List of the Lost

by Morrissey

  Prior to all of this commotion our pure-hearted and devotional track boys finally saw June loom as the deadliest month, as life caught up with fantasy (or perhaps the other way around), a gloomy coincidence that no one could have predicted. There was suddenly no sign of a forgiving Jehovah, and our superior boys were now inferior hangdogs fully absent of the divine light of reason. Noah Barbelo’s name had slipped from print as an embarrassingly timed discovery that had been inefficiently investigated and then flicked away with easy conscience. Had Noah been Naomi, perhaps the hot-pants turn-on might have sweet-toothed the press into a more aroused cruise mode, but it was rarely admitted that such off-base sex attacks could possibly befall boys such as Noah, and thus the media struggled with the language required to describe what they could have outlined with such impressive oomph and glitz had Noah been a fluffy girl. The dense and insensible Dean Isaac spun further black magic, with his carefully orchestrated retirement plans walloped across local newspapers, bearing witless bylines accompanying excited shots of Isaac infatuated with his own reflection as he wore his coat on his shoulders in cloak fashion, and waving confidently to the world beyond the lens that made flesh and then created truth, and into which the entire universe peered back from the other side – with no voice. Smiling with pork-fat contentment, heroically soaked in elitist sanctification, Isaac was ready for a new dawn – one which, many years ago, Noah Barbelo had no right to claim and no reason to expect. Might successfully impinges upon right. Although the police had been anonymously and eloquently tipped off, Noah’s name tip-toed into cautious page-twelve scrutiny minus any link to Isaac, and minus any journalistic penetration into the full cause of death, for life is too short to stretch the imagination further than necessary; boy-sex murder not worthy of the peepshow circus automatically unwound for the sexploitative girl-sex murder. The boy had lived quietly with his now-absent mother, both of them lost in the greyness of shaded side streets of no influence, no family, no useful links to the icy judiciary, all of which presented a perfect concoction for horndog Isaac and his protected pederast wish-fulfilment. Are the lowly and lonely likes of Noah ever a courtroom success? No. Did title and unflappable wealth protect Dean Isaac’s necrophilic lust from moral investigation? Well, of course. We are spared the details of precisely how Noah Barbelo died, or why whoever killed him considered the boy unfit for further sunlight. Death shifts, my little buddha, my little buddha, and how soon an old story just does not matter.

  Confused all over again, Ezra stood sealed in his teal college kit and waited for whatever was to come just to get on with the irascible business of coming.

  “Let’s tear up the track!” bounced dogtrot Dibbs, “let’s outstrip the wind!” he belched, “let’s make some knots!” the hot air hooted on, as Dibbs burst into a high-pitched yelp that only the sexually secure male might dare accept of himself … “Let’s give it the gun!” the launch went on, exhausting everyone around him, who could only glare at the boun­cing, beheaded mockery before them.

  “Dibbs?” said Nails very softly.

  “Yes, Sir!” suck-ass replied.

  “Have the common decency to die soon. Consider your friends,” said Nails, the words hitting precisely as they should. “Three’s company, four’s a crowd.”

  “OK!” Dibbs jumped back, embarrassed to be misled by over-confidence. He then visibly shrank several inches.

  Spot starter Ezra rose courageously from the starting block with a trimly sprint to second baseman Nails – a tight and shipshape acceleration, flat-out throttle of speed, with quickening cannonball blast giving a confident hand-over to third bagger Justy, who gripped the baton all ataunto, with the old glory rising like the lash of a whip at the starboard tip of a mid-storm ship losing its grip, as wide-open spikes thundered along as they ate up the track and to never look back or to give a rat’s ass … back at ’cha, back at ’cha, back at ’cha … and should I never make love again let murder and rust befall me now and let those I love abort and die … but just let me win, let me win, let me win! My legs! My legs! My life! In your face, in your face, in your face, lover do I never need as long as I have these that send me like the wind … the bullet of Justy as a hell-driver flyer with a disciplined land into Dibbs’ dry hand, and the new corner man faced the home straight with power-hitter grunts and Bunkie pluck as the bilge-free body speedballed with stirred stumps to beat the devil with scorch and sizzle and unfortunate dribble and snappy like crazy he somersaulted with pitching motion into a ferocious belly-flop tumble of a sprawled pratfall – face to the gravel, each limb slithered like snowslide subsidence. In slow motion, Ezra, Nails and Justy watched the concluding pantomime with all of its outlines now clear … and there is some suffering, after all, from which no strength can be drawn. Dibbs lay in tears on his back on the track, the baton flung somewhere towards hell, damnation and Cleveland.

