Part 2 - 2.4

2.4

Vern Field and her audacious love of god and desire for purity was no match for my cousin Trevor’s insistence. My insistence that I had loved her at first sight and had seen her first seemed only to spur Trevor's interest. Vern was fascinated by his bad boyness, this is how we began our long telephone calls, she would phone me to find out about Trevor, but the calls would go on, for hours, we talked about everything, I read to her from my latest literary discoveries, there was no end to my want. Even when Trevor and Vern started going out, the phone calls continued, Trevor didn’t like me speaking to his girlfriend all the time, I couldn’t help myself, our phone calls and meetings became more and more clandestine, fleeting. Vern had a friend at youth group called Lauren, I took to phoning Lauren, to talk about Vern, in a slow weaning, a musical chairs that would I would follow the rest of my life, my affections began to shift. There was something in Vern’s slow undoing by Trevor, his confessions of how far they had gone, me talking to her, her hinting at how far, me knowing, that became sordid and somehow deeply satisfying. “I” would never have treated her this way, “I” was good, Trevor bad, Vern was slowly being taken over by an evil force, she became less attractive. And she pitied me, tried desperately to find someone else for me to pour my nascent love out onto, she had a friend, whose name I do not remember, that she pushed me toward, in my rebellion my embryonic hatred of her purity, her Christianity and its easy corruption, I found myself latching onto Lauren, Vern pitied me more. I stopped finding, excuses to go around, “Vern is going to teach me piano” or guitar or whatever, and started lusting after Lauren. But as the relationship shifted, I needed a new confidant and I found it in Fiona, the musical chairs shifted, Vern lost her seat.

And then I learnt that Vern was going to move to New Zealand. Lots of families were moving away, I never grasped the reason then. Somehow, I got real desperate, I needed affirmation, I began to discover, then, perhaps 15 by now, already sneaking out to nightclubs, trying to buy favor with the cooler boys, my ability to slowly coerce. 15 years later, the raw power of this ability was to render me impotent, but then I became fascinated with the slow torture of Vern. Of turning her on to her wrongs, to (before she left) bringing her to full Christian confusion. The details are scanty in my head, but after she had admitted to me that she had “done it” with Trevor, that it hadn’t been that nice, I turned the screws, phone calls and then bouts of ignoring her. Quoting the bible and telling her that Jesus would forgive her if she repented and left Trevor.

One night, two nights before she left, we went to a movie, probably “Young Sherlock Holmes” or some such derivative speilbergian crap that I was into then, and afterwards while we waited for her parents to pick her up, I twisted, she broke, we kissed, she cried, confused, she said some things that she probably didn’t mean, but they were enough. I was vindicated, I had conquered. The next day Trevor phoned me, he didn’t understand why his girlfriend was refusing to see him before she left. I felt that power keenly, that memory is very clear. Sitting on the wooden phone bench in the cool dark afternoon passage at my childhood home, alone, I put down the phone and did not know whether to laugh or cry, but none came naturally, just a feeling of being stunned of not fully knowing what I had been a part of, yet somehow knowing, in the core of me, that I had won something, that I no longer needed to fight for her.

Her letters from New Zealand, I replied to for a while, but her acquiesion to Christ and the Church the moment she got there, her constant chiding that I give my heart to Jesus, (Oh since then how many times I’ve recited the sinners payer, take me sweet Jesus, with fingers crossed). Well, I no longer needed to pretend for Vern. I had other things to concentrate on, she just inspired boredom. At Youth group I needed for them to believe in my commitment to the Lord, by then I had another purpose for them growing in my mind and I needed Jesus to be my patsy. I wanted to be popular. Like my sister was popular, I wanted to be invited to the nightclubs, not sneak my way in. And with my record collections, my subconscious machinations began.

