Leroy's Dad's Birthday

  Leroy thought of Delilah often. She had been the magical catalyst in his unreactive life. Not that he took to gun fights and gang wars after their brief encounter, but a shift did occur, as surely as the turning of a page. As a gaunt and anaemic moon becomes fuller and eventually reaches a glorious Camembert, Leroy grew into himself. He found himself constantly thanking Delilah, joyful that he had not become the boy who loved a girl with big, green eyes, but rather the boy who had features of his own to describe. His loneliness, as christened by Delilah, was a selling point, his awkward hair a unique detail, his eternal discomfort an insightful statement. He learned to wear his gracelessness with elegance, and although his neurotic nature occasionally led him to panic over whether becoming too comfortable might compromise his reputation, he felt he was expanding and inhaling, becoming something rounder and fuller with every breath of identity.  

That is not to say that Leroy leaped to self-actualisation in a single bound. He had, in fact, at twenty-one, come to accept that his mother had ruined him far too profoundly to ever achieve a higher recognition of self. Echoes of her combative parenting trailed along behind him, tugging on his sleeves and ensuring that therapy would never be completely off the table. Even in his tastefully grimy flat that reeked of seized freedom, there hung a family portrait above the fridge, framed in plasticky pinewood, so that his every fumbling for food forced him beneath the scrutiny of the loins of his fruit. The photograph was stiff and strange, as family pictures always are, with each member standing straight with their backs against a plain white wall. Twelve-year-old Leroy stood in front of his parents as each rested a heavy hand on his shoulders, and his vaguely alarmed expression made the picture more Judgement Day than Brady Bunch. The lipstick on Annette’s cereal-box smile was matched in colour by the ketchup stain on Ed’s woollen pullover.

Leroy usually avoided the photograph because it always made him feel like a teenager again. Sustained eye contact was enough to make his knees quiver and pimples spring up on his face like dandelions, so he went to the fridge with his eyes downturned. Guilt prevented him removing the portrait, and yet, guilt prevented him facing it.

He did look at it one grey Saturday, as he grimly heated Ramen noodles in the noisy and out-dated microwave that hummed like a tone-deaf churchgoer. It was his father’s birthday, and so – once again prompted by the gristly conscience that lived in the pit of his stomach – Leroy dragged his eyes to Ed’s face and thought of him.   

He and Annette lived in the same house they had always lived in, where she aggressively attempted to recreate the glowing, white-washed feeling that accompanies early parenthood, and that had previously filled the little semi-detached home. She redecorated at least once per annum, and every year more brightness was forced into the house: a whiter shade of beige on the walls, more furniture from the French Style section of Ikea, permanent air fresheners in the shapes of their sad and flattened prototypes (a pine tree eternally hung beneath the sink in the bathroom). The brighter the house became, the more Ed was marginalised, as if the very expensive lino on the kitchen counter had arrived in return for part of his presence. He slunk from room to room, barely leaving a dent in his favourite sofa, yet kindly telling Annette whenever he could that the house was “just like always, just like home”. That was the relationship they had: a complex mixture of unabashed gentleness in equal parts with rigorous systemisation, and the stoic acceptance that affection was not found in romance or fantasy but in the day-to-day.

Leroy removed the noodles precisely as they reached the perfect texture (his deftness well-defined from practise). He wondered whether or not to visit his father on his birthday, and cast his mind back to previous birthdays. While Annette denied her birthday as vehemently as a murder charge, Ed greeted his with quiet acceptance, as he did every other facet of his life. This day last year had consisted of a dry roast dinner at the Saldemando household, where silence was heartily served alongside the beef. This was due, in part, to the fact that Leroy had brought someone with him. That someone was Cherry Viles, a woman with blue hair. Leroy should have heard alarm bells when Annette, after greeting Cherry through clenched teeth, had dragged Leroy into the kitchen and hissed, “She’ll clash with the crockery!”

