Presenting the World’s First
Edible Society

A surreal ramble through an impossible situation

by Pete Gioconda

WE FOUND THEM in a wreck of a sea pier, setting stuff up so it’s good enough to eat. The society they came from had got to the stage where if you look too scuzzy – punks, hippies, wrecks and hideants – you can’t buy even food from the shops. They’re too out of it too, using drugs in fancy shapes and sizes, dropping them more often than not – arriving at some weird scenes. That’s when the idea hit them.

Forced to switch food for drugs: red marbled capsules, plenty in stock, no pig hassles (being self-sufficient), and anyhow (in pigspeak): ‘Doomed to die – we’ll be glad when they’ve finally rotted or decomposed, whichever happens.’

Their stockade: desiccated and scalped to the bone . . . Ex-ornate panelling with weird post-y frames where phony fortune sellers used to sit beneath silly towerlets, curved silver-grey roofs and minarets clustered at the bowsprit tip, several hundred huh-hums offshore. The link to the shore is no longer there, successive storms having swept away two sections of the structure: rebuilding got choked in the distant past by a lack of financial interest, and the future looks uncertain. What remains is a small unused stack, and the now inhabited, squatted, barbed wire barricaded fortress further out.

These days the sea is always fogged over, so it all looks much better. No sea to be seen. Steaming and haunting of Hades. The legs down to the murky depths are sensibly clad in brown-black seaweed, deceased. There had been talk of doing away with these pile supports which bug some of the grebos, who are tempted to shimmy down. Better to be suspended as if by magic above the void. Means of support (decisions made for the Messed Pier Truss, one dream evening):

(1) Magnetic repulsion – no, that recognises a floor.
(2) A tower on land with wire down and winch to tighten it – too mundane/ noticeable, and bound to get sabotaged.
(3) Gas balloon refuelled from the pier – not bad.
(4) Stationary satellite and adjustable cable – too technological (it would tie the Earth up more).
(5) Adjustable belt to the moon? – possible, but hard to tighten without going mad.

Other ridiculous ideas . . . A difficult one: Gravity cable to the Pole Star. Or: Flying pigs high above each side, in pipe-refuelled helicopters?

They decided the one they’d do, if they could get it together, would be to build a corresponding pier on the North Coast of Scotland (this one being South Coast, England) – and have a wire strung over pylons, disguised where necessary with foliage and tubes, to the top pier (which would be a second edible society). With tightening devices, naturally. Perhaps they could communicate then too, skipping over the wilderness between . . .

We see them swinging from beams like apes in the night. Bug-eyed wasters leering through broken windows, guffawing and belching swamp children. Here comes a song strained through the dim light of an ancient lantern in orange —

       My fly-blown baby is touching me up
       Thinks I cain’t see where she’s at
       She takes me money an’ me laffstyle too
       Nah don’ getta see none of it

       She takes me up an’ she slabs me down
       Hangs her horn on any ole noose
       She thinks she can suck all night
       Leaves me hangin’ long an’ loose

       So leave me be, oh leave me be
       If ya cain’t come more’n that, baby

       Da da der-dee da da der-dee doss . . .

‘Hey guy, I was rather taked aback by that,’ I blimp out. ‘Why you sing dat dare sad song? Thing no’ go so righ’ no more?’ I asks. I thought they were s’posed to be happy, wending their way and that.

‘Hey man, I ain’t Guy,’ the crooner stuffs back. ‘I be with names of Beaked Bones. Wors yors?’ snuffles he and proceeds with his ditty awhile —

       Thru the in-door and spewin’ owt
       Sickness spreads its roundabout
       I jus’ wanna sex an’ no how’s how
       So Fly-Blow, oh fly-blow, leave me out

       Da da der-dee da da der-dee doss
       Ah thing ah’d rather die than . . .

Interruption by me trying to cheer again. ‘Weell sorree BB, meen wor Hippy Groangreaser . . . If you like you be greased too?’ (See me well into a swing, brandishing a mean bottle.)
BB answers: ‘Or-rart man, bu’ lemme finish me hidsong firss thin-ggg,’ and he continues in the same vein, but in a posher voice and more eagerly.

       I think I’d rather die
       Than fool myself this far, pah
       I’m fool to mess with ole Fly-Blow
       Blah blah, blabby-blab, crawling scab

       This girl stuffs her sex up for happy (yum-yum)
       Then she takes it out fer lunch again
       So-a Fly-Blow jus’ leave me be
       If ya cain’t come more’n that

       Da da der-dee da da der-dee doss . . .

(deep breath)

       My-e Fly-e Blowne Baby-e gets the better o’ me . . .

