Rap's Most Pitiful Skits

I've listened to this stuff so that you don't have to, although I should probably state for the record that I own all of the CDs from which this drivel is sourced and love most of them to varying degrees, so my sneering comes from a place which is otherwise mostly respect. The following should therefore not be mistaken for a twatty middle-aged white bloke scoffing at those hippity-hoppers with their rappers' music on the grounds of it failing to sound like Gentle fucking Giant.

Angry jailbird questions Dr. Dre's sexuality, yet again.
This one is more obviously directed at Eminem, but the joke - if we're going to call it a joke for the sake of argument - is so powerfully lame as to be eclipsed by its own insults. I'm referring here to a skit featured on Death Row's Too Gangsta for Radio compilation of 2001, a compilation which could have been great. I remembered it as being mostly great but listened to the thing this morning and noticed that once you're past a few decent contributions from Above the Law, the LOX, Murder Inc. and a couple of others, it's mostly just Death Row's loyal elves saying the same old stuff on behalf of their master, the most eye-rollingly underwhelming of which is probably a Tupac impersonator ironically named Tha Realest - so I guess the practice of keeping it real must extend to sounding like some other guy's Spitting Image puppet. Among Tha Realest's contributions to Too Talented for Radio is F*** Hollywood which posits that specific celebrities are disgusting faggots who will definitely give you AIDS if you're not careful, and who are therefore unsuitable as role models for our kids. In case this sounds a little homophobic, or even fucking moronic, Tha Realest is careful to make it clear that he ain't hatin' but rather is simply telling it like it is - so that's a relief. Anyway, to get to the point, the skit in question purports to be the testimony of a leading Ku Klux Klan personage as he welcomes Eminem into the fold and explains what his mission is to be, namely to infiltrate rap music so as to make more money from the same than any African American rap artist ever did. The subtext of the skit therefore cleverly implies that Eminem is, in fact, a racist. Do you see? The efficacy of this short audio drama is, however, undermined by the aforementioned Grand Dragon proposing that Eminem will undertake this mission by adopting the name Marshall Mathers, suggesting that whoever wrote the script doesn't actually understand how names work. The Grand Dragon additionally proposes that Eminem - presumably cleverly using his own actual name as an alias - infiltrate the rap business by buddying up with Dr. Dre, formerly of NWA; and here comes the ingenious part - the same is identified as Dr. Gay of a group named either NW AIDS, or NWA but with the W standing for with a dick in his mouth*. Behind this Wildean wordplay lays an implication of Dr. Dre being a homosexual who might therefore justifiably be rebranded Dr. Gay - read the sentence again a few times if it went over your head. It's interesting to note that, regardless of anyone else's sexuality, or even the label's failure to release anything which wasn't mostly shit since its best artists either died or jumped ship, the individual behind the beef seems to have spent one hell of a lot of his time in an all-male correctional environment thinking about deeds involving Dr. Dre's knob, just like the great big heterosexual that he definitely is.

C-Murder's inconvenient phone call.
Bringing this one up feels a little like kicking a dog, but it would be wrong to excuse certain artists from the roll call simply on the grounds of the rest of the album being exceptional, and Bossalinie is an otherwise great album; and never mind a dog, this listing additionally amounts, it might be argued, to kicking a man when he's down, which is never a good feeling. C-Murder is presently incarcerated for a crime which it kinda sorta looks a lot like he didn't do, the sum total of evidence apparently amounting to him being a black man who was in the same club and that he calls himself C-Murder; but unfortunately the skit, which is identified on the inlay as Phone Call, may actually be the absolute lamest of its kind. First we hear a phone ring and C-Murder answers, clearly disgruntled with having been called at 5.30AM by a fan who explains how he got the number from a girlfriend. C-Murder tells the caller to fuck off in no uncertain terms and hangs up, following which we hear his pitiful admirer exclaim damn, because he knows he's given offence to a great man. The fragile reality of the skit is diminished by the stilted acting and the fact of both voices being heard clearly, where that of the caller really should have been treated so as to make it sound like an actual phone call. The import is of course that C-Murder is amazing, a man who finds himself having to put up with all manner of nonsense in his line of work, while the fan is a much lesser person and an idiot. The problem is that C-Murder has already spent an entire CD telling us that he's amazing, and Phone Call fails to add anything of value to the hypothesis; but worse, for something which is presumably intended to be bitterly amusing, it contains no actual joke. It might just about have worked with a better actor speaking at the other end of an actual telephone line but still probably wouldn't have been that funny. C-Murder was never the most original rapper, but he makes up for any shortfall with a powerful and chilling delivery and by playing to his strengths, and skits sadly aren't one of them. That said, I still don't think he should be in the stripey hole.

