Goliath time

Women, eh? Can't live with them, can't leave 'em by the side of the road when yer finished with 'em.

Zosia went home in a huff last night. I wanted to watch Spurs play Arsenal in the semi-final of the Carling Cup.

Zosia would rather stick her tits in a blending machine than watch football. She wanted to watch some DVD she brought back from Poland, but I stuck to my guns.

And that was that, she gathered her shit angrily together and stormed out with a hefty slam of my front door, the words "We is fucking over, man!!" ringing in my ear.

Yeah, yeah, yeah...

It was a good game. 1-1, although Spurs should have won it easily.

Anyway, over my morning tea this morning, I discovered to my chagrin that I had no weed left. The solution could only be found in a visit to Goliath, a colossal guy, black as a Model T, who lives a few streets away.

In my humble opinion, Goliath is my local area's leading purveyor of fine herbal remedies. Potent hydroponically grown skunk weed has always been his specialty, and my weapon of choice.

I showered, dressed and wandered the streets to Goliath’s to purchase fifty pounds worth.

I rang Goliath’s doorbell and waited, resting my weary bones against the wall by the doorstep. It was a long wait. Nothing unusual. Goliath exists in Goliath Time, in which it can take up to twenty minutes to answer the fucking door.

Eventually his deep voice crackled over the intercom. “Yo?”

“Goliath?”

“Yeah?”

“It’s Zacarias.”

After a lengthy pause, during which I swear I could hear the mental cogs and wheels of recognition grinding slowly in the man’s brain, the door buzzed open.

I wandered down a long hallway and found Goliath in the front room, crouched low over a child’s piano naked from the waist up, spliff dangling from the corner of his mouth.

Without bothering to look up, Goliath grunted, removed the spliff from his mouth and distractedly waved it in the direction of the sofa upon which a blonde girl lay stretched out, hands behind her head, eyes closed wearing nought but a giant grey t-shirts. One of Goliath’s, I imagined.

“You know Sylvia.”

Actually, I’d never seen her before.

Sylvia opened her eyes blearily, raising her head slightly to see who I was. She was pretty, very pretty. She smiled vacantly and rippled a silent hello with her fingers before laying back and closing her eyes again.

She was clearly off her tits on something, presumably having worshipped at Goliath’s High Altar of the Sacramental Herb.

Either that or she was basking in the warm afterglow of a magnificent seeing to courtesy of Goliath.

I wished the both of them a happy new year, to no obvious response.

A few moments passed, me standing like a melon in the middle of the room listening to Goliath attempting the same tune over and over on the tiny piano. He made mistake after mistake, starting again from the top each time.

I stole a few glances at the Sylvia girl, quickly looking away each time in case she opened her eyes. There was something quite Scarlett Johansen-y about her.

“Shiiiiiit,” drawled Goliath in his rich baritone, breaking my reverie.

He took a huge drag on his spliff and reached out to pass it my way without looking up, but then thought better of it and popped it back between his lips.

A baby cried out somewhere in another room.

The Sylvia girl sighed wearily, got unsteadily to her feet, stepped around Goliath and padded out of the room, smiling wanly and brushing my arm with her fingers as she passed.

Goliath stared down at the piano.

I took advantage and turned to observe Sylvia’s shapely harris disappearing out of the room.

Goliath began picking out the same fucking tune he’d been attempting before.

“Listen, Goliath. Hate to piss on your fire, but, um, got any that killer Skunk?”

“Yeah man, but it ain’t the same shit as you ‘ad before.” Goliath chuckled to himself. “It’s a hybrid. Not for the feint hearted, if you know what I’m sayin’? It’s got magical powers. Blow your fuckin’ socks clean off, man. Back to the last century.”

He left the piano, stood up and took a single giant step towards the sofa and bending down, picked up a brown leather satchel from the floor.

He produced a plastic money-bag of weed, dangled it in front of his own face and grinned.

“Wanna try before you buy?”

Ah, now Goliath has asked me the same question many times before. Usually I say yeah, Goliath brings out his bong, we smoke some of the weed I’ve just bought. I get enormously stoned and then feel unable to walk home.

Goliath’s friends and other customers drop by and sample some too and eventually I leave hours later with just a fraction of the stuff I’ve bought.

This time I decided not to make the same mistake. I said I was running late for a meeting.

Goliath handed me the bag of weed.

“Well okay but treat this shit with respect, my friend, ‘cos it gonna creep up on you and bam! Rip your fuckin’ head right off.”

Goliath snapped his fingers to emphasise his point then changed the subject completely.

“Hey, yous a writer, yeah?”

“A musician, really.”

“Well whatever...I got dis great idea for a film script, man. It’s about this midget bloke, yeah, who does da voices on da telly and shit, like on these programs for kiddies and shit on da BBC, yeah?”

“Okay.”

“And he’s really really bitter and dat at havin’ failed as a proper actor cos everyone says he’s too small. They only wanna give him parts in kiddie shows and dat which he finks is beneath him ‘cos he’s a trained actor and he don’t wanna do nuffink like that."

"Right."

"Well, he gets so frustrated, yeah, and so mad, right, he goes on a killing spree murderin’ loads a these telly people and stuff one by one. All the ones wot turned him down when he was tryin’ to be a proper actor, plus some actors who he don’t like anyways...”

As he explained this, Goliath made vague stabbing motions with his right fist.

“…But, like, the police, dey can’t solve the mystery of who dunnit ‘cos no one suspects a midget telly voice bloke and the footprints wot he leaves at the murder scenes is done wiv shoes that he wears on purpose wot is too big for him."

He drifted off in thought for a moment. "I was finking to call it ‘Midget Madness’…”

Thankfully, the pretty Sylvia girl came back into the room holding a crying, coffee coloured baby and settled herself down on the sofa to give it a bottle, sparing me further details of Goliath’s awful film script pitch.

It took it as the perfect cue to make my getaway.

“Well, I'd better be off,” I said.

With one hand scratching his arse, the other holding the joint and his mind clearly still reeling with the cinematic possibilities of a midget-based slasher movie, Goliath shrugged his shoulders dismissively.

“Das fifty.”

I paid the man, said nice to meet you to the pretty Sylvia girl, who’d closed her eyes again, baby suckling at the bottle. She managed a tired, weak smile. I made his way out as Goliath crouched back down to fiddle with the child’s piano once more.