Hey toots. Hasn't it been a while? It has, it's been a good while, in as much as time out of the bar can be good. Funnily enough, your landlord has been out on something of a barman's holiday, and as luck would have it discovered himself in possibly the world's best bar. The Kismet hotel near Ephesus has a balcony bar overlooking a harbour. Each night your barman spent checking it out, the sun melted into a whole load of pastel haze and fading hills. Each night the moon crawled yellow from the barren skyline louring above the thick jewels of light following scalded holidaymakers from room to room among the warren of hotels and 'English bars.' Each night your barman forwent his pre-dinner tussle in the shower because of the rich, dry heat and could hardly be restrained from biting the waitresses as they passed. Many of our regulars here at Mike's are very good looking women, but even you lucky girls would have your work cut out drawing eyes amongst the women of Turkland. We're not just being shallow and sexist about the barmaids, either. Even the fucking police and army is staffed by women of deep and mysterious loveliness. If it's any consolation, when they hit forty they develop skin like crocodile testicles and their legs start to go Chaplin. And they miss out on the fountains of wit that pour from Englishmen on a regular basis. Or did I dream that?

Now, as everyone knows, no serious gonzo theologian would have ventured to the Middle East without taking along his attorney, and so it was that your barman heard the legend of the Elephant Caliph from our legal correspondent. The Elephant Caliph was originally a bellied Englishman who was so overcome at the sight of this fantastic bar that he knelt and wept, and where his tears fell there sprang forth springs of lager which to this day have not run dry. I can believe this. No-one needs reminding that bar culture is an ill-mannered and shouty cunt in this sodden den we call home, but to come back from a place that is like the Platonic ideal of how a bar can be to my own filth and clutter and bitterness is more than I can, or you should have to bear. So, it is with a whisking away of the postcard reminiscences and unusual cheeriness that we return to business at the bar as business is done here. One last thing - if anyone knows the Turkish for 'there was fifty pounds in sterling in this suitcase when I arrived, you thieving cunt,' drop an 'e' at the usual place. Our reviews this week are Marlboro Medium with no health warnings and whisky sours provided at the tap of a finger on the bar drunk under a palm tree in the warm breeze coming off the sea at one in the morning.

Who's in as we return? Debs, of course, who hasn't left and doesn't seem to know we've been away. Pete has been visiting friends in South America and has returned with a tan, some curious gear and a rash like toadstools on his bobby's hat. Mr Once-A-Month has been tending the bar for me, and I'm pleased to note that he has stolen about as much scotch as a man can drink, but no more. I knew I'd keep most of my booze if I let him loose. Anyone else would have tried to make money out of me, this cunt's just been sitting like a bullied schoolchild in a candy shop for two fucking weeks. We have taken on a new regular in my absence, and since the others are getting a bit too familiar I'm going to let him take the floor for this evening.

