Mate.
Last night I went to possibly the worst party I’ve been to this year. For starters, it was way outside London in some town where they still dress like Danny Dyer, secondly, they were popping off a well generic blend of house and garage (it’s 2020 ffs) and finally, it seemed the only drug available for purchase (which is SOOO 2018). I’d woofed a village of MDMA, however, so I stayed for three hours trying to find someone who wasn’t going to sinny my rag. This proved impossible, yeah, so I bounced outside to find a cab to take me back to London. This was where things took a turn for the Twin Peaks, right.
I was approached by a shifty looking (Iranian?) geezer with a well Casio beard and hipster headscarf, who gabbed about taking me back to town for £40. Now, I would have gladly paid double that but I’d be a right duplo to let him know that so I just nodded yes and slipped a gang of crumpled fivers into his (tiny) hands. He led me to a mad clean BMW and two minutes later we were bombing it through red lights, French Connection style. I sat in the back, paddling MDMA up my snoot and listening to his far-out transcendental tunes, when it occurred to me that the only sensi course of action would be to interview this lad, there and then, as he hung onto the steering wheel like that kid out of that Harrison Ford film I’ve never seen. My iphone was on the drops (3% battery like) so I used the scraps of paper that the MDMA had come wrapped in to record his thoughts. I’ll be clean, right, I don’t remember much about this scene, but I’ve been trying to piece our conversation together from the hastily scribed squares of powdery paper I found stuffed into my pockets this morning. What follows might be what happened.
Me: “What’s your name, mate?”
Cabbie: “Kanny.”
Me: “Kenny?”
Cabbie: “No Kenny, Kanny…like Can of Coke, Kanny.”
Me: “Where are you from?”
Cabbie: “Kosovo.”
Me: “Oh yeah? What’s the EDM scene like there?”
Cabbie: “What EDM is, buddy?”
Me: “You know, club music…tunes and that…”
Cabbie: “No.”
Me: “What about the drug scene?”
Cabbie: “You want heroin, buddy…I get you good price. nice price.”
Me: “No thanks mate, I’m not a marmite.”
Cabbie: “I get you best deal…good stuff…”
Me: “Don’t worry about it mate, Trainspotting was time ago.”
Cabbie: “Who is Trainspotting, buddy...you want to buy a sattelite dish?”
Some of my notes get a bit Katona at this point, and are almost too Shackleton to translate. I remember we yapped on about the US, Covid (which he thinks is a Mossad conspiracy) Taylor Swift (who he was in love with) and Thomas Pynchon (who he’d never heard of). We had just entered Stoke Newington when things turned a bit Lost series 4, like, I’m talking total total herd migration.
Cabbie: “You want buy a gun, buddy?”
Me: “Not really mate.”
Cabbie: “I get you good price, you want gun, banger banger, I get you one, buddy.”
Me: “How much?” (I didn’t want a gun, but it’s always proper rigid to know how much these things cost)
Cabbie: “How much you got, buddy?”
Me: “Well…I’ve got nothing, I just gave you my last £40, yeah?”
He slammed the brakes on and screeched over to the kerb, turning around with a boat like wonky thunder. It was at this point I noticed that he had a mouth full of gold teeth. Obviously something I had said had jammed his inbox.
Cabbie: “What you bloody say to me, buddy?”
Me: “Nothing…just that I gave you my last £40, that’s all…”
Cabbie: “You think you smart, buddy, you think you fool Kanny?”
Me: “No, mate, not really…”
Cabbie: “You think you fool me? I know shit like you, with your Friends DVD, and your walkman headphones and your Nike trainers, in Kosovo we call you gormarica.”
Me: “What’s that?”
Cabbie: “You don’t know gormarica, buddy, are you some sort of budalla?”
Me: “I don’t know what you mean, mate, is it a good thing?”
Cabbie: “Right, that is end to story, you get fuck out of my cab now, buddy.”
Me: “But we’re only in Stoke Newington, mate, and I want to go to Hoxton.”
Cabbie: “Then you better get walking in those fancy pants Nikes, buddy.”
The next thing I knew, he had sprung out of the car and dragged me onto the pavement, calling me a ‘fucking turkey‘ and throwing weird hand gestures in my boat. He then drove away laughing (or crying, I’m not sure which). I bounced the last two miles home mind-scanning that I’d charged my iPhone so at least I could have listened to a big slice of Madagascan dubstep, but I couldn’t, so I just imagined I was listening to it, which was better than actually listening to it (because it’s mostly a right old load of Nokia). It then occured to me that, had I bought some heroin from Kanny, it would have made this a far more interesting story, or not.
The lesson I learned here was don’t take an illegal cab anywhere, and if you do, at least buy some fucking heroin.
Laters.
