Darren

I walked into my house, there were jars of urine everywhere, as well as many old newspapers
that I’d been obsessively saving. The place was very run down.
I unzipped my trousers then urinated on one of the piles of newspapers, as had become my
habit of late. The idea, I believe came from seeing dogs urinate around the neighbourhood to
mark their territory. Once I’d finished doing this, I put myself back away in my trousers, zipped
them back up, then walked around the house looking for a can of spray paint that still had some
paint left in it. Once I found a can, a red one, I shook it up a little then began to paint a lewd
rudimentary depiction of a naked woman on one of the walls of my house. Once this was
finished in all capitals I wrote WHORE next to the lady then underlined it.
‘Dumb slut’ I thought to myself as I looked at the painting, ‘just like the rest of them…’
‘Do you want me to get the next round?’ she had said to me, and I’d then replied,
‘Alright’
The clouds were filled with hundreds of little butterflies and mast was resting on a mossy log in
a forest somewhere. I can still remember all of the girls fluttering off around me and the time I
took Ketamine in a dream, and looked at this wood sprite of a girl in an airport, and saw Pablo
Picasso making love to an underaged girl. This was why I had to save up all of the newspapers,
because I didn’t want to risk losing anything, any detail. They coludn’t understand all that of
course; they didn’t know, or care to know about all of the different forces listening in on them,
from this planet and others, of course.
I’ve been living here on my own for awhile since I dropped out of school.
I love being away from school, and my stupid life. It really does suck out there. It just sucks. The
girls are pretty, but if they’re not, you can’t trust them.
Eventually one day everything rather suddenly changed. I met this other fellow outcast from my
neighbourhood and we started taking everything very seriously. Everything was different
somehow. The girls were still beautiful, but they were enjoying sleep, it wasn’t just so much
that they didn’t mind being awake as well. They would still speak in Haikus, but then I would be
able to understand them, to actually understand them.
The other young men, had plagiarised a lot of what they told me from the universe, fires,
embers, their loins. I of course had never been a terribly sexual person, it just didn’t interest
me. Often after I’d finished making love to the girls, I simply wept, at the impossible beauty of it
all. And for a lot of my life as a young man, I was up to my neck in pussy. I mean I was the
striker on our highschool football team and that didn’t hurt at all. But inside I was crying. And
the girls of course knew this, and they used it against me. They were all so strange, such
strange, dangerous creatures. They took advantage of my depression, and asked me what I’d
been like before I’d hit puberty. They were desperate to find out more about my soul, and the
various sins I’d commited in my life.
But to go back to my new friend... He just wasn’t like all the other boys!! Take his email address
for one, exorcise_me666@hotmail.com.
For about a solid week before I first spoke to him he had my attention; undivided; all of it.
He worked as a barista in the local café I always went to, and whenever I went there, I would

always take books with me, with the hope that he might see me reading them, and thus see me
in a certain light. I read Tender is the Night in there, the Diary of Anne Frank, William
Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, and lastly the Bible. I wanted to give him the impression that I
was a very intellectual and sensitive young man. He would conjure himself in my room at night,
and at times sit on the edge of my ceiling fan as it went round and round.
I did want to make it clear to him however that if we were to pursue any sort of relationship,
that it would not be a sexual one, I literally cannot stand fags, but more so as best friends,
confidants and brothers, and also that he would have to share me with my computer. I spend
some 90 odd percent of my waking hours behind my computer, surfing the web and living out
the life of my alter ego Zora_Link772 in Runescape. Which basically all of my skills, except for
herbistry, are maxed out at 99— I’m boasting, lol, but whatever.
Anyway, I just wanted this boy to know, well that one, we could be really happy together, play
lots of great games together, level alts in WoW together, tell each other ghost stories, have
sword-fights with wooden swords, paint LoTR models, all of it together, but I wanted him to
also know that he’d have to share me with my computer. And if he couldn’t accept all that and
didn’t want to have anything to do with me, then I didn’t really much care if he was dead or
alive.
And I would sit on the metal chairs in his coffee shop day after day and look dreamily at him,
and imagine the sort of life we could enjoy together. I would look at beautiful young women in
the shop while I was in there and imagine us both making love to them at once.