3.3

Let me paint a picture with a thousand words. Count them. I grew up in a really big house. In part of my suburb that wasn’t considered rich. I didn’t have a lot of pocket money, but my parents indulged every whim. From guitars to BMX’s to film playback toys and view masters. Surrounded by bits of antique bric a braq from various great grand this or that’s. The subtle insinuations of lost honour and a huge lounge with a marble fireplace. Domestic staff and a top lawn a front lawn, a back lawn, a bottom lawn, a swimming pool, a greenhouse, a giant avocado tree and a vegetable garden/orchard, a shed, servants quarters, a separate TV room for my sister and I, my parents TV room had it’s own bar. As well as the liquor cabinet in the formal lounge. Yet apart from having to climb the avo tree to pick the fruit to then go and give away to the neighbors, I really only have, as memories or my parents, my mother driving me to school, my father taking me to his building sites and telling me how one day all this would be mine and together we would beat the competition, that is, his dad’s building company. They gave me complete freedom. Unabandoned freedom. Or more like abandoned freedom. To roam the nature reserve, the other kids houses. All that. But ours was the biggest on the block. At school I had no status, in the neighborhood, I did. Every evening, even though the TV in our TV room was bigger me and my sister would sit in the bar/TV room with my parents, I would watch the TV I wanted and every ad break pour my dad another drink. When he fell asleep, my mom would send us upstairs to the second floor to watch TV, while she smuggled him to their mauve bedroom. The only time I ever watched TV on my own upstairs was Saturday nights when my sister was out with her boyfriends. I’d shut the concertina Formica door at the top of the stairs and masturbate to the Solid Gold Dancers. Dizzy from the experience, knowing it was about the time my mom was shuffling my dad to bed, I’d put on Depeche Mode’s Broken frame or Duran’s Seven and the Ragged Tiger and dress in my sister’s underwear. Sometimes if my sister was getting home late, I’d sneak out into the suburban roads dressed in her training bra and panties, and spill my seed in various neighbor’s driveways. In one driveway in particular, as a voodoo charm to make the girl who lived their desire me. Not love me. I wanted raw sexual lust. It was an escape from all the other shit I had going on with girls. At home I had all the toys, all the privacy, all the power. At school, in Standard Six, I was a chubby nerd. I had chubby nerd friends and I desperately wanted to be cool, like my sister was cool. And all the cool kids had the best record collections, snuck out to discos. So I wanted that, so I always chose 2 records every time I went to Moola’s, one for me and one to impress them.

In Standard Seven, a church youth group regular, slipped from 6A to 7D because I chose art over Latin, I met Guy D. who introduced me to the coolest kids, Warren H. and Andrew G. The same Andrew who had slapped me for saying spastic 2 years earlier. It was my chance to become cool. I tried to figure out how to deliver. And the church youth group provided the perfect cover, as was to become pattern, all the precursors were becoming beacons and the pieces begun to slip into place.

Bugger, only 640 words, I told you I’d lie. But how about I make it up to you later?

1.3

“If your treat a man as he is, then he will be as he is, If you treat a man as he could be, he will become what could be.”- Goethe

Let’s start here, I am a charity case, I survive through the kindness of family and strangers (and a mysterious other force, call it third) . The dancing monkey at the cocktail party, I am bought out to show off other people’s kindness. I wouldn’t survive if it weren’t for X. Y has helped me so much. I’m so grateful, for the cheap rent, the food, the money I have to pay back. And yes I pay for all these things by being the dancing monkey, I constantly have to relive my downfalls, and the only way to do this is to quickly highlight, but never linger on my successes. It is perverse. To constantly remind me and place me constantly in the context of someone who used to live on the street in a cardboard box. I am no longer that person, no more than I am still the child who sought to impress with an extensive record collection. But with words I can be that and words travel, words have power, words shape other people’s perceptions of you. And what are we, if we exist in this world of people, other than the sum total of other people’s perceptions. Even if you are your own man, it is because you are perceived thus, the only option other, is solitude, divorce form the world. When I strike my hand upon a surface, I feel the material weight of my hand and the surface, I am therefore of this world and will therefore experience this world. This has always been my philosophy.

I always thought 10 months of no sleep would be the price, not chubbiness, bugger. I sit here. Rid of the desire. Feeling healthy in mind, but feeling the price I have paid in my body, and now this, chubbiness, jeans so tight as to cause striations on my hip skin. Enough of me. I will now try and bind your life to mine with music.