oscar never really fit in well. after all, who would have been keen to see a beefed up brawny rock of a boxing champ turn into a wimp while trying to brush aside the twisted dark humor that life had been dishing out to him in recent times. what we usually tend to forget at a time like this is the fact that it is the screenwriter who is to blame for all the shit that we’ve been slipping over while trying to keep a steady pace on the sidewalk, and maybe help some one cross the street once in a while. but yes, you will get run over if you try it now. you most certainly will.

then there are times when he finds himself walking bang in the middle of the road. right in the face of an approaching roadroller moving at the speed of an interstate bus. only he sees it (or thinks he saw it), once it has run him over. there he lay, plastered to the black tarmac with eyes looking up at the sky. no, there is no background soundtrack of chirping birds, nor does he inflate himself free from the road. he just lies there as an ugly sticker getting uglier with each passing tyre mark. some who spot him from a distance make sure they skid their tyres on him – ever tried rubbing anyone the wrong way in an oblique direction? – acts out worse! the sun just kept itself at its blistering shiny noon hour, even though it was way past the time for the moon to have come up to cool the heat off a bit. the sun and moon are one of the best conspirators when the time to set comes. the blisters, in the meantime, just kept bursting themselves raw under the tyres. for the world to see.

oscar’s family was in the mob business. a big family it was. with dirty bigger secrets. but like every good family, the cat was never let out of the bag in the open. it was the dogs in their case here.

oscar was a boxer in his life at some time. a boxer who never lived up to being as wild’e’ as his family name expected out of him. such were the expectations from him when he started entering the ring regularly, that his cousins made him drop the ‘e’ at the end of the family name to give the name a more menacing ring to it. not that he cared much – each time he was thrown against the ropes of the boxing ring, he always got a sharp reminder about the missing e. more like e#, with which he always struggled getting the note right. somehow, he could always get the note right inside his head when he was asleep. drifting in a dream state, he would play continually with utmost abandon in a tone of lament which upon waking up just left him with a dry rasp in the throat and a quizzical headiness about what he was longing for in his dreams. not that he remembered any of his dreams either, being the sort who would just crash out on the bed whenever his body demanded sleep, and sleep he would. deep, undisturbed, maybe not as peaceful, but sleep he would, waking up each morning with a start whenever his body’s alarm went off. each morning bringing with it that same lilting downer sans a cause, which no amount of the opaquest black coffee could get him out of. the black coffee probably also didn’t work because of a lurking fear within of all things black, but out of fear of being what is widely known as ‘politically incorrect‘, he never really expressed his views in public, except that they did become quite evident in his actions, and went to obscene extents at times. the black coffee just made him worse than any of those he thought niggas who may as well have been homies. that was was how the black of the coffee got back at him. maybe obscenity came naturally with his name, which may have been possibly averted had the mother (who had been named dorian, after an unsuccessful attempt by her mother at getting a picture of herself painted when she was carrying her around. the painter said he didn’t have a canvas as big) not been intent on watching the handing over of golden statuettes in recognition of histrionic excesses committed while the father was trying to indulge himself in the act of siring. he didn’t let go of his habit of smoking cigars even then, even when they went damp with human sweat and else. the father felt that cigars imbued him with a feeling a power, ever since he realized that they were what kings and presidents preferred once they were done with their petite share of dinner from a spread which could easily have fed his family of five twice in the same day. not that the father cared about the hungry, but it was something about the phallic cigar which got him hard, not just in his nether regions. emperors had their regal staffs, and the father had the symbolic cigar in his hands – the perfect jerk holding the phallus. jerk?

of course, there have been presidents who have displayed a marked affinity for the cigar, in flavors other than plain vanilla ones. some displayed a penchant for birthday cakes which may have been vanilla, but whose frosting was made heavenly by a husky rendition of the birthday song. the president’s knees surely would’ve been wobbly as jelly then. marilyn’s knees were all there was to the picture, till the time it leaked out of the classified secret service files that the president had all along been under the steel grate while it bellowed air out of the duct, filming from another angle. the leaked documents also mentioned that there was good reason for the president to have been under the grate and for marilyn to have held her dress down against the blast of air – this just aided in making the suction effect of the duct underground give the president the biggest orgasm of his life. (it is mentioned in passing in the document that if the walls of the duct would have had cunts instead of ears, the president would have been run down by a mob of his own progeny. but then presidents have a way of facing their progeny, or rather it is nations which come to terms with the bastards their presidents leave in the gutters below us, sans mothers). the private who leaked the documents is still said to be in an chamber beneath the oval office.

oscar, in the meantime, was getting overly obsessed with the cause for the lament in his dreams. so much so that he started spending more and more time flitting between dreams and reality. what slashed at him was that the pain of a reality where he didn’t know nothing cut deeper than the joy of a dream where he didn’t know if he knew anything. he reached a stage where the only way he could distinguish whether he was dreaming or awake was when his fingers would bleed while playing the guitar. that was when he knew for sure that he was dreaming. in real life, he was too much of a sissy to see blood. even if he had a mob pedigree to boast of. in one of his dreams, he saw a bespectacled old man with a scraggly beard walk up to him and start playing the guitar alongside. oscar definitely thought that the old man was slow with his hands, but then he thought that his perpetual stonerheadedness outside dreams had entered dream state too. the old man started playing a tune which sported a lament which ran much deeper than anything oscar had experienced in any of his dreams. not really surprising, but the old man wrote this tune for a spurned love. a love that both he and his closest friend used to have at one time in their lives, but which never really stayed with either of them. it was widely believed she went and joined manson for a while, but she didn’t find it as much fun to be part of the plan to slash an impregnated sharon tate. she wanted more, which is why she probably got married to the yakuza mob is what they used to say now. everybody knows the yakuza have definitely eccentric tastes when it comes to meting out a (mis)fortune. the mob had decreed that this tune never be played ever by that scraggly old man. but the old man was in the comfort of dreams, where he thought no one could do him any harm. suddenly, out of nowhere, there was a piercing shrill sound, and a stone shattered the glasses of the old man’s specs. oscar felt like screaming but he realized that he had never uttered a word ever in his dreams. he just didn’t have the capacity to speak in dreams. and thus the mob came down as stones raining from the skies. they gave a run for what is said to have happened in sodom. when it was all over, oscar tried to look up and see if he could recognize any faces from the mob. he could after all use his family connections to find out what happened and why. all he could see in the distance was a blurry vision of a smiling face, more beautifully angelic than any he had seen, and with each step he took towards it, the face just kept fading. as the face disappeared, those lips just whispered two syllables before vanishing into oblivion – layla.

oscar didn’t scream when he awoke. he was covered in cold sweat. he woke with a start. but his mind was clear now. he knew what was the cause of the lament in his dream now.

the old man got lynched. by the mob.
what made the scene worse was that the mob consisted of a singular pretty face.
obscene, more like it.
mobscene.

oscar would probably never fall in love. again.

(in the spirit of oscar wilde)
be obscene
be be obscene

*title and some bits inspired by ‘mobscene’, marilyn manson, and other bits of popular unpopular culture. the rest, well is just a figment of a fucked up fertile imagination, intent on getting, well, more fucked up*