Farewell to All My Outcast Companions.
Life's not easy. There's violence given and received to contend with. The futile pursuit of cheap sexual thrills can last for years. Not only that, we must qualify in the armed forces, to make ourselves equals. A short soul should wrestle with his possible future hereafter or render his effort limp.
My life, and lives of my friends, were enough to make a man sick in his stomach for the rest of his life. Hatred meted followed by another derision, and that is suicide.
The suicide I talk of is that of my loved ones, and of my friends and companions, and of my rivals. At age forty- one and residing in the same city as where I reared, I am a small gangster with a Mafioso history. Although I say I am a small gangster, this is in reluctance. I do not actually want to see or experience violence or even threats or be reminiscent of them. I am also a Jewish landlord, living in the same house over which I preside.
Aside from music, there's not much to do. First, I wrote a piece about caves, to play on a rock piano. Then I imitated people. I don't know what it was which made me do it, likely a lust for power. The smooth smirch of saxophones and synths were too overpowering. I never recovered. I'm not sure if anyone will.
I dress in cotton, denim and nylon. I've confiscated a few drugs, back when I was a cop. Took on a missing persons job. I wore my nylon bikers’ cloaks and found the persons, living in a box in the centre of Central Park. I don't want to mention the emergency in the City of Angels, because it was too violent, murderous. Yet a gangster I am. I cannot help it. I even imitated Al Capone's stalker in a movie.
The first suicide I experienced was of a sailor in the navy. His name was Phil. In prior times I was in a boy scout unit with him for some time. This lasted from when my two brothers and I were only boys until the age when we prepared to leave home. Yes, things in our lives were becoming adventurous. I had not seen young Phil for some time. I had at first become used to catching the same bus link as him. Then as we planned for our adult lives, not having met him for about a year. I expressed to my younger sister that I missed him and would like to meet up and swap stories like in the old days. This was when she told me the news, that he had committed suicide.
But not only had he committed suicide; he had committed suicide in a submarine. That got to me, in her choice of words and in the intrinsic irony and unlikely situation it suggested. You can’t commit suicide in a submarine. Can you? And the military don’t commit suicide anyway. We have trained to only turn our big guns against others, the people in the conflict. To kill the purported enemy and then live later to tell the glory of the tale. Yet little Phil, at the age of sixteen, we would not see again. Then my sister told me of the situation in which he died. The pressure had increased, and he opened a grenade. Still to the day I have not received further information, and I do not expect to.
Was my sister trying to be witty in the irony by using the terms of abuse and cliché? That the submariners’ association has repute by those who derided it. They called it the suicide academy, or the dropouts’ navy. That Phil had not done it to himself, but that he had died in a downing ship. Was it done with valour and loyalty as he tried to achieve an impossible mission? I do not know and will not but am left remembering those words that she had used. That he did so as a volunteer and he was willing in his own demise.
There was a measure of doubt about the causes and circumstances or even the fact of Phil’s death. But not so much so when it came to the death of an art student named Arnold. Again, known to both me and my sister, although he was more a friend to her than he was of mine. He had talent at sketching and painting. He looked reminiscent of his personality. Vague, untrained, and simple. He had the type of personality that a soldier would avoid. I did not know him well.
Arnold's lasting picture was a finished pencil sketch of a dove on white paper. I congratulated him for making this image, to which he whispered a small comment. The comment he made was so vague that a psychologist could have understood but not me. Due to his strange reply I began to ask my sister questions about him, trying to find out why he talked like that. She replied that his first pursuit was for alcohol and cheap drugs. It was only the belief in him and generosity of his mother that had found him a place inside the art school. My Sister was his connection. By the end of the first college year, someone found Arnold dead from some overdose. I trusted my sister a far degree less after this.
I turned away from my family because of this. Steering away from the arts, I sought a more professional job in which I could save lives. Of course, I sought perks. To give and receive active duties. Rather than take every hard knock which an underclass status can give.
Life went on, and I travelled the world. I lived through some horrifying events. Yes, I almost died a few times myself, and staggered strangled with half a face on the dockside. Not that I survived thanks to good medicine and institutional hospitals. I survived because I am tougher than the rest.
This small pioneering nation is narrow- minded. In a mountaineering holiday I became the victim of an extortion which laid me low. It has done so with repeated legal papers served on me since. Why would good Protestants forgive a man with only half a face? They do not even know how to. The pattern this gave rise to a forced early retirement. Accompanied by a death sentence, decadence and degenerate behaviour. This has occurred for three decades now.
But I do not want to bore you with the trivial details of that and what it involved. I'll leave you with a reminder, my own sister in an electric chair. And in the face of relative poverty. Mixing with oodles of time at one’s disposal, people tend to be laconic, alcoholic and tired. I loved this part - wait for it. Addiction steps in. Followed by maudlin tales of self-abuse. Medical substance dependency is not a laugh. I see it in the lives of friends and family. Yet amplified in the warped lens of my imbalanced life, appearances changed. So that everyone around me were topping themselves. This after having only a little to do with me. Social outcasts, debris. I did become involved. I'd drink and rant and rave and par by course would ravage the naked bodies of my female consorts. This sometimes whether they were willing or not. We would cheat on each other’s partners. We'd would scream at each other and pass bitter back-handed comments like a tribe of fighting cats. Such fond memories. We'd go into reclusion to keep it all a secret. Then along came the decline of morale after their news broke. I heard that so– and- so had hung herself, or that Major so- forth had thrown himself off a bridge. Then the lost hippie solitude had taken an overdose of tablets. And this is what this story is about.
