The Peacock Manifesto (Peacock Tales Book 1) by Stuart David

Author:Stuart David [David, Stuart]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Unknown
Published: 2018-05-14T06:00:00+00:00

Chapter 18

We came out of the studio straight into the LA rush hour, me and the wee man. The daylight hurt my eyes, and we were a bit drunk by then too.

The last part of the operation had been the most tedious of them all. Gerry had been recording each instrument separately onto a tape for us, and in the end we’d just had to leave him to it, and go and sit in the lounge.

It was alright in there. There was a TV and armchairs, and—most importantly—you couldn’t hear any music coming from the studio. We had Spike bring us a few beers in there, and we watched some of the crap they put on TV in the middle of the night. Then a bit later Bob found a channel showing a recording of an old American football game—so we watched that for a while.

It’s a fucking strange game, American football. In a way it’s a lot like their TV shows; as soon as it starts to get going they stop it. You can understand it a bit more with the TV programmes, cause they want to show you as many adverts as possible. But fuck knows what it is with the football. Mind you, it’s a bit like the country itself; you drive for a thousand miles and see fuck all. Then—suddenly—you see something unbelievable, something totally fucking spectacular. You get all excited, and then it’s gone. And it’s another thousand miles of fuck-all again.

While we were watching the TV in there I started hatching the idea that they’d had to invent adverts by necessity, cause they couldn’t take too much of anything at once, and they needed a reason to keep stopping the programmes. Maybe they should have gone the whole way, I thought, and just made it exactly like the country—just have a blank screen and silence for the length of time the adverts took up. That would be more fucking like it.

Still, I made an effort to understand the game. I kept asking Bob questions about it, and trying to grasp it.

He didn’t like me calling it American football though.

‘What the fuck is with that, Peacock?’ he kept saying. ‘Why do you call it that? It’s football. Just football. No American—just fucking football.’

‘It’s not football to me, son,’ I told him. ‘Anyway, they fucking carry the ball most of the time. Feet hardly come into it. It’s more like fucking rugby. Except for the armour.’

‘When you’re here, Peacock,’ he said, ‘call it football.’

‘I can’t, son. This isn’t football. This is American football. Football’s a great game. This is all fucked up.’

‘Fine,’ he said. ‘Fine. American football.’ And he started trying to explain what I’d asked him about originally, but I still didn’t have much of an understanding of the game when it finished.

So we drank some more and watched some more crap, and finally Gerry came to tell us he was done.

‘It’s been a long night, guys,’ he said.

‘You’re not wrong, son,’ I told him, and he took us into his office.

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