Names mispronounced with hilarious yet revealing consequences.
At the risk of enraging simpletons, I'd say that 2Pac was somewhat overrated, which is doubtless something to do with the James Dean effect in relation to his unfortunate passing. True enough, when he was good, he was amazing, and he recorded a couple of exceptional albums prior to disappearance down the Death Row rabbit hole; but those posthumous double CDs really ain't great. With one or two exceptions, the beats are mostly lackluster, and for the most part those discs seem to be the work of someone who wasn't very well, who was succumbing to toxic levels of paranoia, and who had apparently stopped caring. There might be a single decent album's worth of material among all that posthumous stuff, but the rest is just more of the same bollocks about bitches, money, loyalty, enemies, just how much 2Pac doesn't care about what those enemies be saying, and words prefixed with thug to the point of absurdity - thug passion, thug nature, thug life, thug somnambulism, thug unintentional homoeroticism, thug collectible figurine display case and so on and so forth. The laboriously titled Makaveli the Don Killuminati: The Seven Day Theory isn't a bad album for all that it's no 2Pacalypse Now, but is nevertheless one of seemingly hundreds which open with a news report live from the launch party for the much anticipated new album from controversial rap artist 2Pac Shakur, and this much anticipated new album is usually the album we're listening to - which makes no fucking sense whatsoever - because some rap dude releasing a new album would obviously make the evening news. Usually the reporter tells us that he or she is trying to see what's going on, and we can hear an excitable crowd in the background, possibly with some guy letting off a few rounds from his AK47 in a generally irrepressible spirit of excitement. The reporter then inevitably goes on to explain how whichever rap rivals 2Pac had fallen out with that week have been reportedly crying and shitting their pants like lil' bitches, terrified of what this new masterpiece from the wise one will reveal about them and how it shalt demonstrate their own inane bleatings to be as unto the folly of simpletons. To this effect, the reporter who calls in Makaveli the Don Killuminati: The Seven Day Theory specifically identifies Mobb Deep and Notorious BIG as among those now in tears and running for their respective mummies, except he erroneously mispronounces their names as Mobb Sleep and Notorious PIG - which is hilarious, obviously. Biggie was quite a large gentleman so mistakenly referring to him Notorious PIG seems uncannily fitting, and so much so that I half suspect it may even have been deliberate. Jay-Z is also mentioned, although the reporter misses a trick in failing to refer to him as Gay-Z, so I imagine the Death Row brains trust still had that one in development at the time of the release party which didn't actually happen. Possibly, having come up with Dr. Gay as an hilarious yet revealing rebranding of Dr. Dre, they didn't want to confuse the issue. Maybe the whole thing would have worked a little better had 2Pac ever released an album as good as Ready to Die, The Infamous, or Illmatic. What a waste.

Puffy's sexy cultural experience.
The internet reckons a skit is a short comedy sketch or piece of humorous writing, especially a parody, which coincides with my understanding of the word, but not with a great number of the skits found on rap albums, many of which constitute po-faced dramatised affirmations of the artists in question being bigger, harder, better paid, more lyrical, or more violent than the rest of us, and with not much in the way of chuckles. Puff Daddy, or whatever he's calling himself these days, is a man who has never been afraid to take himself far too seriously, and his skits accordingly tend to be merely wry at best, but executed with such ham-fisted determination as to actually make us feel a little bit sorry for him. This one turns up uncredited at the close of Señorita from 1997's No Way Out and constitutes a seemingly candid recording of Puffy fooling around in bed with some Hispanic woman. The listener is invited to assume that they've just finished having it off so we hear various sighs and the occasional slurping sound as Puffy addresses his lady friend. He playfully tells her that he wants to learn Spanish so as to be able to deliver certain romantic exclamations in her own language when shooting his load. The cross-cultural aspect of their union is emphasised by the music we hear in the background, which is clearly in the Latin tradition. In fact, it seems to be emphasised with such force that I'm surprised Puffy doesn't ask her to fix him a nice spicy taco or a half coconut of tequila. As skits go, while this one isn't even remotely funny, neither is it particularly stupid or offensive, but the problem is that it seems to go on forever, at least beyond the point at which the listener begins to feel awkward. We get that he really, really, really fancied Jennifer Lopez, and that she was doubtless amazing in the sack, but this sort of eulogy - along with those fucking tracks on later albums where he was begging her to come back - is simply embarrassing. It's like the teenager who mentions the name of some specific girl every five minutes, regardless of the general thrust of the conversation. You could be talking about Chairman Mao and he'll just happen to mention that he saw Karen going into the Chinese takeaway on the high street on Tuesday night. He's pretty sure she ordered sweet and sour chicken. At least that's what it looked like. No-one needs to hear it, and neither did anyone need to know so much about what it's like inside Puffy's head. Sometimes it's good to keep stuff to yourself.

