by Aidan Truhen
It being Hamburg there had to be a twist and the twist was that there were flamingos wandering around and if a flamingo stood on your table the house bought you champagne and the houris made a huge fuss about the whole thing.
Well enough but your flamingos for some reason don’t like to stand on tables especially they do not stand on tables covered in ashtrays and bottles of Cristal. It turns out that flamingos despite being associated with excess because they are pink they are real homebody types they do not appreciate bad smells or strong liquor and in fact these flamingos were depressed. They were becoming agitated and I think we can safely say even if Ronnie Platt hadn’t’ve come along they’d still have shut the place pretty soon. There is nothing sadder than drinking champagne with four dozen silent flamingos standing around in the grip of an existential crisis.
But Ronnie man Ronnie. Ronnie was a generous asshole and he could feel the sorrow and he figured to fix it. Ronnie figured that the flamingos were sad because they were captive and the night after I told the head of Lindo-Michaelsen to kiss my ring if he thought I was buying his crappy fauxlombian—I could smell the deceit on the fucking paperwork and I left him holding that warehouse full of shit and Jeni Sutton called me the Cardinal—the night after we were in the Garden. Ronnie was not real rational on account of having actually washed himself in vodka on the advice of some Swedish naturopath. He looked at one particular flamingo and it looked at him and some kind of thing passed between them like brotherhood and Ronnie shouted:
“FREEDOM!”
And he picked it up and he ran.
Ran like the wind.
To the edge of the building and launched this flamingo into the air so it would you know like have an advantage. The whole thing was just beautiful and there was actual background music which was a Pashtun cover of “Take My Breath Away.”
But of course it was all not great because the flamingos were clipped to keep them on the roof. Ronnie stood there with this deep connection burning in his face and he and the bird made eye contact and there was certainty and complicity between them and the bird spread its wings and Ronnie shouted FREEDOM! again.
And the bird fell seventeen floors and landed on a school bus.
No one died but you know the whole thing was not popular in general.
And obviously when I say no one I do not include the flamingo, which definitely for real died, along with Ronnie’s career.
So this is the face on the kindhearted total lack of intellect who grabs me in a hug and shouts my name right there at the top of his voice and of course he does not say Banjo.
He says Jack.
Eiger is listening now.
* * *
—
“HI JACK OMIGOD JACK PRICE? MAN IT’S MEEEE RONNIE FLAMINGO MAN HOW AREEEE YOUUUU?”
When Ronnie talks is the moment when everyone else pauses for breath so his whole thing his whole too-loud thing goes out like an air-raid warning? Nope. Because that is how it is when your world turns to one hundred percent asshole and you have stood there too.
Now you can see in my face I want to kill him. That is actually the danger with being a Demon is that every problem starts to look like the kind of problem where that is the best answer. Leaking faucet? Kill the plumber. Traffic on I-9? Kill the other drivers. Like that guy’s car? Easy he won’t need it. Network cancels your favorite show? Well sure how many of them gotta go before the rest get the fucking message that the world needs more Dichen Lachman not less?
Quite a few actually, as it happens, which surprised me, but never mind that right now.
“OMIGOD JACK SOO COOOOOLLLLL WOW MAN NICE THREADS HEY IT’S ME FLAMINGO RIGHT RONNIE FLAMINGO JAAAAACK EHEY RIGHT HAMBURG AM I RIGHT?”
Kill this asshole it would be
oh
so
easy.
But probably not ludic.
I am Banjo Telemark. Banjo Telemark the artist who lives for confusion and bewilderment and this right here is found fucking art it is Banjo gold disc. It is immortality.
I say:
“OOOOOOMIGOD FRIDA KAHLO I AM YOUR BIGGEST FAN!”
And I kiss Ronnie Flamingo on the mouth.
With tongues because hell it’s Frida fucking Kahlo.
The staff at the Hirschen are totally relaxed about sexual orientation but they do not like shouting or artists or public tongues that is not their jam.
They sit me down and they kind of hoosh Ronnie away like hoosh hoosh back to his own table.
Eiger says: “Jack?”
I say: “Man I have no idea what that was about. That guy thinks he knows me.”
Eiger says: “And he is wrong.”
“Of course he is.”
“I think it would be best if you left now Herr Price.”
“Price, what Price? I am Telemark. Man I have just no idea who this Price guy—wait is that the guy you totally shot in the face?”
“Your speculations are unwelcome Mr.—”
“Banjo—”
“As you say.”
I say: “So man I feel like I have upset your equilibrium man but Hans—baby—I really want to rob your bank call me it will be great.”
And I go back and I eat my lunch and then I pay and I leave.
I pay for Hans Eiger’s lunch too which is a nice gesture and also too it means he won’t find out for another few hours that someone has broken into his day-to-day bank account and stolen thirty-one thousand francs and his bank are saying it is all his fault for setting his password to P4SSW0Rd.
