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Description
The One-Balled Dictator

Early in the twentieth century, a rumour arose that Adolf Hitler – German Reichskanzler, war criminal and all-round party-guy – was in fact one testicle short of a pair. The rumour reached a peak during World War II, when some renowned British poet made a song about it, which was promptly adopted by the entirety of His Majesty's Army. The song was called “The One-Balled Dictator”.

This is also the name of a cocktail. It consists of cheap German wine and expensive champagne (shaken violently to represent the War) to which one – as a finishing touch – adds a ball of cinnamon, representing the now-deceased Führer's missing testicle.

There is a pub down the street – I cannot possibly tell you which street this is, since I'm somewhat of a celebrity and I don't want any of you trying to visit me – where they make the best one-balled dictators imaginable. At least, this is what I've heard. I myself can't stand the taste of cinnamon, and the idea of drinking something with a symbolic testicle in it always seemed kind of camp to me.

Why don't you drink one without the cinnamon-ball, then? I often imagine being asked. The answer I usually give – sometimes out loud, which makes people on the bus stare at me rather rudely – is of course: Well it wouldn't be a one-balled dictator without the ball, now would it?

I quite like this pub. For starters, it's nicely decorated. The lights are always dim enough to create a pleasant, sensual atmosphere, and never quite dim enough to lead you to believe the occasional sensual girl who is occasionally sensually chatting you up is in fact pretty. This is a very important characteristic for a pub to have. The (slightly sensual) music is always playing at a perfectly appropriate volume – so as not to interfere you chatting up the occasional sensual girl who is, in fact, pretty – giving the entire place that agreeable loungey feel.

Most importantly, it does what a lot of pubs fail to do. It serves a mean mojito.

I quite like mojitos.

It takes about four of them for me to get pleasantly drunk. That night, I was up to my ninth, and incidentally, the entire pub was swaying slightly. I was beginning to feel a bit puzzled about this, but then I noticed the girl.

She was sitting on a barstool, radiating beauty throughout the entire place, and being chatted up by some sinister, business-like type. By the way he succeeded in saying very little of any importance at all in quite an extraordinary amount of words, I gathered that he was probably a Human Resources Manager. I could imagine his car having a bumper-sticker with some stupendously bad management-related joke – probably something like “Don't worry – I can manage”.

I was waiting desperately for him to bugger off so that I could go talk to her, but he seemed to be on a roll. And then – praise the Lord – she quite deliberately spilled the red wine she was drinking all over his white shirt. It seemed like something out of a second-rate Hollywood chick-flick. I watched intently to see how Mister Foppish HR Man would react to this – he looked utterly bewildered, not used to ever having to think of anything else to say but the usual shallow small-talk.

He turned a ripe shade of tomato, muttered his apologies (yes, that's right, he actually apologised for having red wine chucked over his shirt) and left for the bathroom. I rejoiced in this victory for the human race, and got to my feet. It greatly displeased me that the entire pub started swaying very violently the instant I did this, but I was a man with a cause now.

I staggered gracelessly – yet stylishly – to the bar, while contemplating my opening line. I was thinking of going with the usual Publishers are arseholes, one of my personal favourites, because politeness usually obliges them to say Oh, are you a writer then?, to which I can then happily reply that Yes, yes I am, and a good one. Although, for this special occasion, I was considering something along the lines of Can I offer you another drink? - and I would of course run off if she also expected me to pay for it.

“Are you a hooker?” I blurted out. Obviously there had been some kind of miscommunication between my brain and my mouth.

“No, I work in publishing, actually,” she replied, rather stoically. Her face kept swimming in and out of focus, but I failed to see that this was pretty much my own fault instead of hers.

“Really,” I said, and good God, my voice was so loud! I was quite impressed with myself. I really wished the room would stop spinning. “You must've heard of me, then. You see, I'm a writer myself.”

“Is that so?” she said with a notable lack of enthusiasm. “You wouldn't believe how many losers call themselves writers these days, and it's only getting worse with this whole self-publishing business.”

“Yeah, publishers are arseholes,” I bellowed, while nodding vigourously.

She sighed and rolled her eyes. It looked dead sexy. “Anyway,” she said. “If you're a writer, what have you written then?”

“A novel.”

There was a short pause before she continued. “Yesss,” she said in an utterly seductive tone that sounded somewhat like the one my old nursery school teacher used to take with me when I was four. “I meant, what's your novel called?”

“Oh! Yes! It's, um... Um.”