They were not meant to be within unfulfilled need and without discipline. But they became my close friends anyway. Forced to be by default, since my real team had proved themselves absent. I had not wanted them to be. Only they were so sexy. Now my close friends have committed suicide and left me standing. I am amid an empty space, feeling dumbstruck by their derision and carelessness.
Did I say that I once worked for the missing persons bureau? There are still a few open cases. Others have shut down in paper envelopes. No doubt stained by blood spills and etched by fallen syringes. The scalpels of hospital emergency wards and ambulances outworked during the random forays. Doctors can't save some emergencies, despite the relatives pleads.
I’ll go on to talk about a young man I knew called Grayson Hills. He was a tall and skinny auburn- haired dude with blue eyes and a death wish. He didn’t work in as far as having a regular job, like many others I have known. He was a grifter. Welfare provided, and he made the rest up. Keen and eager to eke out a living from insufficient payments from the nanny government. He couldn’t hold down a job if he got one. One of those many who displayed some sort of out– of- control psychic disturbance. Hearing voices and seeing visions kept him occupied. Who knows what the symptoms were when it came to that boy, only he had a death wish? Many would, if these other forces seize their minds. He preferred to live in complacency. Referral to a psychiatrist who wrote out his committal papers. All it took for the committal was a series of peremptory interviews. He used to say things to me such as, “I can’t conform because that’s what the voices are telling me.”
He believed they were spirits from the other side who had come into communication with him. Because of this, he was special and chosen by Lucifer and his dark angels. He supposed he had messages and advice imparted to him from some greater realm beyond. The first conversation I had with him revolved around his ambitions. The unseen world gave him ambitions to be in it. He revealed to me that he desired to gain the skills offered to him by unknown spirits. To gain the ability to transform matter and manipulate wills and even shape-change.
It was on a sunny Saturday, early afternoon. We were leaning on a city step when he first announced it.
“I’m a wizard adept. I have initial training in manipulating wills. I brought my presence into training through a thief. He’s a very wise man and a liar, and now that I’m in I can’t get out. Leaving his school would result in death. And that’s what I want, to be dead,” he told me.
I only left him up to have his delusions. I hadn't worked as a psychiatrist since my school years, and it wasn't my business if he wanted to die. I shrugged my shoulders and continued to breathe my cigarette smoke out. I had had an arduous morning's work scrubbing pots in someone else's kitchen.
He then said that manipulating matter was a first easy step on the road to full powers. Although it required a whole lot of energy generated and gathered. Then the same energy imparted for the spell to take place. When the subject of shape- shifting came up, I chose to state a new remark. I had read a book written by survivors of the Nazi concentration camps. It told of the presence and activity of a shape- shifter, half human and half beast. It prowled the dormitories of Auschwitz.
This thing, and there were several seen and not identified, took a physical form. Causing chaos where there was evil, marring the general efforts there. As the prisoners couldn't survive, it also confused the procedures of the Gestapo. I raged by this time, so I said it. Imagine wanting to be a wizard, couldn't he choose something more realistic?
When I told Grayson this, he remarked, “Hey, that’s heavy man, I didn’t want a lecture from a nerd. I’m here to have a rest and recover my powers after a heavy night with a lady."
"What did you do to the lady?" I asked him.
"None of your business. Mind your manners, rapist boy," he answered.
I kept silence for a minute. He became agitated.
"Hey, you’re not a Nazi, are you?” he asked. I scoffed and looked at him.
"No, I'm not a Nazi, but I’m not a holocaust denier neither. Do you see any swastikas on me? Go on, search me, I dare you. I'd turn you into a dead lemon. I’m not a voice- hearer, or in no way interested in gaining any of your occult powers."
“Don’t be such a drag bud, here have a joint, they only cost twenty dollars. It’s on me,” he exclaimed.
Once again, I told him that I wasn’t interested. There are better things I can do with my time than introduce attachment chemicals. The brain is a wonderful thing, and it is such a tragedy when it malfunctions.
Grayson avoided me around town after that. The mental health consumer circle of society has its own code. Some of the in- crowd don’t mind telling a lie, stealing, or harassing others. They'd sell any such crap and spread it around for as long as it assists them in feeling a five- minute pleasure. Or else lines their pockets with dollar notes. They don’t care what trouble their behaviour will cause in other people’s lives, if it makes them happy. And by happy here I mean gloating and avaricious. I call it rape, or some similar perversion of violence.
Grayson Hills continued to smoke pot, and he never worked. Told the people that he met that when he died, everyone would be sorry. I met him again later in a hospital acute mental ward. He repeated the same line to me, that when he killed himself, I and everyone else should feel ashamed.
