The Cocky Companion (3)
By:
May 21, 2010
Every other Thursday, Patrick Cates (HiLobrow’s Magister Ludi) produces The Sniffer, a compendium of vulpine insight, authorial wisdom, and shower gel tastings that’s mailed to the life-loving men and women who’ve pledged at least $10 to support our serialization of James Parker’s novel, The Ballad of Cocky the Fox. (Subscriptions are still available; check in with Cates for details.) Each edition of The Sniffer features an extract from “The Cocky Companion,” a Rosetta Stone for decoding Cocky’s London vernacular. Yesterday’s Sniffer (#3) contained the following glosses on vernacular from Parker’s Fit the Third.
SPINNEY: Spinneys are small, dense, wooded areas usually found peppering the outskirts of British towns. They afford suitable cover for underage drinkers, peeping toms and pornography hoarders. Our daily walk between Tube station and public school took my friends and me through a spinney. I will always remember it as the place where we once jeered at a man who we spotted in a trembling, masturbatory crouch. He responded to the barracking by standing up, putting his hands in the air, revealing his genitals and inexplicably protesting: “But I was only palming!”
ALL-NIGHT GARAGE: The all-night garage, recognizable to the American consciousness as the 24-hour gas station, is a too-brightly lit magnet that attracts street-dwelling shufflers, ravenous stoners and post-club drunks. After midnight, the garage trade is restricted to Rizlas, sickly sweet milk drinks and six-packs of mass-produced sugary stodge sold, more often than not, under the misleadingly quaint “Mr. Kipling” marque. In the early hours, all business with the attendant is conducted via a small, protectively glassed kiosk. Transactions often descend into window-bashing, shouting and stealing.
BONKERS: Crazy, but harmlessly and fascinatingly so. Charles Manson is not bonkers (crazy, fascinating but harmful). Cricket is not bonkers (crazy, harmless but boring). Dick Cheney is not bonkers (crazy, boring and harmful). Syd Barrett, Spike Milligan and Screaming Lord Sutch, on the other hand, were all bonkers. Consider any of these British silly billies when fathoming the “bonkers glare” of a security light.
SHAGGING: An innocent American might have been bemused to read about an absent-minded fox swinging his vixen around the dancehall to the sounds of 1930s big band music. But shagging isn’t dancing. It’s fucking. Fucking with a smirk, a wink and a glance over the shoulder.
KEBAB: In the minds of most Britons, a kebab is a late-night Turkish-Cypriot calorie bomb comprising pita bread, salad, “lamb” and chilli sauce. The kebab shop owner typically slices strips of the “lamb” off a hot, rotating, thigh-shaped blob of “sheep product” with a ceremonious flourish of a knife that should really be called a sword. This sword is also used for threatening drunks who refuse to pay. A kebab is rarely eaten. Instead, its contents are scattered clumsily all over the pavement as the would-be eater staggers home.
ROTTER: If you are a rotter, you are a mixture of rat, cad, cur and git. You behave badly and you boast about it. You are the bastard who treats them mean and keeps them keen. You are Rod Stewart.
WANKER: A live children’s television programme called Saturday Superstore introduced me, and many British prepubescents like me, to the word “wanker”. Matt Bianco, a regrettable jazz-pop outfit who fell into the charts a few times in the 1980s, were guests one Saturday morning. Viewers were invited to call up and ask the trio questions. The host: “Simon? You’re through to Matt Bianco.” Caller: “Is that Matt Bianco?” Matt Bianco (avuncular, smug): “Yes, Simon!” Caller: “Well you’re a bunch of wankers.” I’m not sure if Simon had ever seen any of Matt Bianco masturbate. I think he might have been using the word “wanker” in its metaphorically insulting sense.
Each installment of THE BALLAD OF COCKY THE FOX was complemented by an issue of THE SNIFFER, a COCKY THE FOX newsletter written and edited by Patrick Cates. Originally sent only to subscribers, they are now all freely available here.