The Killing of Sully Bupkis

By Cameron Peter McDonald

This is the madcap rollicking black humoured tale of Sully Bupkis, prodigy, charity worker and good old Catholic boy. Everything is going bloody fantastic until tragedy strikes and his life spirals out of control. Sully becomes a barbarian, a down and out, working as a reckless bruiser for a loan shark. Sully drinks, snorts, shoots and smokes his way between maiming clients who owe money to his boss. In some crazy way he accepts his fate. It's a shit of a life but someone has to do it! Five years in there is a cameo appearance by a "client" that Sully starts to question his life's journey? Will he get on the Road to Redemption or take a sharp left down Oblivion Avenue. It's anyone's guess, but it seems the only way back for Sully is to fake his own death. It's complicated.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris AU
• Release date: Sep 30, 2020
• ISBN: 9781664100121

Cameron Peter McDonald

Cameron McDonald is an Australian writer, Chef and Life Coach. He grew up in Victoria and now lives in Tasmania with his family.

Book preview

Copyright © 2020 by Cameron Peter McDonald.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to any actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Getty Images are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Getty Images.

Rev. date: 09/29/2020

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Contents

Chapter 1 2005: Disappointing Numbers at My Funeral

Chapter 2 2005: I Made My Nemesis a Suspect

Chapter 3 2005: Frying Pans Should Be under Lock and Key

Chapter 4 2005: Focalism Is an Anchor

Chapter 5 1986: This Diamond Ring Doesn’t Mean What It Did Before

Chapter 6 1848: An Optical Illusion

Chapter 7 1978: I Never Knew What a Good Beating Was

Chapter 8 2004: You Get Used to Losing

Chapter 9 2005: Every Junkie Is Like the Setting Sun

Chapter 10 2005: His Face Was Burnt to a Crisp

Chapter 11 2005: Choices? You Can Choose Other Things

Chapter 12 2005: What Do You Get When You Squeeze an Orange?

Chapter 13 2005: The Basket-Weaving Sessions Became Boring

Chapter 14 2005: Another Signature Stuff-Up

Chapter 15 2005: Every Pepsi Has an Accelerant in It

Chapter 16 2005: A Spear Tackle Is Going to Do Your Head In

Chapter 17 2005: Hot Bouillabaisse with Chilli

Chapter 18 1981: The Minutiae of the Cosmos

Chapter 19 1964: Webbed Feet into the World

Chapter 20 1986: My Mother, the Eco Terrorist

Chapter 21 1986: Precious, Precious Lithium

Chapter 22 1987: Once upon a Time, I Was a Prodigy

Chapter 23 1989: It’s Official: The Entire Human Race Has Gone Troppo!

Chapter 24 1994: Diffy’s Maserati Goes Like the Clappers

Chapter 25 1994: Mungo’s Revenge Was Served Cold Buffet-Style with Condiments and Champagne

Chapter 26 1995: Spark of Divinity

Chapter 27 2005: We Forget We Have Life in Our Hands

Chapter 28 2005: There’s a Prisoner Inside, Pummelling His Way Out

Chapter 29 2005: Eckhart Should Have Gotten His Own Fork

Chapter 30 2005: Naked and Soapy with Cactus Needles in My Foot

Chapter 31 2005: 1,199,400

Chapter 32 2005: Why Do I Abuse My Friends?

Chapter 33 Year 2000: Be Careful of Free Alcohol

Chapter 34 2000: My Brett Whiteley Is in Dire Straits

Chapter 35 Year 2000: Be Careful of Swinging Dwarfs

Chapter 36 2000: The Only Thing Permanent Is Change

Chapter 37 2000: How I Met Eckhart

Chapter 38 2000: Montecristo Cigars and Makua-Lomwe

Chapter 39 2000: Beware of the Ricochet

Chapter 40 2001: Snardo Bronski’s Plump, Thick Slices

Chapter 41 2001: Upside-Down Fish

Chapter 42 2003: He Becomes What You Want Him to Be

Chapter 43 2005: The Dazzle and Aplomb of a Nightclub Owner

Chapter 44 2005: You Never Have Old and Bold Mushroom Pickers

Chapter 45 2005: White Men Are Always Running from Themselves

Chapter 46 2005: Our Lives Are a Result of the Words We Tell Ourselves

Chapter 47 2005: There Isn’t Anything Funny in East Africa at the Moment

Chapter 48 2005: Maintain Our Usual Facade

Chapter 49 2005: Xena, the Warrior Princess

Chapter 50 2005: I Questioned My Gender Preference

Chapter 51 2005: My Three-Hour Drunken Furore on Wikipedia

Chapter 52 2005: There Have Been Regional Reports of Explosive Diarrhoea

Chapter 53 1990: Jesus, It’s Lemuel Gulliver’s Worst Nightmare

Chapter 54 2005: David Miscavige Has a Lot to Answer For

Chapter 55 2005: Have I Missed the Point of Life?