I had momentarily forgotten the name of my novel. In my defence, she had momentarily doubled, and I was quite intimidated by the two of her.

“I forgot,” I admitted, still at an unreasonably loud volume. “But it's a best-seller, I swear. Spielberg phoned me the other day, said he wants to make a blockbuster movie of it, but I told him no, no Steven, I haven't forgotten how you screwed up Jurassic Park.”

This was a lie, but chances were that she would not notice.

“I thought Michael Crichton wrote Jurassic Park,” she remarked dryly.

So she had noticed.

“Well, anyway,” I said, but nothing else came. I tried again. “Well, anyway... um... anyway, my novel is great, you see, it's set in this alternate dimension where the nazis in fact won the war, and the world is governed by Japan and Germany, and...”

“Philip Dick,” she said.

“What?”

“The novel you're describing. It's The Man in the High Castle, by Philip K. Dick.” Her cold eyes were beginning to lose some of their initial sensuality.

“No it's not!” I shrieked, the volume of my voice rising alarmingly again. “Mine's about bureaucracy.”

“Bureaucracy?”

“Well, yes! Nazi bureaucracy.” I paused for dramatic effect. “It's bad, that's what it is!”

“... What?” she asked, rather exasperated. From this I gathered that she had, in fact, no notions of Nazi bureaucracy.

“The point is,” I continued. “that I don't know this Dick fellow. Are you sure you haven't heard of me before? I'm very famous.”

“Really?”

“Yes. Really.”

“What's your name, then?”

I told her.

“Nope,” she said evenly. “Doesn't ring a bell at all.”

“But you must have heard of me,” I insisted. “You work in publishing!”

“I was probably on my lunch break when they mentioned you,” she said in a perfectly reasonable tone of voice. This somehow reminded me of hitchhiking.

“I am very hungry,” I said, in a moment of nearly embarrassing truthfulness.

“All right then,” she said with a sigh. “Since I've clearly never heard of you, send me a copy of your book. I might even read it.”

“I can't,” I blurted out. “I haven't finished it yet!”

There was an awkward silence.

“But I'll finish it any day now!” I assured her.

The awkward silence continued.

“That is to say, I'll get started on it any day now!” I admitted.

The awkward silence ended with her cold and hollow publisher's laugh, the sound of which followed me all the way into the lavatory, where I decided to stay and hide until she had gone away.

*

“Hullo mate.”

Shit. “Piss off,” I told the Human Resources Manager.

He was standing over the washbasin, soaking his shirt in foamy water. The sight of his naked, chubby upper body – particularly his hairy tits – made me feel slightly nauseous, although that could've just been the mojito's. Mister Manager was not at all intimidated by me.

“Having a bit of a rough evening, aren't we?” he said jovially.

“Speak for yourself, thank you very much,” I muttered ferociously, trying to make out which one of the blurred faces in the mirror was mine. (It turned out to be the one on the right, in case any of you cares.)

“Whoa, sensing somewhat of a hostile vibe there, mate,” the flabby fop said with a chuckle. To my increasing horror he swung an arm around my shoulder. “Wanna talk about it?” he asked sympathetically.

I turned my head to face him – a bit too fast, it would seem, because at that exact moment the entire room decided to turn in the opposite direction. I lost my balance, falling towards the shirtless man, who promptly pulled me in a hug.

“There, there,” he said soothingly. “It'll be all right. Nothing like a good cuddle, eh?”

I tried to push him away but failed miserably. I did however succeed in pushing myself away and hitting the washbasin with my spine.

“Ow! What the hell is wrong with you?” I demanded to know.

He looked baffled. “I was just trying to help, mate. You look a bit down.”

“I'm not your mate!” I shrieked. “Do you even know who I am?”

“Well, no,” he admitted. “Who are you?”

“I'm a writer. A famous one.”

“Really?” he asked, sounding enthusiastic but without any real interest. “I myself work in Human Resources Management. You know, last week I went to a fascinating seminar ab...”

“Shut up,” I interrupted him. “Jesus Christ, you HR-people always do this! You ask a person a question and then use their answer as a cue to start talking about your own miserable, boring lives!”

“Boring?” he asked with just a hint of hurt.

“No,” I corrected him. “Miserable. And boring. And empty.”

“That's not true!” he protested, and then thought about it for a while. “I have a very important function in my company.”

“What's that, then?”

“Well,” he said. “I motivate people. I'm the one they can always talk to, and I make sure they're happy doing their job. Yeah. I suppose you could say that my job is to make people happy.”

