"It's the last time, baby" - a Caine town story

Everyone wants some sort of stake in Caine Town, the town that fratricide built, especially if they’re born and raised in one of the Old Outposts - Bonehill, Boarville, No Man’s Heath, Harlow’s Hall. There you’re born with the original sin of wanting to get out, of wanting more, to see what it’s all about and the only waters that’ll baptise that kind of fire away come from storms reserved only for the brave.


Many a sorry sailor has seen their best efforts spewed out by old Caine Town. Very few prodigal sons have returned triumphant. Fewer wannabe prophets stay that way and, even fewer still, strike a Byronic silhouette that casts shadows over the indolent.


Slim used to drink himself half to death each night just trying to create something that seemed monotone out of all the stimuli waging ungodly war upon his senses, from that crummy Caine Town flat. LED lights spouting substance-less sermons, labour allergic acolytes in Neon violet, news as honest and Edenic as an adder, the humdrum of the city beat, one too many apostle of the digital epoch telling you what you should and shouldn’t do.


The truth was out there.


He saw it each day from the prophet crazy man who’d scribe his message upon the streets. He felt it each time he visited Sandrine. He smelt it each time he sailed passed Ivan cooking his famous Morning Beef Stew Breakfast down by the river bank. He heard it when Hercule rapped his double bass and lead his gypsy trio to Gypsy Heaven on the corners of Canaan Square. He tasted it in Massimo Valentino’s home brewed banana wine he cooked on his barge out there along the canals, the dried, old bloodlines of the city long gone by.


“They’ll break you down and shake you down”, Sandine’d say, “here you lay it all on the line and pawn all the riches that only true love can buy”.


“Not me”, Slim said.


Nights were long in Caine Town and the days were always humid as Hell. A real Unholy Vatican. A place of pilgrimage for the desperate, the crooked, the corrupt, the conniving - the hopeful.


It was Europe’s answer to Vegas, only more Vaudevillian and a Hell of a lot more blood stained throughout the annals of its past. Sinatra had it right, though, he just had the name wrong. If you could make it here you could take over The City That Never Sleeps without anything more than a glare and the right posture - a posture that said one thing - you’d cut your stripes out there in the neon wild, breathed fire in a vacuum of prayers.


But Slim had had enough. He was ready to hang up his spurs, meet the promises Violet made of the settled life in old Boarville. Her eyes had sobered his mind and tempered his wild but it was only after he’d given everything that he’d realised even young villainous Violet lived by the same lies. She was just like the other sirens disguised as wives, a girl of snares and graces, a girl infatuated with heights but no taste for the climb, preferring to be carried up life’s unforgiving flights.


And, like always, the truth was out there.


This truth was laced with adultery and the spendable riches only fading beauty can buy, the perishable heat of a monkey branch upon which blind and unsatisfied eyes have a fearful grip clambering for wet soap. With broken heart and tired bones, Slim made his way from the cold warmth of Violet’s so called ‘truth’ and ‘promises’ and back into the dusty fray of the Hustle and Grind, found an apartment in downtown Boarville and set to work re-soldering the parts of a broken heart.


There were those who tried to provide insight, like Dark Annie god bless her eyes, god bless her precious sighs. Sweet Dark Annie with her wildfire and her talk of sweet getaway, her arms of warm lavender, her soft embrace of young womanhood. But the wars waged with love in mind need not only the soldering iron but a surplus of dwindling time.


At night, alone in the blaze of the flickering street lamp piercing the apartment window, deep at work on the soldering iron, he heard the couple above in yet another lover’s war. The young Napoleon had been drinking again.


“Come on, baby! It’s the Last Time!” He was pleading again.


‘The Last Time’.


God knows Slim had spent his fair share of arguments spouting the same line. The Last Time is one step down from Tomorrow in that it so rarely ever arrives.


“Come on, baby! It’s the Last Time!”


It almost sounded like a sermon, some idyllic utopia if only every man, woman and beast of burden and vice could find and build their own little taste of paradise.


“Come on, baby! It’s the Last Time!”


Slim had even offered words of comfort, the many nights and raging fights prior, to young Napoleon. “I’m sure she’ll come around”. And she always would.


But tonight that seemed like the Last Time...


Slim had long conquered the call of the liquor. He’d found his Last Time on that road. Now it was another Last Time he wrestled with. It was the Last Time he’d give his labour, his love, his syllables, his blood, his heart and every earthly thing he ever owned to lies, deceit, dust and bones. Now, in the midst of reluctant and renewed Hustle and Grind, he’d tame the wild of Caine Town and return to Bonehill prodigal and triumphant.


“Come on, baby!” Cried young Napoleon above, “it’s the Last Time”.