Pex ‘n’ Quads

…my long term health, and so I became in short order the habitué of a certain rather soigné gym. It behoves me to say a little bit about this establishment, since it is integral to much of the history to be chronicled in these pages.

- In another gym, this does not happen.

…of Nero Cesare was to be heard echoing through the vaults and halls and salons and vestibules of Pex ‘n’ Quads:

A foul early morning: grim turd-brown skies, bitter aquiferous easterlies whipping up the garbage along the Hotwells Road. Pex ‘n’ Quads a sanctuary at such a beastly hour. The quotidian: over the gangplank, through the glass doorway, into Reception. Placate the Cerberidae, exchange the obol, descend into Hades. There was comfort in the familiar rituals.

…one morning some weeks before his about-to-be-related apotheosis, crossly grunting over the squat rack in the basement of Pex ‘n’ Quads. Earphones jammed into his lugs insulated him from the external world, but did nothing to insulate the external world from the screech of boy band r&b which was inevitably his pleasure. From then until his apotheosis, I would encounter him at irregular but fairly frequent intervals, sometimes alone but…

…and contumely and spite, between the respective guardians of the cultures and memes and lares and penates of Pex ‘n’ Quads and of Quads & Pex down like fuckin’ Easton, rivalled the notorious cricket-based animosity subsisting to this day between the Old Disgrace & Bristol Sikhs, with their sacerdotal gimp vapourising in the Old Disgrace shed, and the Easton Brokeback Cowboys, who maintain since time immemorial a profane and dirty…

…the ranks of the old men eternally washing their nethers, for he now approached the grimy drawbridge separating Pex ‘n’ Quads from reality. Probably needed the money. Our eyes met then, and he stopped in front of me and said

We felt the effects in Pex ‘n’ Quads. By degrees, the moat surrounding us became genuinely a moat, in which now floated a mildewed armada of discarded stuff: frayed and curling cardboard boxes crewed by half-gnawed fragments of hen; spavined cider and lager cans; plastic three litre bottles, like the cans spavined and formerly containing cider and lager, withal buoyant; outlying: the butts of cigarettes and single-skins. And now the…

…the mezzanine/penthouse prize assizes, and also vexed at their having been sent to Coventry by the management of Pex ‘n’ Quads. The samizdat media, those fell bruiters of idle innuendo, noised abroad that Emanuel Künt had constructed a wax effigy of the White Willy, and that this sorcerer had seduced certain of the Spartacists away from the path of righteousness to a stony place or Gethsemane inhabited only by harlots…

…The roundabout at the bottom intersected the Hotwells Road, where was moored Pex ‘n’ Quads. Down there, I did espy Aeromonas Annie lurking across the way, who scoping me seemed knowingly to smirk, and then skulked off in the opposite direction into town, whilom with a cackle she flung over her shoulder a Parthian shot:-

…took my way along the pavement, still slimy from all those weeks of drench, to the portals of Pex ‘n’ Quads.

…firstly that Mr Lupine enjoyed outwardly cordial relations with many of the disgusting yobs populating the basement of Pex 'n' Quads, and was to be observed quite frequently in the company of those Alphish personages Caliban and Mr Jupiter the urolagnist, and also that marginally less Alphish personage, the fake psychopath Wanksy, who of course imitated Mr Lupine most slavishly. I cannot forbear to mention that, indeed, certain of the…