If that was actually his password that would entirely be his fault that is a shitty password.
His password was some crawling alphanumeric horror no sane human being could remember but once Charlie has your bank’s dongle and an idea how the whole thing works that is not really much help.
* * *
—
Hans Eiger will check out Ronnie Flamingo and he will find out that there really was such a guy and that he knew Jack Price. But then he will also find out that Jack Price was not then known as Jack Price and then he will find out that Ronnie Flamingo died in Gozo in ’06 before Jack ever went by Jack.
I do not know what the fuck a dazzling urbanite like Ronnie Flamingo was doing in Gozo I am guessing it is not a good story.
Gozo is the island next door to Malta which is where Banjo Telemark is from.
The guy who just got Frida Kahlo’d is an actor I flew in who now includes on his résumé the information that he worked four years ago on a live project by the famous Ambiguitionist artist Banjo Govinder Telemark.
Eiger will find all of this out.
And it will drive him batshit.
It is totally ambiguous. Banjo Telemark is an actual prankster. A known international bullshit merchant who specializes in fucking with you in the name of art and that is precisely the kind of art Hans Eiger particularly hates. Art should be painted on canvas and have ballet dancers or squares of red and yellow and blue that is just what is right.
All this means I am obviously not Jack Price even if Hans Eiger and Evil Hansel did not kill Jack Price last week, which demonstrably they did. I am some hairy asshole bullshitting my way into the art scene to make money and get laid and right now I am bullshitting Hans Eiger because he hosts the festival. It is obvious.
And yet he knows in his bones he knows it in every fucking crag of his craggy fucking mountain face that I am Jack Price and now he has to kill me again. He just knows it because of course he does he’s not a fucking idiot.
Now that he has thought it he cannot ignore it and at the same time he knows he fucking knows that my whole jam the whole entire thing that Banjo Telemark does—Banjo’s entire bullshit—is the creation of ambiguity and if there is one thing Hans Eiger fucking hates it is ambiguity and now Mr. The Art Of Ambiguous is fucking with hi
m and he cannot he absolutely cannot fucking overreact right now because if—oh God if—if this is a demented fucking art-house prank and he goes for it and he somehow gets Candid Camera’d firing a long gun at a chortling anarchist reject with gold teeth—then o God—o God all that reputational zing and boom he has just murdered his way to will burn up like mist on a summer day and—and—and—
Soon he will also find out that all around the world men and women called Jack Price are committing crimes because there is money to be made in doing so and he will know that this is something the Demons have done because Jack Price is dead and they want to hide that fact.
Or I did it to make him think that.
Does that mean Banjo IS Jack Price or that Banjo is part of some conspiracy BY Jack Price or that Banjo has tapped into the Pricegeist or or or—
But the thing about Banjo is Banjo is this obvious tremendous try-hard asshole. Banjo is in Hans Eiger’s face. In the macro Hans Eiger needs to be strategic and wise and he can do that but in the micro—
In the micro he has to beat Banjo Telemark.
He has to beat Banjo so that the river of the world can resume its course.
And the only way he can possibly do that is by playing Banjo back at his own game. Roll with the joke. Be funny. Funny is not his natural home but he can be funny of course he can be funny fucking otters do it on the Internet all the time. Cats climb on Roombas how fucking hard can it be for a man like him?
He can roll with the joke.
This will make perfect sense to him it will seem like a message from God. Because right now the whole world is fucking with Hans Eiger and there is nothing he wants to do more than fuck it right back. It is like a dare. It is everything he is.
Security. Strength. Certainty.
He is going to make two mistakes right now. The first one is actually not a mistake it is a sensible thing to do but this is my oeuvre. He is going to phone a friend.
That is fine and dandy. It will hurt him in the end because I am a fucking artiste but that is not his fault that is me. But the second…oh Mr. Eiger oh in his soul he knows it is wrong and yet he cannot but do it anyway.
He is going to let me put bulldozers on his mountain.
Not today.
Probably not tomorrow.
But soon and for the rest of his life.
EIGHT
THIS IS THE CALM BEFORE THE YOU KNOW WHAT. We are waiting for Mr. Friday to come through. While we do this we are in a resting state of readiness. I am the stillness I am the lake water the river the sea I am—
I am very bored.
In fact although I fucking hate this part I approve of it enormously because robbing a bank is what? It is PROCESS Uncle Jack yes that is right. It is not fucking black suits and guns and spooky masks it is process and it is HOMER and process and that is how we do not die. Doc is arranging aerosol-dispersal anesthetic for elephant conservation in India, which coincidentally is also useful for wide-area pacification of security forces on mountains. Doc wants to narrow the focus of delivery and I say JUST ELEPHANT TRANQ THE WHOLE FUCKING CANTON—
But Doc says she has it so she has it. She does. I trust her. I tell her so.