Chapter 56 2005: Puccini’s ‘Che gelida manina’

Chapter 57 2005: One of You Is a Chaperone, One’s a Spy, and the Other Is a Gooseberry

Chapter 58 2005: The Bug Was a Six-Legged Interloper

Chapter 59 2005: A Warehouse of Unrefrigerated Month-Old Hummus

Chapter 60 2005: Antidisestablishmentarianism

Chapter 61 2005: I’ll Make Sure You’re Flushed at the Same Time

Chapter 62 2005: Was It My Esperanto Language Teacher?

Chapter 63 2005: I Was a Victim of My Own Thoughts

Chapter 64 2005: Drink-Driving in the Hearse

Chapter 65 2005: Don’t Get Caught Up on What Happens

Chapter 66 2000: Greenish Liquid Ran down the Windscreen

Chapter 67 2005: A Young Man in a Turtleneck Sweater

Chapter 68 2005: We Continually Reissue Our Memories

Chapter 69 2005: We Thought the Chemo Would Stop Him in His Tracks

Chapter 70 2005: Someone Left the Cake out in the Rain

Chapter 71 2005: It Involved an Undertaker, Unbelievable Timing, and an Underdog’s Desire to Win

Chapter 72 2005: Are All Events Completely Determined by Previously Existing Causes?

Chapter 73 2005: It’s Your Life

Chapter 74 2005: Caffa’s Garden Party Posse

Chapter 75 2005: The More Bombers, the Less Room for Doves of Peace

Chapter 76 2005: AFP

Chapter 77 2005: She Made Love to a Chocolate Danish

Chapter 78 2005: Wasn’t the Plan Just to Fake Your Death?

Chapter 79 2005: The Best Thing about Being 41 Is the Diminishing Appeal of Self-Destruction

Chapter 80 2005: I Heard Drum Solos from the Grateful Dead

Chapter 81 2005: The First Synergy Since Inception

Chapter 82 2005: I Have Wasted So Much Time

Chapter 83 2005: Floyd Saw that It Was Me Driving

Chapter 84 2005: Woo

Chapter 85 2005: Shanghaied

Chapter 86 2005: My Final Way Home

There are no random events, nor are there events or things that exist by and for themselves, in isolation.

The atoms that make up your body were forged inside stars, and the causes of even the smallest event are virtually infinite and connected with the whole in incomprehensible ways.

If you wanted to trace back the cause of any event, you would have to go all the way to the beginning of creation.

The cosmos is not chaotic.

The very word cosmos means order.

But this is not an order the human mind can ever comprehend although you can sometimes glimpse it.

(Eckhart Tolle)

Learn to recognise the counterfeit coins that may buy you just a moment of pleasure, but then drag you for days like a broken man behind a farting camel.

(Hafez)

Author's note

Life? It’s just a game! Make it simple and play with kindness and joy! Because my friend, what you worry about and what you fear becomes meaningless as the game reaches its climax!!

Dedication

To Alan and Valerie with all my love and thanks.

Acknowledgements

Unfortunately, the following people have had little choice but to share their life with a writer.

Celeste. When I met my wife in 2005, she had to coexist with me, my dream, 2134 pages of ramblings and four walls covered with notes. There little room for her! Her unwavering love and support helped me, purge and declutter through my darkest hours. She shines brightly in my world and I love her with all my heart.

Jessica. My daughter, my miracle, my first born, who has been a beacon of inspiration for me through stormy seas. She was only twelve years old when she told me to dream, believe, create and succeed. This book was started because of her and was completed because of her. Love always darling!

Dillon. My son, the intelligent handsome and quick-witted young man who will always be the sextant and measuring instrument of my life’s destiny. From one man we come and then hand life to another. Many Thanks.