Ganksta Nip interviews himself.
The chorus of Ganksta Nip's Texas Chain Saw from his 1998 album on the Rap-A-Lot label, Interview With a Killa runs Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Blacula, Daytime: walking zombie, nighttime: evil Dracula, which is actually just an arbitrary list of slightly mismatched scary things - first naming two fairly dissimilar horror movies, and then two states of being between which Ganksta Nip purportedly divides his daily existence. Specifically, he spends the day as a walking zombie, so he claims, then each night transforms into an evil Dracula, which is something quite different to those good Draculas you're always hearing about it. This, I would suggest, illustrates the main pitfall of rap careers undertaken by those who watch way too many horror movies, namely how easy one can end up looking like a fucking idiot, as should be pretty obvious from a quick glance at all heavy metal. The key to getting it right seems to be either keeping a sense of humour regarding the absurdity of one's performance while pulling those scary faces, or else walking the walk with such conviction that you come across as certifiable and probably a danger to yourself - which is presumably how Insane Clown Posse, NATAS, and Three-6-Mafia got away with it. Unfortunately, Ganksta Nip goes one further on this album by conducting an interview with himself as both into and outro. I'm sure we've all heard those fake news reports about the impressive notoriety or criminal prowess of such and such a rapper who is also so obviously also playing our on the spot reporter, but Ganksta Nip interviewing himself is worse. It's not so much that he doesn't have a whole lot to say or that what he says isn't anything like so scary as he seems to believe, but the delivery and execution are such as to suggest he must have been about twelve at the time, which he clearly wasn't, otherwise he would have been working on his first album at the age of five. Both interviewer and Ganksta Nip speak slowly during their notional meeting of mind, an affectation which is probably supposed to sound sinister, and Ganksta Nip replies as himself in a laboured scary voice possibly based on that of the Leprechaun from the movies of the same name; but the touch which really reduces this already shaky production to ham-fisted idiocy for me is the peculiar phrasing of the questions, at least two of which are suffixed with the interviewer adding, let me know. I suppose let me know might be a quirk of language, some regional equivalent of asking what's that all about? immediately following did I see you wearing a Wonder Woman costume outside Toys-R-Us earlier today?, for example, but I'm not from Houston so for me it's something you say when communicating with a person to whom you're not actually speaking, when writing a letter, for instance.

Dear Sir, thank you for kindly sending me the 1979 Hornby Railways catalogue. I wish to order the R.629 Level Crossing with Opening Gates but am unable to find the correct price and postage. Might I ask that you provide these in your response, for which I enclose a stamped addressed envelope. Let me know.

Let me know somehow makes the whole thing seem ridiculous, which is a shame because Ganksta Nip is clearly not without talent and is very listenable when he's not doing silly voices or discussing different types of Dracula.

When even the toilet scene has its down side.
It's called I'm a H-O-E and is specifically identified as a skit in brackets on the second Ruff Ryders label compilation, but takes the form of a song rather than the usual minute or so of unconvincing dialogue. I say song because it has a beat and a tune, but really it's more like a horrible nursery rhyme with commentary. What are you, bitch? asks our narrator, to which the response is sung back, I'm a H.O.E. - not an acronym but simply spelling out the short form of whore in a way which conveniently sets up the rhyme scheme for the rest of the number. Are you really? asks our man, and if the young lady's response is indirect, providing no clear statement of either positive or negative confirmation, it is difficult to miss the import of I'll fuck the whole family. The import is that our man is dealing with a sexually promiscuous individual, and so naturally he becomes excited as the young lady sings the rest of the nursery rhyme, in doing so revealing that she is keen to take it up the wrong 'un, facilitate a gang bang, and to have her partner - or possibly partners - urinate and defecate upon her person during their romantic liaison. Our man's reaction to these promises is mostly that he can't wait to tell his boys about this one and that he can't believe his luck - which probably works better, or is at least more amusing, if you're into what I understand is referred to as the toilet scene. I'm not, so I find it bewildering unless it's supposed to be funny. Unfortunately, it doesn't really seem to work as humour either so far as I'm able to tell. Anyway, the cloud surrounding this silver lining - or golden brown lining, I suppose - that is to say the punchline to I've found a lady who will let me do a sexy poo on her and I can't believe my luck is that the lady in question is unfortunately HIV positive, doubtless as a consequence of her sexual exploits. Ultimately, I found it difficult to keep from feeling sorry for everyone involved in this one minute and twenty seconds of witless drivel.