I knew it was rather rude to laugh at this, but I honestly couldn't help myself.

“You're not serious, are you?” I hiccoughed. “I mean, you... all right. All right, listen.”

With some difficulty I extracted the thoughts from my intoxicated mind, because I was under the strong impression I was actually – eventually – going to make a point.

“How can you possibly believe you're making people happy by having meaningless and empty conversations to pretend you care about them?” I asked, rhetorically. He opened his mouth to answer me. “Shut up.

“Sure, you might succeed in making them momentarily feel good about themselves, but it's just some superficial form of happiness, not the real thing. Eventually some of them – some, not all, most people aren't even intelligent enough for that – will realise they've been had, and feel even more miserable than they normally would have.

“Of course, that doesn't really matter to you, because you're only concerned with their feelings as long as it's work-related. You and I both know your job isn't to make people happy, it's to create some clever illusion in which they can live during work-hours so that they'll be more efficient and productive to the company.

“You're enslaving them to capitalism, for which I can forgive you, of course, I'm not some filthy pseudo-vegetarian communist-hippie. But you're also inflicting upon the world even more superficiality and shallowness, and for that, I'm not so sure I can forgive you.”

I had every right to say this. I'm not shallow.

Not at all.

“Furthermore,” I slurred (I was slurring by now because all this talking had worn me out a bit). “You seem to have trapped yourself in this illusion, as well. I mean, do you have a life outside your job? When was the last time you've been out? I mean, to a place like this, or anything?”

The Human Resources Manager had turned very pale. I thought I might have made my point after all, even though I myself had missed it entirely. I was by now contenting myself with merely trying to insult him.

“Shite,” he gasped as I gloated. He quickly started putting on his shirt again. “I've an interpersonal communications meeting in the morning! I need to go!”

He violently grabbed my hand, and I cringed in mortal terror. I calmed down a bit when I realised that all he wanted was a handshake, and not my blood.

(As a side-note, I'm very, very tired of people being after my blood. Seriously.)

“Cheers, mate!” he bellowed as he left the lavatory. Clearly he had missed my point as well.

For a moment I stared at the crumpled business card the manager had managed to shove into my hand. I flushed it down the toilet before I splashed myself with some water from the washbasin and entered the pub again.

*

There was a new girl sitting at the bar, although I wasn't quite sure if she was in fact actually new or just someone I hadn't noticed before. It made no difference. She was blonde, hot, and nobody was occupying the barstool next to her.

And she was drinking a one-balled dictator.

I ordered another mojito at the bar and casually flung myself onto the stool next to hers. Unfortunately I missed, and had to pick myself up. This greatly ruined the stylishness I'd been going for.

“You know,” I said, and took a sip from my mojito.

I don't know if it was her red dress playing tricks with my mind, but she reminded me a great deal of Tricia Helfer, the hot Cylon chick from the Battlestar Galactica television-series.

“Excuse me?” she said at last.

I took another sip from my mojito. Her voice was a lot more annoying than Tricia Helfer's.

“You know,” I said again. “He only had one ball.” I felt I needed to elaborate on this. “Hitler. He only had one ball.” This last part unintentionally came out as some sort of nasal, sing song sound.

She stared. I found it rather rude. “What?” she asked.

“Your drink,” I explained patiently. “Is named after Hitler. Because he only had one ball. He was a one-balled dictator. It's a song, too.”

“Oh,” she said. “Really?”

“Really,” I assured her, and finished my mojito with another big sip. “I don't like it much. The drink, I mean, not the song. The song's brilliant. But I don't like the cinnamon-ball.”

“Why don't you drink one without the cinnamon-ball, then?” she asked.

I thought about this. “Actually,” I said. “That's never crossed my mind before.”

I ordered a one-balled dictator, without the cinnamon-ball.

“It's quite good,” I told her after tasting it.

“Yeah,” she said. “I absolutely adore them.”

We sat in silence for some time, although it wasn't an awkward kind of silence, as with the publishing-woman. This triggered a train of thoughts in my mind, and suddenly I started laughing.

“What's so funny?” she informed.

“I was thinking about Hitler's balls,” I confessed. “Oh! No, no!” I added quickly, noticing the strange look she was giving me. “I'm not a poof or anything like that!”

She made a “mh” sort of sound at this.

“It's just that,” I continued. “what with modern day cloning techniques and all, I gather, if they'd just been able to save his one ball, or any part of his DNA for that matter, someone could clone Hitler.”

