The Man Who Did

Have you ever wondered?

I don't really care if you have or haven't.

To be honest, I don't care much about what you're thinking most of the time... unless it is:

"We love you. Please piss all over our favourite art forms and mediums. We need you to ruin and subvert."

Do you hear that?

It's the smallest violinist playing the largest cello for everyone reading this.

The heat might be getting to me.

But maybe that's an excuse.

Subterfuge.

Gaslighting.

Smokescreen.

Mirror talk.

Do you have trouble making connections?

Is it part of your childhood, or something missing from your heart and soul?

Did you cringe when I said heart and soul?

So did I.

I just sat down...

To cause a bit of...

How do you say it?

Disruption.

Without nuclear.

The disruption.

Call me it in your special voice.

The one you reserve for dismissiveness and abject journalistic violence.

The above was an excerpt from the last and drowning achievement of Paul Stewart.

The man who did.

What he did is hard to pinpoint in just words.

He was beyond myth and stronger than allegory.

I was asked to write about the arsehole formerly known as Paul Stewart, who is somewhere deep beneath the literary Euphrates.

Suffering for his art was not something he took too seriously.

He seemed to take great delight in his ethos of:

"He who edits too much edits the truth and the lies... and that important bit of ampersanding."

A man who made an ass of nuance whenever anyone dared to pick apart his writing.

His famous children's book, complete with descriptions of festering pig's guts and an Escher etching, became notorious among the pigeon parents—the kind of parents who build a nest for their children and expect them to live there, feeding off seeds and chicken nuggets.

They were fans of it...

...but didn't like the secondary storyline of a dead frog that gets fed to various townsfolk.

So the old crook died.

I don't mean crook because he wrote like every word was plagiarised from someone better...

...but because he stole my yacht and wife and insisted on calling it The Floating Shit Pile.

Rumours of its—and my wife's—destruction in a bloody fiery fire at sea cannot be corroborated.

Her silicone implants were found choking a manatee.

They survived and were stolen by the British Museum for reasons like:

"We look after stuff better,"

and

"All hail the rise of the second coming of the British Empire."

You will find them next to a stolen manuscript of Paul's for an untitled play he planned to put on at the Old Vic...

...or at least the car park next to it.

It was a play, in Paul's words,

"where a bird, meaning female, meets a stud, meaning attractive specimen of man, and they discover the true meaning of life, sin, entropy and atrophy, astroturfy and sofa surfing, set with the backdrop of the Second Cold War, an argument between spouses about whether the thermostat should be set higher or lower, and something about the dichotomy of human debased basal intentions for evil and not very nice."

I told Paul over a game of backgammon, while he was "it",

"Surely you want that chick to write it. You know the one. Tori Amos. Oh... I see she wasn't available.

That's a shame. Chanteuse is one of those words they used to describe her. Does that mean you can't understand half her lyrics because she yodels them into a bag of fish, curries, chips and a bottle of cash-and-carry absinthe?"

He didn't answer.

As I ate the gammon from his back.

There was no arguing with him because, boy, did that mule wreck his oesophagus worse than Bert ruined Ernie.

I did try to suggest I may not be the man for the job.

Given that we were intimately related by blood.

His mum banged my mum or something.

It was a whole thing.

A whole damn thing.

But for the benefit of making a truly insightful piece about a man who was an affront to humanity and wasn't afraid to say it, because that was his schtick, I have adopted a very non-attached, floating, omnipresent third-person narrative in telling the tale of the man who did.

The mystery...

...is determining what he did.

He did a lot for the anti-British movement of 2032.

And claimed that Banksy was a twat.

My wife had said it might kill me trying to write about Paul Stewart.

I mean...

...he did write a lot.

From a volume approach, his bibliography puts Shakespeare to shame and makes Dean Kootz look like Dean Koontz.

But when you stare too long into a hairy arsehole...

...you may find you yourself become a hairy arsehole.

I have found that as I write and edit, drink and abase myself, and baste my balls in almond oil and almond milk...

...I can hear his voice in my head.

He would say,

"Make sure they know that I thought Liberace sucked.

And not in the good way."

We once argued about the use of the unreliable narrator.

My claim was that it is a shameful, abysmal attempt to make any poorly written piece suddenly crafty and literary because,

"Oh fuck... I turned pages for days because the man promised me revelations you expect from reading Proust or staring at Duchamp."

He dismissed it and stated that an unreliable narrator is a trusted and tried-and-true literary tool because it's realistic.

The fact that half this draft has fed on his own words is testament...

...or testimony...

...to that.

He argued with me about most things.

He'd say,

"Don't you know who you're talking to, Paul Stewart? I was washing pants before you even had pants."

In truth, he was right.

He was always ten years older than Paul Stewart.

Even on leap years.

If you can imagine it.

I was once asked to sum him up...

...in one or two words.

I am still writing that reply.