Swizz Beatz likes to partake, if you know what I mean.
I don't know what went wrong with Swizz Beatz. One moment he was a mysterious background figure crafting genuinely weird minimalist beats, like some some guy trying to pull a track to pieces to see if he could keep all those plinky-plonky Casio presets balanced on the very edge of falling apart, resulting in something like the sonic equivalent of Japanese minimalist horticulture; next, he's this goon jumping up and down pulling faces in the background of a Bontempi organ set to carnival sounds as it pulls on a leather jacket in the hope of seeming at least as hard as Michael Jackson in whatever that video was - you know the one I mean. Here on G.H.E.T.T.O. Stories, Swizz Beatz' first approximately solo album - and I dread to think what G.H.E.T.T.O. stands for - he additionally takes up rapping, which is ill-advised given that his raps tend towards the simplistic, frequently rhyming words with themselves, which is actually just repeating rather than rhyming. Probably the most annoyingly stupid example would be Who's Real from Jadakiss' Last Kiss album, upon which Swizz drops the following science:

He's phony, she's fake.
That's the type of people I hate.
If you real and you know it clap your hands.
If you real and you know it clap your hands.
Wait a minute - who's real, who's not?
She's real, but he's not.

One possibly shouldn't over-analyse club bangers - as they're known in the trade - but this one was really giving it away, beginning with a brave denouncement of not only phonies but also fakes, two groups of people generally loved and admired by most of the populace, and yet Swizz Beatz here takes a stand, declaring that actually he doesn't like phonies or fakes very much at all! This is followed by a vocal call to identify real people and to distinguish them from the fake and phony demographic by having them clap their hands, then concluding an intriguing examination of this duality in greater depth wherein the word not is cleverly rhymed with the word not. With this degree of cerebration in evidence, it's probably obvious that Swizz Beatz is not averse to the old space fags, if you know what I mean, and his enthusiasm is communicated at length on G.H.E.T.T.O. Stories, most wearyingly in the Alien skit. First we hear Swizz talking to himself as one does when off one's fucking cake. The story seems to run that Swizz has smoked so much dope as to have summoned an actual alien presence, presumably voiced by the man himself using a pitch change effect. The alien has apparently travelled half way across the galaxy principally so as to encourage Swizz Beatz in his dope smoking by exhorting him to smoke that shit, boy, and the like, which would imply that the album Carl Sagan glued to the side of the Voyager space probe was almost certainly wasted on the boring green cunts. Swizz duly smokes that shit and in such quantity as to render himself unconscious. This upsets the alien who first exclaims, oh fuck! Not again! before concluding, my work here is done, presenting the confusing possibility of an unfamiliar extraterrestrial value system riddled with apparent contradiction in which one may be upset and even distressed by that which one successfully achieves, unless it's simply that the skit was written, most likely improvised, by a fucking idiot. This announcement is followed by our extraterrestrial visitor exclaiming, I'm the space alien blunt smoker, either seeking to remind himself of his own identity, or providing gratuitous and perhaps even unnecessary quantification on our behalf. This skit is probably hilarious if you've just smoked one, but then under such conditions it's possible that everything is hilarious, therefore reducing this incoherent bollocks to two minutes of your life you'll never get back.

Crying Thug is surprisingly not so tough as he may seem.
Crying Thug is the name of a contestant on a nonexistent game show which was originally broadcast uncredited at the end of Crush Tonight on Fat Joe's Loyalty album. Considering all that Fat Joe was going through at the time, it's impressive that he even managed to record an album, let alone one as good as Loyalty, but it really could have done without the skits. Admittedly there are only two requiring use of the skip function, but they nevertheless detract from the whole and this one really is utter bollocks. Skits based on game shows seem to be fairly common on rap albums, the punchline usually being that the prize is a gun or a nice car or some hoes, or whatever. Of its kind, The $20 Sack Pyramid on Dr. Dre's Chronic album is probably the only one that's actually funny. Rep Your Set roughly duplicates the formula with theme tune, smooth talking host, and wild audience sounds, requiring that three contestants rep their respective sets in order to either win a gun or, in the case of the losing contestant, avoid being beaten up. By way of example, the second contestant reps his set with the following statement:

Chi-town motherfucking hustler bang a motherfucker cash money murder man Gotti.

