Worst. Person. Ever. Read Free

find a shred of mercy or concern or even interest from the citizens of glamorous West London, but no, they were all so fucking busy with their drug-taking, their lotto-ticket-buying and dole-robbing—assuming they were even fucking English—that seeing a visibly sane man like me being attacked by an obviously violent nutter like Neal elicited not a whiff of protest.
    A colon–scented mouth and the one working eye asserted itself in front of my face. “We like ourselves, don’t we?”
    I shut my eyes.
    He twisted my right arm behind my back, “We like ourselves, don’t we? So, what’s your name, then?”
    I twisted around; there was no escape to be had. My eyes opened.
Fucker.
    He smiled at me. “And our name would be …?”
    The smell of street grit reminded me of childhood.
I’m not telling this low-life fuck my name.
“I’m not telling a low-life fuck like you my name—
Neal.
”
    “Right then.” Neal did something I still don’t quite understand to this day, but it resulted in a jolt of pain in the shoulder that was a gourmet blend of stubbed-toe-meets-hot-boiling-chip-fat.
    “Raymond!” I moaned.
    “Whazzat?”
    “Raymond! My fucking name is
Raymond!
”
    “That so?” Neal rubbed his dreadful, dreadful hair in my face. “My name is Neal, and my hair is called Neal, too. I can give my hair a name because I’m nuts and live on the street and I haven’t washed it since Princess Di died. It’s my way of letting my love for her live on and on.”
    “You sick, contaminated fuck, what is wrong with you? Get off before I get fucking super AIDS from your fucking beard.”
    “Can’t do that, mate. I have a lifestyle, and part of me being me is me keeping my style alive.”
    He is off his fucking rocker.
“Are you off your fucking rocker? No one dresses like Duran Duran anymore. The eighties revival came and went. People barely dressed like that back in the fucking
day
and all of those wankers can’t change their own fucking diapers anymore. If you have to dress like some haircut band, at least make it Echo and the fucking Bunnymen instead of Duran fucking Duran.”
    Another profound jolt of pain racked my shoulder. I shrieked.
    Grannies with vinyl tartan grocery carts passed by as if Neal and I were tweens sharing a chaste kiss.
    “Right,” barked Neal. “Echo & the Bunnymen thought they were so cool, but it was just Ian McCulloch acting all fucked up with asymmetrical hairdos so that birds wouldform a line outside the bus and chain-bang him one by one.”
    “Well, that’s why anyone becomes a musician, Neal. Why the fuck else would you do it?”
    The pressure on my shoulder was eased.
    “You have a point.”
    “Neal, I would like you to stop crushing my skull into the pavement. You may like life on the street, but I, myself, am not used to smelling evaporating lapdog piss close-up.”
    Neal began to croon: “
I was working as a waitress in a cocktail bar!
”
    Oh Jesus, the daft fucker was singing eighties pop tunes in the key of hepatitis C.
    “I said:
I was working as a waitress in a cocktail bar!
”
    Neal shook my neck; a fleck of pigeon shit went up my right nostril. “Raymond,” he said, “you have one last chance before this escalates to the theoretical next stage. I repeat:
I was working as a waitress in a cocktail bar!
”
    I whimpered my required line: “
That much is true.
”
    “Don’t You Want Me” is a single by British synthpop group The Human League, released on their third album,
Dare
, on November 27, 1981. It is the band’s best-known and most commercially successful recording, and hit number one in the UK’s Christmas pop chart, selling over 1,400,000 copies, making it the twenty-fifth most successful single in UK Singles Chart history. It topped the Billboard Hot 100 in the U.S. on July 3, 1982, and stayed in the top for three weeks.
    The title is frequently misprinted as “Don’t You Want Me Baby,” which is the first line of the chorus.
    Basically,