Blythe, by Charles Swain
The wet brownstone had left smears on Martin’s fingers when his hands vainly lunged for its surface. His stumble had caused a recently purchased craft beer to slip from his grasp, spilling onto the ground, frothing around twigs and cigarette butts.
His grazed palms were just another injury, physical this time, spewed from a night turgid with them. To start the night the store clerk had asked for ID. Then – at the bar – his friend Maddie had told him about a group of DIY lithographers that he hadn’t heard of. And finally, he had been forced to listen to some guy on the Megabus give a lecture about an exhibit he was putting on where the artists dressed as farm animals and read Spinoza to caged birds. He wished he had fucking thought of that. He wished he could bang the guy’s girlfriend in her quirky Orwellian pig costume on the opening night. Out of resent he had stolen the guy’s cigarettes from a leather shoulder bag when he got up to use the bus’ shitty toilet.
Martin pulled himself to his feet and checked out his hands: bloodied, and the lines were ingrained with dirt. He wiped them down the front of his jeans while looking over his shoulder to see if anyone had witnessed the fall. Pulling a small pipe from his pocket he hurriedly filled it with some of the surprisingly good weed he had found wrapped in cling film at the bottom of the stolen pack of Newports.
“Fucking prick,” he muttered, sucking down the billow of dry, pungent smoke that issued from the small resinous aperture. The guy’s weed was better than anything he had previously been able to get and resent briefly flared as a dull pain in his forehead.
He walked a few paces on and then a bilious wave broke upon his head and his stomach, and he darted into an alley spraying vomit before him. His fingertips splayed against the brownstone once more as the expectoration slowed, trickling into a thin gruel that dripped onto his upturned trouser cuffs and leather shoes.
A noise from off to his side made him turn his head and there, in the very centre of the alley, was a man sitting crossed legged in a small yellow rubber dingy. He wore a black and white striped tunic under a disheveled naval officer’s jacket: double breasted with tarnished bronze buttons, tasseled epaulettes and a rectangle of different colors at the pocket indicating rank or commendations. The once bright white stripes at the cuffs were heavily stained as if dipped in a strong stew. Filthy long johns covered his bottom half.
Martin wiped his mouth and walked closer to the stranger, wondering if the weed had been laced with some drug that everyone was now doing, some potent psychoactive, one he should of known about. The pain briefly flared again in his forehead.
He stood, swaying slightly, as if finding his sea legs, staring at the person who, after a while, beckoned to him with an oar to join him in the craft. Feeling strongly compelled, Martin walked toward the boat and sat down, upsetting an empty rum bottle as he did so.
“Shblast, cleskdjeg, f-ff-fffucking clarabation,” voiced the ragged stranger, his head swung crookedly over his shoulder towards Martin. Even after this phlegmy string of apparent invectives, his lips moved together and apart soundlessly for some time, his distant gaze fixed upon a spot just over Martins’ head.
The man was in the later stages of Delirium Tremens. Martin had briefly read about it during a brief aspiration to become an addiction counsellor. The fact that he was not currently swigging from a bottle, coupled with the constant tremors in the arms, attested to this. Suddenly, he jumped from the boat, wielding the oar; he brandished it like a sabre before striking a swashbuckling pose.
“On guard! To the victor goes the ship!” He called in theatrical tones, pointing the oar’s flat end at Martin.
The gesture was not reminiscent of a dangerous drunk, or a mentally unstable tramp, but that of a child at play with friends. Again the compulsion struck, and Martin jumped to his feet picking up the other oar.
They sparred back and forth, parrying from side to side and feigning the blows scored by one another. The furnishings of the alley became props in their production. Martin swung from the yard arm via a length of oily rope that hung from a fire escape, while his partner dodged Martin’s flying sabre and ducked behind a capstan conjured from a greasy oil drum. Occasionally Martin stopped to vomit, and Blythe’s eyes would once again glaze over as his mouth worked silently. But the game continued when the vomit stopped, as the fight forced them to join together, comrades in arms against the threat of “The dogs of Celebes coming to seek vengeance for the theft of precious pepper.”
Finally, after an hour or more, Blythe climbed climatically onto a dumpster and, emblazoned by the rising dawn from the other end of the alley, threw out his arms and declared that he, Captain Blythe, was commander of all seven seas. Then his eyes glazed and a wet patch spread out from the crotch of his long johns as he pissed himself. The urine stuck to the fabric of his legs as it made its way down towards his ankle. Martin thought that it made it look like Blythe was wearing Oliver-esque tights.
Exhausted, he crawled onto an old upturned mattress and slept like a worn out child, his head surrounded by toy cars. Captain Blythe lay next to him, grasping at imaginary insects that he claimed poured from the walls.
When he awoke, Martin smoked the last of the weed and walked to the corner store to buy Blythe a fifth of rum. The dull pain flared once more in his forehead as he saw people milling outside an organic coffee shop and again when he spied the guy from the Megabus’ bike tied outside a nearby gallery. Stuffing the Newport pack – complete with empty cling film – into the saddlebag made him feel a little better as did the thought of once more joining arms with Captain Blythe.
