to stand in relation to conventional retail establishments much as does its filmic inspiration to anything involving Harry Potter. It sells vinyl records, but it also sells musical instruments, effects pedals, t-shirts, action figures, and anything else to which a price tag may be attached once all the crap has been cleaned off. Rusting single seater spaceships and automobiles from ancient fairground rides are parked on the roof and around the sides of the building, which itself is decorated in the colours with which Mexicans traditionally paint their houses. So Robot Monster isn't too easy on the eye, but nevertheless serves as an example of what made America great, and of what still makes America great in those places where the very worst of our shitheads never dare to venture for fear of either Communism or catching something.

Either Pie or Alba are related to the guy who runs Robot Monster, or they know him, so that's how we came to be invited. He asked either Pie or Alba if they wanted to set up a craft stall selling stuff in anticipation of Halloween, which they did, and here we are. Bess has known both Pie and Alba a long time. Pie got her name due to a love of pie during her teenage years. I'm not actually sure which one of them is here today, and I'm almost certainly getting my wife's friends confused with one another; but one of them has a table from which she is selling hand crafted spooky goods in black, orange and purple. There's a small paved patio in front of the store with iron fencing running around, so that's where we are. We set out our stall, I attach my canvases to the frame upon which I display them, Bess arranges all of her stones and painted things across the table; and we sit and wait to become rich.

We're next to an old guy selling photographs he's taken of Mexico, and I recognise a lot of the places because I've been to them. I wait for an opportunity to talk to him, but he's entertaining Alamo Heights types for about an hour - well dressed face lifty women who are probably having a cultural experience, but don't actually - after all that - buy anything, because they never do. By the time they've moved on, I've decided I can't be bothered, plus I've realised that his photographs are just snaps he's taken on a bog standard digital camera and then printed off on his PC.

On the other side is a family of hillbillies selling baked goods and wooden things embossed with crowd pleasing slogans about America or local sports teams.

The crowds, however, fail to materialise.

Around lunch I drift next door to El Milagrito and order migas to go along with various sweet teas for everyone else. Migas is essentially an omelette cooked with cheese, salsa and corn chips for texture, usually with refried beans and fried potatoes on the side. It has become my late breakfast of choice in recent years, and the El Milagrito version is as wonderful as their reputation has promised.

After lunch I succumb to the gravitational pull of Robot Monster. I'd been holding out, fearing the inevitability of this being one of those sales where I spend a lot more than I make. Their vinyl section leans strongly towards punky metal and bands with names like Crematoria or the Satan Likers rendered in hand-drawn barbed wire letters, because that sort of thing seems to be San Antonio's default setting, musically speaking. This means that I find an album by the Varukers, which is weird because they're from Leamington Spa back in England, where I took art foundation. Unfortunately, beyond the sheer novelty, they were never really my sort of thing so I keep on browsing. I'm sort of tempted by the Charles Manson album, but eventually pop for Hey Jude, a compilation of Beatles singles I've had my eye on for a few months, and the first X-Ray Spex album, which I only have on compact disc.

'I used to deliver her mail, you know,' I tell the bloke at the counter, because I still can't get over the fact and am therefore still telling anyone to whom it will mean anything. 'She was lovely.'

I'm referring to the late Poly Styrene of X-Ray Spex. I used to see her out and about in Dulwich with some frequency. She had a lovely smile and, as claimed, I briefly delivered her mail. This is significant within my own personal mythology because Germ Free Adolescence by X-Ray Spex was one of my wake up records, one of a couple which vividly heralded my transformation into whatever the fuck I was as a teenager.

'Very cool!' Bob, as the bloke at the counter will eventually introduce himself, is gratifyingly impressed. 'I've played in England a couple of times. It's a great place!'

'You're in a band?' I'm actually very relieved to hear this because it shifts our conversational focus away from my name dropping.

'Used to be, man - not these days. I play bass.'

'What was the name of the band?'

'We were called Pigface.'

'Holy shit! You mean with Martin Atkins?'

'Yeah, man.' He's surprised I've heard of them. 'Martin's a great guy. You know I never played on the records, but he gives me a call when they tour.'

I feel slightly embarrassed that I've never knowingly heard anything by Pigface, having regarded them with suspicion as being Martin Atkins surrounding himself with famous pals in the absence of inspiration. Naturally I keep my mouth shut because I like Bob.

'Small world,' he laughs.

I also laugh, then tell him about how the guy who installed our washing machine used to be in Brujeria, a Mexican band featuring Shane Embury of Napalm Death, with whom I shared a couple of distantly mutual friends back in England. My distended name dropping has begun to sound a bit wackadoodle, as my wife would put it, even to me; but Bob smiles regardless.

'Sixty dollars,' he says, ringing up the sale.

'Holy shit! What? Are you sure?'

'The X-Ray Spex is fourty-five.'

'Oh bugger.' I take the record from the counter. 'It was fourteen, I'm sure.' Fourty-five is written on a red circular sticker attached to the plastic outer sleeve, but it hadn't occurred to me that this could be a price, there being no dollar symbol. On the other hand, $14 is specifically printed on a label on the inside of the record sleeve. The Beatles record also has its price denoted in this way.

'Well okay, then - fourteen, I guess. Sorry about that.' Bob seems embarrassed and I get the impression he's only filling in at the counter for a buddy. 'He really needs to get his pricing sorted out.'

I pay and get out, telling Bob it has been nice to meet him. I later realise there's something odd about the X-Ray Spex album - a couple of additional titles have been added to the track listing on the cover in a different font and with the dubious spelling of Oh Bondage Up Jours. Also, it's on the Art-I-Ficial Records label, which seems dubious. Discogs lists it as a bootleg, although the sound quality is great. I'd been wondering whether it really was priced at $45, and the $14 sticker was only a leftover from the original sale. I don't want to have gotten Bob into trouble, but then the pricing did seem ambiguous, and I don't feel so bad given that the thing is obviously a bootleg.

Bess's uncle Carl has turned up at our stall with his family in tow, two sons and two daughters. They've bought two of my canvases while I was inside boasting about having delivered mail to Poly Styrene. Selling work to relatives, even if only to relatives by marriage, somehow feels like cheating, but a sale is a sale, which is itself gratifying regardless of other considerations.

They ask after my mother's health because I was visiting her in England about a month ago.

Carl, presumably now thinking about English things, tells me something about some Beatles record purchased from Robot Monster, qualifying the report with, 'although I know you've never cared for the Beatles.'

I take up the carrier bag from the store and slide the Hey Jude album up from within, adding, 'I don't know what gave you that idea,' because I truly don't. Carl is ever a man of mystery.

He laughs.

'Talking of the Beatles,' I continue, 'you know my mother grew up in Liverpool, right?'

'I didn't know that!'

'Well, all this time I've thought she occasionally saw them wandering around the city, just as fellow teenagers, and she didn't think anything much of them. That was the story I remember.'

'Wow,' says Carl, not yet caught up to the implication of an incoming twist ending.

'Well, it seems I've remembered the story wrong all this time. She actually saw them play at the Cavern Club, but wasn't impressed for whatever reason.'

'Wow,' he says again with added feeling.

I can hear myself saying all of this as I'm saying it, and I find myself exhausting, but I say it anyway.

It's probably why Martin Atkins never listens to any of my records.