“Why on earth would anyone want to do that?” she piped up in that voice I'd already come to dislike intensely. Why did the hot chicks who didn't run away from me always have to be so flawed?

“Well,” I explained. “It'd be great as a psychological experiment. You know. To see if he was really evil, or if it was only a combination of outside influences.”

She made another “mh” sound. I could live with those, as long as she didn't say anything else.

“You see,” I pushed on. “I think he really was inherently evil. I think, theoretically, if Hitler lived now, and if we disregard all the possible political, social, economical, demographical and religious factors for a moment, he would be” - dramatic pause - “a publisher.”

She was staring again. “A publisher?” she asked.

“Well, yes, think about it!” I nearly screamed. Why was it so damn hard these days to convince people that publishers are, in fact, arseholes? “He'd be so disappointed and depressed about being in the wrong age or social setting or whatever to fulfil his dreams of a Third Reich, that he would eventually take contentment and joy in destroying others' dreams, and who could better do that than a publisher?”

“Hm, a publisher, I don't know,” she said, still unconvinced. “What about a lawyer, or an accountant? Hitler could be an accountant.”

“No, no,” I said firmly. “It has to be a publisher. Lawyers and accountants are vile cretins as well, sure, but nothing beats a publisher.”

“Goebbels, then,” she said, with a dreamy look in her eyes. “Goebbels would be a Human Resources Manager.”

I fell in love with her, right there and then. Annoying voice and all.

“Marry me,” I blurted out. And then, after some consideration: “Please?”

She laughed. It was a good thing, because it made her voice sound pleasant, but I was rather hurt. I'd been serious.

“Oh, later, maybe,” she said, noticing the hurt look, perhaps. “Say, what do you do for a living? I'm a high-maintenance girl, and I need to ascertain whether you'll be able to support me before even contemplating marriage.”

“I'm a writer,” I said, still trying to figure out what her last sentence meant.

“Oh,” she said, politely interested. “A penniless one?”

“No, no,” I countered. “A best-selling one. I mean, can't you tell?”

This was probably pushing my luck. But then again, I was pretty drunk. I took another noisy sip from my dictator.

She stared intently at me for a while, made another “mh”-sound, and turned her attention back to her drink.

“What about you?” I asked, not because I cared, but to keep the conversation from haemorrhaging. “What do you do?”

“I work in television,” she said, looking rather ashamed of herself.

“Oh, wow, really?” I yelled, with probably more enthusiasm than anyone should ever yell with. The dictator was not mixing well with the mojitos.

“Erm, yes,” she said bashfully. “But I'd much rather not...”

“Were you in Battlestar Galactica?” I asked/muttered sharply.

“Balthazar who? No, no,” she replied. “If you must know, I host one of those late-night quiz shows.”

She looked quite miserable.

“Wait,” I said. “You host one of those shows where people have to phone to guess a word? Like, those sad, jobless people who have nothing better to do with their life than to sit and watch those game shows until four in the morning?”

“Yes, those.” She looked more miserable still.

“Wait,” I said again. “So you're like, one of those women who just keeps talking to the camera for hours and hours on end, trying to convince those sad bastards to phone you and that they'll surely win at this hour because they're surely the only people still up watching the show?”

“Yes, I'm one of those.” I didn't think she could look even more miserable than this.

“Wait,” I pushed on. “You mean to say that, if this was Germany, you'd be one of those women who would be naked by five in the morning, because you're useless for movies, you're useless for radio, you're useless for modelling and you're actually quite useless for television too, but hey, you have breasts and no one who watches the telly at that hour is particularly picky?”

“Yes, yes, christ, yes!” I was wrong. For a second I thought God Himself was going to smite me down for making one of his creatures so miserable – because, as everyone knows, that's His job. She shakily reached for her packet of cigarettes.

“Hey,” I asked. “Can I bum a smoke?”

I swear I never saw her hand coming until it hit me in the face.

*

The pavement was extremely uncomfortable. I endured it for a while, before deciding to open my eyes. A half-eaten hamburger was staring back at me. It did not make me feel any better at all.

It was light by now. I vaguely recalled getting slapped, and then getting harassed by the pub owner. Something about not paying bills. Ludicrous. Why the hell would I pay my bills? I'm famous.

No one ever made a fuss about it before.

Well, at least, no one ever beat me up about it before.

I scraped myself together, chuckled at the thought of the disappointed faces of the thieves who had apparently nicked my utterly empty wallet, and considered getting started on that novel today.

Better not, though, what with this hangover.

Maybe tomorrow.

Maybe.