The rest of the day had consisted of more silence, and then cricket on the television. Ed had remained oblivious to the awfulness of the scene, and sat with a small contented smile, holding a beer in a mug that said “LIVERPOOL LADS FOREVER” on the side. After the cricket had ended, Leroy kissed his mother on his cheek and shook his father’s hand, and left the house. Cherry practically exploded from the front door and exclaimed, as she leaned agitatedly on the picket gate:

“Fuuuuck. Leroy, man, let’s go get a drink. I’ll pay. For anaesthesia if I have to.”     

Leroy decided to forego Ed’s birthday. He hadn’t heard from his parents in a long time, and there had been no invitation shoved under the door or popping up in ‘unread messages’. His mother had called the other day to ask about his sock size, but that was about it. He finished his noodles, called the family home and left a message on the overly perky answering machine. 

Words

It's called slam poetry. I know it sounds like something Norma with the pet rock and thick round glasses might be into, but it's better than that. Words are bitchin and they do more than get the point across, and often, when said quickly with rhythm and rhyme and meaning, they actually make something amazing. 

Leroy.

For the first chapter of Leroy's life, click RIGHT HERE ON THE PURPLE WRITING. 

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11 years after the chorizo was so thoughtfully bought, Leroy lived in a cloud. It was not a candyfloss cloud, nor a Botticelli cloud, nor even a pink and scarlet sex-on-the-beach kind of cloud. It was a raincloud, grey and omnipresent and deeply irritating in its needy and indecisive hovering. And the most irritating thing about this particular breed of resolute cloud was that it had overstayed its welcome, and extended from the metaphorical into the physical, so that Leroy’s life had been flooded up to the knees with watery irony. Leroy did indeed live in The Cloud Apartment Block, where “luxury accommodation meets instant trendiness”. The word ‘trendiness’ should have been a warning to Leroy, who had undertaken two university degrees before finishing high school. The sarcasm in “luxury accommodation” should have been apparent to Leroy, who could explain – in detail –String Theory and Other Scienc-y Things. Regrettably, the only thing that did strike Leroy was the gradual rain of paint flakes that fell from the ceiling like pallid snow.

He had considered finding a roommate when he initially rented the place. He had even put up ‘tear-here’ posters on lampposts and traffic lights, where time had managed to spitefully smudge and slur the ink until each word was much longer than it was originally, perhaps, Leroy worried, insinuating a more intimate and longitudinal arrangement than intended. In had flown the Restless, the Righteous, first the Rocking and then – gradually – the Rolling, the Coy, the Baby-faced, the Undeniably Rude and the Imperturbably Perky, the Artistes With An ‘E’, the Call Me Gavs and the I Prefer The Term ‘Natural Healer’s, all of whom were turned away awkwardly and without finesse. It was Camden, after all.

Eventually he decided that he would not have a roommate, not because, as you might think, he found them unsavoury, but because his childhood had brought him, he felt, quite up to speed with the caricaturish nature of life, and what he really needed was not Greta with the dreadlocks and cactus collection, but his neglected and derelict friends, Peace and Quiet.

So he retired to life as a twenty-something, filled his three rooms with many bits and pieces and even found himself a favourite café, which made coffee just the way he liked it, even though he had not previously been aware that he liked it any particular way. Milk to sugar ratio, it turned out, was the key.

It should be mentioned that Leroy was not now the same man he once was. A turning point had come when he was fifteen and he had realised, unceremoniously, that nobody liked him. It was not necessarily his fault; if anyone was to blame, it was his mother, who treated parenting like NASCAR driving, or perhaps his father, whose interest in his son had receded with his hairline. Nevertheless, Leroy spent several uncomfortable months in his mid-teenage years trying on different outfits and personalities, as if he might suddenly find his true self, crouching sheepishly behind a rack of studded shoelaces. This continued for about a year before a girl named Delilah changed his world, and not in the way you’d think. Delilah smelt of patchouli and played the clarinet. She had enormous eyes the colour of the blue-green veins that spidered out beneath the skin of her wrists, and harboured a collection of expressions that ranged from aloof-nonplussed to aloof-bemused and somehow lassoed her a strange popularity. Leroy, who looked uncomfortable in pyjamas, viewed her as some wild and mythical beast, and may have even loved her if he’d ever found a way to forget that she was destined to be rare and lesser-spotted, while he was doomed to be eternally common-or-garden.

