a twenty fifth story...'and now, someone with elephantiasis!'

Vincent had to go the shops with a towel over his head.  His appearance was hideous.  While it was better to keep himself and his good looks a secret from innocent women and children on their daily jaunt around town, Vincent couldn’t always see where he was going as a consequence.  This could lead to a few painful altercations. 

He had chosen to wear a towel over his head on his shopping trips after his cousin, a cruel and spiteful adolescent called Paulie, left a mirror behind in Vincent’s bedsit.  Vincent saw for the first time the massive eruptions of skin all over his face, the bulging protrusions from his scalp, matted with tufts of mangy, dark hair, and most disconcertingly of all, the look of horror and absolute revulsion in his small, sunken eyes.

Vincent wept as Paulie sniggered all the way home to the mean little red brick terrace he shared with his dim and brow beaten mother.

~

‘Outcsh’, said Vincent, from underneath his towel.  He had collided with a scaffold over hanging the pavement.  Vincent was six feet eight inches tall.  The charity stores didn’t have trousers long enough to fit him.  He resembled a teetering circus performer on fleshy stilts, and a rather ungainly one even at that.  Vincent’s mother had been a trapeze artist in the Moscow State Fair.  She was petite and beautiful.  Vincent had come as a surprise.

The wage Vincent’s mother received from the Moscow State Fair was enough to hire a carer for Vincent.  However, carers came and carers went.  Vincent was so gentle and kind, and yet helpless and hapless to the extent his carers soon felt caring for him was hopeless in itself.  Vincent’s mother had tried to look after him, but her decrepit child was too much of an insult to beauty for her to cope very long.  And to make matters worse, Vincent grew very big. 

~

Vincent held his forehead gingerly, trying to feel with his good hand whether he was bleeding.  He wasn’t as far as he could tell, and so he continued on his way, staying close to the walls of the premises bordering the high street.

~

Following his visit to the shops, Vincent was due to host his friend, Julie.  Julie was a remarkable young woman, not least because she could behold Vincent minus towel without feeling nauseous.  And though there was little physical contact between them, she loved him.  This is another reason why Julie was a remarkable young woman – she loved Vincent for his mind! 

Julie was a nurse and they met on the ward.  Vincent was an in-patient.  He had sprained his ankle trying to step blindly onto a kerb.  Julie was surprised to learn in spite of his extreme ugliness, Vincent was actually rather well read.  They shared a mutual affection for Thomas Pynchon.  Thomas Pynchon’s books are the most bootlegged in the world.  Vincent had been reading a bootlegged copy of Gravity’s Rainbow when he met Julie.

~

The first and in fact only shop Vincent was intending to set foot in was Blockbuster Video.  His outlook on life, or rather the lives of other people, was half informed by the films he rented and watched on his second hand television.  After all, he lived most his life out in the big, wide world under a towel.  Meeting Julie had broadened his horizons somewhat.

Today, he was returning two tapes, one of them a police movie, the other a documentary film on penguins.  Vincent avoided romantic comedies - his anguish was already enough. 

Working at the checkout was a twenty year old girl called Amber.  Curiously, she was named after Amber Green (perhaps better known as Miss Misouri 1994), and not the fossilised tree resin that has been appreciated for it’s colour and natural beauty since the Neolithic era.  Unfortunately, Amber was not a natural beauty, and was bored stiff of her job at Blockbuster.  She hadn’t even noticed that three times a week she served a man who wore a towel over his head, standing six feet eight inches tall.

Nevertheless, Amber wasn’t stupid, and had she not possessed the bulk of a pilot whale, she would have done well in sixth form and perhaps gone on to better things.  But because of her blubber, the boys (and girls) bullied her and she dropped out of school without a single meaningful qualification to her once illustrious name*.

(*at least around Missouri, circa 1994).

In a sense Vincent and Amber could have become kindred spirits, but only in the sense English speaking humans use ‘in a sense’ to allude to, without openly conveying, serious misgiving, doubt or disagreement.  Moreover, Vincent had never set eyes on Amber because of the towel over his head, so he didn’t know what he was missing.  On this occasion he rented Apollo 13 from her.  Apollo 13 is about a group of highly intelligent humans who travelled into space with the intention of landing on planet moon before running out of oxygen and returning speedily to planet earth.  The parts are all played by actors; they employ a degree of artistic licence and command otherworldly sums of money.

Concerning the subject of money, you might ask how Vincent survived without a job, an income, or indeed any social benefits whatsoever.  In a sense he survived relatively well.  With a towel over his head he could do his shopping, and he received an allowance from his mother, still travelling the world with the ageing and not-so-much-in-demand-anymore-Moscow State Fair, which bought him ready meals – he had a microwave – as well as fizzy drinks.  Julie helped too.  She gave him books to read, books other than Thomas Pynchon novels.  She also conferred on him, the most precious and special gift of all.  Clue: it’s a four letter word. 

~

Walking home after his visit to Blockbuster, Vincent was called a four letter word.  It probably isn’t the one you have in mind, besides it wouldn’t quite make sense in the context of this paragraph.  The four letter word Vincent was called is commonly spelled like this: c**t.  It was followed by: ‘wotch where you’re going!!’  By now, Vincent had become relatively immune - in a sense - to these kind of insults, still he apologised profusely.  The person who had fired the insult in Vincent’s direction was a portly, red faced estate agent named Giles.  Giles also said: ‘and take that bloody towel off your head’, although of course, he didn’t really mean it.

~

The word you should have floating toward the recess of your mind is this: LOVE.  And when Vincent got home he received a phone call from Julie.  She told him she would be a little late for her visit because one of the shift workers on the ward had not turned up yet, but that she had discovered a new Thomas Pynchon novel on the internet and had printed off a copy for Vincent to read.  She would bring it along later.  When they finished talking and Vincent put the phone down, he tried out this four letter word in a new and hitherto never before used sentence: ‘I love you, Julie’, he said.