Jón Gnarr - The Pirate

“Can I offer you a chance to buy lottery tickets for the Red Cross?”

“Yes, yes,” people said and thought it was exciting.

Most folk opened their ticket in front of me. There were no winners, not a single ticket; no one ever won anything. I didn’t have any morals, so this was fine. I felt like I wasn’t doing anything bad because the tickets were not that expensive, and no one was angry when they didn’t win. People seemed to just find it fun and exciting.

“Aha, Red Cross lottery tickets, listen, I’m going to get three tickets — and I’m going to get a prize!”

We both laughed. Of course, there was no prize.

“Listen, that was just really bad luck, I’m going to get another three tickets. Now I’ll definitely win.”

I smiled encouragingly.

That Christmas my parents, along with everyone in the family, got awesome Christmas presents from me for the first time. I said I’d purchased gifts with the money I had earned from being a salesman, but of course these were all prizes I had picked up from the Red Cross. Mom got a box of Norwegian chocolates, and Dad got the tow hitch. Aunt Gunna and Aunt Salla each got a box of chocolates. Everyone was happy and surprised because no one had ever received a Christmas gift from me before.

When a man hits on a masterstroke that enables him to cheat, it’s vital to keep quiet about it; at the same time, it’s tempting to boast about having found loopholes in the system. It is not just tempting for selfish reasons: you also want to give others a share in the discovery, and I wanted to reveal how crafty I had been in illuminating the tickets. I showed a couple of other sales guys this trick and taught them how to identify winning tickets from the rest. Two knew, then everyone knew. Next time I went to the supervisor in Fossvogur to get more tickets, I noticed she wasn’t as cheerful and high-spirited as usual. Instead of handing me a box, she asked me to sit down with her in the kitchen. I was immediately suspicious that she had found out about my trick. I was sure that somebody must have talked to her. She crossed her arms and looked hard at me.

“Is it true you’ve been looking through the tickets?”

I put on my surprised face and appeared as though I didn’t know what she meant.

“Hmmm?”

I seemed to be gaping with surprise at the very thought that someone could have such a thought in their head.

“Nahhh, who said that?”

“I was told you’d looked through the tickets and could somehow see the prizes.”

I continued looking totally amazed. How could such a crazy thought occur to someone! And who could be so obnoxious as to blame me? The most hardworking salesperson! This was nothing more than a petty swindle. I shook my head.

“Nah, I don’t think that’s even possible.”

“No, I thought not.”

She clearly thought it wasn’t credible. Maybe she didn’t believe whoever had told her? I thought it would be best to persuade her to believe that the person who told her was jealous of me because I was so hardworking and, on top of everything else, had the most sales of all.

“Who said it was possible?”

“It doesn’t matter.”

“Yes. No, I’ve never done it,” I said innocently, smiled and then added:

“I don’t think it’s even possible.”

She looked at me thoughtfully.

“No, well, it doesn’t matter.”

“No, so I just want to get some more tickets,” I said, in a livelier tone.

She was hesitant.

“The thing is, I just have so many people now who are selling and I simply don’t have any tickets for you. But thank you, and do come talk to me next winter.”

Huh? Next winter? Was she firing me? That’s how I was fired from my first job, something I would go on to experience many, many times, over and over again. This was only the first of numerous jobs I would be fired from. I was once again unemployed and could no longer fund my shopping trips and cigarettes. Good advice had become costly.

The rumor was that all us kids at Hlemmur were on drugs. That was a gross exaggeration given how limited the supply of drugs was. There was just normal stuff: sniffing glue, markers, and gas. Occasionally maybe you’d get a hit from a hash pipe, but that was rare. One drug we used quite a lot, though, was travel sickness tablets. The tablets were sold in pharmacies, but they wouldn’t sell you more than ten tablets at once. So you’d just go into a pharmacy, say you were really carsick, and ask if it was possible to get something for motion sickness. You’d get sickness tablets. Then you just played the game again, went to the next pharmacy, and got more sickness tablets.

“Hi. I’m going on a trip…with my dad…to Patreksfjörður. And…I get so carsick, and this kid I know said it was possible to get some kind of motion sickness pills.”

“Yes, yes, there are tablets for that. Here: sea- and carsickness tablets.”

“Ahh, okay.”

And so you immediately had twenty tablets, enough to get a good high. You’d swallow some ten to fifteen of them. The effect: hallucinations. Enormously large visual and auditory hallucinations, a strange and alien state.

Like most boys, I was interested in girls, but it was just that I was so timid and afraid of them. Girls were exotic and mysterious beings who thought and behaved according to strange and incomprehensible laws. Moreover, I found that girls did not have any particular interest in me. I had had some conversations with girls, but they were such weird conversations. Sometimes some girl sat with me at Bústaðir and began to ask me about something connected with me, what I was up to and what I was interested in. My mind went flying. Why was she asking me this? Had anyone put her up to it? Or was she just curious? Then it happened one time that a guy who was with me at Rétto spoke to me and told me that these two girls we went to school with had asked him to invite me over while they were babysitting; they would like that. I was astonished. This guy was not an idiot. We weren’t especially friends, but he was a good, decent guy who had helped me sometimes when I was being teased.

“Why do they want me to come?” I asked, cynical.

“I think one of them has a crush on you,” he said.

Crush on me? How could someone have a crush on me? Who could have a crush on me? That was exciting. Some girl had a crush on me. The thought of going and meeting them was exciting but frightening at the same time. What should you do? What did they want you to do? Would we make popcorn and play a game? Or perhaps we’d listen to music and kiss? I’d never kissed a girl but still had seen quite a few kids kissing, even with tongues. I was totally up for it if that was what she wanted. But maybe we were just going to make popcorn. But what were you supposed to talk to girls about? I rarely had any interest in talking to girls and thought they usually just talked about uninteresting and boring things. I had never heard of a girl with knowledge of or interest in anarchism. But I would be so happy to talk about anything if I could kiss her. The more I thought about it, the more nervous I became. This would totally fail, for sure. I would be so nervous and awkward and definitely say something that they found silly. Maybe they would all start laughing at me. In movies, kids are always just doing something and then suddenly they kiss. I did not quite know how this contagion of kissing happened. Wouldn’t it be reasonable to ask people if you could kiss them? But “Can I kiss you?” sounded lame. “Can I make out with you and fondle your breasts?” was even worse.

As the days passed and the evening approached, I became increasingly confused and nervous. I decided to go to the pharmacy and buy some sickness tablets so I could be relaxed on the evening in question. That night, I took a low dose, just right for some small visual and auditory hallucinations. When I was in that frame, I generally found people fun and relaxed. They, of course, didn’t know I’d taken tablets, and just found me interesting and amusingly bewildered. Sickness tablets also allowed me to be free from cares and full of courage. There would be no problem kissing on travel sickness tablets! It would happen by itself, and it would just be fun. I met my friend up at the shops after taking a few more tablets, and I also brought some more with me, just in case. Maybe the other kids would want to do tablets, and also maybe I’d need to take a few more.