She has already solved the issue of how to get loot off the mountain at the end of the job she is going to have me distract everyone with exciting drones which of course Banjo Telemark will have as part of his ART and which everyone of a law enforcement persuasion will assume have been hijacked or co-opted for this purpose, while in fact the real work will be done using the cable car. Then we will just load the loot into a big container truck marked as roofing supplies and drive it away.
I say the cable car is a boring way to leave a fortress you can only get to by cable car and Doc says yes, it is, that is the point.
I leave Doc to be very grown-up and I feed her pigs and do not let the doors kill any of them and I go to buy junk for my special fucking-with-Eiger-horrible-revenge show.
* * *
—
“Hi my name is Banjo Telemark I wish to buy your junk.”
“No we are—we recycle we do not—this is where junk comes to—”
“Madame I wish to buy many tons of junk I will pay enough to recycle many more things it is for art. When the art has been viewed I will return the junk to you as junk if no one buys it you will get free junk plus money. This is a good thing.”
“Yaaaawuh and what do you get?”
“I get art madame I do not need money. Rich people are forever giving me money for art but part of that process is scarcity. This art can be ephemeral so that my other art is expensive.”
“That is good business.”
“I am an artist that does not mean I must be an innocent adrift in the world madame.”
“…What junk do you need?”
“Auto parts and airplane panels also any ethnic Swiss schlock you may have.”
“Ethnic—”
“Many of your fine hotels and eating establishments and so on here feature cowbells and such also many cows but I am assuming there is ultimately wastage and recycling of same.”
“Yes that is true.”
“I wish to buy cowbells and aluminum car parts for use as art. Ideally in this quantity which I have written on this paper.”
“This is a large quantity but…yes I suppose it is possible.”
“Excellent here is money. Please deliver half of it to this address here and half to the Kircheisen Festung for the art fair marked to my attention.”
“O you are with Herr Eiger?”
“He will be thrilled I promise you.”
He will not but sometimes art is really just for the artist I guess.
* * *
—
Charlie is not bored Charlie is fine. While I was in Iceland Charlie went to see Bruno and she is very excited about ecoterrorism and she would like that we take a few weeks after this job to do some pro bono environmental work. Bruno evidently understands Charlie very well because he took her on a job under the water and they plugged Z-Vat in an illegal outflow together and had sex in the water—not the outflow water some clean clear water upstream—and then had sex on a barge in front of some sort of boat-safe smokeless stove. I do not entirely get how you have sex in a dry suit but if anyone can do it that person is Charlie. Charlie figures we could kill the Japanese whaling industry in a month and move on to illegal logging in the Amazon next year and in this she has Doc’s cautious agreement because it is undeniable that if the earth catches fire and falls over then being rich will be considerably less fun than it is now and Doc feels this is a very real scientific possibility owing to feedback and shit that I do not understand but I trust Doc. If Doc says this is bad it is bad and Doc does so that is fine.
All the same it is not good for Charlie to get too euphoric so I make her come with me to rent bulldozers.
* * *
—
“Hello I wish to rent bulldozers. Also other heavy plant. Have you anything in purple I do not like the yellow.”
“We have a very little red and some green that is all.”
“If I was to arrange payment would you permit me to respray? I would of course reverse the process after my show—”
“Show?”
“Ah yes I am an artist—I work at scale which is why—”
“Oh, you are that Banjo Telemark yes of course how FABulous and what are you making—”
“Art of course ahahaha you see—”
* * *
—
Charlie hangs out with Frau Anton to discuss bulldozer regulatory blah blah blah and I am at a loose end so I go back to Eiger’s cigar shop and I buy another cigar. The little guy asks if I liked the first cigar and I tell him I haven’t smoked it yet. He asks me why I want another one and I say that I like the process of coming in here and buying cigars
I don’t really like to smoke. But the smell of the place and the vibe and so on that just makes me feel comfortable and happy like there’s a good world somewhere under this one that I can find if I stand still.
Which is actually sort of true but I don’t know that when I start saying it only when I finish and then I am embarrassed and I still don’t know why Eiger comes in here because he also does not buy any cigars.
Maybe he also just likes to come in here and be with the little guy.
Maybe we have that much in common.
I do not ask the little guy about Eiger and we don’t talk about coffee this time we just—
We don’t talk about anything at all for an hour. We just stand there and do things in the quiet of the shop.
And then I leave and he does not say goodbye.
* * *
—
I see Volodya across the street just going into a shop. It is a hat shop. I run across the road and nearly get hit by a car. There is a lot of honking and shouting in Swiss. Swiss is a great language to be pissed off in.
I get to the hat shop and go inside but of course it is not Volodya it is a fat man from Sion.