Bella-Rose. My youngest, already writer of many, many stories, and the most present person I know You are a gift from heaven. I am indeed the luckiest father in the universe and with your help with this book and my life I have become the man I have always craved to be.

Many thanks to Robyn Friend, Gemma Dean-Furlong, Warren Boyles and John R. Sargent.

Introduction

Life is a series of moments based on a shitload of decisions that end up being good, bad, or routine. The past, the present, and the future sit within a long chain of events. And in the end, when we leave this world, we are given something to symbolise our time on the earth. Do you have any idea what that is? It’s a two-centimetre gap on our gravestones, our urns, or our plots that sits itself right between the year you were born and the year you died. That’s it. That’s all you’re getting.

And that gap between those two numbers is the sum of your life.

‘That tiny space?’ you say. ‘How can it even come close to reflecting everything in my life? How can it encompass the love and hate I felt, the heartache and struggle I went through, the direction I took at 20 years old, the decision I made to have children, the money, pain, drinking, holidays, jealousy, gluttony?’ The list goes on, and questions arise. Did you drive your life with free will, or was it all preordained? How much of the day are we truly mindful?

Enough with the questions, eh? Well, let me start with spitting a few facts about me and my time in this fucking crazy universe.

The name is Sully Bupkis, and I am an alcoholic. I am a drug-dependent thug for hire with a penchant for self-destruction. Let me tell you, I wasn’t always this way. There was a time that I flew from one beautiful moment to the next, life was in the bag, and it was filled with love, fame, fortune, and wild, untamed spirit.

What happened? What changed? Nothing I did personally. The universe just decided to shake me from my tree and take something from me that I never thought I could lose. And that changed my very own meaning of life. My world collapsed. Everything I knew as me vanished.

I ended up on the fucking wrong side of the railway track with minimal amount of casino chips in my hand. And I bet on life; I bet on life returning to normal, but guess what, I lost the lot on loose women and bad plans. Or was it bad women and loose plans? I can’t rightly remember. Add the drugs and booze, and it didn’t take me long to become an evil bastard.

Nothing worked. Nothing I did got me back to the way it was – until I decided to kill myself.

At the time, I believed one thing for sure. I knew that the day that I’d go, there was not going to be one more fucking thing left to be or to do. There would be no favours left to return or no payback of luck and good fortune. In my best thinking, it was all measured out, each credit I accrued carefully set against the debt I owed. Everything was ordered out, everything accounted. And you know what, I genuinely thought I’d be worn out.

I killed myself in 2005. Well, I faked it. It wasn’t easy, but I did it.

The following is an account of my recent life on the earth, told by myself within passages of liquid time, based on truth, lies, scandal, and rudimentary commentary. This is not perfect, like life, but it will show you connections that will and can determine one’s destiny.

Chapter 1

2005: Disappointing Numbers

at My Funeral

PICTURE%201.jpg

While you sat comfortably and possibly with little care, I was in a dark confessional box in Laredo Catholic Church, circa 1814. This was the house of worship I attended as a child, served as an altar boy, and spun my early beliefs about compassion, goodwill, and service to humanity. I was watching my very own funeral. I was contemplating fate and how it brought me to this point. By my own free will, I engineered my death.

Right now, I was very much alive in my hidey-hole, the ‘sin bin’, aka the confessional box. I was watching black-clad people filling pews. It was surreal.

Still, given the opportunity, wouldn’t you like to have a squiz at your final proceedings, even if it was just for entertainment value? Who showed up? Who was saying what to whom?

The complete idiocy of being human believes the folly, the illusion, that we have life in the bag in aeternum . . . forever. We are offered the trickery and buy it without thinking. Life becomes very much like shopping at Harvey Norman.

This was it, the culmination of a life – my life. And the people here represented the relationship I had with it. Right up to the day before, I carked it.

As I inched open the purple velvet curtain of the confessional a crack more, Eckhart Goethe – my best friend in another life – lumbered in his rhinestone boots to a seat. He sat metres away with no knowledge that I was alive. While the last few people seep in from the street, leaving most of the church still empty, the organist Prunella Onslow began to deftly find her way into the Paul Anka–inspired yet Sinatra’s own ‘My Way’. Regrets, I’ve had a few but then again too many to mention.