  “There’s a coffin out there with your name on it,” leaned in no-mercy Nails. “I will bury you.”

  Dibbs cried louder, “People are allowed to make mistakes!”

  “People, yes, but that excludes you,” Nails spat.

  “When exactly did you die?” came Justy, leaning over the incapacitated turd. Dibbs cried louder still.

  “You are vegetable dip, you are a fucken hairball … I have nothing more to say to you. I’ll save all of my hatred for your funeral – which we shall all enjoy.” Nails could not stop himself, and therefore didn’t attempt to. Rims was soon on the spot, and, as always, he began his rag-chewing speech.

  “Such days as these only exist for people who are thankful. I am no such person. This is the lowest point of my entire life. I have wasted a full hour when I could have been somewhere else getting something uncomfortably pierced. It’s different for all of you, of course, because you can all at least plead insanity … with your faces like slipped discs, who would doubt? But some of us have good reputations, just as, as you’ve displayed, some are bagged by PMS days. Quite beyond the power of words to describe! But let me try! I have never before seen a relay team getting in the way of their own race – with only themselves on the track. No explanation is possible for this. I very suddenly have an old soul. What’s worse is … I don’t actually mind. Today we have new meaning to the word tragedy, and, I don’t quite know how to put this, but,” and then he paused an intake of deep breath in preparation for his final, deeply emphatic “goodbye”, which came with assurance, and there it was. With the bitterness of it all Rims moved quickly away from the funeral pyre, as he had done so many times, smaller and smaller as he hunched his way into the distance and into this story’s history. Our three soldiers symbolically ripped off their college singlets.

  “A-ban-don ship!” said Ezra, with bite.

  “Ske-daddle!” sighed Nails, with hate in his voice.

  Cold-bloodedly they left Dibbs sobbing with his face buried in his hands, unable to stand up from where fate had plonked him. Let it all now pass … and it shall. Free of tournament deadlines, all faith came to an end, and had always been something of a problem to begin with. Trapped, they were now free, and the team died out with a sad awareness that they would not be remembered for what they had been in those glory days of late summer afternoons when reward outstripped sacrifice and the sun shone on the young sons of smiles and sardonic doggerel, shaped into a supreme fitness design with the world at their feet (since their feet were their world). It was all done with, now – that playful time of sarcastic kicks, sunny natured treading of the pitch … teasing girls when sex comes next. Hearts may die but these bones are immortal … the striding man of satiric gait, non-timid he with all in place, as blessed as the best. More tears to be cried as all three stood at Harri’s symbolic stone, he barely settled in his grave as a forgotten saint for whom no more hope could help. Claims of protection rushed through the boys of hearty hugs … a substitute for closer affection, as yet unmastered. So easy to say ‘I love you’ when the warrior cannot respo
nd, and is now a composite of clay for mighty maggot and slightish mite.