Eventually my obsession with this boy, Darren got too much. And so I decided that come hell or
high water I had to let him know how I felt. One Friday I got drunk as hell before going into his
coffee shop, to give myself some of the ol’ Dutch Courage.
There was a pretty girl in the coffee shop that afternoon. And I watched as she wriggled her
little butt over one of the metal chairs in there, as she seemed to be trying to find a
comfortable spot on it. She had her cheek resting on her knuckles and I thought
absentmindedly of her for a shortwhile, and did a little sketch of her in my notebook, which
also had Darren’s name doodled over page after page of it from the last week or so.
I looked at the girl some more, then thought to myself, ‘Don’t think about that prissy little bitch.
Today isn’t about her. Don’t get distracted. Today is all about Darren. And telling him how you
feel. You will have to let him know from the get-go that you’re not a fag though. Make sure he
doesn’t think you’re into him in some sort of weird faggy way. There’s no faggy-element to it.
It’s just two lonely young men, who’ve found each other in a world of suffering and pain. Then
you can both go out and get drunk as hell and chase tail, and get into action and mischief
together—it’ll be great. I’m sure he’ll feel the same way. You’ve seen the way he looks at you.
And if he starts to seem weirded out or tentative about things. Just, simply let him know that he
has no choice; that if he’s not into it, a person in your position can easily make things very
difficult for him. Very, very difficult indeed…’
I took out my flask and Irished up my cappcuino, as I continued to work on my sketch in my
pad, and try to build up the courage to approach him. I drew shit like crucifixes and
pentagrams, beauty queen decapitations, kalashnikovs, severed limbs, and what not. I was

playing a lot of violent video games and reading a lot of violent comics at the time, I guess, and
this bled rather heavily into my work.
I looked more at Darren. He kind of reminded me of Jessie Bradford or perhaps a young,
Titanic/ Romeo and Juliet circa Leonardo DiCaprio.
I liked how he kept a three day beard, wore ripped punk shirts, and rode a skateboard to and
from work. I saw him as just this charming rebel, who played by his own rules and didn’t give a
damn about what anyone might think of him. I liked watching him get his moleskine journal out
on his lunch breaks and jotting things down in it.
And I used to wonder what he was writing in it, possibly things about me, as I often wrote
things about him. I hoped that he felt the same way! And if not… Well, like I said, things could
get very difficult for him. But, the choice, ultimately was his.
It wasn’t that he was always on his own on his lunch breaks though, I don’t want to create that
impression, sometimes he sat with a girl, but she was just a bitch, and clearly didn’t interest him
all that much, and she doesn’t bear being described or written about much.
And as he wrote on his lunch breaks, I liked to imagine him like Romeo, musing about how
sweet love itself was possessed when but its shadows were so rich in joy.
I continued to sit there and look at Darren as he worked. ‘We’re going to be so happy together’
I thought to myself, ‘little do you know that the finest season of your life is about to begin! And
look at you so oblivious there, as you froth up all the cappucinos, lol. This is going to be great’
I took another sip from my Irish cappucino. ‘You have to talk to him, obviously don’t be rude to
him, you’re too nice a guy for that, but just gently let him know that he can agree to be your
friend, or suffer the consequences. I figure that a guy this gorgeous would have to be dating
someone, but that doesn’t matter, you two can still be friends, just so long as he knows that
your friendship comes first’
As I looked at him I felt like a scientist looking at amoebes thru a microscope, intrigued, terribly,
yes, but unable to interact. I continued to drink more of my cappucino and think about how
best to go about approaching him.
‘Don’t worry though’ I soon said to myself, ‘soon you will have approached him, and then
everything will be altered with the first spring of things. The first delicate flowers. Before you
have him in your life, you must first manifest him. Think of his body, his chest, eyes, hair, lips,
his toes, his cock. As it is written in the Gita, the perception of truth must be grown from within.
