From Iceland with Love (part 1)

Haldor had just gently swiped the paintbrush over the last remnants of graffiti covering his storefront sign, wiped the brush clean on the paint can, and capped the half-empty touch-up can tight.  He did not, contrary to the graffito that frequently appeared on his business, “HANDLE COCK ALL DAY,” though he could understand where the misconception came from.  It was a hazard of his profession, and he chalked it up as such.  Someday though, he would earn the respect of his new neighbors.  Someday, the uncultured rabble of Husavik would quit the spray paint and, perhaps, bring him a steaming cup of coffee and bid him good morning.

It was beginning to get to him.  Not so much the fact that he had to spend his morning painting over fresh statements on the hanging sign or, worse, scrubbing the words from the stone monument near the street.  He didn’t really mind having to perform these tasks every morning.  They gave him something to do; they gave him purpose.  After all, there wasn’t always a whole hell of a lot of work that had to be done to keep the museum presentable.

He had long since categorized and catalogued all of the specimens that adorned the shelves.  He had meticulously handwritten the descriptions, often including not only the genus and species but the method of acquisition and, more often than not, an anecdote or two about either the specimen itself or the donor gracious enough to gift these valuable pieces to a fledgling museum on the north coast of Iceland.  Truth be told, the bulk of the collection, and all of the laminated description signs, wired 3-ring notebook indices, and framed letters signed with American names willing to make post-mortem donations, came with him in a moving truck when he relocated from Reykjavík six months earlier.

All he had to do once he arrived at the decision to plant himself in Husavik (a decision based more on the fact that he had almost circumnavigated the Ring Road) was rent studio space and decide upon a layout, both of which he accomplished relatively quickly.  The place looked great; it was exactly the way he wanted it inside—the newer most intriguing specimens placed strategically near the entrance to attract passersby.  The swinging sign he brought from his old location in Reykjavik required a little effort to hang, and, of course, the stone sculpture needed to be placed properly—he though of it like the equivalent of a blinking neon sign—in order to be successful.

With all of that accomplished within the first week, he was ready to open the doors to the public much sooner than he anticipated.  And he didn’t anticipate business to be this slow.  So he knew damn well it wasn’t the fact that he had to repaint or rebuff for a few hours every morning when he strolled to work from the room he rented behind the Anglican church just off the main road.  Those actions became a welcomed distraction.  A minor inconvenience that served to give his life meaning.  What bothered him was the graffiti artists’ utter lack of originality.

Sure, the culprits had started off strong: “Haldor’s Handjob Habites,” had been his personal favorite, more for the strange linguistic joy he got from the odd mixture of his decidedly Icelandic name juxtaposed with a strange American English colloquialism juxtaposed with a bastardization of French he couldn’t quite wrap his mind around.  Did the hoodlums think they were calling his museum a house of hand jobs? Wasn’t habiter French for “lives”?  He guessed he could see their meaning.

He had since seen them all.  All of the derogatory terms and phrases these greenhorns with a penchant for red spray paint could conjure:

FAG

FAGGOT

FAGBANGER

QUEER

QUEERIE

QUEERBALL

QUEEN HALDOR’S MAGICAL COCKPORIUM (he did admire the effort, here)

WINK

WINKY

WANKER

COCK GOBLER

COCK HANDLER

            Etcetera, etcetera, until the whole lexicon of pornographic euphemisms ran dry.  After nearly a month of new and sometimes relatively witty slander appearing every morning, the monsters decided on a simple sentence that had been repeated each morning for the last four and a half months:

            HALDOR HANDLES COCK ALL DAY.

            There was never an exclamation point.  They never forgot to include his name.  There was never a word misspelled or altered in any way.  At some point he began to think that the miscreants were washing off the paint he applied fresh each morning, but that was impossible.  The paint was always dry before he closed up each night.  As far as he could see, the perps made a decision to repeat that phrase ad nauseum until they ran out of red paint.  

It’s as if the bastards knew this would irk him more.