the story (from more nice)

Ain’t Life a Bitch

When the sun shines bright, and it’s a late morning in May, it’s difficult to imagine that in just a few short weeks this house, now so full of people laughing and doors slamming, will become an empty house again, just like all the other houses you see every day, cheerless and impersonal. But today, it’s our house, and I love it.

Each time of day has its own special atmosphere; in the mornings, around eight, the two French boyfriends get up to go to work, but it is very seldom that anyone sees them do this, unless someone didn’t bother to go to bed at all. Then the second shift,, at ten o’clock, which consists of the more industrious pleasure seekers and the rarely seen individual who actually attends the university with any semblance of regularity.

Finally, when all is tranquil, when the shops are starting to close for lunch, when there can be no question at all, as to what the weather will do, the three time-hardened hedonists crawl out from underneath the covers, ready to face even the most taxing of pleasurable pursuits.

A quick glimpse at the balcony suffices to check the weather. If it is raining, it is highly unlikely that any of the three will venture out until well past dark, and even then only if there is a large, fast, comfortable car and a previous engagement involved. However if, as is normal, the sun is shining high in a bright blue cloudless sky, someone will doubtless shuffle into the kitchen to perform the first really important task of the day.

Grinding your own coffee, never an easy task, is even more difficult when you have a really bad hangover, but it is soon over and, leaving the water to boil, the earliest riser, for that is the penalty, is left at liberty to trip delicately down the steps, though the garden and up to the gate to see what the post has brought. Anything remotely resembling a bank statement is discreetly placed on one side and the recipient is quietly informed of his bad fortune once he has fully recovered form the previous night’s drinking.

Reiner’s special way of recovering from a particularly heavy bender is to soothe his mind with his favourite book, which he has been reading now since January – The Function of Orgasm – in the original German. This might strike some people as a somewhat bizarre taste in early morning reading, but he seems to like it and we have long since ceased to question anything he does.

If Mike was paralytic the night before, then he will lie in bed groaning, informing anyone who will stop to listen that it is very unlikely that he will survive the next few hours; but if he had just been pissed, as is normal, he will first make sure that he has no-one to apologise to for the previous evening and then bring out his guitar and begin to play. And me: well I need about eight cups of coffee before I could even tell you what my name was.

Another aspect of this house is that one never knows who one is going to wake up next to. As we have many visitors, most of them arriving on our doorstep with no previous warning, it often happens that one of us comes home to find a perfect stranger in their bed. Not wishing to cause any misunderstanding the next morning, a complicated manoeuvre, vaguely reminiscent of Musical Chairs, takes place between those members of the household still in a state of sufficient consciousness to remember where it was they were originally going to sleep.

And so it was that I returned home early one morning to find that we were hosts to Canadian football player, his alcoholic brother, an Englishman wearing a beret and Doctor Martins, and two Germans for whom we could find no-one to claim responsibility. Guests often find that they have let themselves in for more than they expected when, wishing to be helpful they offer to do the washing up. Unbeknownst to the hapless volunteer, this is possibly the worst move they could have made as the tradition in this house is to leave everything until there is not one clean item in the kitchen and then eat out until it begins to smell, or the next visitors arrive.

My favourite guest has just left. An interesting character, he did not want to go back to his native Canada as, he explained in his own charming way propping up the table, the Mafia had several contracts out on him including one for a hit and run accident involving a rather expensive speed boat he was driving and a brick wall. He fitted in very well here as, like his mother who came to visit several months ago, he was drunk most of the time. Most of what he did during the three weeks he was here involved champagne in one way or another. At one point he and his brother consumed ten bottles of the stuff, the only concession to the time of day being, at nine o’clock in the morning, to mix orange juice with it.

Every now and then the hectic city life we lead gets too much and we all pack into Marco’s camionette, those of us with nervous dispositions, or a grudge against Marco going in the car with Reiner, and we somehow manage to reach Charly’s house in the mountains a few hours and several bottles of wine later. Marco’s chief ambition is to become a rally driver. At present he is being detained in hospital under observation.

Charly is a heroin addict with a voice like velvet, a smile like Bryan Ferry and a heart of gold. His parents have a small ramshackle cottage, twenty minutes drive from the nearest village and ten or so of us go up there for the weekend for a bit of clean, fresh mountain air. We take only the barest essentials with us; a good large stereo system, half an ounce of dope, two crates of assorted alcohol and several hundred francs worth of food.

Charly and Marco bring their own reading matter; highly pornographic French magazines, and Reiner his Function of Orgasm and a selection of David Bowie cassettes. I bring my shot glasses. On arrival, everyone has a different reaction. Reiner is the first out of the car and by the time we catch up with him he is normally perched on some isolated rock, reciting half-remembered speeches from Macbeth with a heavy German accent to an astonished ten year old peasant boy and his dog.

Charly opens up the house and slips upstairs to put on his traditional country garb which consists of an off-white pyjama shirt with matching long-johns, while we bring in the bags. The interior of the house looks like something out of Popeye, with a big fireplace, ships made into lamps and crooked little stairs leading up to two low-ceilinged bedrooms.

The music is the first thing to be installed but we keep the volume down nowadays as the first time we were there we received complaints from our nearest neighbours whose house we could just make out through the binoculars, across the other side of the valley and halfway up the next mountain.

There is a delightful little balcony where we are in the habit of taking our first drink of the morning, which gives the picturesque impression that it is just about to plunge thirty feet. We have air-rifle shooting matches from this point when the weather is good and when we are sober enough to find the bullets. I won the last one by picking off one of the local boys whose misfortune it was to be up for a weekend at the same time as us.

The nights in the mountains are very difficult to remember clearly. Marco’s second favourite hobby is fire; he devotes hour upon hour to stoking up a huge blaze which, owing to the deficient chimney, built by Charly when he was drying out there last summer, nearly manages to suffocate us and we end up freezing anyway as we have to open all the doors and windows to let the smoke out.

If you manage to survive the heating arrangements, then the smoking and drinking might finish you off. Karen and I once passed a pleasant weekend when, after having drunk everyone else under the table, we continued with a little friendly competition involving a bottle of whiskey, a bottle of vodka and two shot glasses.

On Sundays, the chemical toilet normally floods the whole of downstairs and the ever-obliging Charly sweeps it up while the rest of us are sick outside. We finish off the weekend by wandering around the countryside, drinking some more, and trying to eat the so-called ‘barbecued’ chicken which, in reality, means that someone tried to put it on a spit, was too drunk, dropped it in the fire and wandered off, hoping that if he ignored the problem and forgot about it, it might go away. On Sunday evenings we pack up and join the queue of would-be rally drivers all ready to take their chances on another unofficial downhill mountain race.

And so back to the daily grind of life in our villa. People are always saying that all we do is eat, sleep, drink and have sex, but I for one have learnt a thousand and one things since I have been here. I live with the nicest people anyone could ever hope to meet. And yet I know for certain that, had I met them in London, I would probably not even have bothered to ask their names.

I have learnt the art of self-entertainment, something no-one cares to practice in the anonymous, remote-controlled, pre-packaged city I come from. I’ve had the best love affair that I’ve ever had with someone I care for very much. But most of all I’ve learnt that nothing is ever what it seems, that I can do exactly as I please and that life is good.

May 1983