In other words, contestants compete by reciting meaningless gang gibberish in a vaguely threatening tone. However, Crying Thug, delivers his address with a distinctly fearful tone, therefore poorly repping his set, following which we hear him receiving an enthusiastic beating. This is hilarious because he's named Crying Thug, and it sounds like he's crying, and because the host calls him a pussy immediately following his characteristically disappointing statement. I'm not sure there's actually anything else to unpack from this one, semiotically speaking. I guess you had to be there.

Ludicrous slurping noise.
I can't even remember which album this turns up on, or even whether it's just one skit as I'm sure I've heard several variations on the scenario. I thought it was either some Dr. Dre or Three-6-Mafia album but have drawn blanks on both counts and can't be bothered with searching further. The skit, as I recall it - albeit with some reluctance, depicts a romantic liaison between a young woman and the man, or possibly men in the plural, who rap on whatever the CD may be. In essence, she's attempting to provide oral stimulation of either his penis or their penises but isn't doing it right, much to the bemusement of whoever is on the receiving end. The unhappy customer or customers then provide instruction on how the young woman might do it better, prompting her to ask you mean like this? in a voice conveying a somehow unpleasant degree of innocence, followed by a ludicrous slurping noise suggestive of a mean spirited child loudly and demonstratively licking an ice lolly so as to antagonise another child who has no lolly. Quite aside from the question of what qualifies the unhappy customer or customers in the dispensation of blow job advice, it simply doesn't sound like that. I appreciate that the artist or artistes responsible were attempting to convey a sexual transaction with no distinctively associative sound, but the result suggests sexual acts as imagined by persons with little or no actual sexual experience, which is marginally more amusing than whatever boorish porno crap they were originally intending to communicate.

Master P raises them right.
I'm convinced I've heard a skit wherein Master P dispenses fatherly advice to his kid, then about five or six-years old, regarding how he's getting on at school. The advice divides into two categories, firstly the regular stuff about working hard and being respectful to your teacher, then the inevitable ghetto gibberish about how you should be true 2 da game, and always look a man in the eye before you kill him - amongst other suggestions which seem to run contrary to those in the first category. I feel as though I've heard this skit a number of times so I'm sure it exists and yet I can't find it on any of my CDs, so it may even be my imagination blending spoken parts of otherwise unrelated songs into a single conversation. Anyway, the next best thing is probably the thematically similar dialogue which opens Goodfellas, the first album by Master P's 504 Boyz. Dad, asks the boy, is Tupac still alive? prompting a request for clarification by his father, not unreasonably given that all rap music had spent the previous five years banging on about the aforementioned Tupac being very much deceased. I heard, the boy explains, that you got a nigga, Krazy, sounds just like 'Pac. Here he's referring to the rapper Krazy, then newly signed to Master P's No Limit stable, whose delivery betrays a pronounced Tupac influence - although it would be unfair to suggest that Krazy sounds exactly like Tupac. Broken down, the question operates by a form of logic which might just as well be extended to presuppose that, for example, David Bowie is still alive because Phil Cornwell was on the telly doing an impersonation of him just now. Master P gives no answer, instead allowing his son to ask another question before launching into an extended account of an argument with another child in the school playground, the usual crap about frontin' and stuntin', keepin' it real, and so on and so forth, all of which suggests that, since the previous skit - assuming I didn't just imagine it - our boy has ignored almost all of the advice belonging to the first of the two categories with regard to his education, the little bollix.

*: Presumably implying the artists in question were actually called NWADIHM.

More Shooty

Our neighbour, Shooty the Drug Dealer has been away. Having been released from prison a couple of months ago, he became angry and confused by the lack of recreational facilities and employment options available to a gentleman such as himself, and so lashed out. This expression of frustration culminated with him stood on our porch as we were about to go to to bed screaming that we had better not be sayin' shit about his son. Being, up until that point, barely aware of even Shooty's existence, let alone that of his kid, we actually hadn't been sayin' shit about his son. It seemed there had been a misunderstanding.

Next day my wife went to the courthouse with Shooty's long-suffering mother and gave evidence resulting in his being sectioned that very same evening.

