Ratso

You meet all sorts of people as soon as you start letting contractors into your house, some of these people are nice, some are not nice, and some are just plain crazy. It's the latter catagory I ended up dealing with yesterday.

A contractor was round installing 5 new windows in my attic - and let me start by pointing out that he did a good job so I have bo qualms about his workmanship - it was his assistant that freaked me out.

He was a short skinny rat-like man who just oozed sleaze and talked about nothing except drinking and fucking - the kind of conversation which is fine down the pub but could be construed as strange when you are talking to a customer whom you've never met before.

He's yammering away talking to me while his boss does all the work, occasionally he picks up a dustpan and brush and does a bit of sweeping but mostly he just wants to talk about drinking and fucking. Eventually I get tired of it and retreat to my office for sanctuary.

5 minutes later he's at the office door with a bottle of Guinness in his hand that had previously been lying on our dining room table.

"Is it true what they say?" He asks me.

"Is what true?"

"That Guinness gives you strength?".

"Well, I know that's what the old style Guinness ads used to say, yeah!"

"No no no, you don't understand. I heard it puts lead in your pencil!".

"Eh?"

"You know, like Viagra and shit..."

He then proceeds to talk to himself about how this might be true and maybe it would work if he put a raw egg in it. Raw egg and Guinness sounds to me like a really disgusting combination, and to be quite frank, might be enough to put me off Guinness for life. I tell him to take the bottle away with him as I really don't feel like drinking it anymore. He goes back upstairs to his boss like a child with a new toy.

God helps us all if this man is breeding....


Later that night I end up in a bar called "Siberia" - a dump of a place just off Times Square hidden behind an unmarked door inside a parking garage, no I'm not joking! The toilets have no locks on them, they only sell Budweiser and other FCTW beers (FCTW - Fucking Close To Water. As in, "What's the connection between an American beer and having sex in a canoe? They're both FCTW..."). The jukebox is great, the staff are dismissive and the walls are streaked with grafitti. In short, Siberia is your classic NYC dive bar.

I stagger out into Times Square in all it's neon corporate glory and sudenly I'm thinking about the movie "Midnight Cowboy" and what Times Square used to look like and just how much the afternoon's encounter with ratman reminded me so much of Ratso (Dustin Hoffman's character in Midnight Cowboy). I think it puts a nice sheen on your day when your mind makes weird connections like this.