58
Pigorilla Power !
9 December 2009-12-09
The Pig can run a wheel as well as a hamster!
Well, despite all my efforts to stay out of the Rat Race, I am getting sucked into the vortex like a drowning child. The problem with the Rat Race is that even if you win, you are still a Rat. It’s out of my hands now....I have run out of money and run out of money to loan. Every now and again, I dream of trust funds and fun I never worked for, but without my polished silver straw with which to suck up the finest Peruvian Flake, my dreams seem just dreams....where has the realism gone?
My day today cannot be done any justice with the thirty odd minutes I have to tell you about it, but you may as well hear some of it from me, while I will leave the rest to your fine Pigorillian imagination.
I woke up at 05h30, climbed out of bed, and as is customary every morning (no matter when I wake up), looked at myself in the mirror and wondered how the hell I ended up here. I guess I could be in a prison in Bangkok, but we are not trying to guess what could be worse....or better....it just is. I couldn’t ponder too much as I had planned to go to gym and swim. I took my Zinc, Magnesium, Acetyl, Pseudo – Ephedrine, Ginger-Root and a few other things, brushed my teeth, got dressed (jeans, Madiba Man T-shirt and Ecco boots with leather jacket) and then jumped back into bed and closed my eyes counting backwards from “Twenty Dinosaurs to Six Dinosaurs” where upon which I leapt out of bed before I fell back into a deep sleep....rushed downstairs into the Madiba-Van and off to gym I went. I parked by the entrance so that everyone can see that I am a man with a van and dived into the pool. I lost one of my Speedo ear plugs and spent 15 minutes looking for it while everyone wondered what I was doing at the bottom of the pool pretending to be the man from Atlantis.
I made it to my appointment at 08h30 just ten minutes late after forty minutes spent creeping along Kings Road at the pace of a sloth. We went to Home Base to buy a carpet and then to a studio which “Andy” looked after for a landlord to fetch a couch. We replaced the couch in the following place with the couch we had taken and also picked up a single sofa for the landlord who was a little eccentric and had seven cats, five dogs and three foxes. Andy said people thought that she was a bit weird. “I wonder why?” I asked. He missed the sarcasm. The sofa was for the foxes.
We arrived at the house which seemed perfectly presentable and the landlady came out looking quite alright in a canary yellow matching track-suite top and bottom, red lipstick and yellow hair, although I thought that it was probably just white and reflecting the yellow of her outfit. I nearly shook hands with her, but felt a little intimidated by the inch long black finger nails which I had just noticed and she didn’t seem to mind that I hadn’t so I didn’t. “I hear you have three foxes”, I said as a way of breaking into conversation as Andy was getting the sofa out the van. “Yes”, she said. “I would love to see them”, I said, “Are they around?” I asked. “No, they will probably be hiding upstairs”, she answered and went on, “They hate men...with good reason too.” I wasn’t sure if she meant that men had been nasty to the foxes or not, but I got the feeling that she was in agreement with the foxes for her own reasons and besides, her doddering man-slave had come out who was only about fifty (going on eighty) who was going to help Andy with the couch. She muttered something of an insult to him as he walked past and he bumbled something equally as discontent through his beard and bent frame as he grabbed his side of the sofa to assist Andy. He smelt like he had wet his pants and was coming across a little grim, but I wanted to see the foxes so followed her up to the front door of the house which was just ten metres away.
She opened the door and there was a black cat arching on a sofa just inside the door, but oddly enough, I only thought of that again now for the first time since it happened. What struck me as I walked through the door was as clear to my senses as if someone had walked up to me and poured a bucket of ammonia, rotting flesh, and putrefied, rank, rancid death all over me. In all my years and all my experiences, nothing has prepared me for that most shocking stench. I looked at the landlady who was coming across more as the anti-Christ than anything else I could think of. She was standing there talking about something I could not hear. The husband and Andy had just arrived through the door and were going to close it behind them. That would have been unacceptable to me. I tried breathing through my mouth and blocking my nose, but the noxious air was filling me with horrid feelings of desperate loathing and fear. I said, “I’m not comfortable with leaving the van on the pavement and am going to keep an eye on it.”
“Oh, don’t worry about that. The neighbour is no problem at all”, the anti-land-Christ-lady said. “oh my god”, I was thinking, “What is wrong with you fucking people? Can you not smell the death and decay and filthy putrid stench that is soaking into us and clogging our lungs and lives?”
“It’s not the neighbour I was thinking about”, I said, “more like the police for me having illegally parked the van.”
“Oh, never mind about that. You won’t see them around here”, she retorted. I could almost hear them thinking, “This one’s lasting long...another ten seconds and he’ll be left with no choice, but to pass out.”
I pulled out my phone, answered an imaginary call, and left the building. Trying to keep my life running as normally as possible, I made a call to the husband of a friend of mine with whom I was going to meet after this appointment and before my next one, if there was time. There was no time, but I could barely get the words out before retching thrice and then throwing up into the gutter. “Are you Ok?” Chris asked from his five star hotel in Knightsbridge. Oh, how I wished I was there! I assured him I wasn’t, wretched again, tried to explain what was happening, then had to negotiate with Andy who came out and was trying to persuade me to not only help him to take the couch I already had to the dump, but also a stained stinking one by the door with cushions that he had already loaded with fresh brown wet poo wiped into them. Already the back of the van was reeking with the stench of it and I said that I was terribly sorry, but that was not going to be possible. He said that it did have a slight odour about it....OMG....I felt like things were totally out of control. The next thing I knew, the smelly husband and Andy had hopped up into the cab and were coming with me to the dump to offload the couch we had collected earlier that morning. My window was open, but Andy was keeping his closed....could he not smell this chap? Something was wrong? I could practically see the snakes writhing beneath his shirt....I offered to dump the couch on my own and dropped them off....the horror, the horror.
Meeting up with colleague and friend who is from SA to do the next job was a welcome break and it involved packing boxes for a Jewish couple at their home. I’m convinced that the inventor of Judaism was a manufacturer of crockery. They have a different plate for every meal of their lives. I couldn’t afford to be one.... Atheism is much less expensive. The husband was a t work, but she was home. She was about twenty-eight years old, dressed plainly with no make-up and wearing low slung loose fitting tracksuit pants, but had long blond hair (and legs), wide set eyes, flawless skin, perky breasts and arched her back with a tight bum that just begged to be spanked. Wishful thinking, but it was not to be. Ended up packing the boxes, then leaving.
What was the most unusual turn of events of the day came with the call I received just after leaving the house....