It's actually his grandmother's house, but Shooty lives there too. He'd been detained at the President's pleasure - or however the hell it works here in America - for assault of a senior, presumably the aforementioned grandmother, and detained for five years which suggests something stronger than an uncouth slap. By the point at which he felt compelled to explain his bewildering reservations in the strongest possible terms on our porch at an ungodly hour, the grandmother had moved out along with the mother and Shooty's son. They couldn't deal with him. Shooty's mother had actually adopted his son as her own kid, making the child both Shooty's son and foster-brother.

So this was why he couldn't find his son that one time, because the child was in the care of someone who actually gives a shit about his well-being.

Anyway, it apparently only takes a week to cure Shooty because suddenly he's back on our street. He's smashing bottles in the road at 2AM, mostly outside our house for some reason.

Logan who lives across the way spots him at 2AM, stood lurking in the gap between Logan and Tony's house, for no obvious reason. 'You have to stop this,' Logan tells him. 'They're not going to let you see your boy if you keep acting crazy.'

Shooty explains that it's okay because he's clean, completely off the drugs now. In fact the only thing he smokes these days is pot, so that's good news.

Tony's truck is broken into at some point during the next evening. A credit card is taken and someone tries to use it to spend $150 at HEB. The cops are called, but it's a mystery who might have been responsible. Maybe it was the creepy disused fairground owner or perhaps even the mayor all along.

Shooty's grandmother runs down the street midday screaming, 'He's trying to kill me!'

Shooty himself storms down the street early morning yelling, 'I hate that bitch!'

It's not looking great.

So as to save myself the bother of writing it all out again, here's what I posted on facebook.

Shooty the Drug Dealer paid us an afternoon visit. Either the meds aren't working or it's all the really awesome ganja he be smokin' like a chilled out playa that's been making him jumpy, because there he was on our lawn at two in the afternoon shouting the usual incoherent gibberish about how we be disrespectin' his son - a child the existence of which I am barely aware. Noticing our front door was unlocked, I went to flip the latch but before I could get there he kicked it open and hard, still yelling. I got the red mist, slammed it shut, then yanked it open and bellowed, get off my fucking lawn, you fucking cunt, as he scarpered back to his house.

The cops arrived two hours later and once again told us that he was a very troubled man with many issues.

'So we should definitely give you a call if he does it again?' I quipped, having already mentioned all the previous incidents. Shooty seen hanging about in Tony's yard at 2AM was probably a massive coincidence, to be fair.

'Yes,' said the cop, failing to spot my sarcasm. I went inside because I knew I wouldn't be able to keep myself from calling them a pair of useless donut-scoffing wankers. My wife kept talking to them. From what I could hear most of the conversation seemed to be the cops making sure we weren't going to do anything to upset Shooty.

I don't know how much Wendy Davis plans to defund the cops by, but whatever the sum, it isn't enough.

That was Sunday. Shooty himself called the cops at 3AM on Monday morning because his house was under siege by an armed gang which only he could see and hear. It took the cops eight minutes to respond - which is good going compared to the two hours it took them to get around to responding to us when an absolutely real and physical nutcase tried to kick in our front door.

By Monday evening he's back inside. This time his mother didn't require additional testimony or evidence, although again, we have no idea how long it will last or how soon he'll be back on our porch yelling at our house for no fucking reason. There doesn't seem to be much point in hoping for some miracle cure by which he'll suddenly start behaving himself.

We can get a restraining order, although the problem there is that it can't be delivered to him while he's in the loony bin because it might make him feel a bit fed up or something. My wife has nailed a no trespassing sign to every vertical surface on the exterior of our house which faces the street, which makes her feel better, but very much resembles a display of fear to me. We've purchased a box of shotgun cartridges from Walmart, which cost a surprisingly budget-friendly five dollars and probably represents the crossing of some line or other for me, but I'm past caring.

If nothing else, I take comfort from how fast that fucker ran when I bellowed, get off my fucking lawn, you fucking cunt. Never in my life have I had that effect on someone at the other end of a disagreement. It doesn't suggest great reserves of idiot courage on his part, and if he really wants to get at us because of something explained to him by the voices in his head, I don't think he has the intelligence for anything devious or sneaky.

I guess we'll just have to wait and see.