Of course, being a sex and drug addict, he hung out with people who were the same kind. That was when he met Sylvia, the loose- legged woman from the Western suburbs. He had met her well before I had, and it was only misfortune which redirected my life towards mingling with them. She was a boarding- house whore, doing it for coins and wine and small stash. The clients knew her for arriving at any poor lodge. Walked into a bedroom or lounge where there could be any number of guys waiting. They'd spend their time, and no- one made any detailed introductions or justifications. She would lift her dress around her waist, part her legs in front of everybody and wait for a man to fill the space there. It was she who was Grayson’s undoing.
Being short of a place in which to live, he shacked up with her in a tiny cheap tenancy in the suburbs. The landlord was an Asian man who presented no trouble, being happy to collect rent and keep quiet. Both Sylvia and Grayson were addicts. This was his final flipping- coin and the last tripping- stone. It prompted him to live out his immature threats and fulfil the death wish he had carried for decades.
Out of necessity and proximity, Sylvia became his dealer. She'd burn him for money in every exchange. She provided him bags of herb sprayed with insecticide for thirty dollars. Claimed that it was kef. Rarely either of them would get so high on good quality, golden- grade head, that I didn't rate them. Credibility is not bought; it must be earned. I had succumbed to use it by then, and I can become so psychotic that I am beyond liar, I become honest and stupid. These were the memorable moments in their lives, what they called the ‘happy times with family’. Beats me how people get on.
It was the price of loose rolling tobacco which brought Grayson down to his knees in ruin. It was doing this to everyone in the system at the time. The government inflated the price in the knowing that it was addictive. Addicts would pay extortionist prices to keep their own supply on hand. Grayson could not afford it. The representatives of government met in private groups. They wore swastika badges and haggled prices. The councils and merchants would do as how told out of fear.
Grayson collected the fare of rent plus grocery money and little else on his benefit. But not the extra fifteen to thirty dollars it took to buy thirty- or fifty- gram pouches of smokes. The supermarkets and superettes demanded their pay for goods. Sylvia collected the rent as a tenant, before paying a smaller sum of the rest to the landlord. In this way she could afford her own supply.
Once having smoked them, the ashtray collected the remains and ends of the reefers. And it was her ashtray. Her fag ends, so her property for sale. Which she did to her poor young friend for at first twenty cents, then fifty cents, then a dollar for each roach. Each roach of used tobacco, the used filters also considered in the price haggle. It was third- handed extortion in a closed room.
It was then in desperation that Grayson took his last opportunity. One morning before dawn he went outside and climbed a tree at the suburban pavement side. He took with him a measuring stick. He wore his best clothes. At ten feet he hung himself with an extension of a light cable tied with his cloth belt. Friends he associated with have never been the same since. We look back on suicidal Grayson a lesser messiah now. As we have done for the last fifteen years since his final moot.
Have you ever met a woman who was completely beautiful yet also completely helpless? Her face and body are proportionate to her weak will and flawed insight? It was so with my friend Seraphina. The brief story I can tell you from the time we met until the time she departed is prosaic and tragic. I met her in a sanitary mental hospital. The reason for her being there and not inside a drugs detoxification ward was not stated. I assumed that it was a matter of mental health rather than positive blood test results. She had recently flown in from a foreign town. Six of her most beautiful colleagues accompanied her. All were entertainment models, and export nationals. By virtue of their care of appearance and enterprise, became the core celeb of the silver city. I met several and they were delicate and slim and graceful. For nine concurrent years their careers had flown straight upward. As a troupe they had ruled the photo shoot studios.
But fame and fortune and fast living have their downside and for them it was coke. One cannot live an immoral life without the drugs. Drugs bought and consumed at an ever- increasing rate. Elevated these creatures of narcissus during their high life. When the Law busted the ring, they all found themselves out of work. Every hotel, theatre and taxi on which they had previous relied locked them out. And so all seven of them returned to little old Oakland. Carrying the memories, marks and trauma collected from their once- skyrocketing escapades.
She hated her time in the hospital. She'd sit around screaming and shaking. All her friends would visit the ward and warn everyone there about death sentences. They described electric chairs and gallows. Every word that came from their mouths were cynical acts of self- defence. They saw the occupants of the ward presenting nefarious, and suspicious, lurking threats. They questioned why they were still alive.
She had a discharge from out a drug detoxification ward. Moving straight into a ward for the mentally disturbed, she was in a huge amount of personal defeat. It was difficult to manoeuvre one’s way into the zone of trust that is necessary for friendship. Yet manoeuvre I did, and after her violent discharge into an apartment of her own she let me visit her on her own terms. I remember the striking way in which she left the hospital. At the front doors she received a pink prescription page when she was getting into a car. Opening it, she saw what it was for. A medical attempt at providing her a substitute for cocaine. She flew into a rage of a temper, leapt at the man who had instructed her. He said for her to take the pills. She screwed and ripped the page and threw the torn pieces at his feet.
“You damn human rights abuser! Like hell I’m going to go into lobotomy for a rapist like you!” she shouted.
Her pro- lib female nurses then ushered her into the white vehicle and drove to her new apartment. She settled in without a prescription.