They had run into each other at a garden warehouse, when Leroy had been carrying a large terracotta flowerpot for his mother – which he promptly dropped – and Delilah a packet of sunflower seeds. In his dreams, he would see the fall of the pot reflected in her water lily eyes, and she, fearing reprimand from an irritable employee, would grab his hand and drag him down the Pests & Insecticides aisle to hide behind the 100kg bags of fertiliser. Then, with a wink (he had never been winked at before), she would pull him away and they would run together, laughing, away from the grouchy man who didn’t understand teenagers, until Leroy knew he was in love and he didn’t need a personality anymore, he could just be the boy who was in love with Delilah…

In reality, she blinked in the second the pot hit the floor. It shattered, and they stood there for what felt like a long time, before an apathetic nineteen-year-old in a red EMPLOYEE polo shirt shuffled over with a sigh and a dustpan.

And while Leroy felt the colossal pressure to say something weighing down his chest and squeezing his lungs, Delilah felt no such obligation. This was what Leroy later reflected on, when he was running through the day for the hundredth time: she didn’t have to say anything. She could have just walked away, she could have been cruel, could have laughed or smirked or even, if she was truly merciless, sighed, but she didn’t. Instead, she said:

“I like your hair.”

No one liked Leroy’s hair. He had dyed it black the month before for no particular reason, and he didn’t dislike it enough to remove the colour yet, didn’t like it enough to blacken the mousey roots that sprouted unkindly from his scalp. It was, to use his mother’s words, thoroughly offensive. It was, to use his father’s words, a train wreck of a hairstyle.   

The apparition addressed him again, without blinking her winter-sky eyes.

“It looks, like, good.”

Leroy finally spoke, his tongue like rusty metal. 

“It doesn’t look like anything.”

“Yeah,” she breathed. “That’s the point, like … you look… totally unique, just out there… like, lonely”.

“I am, thanks.”

“Noooo, it’s cool. It means you don’t ... like … listen to anybody else, you’re just a person and …”

The bewilderment in his face must have annoyed her; her delicate eyebrows drew together menacingly.

“Oh just figure it out.”

And she left him in the centre of a terracotta skeleton. 

Something that I like and something I do not.

Something I like:

Bubbles. I like how whenever bubbles are involved, a bit of movie-land leaks into the real world and everything is awesome. I was recently chilling in the city with friends and we turned a corner and VA VA VOOM. Bubbles! Everywhere! Floating above an ICE RINK with a million happy children skating around like cheerful penguins. I would have joined them but the view of me iceskating is akin to the hulk giving birth and should never be seen. If the hulk wasn't a dude. Not that you can really tell when he's all big and green and shit.

On that topic, something I do not like:

The Avengers. Yes, I know, you love them, they are your childhood, you used to fall asleep in a cradle made of mushed up Marvel comics, you wish to get married under a giant Ironman statue, and you own a hulk suit. I'm sorry. But this was a stupid movie. REASONS WHY:

1. The ONLY useful character was Ironman. And I mean that sincerely. I have no problems with comic book characters, and I liked the Ironman movies, so I assure you that I do think that he is pretty awesome. But apart from him, everyone else just ponces around in costumes looking dim. Especially Scarlett Johansen, who is only there to fill the film's boob quota.

2. When boys are ten years old, they say "who do you think would win in a fight??? This fictional character or THIS fictional character?" This entire movie was that. They are on the same team, WHY ARE THEY FIGHTING EACH OTHER IN A WASTELAND?

3. Similar to the first point, Captain America is about as useful as an automatic pencil sharpener. It frustrates me when all a character can do is barrel roll.

That is the end of my rant.

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