The Who Bloke

 

There were two doors, both number fourteen. One of them was A and the other was B respectively referring to upstairs and ground floor flats, but it was anyone's guess which was which. Both doors had inset panels of frosted glass so if you pressed your nose up close, you could just about see a flight of stairs behind the door on the right; but without any indication or which was A and which was B, it was anyone's guess. I tended to put the mail for flat A in the door on the right, basing this decision on a hierarchy of the uppermost dwelling being the primary one. Occasionally one of them would get something specifically addressed to the basement flat. After a while I began to remember the names, as I did with almost everyone on Glengarry Road after a year or so, and it got to the point where I no longer even needed an accurate house number. If, for example, I had something addressed to someone with the surname of Burnap supposedly living at number 63, it would go to number 36 without my really having to think about it, because that was where Campbell Burnap lived. Somehow I still retain some of this information twenty years later.

I haven't retained the name of the guy who lived at 14A, or possibly 14B but it may have been Adrian, or at least he looked like an Adrian to me. He resembled a more sensitive version of Phil Mitchell from Eastenders and was obviously gay. I'd been living and working in East Dulwich for about five years and gay people seemed drawn to the area for no obvious reason beyond that it was quiet and mostly civilised, and so I had somehow developed gaydar without really trying. I don't know how I knew, but I almost always did, although the information was never really much use to me. My sexual liasons have historically tended to favour persons with boobs, and jokes with opening lines such as three poufs walk into a bar aren't entirely my thing so I've never needed to check whether the coast was clear before committing myself to knuckleheaded discourse.

That said, at the time I hadn't had sexual liaisons with anyone in possession of boobs for a number of years and, some might argue as a consequence, I had taken to Doctor Who books. There was a new one  every month, and most of them were better than anything which had been on the telly. Doctor Who had been cancelled in 1989 and was still a decade away from returning as Britain's favourite breakfast cereal, so people tended to look at you funny when you mentioned it. I'd been obsessed with the show as a child and then as a teenager, so this may even have been the early onset of a peculiarly specific form of mid-life crisis.

One item of mail regularly received by Adrian - or whatever his name could have been - was a monthly subscription copy of Doctor Who magazine. I'd looked at the thing in WHSmith a couple of times but it was a bit too intensive even for me. Nevertheless, it meant I was well-disposed towards the Who bloke at 14A, or possibly 14B, even before I met him. On the first few occasions when I actually did meet him, my cheery postal good morning was met with only a silent sullen glance, but I persisted on the assumption that he was probably just having a bad day, plus life is too short to harbour resentment against persons you don't actually know. Eventually I caught him at his front door as I stood there with his latest issue of Doctor Who magazine about to go in the letterbox.

'Yes, I've been meaning to have a word with you,' he began somewhat icily, then went into a lengthy complaint about his mail being delivered to the flat upstairs.

'I understand the problem,' I said, 'but I don't think it's me,' launching into an explanation which probably foreshadowed the first paragraph, adding that his complaint tended to be common when I was on holiday and someone else was covering for me, and that whoever that was stood only a 50% chance of getting it right given the absence of anything to indicate which flat was which.

He seemed to understand, and was even a bit embarrassed, so I changed the subject with, I see you're into Doctor Who, which was probably akin to recognising a fellow Freemason in whichever year it was. He smiled for what seemed to be the first time ever, and we compared notes for a minute before he had to be off, being on his way out somewhere.

The next occasion, I got invited in, which was a bit of a shock after the first couple of frosty years and his failure to reciprocate any of my greetings. He was a little older than me but looked significantly older, so I thought, and his flat was much the same as mine. He mentioned a partner of unspecified gender, possibly feeling awkward about it for some reason, and that the partner had died. Additionally, his mother had died more recently. This seemed to explain my impression of him being a less than happy bunny, and I mentioned the unreciprocated greetings, or at least tactfully referred to them by saying, 'yes, you always struck me as having a lot on your mind.'

'Sorry about that,' he said. 'I think I was having a bit of a nervous breakdown for a while there.'

We talked about Who, albeit at crossed purposes. He hadn't read the books, although he'd heard good things about them; and he was quite into conventions and fan gatherings, which didn't really sound like my sort of thing. He'd met Sophie Aldred a couple of times and told me that her screen persona was pretty much her persona in real life. He showed me a fairly large model TARDIS which occupied his bedside table and had a lamp inside, which I found a bit weird. I might have found it weird that he showed me his bedroom, but his flat seemed to be mainly just a bedroom, bathroom, and kitchen - much like my own. We seemed to be fairly similar in many respects.

I imagined that this would be the start of a friendship, if not necessarily a beautiful friendship, but from then on he kept himself pretty much to himself, just as before. Our meetings were chance occurrences, albeit significantly more jovial chance occurrences than they had once been. The very last time I saw him, he'd been having a clear out and getting rid of stuff. I handed him his mail and he gave me a DVD, saying, 'Here, you need to see this if you haven't already.'