It was when I visited her at her rented place that I did see the lifestyle and personality that she lived. She had informed me in advance that she was lesbian and had never had sex with a man. We cuddled anyway. She always complained at the amorous advances made when we reclined. Straights must accept this sometimes, when they shack up with a person. If she isn’t interested in their body, then they cannot have their own way. This I lived with for the brief time I was her friend. Still there was something else I became aware of in her personality. I helped her with it, but it defeated her. She confessed during our conversations that she was experiencing hallucinations. That they were persistent and tormenting. She heard voices of entire conversations from the past. She imagined and sensed threatening entities at the apartment's windows and doors. She said they were abnormal, and I agreed.
Friends who also visited and discussed this agreed that it was abnormal, and a problem. They must deal with it for the sakes of the lady. She went back to the drug de- toxin ward and started using a prescription. When she moved back home, I saw the effects and the relief that the new pills had on her mind. She would collapse with a sigh and sleep all day. The vampires receded.
She then had a strategy which would help her with the hallucinations and fears that they caused. Given this, she now wanted to be alone. Not based on necessary conversation or drinks or hugs, so no necessity for company. I stopped visiting her and lived in my own house rented in the poor suburbs. Two weeks passed. I put her problems out of my mind and busied myself with study and work.
Then I received a call from a friend of hers from in the central city. She told me that her demons had defeated her. She had hung herself off a door lintel during a conflict with something. It spilled blood over the walls and floor.
I was silent after the call. I remained silent on it for two days. Then I blamed it on myself. I blamed it on the male guards at the asylum. I blamed it on her drug dealers. I blamed it on her. I had no - one to blame it on.
Her life and problems were over in a rash of violence. All the trust had ended. Adult persons with their insights were no longer able to call or visit Seraphina. The responsibility to talk about the weather broke. I was not taken to the funeral service by her friends or family. I heard that it was a quiet and regretful service at a rural church on native land northward of the city area. I remember standing by my front gate and fence on the day of the funeral. For two hours I waited for a ride to take me out of there, like a little boy waits for his mother to come home.
As powerful and mysterious as the violent death of Seraphina was Maria's death. Maria Grieves was self- obsessed and even parasitic in her staged pity. While the first lady had died unseen by others, the second lady that year chose a place where others would find her. Once darkness had lifted, her body revealed by daylight. She was another dreamer reliant on therapy. Although she had different tastes and levels of ability than the first.
She idolized the hysterical age of rock in the swinging Sixties. In particular, the three characters of Hendrix, Morrison and Joplin. She believed she knew everything about them, their lives and personalities and deaths. She had inherited this curiosity from her hippie mother. By the time Maria entered her adulthood years, her mom abandoned her to her own dogmatic devices. She would lecture me in our lounge time. The peccadilloes of Hendrix and the shamanism of Morrison and lesions of Joplin. She's claim she had special knowledge of them all. She analysed hypodermic lesions in their multitude.
I listened for the light entertainment and trivia value contained in her speeches. I'd laugh, only half- hearted, because the subject is not my favourite. She'd respond to my lack of commitment in the conversations by firing off sets of questions. Questions about sexuality and war and peace in that decade and condemn me for my vague replies. It was very important to her that everyone within earshot knew that she was an expert. Our friendship began with a lot of spare time.
There were hours poring over hardback books on the lives of the three great musicians. Meanwhile she would drink her sweetened tea and hide her medication in the hem line of her pyjamas. The mentally subduing medication was not psychedelic enough for her purposes. So, she had no immediate use for it. Instead, she invented a final use for it. While the years of her therapy passed in quiet courtyards. She gathered a great concealed stash of assorted tablets. They were issue of the jaded nurses and disillusioned doctors of the jail houses.
Seeing amusement in her lazy clumsy ways, I pursued her friendship. We received encouragement in this from another woman. Her name was Susan. During a Guy Fawkes party we attended, she exhorted us. She said to extend our friendship to companionship.
“You’re into each other. We’ve noticed. The Staff have noticed also, and they don’t mind. Why don’t you go for each other? That’s what these parties are for, so people can slink away before the final bed call. Take her home, we know that you both want to,” Susan said.
So instead of my usual self- conscious grin and offers of further visits, I took Maria by my arm. I held her around her waist and led her out of the compound and back to my place. That night we walked through the imitation war zone of October the thirty- first. It was full of the drifting coloured gunpowder smoke of ten thousand fireworks.
‘Like Vietnam,’ I said to her. She smirked.
We talked of the marines as we walked, and she began reciting a prayer. She would do that, recite prayers as she walked along the suburban pavement. Such as the Anglican Hail Mary and the more creative prayer for the damned.
We passed the ‘top cat’ liquor outlet. On another day we swam at the beach in full tide. On another day she went missing, and her house manager would call me searching for her. Maria was a slim slender lady and as tall as I was. She had lips like a rock star. They were wide- mouthed juju tongue lips. Although she was as light as a stick and went missing frequent. She'd give herself to ranting and raving about anything anti- establishment. Repeat her speeches. Alter them in the saying until they became semi- religious chants. Which drove me crazy, but there was no changing her.
It was her creative approach which I found so frustrating. Such as her reference to the stainless- steel toilet in a cell as a transsexual shunt machine. Or our combined laughter. We laughed about how impossible it was to escape the neighbourhood scroungers. The neighbourhood was full of scroungers.
These people would lie around on the grass. To wait outside poor houses and request cigarettes. Even though nobody had any spare. They'd call their days of begging ‘hard work’. I told her I loved her and threw my arms over her shoulders when we were in the harbour up to our necks in water. The staff constant called looking for her when she was absent at every curfew for anything at the villa. It was a fun, drunken, semi- naked summer.
