There he was.

Jed.

He had joined the workforce at McIntyre and King, Brunswick Dock and ate with his face for the most part. His head was bullet shaped but his pace was slowed by chemicals he took for his brain. Some kindly fucker had thought I needed to care for a man who ate with his face.

He sat beside me. Breathing. Breathing. Papers flew in the breeze under his bullet. At the sorting office I had to watch him through some terrible hangovers. He messed up orders I didn’t care about. I would fix them. He cost them money and me precious hours of music and thought. Before Jed came, all I had to do was smoke one in the morning, clock in, sit down, plug in CD player, put on headphones, sort mail for two hours, smoke another at break, sort more mail, get as many drinks in at dinner as I could, sort more mail, clock out, go home. I had it down.

Another routine.

The college money gravy train was over. The beautiful routine was gone. Things were stale and there were no more parks or VP Sherry at odd hours. That had been real. This was water on the moon. No one cares if that freezes, burns or turns to shit. All those months had been mine and now I had less than the smackheads on Lime Street. When I couldn’t drink all day I felt it all around me. Sneaking fingers shoving cuntish reality in my face.

The dream was over.

I carried Jed’s can, it stank of piss and his broken mind slopped around on the bottom. It was a job for simians and some elder simians had been there forty years. The pride these doomed bastards took in that fact made me consider suicide everyday and the canteen was already The Place Where They Cooked Sorrow.

Jed brought a new series of stomach churning human calamities to the table every day. His expression never changed apart from when the elders would encourage the poor bastard to moonwalk on Friday evenings. He would light up and perform. Cruelty and mirth. I would sit and watch them not Jed. He was very fat and very small and he would gyrate for these grinning piss-takes on humanity.

Jed was not retarded. He had ruined himself in his early twenties, just as I was doing. He would leave me to the Glasshouse on Vauxhall Road every evening in his car and play a two track Dire Straits CD. Private Investigations and Walk of Life. He would add insane percussion on the dashboard.

I never asked him in. Work was work. Jed was Jed. I had no help for him. We were both fucked. When I left after two years he was emotional. He kept saying “Seeya mate” and squeezing my hand. His unusual table manners and his moonwalk are raw memories.

All I had ever done was growl at him.

Jesus fucking Christ