I knew Prunella’s image graced Siddleton’s 14 oz. skipjack tuna cans from June 1965 until August 1971. She was one of Laredo’s first models, and my father, Cornelius, it was said, had more than a crush on her back in the day. That could be another reason he called her a sensational organist.

I watched a Portuguese man I had not seen in half a decade place a single red gladiolus on my well-sealed casket and murmur to the unfortunate stiff inside. My so-called corpse was substituted with an eighty-five-kilo dead wild pig courtesy of the local undertaker Miles Mumm Jr as a return favour to my father. The man at my coffin was Henri des Cortez, a gondolier from the waterways of Venice. Years ago, he saved Eckhart and I from a flurry of bullets. Henri was hammering both fists on the timber lid and weeping; his overacting made my fingernails crawl. Cortez, in real dramatic style, channelled a Willy Loman moment and lamented the concept of my death.

‘Is a man worth more dead than alive?’ He turned and loudly asked the congregation. ‘I tell you, there is a need for butt-faced irony to be dished up instead of sacraments.’

‘I asked you to show a little emotion, not take a fucking curtain call,’ I whispered to myself.

Was all this strange enough? Well, if you read deep enough into this story, you’d soon realise that my life wasn’t filled with logic and reason too often. Hell, the truth was I had to stage my death to stop my own murder. Did that sound complicated? You bet. Anyway, let’s get back to my funeral.

After the very righteous father Cafferella-Challis performed his religious pitch on behalf of the church, my ex-boss, Napoleon Rizzo, shook off his supporting brute, Knuckles O’Hearn, and made his way to the pulpit with the aid of his cane. Only a few months ago, Rizzo was the spitting image of the famous director Cecil B. DeMille, but time and gravity had taken their toll, and he now looked like a beat-up Muppet. Rizzo was suffering from the cumulative effects of weeks of chemotherapy and radiotherapy. As always, he wore loose dark clothing and those fucking yellow leather shoes that, he maintained, Hollywood actor Gregory Peck gave him while filming Roman Holiday in Italy in 1953.

After catching his breath, Napoleon Rizzo grasped the edge of the pulpit, his withering frame ramrod straight. Rizzo surveyed the congregation. ‘I see you, the battler, the bogan, the businessman. Look around you – faggots, hookers, cops, pimps, bearded schoolboys, playboys, and teachers.’ Rizzo hissed. ‘The only people missing here is the stone-cold loser Mayor Mungo Caffa and his horde of wayward grandstanders.’

The crowd turned and murmured to one another as Rizzo shook off a little slump that had formed in his shoulders.

‘Most of you are probably happy one of my guys bit the dust.’ Rizzo gave a measured slow nod as he spoke as if he agreed with himself in his preferred way. ‘I knew Sully for a few years,’ Rizzo continued. ‘But I can’t regale you with amusing anecdotes about fishing, attending a game together, or even remodelling a bath. We had times together, but due to several law enforcement officials being present, I will not get into that.’

The crowd roared. You’re a card, Rizzo.

‘So, I’ll tell you a little about Sully. He went to school just up the road, took hold of one or two stupid beliefs regarding kindness, and left Laredo and the many opportunities this town offered. When he failed out in the big world, he came back a pathetic whimpering loser.’

Chatter and mumble broke out from the congregation. Pigg Darnell, my co-worker in crime, turned and shot evils at those grinning while my flatmate, Nami Salamat, burst out crying.

‘I first bumped into Sully five years ago!’ barked Rizzo, shutting down the disruption. ‘my team was at the Australasian Hotel, doing the inaugural photo shoot for my clothing company, Frontline Furs.’

‘Fur is murder!’ shrieked Nami Salamat.

Some of the congregation nodded; others scowled.

‘Sully ruined the shoot. He was high, dry, and abusive.’ Rizzo scowled. ‘You know what I’m talking about. You know what type of person he could be.’

Most of the audience nodded. I watched Trinidad Meersley, the cafe owner, grimace. Rueben Onslow, the lifesaver, lightly brushed over the fourteen stitches’ wound on his forehead and noticed three other people touch the place on their body where I had maimed them.

‘Although Sully was truly loathsome that day, I still managed to recognise something special in him, although it could well have been plain and simple his stupidity. A year or so later, as fate would have it, I took him on board. After five years of working closely together, I like to think he saw me as the father he had lost.’

Now that was a healthy dose of absolute shit, the biggest gangster in town getting paternal.