(I start to yawn, but he won’t be hassled)

       Yer can fly-blow me yer kiss oh one
       An’ ah’ll luv yer but not too much
       Ah jus’ cain’t be satisfied, y’know
       Suckin’ up to any ole fly-lips

(pause, then bellow like spitting insect)

       DON’T LET ME EVER AGAIN BE FLY-BLOWN!!!

‘Or-right then,’ he continues, after sucking in rapid gasps of air, looking cosy like a Blue Peter aunt. ‘Sit and listen, man guy greasering. Use telly to watch programmes about telly all day, all life all day . . . So we say, use life to watch life all day, if not do . . . Yes uh-hum – do! Then, we are happier us, yet still do we think about past miséricordes, fly-blows and sewage suppers. Ah mean, we dun wanna bee arty-fishal, not total, if not complete. Is thar not stuff tar learn from? But leas’ we don’ need chinkies, coins of dosh . . . You thrown yours in yet?’ – Sincere look, hmm.

Me: ‘? – Oh, um, right, you mean pool my money? I’m, em, new here and, ahem, awkward and that . . . if that’s all right. Silly me.’

‘Nah! nah nah nah! jeepers creeps baby oh golly grossgreening man. Not pool – yeah pool – there!’ (points with forefinger Hitler moustache) – ‘In sea pool of bubbling hell void.’ He grabs the change from my palm and flings it over the side.

We get down to some serious pods. Two red bottoms, one parti-coloured noseflute pod. For starters.

I go into a dream. I keep sliding my hand up my hip to my side, cocking the elbow up and down. I blow a bubblegum bubble.

A horror: squeezing slow a long (three inch) furry wasplike insect arsefirst out of hair follicle on my belly, mistaking for blackhead. Half of it is out, flapping and wriggling, buzzing sharp, but I can’t kill it or catch hold. It pinches my fingertip, chewing a chunk out of my fingernail, which is sliding forward. Can’t stop it.

Blood has departed my face, worse than pale.

Beaked Bones: ‘Everyone has that. Come on then, I’ll show yer to yer room – hah! – ah mean, ta see some uvvers.’

We lead through a long corridor, hopelessly peel-painted and shattered. Except it’s not a corridor, it’s a passage round and round, opening out in the lashing seaspray mist. We go round three times. Stop.

A girl with x-ray eyes, tilted, with lovely white-blonde hair and red eyes, comes up: ‘My boyfriend’s thinking of packing me up.’

‘Don’t mind her,’ refreshes Broken Beans.

Sloshing over the piped music system, the fading words of Bob Dylan:

       And the only tune my guitar could play
       Was The Old Cruel Rain and the Wind

Startled and white-eyed, BB grabs my shoulder. ‘Quick!’ he honks, and we rush to the west side of the pier, exposed to the elements. Music gets taken seriously – literally – here. Their wilderness reorientation facility is doing quite well, I think, at least as far as disorientation. We go back into the parlour.

I see another vision of a heavenly lady before me. She smiles and grasps my substance, distorting me forwards to her, she in ragged white dress. Barefoot, with snarling mouth, she wears her mousy hair up and back in a pile; her eyes are half-glazed and languishing clear (I read all this myself). She turns back to a schoolchild’s blackboard she’s been adding stuff to.

       Drinking in   –--->  eDiBLE sOcIeTy

sensuousness      orgasm ecstasy perfume
please) Dinny§u§ & pleasure sweat glandular
     Mental wank  &   rubbing of parts
     Drinkdrugs    +  female fluid & semen
      + sEX      +   nipple erection ok

BB speaks to me. ‘She’s been bottle-hopping,’ he explains.

‘I don’t understand.’

‘Boozing,’ he huffs. ‘She’s been at the cabbage revitaliser.’

It occurs to me (– oh yeah, they make deliberate spelling mistakes –) that I haven’t been to the main part of the pier yet. I’m only halfway there.

‘What’s your name?’ I ask very softly of the divine girl, underhand. Cindy she says, oh my Gawd, looking a serious-mysterious moment, defended and offending, then resuming her ponderous scraping of chalk on the board.

As we amble out a little, to grope the rest I hope, I feel moved to let BB know I’m smitten by Cindy already; not that it will do any good, not that it isn’t embarrassing. She probably frequents and frequents all the toerags here – there I get cynical. Ah but. Into just teasing strangers. Maybe it’s the closest I’ll get, mentioning her charm hunger. ‘She’s lovely,’ I say, some voice tremor. ‘Divine. She is certainly good enough to eat. Yum.’

BB takes for granted – shame – and belches, slapping his belly as he goes: ‘Well thar you have it, see wot ah mean. She’s crusty and lavish, she’s a half-gherkin.’

