Airbag Lodging
by Albert Russo
At first I wasn’t sure
whether the fact of having to remain in Israel
would bother me or not. But seeing that my uncle
had turned from Feta white - is that where the
expeshun ‘chalk and cheese’ comes from?
- to the color of Brussels sprout, I got a lil
cheeky. Coz if I don’t nudge him a bit
firmly (I usually slap his thigh so’s to
straighten him up), he might veer to crocodile
green, and then he pouts for hours on end, with
his mouth half open like them disgraceful
prehistoric beasts that look petrified, when what
they really want is for you to come near them for
a quick bite of raw human flesh. Brrr …
another failed invention of goddess!
“Don’t worry,”
I said, getting happier by the minute, but
pretending to be annoyed, “I’ll help
you buy the food, even though you know I hate
supermarkets.”
Bonka squinted at me - this
is what happens when he comes out of a nightmare
and touches ground, like a plane that’s just
lost one of its wheels as it lands. Yeah, he gets
all shook up, and I need to give him a good loud
bark for his two eyes to resume their normal
place. Only then can we start having a ci-vi-liiized
conversation. He’s the one who taught me
that even if we disagree we oughta discuss with
calm and compowwwsure.
Between you and me,
sometimes you have to be fast and furious to stop
growlups shenanigans, coz it can go on
and on, with preface, introduction, convoluted (yeah,
I know that word too, which has ‘con’
in it) explanations and epilogue, which, when you
get there, becomes a whole fookin’ epischmuck
and you’ve lost an uncoushy (unconscionable,
ha ha) amount of precious time during which you
could have built a castle in the sand.
“Now, now, Unky
dearest,” I sweet-talked, forcing myself to
be nice - this is when my jaws start hurting, coz
it ain’t natural to be kind when you are
boiling inside -, “why don’t we look
for a nice lil airbag place overlooking the beach?”
There were quite a few
offers on booking.com, but my Unka the Bonka said
that those were for the likes of Angie Jolie,
Meryl Strip or Lenny Di Capricorn, meaning they
were much too expensive for us.
After searching for maybe
two hours - I had to contain myself not to bash
his head - we found a cosy apartment in the South
of Tel Aviv.
We had to take three buses
to get there to meet our landlord.
Wa wee wooow, we had never been to that area. It
looked derelict and smelled of garlicky
food and piss at the same time. Only later - it
was already too late - did I learn that it was
mainly inhabited by poor Israelis and immigrants
- many of them illegal. You could see that some
of the people around were either slightly drunk
or stoned.
Excerpt
6 from CORONA ZAPINETTE by Albert Russo
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