‘We did, however, spend a lot of time at each other’s throats,’ Rizzo chided. ‘Bupkis was a stubborn and insubordinate bastard. He made my life a living hell.’

‘Like you haven’t made our lives hell, Rizzo!’ bellowed a monster of a man with a South African accent at the rear of the church. A howl of laughter erupted, and heads nodded in agreement. Then the man was slugged from behind by a limping Turk named Inverghassy and dragged out of the now hushed church. Weeks ago, Inverghassy was at the bottom rung of Rizzo’s gang but was now at the top.

Rizzo looked to soak up the dominating control he imbued Laredo with before continuing, ‘Sully Bupkis challenged my decisions, undermined me, lied, stole, and consistently toiled against me. You may notice I didn’t use the word work.’

That’s more like it, I thought.

Nap Rizzo coughed so hard that he looked like he’d split in two. When he recovered, he said, ‘All said and done, I came to realise a son can’t see what his father represents any more than a soothsayer can predict the future.’

Wow, man, what an acknowledgement – this from one of the men who wanted to kill me. Did Rizzo just speak a universal truth? Did he just say something that signified a deep understanding of human connection or disconnection?

‘Earlier today, Father Cafferella prompted me to include something from my own life in this eulogy, something I learned from Sully Bupkis. On reflection, I came up with nothing. He taught me zilch. But I am reminded of something he once said, a beaut. Sully once said that more people would read the obituaries if they told you how someone died.’

I never said anything of the sort. If anything, I would have said something funny and brilliant like, ‘There is a sense of great camaraderie when an entire line of cars team up to stop a jerk cutting in.’

‘All of us have an expiration date stamped on us,’ continued Rizzo. ‘You can’t see the date, but we will leave this place one day, many to eternal pain and torture but some, like me, to eternal bliss in the presence of our Lord. I’m not sure if every one of you knows how Sully perished, but it went a little like . . .’ Rizzo trailed off and then left the pulpit, leaving all to wonder how I did perish.

Next at the podium was Eckhart Goethe – at one stage my purported best friend. He looked to be in very average condition, most likely drunk. ‘Some of you may believe I have had more than a few grappas, but it’s not true. I am not inebriated, annihilated, or laced but simply emotionally disembowelled.’

After that statement? Drunk!

After a few moments of suppressed belches, Eckhart composed himself, retrieved a small blue card from his vest pocket, fumbled with it, and began to read. ‘Sully Bupkis was my amigo and a tour guide of existence but always like a rebellious brother. We shared many experiences, some very hairy. I could go on for hours talking about the kind of person he was, but I think many of you here already have your interpretation. Personally, the tragedy of his death leaves me gutted. There was so much more living ahead for someone like Sully. He was making changes. How could I tell?’

‘He stopped advocating the fist in every conversation!’ bellowed Clive Levi, my future wife’s stepfather. The congregation erupted with genuine laughter, and I even saw Napoleon Rizzo smile in amusement.

Eckhart shook his head as if he was trying to shake loose some entombed negative thought. ‘I could tell Sully was changing because there was no veneer,’ he slurred, ‘no layers, no coverings, no masks for public display. What you saw was what you got. He was unapologetic, demanding, and blindly loyal to his own beliefs, which he seemed to change at will conveniently and depending on the situation or how many drugs he had in his system.’

Speak for yourself, you drunk monkey!

‘I must inform you of Sully’s favourite quote. It comes from philosopher George Santayana. If a man were a wild spirit without a body or a habitat, his philosophy might harmlessly change at every moment, and he might well pride himself on changing it often and radically, so as to display fertility of spirit and enjoy an inexhaustible rich experience. Being absolutely free and unfettered by circumstances, why should he stick to any particular principles or idea and waste his time repeating himself like an idiot or a cuckoo? This is the epitome of Sully Bupkis, always freeing himself from a situation of his own making.’

‘He never quite got there, but he sure as hell gave it a good probationary period!’ shouted Clive.

‘When I first met Sully, he was unruly, edgy, and raw, the proverbial gnarled tree. When he made it back from Italy the second time in 2000, he was recovering from major surgeries and grappling with an addiction to painkillers. He began a fight for every little advance in this jungle we call Laredo. But it was the fissures, cracks, scars, and breakages that made him who he was. They became an essential part of his character. Throughout the five years that I knew Sully, his opinions, ethics – it was debatable he had ethics – philosophies, and creed differed often objectionably from mine. I do remember fighting bitterly and incessantly with Sully.’