Description
The One-Balled Dictator

Early in the twentieth century, a rumour arose that Adolf Hitler – German Reichskanzler, war criminal and all-round party-guy – was in fact one testicle short of a pair. The rumour reached a peak during World War II, when some renowned British poet made a song about it, which was promptly adopted by the entirety of His Majesty's Army. The song was called “The One-Balled Dictator”.

This is also the name of a cocktail. It consists of cheap German wine and expensive champagne (shaken violently to represent the War) to which one – as a finishing touch – adds a ball of cinnamon, representing the now-deceased Führer's missing testicle.

There is a pub down the street – I cannot possibly tell you which street this is, since I'm somewhat of a celebrity and I don't want any of you trying to visit me – where they make the best one-balled dictators imaginable. At least, this is what I've heard. I myself can't stand the taste of cinnamon, and the idea of drinking something with a symbolic testicle in it always seemed kind of camp to me.

Why don't you drink one without the cinnamon-ball, then? I often imagine being asked. The answer I usually give – sometimes out loud, which makes people on the bus stare at me rather rudely – is of course: Well it wouldn't be a one-balled dictator without the ball, now would it?

I quite like this pub. For starters, it's nicely decorated. The lights are always dim enough to create a pleasant, sensual atmosphere, and never quite dim enough to lead you to believe the occasional sensual girl who is occasionally sensually chatting you up is in fact pretty. This is a very important characteristic for a pub to have. The (slightly sensual) music is always playing at a perfectly appropriate volume – so as not to interfere you chatting up the occasional sensual girl who is, in fact, pretty – giving the entire place that agreeable loungey feel.

Most importantly, it does what a lot of pubs fail to do. It serves a mean mojito.

I quite like mojitos.

It takes about four of them for me to get pleasantly drunk. That night, I was up to my ninth, and incidentally, the entire pub was swaying slightly. I was beginning to feel a bit puzzled about this, but then I noticed the girl.

She was sitting on a barstool, radiating beauty throughout the entire place, and being chatted up by some sinister, business-like type. By the way he succeeded in saying very little of any importance at all in quite an extraordinary amount of words, I gathered that he was probably a Human Resources Manager. I could imagine his car having a bumper-sticker with some stupendously bad management-related joke – probably something like “Don't worry – I can manage”.

I was waiting desperately for him to bugger off so that I could go talk to her, but he seemed to be on a roll. And then – praise the Lord – she quite deliberately spilled the red wine she was drinking all over his white shirt. It seemed like something out of a second-rate Hollywood chick-flick. I watched intently to see how Mister Foppish HR Man would react to this – he looked utterly bewildered, not used to ever having to think of anything else to say but the usual shallow small-talk.

He turned a ripe shade of tomato, muttered his apologies (yes, that's right, he actually apologised for having red wine chucked over his shirt) and left for the bathroom. I rejoiced in this victory for the human race, and got to my feet. It greatly displeased me that the entire pub started swaying very violently the instant I did this, but I was a man with a cause now.

I staggered gracelessly – yet stylishly – to the bar, while contemplating my opening line. I was thinking of going with the usual Publishers are arseholes, one of my personal favourites, because politeness usually obliges them to say Oh, are you a writer then?, to which I can then happily reply that Yes, yes I am, and a good one. Although, for this special occasion, I was considering something along the lines of Can I offer you another drink? - and I would of course run off if she also expected me to pay for it.

“Are you a hooker?” I blurted out. Obviously there had been some kind of miscommunication between my brain and my mouth.

“No, I work in publishing, actually,” she replied, rather stoically. Her face kept swimming in and out of focus, but I failed to see that this was pretty much my own fault instead of hers.

“Really,” I said, and good God, my voice was so loud! I was quite impressed with myself. I really wished the room would stop spinning. “You must've heard of me, then. You see, I'm a writer myself.”

“Is that so?” she said with a notable lack of enthusiasm. “You wouldn't believe how many losers call themselves writers these days, and it's only getting worse with this whole self-publishing business.”

“Yeah, publishers are arseholes,” I bellowed, while nodding vigourously.

She sighed and rolled her eyes. It looked dead sexy. “Anyway,” she said. “If you're a writer, what have you written then?”

“A novel.”

There was a short pause before she continued. “Yesss,” she said in an utterly seductive tone that sounded somewhat like the one my old nursery school teacher used to take with me when I was four. “I meant, what's your novel called?”

“Oh! Yes! It's, um... Um.”

