The Dining Rooms - Flamenco Sketches (nicola conte new rhumba version)
pressed in 2004
Conversazione:
"What a remarkable journey my life has been. I was born one of craniopagus quintuplets - five infants connected at the head, our bodies extending radially like flower petals.
I was the only sibling to survive the surgery that separated us. My father was an imposing and remote figure, very much the martial patriarch who valued certainty and implacable resolve above all other attributes. (Father was particularly fastidious about language. I was with him on a plane once when he turned around in his seat and slapped a complete stranger across the face for mispronouncing the word putsch.) Mother, albeit not an intellectual - she was incapable of naming four American presidents, making change for $20, or reading a menu - was certainly a more empathetic and tender parent. But her influence was effectively muted by Father's strident and unyielding decrees. As a child, I was absolutely forbidden to express or inwardly harbor self-doubt. Soon after Mother's mysterious suicide, Father hired a telepathic governess from a Soviet parapsychology institute. If, in the sanctuary of my own bedroom, I had thoughts that even remotely hinted at irresolution or trepidation, the woman - an affectless martinet with an intricate circuitry of braids enveloping the back of her skull - would suddenly materialize to flay my bare buttocks with a heavy Cyrillic ruler, chiding in her eerie monotone: "Dun't sink negatif!"
After leaving home, I supported myself by doing odd jobs.
For twenty dollars, I'd arrange the cash in your wallet, President-side up, in increasing denominations. That was standard. Specials included alphabetical arrangement by last name of Secretary of Treasury, by ascending or descending serial number, etc. I did a job for a lady who liked her wallet arranged with wrinkled bills up front and crispy bills toward the back. A transit cop once hired me to arrange his bills by shade; this is called the "the fade" - bright cash up front, bleached cash to the rear. Chacun a son gout. Specials were extra, of course. You'd be amazed at what people won't do for themselves, or can't do because they have their weird little phobias. A guy once called me - a young guy, I'd say about twenty-five - and he wanted me to cut up his expired credit cards. The guy had this morbid fear of credit cards once they've expired. Obviously, there's some complex psychopathology involved here, but hey....
When I arrived at the guy's house, there were two expired cards - an American Express and a Sunoco -
lying in his bathtub where he'd flung them in a panic the week before. So acute was his aversion that he'd refused to go anywhere near the tub. I might add that the dude had cultivated quite a stench (which cost him an extra ten bucks; if you had really bad body odor, that would cost you an extra $10 no matter what I did for you). And when I picked up the cards and walked toward him, he recoiled in horror, weeping, falling to his knees, pleading with me not to come any closer. I diced the cards with a pair of shears from my tool belt, and, per our agreement, disposed of them in a landfill some ten miles out of town. I charged him $60 - the regular $50 for cutting cards, plus the $10 surcharge because he stank so bad. Ironically, he paid with a Visa card - active, I assume. I also killed pets.
Pet "hits" were a lucrative portion of my business.
A lot of people wanted their pets dead because they've become too much trouble, but they couldn't bring themselves to do it because they'd become so emotionally attached or for religious reasons or whatever - so, for a fee, I'd do it. My first job, I garroted an incontinent Schnauzer for a guy in Englewood, New Jersey. It got easier and easier after that. A woman once contracted me to kill her turtle. The lady's got something called purulent erythema serpens, which makes your skin look like Roquefort cheese, and she thinks she caught the disease somehow from the turtle, so she hates the turtle and wants it dead, and she wants to see it die. So I devise a nice little car bomb for the turtle - a matchbox pickup truck with a piece of lettuce in it and a cherry bomb under it. The turtle waddles onto the toy truck to eat the lettuce, I light the fuse, and boom! Arrivederci, Michelangelo.
But I did all sorts of other things, too. I'd help you take your cowboy boots off - that was $3 dollars a boot. If you were straightening a painting on the wall and you needed someone to stand across the room and tell you if it was level - that was $7 per painting, and I'd do four paintings for only $25. And I'd charge ten bucks to smell your milk - y'know, if you couldn't decide whether it was spoiled or not."
- Mark Leyner (cut)
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