Until the night she went missing for keeps. Parks and complex alleys covered the local area where we lived, in and out of the street plan. I didn’t know where she was. They didn’t know, and it was only later when her whereabouts became known. The cold dew was falling in the pre - dawn morning mist and it was cold.
She knew people at numbers of addresses around the area, but she chose to settle her body and spirit on my lawn. She had purchased a forty- ounce bottle of hard Vodka from her friends at the liquor shop. Carried away three bags full of mood- and mind- altering pills from the therapeutic house. These are what she had collected in secret throughout the years she was a hostage held by the system. They had stuffed them into the cheap crinkly plastic grocery bags. The kind which every supermarket dispensed to their customers. I didn’t see the pills because she had eaten them all. Although they must have been a right multi- colour collection. Given the variety of hues the chemicals take on in production. From fancy pink of three tones. Through bright and dull blue, to crimson and purple and greens. Of course, the white ones which came in graduating sizes. She may have even thrown into the mix a choice assortment of the herbal variety. That would have added skullcap valerian and nightshade to her lucky dip. I awoke that night to hear her weak cries for help coming from where she lay on the lawn. By that time, she was well inebriated and tranquilized. I called an ambulance and told them the address, but they refused to arrive. I remember standing over her in my dressing gown and saying, ‘Hell, Maria'. I felt how limp to the hand her neck and arms were in the last stages of her asphyxiation. Finally, under the early light of the sun, a St. Johns doctor arrived. He declared her to be dead and stated that he would be back with a police officer. I didn't want a label and ignorance. I'd have taken blame and abuse and treatment as an excuse. I had no patience for that arrangement. I did not leave her body where it was. Picking her up, I tried both cupboards in the house for resting places. I then decided to replace her before rush hour traffic somewhere else. Loading it into my mini car, I drove at top pace to a blind bend in a no-exit road and threw it out where it stayed on the gravel. I took to the highway after that and ended up at a lagoon or rock garden on farmland still within sight of the big smoke. To this day people want to know what situation happened when Maria died.
The sisters of the poor of the church granted her a funeral. This is where she would help in the days when she was alive. I shut up my mouth and listened. It was a large crowd.
During all these ends of the line events in this simple town, I knew another man. As if the losses before narrated would not have been enough for a man to lose his patience. Among the poor and disturbed, this one man’s life and attitude could be an award winner. He had obstinacy and self- centeredness. He befriended me when I was serving a sentence in a live- in community of adults. This was following my legal self- defence after I had been the victim of extortion.
He was a quick talker, this Locke, and the first to offer a political viewpoint. I had to share a room with him. It turned out that he had worked and lived in Sydney and travelled through India and gone mad in the process. By ‘gone mad,’ I mean that he had served a maudlin addiction to heroin for ten years.
All this combined with a low intelligence in conversation. He had bullish persistence in serving his own needs first and others last. In this he was a character of the first order. "Duncan," he would say to me in conversation…, "a man with your limited life experience shouldn’t contradict me."
I would reply that my life experience was not limited. That I had been around the world numbers of times and across borders which he could only dream of. This prompted his long and boring speeches about conning. He had traded false gems in India. The simple existence of the villagers in the Rajasthan desert where he journeyed.
He followed that with an attempt to crush his perceived opponent in debate. By reminding them that they were coming from a very poor and under- resourced social class. With ignorant world outlooks and a low held set of ambitions. Every one of his puts- down delivered like a propaganda statement. As he spoke, as if he was imitating some great historical persons or villains such as Lenin or Hitler.
It was impossible to get a word past him when he launched out on his quasi- political diatribes. Designed with the purpose of gaining his own way. Because he would not listen and became angry when challenged. He was a genuine full- fledged maniac of a megalomaniac persuasion. One of the many that defeated working class bigots became.
Locke and I used each other for seven years. Until he chose his demise, like all the rest of those futile early leavers did. When their intentions and efforts are not measurable with reality. He told me that he and no- one else he knew believed my stories of the world. That they were a symptom of mental illness. This was him. Just if he defeated everybody around him. Drag them down in morale and intellect. Do it by his nuance and lecture. Then they're satisfied. His bullish ego demanded a feeling of the power of dominance over those around him, no matter who they were. He bored my fundaments.
His charm lay with the fact that like all dictators, he was practical and convincing. He turned this persuasion onto all those he met. If he did not get his way with them, he looked to someone else for advantage. This trait humoured me, and I decided to take some time with him.
We fell into the habit of drinking together in pubs and cafes. We dwelt alongside each other at close quarters in more than three apartments. Rowdy over our seven- year frame of time. Our stories which we swapped were entertaining. To not only us, but whomsoever it was that overheard them. We talked of poverty, about drugs. Mysticism and its useless derivatives, travel losses and successes. Crimes and the history of law, even space travel. From all these themes we derived unusual and surprising theories. We'd visit the public exclaiming such absurdities as ‘War! Prepare yourselves for the Holy Armageddon!’ or, ‘There is no escape from masturbation! Tie the bugger up!’ To console younger people out of their confusion. We'd reassure them that, contrary to popular image, even octogenarians pass flatus. Tell the local shopping trolley pushing bag man that he should get a sickness benefit. We smoked anywhere and didn’t care and would argue right down to our last whiskey.