This guy is one of those people who is happy fat. Now, most fat people are constantly struggling with it, trying to lose it, blaming their schedule, their glands or the sugar in their pint. Others, though, they live with it for years and it becomes a part of them, they just develop this range of embryo positions which make them feel comfortable and let them breathe. The dieters hate this because they can't work out why these people are happy. 'That guy's talking to that lady like he ain't fat, what the hell's going on?' The fact that they spend so much time shifting themselves and dressing for a vague outline, looking miserable and daring everyone to mention their obesity doesn't occur to them as a possible reason why the happy fatties are doing so much better than them. But I digress. This guy is happy fat, embryo slouch and plenty of money gone on his clothes. He's reasonably successful with the ladies, as much as a friend of Mr Once-A-Month can be. He came in last night and there was a lady at the bar. Debs was brilliant with rage in the corner while this lady just sat drinking. Now, I have to sympathise a little with Debs here. I dig it, it's not your fault if you're beautiful, okey. We still hate you. That's our fault but we don't care. You get better stuff than we do. Better service, better sex. Tailors are salivating when you enter their shop rather than perspiring when you leave it. You get picked up in bars and never pick up the bill. Cancers and heart diseases and all the joys of twenty-first century mortality, they're all set up for the fatties and smokers and twisters and drinkers. If Pete gets fat, it's his fault. He eats too much, he doesn't exercise. Believe me, you bunch of smug wankers, Pete does fuck all about his body except keep the pain threshold and hand-eye sharp and hard for when he's working. Your hours making eyes at the mirror and so on, shit - it's not polite to mention that, is it? Fuck me, you want it all your own way. And we want to give it to you. Uglies aren't loyal. Look at all these two-bit child whores getting a record deal and a professional make-over. They just can't wait to ditch their friends and start laying their meat on the pornographer's table for a few quid and some attention. If it helps, my fellow pugs, being beautiful doesn't make you immortal. It just makes you rich, wanted, special and important. But I digress. This guy, he has an easy way with women. I remember Shady once saying that he never fell in love, but kind of eased into it like a hot bath. This guy is a little like that, there's an air of the good life about him which I have to admit I admire. It's not like he counts out drinks for you, it's more like when you're with him you're always at least a little tipsy. He came in last night, said to this girl at the bar that was getting Debs so green, "I want to buy you a beer. Not a vodka, not a gin, not some wine, I'd like to buy you a beer." Now, carrying himself with a little confidence, he got away with this. The next bit was even more incredible. "Okey," she says, "I'd like a drink, but beer'll make me fat."
"Might do," he says, "But it'll make you smile, and that smile is one of the prettiest things I've ever seen." Now, your humble barman would never have got away with that, and would have been seriously assaulted, and quite right too. This smoother manages to put into this girl's head the idea she's about to enter a bar where she is smiling and doesn't have to guard her appearance so anxiously.
He puts on this stuff every night and eventually I have to ask him.
"You are something of a serious fucking ladies' man, my friend. What's the trick?"
"I don't care."
"That's your trick? You're playing hard to get? Being a meanie?"
"No, Mike. I mean I really don't care. Guys who play mean are doing it because they saw it on telly, on a film. They think it works. It doesn't. The still want to own, they still get hurt and act like a cunt when things don't go their way. They're amateurs. I'm successful at the habit of getting women to fuck me because I don't care whether they do or not, or whether they stay around afterwards. I'm hunting half-heartedly for the right one, but to be honest I think I've met her and she's gone."
"You're starting to sound more like you might fit in here, old son," I said. "Tell me about that one."
"I met this woman when I was younger. She was attractive, but in a weird way. She just put everybody at ease, made everyone feel better about themselves. She was vulnerable and kind, and she gave head like I had booze coming out my dick. She got into trouble."
"Like?"
"She was buying some drugs. Nothing heavy, she wasn't deep into it, but she liked speed and that. She was in a house buying drugs, where I never went. Not my sort of thing, really, a load of malnourished cunts talking about William Burroughs and Goa and crisps. Some silly bastard fell asleep and set the carpet on fire with a cigarette. She was asleep upstairs, and of course none of these cunts even knew who was in the house, let alone tried to help each other. So I guess, anyway. She wakes up and she's about to burn, basically. She's there in her pants and there's flames actually coming in the door. She can't see too good, she's coughing and all that shit. A minute of sheer panic goes by and there's sirens and suddenly this six foot silhouette cuts the light and she's in some guy's arms. This fireman's picked her up and gone straight out the window again. I wanted to buy him a drink, whatever, but he apparently just went off because there was more stuff to do with the fire or something. Whatever. Point is, I thanked this guy in my head over and over. She was scared and it kind of weirdly brought us together, dig? We'd always had fun, but now we had something for when we clung together, a nightmare to share in the small hours. She remembered it vividly. The smell of cheap furniture going black, the sight of books curling and the pages jumping out like grey leaves into the air. The wetness of the guy's jacket, because they spray them if they're going to walk into the heat or something."
