Fucked Up

excerpts 30. The ass and the airCane and Tolstoi on the train. They talked about the status of the writer in society, how good it was during communism when writers were given cars, villas and fat paychecks. Of course you would keep on writing; today you write and everyone's fucking you up for not writing like Breban or Drutza.Now I'd be happy to write how fucking cool Brezhnev is or something like that, if they only paid anything. They say you should write for your name, for yourself and for posterity. I don't give a shit about posterity, postmodernism and post-industrialism. I want something now. Anything.Evenin'. Your tickets, please.Cane and Tolstoi get out of the compartment. We're students, Mr. Ticket inspector, sir, we don't have much money, but we'll show our gratitude later. The ticket inspector groaned something and pointed towards the compartment. Don't leave this one, or you're in for it, you hear? Cheers, Mr. Ticket inspector, sir. We gonna stay here. Hey, Cane, don't you think wanking is cooler than fucking? Women are moody, you would say they've got some sort of treasure there between their legs instead of a cunt. It's better just to wank at the speed you like instead of sweating like a pig. It's better, seriously. At peace with yourself, no complications. You just sit in front of the tube, drink beer and wank. Or you can have a woman do it to you, that's also cool. You're being stupid. No one can do it better than yourself. I don't give a shit about a woman's wank, they can't feel it. She'll either scratch you or grab you too hard or with a flabby hand good for holding cereal not a dick.Cane, my brother, you're really dumb, too many tables you've banged your head against; it's made you an idiot. Either you don't know what you're talking about or you haven't had a good wank from somebody in a long time. Do you know how good my wife is at it? It's even better than if I did it myself. And I don't mind anymore, I fuck her when she wants to, she gives me a wank and I want one. Perfect harmony. That's what I call a family. If we also had a place to stay, everything would be peachy. You're losing it, Tolstoi, you don't know what you're talking about, no woman will ever replace a mate. And I wank best myself. There's no need to be polite with your dick, to buy it ice-cream, flowers. You just look after it like you look after yourself. None of the psychological shit.It was getting late. After the lady in their compartment had eaten for about an hour: salami, onion, garlic, ham and so on, she lay back on the bench in front of Tolstoi and Cane. A very fat old lady she was. She turned her ass to her traveling companions. She had taken off her shoes and a stale smell of long forgotten times set in the compartment. She seemed to carry with her all the smells of the trash cans she had ever passed by. The dress was stained with mustard, cigarette ash and something impossible to guess. It unveiled part of her legs or her ass, it was hard to say what exactly because of all the fat, deforming the shapes of a former body that was now monstrous, a fat and repulsive monster. Cane and Tolstoi had stopped talking and they were now staring at their companion's butt. The smell, the unbearable sight made their eyes glow and they couldn't look away. I had the greatest erection ever, Cane would tell later, I wanted to shag that old hag like no one before, her filth made me horny, I wanted to feel up her layers of fat, to find her cunt in all that and fuck it. It would have probably been difficult to do so, like rediscovering America, something simple but unconceivable.Tolstoi admitted to that himself. If I hadn't been paralyzed by the sight, I would have jumped on her like a dog, my dick was so big it didn't fit in my pants anymore; all that filth tortured me, I just wanted to fuck her, but I felt small, very small, there was no way I could have all of her, fuck her so hard that every layer of fat would start trembling, and filthy sweat and slobber would stream down her body like it did then on the bench.Before the train stopped, the Ticket Inspector dropped by the compartment once more. Cane stuffed a bunch of one thousands into his hand and went out with Tolstoi. They were both pale, their eyes looked tired, bloodshot and their clothes reeked of that strong and pungent smell. The old lady was asleep on the bench, her legs spread. The Ticket Inspector stood gaping at the old lady's naked, filthy, sweaty limbs. Then the train stopped suddenly and the ticket inspector found himself, his dick a mile high, between the legs of the old crone, who had waken up and was wiping with one hand the slobber and the snot that had run down her neck.  39. Galilei Galilei was the answer. Galilei had found out what we needed. He was a silent guy, who seemed to always have something on his mind. He only came to school during the exam sessions, yet all of his grades were good. He was the discoverer. The discoverer of the Grail. He had discovered a lot of things actually. Even for the exams. He would fix himself a potion that made him very strong for a while, he didn't need sleep anymore, he memorized everything he read and later on he forgot everything.He made all kinds of experiments. He would mix pills, substances. To come up with the formula of happiness. You have an exam – take this, you're depressed, you're tired; you lack energy, Galilei would find what you needed. He tried everything out. For friends it was free, or for the price that he had paid himself, he sold to some, others were his lab rats. Stick this up your arse, we'll see the effects. Or shoot this up. Or smoke this. The truth is the risk was never too high. For a drug addict. Because Galilei had a sense for measure, he checked the quantities, he predicted the effect.Sometimes, he wouldn't leave his apartment for months. If you called on him, a stench of medicine, of all kinds of substances struck you from the entrance. I would find him working, in a trance on the floor or in his armchair, his eyes rolled back. When he saw me, he would take a shot to come to his senses, then he turned cheerful and talkative.After that we'd smoke some weed, like the traditional fellows we were. For old times' sake. We would laugh, watch a movie. Galilei said that maybe he'd discover the substance that kept one happy and cheerful and optimistic and full of energy throughout one's life. He was joking, but I believe that he was thinking about this when he was experimenting with the powders, I believe