Rodrigo Leao - All Dogs are Blue

Rimbaud liked playing with fire. He lit candles. Baudelaire liked the dark. But he didn’t like fighting and he often disappeared when Rimbaud showed up. Rimbaud was my friend all the time. A real wild child.

I’d never met anyone who’d been beaten.

So I went to Disneyland and beat the shit out of Pluto, machine-gunned Mickey Mouse. All because I liked National ‌Kid and the Venusian Incas 10. Violence is so fascinating, and our lives, so normal. I’m talking about a specific kind of violence. Everything can be violent. Even God.

Not God: gods.

I have rituals. I light one cigarette after another and let them smoke. I let each of the gods smoke their own cigarette. Sometimes I light them all at once.

My gods smoke with me. It’s a mess, an orgy of smoke. And Rimbaud dances. Baudelaire runs away. I smile.

What if they were joints? The gods would get totally stoned and turn into devils for life. They’d come in gods and go out demons.

The B Cops decide to leave the asylum. They didn’t come to any conclusions. What is a conclusion? It’s the certainty of having lost your defences. Someone opens a bottle of Coca-Cola. Someone looks for a recipe for happiness. Some eel in my hair declares that electroshock treatment is for getting back to normal. But do I really want to get my normal back? I don’t know about the cricket and the blue dog. They’re just blue animals. Blue is also the colour of her eyes. Granny comes and hugs me. She wants to dance a tango, but I don’t know how to dance so slowly. I dance to ‌a different beat. Acugêlê banzai! 11

I’ve been to Japan. It was a different kind of place. Not unlike an asylum. Full of people. Sometimes, when I think back on Japan, I remember Fearsome Madman. He was a nice guy. He’d killed six people. Strangled. Raped. He was a weird guy, but gentle with me. Like I said, he was afraid of my voice when I spoke in a lower, deeper pitch. Fearsome liked playing chess with himself. Who killed Fearsome Madman? It was a mystery that echoed throughout the little silence that existed in a place like that. I want to fill that silence with my voice.

In my voice, a scream.

But Haldol holds me back. It holds back my screams, whispers. I, having hidden tons of pills under my tongue, now take them all, no questions asked. Who knows if they help. I just know that I miss my two friends. Rimbaud appears and tells me he has AIDS. He wants us to become blood brothers. I agree to it and cut my thumb. Baudelaire appears and says he wants to become our blood brother too. Just the idea of dying from something other than the chip (or cricket) makes me happy. To die with Rimbaud and Baudelaire. Nothing could be better. Acugêlê banzai!

I’ve been to China. Saying it like that makes it sound like I’ve travelled a lot. It was a very pretty place, full of people, bicycles and lots of clouds. The clouds, the clouds. There I was hungry, I was thirsty, I was a foreigner and I was madly in love with those far-away clouds, oh those wonderful clouds! Shapes in the sky. When the day is like that, a sunny day, a day like today, I no longer want to get out of here. I’ll sleep in the calm green of 6 mg of Lexotan. Hold on tight to my blue dog and enter into a pact with happiness. Remember China, its bicycles, its blood-red flag and, finally, those incredible clouds in the Chinese sky. I think I’ll be happier once I’ve taken the bloody blood oath. I want to die of anything, anything but of a chip I swallowed. I swallow the pills. One day, I swallowed three. Another day, I swallowed four. I don’t really know what I should do to get better. Simply because I’m a pterodactyl in a cage. A raven pecking at the belly of a scarecrow. A man who isn’t afraid of the terror of living without fear. Nevermore, no one here is afraid. Not even the Attorney General. He reminds me of a character in a Western or a gangster film. He uses a spoon instead of a knife. The Attorney plays that dangerous game where you stab the gaps between all your fingers with a knife, or in this case, a spoon. We only have spoons here. The old man does it skilfully, as if he’d been practising for a long time. Just for kicks. Letting the winds of adrenaline blow.

Rimbaud appears during gales. The winds that bring him make me wrap up in his scarf. He smokes weed. Puffs of smoke from Baudelaire’s pipe disperse close to me. He tells me that he’s a macumba priest. He tells me he has powers. He renews my language. I believe him completely. Rimbaud is the storm. Baudelaire is the wind. One ‌takes ether. The other, cocaine 12. I’m just sad — I’m the guy who finds out that the coloured pills make me fat and stop me, more and more, from spending time with these old friends of mine. What’s life without friends? I’m like Emmanuel Bove, who secretly loved the friends he didn’t have. I’m friends with my eyes. They only see what I want. I look through my tinted glasses and see everything in black and white. Everything looks like a Bergman film.

Actually, I look a bit like Charles Laughton.

Just for a while, hopefully. Why drink coffee with sugar when you’re fat? Everything with lots of sugar. I look at clocks and coffee cups. I spit soap bubbles. I turn into a train that goes along without knowing where to stop. I transform myself into a writing machine and it writes whatever I want it to write. I ravenously attack an ant, and start plucking out hairs from my armpit. A little hair removal. I pluck out footprints. Chills. Certainties. Things I should do. I pull out ferocious eels and cover my belly with candyfloss.

It’s June.

‌They’re having a festa junina 13in the asylum.

The square-dancing lunatics are all in a line. The ones who take Gardenal don’t speak. Others take Haldol. Others are drug addicts. Others could kill for a cachaça and play snooker. No one wants to join the line and dance. No psychotic wants to dance. No dimwit wants to stop banging his head against the wall. But Rimbaud is happy and dances without any sadness. There he is, if you pardon my bluntness, with the knife between his teeth. He’s a gypsy spirit, the spirit of an Indian. Spirit of a pig. Thorn. Leprosy. AIDS. The silence of quicklime and myrtle, hollyhocks among the garden herbs. Rimbaud embroiders frangipani flowers on a straw cloth. Seven birds in the colours of the prism fly on the grey spider. Two horsemen gallop by Rimbaud’s eyes: Baudelaire and me. Everything that kills passes by me. What is this? Cocaine or ether? What is this new sound? Drums. I can’t dance, I can’t dance. He’s my friend, finally — a friend. Acugêlê banzai! I spit up into the air and open an umbrella. Baudelaire spits as he speaks. I use the umbrella to protect myself. Spits and sputters.

I was ordered to be here. I didn’t want to come. I don’t want to stay, for fuck’s sake! Tell them I’m Charles Laughton, for fuck’s sake! Haven’t they ever seen a film? The abandoned ones would have a better life outside. Even I would. Let’s say I’m spending a season in hell, a season in my temples with my poet and actor friends. Tomorrow I’ll forget about them, but they’ll be back the day after tomorrow. I know they’ll never abandon me. That’s what friends are for, right? The street cleaner invites me to eat a box of Segredo biscuits with him. Life is a secret for me. I don’t know exactly what it means. In the outside world I look for my name in the obituaries every day. I’ve already decided: I don’t want to go to my funeral. I wonder what heaven for objects is like? Heaven for clocks, for TVs, computers, slingshots, forks, knives, spoons. We only have spoons here. No one eats with a knife and fork. They eat with their mouths open, except Granny who eats a bit like my grandmother; she’s skinny, soft, sweet. And one more very important detail: she gives me a kiss every time she passes by. I don’t really care much for kisses. Rimbaud forced me to kiss him on the lips once. I’ve told him, it’s no use, I can’t be what I’m not.