I had momentarily forgotten the name of my novel. In my defence, she had momentarily doubled, and I was quite intimidated by the two of her.

“I forgot,” I admitted, still at an unreasonably loud volume. “But it's a best-seller, I swear. Spielberg phoned me the other day, said he wants to make a blockbuster movie of it, but I told him no, no Steven, I haven't forgotten how you screwed up Jurassic Park.”

This was a lie, but chances were that she would not notice.

“I thought Michael Crichton wrote Jurassic Park,” she remarked dryly.

So she had noticed.

“Well, anyway,” I said, but nothing else came. I tried again. “Well, anyway... um... anyway, my novel is great, you see, it's set in this alternate dimension where the nazis in fact won the war, and the world is governed by Japan and Germany, and...”

“Philip Dick,” she said.

“What?”

“The novel you're describing. It's The Man in the High Castle, by Philip K. Dick.” Her cold eyes were beginning to lose some of their initial sensuality.

“No it's not!” I shrieked, the volume of my voice rising alarmingly again. “Mine's about bureaucracy.”

“Bureaucracy?”

“Well, yes! Nazi bureaucracy.” I paused for dramatic effect. “It's bad, that's what it is!”

“... What?” she asked, rather exasperated. From this I gathered that she had, in fact, no notions of Nazi bureaucracy.

“The point is,” I continued. “that I don't know this Dick fellow. Are you sure you haven't heard of me before? I'm very famous.”

“Really?”

“Yes. Really.”

“What's your name, then?”

I told her.

“Nope,” she said evenly. “Doesn't ring a bell at all.”

“But you must have heard of me,” I insisted. “You work in publishing!”

“I was probably on my lunch break when they mentioned you,” she said in a perfectly reasonable tone of voice. This somehow reminded me of hitchhiking.

“I am very hungry,” I said, in a moment of nearly embarrassing truthfulness.

“All right then,” she said with a sigh. “Since I've clearly never heard of you, send me a copy of your book. I might even read it.”

“I can't,” I blurted out. “I haven't finished it yet!”

There was an awkward silence.

“But I'll finish it any day now!” I assured her.

The awkward silence continued.

“That is to say, I'll get started on it any day now!” I admitted.

The awkward silence ended with her cold and hollow publisher's laugh, the sound of which followed me all the way into the lavatory, where I decided to stay and hide until she had gone away.

*

“Hullo mate.”

Shit. “Piss off,” I told the Human Resources Manager.

He was standing over the washbasin, soaking his shirt in foamy water. The sight of his naked, chubby upper body – particularly his hairy tits – made me feel slightly nauseous, although that could've just been the mojito's. Mister Manager was not at all intimidated by me.

“Having a bit of a rough evening, aren't we?” he said jovially.

“Speak for yourself, thank you very much,” I muttered ferociously, trying to make out which one of the blurred faces in the mirror was mine. (It turned out to be the one on the right, in case any of you cares.)

“Whoa, sensing somewhat of a hostile vibe there, mate,” the flabby fop said with a chuckle. To my increasing horror he swung an arm around my shoulder. “Wanna talk about it?” he asked sympathetically.

I turned my head to face him – a bit too fast, it would seem, because at that exact moment the entire room decided to turn in the opposite direction. I lost my balance, falling towards the shirtless man, who promptly pulled me in a hug.

“There, there,” he said soothingly. “It'll be all right. Nothing like a good cuddle, eh?”

I tried to push him away but failed miserably. I did however succeed in pushing myself away and hitting the washbasin with my spine.

“Ow! What the hell is wrong with you?” I demanded to know.

He looked baffled. “I was just trying to help, mate. You look a bit down.”

“I'm not your mate!” I shrieked. “Do you even know who I am?”

“Well, no,” he admitted. “Who are you?”

“I'm a writer. A famous one.”

“Really?” he asked, sounding enthusiastic but without any real interest. “I myself work in Human Resources Management. You know, last week I went to a fascinating seminar ab...”

“Shut up,” I interrupted him. “Jesus Christ, you HR-people always do this! You ask a person a question and then use their answer as a cue to start talking about your own miserable, boring lives!”

“Boring?” he asked with just a hint of hurt.

“No,” I corrected him. “Miserable. And boring. And empty.”

“That's not true!” he protested, and then thought about it for a while. “I have a very important function in my company.”

“What's that, then?”

“Well,” he said. “I motivate people. I'm the one they can always talk to, and I make sure they're happy doing their job. Yeah. I suppose you could say that my job is to make people happy.”