  “I love you, maestro,” stammered Justy in that far too easy way of not quite saying much, staring at the chipped words on stone which sharpened the need for praise and regret. “I said it before and I repeat it now.” Yet the before was to he of unassailable youth, and the now was to the perished life below – surrendered to the way of all flesh and gathered to one’s fathers, yet his laughter rang on – those strong teeth and pinkish lips. How could they ever be less than what they once were? What divine creationist could be evil enough to make them less, having crafted them in the first place? Why not the joy of ugly into beauty? The porky child becomes the marvel of steaming richness. Why must decay have the final say, and who so decided? Rhapsodically the boys linked their arms around one another’s shoulders as boulders of lamenting love, so much of Harri in all of them. No claims made on the body, but the poetry of true friendship looked down on the juvenility of mannishly boyish fumblings which could only appear in so many juvenescent permutations before it all becomes so predictably cubbish and the grown man appears ungrown after all, and vulnerable and unfinished; virginal at 50, fallow at 60. Unsown, the I-ex-love-you yatter becomes a nightclub act of yesteryear gags, a bed forever too neatly made, tripped up by dated 20th Century Fox 1940s dialogue, as 25-year-olds who weren’t even born at the time when you were already sick of it all now looked over at you and smiled a nod of compassionate pity. The toil and task of avoiding non-accomplishment is no more powerful than in the sexual edges. Labor and effort can lead nowhere, dreams unconsummated, the end of an unfinished life. To die open-ended, sexually overlooked, non-consummation tittering its execution, you are discharged from pain as you close your eyes, as, like all bacteria, we die away, a falling with none to catch. Ezra, Nails and Justy felt a love for each other that prospered without the sexual, or found prosperity precisely because the sexual did not make propositions. But as their spirit forever struggles with the flesh, who is to say that their closeness was not in fact a liberating scream of the intensely sensual? Does anybody know? Can anybody control the inestimable effects of touch? Their outcome was fortunate and felt certain to last. Erotic at times, yes, but safely unsaid. Are we always waiting for life to stop? If you give someone the yes or no option, isn’t it true that they will always choose the no?

  At Ledger’s Bar the day splintered with the sudden appearance of an over-made-up Tracey, phenomenally top-heavy and modernly unfashionable. She had once found herself harnessed in Harri’s arms, and thus her dial-twisting way of talking began.

  “I don’t know how to deaden the pain,” she said to Ezra and Nails, “and I assume there isn’t a way. I pull myself together and then suddenly I’m drowning again. I’ll have a straight gin. I pull myself together and then I’m drowning again. I’ll have a straight gin. I’ve tried to pull myself together but then I find I’m drowning all over again. It isn’t fair. I’ll have a straight gin. I’ve tried to pull myself together – everyone knows that, but then I find I’m … ” suddenly it was Ezra and Nails who were drowning. “ … and even when I finally pull myself together … I’ll have a straight gin it isn’t fair.”

