“All the armpits in china I’d relinquish for it” Elijah nods, twirling a length of vapour around his index finger. “Some of the best records ever made, that man put his name to.”
A litany of wonders recounted - Fresh Fruit For Rotting Vegetables, Frankenchrist, Prairie Home Invasion, that one with DOA…
“Last Scream Of The Missing Neighbours?” St Paul offers.
“The very one” says Elijah. “The very one.”
“D’you what I love most of all?” St. Paul enquires wistfully. “The spoken word records. Aw but they’re beautiful so they are. Orations as spectacular as any I’ve heard that were given on a stage or a podium and not a mountain.”
“There’s a new one an’ all” Mohammad says, “But damn the word I’ve got to hear for I’ve been that busy with the you-know-who gettin’ up to no end of you-know-what - the fiercest grief I’m gettin’ over the head of it. D’you know what they’re at next? They’ve only just -”
At this, Elijah raises a hand, thank God, and also a compact disc player. “Well now” says he. “It just so happens I have here in these clouds a cd-r of In The Grip Of Official Treason that I burned from off the copy Mary stole off Arthur Miller there Saturday past.”
“You have not!”
“I have boy.”
“Oh but that’s the quare wonderful turn of events! And there I thought I’d never hear a word, what with the -”
“Hush now” says St. Paul. “Hush now for by God the last thing we need is a barrage o’ that class of talk, thank you all the same.”
And so, with much nodding of heads and raising of eyebrows and chortles of “That’s the boy, Biafra, you tell them!”, Mohammad, St. Paul and Elijah sat huddled about the speakers, cocking the ears to hear over the intermittent raging of Jehovah, Himself busy smiting the balls off of some crew of pagans nestled to the west of Cyprus.
“He’s the wild man for the smiting” St Paul says with a skew of the mouth. “Jesus but it’d drive you mad, that bit of smiting he goes on with.”
“Quiet till we hear” says Elijah, crossing the legs. “Good stuff, this…”
II
So much has Jello Biafra to say, and so passionately does he say it, that I’d be truly shocked to the back of my absent vulva to learn he goes through anything less than forty-nine tongues a fortnight.
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