In a mockposh voice I go, ‘I daresay she is,’ adding: ‘Smacker-o-blurdies . . . Yes, lying back I could get on quite well here, no thinking but feeling a delicious life.’ (Rub crotch, belly and smack foul lips.) (Oh but what about food.) (Shut your mouth!) ‘Snuffing our way round the tweaking-ground, with nose, tongue and eye of delight, ears smothered in musicphone. Making full use of our gropefeed sensors, ticklers, lickers, pokers, recep-tackle and grabbers – yay, dream-drammers . . .’

‘No numbers . . .’

‘We’re too dreamy for that!’ – in a Julie Andrews voice. ‘But . . . What about hedonism?’ I add, on second thoughts.

‘Yes please,’ BB goes. Never mind. We walk a-ways further, by filthy crashed-out swamp-hands, contented burping ragged surplus-clad clamourers . . . until BB pauses to show me some graffiti in snot on the wall. With bogies for punctuation.

       Grow Cindy’s NC    (that nympho caress)
       Grow Sin D Sensi
       Gross Indecency.

‘See what you mean!’ How to get some of that NC . . . I change the subject. ‘What about this, though? . . . Trees, glades, groves, copses, coppices, spinneys, thickets, jungles, taigas, bushes, scrubs, forests, grooties, spanglies, woodlands, dells, forests . . . to slurp and tickle? Doesn’t it bother you, none of that?’

‘Orr man, you taken some stoneyface cream today or something? Don’ bring us down man, we can’t have anything . . . um, everything. I doubt if we go staying here long enough not to go and get some slurp and tickle like you say, in green.’

‘Yeah, that’s the colour last time I looked, yesterday away. Okay, show us round some more portion, if yer will. Generous helping please.’

We press on and the pleasure centres get more stipulated as Cindy flits by skipping to the Control Room, which is draughty as a wind parade, howling through holes; but no, not damp – some sacks in the corner suck up moisture. Now we’re in the main operations unit where larger pleasures are doled out, on dishes. There are strewn about loads of trip-outs, out-of-its (in conventional terms), slouched against walls and each other. Everyone misconducted in funny, desirable ways.

‘Him there is a robo-hippy,’ comments Bones. ‘He had such smelly feet we chopped them off and stuck him in the corner, where we just pamper to the valve in the top of his head. “Insert Pods Here.” He’s been there ever since.’

As BB speaks, his face goes up and down and a realisation comes to me. ‘Hey Beako – I know you! I was with you a few weeks before, I remember . . .’

‘Yes yes, I’m your mate, but I’m also these people’s, and I spend a lotta tarm ear. You haven’t  – I mean, you ain’t (sorry) – noticed but ah’ve only seen ya four times in the last eight weeks. It’s sorta like ya must’ve been touched by me presence or summink. That’s all-kay. Now look, I’ll introduce – or innerduce (who gives a fu-fu) –’ (gesturing with unpointed hand, pointing) –

‘That couple – I say couple, um sometimes! – Sir Trunk and Meringue . . . That guy, sardonic, he’s Lard Byron . . . Smelly face over there is Sid Delicious, so Cindy says . . .’ (I frown a bit and tell myself I knew she was no virgin.) (I’m glad to be here anyhow.) ‘She, there,’ he garbinues, ‘the big eating female of the species with her pet pongo – cross between a skunk and bingo announcer – is called Lorna Doone, the Bust Eleven . . .

‘I better inner-duce the rest too . . . shoot, such pains keepin this wordpuke from chokin . . . if I can be bovvered – they all pretty out-of-it.’ He pauses to wipe his brow and reflect some grunts back to the heap in the corner.

I can’t figure out if I’m really into this. No one seems to notice me. But maybe that’s no different from . . . Stop whingeing. A flashing insight provokes my head to think, then it’s gone.

‘Some of it’s got paradise round the corner,’ prays the Lard.

BB again: ‘Blissed out one there, under Lorna, is wossyface, Gunter Heaven, after . . .’

Lard Byron begins to recite:

       I can’t remember
       What it is I’m s’posed to do today (least not clear)
       All I know is what I want –
       To go off running in the fields and sea
       To lie in the sun and wander
       Sleeping in the trees –
       With nothing to forget to do . . .

‘Eat!’ chips in L. Doone.

‘Thassit, always blowing her fly-lips,’ BB quips, trying to make it jovial.

‘Some of it’s got paradise round the corner,’ Lard Byron confides to me.

A flashing insight provokes my head to think, then it’s gone. BB seems to have read my mind:

‘Ah nerr. Except for – or rather, “fer” –’ he winks, ‘(gotta keep it common, n’est-ce pas?), blah blah, the spazznames we gotta use, the no-food, the isolation from myriad sad ones waiting outside, or happy ones in the blue; the artificiality of any such constructed sub-society on a basis of rejection (whatever that s’posemeans), the . . .’

‘The weird weather,’ Spakkerhead joins in.