Should I be offended? What about how you blindsided me in Italy on day one, Eckhart? Where were your morals then?

‘We came from two different worlds. I had spent half a lifetime trying to bring an African warlord to justice, and Sully had worked tirelessly for years in helping organisations fundraise for their charities. Very few of you wouldn’t know, but Sully indirectly aided in the construction of over seventy schools in the poorer parts of South East Asia.’

There was a loud murmur of astonishment.

‘But when he returned to Laredo after the accident, he was damaged, angry, and broken. Because of this, I eventually accepted that he viewed life contrary to most of us. There were reasons – his past. Ultimately, I think he wished to see his life as a satire. But regrettably, it seemed to have turned out to be a cartoon.’

The congregation burst.

‘Sully had a crazy, inappropriate sense of humour. I still remember one occasion when we were in a seedy bar in Bassano del Grappa. A 9 mm slug went through a patron’s legs, turning it to complete mush. As the blood and flesh spilled over art critic Benton Hewitt-Lane from Manhattan, Sully turned to the entire establishment. Whose ass do I have to lick to get a drink around here? The young bartender gave him the thumbs up, a smile, and a double vodka.’

A small but loud number of the flock ruptured into laughter as others remained silent.

‘You can’t say that sort of joke these days! It’s highly offensive to the gay community!’ barked Archibald Onslow, the owner and managing director of Calglonica Imports and Exports.

‘Ha. You wonder what the point of this story is. I think it’s an indictment of the person he was. Amid utter chaos and catastrophe, Sully’s humour was present, cold and rupturing, black and distasteful. Sully once said, The morning of a colonoscopy is one of the few times in a man’s life when he is not full of shit.

‘Sully had a lot of issues after Italy and the car accident. To cope, I think Sully buried an exceptional part of himself – the loving side, the compassionate side, the vulnerable side. The accident was an essential layer in the future development of Sully’s personality, and it manifested in a self-loathing and inner torment that he never quite shook. Shame and guilt rerouted his life. He once told me that God had cut him out badly. I don’t think he was using it as an excuse but more of a reason. It didn’t matter to him whether I shook my goaded fist at him or whether the universe shuddered its collective head. Sully Bupkis ignored us all and carried on. I just want to add something – something I never said to him for whatever reason.’

This part is going to be interesting, I thought.

‘There were some things that Sully just didn’t get, like his tendency towards violence and disaster. Sully just couldn’t connect why they came from him. I think that fucked him up. Yes, there was talk of Autism and Asperger’s, the spectrum and that.

‘One thing is for sure: Sully knew his weaknesses. If man, in total, is driven by his insecurities, then in the end, in his last few days, Sully was moved by the absolute opposite. In the end, caught up in his own story, his drama, I think he was managing to transcend life’s bullshit. Sully yearned for redemption. He wanted to discover a way back homeward.’

Next up was Gabrielle Levi. She had squeezed herself into a shape-hugging dark purple miniskirt with ’40s black silk stockings. She wore a sash of starched white albino fox over tanned shoulders and a veil that looked more like a nun’s habit. She stood with a white face and a tight jaw, looking more like a half-dressed burlesque nun than any great-granddaughter of Douglas Fairbanks Jr. Why would my future wife be dressed like this? Dramatic value? A well-rehearsed ploy to piss the Laredo establishment off?

‘What is this, you two? Are you roasting or toasting?’ she said, looking at both at Rizzo and Eckhart back in their seats, Rizzo at the front where the stained-glass window shone a prism of colours onto his insipid complexion and Eckhart near me again. ‘I went to school with you, Eckhart, and you never minced your words. Why now? A frank person never minces their words.’

‘Well, I am not Frank! The name is Eckhart!’ yelled Eckhart, getting a good laugh from the pews.

‘Enough of this bullshit,’ said Gabrielle.

I noticed Father Cafferella-Challis shift uneasily in his chair on the right side of the altar, preening his retreating hairline. Perhaps he realised Gabrielle was about to commence to pour acid on his sacred Trinity.

‘I am here to bring an honest and pragmatic edge to proceedings. I am here to tell how it was with Sully Bupkis.’

To keep my continued existence secret, Gabrielle and I had decided that she must pretend to be part of the aggrieved. No one but her, the mortician Miles Mumm Jr, and the gondolier with poor acting skills were to know I was alive.

