Tuesday, October 09, 2007

Mink Oil Otter Fat and Dejesus

Dejesus listened to Xfm107, Dublin’s Alternative Music Station. He twisted and corked the dial but picked up static and hubbub rather than music and box-waves (Dejesus my goodness not him not him again) sitting on his GI-cot and listened to a mishmash of earsplitting music, some so loud and screeching it loosened the cones and hammers in his ears. In the wintertime he dubbin (used to impart shine and colour; the name 'dubbin' is a contraction of the gerund "dubbing", describing the action of applying the wax to leather) his boots with mink-oil and otter-fat, rubbing it into the stitching with the nub of his thumb. He learned about dubbing from a man with cork-teeth and a blue and purplish birthmark right above his left eye across from his right eye.

Dejesus didn’t believe in things that appeared out of nowhere or had funny names like bric-a-brac and the ever-after which sounded more like eve-rafter than some place too high to see. He liked shucked peas and cob-corn, fiery Mescal and Pepsin chewing-gum. He preferred backgammon to pinochle and square-ball to shuffleboard. He favored Baroque music to Quartets and distrusted anything that came in a brown paper wrapper or couldn’t fit in one’s pocket. Dejesus triple-knotted his bootlaces checked his hair for scabs and shot out the front door like a diesel train, his hat flipping and tossing, eyes trained on the sideways in front of him. As it was Sunday he wore his going-to-church suit, blue serge, his Corker’s tie and a pinkie-ring that he wore on his index-finger, his pinkie-finger had shriveled up to the size of a peapod and he didn’t want the ring sliding off his pinkie-finger and finding its way down a sewer-hole or under someone’s automobile.

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