It cannot be a graft. Maybe, booze was the wrong approach. Perhaps you should’ve fired up the
old crystal pistol. Hmm—no you’re looking for excuses. Booze is fine. Just tell him the truth, be
honest with him about your feelings— no, no, you need speed. You need it in your blood, your
lungs. Faster, faster, faster. Or—poetry, you could tell him how you feel in a poetic sense. Look
at his lips trembling behind the coffee machine—perhaps he feels exactly the same way,
perhaps he is thinking about you in similar terms even now. Just be straight with him. And he
can listen to you when you speak to him, after you’ve mustered up the courage, he can damn
well at least listen to you and take you seriously’ I took another sip from my cappucino, ‘so… A
poem…’

In my pad I then began to write, ‘Darren, you are the wind washing thru the willows, the kiss
hiding in the corner of a young girl’s mouth, the corn sprouting from the naval of the corpse of
Osiris, the drizzle among the corners, your lips remind me of characters written on a letter,
which takes me to an island amongst a sea, though here, I am yours with the dust on the
window panes, our hands gripping each other in a hearty handshake between brothers, as our
eyes meet, and the racket of the machinery outside dies down. I am a genius, and you in your
uncertainty could be a man of great cruelty. The earth turns and turns and the cottage we will
one day live in, lies quietly on the shoulder of a hill, under the solemn brow of night, oh when
will we meet? What will we see? I picture the rain dazzling on us, enormous, so nostalgic in our
death, cherishing the decay and heavy loam.
Do not waste your life, your charm on some ugly, unmotivated girl, but spend it with me
instead, and I will take us to such places, the glassen waters of a lake, the mountains of
Salzburg, I will grip your hand fiercely, afraid to let you go. And I will beckon you to far off lands,
never before seen by human eyes. I am a neon whisper, seductive, beckoning, we are pariahs,
outcasts, midst, windy neon, crooked alleys, crawling thru the streets, to sleep in a shared
capsule, something unknown, our faces moving across the sky like the grim spectre of death
itself’
I looked more at Darren as he worked.
‘What is he?’ I thought to myself, ‘Some pithy summary of existance, all her warmth and terror,
the blurry line between illusion and reality, the threads at the end of the quilt, coming unstuck,
torn and frayed, from which it all might unravel, tall buildings crumbling down, great praying
mantises walking thru the streets, cutting the heads off of all the women. Enchanted reptiles,
delicate rain! Time coming unstuck, working together with men to assemble some bright dewy
hell, golden orbs on the bright strands of the dead’
I could already taste him in my mouth. I imagined our cottage again, and then saw it all rotten,
swollen as the rain drizzled down amongst the corn. The tiles of the coffee shop seemed to be
beginning to putrefy down into some foul muck, along with all of the other furniture. I could no
longer tell what was real or imaginary.
I could no longer distinguish the outlines of the real. The men and women were taking on a
curious impermanence, mixing together like fragments of a dream.
‘I’m going to go home and take a shower’ I heard a girl sitting before me in the café say.
‘Yeah, that’s right, you little slut’ I then thought to myself, ‘go home and get that nice tight little
body, real clean and wet. Soap it down you little bitch, yeah’
It was all unravelling. I knew that if I wanted to make my intentions clear to Darren I would have
to act fast. I could taste the ash on my tongue already, see it falling from the sky. I looked at
him, and felt those strong masculine glimpses of the divine.
I would keep him at night laying curled up in the draw of my bedside table, next to a half empty
bottle of sleeping pills. I would keep him inside the bottle. He would have his own little bottle
and I would hear him snoring gently from within it. Perhaps on his own little bed, and inside the
bed, we would both slowly drift off to sleep.
Who was he? Lolita. Brett Ashley. Some confounding muse...

‘Darren help me’ I thought to myself as I sat there, ‘I feel so damn worn out these days. What if
I just let go of it all?
…The train is already beginning to draw away. This is you missing your chance. I can think of
literally nothing to say to him’
I eventually got up and walked over to Darren at the counter. ‘Um, hey buddy, could I take one
more cappucino please’ I then said to him idiotically.
‘Sure that’ll be 2 pound 90’ he replied. I paid him, then he replied,
‘And we’ll bring that right out to you’
‘Thanks’ I replied then walked back to my table.