  On the television that blared ridiculously loudly above the bar Muhammad Ali yapped his fired soul of rascal fury at the announcement of his future marketplace boxing theatrics with Joe Frazier. Ali, a showbusiness show-off combining the expected lack of respect and the full stage-show dramatics with the illusory importance of what would be, in fact, no more than a glorified shoving match – the best promise a grown man can make to the world; how easy to kill, how queasy to kiss. There are too many secrets in nature. Singing voices are love, but a professional fight pulls in millions of dollars, whereas a similar scrap on the street ends in arrest and public humiliation and the almighty godliness of the ever-sacred cash fine to the court’s quite immoral advantage. There is no financial gain from the street-corner bust-up, and since money turns the world, the courts rake in as much of it as they can at the expense of human misfortune, hahaha. Oh, where would the established elite be without the have-nots! No trapped raccoons to fleece of their coats, and none to make the anarchic rich feel immune to argument. Meanwhile, governor Ronald Reagan flashes a crooked and frozen ice-box smile as he throws his metaphorical hat into the presidential race ring – an ideal antidote to everything now visible on the streets of America. Reagan has no time for black power, women’s rights, gay liberation, animal rights, anti-war rallies or student demonstrations. He contrasts all of the exciting changes that made America new again, and he offers old-fashioned power-politics, the type of which must always keep a profitable war on the go … everything old (including himself ) sold off like fake insurance to the all-powerful conglomerate America of Bonanza, a rich and expertly presented daily television drama where cow-rustling Ben Cartwright lives handsomely with his three sons (none of whom share one single gene, since all three are of different mothers, and, magically, all three mothers are either dead or hidden behind studio curtains). Throughout fourteen years of constant transmission, the entire cast of Bonanza wears the same outfits, unchanging with each episode, the hayseed symbolism not lost on conservative Americans who cherish unchanging times and unchangeable minds. Since the Cartwrights are wealthy upcountry landowners, it might be wondered why they feel undeserving of a second set of clothing, yet viewers are unable to puzzle at how Little Joe Cartwright’s waist-size remains the same at age 34 as it had been when he started the show at age 20. His lilac pants are never discarded, or even once removed. Deeper still, the three very adult Cartwright brothers possess a natural virility and capable masculinity in the hog-wild west yet they are childishly answerable to their father in a family duty that transcends simple respect, and instead lurches towards an almost perverted hereditary Christian bondage; and although deity Ben Cartwright had fathered three sons from three women who had usefully dissolved into tumbleweed, his three strapping sons themselves do not reproduce and almost never pair off for passionate romance. Passion, in fact, is unseen at their backwoods Ponderosa ranch, and the sexual act (clearly enjoyed by their father) does not pass on to the frontier sons, not even in the prairie dustbowl of the 1860s, where there really cannot be very much to do to ignite happiness in the average human animal. There would never be any reference to the sexual act in Bonanza, and although the four men live openly and intelligently together, no heart-to-heart or tittle-tattle prittle-prattle ever touches upon the workings of the very male bodies in which all four struggle to live, and certainly there is no man’s-country evidence of the Cartwrights being in possession of genitalia, even though every conceivable global problem befalls them at the Ponderosa ranch, causing them to do virtually anything other than discuss their own physicality (which, in itself, manifests as a ruthless punishment). As with most parents, Ben Cartwright demands that his sons be younger copies of himself, and they comply without question, for they are indeed good sons. Bonanza, though, is TV evangelism surviving well into the rabble-rousing America of Ronald Reagan, whose impish wife gazes up at him as he gives each after-dinner lecture – she with the fawnish face of a dying child who is unable to exist for herself as a totality. Laura Bush will much later adopt the same gaseous and servile soap-opera affectation when her own husband becomes America’s latest Ben Cartwright, and she, too, will proudly gaze upwards into his eyes as he delivers yet another hellfire illiterate’s public address that is almost always obsessed with killing people. Although Reagan in himself is a past event, he becomes current in the politics of 1975 because America has always feared the future and will forever seek a familiar if untrustworthy ‘type’ (with whom one at least knows where one stands) rather than seek someone who might glow or advance America’s global popularity (the purity of which is in any case not to be questioned). What is happening on the streets of America, and the stormy shouts of the new youth who demand to be allowed to be what they are and were born to be, provided Reagan with a deep commitment to opposi
ng the people, his policies as cruel as the Church. Like all world leaders, Reagan could only be confirmed by the terror he instilled in the people of his country, for this makes for the appearance of solid supervision in a society with no wish to evolve. Whilst animals in packs care for each other, feed each other, share resources and call warnings to each other, the human race thrives only on self-interest. The more targeted approach of Reagan comes directly off the set of Bonanza, and, persistently unable to remember his lines, someone in charge of history will categorize him as a ‘great communicator’ … and it really is that easy and as equally demented.

  Ezra’s shadowy face falls into Eliza’s breasts as they both curl half in yet half out of a sleeping-bag. The basement is always free of bothersome family fuss, and it is here that Ezra and Eliza are free to convey tender generosity without fear of intrusion into their lovers’ bunker. The cyclone cosiness of this underground crib, with its teen-crap depository of big-box storage and a battered and blinking portable television set as it nags and nags and nags at low volume, was at least our fledglings’ nest of snuggle and nestle, settled as they were watching the wrecked tension of the nightly news.