If the cheap local wine tasted bland, we would find a blend that suited our palettes. To drink this until it made us sick. Our women companions found us fun for their lifestyles. So, we used them to pay the rent. We survived, like washed up servicemen left behind. While all their countrymen had long since passed into obscurity. As a pair of irreverent and tenacious bohemians. At days end, when all others had retired, we raved on together until the last lights had switched off. We kept up waiting in vigil for the next first glimmer of hope to shine. Seen from the outskirt of an estranged and passionless civilization.
His days of taking empathy at dance parties had worn him into his devil- may- care attitude. From these times he had developed his very own belief, and it was the belief in ‘the universal mind’. I couldn’t explain this with full accuracy, since he is nowhere now to give his explanation.
It seemed to revolve around synchronicity and one psychic belief. To influence people amongst disparate locations. Necessary spontaneity of action. Suspension of disbelief requiring, this to make magic work between persons. Although he would shoot me down in flames for this explanation. He accused me of plagiarism and obscurity for giving it. An intention originated from owning this his universal mind. It was to hold the ‘One world, one party’ event. During this everyone could live their lives in a day as he had. He was proud that he had lived his life in a day.
I could never forgive him, even over his dead body, for bribing me. I had relinquished my vinyl album collection. This was a prize possession of mine. Its musical variation was wide, and its items numbered over a thousand. I'd gathered them throughout my teenage years at second- hand traders and thrift shops. My ranges to collect had scattered far and wide. There were enough new retail purchases to make it look worthwhile. It was also a family heirloom between me and my siblings. I derived from its presence a sense of identity and place in class and time. In short, it was world- famous. He demanded that he buy the lot for a twenty- cent piece. And after that, throw it away.
My scoffs and railings prompted his death threats. I got some distinct feelings from him. Given his night stalks and nefarious connections, that he would act on them. I took the boxes of rare and postmodern cultural artefacts down to the main pawn vendor. For rock, and I left them at the door. I have looked back many times since. It was the world's fault and the world's business, and so it could have them.
Locke treated this situation at the end of it as another reason to powder his nose. He gloated at his own reflection in the mirror above the pub mantel piece, and the death threats ceased. He had had his own way of one- up Manship on a rival. His bragging became quiet.
His use of drugs did not stop despite rehab. He worked also at the city drug information outlet and needle exchange. I did the occasional support shift there with him. He thought that narcotics could show users astral insight. That the narcotics user, if taken as a case subject, has had mental and spiritual worlds revealed. To him and explored in progress as a result of their transformed consciousness. He mentioned to me once that they, if smart enough, could find irrefutable proof of other worlds. Worlds within worlds and aspects of this one. Which none but another likeminded narcotics addict could define. I thought that this was only unfortunate and nefarious, locked my door and bought a shotgun. My tolerance of the mentalist was decreasing.
I know that all these aspects of his life and personality are far - fetched and thin spread. The thing that bound them all together in a cohesive whole, like eggs in the baking of a cake, was that he was a Catholic. No matter how much he would screw up and turn people against him, he could go back to the family. The parish absolved his sins and renewed his assertations weekly.
He exploited this class, or else he lived in a learned comfort zone in which he took it for granted. Although he used the religion, he had no religious feelings themselves. During his most laconic phases when lying in bed smoking on a cigarette, he'd stare at the ceiling. While muttering, "I'm going to kill that bastard."
I would approach him and sit on the edge of the bed. He would talk of the serial child abuses that he suffered at the hands of the private school clergy when he was a boy. He recalled stories of homosexual paedophile teachers. Who had first told him of the fear of hell? Then knocked him unconscious and raped him and stole all his pocket money for alms for the church. One of these monsters made him eat dog poop. He never recovered and was glad to leave the country when he was a young adult. He regretted ever having to come back to it.
He spent years wondering about the futility of phrases such as the ‘love of Christ’. So, he derived his hypotheses of the universal mind instead. Once, when he was raving at the inanimate ceiling above his bed, he told me something. On the previous night he had whipped a child. I never knew whether this was him excursing into painful imaginings and feelings. Or whether he had whipped a child.
I never found out either. Because when he was at the age of thirty- nine, something happened. In the year nineteen- ninety- nine, he became involved with someone else. In a series of conversations with a flying priest from the arch diocese. The outcomes of their meetings were that he let Christ into his heart. He was water baptized. Then he walked to the section of pavement above the middle span of Merton Bridge. He threw himself off its two hundred and twenty– five- meter height.
The same man from the Vatican administrated his funeral rites. He danced across the pulpit area of the chapel in front of Locke’s shocked friends and family. He referred to him as a child. I had heard from the victim’s girlfriend about his body. A piece of equipment which ambulances keep, a large pallet knife, had had to scrape him off the highway. After its impact on the ground, traffic had already run him over. Surgery abandoned, and the life support system switched off. The wonder of something occurs. If one of his old paedophile attackers had been there to see the bloody mess on the emergency ward slab. Whether he would have taken his last opportunity and rape it. He never made it to his milestone age of forty, so he had never broken his oaths. To begin to learn life’s' metaphysical lessons in practice. It ended as all simple theorizing for Locke. His One World, One Party must continue without him. Whether it had happened during his lifespan or not.