‘Stupid, stupid, stupid, stupid’ I thought to myself. I suddenly stopped, turned around and
looked at Darren, ‘Hey Darren’ I then said to him.
‘Er, what can I do for you?’ he replied.
‘It’ll all be alright…
…So don’t you worry, cause it’s all going to be alright’
‘Er, ok, thanks, we’ll bring that cappucino out to you when it’s ready’
‘Great. Great Darren great. Thank you, I appreciate that, really’
‘Ok’
I then returned to my table and resumed my seat at it.
‘Darren, I’m not happy’ I thought to myself, ‘Darren make me happy. Make me happy, make me
happy, make me happy. I love you. Really. The little god of suburbia, sitting there with your
bored look, canvassing us all for sympathies. If you say something then this whole world just
might start. I see you skipping down my wrists in a pair of blood red chucks, perhaps one of the
laces untied. Leaving a warm wet trail. I dream of you, off in the distance, thru the palm trees
and fronds, the humid buzzing jungles with a drawn m16. Soon, soon proper contact will be
made. Booze, booze was wrong. Can’t focus, can’t think properly on this shit. I need some
shard. I need some shard. To fire up the crystal pistol, then come back in tomorrow, when
you’re truly focused’

I had been spun for days. I couldn’t say how long. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d eaten.
Perhaps three days I’d been up for. Planning, planning, planning on how best to approach
Darren. I had bought several markers, and all of the walls of my apartment were filled with
complex strategems of how best to make Darren mine.
I spent several hours making a flash animation in which Darren’s head motion-tweened into
first a beetroot, then a trumpet, then a stack of dollar bills. I thought about showing it to him. I
thought about telling him that I was a murderer and knew people that could make his life very
difficult unless he agreed to be mine. I was sweating fucking bullets man. I was obsessed. I
browsed 4chan, wiz, tumblr for hours.
More or less every single thought that the slightest amount of joy, pleasure, or wisdom could
be derived from was disected, and taken apart time and time again, everything was contrived,
washed-out in colour. The tribes people were being given iphones, for their help participating in
the commerical.
If there was a girl, one that was distracting him from what we could be, then she would have to
go, we would have to free up his attention. She would be kept behind a wall of fire— or we
would set her off wandering thru that hypnotic jungle of lost boys. There would have to be
some sort of deterant.
I went into the coffee shop, ordered a cappucino and sat down. I knew that after I came down
off this shard I would have to stop, eat something, try my hand at sleep. There were several
concaved mirrors positioned winking amongst the leaves in there, they kept them behind the
ferns, in the far corners of the room, thinking that then we might not see them, the yellow
panther-like eyes, glinting in them, ready to survey the room at a glance, and thus stirred, soon
slinking up behind you as deftly as water, bristling sheckles, drawn claws, the whole shebang.
So if you were planning anything in there, on fucking-about or whatever you want to call it, you
had to forever be weary of the risks, the dangers, constantly scanning those silver moon-lit
puddles for eyes, shimmering yellow, blue, whatever it weas. Not just for the panthers, but also
for the vigilante conscientious-objector, hoping to perform a citizen’s arrest, report you in for
your crimes, the head shrinkers, blood drinkers, peering over your shoulder from behind, blow
darts, arrows, stone clubs and daggers, a vast array of threats one had to forever be vigilant of.
Darren, of course, was on my side in all of this; one of the lost boys, and there was some never
ending animosity upheld behind these two factions, that I knew one day might break out into
violent skirmish. And then we would both have to leave in a hurry, for Zanzibar, wherever, and
lush dark skinned beauties, mudhuts, jungles, opium, painting, dark money drawn from dark
deads, amidst the dim tangles— ivory, sure, you name it, Ethopia, sending out pink flake behind
postage stamps, swimming with the sharks, walking below the vultures.
Soon my cappucino was bought out to me, and as I picked it up to drink, my hands were
shaking. I knew, I had a sense that that day, a decisive battle would be faught and it would be
Darren and I against the world, the machine, society at large. And then we would make it to the
top, side by side as brothers, and all of the sweet young women would want us and be ours.