this is what he saw in his hallucinations. His hands were drilled by shots, so were the veins on his legs and his tongue. He had lost a lot of weight lately. His lungs must have been drenched in filth. Not to mention his stomach. He forgot to eat. When he felt weak, he just slipped a pill under his tongue and he was up and about in approximately five minutes. He had worked out something similar to the speed pill and he would feed it on us whenever we went to some concert. I was amused, because speed is Russian for AIDS. At the concert, we were so full of energy we didn't know what came into us. We would jump up and run about like idiots, we really felt very good. We would occasionally bang our heads against some wall out of happiness, we were usually the last to leave. Afterwards, it was horrible. We were strung out, drained for a few days. The first time I tried a stamp, I was as innocent as a baby, the Shrew had given it to me, to corrupt me. The truth is it made me feel very well, I was able to spend a lot of time with her and not want to eat. We talked nonsense, she told me all sorts of stories about her. We strolled in the park for a few hours then she told me she had to leave or else she would miss the last bus. I hugged her then and I was lost. Later she told me that she had given me the stamp on purpose to turn me on. I told her she didn't have to. She was 5, 6 God knows how many years older than me. Anyway, I had liked the stamp. So she kept bringing me more.She was a fucking machine, that Shrew. One hundred percent cunt. When you fucked her you felt as if nothing else mattered to her then but her cunt. You felt shagged, she was very emancipated. The Shrew made me feel like a woman. She would slip a stamp in my mouth and one hand in my fly. She let me swim between her tits, as if they were waves, she was like a crazy cow when she was horny. If you wanted a cunt, the Shrew was the perfect one. Beautiful, emancipated, slightly insane. She sucked my cock in a bar once. I couldn't believe it. The truth is no one could see us, but someone could have come in at any time. I remember how she wanted me to fuck her the first time. At the entrance of a garage. She was wearing a short skirt, I had taken off her underpants and every time I was about to start, some car would show up, I thought I'd go mad.Then she disappeared. I met her again a year or two later, she told me she was on her way to Cyprus or something like that to pick bananas. And she smiled at me. Like in Scrof's essay – Moldavian, Romanian girls and bananas, or the picking of bananas. I had had a chick before who ended up picking an Arab's banana.Who's fucking our women? We should emancipate instead of beating them up. Our women are more emancipated than we would want them to be. It's them that fuck us, not the other way around. They look after us and when they no longer need us, when they no longer need our dicks, they fucking throw us away like tampons or broken vibrators. Men have become rags, old crones watching soap operas all day long, whining, gossiping, men are whores nowadays, while women are politicians. Before long, women won't need men at all. And they'll be right not to. Fuck men, if they're such dumb asses. Men are already more or less blow-up dolls and, to be honest, I don't know if they ever were anything more than that. I've always felt fucked, sometimes even raped. Not even in my fantasies have I ever imagined myself as a rapist. Slashing a man's belly is easy, it's simple. Raping a woman is almost impossible, either you have to be a brute, and men are lower than animals, or the woman has to be dead… I don't know… men are finished, they can only be the fucked ones. They've been fearful, helpless idiots for a long time now. It's women who discover Viagra for us, who discover cures for our dicks. They don't need anything else from us and I don't see why they should. You can't reproach them anything. Not even the fact that they're sluts. Men are all a bunch of vibrators; in fact, vibrators are a lot more hygienic, they don't sweat, they don't stink, they don't cause infections, they don't pass on diseases. At a concert where the coolest DJs in the world performed, or so the ads said, we lost Galilei. We were all shattered, we didn't know what planet we were from, all those colours, the noise, everyone was wearing glasses and welding masks. I think everyone there was stoned. We were jumping around like nuts, the speed pill had worked. At some point we wanted to have some Coke and we were thinking who to punish to go to the bar. Someone suggested Galilei. We looked around but we couldn't see him. Then we looked on the floor. Galilei was lying there, blood trickling from his mouth. He was still alive. We didn't know what was going on, if it was real, or we were just junked out of our senses, I was junked out of my senses, I thought to myself. But it was all too weird; we tried to pull him up while he was groaning, while blood was trickling down on his clothes. Eventually, we called an ambulance. The concert went on. Buru went along with him. We stayed outside waiting. In the meantime, we smoked some pot. To forget, to stop feeling so bad. It was useless. It had scared the shit out of us. We all looked like shit. We were beyond the wave of music and all the sounds made up a big loud hubbub in our heads. Then Buru came back. We had to shake him, get him some water to help him come to his senses. We walked down to the dorm. The music seemed to go on forever, it grew louder as we drew farther away. It was night, but none of us has had taken off his sunglasses. The colors of the sky frightened us. The stars were like needles pricking our eyes. Back at the dorm, I dreamt of Galilei. He was looking at a painting I couldn't see. And he was laughing. That was my dream. It lasted the whole night. In Alexandru Vakulovski's (b. 1978) Fucked Up (Aula, 2002), "we get a (rancid) perfume of smothering dejections, bad drugs injected under one's tongue, or tablets bought in the pharmacy 'for my grandmother,' rebellion mixed up with the prostration brought about by train wheels (pills) and infinite nausea about EVERYTHING: from his parents ('I was born into a family of geniuses: my father was a drunk faggot and my mother was a whore') to the professors at the Cluj University ('all the professors that cannot fucking make the difference between paranoia and stupidity'), to Romania (this is old, no more quotes), to Eminescu (that, too)." (Simona Sora)


by Alexandru Vakulovski