Europe is the Belly of Dionysus

A vignette based on a dream

A busy train station in Europe where everything is happening, everything was moving, and everything is both past and present. Little Mario with tight muscles in a white vest flicks coins into a fruit machine and fingers fly over flashing plastic buttons, cigarette dangling from his lips, half a pack left in his back pocket of blue Levi jeans that show his a*s as tight beneath a flicking light bulb. His cracked yellowed heels in cork sandals, dried skin flaking into the air in clouds of dust, completely in tune with the manic buzz of the machines lights and sounds. Mario still hates f*****s, you can see the despise in his beady Spanish eyes and the way his lip curls beneath his moustache, you can see it in the front of his pants where his dick pushes against the denim like some coiled snake waiting to strike.

 

The whole universe is waiting for the early evening train that is late; everyone is restless and insane for the journey. We are all underground surrounded by the hum and vibration of the above city’s wild life, the stampede of evening hustle and bustle, maybe in Italy, maybe in Paris, but this is Europe, you can tell by the taste of the air, the smell of the sounds, it’s like the belly of an Ancient Greek God with indigestion and we are the cause of all his troubles, the internal tumult of destiny. Did anyone ever wonder what lay in the stewing belly of Dionysus? Madness, chaos, drunkenness where we are the festering bacteria of all his troubles, the ebbing tide of the evenings salt-smoke wash edging with deliriums with the tip of eternity on all our tongues that speak the same language of love, of loss, of the night while Dionysius is clutching his paned belly, keeling over at the knee’s of Zeus, supplicating him in order to be rid of his pains, for the late evening train to arrive and carry away us- the festering filth of tonight’s world. But the game of air hockey between two young drunks is not over yet, they still have a bagful of coins to keep the air rushing up upon its surface, and play on for honour and glory while bored-eyed Parisian sweethearts gather around with curiosity. And everyone tonight is a God within a God.

 

A friend from my younger years is beside me, his hair is golden and his face is blotchy red with bad skin. He is the sunshine at dawn, convulsing wildly to see the next wild night, if he fails to rise tomorrow the day will be cast into eternal night. We are far from home, far from our mothers in their domestic hell, far from our father’s in their masculine proudness, far from everything that we had once known.  He is thinking of the base of Mount Vesuvius deep in the world, although he would never be able to place Pompeii on the map, and he thought of all the bottomless oceans that he would swim deep in when the night was soft and nothing can be heard apart from the pink sugar bubble-gum pop of girls standing outside drugstores with bored eyes waiting to be fucked like shooting stars f**k the darkness of the night’s sky like the intestines f**k the internal flesh, and truly the purpose of life is for the body to f**k the world long and hard, because the world is a giant c**t, and the meaning of life, like the apathetic housewives of America, the mistresses and w****s of Europe and the brown goddesses of Africa that cry silently to be fucked, is to f**k, and to be fucked in return, which is truly the greatest thing that there is to do.

 

We’re now both on different trains, travelling through the intestinal organs of the God. Michael is far off in Italy, soon to be cruising through the canals of Venice in a striped black and white t shirt reaching over to pick fresh satsuma’s off the market stands along the river, sending me mental postcards of his solitude journey. I’m passing through the cool mountainous snow capped peaks of Norway, tranquil and still, the air like morning sea breeze on my face as I lean out the train window and breath bottomless into the bowels of life itself, like Mario as he blows his cigarette smoke into the a*****e of a f****t while he throttles his own neck and looks into the sperm-choked eyes of the queer. The blueness of the world, like the earth seen from space mixed with the plush green life of nature, is blind drunk.

 

A Michael Jackson impersonator is sat beside his packed suitcases dancing a little in his seat to the eternal sounds of MJ himself in his own head. Sometime along the journey he peels a layer off his skin off, revealing someone completely new underneath, a shapely face with high cheekbones, his black hair pushed back flowing wild as he begins to sing and carouse in the carriage, hearing the beat of his own drummer in his own way, carefully placing the skin layer on the seat beside him with delicacy so as to not loose face. I can barely move outside the carriage, luggage is everywhere, piled on top of each other and I must tread careful so as to avoid detonating any mines along the corridor and toppling the train off the rails as to journey to heaven, to the Great Gig in the Sky. But I am not afraid of dying, anytime will do. You’ve got to go sometime.

 

Now passing through a city, watching an endless queue of young fan girls stand in a line that curls and coils around the neighbourhood districts, once the pig-tailed personifications of innocence, now tainted with the city’s dirt that is embedded under pink painted fingernails,. Thousands of manic thirteen year olds, some screaming, others in silence, the madness up inside their own heads. Michael is back by my side where he always has been and always will be no matter where I go. We skip to the front of the queue and a young girl is telling me I would do better to wear horn-rimmed glasses.

 

Everyone is waiting to meet a little Jewish lady, famous for her breakfast platters in a B&B her husband owns, everyone is waiting to get a room for the night, just for the breakfast. Some have been waiting a few days and others have been waiting years. It is death row here and every little girl has requested a large breakfast platter without her father present. Inside the bed and breakfast dining room are tables of dreary eyed sleepless girls in ecstatic breakfast joy, dozens of brown skinned Mongolian’s rattle around in butler-wear, squawking orders to one another.  The little mother bee Jew lady is in a blurred haze of breakfast preparation; her kindness is felt as soon as you enter, the kindness of a grandmother that strokes your face after you awake from a nightmare and tells you everything is alright. She is the little Jew lady of Paris, outside the cave jazz club I met on valentines night of this year smoking two cigarettes, the deep lines in her face still filled with the sands of time left from eternity’s wanderings. She recognises me as they one who told her that she was beautiful, and her face lights up the same way it did back on the night I first met her.

 

As the breakfast bell is struck Dionysus spews the bile in his belly out over the side of Olympia and the Trojans discover acid rain.