I slowly sipped at my cappucino.

Soon a corpulent youth entered the store, his fleshy body was glistening with fabulous oils,
pigments, and the smeered blood of his prey, cracked and conjealed in places. Around his neck
were six sand shrunken heads. And he seemed to be looking to become the chief’s holy boy.
But it was useless, I laughed at his attempts. The laughter penetrated the languid energy of the
café, soaked in, and wound us in the black treacle of death. Everything was happening all at
once. A stew of images were being mixted together, there were thousands of deaths deep
within that jungle and men were hoping to distill and drink from them, to pluck black hearts
from the coils, and present them to the chief. I saw a bloody headless body walking around,
unmistakably dark arts devised to impress the chief. Spider-like legs were sprouting too from
some of the dismembered heads and they were awkwardly rising and beginning to walk about.
Heads were mounted on stacks, swarmed by thick black darting orbits, the others danced and
stomped on their rainbow feet for him amidst the dust, the girls played gracefully for him, as
graceful as gazelles; they crawled down into their crocodile skin bags, and beckoned him in.
They sunned themselves by the riverside. The nymphs beckoned him under. It was all for him, it
was all for him. We all felt the same so why couldn’t we just admit it?
I suppose, with such a man, there must be a real temptation to become a God, but he was too
pure for that, he would never accept such power. All he would do was laugh, laugh, laugh,
laugh, and his laughter would spurt out hideous darkness, paint the forest with it, and drip
down his chin like black treacle.
We would do anything to appease him, whatever was necessary. I saw one girl bare, smeared in
blood, wearing a necklace of intestines, we were thirsty for his power, we wanted him, we
wanted to quench that desperate thirst, dark stains were dripping down chins, necks, chests,
the blouses of ladies were ripped open. We reckognized that of the savage in him, and we
wanted to stand out from the rest to him. He was our only master, we would follow him with
obsequious vulgar servitude. And me, simple me, not Tiger Lily, Wendy, Pan, just some simple
dead beat kid, who hadn’t even graduated out of fucking high school was there the day the shit
went down.
I watched as a lady in the café cocked her head to one side shyly and softly sniggered at a
friend’s joke. I tried to make her plausible in my twisted mythology of this lost world. I thought
of how Darren and I could both treasure her. I looked at her, with her hand raised to her mouth
as she laughed as if she were shy of her own white teeth. She was fascinating. I wondered what
Darren thought of her. The corpulent boy was chatting to Darren about something or another.
And I looked at him and slowly shook my head. I quickly finished my cappucino then ducked
down behind my table, and mimed myself cradling an m16 in my hands. The time was running
out. His inky personality belonged purely to the world of fantasy and dreams. He was a boy of
pure fantasy—nothing at all real.
They were all speculating on death as we sat there, surrounded by charts of the prehistoric
world. The angles, the sense of perspective was all wrong.
From behind my table I looked at the dark leaves and vines with the blooming purples flowers,
at the others with their frenzied internal searching. Locked up in cages of their own invention,
and it was all real; I had actually been there.
The milky white flesh was pink, red with streaks, the windows were closing fast. And the

corpulent boy was dragged out thru the rain. And I knew that we would never see him again.
Finger cymbals crashed about my ears. And I heard the heavy fall of an axe. Pan drums rolled
hypnotically and the melodies of wood flutes dizzily intertwined. Dust curled up around their
feet. And the distant forest was lit up napalm orange. The atmosphere felt lethal, frenzied,
absolved of reason.
I returned to my seat and continued to watch it all. I glanced into one of the puddles just in
time. Darren was incoming. With him were blue skinned men, forest trolls perhaps, sharp
tusked, hungry for scalping. His face seemed so beautiful as it had amongst the medieval castles
of my dreams, the hunchbacked machinations, the swans on the lake, I felt feint. I quickly
closed the several other realities I had open in my mind, one in which a 17 year old girl had
slept with her two underaged male cousins. I got right back into that reality of the coffee shop
just in time, Darren was then standing before my table and he said to me, ‘I’m afraid, I’m going
to have to ask you to leave, your behaviour is disturbing the other customers’
I was completely dumbstruck. I couldn’t think of a single thing to say to him. I continued to sit
there silently looking at Darren.