Confusion runs at a high rate for victims of childhood attack. I had never met a man more confused than Gregory Lions. He would talk with a stammering and stuttering pronunciation. This was frustrating to listen to. Every conversation with him broke down into sessions of translation and pauses. He would express was a series of broken vowels and consonants. such as, "if...it...I...I... if…it,” if he would be saying, “Hello, how are you?” We would not get anywhere. We'd resign to sit down in the lounge and spin our eyes and smoke cigarettes.
Then he would get frustrated at the lack of understanding between us. Start threatening. Twice he locked himself into his room. He used a series of screw- on padlocks and roller lock latches. He did this is at every house he lived in. He refused to come out for days on end. He would not make a noise, and he was already a difficult person. We became worried about what he was doing behind the doors. We rapped on the doors and windows with our knuckles and demanded that he show himself and speak. With this tension building and with no explanation given. Gregory would sudden unlock himself.
He'd stand before the housemate and say,” You’re a dead man”. He attacked them directly with his head, knocking into the other man’s forehead. He'd knock them to the floor and beat him and kick him while yelling threats and curses. The assailed man had to wrestle himself free and call the police and have Gregory removed. He was later challenged for an explanation. We petitioned an apology for his behaviour. He blamed it all on his victims and dismissed every correct accusation as ‘shit’.
It turned out that he was delusional and obsessed about a woman whom he once knew. This lady, who was by account quite pretty, and with whom he had been romantic in an encounter when sixteen. Though she had decided a long time ago that she did not want anything to do with him anymore and had cut contact with him. For all the years since this separation, he let his thoughts dwell on her. Though they never spoke again he made a goal. To win her once again into his life, this the one sole object of his romantic intentions.
The fact that no - one knew her whereabouts thwarted this aim. Again, made ludicrous by the way that nobody whom he had known since had even met her. He would set out on illusory excursions around the country to meet her. With rendezvous points all made up in his mind, from sightings of newspaper clippings. The personal columns were of primary interest. He and his father believed that she wrote to him in them. All these reports were anonymous and unconfirmed. Yet his obsession affirmed them as the real direct re - invitation from Carolyn to him. They weren’t, and we all knew it. We lambasted the poor fool about how his ideas were not realistic, and how his efforts were a waste of time.
“Get another one, someone else who cares about you,” we would say. But he wanted only her.
His adamant belief that she was the only one for him caused him to keep the same mind. Convinced that she had been dropping hints to him since he had known her, he withered. We all gave up consoling him, since he didn’t realize and because he couldn’t change. Of course, we also said that she had never existed in the first place. He retorted that we had hidden her from him. He demanded that we drop off the bounty on her return. We laughed. He threatened and stammered. This situation continued unchanged for over a decade. He never gave up. We despaired of him.
His evasiveness around the subject of the woman matched an affect. This his avoidance of physical proximity. You see, he had a motorbike. He would ride his machine all around the country. Turn up here as transient as the rains blown by the wind. When he arrived at our addresses, explanations of recent whereabouts were not given. He'd be gone again within fifteen minutes. Sometimes the visits were briefer than that. Consist of a masked man spinning a Bonneville in our driveway and then again gone.
He liked the wildernesses and he lived in parks and farms when not holed up someplace in the city. I felt relieved when I saw how much he had relaxed in the three years he lived on a farm. Assessed by his failure at romance combined with his rural environs, he earned a nickname. It was sheep- shaggier. We'd ask him how his girlfriend flossy was.
The general air of inertia about him was forgivable, though. This was in how well - read and understanding he was in academia. Even though his delving into philosophy betrayed him in the end, it was one of his stronger points. He was a follower of the world’s great writers and mathematicians. After studying, he would give away copies of the books. Books such as The Age of Reason by Jean- Paul Sartre and the review of chaos theory. But he reasoned himself out of existence until there was no point in living. He felt that this was so in a life which received no satisfaction. Nor for his ego, which was not flattered in as much as it thought it deserved. Striving to gain significance failed him. He didn't follow the right methods to gain that.
Instead of absolving personal identity within the world, he would seek an identity. He'd try to highlight it and define it alone. Like a self- referential software code. To define the universe as an expression of itself. His efforts ran short of realizing satisfaction. The world cannot recognize those who define the world as an expression of themselves. So, he was alone in his vain quests for references and permanence.
I thought that I would have to leave him be for some time. Until he was ready to see that essential contradiction in that the universe does not suit our needs. That we must serve our own needs ourselves and fit in with the universe and its impartiality. My avoidance was well served. Then the morning I got the call from a friend which severed contact from the man. He had hung himself from a projecting object in the Catford creek parkland. This was a place where he had liked to visit. Would take all day swimming and drinking in the misty shade beneath the forest trees there. It is a place that has been spoilt by the late existence of a sanatorium. the grounds of which encompassed the river area there.