I knew it was rather rude to laugh at this, but I honestly couldn't help myself.

“You're not serious, are you?” I hiccoughed. “I mean, you... all right. All right, listen.”

With some difficulty I extracted the thoughts from my intoxicated mind, because I was under the strong impression I was actually – eventually – going to make a point.

“How can you possibly believe you're making people happy by having meaningless and empty conversations to pretend you care about them?” I asked, rhetorically. He opened his mouth to answer me. “Shut up.

“Sure, you might succeed in making them momentarily feel good about themselves, but it's just some superficial form of happiness, not the real thing. Eventually some of them – some, not all, most people aren't even intelligent enough for that – will realise they've been had, and feel even more miserable than they normally would have.

“Of course, that doesn't really matter to you, because you're only concerned with their feelings as long as it's work-related. You and I both know your job isn't to make people happy, it's to create some clever illusion in which they can live during work-hours so that they'll be more efficient and productive to the company.

“You're enslaving them to capitalism, for which I can forgive you, of course, I'm not some filthy pseudo-vegetarian communist-hippie. But you're also inflicting upon the world even more superficiality and shallowness, and for that, I'm not so sure I can forgive you.”

I had every right to say this. I'm not shallow.

Not at all.

“Furthermore,” I slurred (I was slurring by now because all this talking had worn me out a bit). “You seem to have trapped yourself in this illusion, as well. I mean, do you have a life outside your job? When was the last time you've been out? I mean, to a place like this, or anything?”

The Human Resources Manager had turned very pale. I thought I might have made my point after all, even though I myself had missed it entirely. I was by now contenting myself with merely trying to insult him.

“Shite,” he gasped as I gloated. He quickly started putting on his shirt again. “I've an interpersonal communications meeting in the morning! I need to go!”

He violently grabbed my hand, and I cringed in mortal terror. I calmed down a bit when I realised that all he wanted was a handshake, and not my blood.

(As a side-note, I'm very, very tired of people being after my blood. Seriously.)

“Cheers, mate!” he bellowed as he left the lavatory. Clearly he had missed my point as well.

For a moment I stared at the crumpled business card the manager had managed to shove into my hand. I flushed it down the toilet before I splashed myself with some water from the washbasin and entered the pub again.

*

There was a new girl sitting at the bar, although I wasn't quite sure if she was in fact actually new or just someone I hadn't noticed before. It made no difference. She was blonde, hot, and nobody was occupying the barstool next to her.

And she was drinking a one-balled dictator.

I ordered another mojito at the bar and casually flung myself onto the stool next to hers. Unfortunately I missed, and had to pick myself up. This greatly ruined the stylishness I'd been going for.

“You know,” I said, and took a sip from my mojito.

I don't know if it was her red dress playing tricks with my mind, but she reminded me a great deal of Tricia Helfer, the hot Cylon chick from the Battlestar Galactica television-series.

“Excuse me?” she said at last.

I took another sip from my mojito. Her voice was a lot more annoying than Tricia Helfer's.

“You know,” I said again. “He only had one ball.” I felt I needed to elaborate on this. “Hitler. He only had one ball.” This last part unintentionally came out as some sort of nasal, sing song sound.

She stared. I found it rather rude. “What?” she asked.

“Your drink,” I explained patiently. “Is named after Hitler. Because he only had one ball. He was a one-balled dictator. It's a song, too.”

“Oh,” she said. “Really?”

“Really,” I assured her, and finished my mojito with another big sip. “I don't like it much. The drink, I mean, not the song. The song's brilliant. But I don't like the cinnamon-ball.”

“Why don't you drink one without the cinnamon-ball, then?” she asked.

I thought about this. “Actually,” I said. “That's never crossed my mind before.”

I ordered a one-balled dictator, without the cinnamon-ball.

“It's quite good,” I told her after tasting it.

“Yeah,” she said. “I absolutely adore them.”

We sat in silence for some time, although it wasn't an awkward kind of silence, as with the publishing-woman. This triggered a train of thoughts in my mind, and suddenly I started laughing.

“What's so funny?” she informed.

“I was thinking about Hitler's balls,” I confessed. “Oh! No, no!” I added quickly, noticing the strange look she was giving me. “I'm not a poof or anything like that!”

She made a “mh” sort of sound at this.

“It's just that,” I continued. “what with modern day cloning techniques and all, I gather, if they'd just been able to save his one ball, or any part of his DNA for that matter, someone could clone Hitler.”