‘Look, sir, would you please leave, you’re intoxicated, and you’re disturbing the other guests’
‘I, I…’ I began, ‘What if I told you I could make you rich? That I could make you richer than your
wildest dreams. What if told you that, hey?’
‘Look, I don’t want any trouble. Please would just leave the establishment sir, and not ever
come back’
‘You know. You know. And I can see that you know, that I know, in the way that you look at me’
Darren shook his head slightly here.
‘You see it was Wilde who once said that women appreciate cruelty—downright cruelty—more
than anything else, who talked of their wonderfully primitive instincts, and there is money to be
made there, there is definite money to be had there for the both of us, if you would only but
trust me’
Darren didn’t respond anything to this.
‘…or ok then, how about if I said I could make you not just rich, but happy too. Some internal
womb of serene clarity— that I could take you there. I’ve, I’ve been working on several projects
at home you see, and at least one of them is about you. In, in one, which I think you’ll rather
enjoy, I took a photograph of you—or well no, I took a few photographs, several photographs of
you on my phone actually and well—I think you’ll be very impressed with what I came up with,
with the results.
…why don’t I just take you home and show it to you? You can clock off early and we can go
now. It’s not far from here, really’
Darren looked at me blankly.
‘And you want to know what else? I know your name. I know your name and your email
address, you want to know how I found those out?’
‘Sir, are you going to leave now? Or am I going to have to get the police involved?’
‘I wrote a poem about you too. I’m a writer, you see—or a poet actually. I’m not the best yet,
but I’m getting better every day. I’ve written a lot of poems about you, because, in a way
everything is about you, so even when I’m writing about something completely different I’m

also kind of writing about you. I, I want to write like Tal played chess’
‘…You play chess?’
‘Yes. Ok, alright, here it is, you and I, we play one chess game, one game. If I win, you have to
agree to come out to dinner with me tonight. And if you win, then I’ll go home and kill myself
tonight, right hand to the bible, and you’ll never have to see or hear or worry about me ever
again’
‘Er…’
‘Listen, I can show you other worlds. Other universes beyond your wildest imagination, I can
take you there, all you need to do is trust me. Take my hand, and I can show you what was and
will be.
…You’re intrigued aren’t you? You’re intrigued.
…God damnit, I haven’t eaten anything in days. I’m fucking starving’
Darren was silent a moment then said, ‘Why don’t you go home then, get yourself something to
eat and some rest? Alright…?’
‘No, no, no canned food, beans, amidst the compass, map and revolver in my satchel bag as we
make our way thru the jungle towards the waterfall, past the splintered rotten settlement,
buried in ivy and ferns, thinking, taking what we can from this life, amongst the faint purr, buzz
from the jungle, the ineffable strangeness of it all’
‘Please, I really think it would be best if you just left now. Go home, get some sleep ok, would
you?’
‘Ok, but I’ll be back’
‘No, you won’t alright, or I’ll call the police’
‘See, see, a stormcloud is rumbling over the jungle, dark grey in the centre, greening at the
edges. I can feel the rush and encroaching blast waves of a nearby bombing raid, see the
mosquitos buzzing and droning around me. Their noise is so constant it has long faded
inconspicuously into the background, amidst the buzz of the rotar blades, the finger cymbals of
buddhist funerals played from choppers at night to spook the gooks into deserting’
‘Ok, now you really got to go. Now you really got to get out of here’
‘…to place the fear in them that their souls will never find rest if they’re to die in this evil place
and will wander the Earth forever’
Darren then leaned over his shoulder and said to a young woman behind him, ‘Meredith, call
the police, would you? Just tell them there’s a druggie creating a disturbance at the Regency
Café, and he needs to be removed’
‘Ok, ok, I’ll leave, I’ll leave’ I said, ‘but I’ll be back’
‘No, no you won’t, ok? You’re not to come back here again, you understand?’
‘You want to see a dead alien?’
‘Meredith, the police, would you?’ Darren then said to the lady behind him and I then quickly
began to make my way out of the café.