At the end of the creek run is a stand of haunted trees. The feelings people get when walking through that forest have not lifted. Even by the ribbon and lifting ceremonies given it by concerned white witches. This is where he did it one morning before sun- up. It can envision that the spirit of the old asylum bewitched him into taking his life for it. Some joggers discovered his body at eight in the morning on the way past. The newspaper next day reported an army of policemen. It investigated the death of an endangered person. The hanging had brought the neighbouring motorway traffic to a standstill.
How could he have operated at the level at which he did? Considering he suffered from a sensory confusion. Sounds would prompt in him great flashes of light in his vision. Whether this was part of the reason why he felt so insignificant. It is of no matter now. My girlfriend and I stood over the body when it lay in state. We talked about how it was the first time we had seen him when he wasn’t trying to do or to get anything.
Even though I had said before the funeral that I would read a poem in his memory during the service, I didn’t. As soon as I got to the church the sight of its white walls and silent architecture lulled me. I fell into an apathetic silence. This feeling of temporary obscurity continued at the reception. I stood and drank and stared while listening and talking to the jokes and stories.
You might think that I’m a corrupt cop during these charades of death. The truth is that all the time while these persons were knocking themselves off, I was not an assistant. My rights to keep the peace rescinded following events after the American riots. I was not an uninvolved bystander in their lives, though. I involved and committed my time to their interests throughout. From the times when I had first met them and to the time when they left me, and I could not say goodbye.
This brings me to the last and latest failure, the lovers’ tryst. Sure, they had happened before, and I have come to accept that it is a common scenario in my life which is going to repeat. But I am not happy with the implications of this last one. It was between Deidre, Carla, Malcolm and me.
I find an intangible quality to cheating and hedonism. After people drink to excess, they argue. Or when they have made love in great quantities, they can make comments. There extends a meaning, wherein the doing of it was not satisfying. We want to drink, and we want to have sex, but the wanting of that is more tantalizing than the action itself.
After the party has finished, there comes for us a set of tasks. A whole lot of cleaning and covering over and recovery and repair. Until this makes the party not worthwhile. And in pursuit of perfection, we want another one, and we want to do it again, because it was not right the first time. In so results the addiction.
Many people live their lives for years over in this condition. They are always striving for the same useless high, pleasant feelings. Yet always living to regret it afterwards.
I am uncertain whom between the two men Malcolm or I was the first to make love to Deidre. But I do know that I was the second man to have made love to Carla, after Malcolm. The sex was almost satisfying, and we wanted more. The alcoholic fuel was potent, and we wanted more.
The secrets were essential, and we needed to keep them. We lived in each other’s houses. We were so close to each other that you could have swept us beneath the doormats. We could have been left there without a notice. We cohabitated, and no- one wanted to say. Then both men sent each woman home, and the questions started flying.
I remember that Malcolm said he cared for Carla. I also remember apologizing without admitting anything of a sexual nature. And I remember that Deidre called me and told me of how Carla made the same accusation. This, that lovers had coupled between Deidre and Malcolm. And then Malcolm took the dark pre- dawn opportunity of a stranger's discovery. He hanged breathless from a tree on the same street on which he and Deidre lived.
Was it the junk, Malcolm that made you do it? Or are you telling me that I had won the argument? I will not know, but one thing is sure, I am confused and nonplussed. It was only a bit of sex, man, and they are only a few drugs. In an ideal world, Carla could whisper this to you in her sleep now.
I can talk to Deidre. I cannot call the other woman. She’s hooked up now with crazy Stanley. He's the man who claims that he tried to save mad Gregory’s life before his suicide. This was after we had all given up. The same man who is many connections for drugs, the abusive names for which are so many that I will not begin to list them. It is beyond my control.
I only picked up a gun at the army base when I was a young enthusiastic and naïve young man. I could run for miles and yearn for honour and glory and badges. The same badges now rescinded and passed and are no longer mine to wield.
I survived, reeling from the shock and numbed from the pain. Two decades of it, in which this pattern of loss and betrayal had become predictable. I had learned to trust a man or a woman. I had cast much security of dismissing doubts over their trustworthiness. I extended help toward them and grew personal knowledge of character. If he or she had problems which were bigger than what my limited resources could help, I tolerated that. I stopped dealing with their problems. What more can a person do than to know the other and accept their faults? I was not one whole team of forensic sleuths or therapeutic tracers. I am not prepared to give my life to save the whole world.
Still, that last quality seems to be the one which all these suicides were demanding. That I die for them in so helping them. They seemed to have been saying to me, "Okay, so you’re a competent man. You are here to give me things. Dedicate your life and all its wits beyond even your own understanding. Dedicate them to the effort of saving me, because I am going to kill myself. Now prevent that."
"And whatever simple things you have to offer me in the saving will not be enough. This is because I have decided, so try harder and give me more in the saving of me while I act out on my decision. What would be even better than that, undo and rewrite my past. Give me a new creation as if you were the Creator. I know it is in your power. You can and must, since you smiled at me the other day as we were strangers on the street."
I mean, damn you all, your un- dead people who invented something which destroyed itself. In the same iota moment at which it enacted itself. And that is the superhuman requests that I received from this score of people. They entrusted me and won that trust then betrayed everything which they had gained. They left me and all those others who knew them without a chance of replying or correcting anything. It wasn’t realistic or kind and places a disfigured mask over the benign face of anyone living from day to day.