He lit a cigarette, which I took to be a sign that the tale was about to twist.
"I basically got jealous of this guy. The fireman who turned his back and didn't sleep, or disappoint, a secret, tall motherfucker who just saves people's lives like he's going shopping or serving drinks. I decided to bring the frivolity back into our lives. I thought at the time it was levity, love, but really I'd just twigged that whatever I did, when her adrenalin was high and when that night was burned into her head, he was stalking about while I was drinking at home because it wasn't my scene. Certainly wasn't my fucking scene. It was his. What a scene he made of it. So we go out, do some bars. One night we're in this shitty night-club, little grottoes of concrete with candles and stuff, a blistered girl in a dancer's kit that looks like it's made out of bicycle chains and paper towels. My girl sings along with the song that's on. 'I'm going to love you forever�' She was only quoting this song, so I shouldn't have done much but smile and kiss her. I said 'No, you'll get a tumour or a lover you can trust. Someone punctual or exciting.' There was no need to bring her down like that. It was only a song for fuck's sake."
"So that was the beginning of the end, eh? Did she leave you?" I asked. Barmen do.
"No, I left her. I just couldn't watch that happy woman get bored of me, so I just knocked back a few drinks and in a few weeks she'd gone and at that point nothing changed. I showered and bought a suit, this suit in fact, and starting wandering the city fucking women and drinking in hotel bars. I know what you're going to say, right? Nice work if you can get it."
I thought for a moment, and to appear honest lit a cigarette of my own.
"In fact, my friend, I'm going to tell you something to cheer you up. Life is not a nightmare. I wish it was, nightmares are colourful and menacing and unpredictable. I agree, sex is fuck all. Money is fuck all. Power doesn't exist. It's just not there. There's no most powerful man in the world. The president of a supernation can't stop his wife getting ill or his bowels misbehaving. There's only one thing you can take for yourself that no-one will ever have more of than you. Freedom. I'm talking about escape, self abuse and revenge. With me? Okey. There's revolution, right? Once upon a time that was freedom. Not any more. The motherfuckers have it. They sell it to you on Che posters and grunge albums. They put pictures of it in films and adverts to make you buy the props in the hope of making your life that good, but the reality is that the tangible aspect of films is a bunch of actors who are told what to do and how to behave, who are more scared of being ugly than being ill. A bunch of frustrated writers who want to write the great American movie and end up knocking out rom-com vehicles for people with good teeth and their own boats. What they miss out on is that there's a little magic in the silver screen that they can't market or package, a little something that got through the net. One night, middle of summer a few years ago, I had dinner with a girlfriend. Everything went right, the weather, the food, us moving around, the drinks. It was just about six hours of total cool. Everything was on silver screen timing, and we knew it. We stole it right back from the motherfuckers and didn't cling onto it, just wasted our time with each other and smoked and fucked and spent borrowed money and walked unobserved through clogged alleys and kissed on the bonnets of expensive cars. You see, life is always slipping though your fingers and it's never perfect. The motherfuckers will always win and they'll outlive everything you care about. But if you waste a little of your life, knock your body for six with booze and smoking and enjoy reeling into bed with a girl who makes you laugh, you've got the joke. You've outsmarted them, because the life they're trying to sell you is lying on a pavement somewhere on the way to your girl's house in a mantrap of broken glass and a bunch of cigarette ends."
"Yeah, it's funny," he said, "they call it 'making love,' but love's the bit in the pub where you regret what you just said, the bit where you catch sight of her on the train station and the air gets lighter. All I ever make in bed is winestains, a puddle of spunk and a thick cloud of silence when the thing we both went there for is over."
He went home shortly afterwards. I started waking the drunks, emptying the ashtrays. Debs came over to the bar for a drink.
"You and the new guy seemed to get on," she said.
"Yeah. How about a beer?"
"I drink vodka. Jesus, Mike, you make out like you care about me and you can't even remember what I like. I'd have let Shady buy me a beer, or the new guy, because they're just messing. A bit of fun, then they treat you like shit. You're who I come back to when it's all gone wrong. You listen."
"That's enough sexy talk out of you, young lady," I said, "let's stay up all night and get wankered."
And so we did, with the cats and sirens howling in the skewed walkways of the brick town, with adolescent lovers picking flowers from blackspot bouquets and two drunks letting the hours go by uncounted.

Ever feel like you've had enough? Me neither.

'Night, toots.