“Why on earth would anyone want to do that?” she piped up in that voice I'd already come to dislike intensely. Why did the hot chicks who didn't run away from me always have to be so flawed?

“Well,” I explained. “It'd be great as a psychological experiment. You know. To see if he was really evil, or if it was only a combination of outside influences.”

She made another “mh” sound. I could live with those, as long as she didn't say anything else.

“You see,” I pushed on. “I think he really was inherently evil. I think, theoretically, if Hitler lived now, and if we disregard all the possible political, social, economical, demographical and religious factors for a moment, he would be” - dramatic pause - “a publisher.”

She was staring again. “A publisher?” she asked.

“Well, yes, think about it!” I nearly screamed. Why was it so damn hard these days to convince people that publishers are, in fact, arseholes? “He'd be so disappointed and depressed about being in the wrong age or social setting or whatever to fulfil his dreams of a Third Reich, that he would eventually take contentment and joy in destroying others' dreams, and who could better do that than a publisher?”

“Hm, a publisher, I don't know,” she said, still unconvinced. “What about a lawyer, or an accountant? Hitler could be an accountant.”

“No, no,” I said firmly. “It has to be a publisher. Lawyers and accountants are vile cretins as well, sure, but nothing beats a publisher.”

“Goebbels, then,” she said, with a dreamy look in her eyes. “Goebbels would be a Human Resources Manager.”

I fell in love with her, right there and then. Annoying voice and all.

“Marry me,” I blurted out. And then, after some consideration: “Please?”

She laughed. It was a good thing, because it made her voice sound pleasant, but I was rather hurt. I'd been serious.

“Oh, later, maybe,” she said, noticing the hurt look, perhaps. “Say, what do you do for a living? I'm a high-maintenance girl, and I need to ascertain whether you'll be able to support me before even contemplating marriage.”

“I'm a writer,” I said, still trying to figure out what her last sentence meant.

“Oh,” she said, politely interested. “A penniless one?”

“No, no,” I countered. “A best-selling one. I mean, can't you tell?”

This was probably pushing my luck. But then again, I was pretty drunk. I took another noisy sip from my dictator.

She stared intently at me for a while, made another “mh”-sound, and turned her attention back to her drink.

“What about you?” I asked, not because I cared, but to keep the conversation from haemorrhaging. “What do you do?”

“I work in television,” she said, looking rather ashamed of herself.

“Oh, wow, really?” I yelled, with probably more enthusiasm than anyone should ever yell with. The dictator was not mixing well with the mojitos.

“Erm, yes,” she said bashfully. “But I'd much rather not...”

“Were you in Battlestar Galactica?” I asked/muttered sharply.

“Balthazar who? No, no,” she replied. “If you must know, I host one of those late-night quiz shows.”

She looked quite miserable.

“Wait,” I said. “You host one of those shows where people have to phone to guess a word? Like, those sad, jobless people who have nothing better to do with their life than to sit and watch those game shows until four in the morning?”

“Yes, those.” She looked more miserable still.

“Wait,” I said again. “So you're like, one of those women who just keeps talking to the camera for hours and hours on end, trying to convince those sad bastards to phone you and that they'll surely win at this hour because they're surely the only people still up watching the show?”

“Yes, I'm one of those.” I didn't think she could look even more miserable than this.

“Wait,” I pushed on. “You mean to say that, if this was Germany, you'd be one of those women who would be naked by five in the morning, because you're useless for movies, you're useless for radio, you're useless for modelling and you're actually quite useless for television too, but hey, you have breasts and no one who watches the telly at that hour is particularly picky?”

“Yes, yes, christ, yes!” I was wrong. For a second I thought God Himself was going to smite me down for making one of his creatures so miserable – because, as everyone knows, that's His job. She shakily reached for her packet of cigarettes.

“Hey,” I asked. “Can I bum a smoke?”

I swear I never saw her hand coming until it hit me in the face.

*

The pavement was extremely uncomfortable. I endured it for a while, before deciding to open my eyes. A half-eaten hamburger was staring back at me. It did not make me feel any better at all.

It was light by now. I vaguely recalled getting slapped, and then getting harassed by the pub owner. Something about not paying bills. Ludicrous. Why the hell would I pay my bills? I'm famous.

No one ever made a fuss about it before.

Well, at least, no one ever beat me up about it before.

I scraped myself together, chuckled at the thought of the disappointed faces of the thieves who had apparently nicked my utterly empty wallet, and considered getting started on that novel today.

Better not, though, what with this hangover.

Maybe tomorrow.

Maybe.