It was a DVD of the BBC's Edge of Darkness from 1985. I'd never heard of it.

'Then you really need to watch it,' he said. 'It's very good.'

It seemed to be a crime drama and therefore possibly not my sort of thing, but it seemed like a generous act so I took the DVD home and watched it. I moved away from home in 1984 and didn't have a television again until about 1993, which is why I'd never heard of Edge of Darkness. The irony is that I'd moved away from home to take a fine art degree specialising in time based media, specifically film, video and, I suppose, television.

I thought Edge of Darkness was amazing, and so much so that I insisted my friend Andy come over and watch it too, which he did over a couple of afternoons. He also thought it was wonderful, and particularly enjoyed Joe Don Baker's massively entertaining portrayal of a Texan character named Darius Jedburgh - this in spite of Andy's infrequently stated general dislike of American culture.

'Yes,' he grudgingly conceded after we'd just watched Jedburgh terrorise guests at a conference with lumps of plutonium, 'if one really must be an American, then you should at least have the decency to be from Texas.'

I have no idea what became of Adrian, but Who was back on the box by 2005, and was a huge hit but seemed to have lost whatever it was I'd liked about the thing in the first place. Given that I now live in Texas, the rest may add up to some kind of narrative - if not necessarily one which means anything profound - but you may have to put the pieces together yourself.

Hanuman About the House

At the heart of the city of elephants, Hastinapura, the Lord Hanuman did make his home, but it was not the Celestial Palace we know so well from other tales of the Monkey King. Pawanputra Hanuman was in those days without such means, and was so obliged to seek affordable accommodation, a quest which saw him victorious when he agreed to share with Anjana and Sita, both of whom were considered great beauties in their way.

One day as Anjana gathered messages which had come from the king, she learned that the date of Lord Hanuman's birth was most imminent, having accidentally read notice of an appointment with the apothecary.

'What should we do, Sita?' she asked of her friend and household companion. 'Should we give him one?'

Sita's face grew red with surprise and embarrassment. 'Gosh!,' she exclaimed. 'That's very modern of you!'

'No, silly,' said Anjana. 'My meaning was, should we give to him a birthday present?'

'That is a very good and fine idea,' said Sita, 'although I know it would be unwise to give him a pearl necklace.'

'Crikey!' said Anjana. 'I would also say that it would be impossible because we are both ladies and it is my belief that such transactions are ordinarily conducted in the other direction!'

They stood for a moment or two because there seemed to be laughter all around, and so they were unable to continue their discussion.

'No,' said Sita. 'You misunderstand me. If you will recall, I once tried to present the Lord Hanuman with just such a gift, but he politely refused it, for it did not feature the name of Rama and was in this way unacceptable to him.'

'So he did not like it then?'

'No, and he was not happy about the necklace either!'

Again there seemed to be laughter all around, and just as it receded, Lord Hanuman himself did come into the parlour.

'Hello, you two,' he said. 'What are we discussing today? I thought I heard you mention something about giving me one!' As he made this statement, he did catch Anjana's eye whilst smiling and raising his eyebrow in a meaningful way.

'Men!' said Sita indignantly.

Anjana sighed and shook her head. 'I really wish you would cease with this line of enquiry, my Lord, for as well you know I am cursed by a certain sage so that when I fall in love, my face will come to resemble that of a monkey, an eventuality I wish to avoid.'

'What's wrong with looking like a monkey?' said the Lord Hanuman, a little injured.

'Besides, I am saving myself for Kesari,' Anjana added, 'and I am technically your mother, I rather think you will find.'

'This is all very confusing,' observed Sita. 'I hardly know whether I'm coming or going.'

'Blimey,' said Lord Hanuman. 'Would you like to sit down? Maybe I could fetch you a chair.'


Much later, following a lengthy series of slightly repetitive comic misunderstandings, Anjana and Sita presented a gift to Lord Hanuman. They first draped a muslin cloth over the gift so as to conceal its nature and enhance the sense of surprise. Unfortunately this gave the gift a priapic appearance which put everyone in mind of the male generative member.

'I wonder what it can be,' said the Lord Hanuman dubiously.

'I shall give you a clue,' said Sita. 'You will enjoy it in your mouth.'

'Crikey,' spluttered Lord Hanuman. 'I rather think you girls may have entirely the wrong idea about me!'

Then they revealed that the gift was in fact a banana.

'Because you're a monkey, and monkeys like bananas,' Sita explained happily, which cleared up all further laboured comic misunderstandings.