‘I first saw Sully bidding at an art auction in 2001. I was intrigued. He looked like he knew what he was doing. I was told by a friend to keep my distance because he worked in a field that was not suitable for good health. Back then, I didn’t know what that meant, but it didn’t take long to find out. Sully Bupkis was a hooligan, a notorious, wild hoodlum that was no good.’

Gabrielle’s words transgressed the sacrament. With a nod from Father Cafferella-Challis, the altar boy was tugging her arm, pulling her from the platform.

‘Sully spent most of his time desecrating the world and the people around him,’ said Gabrielle as her elbow smashed into the young man’s head, an exclamation mark to her comments. ‘You can all say what you like, but I am not going to lie. Sully was an abusive, unpredictable, short-tempered prick.’

Father Cafferella-Challis and a few congregants closed in on her.

‘He was a nasty piece of work,’ she said quickly. She pushed the boy, and he fell into the god squad, momentarily halting their advance. ‘If character flaws were marble floorboards, then Sully had enough of those to tile Vatican City.’

As one of the first men reached her, she said, ‘I am so glad he’s fucking gone.’

They dragged her down the aisle hawking and yelling, ‘You Catholics are such bloody peacekeepers these days!’

That’s my girl, I thought.

My wake was held at D’angelo’s, an Italian restaurant owned by Trinidad Meersley. Gabrielle told me that a large banner was pinned between two large monstera plants above the greasy servery gracing a carton of old eggs and three kilos of homemade pappardelle: ‘Goodbye, Sully, you son of a bitch.’ Thanks to a shipment of Scotch whisky brought in by a man who owed my boss, Napoleon Rizzo, a big favour, considerably more people made it to the wake than to the funeral. Gabrielle told me afterwards that Phillip ‘Pigg’ Darnell, my former partner, drank three-quarters of a bottle and ‘grieved’ with a dozen or so revelling mourners in an alcove near the urine-scented restrooms. He enlightened them about the reason they killed me, how, and who was responsible. All of it was crap.

In the end, there were three conflicting rumours on how I snuffed it. The first was that I was shot in the head by a hair-trigger South African pistol wielded by the Turkish assassin Inverghassy. The second theory was I was poisoned with cassava cyanide slipped into a macchiato at the very restaurant of my wake. And the third? I was force-fed a bellyful of dirty Mexican coins one by one until I choked. All of it was shit talk. You and I and just a few others knew the real truth. I was alive. I was alive, and I had big plans.

Chapter 2

2005: I Made My Nemesis a Suspect

A while before my funeral, as I said, life was already pretty much out of control. I could count the number of people who still believed that the sun shone out of my ass on one hand. The throng of gormless degenerates who had maintained a genuine white-hot anal love for me in the mid-to late 1990s were gone after forgetting what I did for God and country.

There was no doubt in my mind that the original number of approving people would never be known. Still, I reckon the total had dwindled by 99.9 per cent since the accident in 2000, where I; my drunken driver, Alfonso; and a female hitch-hiker from Croatia named Lada were cleaned up by a forty-two-tonne box of steel speeding from Busto Arsizio to Milan. In the five years since, there had always seemed to be a line-up of people who had it in for me, people like Floyd Carver. I want you to remember that name, Floyd bloody Carver, a self-righteous philistine who managed my apartment block.

You see, the big news was that Floyd lost his shit recently and knocked someone off. Yeah, that was right, killed someone. He said it was some worthless flabby supine wanker, some Joe of no consequence, but that was not the point. Floyd said if it weren’t for me, he wouldn’t have done it. He said he would not be on trial for murder, and he would not have had to spend the day at the Laredo cop shop with Det. Blethen Noriega up his ass. I was speaking figuratively. ‘Sully Bupkis gave me a bad spin,’ he told Noriega.

Let’s stop right here. I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking that you’re only getting half the story. Perhaps you think that maybe, just maybe, this Floyd fellow isn’t such a tosser, and I’m the trouble. Now, that means you are going to have to choose either him or me as the desperado, especially if you intend to keep reading. Is there any other choice?

And that’s what life’s about, isn’t it? Choice? Everything is a choice. So I am asking, what team will you go in and to bat for? Will I, Sully Bupkis, come to be, in essence, a virtuous man,