Rodrigo Leao - All Dogs are Blue

Who knows, Rimbaud, maybe Verlaine will come along and fix that.

Baudelaire appears wearing boxing gloves. Baudelaire is nearly always an annoying, cranky prick. And strong. I almost, almost, never say yes to Baudelaire. Rimbaud’s dirty. He needs to take a shower. Like Foucault always said, a good shower is a cold shower. Every lunatic should take a cold shower before bed. Electroshock comes from thermal shock.

The cold invites the fire. Jump over the bonfire, Rimbaud.

Jump, you bastard!

A dimwit and a bipolar woman are married by a hot psychologist. There are some good doctors. Most of the doctors are nice. My dad comes by. My sister comes by. My brother, my sister, Adélia and Anália, our sweet maids, with the strength of a thousand Haldols.

I’m sad and everyone is happy.

I’m reminded of the festas juninas of my childhood.

Because I’m fat, I dance with the fattest girl. That’s life. Fatty with fatty. Skinny with skinny. Ugly with ugly. Pretty with pretty. I’d like the prettiest girl. I want to screw the psychologist. That’s life. Lunatic with lunatic.

They made a huge bonfire out of paper and the lunatics’ dirty nappies.

That guy who dared to leap over the flames got taken up the arse by the huge blaze of shit. That’s what yesterday was like. And that’s what today is like. Nothing changes. When you’re a kid. When you’re an adult. Life drains away into the sea through a sewer pipe. Thank goodness the sea is green, the colour of my brother Bruno’s eyes. His eyes are clear, free of suffering. If you don’t suffer, you’re not alive. If you’re alive, you eat French fries. It’s a good thing there are always French fries to ease the burden. The days are all alike and keep repeating themselves. No one ever asks nicely if they can enter my life, but they always find an excuse to leave. Neon veins remind me of the signs I saw in New York with Rimbaud. Now that would make a good chapter title: the poets in New York. I can see myself lost in Columbia University or even in Harlem. Here we go: I’d be the king of Harlem. I’d screw the little Jewish chicks and kill the Irish bootleggers. Then I’d say: this is my motherfucking territory, bitch!

I take my pills with a Coke. The coconut sweets travel up my veins. The peanut brittle arrived dirty. Some idiot might think I’m lost in this party, dancing with the fattest girl in the room. I wanted to dance with Clarissa. I wanted to dance with the psychologist. But Granny lets loose, dancing down on the ground. Can she get back up? Only with a winch.

Call the paramedics, quickly, please. Actually, better call the cops.

Focus. Out of focus. I’m blind.

Deaf and dumb. My nerves are lit up but everything’s dark.

Fearsome Madman appears in my dreams. He says Rosebud killed me. My head’s exploding. Who killed Fearsome? The foetid veins in my head scan my speech. Rimbaud wants to marry me. Baudelaire is neurasthenic; he’s always distant, even at the party. He’s not going to found modernity with that perspective.

So I say to him: let’s be modern, Baudelaire.

It was only then that he saw the girl passing by him. She was the passante . Later he told me that he never saw her again. God, Baudelaire is difficult! He likes to watch the girls go by in skimpy bikinis on the beach. It was only after Baudelaire that Vínicius de Moraes wrote ‘The Girl from Ipanema’. The girl who when she passes, makes each one she passes go Ahh is the passer-by, for fuck’s sake! The sea always beats down on the rocks of illness. The Lexotan 6 green sea. The Haldol 5 blue sky. The Rivotril white clouds. Everything is illness in mental illness, even the lovely Girl from Ipanema. Why haven’t they come up with a cure for my illness?

Why are they building rockets to go into space?

I have a delusional episode while Alfonso appears and tells me he’s going to Paracambi. God, that guy should just go fuck off.

To keep repeating that ditty.

Poor thing.

I wouldn’t wish being pitied, being seen as a poor bastard, on anyone. I’m not asking to have a place in heaven because I’m a poor bastard — far from it. I want to have the same look in my eyes that a lynx has for its prey. That Rimbaud has for his Abyssinia. Baudelaire’s movement and his beautiful flowers. I can’t stand taking the role of the victim. My role is the toilet roll. I’m a child and I don’t know the truth. The truth, out there, is in the eyes of my brother Bruno, who doesn’t know or care about anything. He lives happily with his nothingness. Everyone has nothingness.

I’m not nothing, Rimbaud. Want a cigarette?

I’ll never be nothing. I can’t want to be nothing.

Besides, I’ve got all the pills in the world inside me.

Rimbaud, I’ll always be the one ‘who wasn’t born for this’, I’ll always be the one who waited for a door to open up for him in a wall without a door.

Rimbaud, we’re bored of this party now, right? Baudelaire even wrote a poem. As for us, nothing. Although that story about New York might be interesting. What do you think?

The fat girl who danced with me explodes à la Mr Creosote.

Her body, her guts, displayed on my chest. Her chest on my chest. She keeps dancing. Just her legs. Granny keeps dancing and I try to keep up. I’m not good at this. I miss Mr Creosote’s daughter. Miss Creosote.

I didn’t want to dance with her, but I didn’t want her to explode like that.

Her bits spread about all over the place.

I want a milkshake.

People who eat a lot don’t know what they’re eating. People who travel a lot don’t know where they live. Every time I take a trip I mess up. I throw shit into the fan of sanity. One time I went down to Rio Grande do Sul. A friend of mine lived there. He played drums in my rock band. He was fat just like I am today. He had a love hotel there in Rio Grande do Sul. His hotel was quite different from the asylum. He went to all the brothels.

I’d already swallowed the cricket quite some time before that. I was twenty-one. It was my second sneak preview of hell.

On the first day, Rimbaud, we went to the local brothel. Back then whores didn’t kiss.

Nowadays they do everything. They might even pay you to have sex with them.

Why are whores so clingy and so needy for love? I don’t like whores very much.

I like to give and feel pleasure.

I had a girlfriend at the time. She had blue eyes. They were the most beautiful blue eyes in the world. Even so, I went down to Rio Grande do Sul. When I tried to kiss the whore she blocked my hand. You can’t mess with my stuff. You have to pay. Paying for sex wasn’t part of my plan. I’d planned on flying the aeroplane of pleasure with her.

We left the brothel with four whores. Acugêlê banzai!

A long, long time ago I went to Korea. It was really different from Rio Grande do Sul. Every place I went looked like an asylum. There was a nuclear bomb there. One hell of a mess.

My friend wanted to have a drunken orgy. I wasn’t really into that. I was a bit of a prude. Maybe today, after many orgies with Rimbaud and Baudelaire, I could have one with my friend. But I was barely in my twenties, just a kid. I wanted to have the whore all to myself. I wanted that whore with the feather touch. We got in the car. How many rooms does your house have? What does your mum do? I had my eye on the hotel maid, too.

While the hands of the least pretty whore ran up and down me, in my friend’s Ford Landau, I got paranoid, because her hands were rough. I started to think she was a transvestite. What had happened to the feather touch? Pure paranoia.

Paranoia. My psychiatrist at the time had given me Melleril.

But I didn’t like the colour of the pill. A sort of peanut brown, ‌a shit brown. Roberto Carlos 14used to dress in brown, then he started wearing blue and his luck changed. What had he done to lose his OCD? I have my own. I don’t like three, I prefer four.