— Who wants Sub in the marathon?
— Johan Westermark … he got full points with three hundred and seventy-eight last time …
— And I have Kåga-Women … by Satan … for lack of anything better, it’ll have to be “The Stork” Sundqvist …
Then we were finished with rolling dice and writing stuff down … the marathon was played with ten times ten dice, you start at the top of the list and go down one roll at a time … At three throws, “The Ant” Greenland slipped … she was thirty points behind the nearest challenger … The others were close, between a hundred five and a hundred ten … After five throws, half the marathon, the positions were:
“The Ant” Greenland
160
“Sinbearer”
193
Johan W.
178
“The Stork”
189
“SATO”
166
Rockojärvi
175
It looked like I had two losers to deal with … “The Ant” and “SATO” were the haircurdling showstoppers … Moronic Greenland threw a 24 in the seventh. The tramps and “The Stork” caught up to the leaders. It was starting to look like a triple for Grandpa …
— Noooo! Looks like Johan, the bastard, can’t even get his cock blue! I groaned when he threw 27 in the ninth.
Grandpa took the ten small white dice with black pips and rolled them imploringly over his open palm … Then he tossed them onto the felt cloth with a sly look … A quick glance revealed: 36 … fair, but nothing to holler about. The last roll was anticlimactic. Grandpa rolled a three-double: The Bush 6p., Kåge-Q 5p., and Finland 4p., Sub. 3p., CP-q 2p., and Skola, the old master-team, 1p. “Sinbearer’s” winning time was a nice 384 … 6 of 10 rolls of 40 or better … But the ten-time runner scored over 400, so he’d averaged above 40.
The World Cup ran two “days” with six meets per day. A runner could only participate in one race a day.
100,400, 1500, 5000 marathons and 4×100 the first day …
3×3, 4×4, 4×5+1×3, 6×8, 10×10 and four stretches with 3×3 dice …
The second day: 200, 800, 3000, 10,000, half-marathon and 4×400 …
2×6, 4×5, 5×6, 8×8, 9×9, and four stretches with 4×4 dice …
When we played “Lord of the Rings,” Grandpa wanted to be Sauron. When I said it was against the rules, he beat me with Bolshevism from Moses to Lenin. He refused to trade down to a balrog, and waved his hands dismissively when I read the racial descriptions of the Uruk-hai, Huorns, dragons, and Nazgul. On a whim, he let himself be persuaded by what I read aboutthe Nazgul in the rulebook: “If revealed with the aid of magic, they appear in the guise of great, haggard kings with cold, evil eyes..
— Okeydokeysmokey, I’ll be a ghost, then … and I’ll be a black Numenörean … and an Uruk-hai … You’ll be a fallohidehobbit … a hummerbagge … a buggerwoser …
We made up our own rules this time … We said you didn’t have to die if you died in the game … Grandpa won … he always does … he makes the rules … he pulls the strings … he’s behind it all …
__________
näken — a water sprite
XIV
Grandpa was in bed with his cock wrapped in a wet, warm towel, reading aloud from Geronto-Eroticon by Ernst Carson, the Skråmträsk devil.
—“…let men protect their sweet flesh from sexual intercourse with sundrenched whores — hair like frostbitten chaff, asses like rusty, sooty, greasy burntout ovens” … bring me my munchies, you little rat!
I sat in my dogcrate gnawing on the corn growing on my largest foot.
— Bring me my special brownies and buttermilk!
I went to get his snacks. Down in the kitchen, a feral cat was raping a cacklingtease of a laughinggull. I walloped them both with a firepoker and went back upstairs with Grandpa’s evening snack. When I got there, his hoarse wheezing voice washed over me like the scent of pigs roasting near Smammarn.
—“…Augustine already wrote about how nasty, dirty, sleazy, and queasy a womans embrace can be … Kill the firstborn of her loins! Let a cry be heard from every sty! For every killingblow, a man goes free! As long as a single motherwomb exists, we’ll never find our way back to Our Father! We’ll be nothing but wideeyed little boys when Doomsday’s Bloody Sunday strikes! On that day, magisters will roll up the starry skies! The earth will swaddle us like a rotten mummy’s bandages or a stinking, unchanged diaper, hail big as horseballs will beat the recreant earth blackandblue … Copperbright bikers with awful hygiene will wander cold waiting rooms with shaking voices: ‘How odd that mommy’s late
Grandpa put the thick leatherbound book away when I crept close to the bed.
— Ernst was a fellow with the right attitude, he said. He could tear the throats out of a hundred and fifty chickens a minute and never show a trace of remorse … the guy was icecold … But his writing is as bad as a cop’s.
Grandpa opened the box and crammed his mouth full of special brownie. I poured his buttermilk into a mug.
— I could tell you things about Ernst and his life that would make Unicef and those Save the Children queers look for a nice quiet corner to curl up in and die … But I think I’ll give you an oraltest instead!
His sharp, level gaze turned Latinate.
— What are the sevendeadlysins?
— Humility, generosity, chastity, modesty …
— More!
— Uhhhohhh … bulimia! meekness and productivity!
— Bravo, boy, you’re the slowest of them all … And my totem is …?
— The brown rat.
__________
Smammarn — small lake in Lappland
Skråmträsk — village in the Skellefteå
XV
— I owe all I know to the Herrey Brothers, Grandpa said, looking embarrassed and taking a drag from his Kent ciggibutt.
— All too often the all too many assume it was Nietzsche himself who transformed me into natures stroke of luck, which is what you could say I am. But no! it was the Herreys!
— What about Basedow and Bekhterev?
— I met them when life had already used and abused me until I felt like Sigge Fürst trying to blow Satchmo. Of course, Hegel’s Phenomenology and Schreber’s Memoirs served their purpose, when I decided to dynamite my brain so it became as small as a strandloper’s. Think and feel as little as possible, always be happy and kind! he commanded and speared a titmouse with a dart.
__________
Herreys — a Swedish pop group made up of three Mormon brothers
Basedow — Karl Adolf von, a German physician who studied Graves’ disease (also known as Basedow’s disease)
Bekhterev — Vladimir, Russian neurologist who studied what came to be called Bekhterevs Disease
Schreber — Daniel Paul Schreber, author of Memoires of My Nervous Illness.
Sigge Fürst — Swedish film actor, known for appearing in the films of Ingmar Bergman, among others.
strandloper — Afrikaans, “beach walker,” name for a native bushman
XVI
— You may think you’re a boy, but you’re just a fuck, my own dear Grandpa said, laying it all out for me. Anyway, the one measly adventure I remember was taking the bus to Auntie Eskil’s out in Tåme. He was gentle as can be and always offered you a mix-edracejuice and priestscurfpowdered kannibiscroissants stuffed with livelampreys. Weather willing, we’d look out onto his grisly little courtyard. He’d also turn on the radio, which must’ve gotten screwed up somehow, because it was always playing the same program.