At The Princess Fantastika

Originally published at The Revolution Will Be Monetized. You can comment here or there.

At seven feet one inch, Jarl was not just a powerhouse homosexual viking mercenary, but he was also one cool motherfucker. We were hanging out one night at some club that was too cool even for artists. There wasn’t music playing. They never played music. They couldn’t find music as cool as the people who came in. (At least that was the rumor). I could accept that and even dig it a little bit.

It was Jarl, myself, and a few of the less relevant pissant rabble doomed to redshirt in a fashion most tragic. They liked to come along. We had to dress them. It wasn’t like we had a lot of extra clothes sitting about, but one hopes that at the very least one can buy ones way, visually, into an art bar. But this was no ordinary art bar. This was the Princess Fantastika — a name thought to be ironic for a shithole basement corridor, dirty red bricked walls all around, with matching death-trap fire-hazard rooms off on either side, each with their own bar. The irony is forced and in fact is the only thing that makes the place palatable. You see, we, the artists find it ironic that these stupid fuckers revel in their faux irony. We’re lapsing meta now, but sometimes, that is what an irony endgame requires.

Jarl was the one who first came up with that. His speech was too precise for him to be an American. He spoke too clearly and his vocabulary too large to have been bred on television. He was obviously some flavor of Scandinavian — I never asked.

“The irony in their desire for irony going so far as to name their drinks ironically, is that it is a desperate plea for attention to people such as yourself, myself, and that hot scrawny guy milking the Pabst Blue Ribbon over at the fake plastic bar. One hopes that he sees his own drink ironically — realizing that the working man’s beer is mass-produced by a mammoth corporation that isn’t attempting to pander to the working man but instead to produce the cheapest beer possible.

“I’ve always had a thing for that label though — it screams, in a very subtle way, poor royalty was here and all that they left behind was an assortment of black velvet paintings of dogs playing poker and a few (and he eye-rolled here, icy blue eyes rolling under blond brows and a smile splitting a meticulously cared for blond goatee) hula girls replete with ukulele and grass skirts.”

We all of course looked at the skinny artist man, black pants, tan jacket a bit dirty from whatever his day job is, white t-shirt underneath, dead black eyes looking up from a far too perfectly tousled shock of black hair cut in a bowl and revealing a jaw-line that any Hollywood actress would kill for. Noting our attention, he looked off but inside must have glowed at the sought-after attention.

Our waitress came over. She was totally smoking hot — too hot to be an artist. Yeah, well fuck you for suggesting that I suggested that a hot chick couldn’t be an artist. Maybe she was an artist then, okay? Does that make you fucking happy? Maybe she was directing one of Shakespeare’s (that old sexy woman who pretended she was a man and according to some stories, dressed as one) plays? Sure, she didn’t pay extra for the blackwork tattoos in hopes of overcoming a beauty that glowed out from all of her attempts to sever them. I think that the overdose-to-zombie of black eye liner brings out her fake-green-eyes even more.

Yeah, well fuck you again. I saw her at the grocery store before — her eyes are shit brown like mine and she had a huge pimple on the end of her nose… uh… like mine… and her ass was sagging a little bit in her Nike-brand sweatpants and white ipod headphones… What — am I still a bad guy now for calling out the hottie as a poseur? Does it matter?

“You’re just angry because she shot you down and pretended she only dated women,” Jarl said a smile splitting his big square face, his mane of golden hair back lit by one of the few carefully placed ceiling lights. “It is not her fault that she is beautiful, Rev. It is a hard curse to bear for all of us. Look at me, no?” He clapped me on the back with that big bear paw of his knocking most of the wind out of me. Yeah, he was just that fucking strong, and the damage was unintentional. I would never suggest that he was trying to take me out. If he were, I’d be running for an exit now and not just sitting here smiling goofily.

Yeah, you’re right — goofily is probably not a word.

“Let us drink my silly skinhead friend,” Jarl said raising the pitcher of beer that he drank from in a MOST unsubtly artistic fashion, a bit of foam already decorating his upper lip and mustache from the last quarter-pitcher draining gulp.

I explained before why calling me a skinhead was wrong. He continued doing it just to watch me arch an eyebrow and prepare to argue.

He defused the situation as he often does by being seven fucking feet tall, three hundred pounds of muscle, and smiling, and raising his pitcher in a toast. “To that fine young man over there, to artworks as yet unrendered, to a resurrection of art that belongs to the common people, to no more of that dipshit Les’s Artt Bombes, to a flight of doves going over a small green garden where I sit on a fortified white-painted bench sipping mead…”

“What?”

He grinned even wider at me and again clapped me on the back. He gave a mischievous wink, “I was just checking if you were paying attention Rev.”

“I always pay attention Jarl — especially to handsome brilliant fuckers like you.”

He wrapped a massive muscular arm around my shoulder housing me in the pit of his plain navy blue t-shirt. It smelled rather pretty. A hint of lilacs perhaps and a cleanness of sea air. Mental note: inquire as to deodorant used by the big guy.

“Are you,” he said giving my shoulder a squeeze using a huge hand that could probably pop my head like a grape, “flirting with me, comrade?”

“No, sir I’m not. I make it a point to never mix business with pleasure. Or penises… I don’t like those either.”

“Your loss,” he said, slapping my ass, and then yelling something in a crazy language, one of the dozen or so he spoke, at our waitress who was shuffling by aimlessly.

Words: overcome, seem, running, threatened, tragic, hopes, glorious, director, suggest, endgame, rabble, unintentional, sometimes, imposed, agree, popular, showdown, surrounded, effects, progress