‘Yeah, the burnt Earth forming clouds so the sea leaks through the sky,’ Lard spoons in.

‘And no halibut furniture, or indespondent newspapers,’ says Gunter.

‘Yeah, the, the . . . etc,’ goes on Bingo Bollocks.

‘Emancipation of the molasses,’ several call for, and strange pies are opened. There is food after all (I thought I smelt some earlier). Soon I will discover the truth.

My thoughts run on: ‘Cindy, my flowerchild, gyspy girl with chocolate lips and sauce-eyes, listen O lovely 1 . . . I recite this poem to you with my eyes, intense, silent and trembling. It’s by Shelley —’

       The fountains mingle with the river
       And the rivers with the ocean,
       The winds of heaven mix for ever
       With a sweet emotion;
       Nothing in the world is single,
       All things by a law divine
       In one another’s being mingle –
       Why not I with thine?

       See the mountains kiss high heaven,
       And the waves clasp one another;
       No sister-flower would be forgiven
       If it disdain’d its brother:
       And the sunlight clasps the earth,
       And the moonbeams kiss the sea –
       What are all these kissings worth,
       If thou kiss not me?’

And you know, I think she caught a smidgin of it.

I notice a control panel beneath the seaward windows. It’s made of cardboard boxes, poster paint and Fairy Liquid bottles. Things like forward-reverse; life giving ray – on/off; spiritual experience shaft in/out; love machine rotation on/off.

I point: ‘That stuff’s quite good. This edible society thing’s a brilliant idea, um, scheme, nah mean: way to leave, nor live. Who thought it up? – Of course you all did: it thought you . . .

‘I thought of it when I walked up Fester Road on Shopping afternoon . . . Have you seen minds being sucked out of strangely shaped heads? Coming from all directions – Muttley grins with teeth over boils – consumer eyes swivel to offer a bite, makes me ill to . . . sourfaced yoghurts – bilious bags, enema and colostomy . . . trusses – rule of the drool – someone’s been at them, hacking, sick . . .

‘Then suddenly: Sweetfaced Sue, Alleycat Alice . . . blow them quiet kisses – I’m not s’posed to – delicious female legs bare and pale or tanned, or black nylon, to see is to sex, a female foot, ankle and calf, leading up to . . . after the sicklike dinner I just ate . . .’

Sid gurgles and stands, rattles a long chain from the handcuffs on his belt, and brandishes a manky redbrown whip, a grin spreading left and right. ‘I can’t believe people wanna be so tame, when there’s a life to live, and the meek go to work to pay for bombs and rockets . . .’

‘Must be fun!’ Beans tins in.

‘. . . leaving the symbolic living for us to act out in sick black humour plays.’

‘An’ we dress the part with gusto,’ feeds on Beans.

‘Yeah, ’gusting,’ gets echoed.

Sid goes on: ‘In towns we show them up, they in law suits in sealed-up tins; us in scuzzrags, groovy gear.’

‘Call us dirty!’

‘Call us dogs!’

‘We walk the streets!’

Sid gets fascinated by my Roger McGuinn narrow sunspecs with slits that glint my eyes to snarl. ‘They’re chokin’ me up . . .’ Sid’s the one I’ve seen marching down Fester Road, bouncing along kerbstones, his boots with buckles flaring outerside like a winged Trojan Boadicea. I’ve seen him crash through British Home Stores, freaking out the biddies . . .

‘Get off the street ’cos I’ve got a job!’ he screams.

So they gather here, swarming minions, apple of my eye, friends. I could never find them in the pub they should be in. Now I feel quite different.

Best to slide out now and be in the right place at the right time; the best is when I don’t even begin to get outside an awareness of how I feel . . . being lost – ah! I can get back in the Garden automatically if I’m lucky, or by worming my way in, able to feel my way forward.

— Careful! Not too careful! Don’t blow it! Don’t worry!

I stumble away quietly, stepping over heaps I’d forgotten in the corridor. Lorna and Gunter bonking further along than before. I nod to each of the toads in turn – they return it roughly, surprisingly, evidently having noticed me; and the control room at once is like a waiting room – for what?

‘I’m Cindy!’ – she rushes up with kissing eyes. ‘If you’re going, I’ll see you later, I know where you live.’ She gives me a peck on the lips, wet . . . I’m ready for some out of sight delight tonight.

If not here, then the Other place. I think Alice with her ankles will . . .

What’s all this fuss about intimidation? How do they live?

They sign on. They’re quite normal. No one knows they’re here.

Except me, and I won’t let on.

© 2023 Copyright by Pete Gioconda & Black Cat Communications

The story “Presenting the World’s First Edible Society” is an original work protected under copyright law,
and may not be reproduced or adapted without the written permission of the author.

Dayglo Dawn – Contents

Edible Society – Short Stories