‘Now that man, the driver, he jes turn aroun’ and laughs and says, “Hey, so what?” an’ walks off. Now wouldn’t you want that man to go to heyall? Wouldn’t you want that man to die an’ go to heyall?’
By now, although the blessing up front is still continuing, a gang of Christians has left the tent to watch this debate.
‘I might,’ I say, ‘but I’d try to find some forgiveness, and I’m not even God. You’d think if God was in control of all this, he’d know what made that man that way. In fact he would have made him that way, and so he’d be able to understand him and forgive him.’
‘Well, but thar, that’s my point. If that man, before he die, if that man gets saved, if he accepts the Lord Jesus Christ as his saviour, he can go to heaven.’
‘I see, but a guy who did good things all his life, never got involved in any of this car crash and murder stuff, that man won’t go to heaven unless he asks?’
‘That’s right. You see the Lord, he puts out his hand to all of us. It’s like a drowning man. All we gotta do is ask and he’ll reach out and he’ll admit us to the Kingdom of Heaven.’
‘But if we don’t ask, we’re damned to eternal hell?’
‘That’s right.’
‘Even if we’ve been good all our lives?’
Out comes the Bible again and it’s back to the original passage, but this time I’m not taking it. I’ve got a little parable of my own.
‘Okay, so try this,’ I say. ‘I’m on the bank of a river and this guy comes struggling up and he’s drowning and he reaches out for me and says, “Help me out! I’m drowning!” and I say to him, “Only if you ask nicely.” You don’t think maybe that’s a little childish at best? I mean what kind of behaviour is that?’
Well, now everyone’s weighing in and pretty soon I’m swamped in Bible quotes and tales of personal redemption, guys who drank but don’t anymore, guys who beat their wives with pool cues and quit—‘The power of the Lord’—and then there’s Leland, a tiny figure among these converted ex-brutes, and soon I’m into capital punishment with ‘So how can you be into capital punishment when you’ve got the “Thou Shalt Not Kill?” thing in there?’ which gets a “Ours is a warlike God,” and I’m dodging this way and that to avoid biblical passages flung at me from all angles and I’m trying to parry them with irrelevant questions to Leland like, ‘So did you go to the Baptist college up there?’ ‘No, sir, he went to Knee School,’ says one of the burly men who used to beat his wife or drink, I can’t remember which, and someone else says, ‘Don’t you realise Amerca’s goin’ heathen?’ and pretty soon everyone’s squawking about the fact that I’m from England and I’m not saved and it becomes clear if I don’t beat a hasty retreat they’re going to save my soul by sheer force of numbers and so I start photographing them and edging back toward the tent, determined to at least get one shot of the jail preacher before I run to my car and flee, so I manage to get up near to him and he’s still preaching and saving souls so I shout over to him, ‘Will it bother you if I take a photo?’ and he grins at me and yells back, ‘Listen, son, I had Bibles thrown at me in jail an’ they flush the toilets all the time so I don’t think one itty-bitty camra’s gonna bother me at all!’ and he grins and keeps on preaching and I snap a few and he waves and now I’m ready for a drink but the only way I’m going to get out of here without actually saying, ‘Willyouleavemethefuckalone?’ is to promise to come back the next day and let Leland take another crack at me, which I do, and, Praise the Lord, I’m finally at my car door which I open—and bong, bong, bong goes some signal from within, like a bugle sounding the retreat—and now I shut it and I’m inside in blessed silence, and with a grin of defeat, I departeth and headeth off for the relief of the squishy flagon of wine in Gloria’s refrigerator, which, verily I say unto ye, I intend to drink deeply therefrom (or should I say ‘tharfrom’?) just as soon as I can.
And do.
Gloria is not in good shape. As I aim wine into a glass, she tells me Lester’s gone home and Ruth-Anne has followed. For the last month, whenever the subject of her leaving has come up, Lester ‘just bawls.’ This evening, he spent the whole dinner cracking jokes and then when they all got back to the Magnolia House, he took a glass of wine and went and sat out in his pickup. After a while, he roared off home without even saying goodbye. It’s like he can’t say goodbye.
‘I’m gonna put on my scrubs,’ declares Gloria, now in tears, ‘and go on up there and make him hug me goodbye.’ After a while, however, he calls and everything is smoothed out. She’s coming back for their wedding in a month. They will bring up her two horses in August when she’s settled.
Gloria sniffles. ‘I was driving back home tonight and I was crying and I was thinking, three months ago I went up to my church and prayed. I needed a new job, I wanted Lester to find happiness, and I wanted to get along with his new love. Well, I got what I prayed for and now the Lord must think I’m ungrateful, but I’m not, I must be the most fortunate person in the world. It’s just that I got what I wanted and now I have to leave.’
A firefly comes into the kitchen. ‘Did you know if you squish off his butt and rub it on your nose, your nose’ll glow in the dark? Used to do that a lot when we were kids …’
She wipes her nose and smiles. Two more days and she’s out of here, but she won’t give in to despair. She got what she prayed for.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
John Thomas in Exile
The pressure of academic expectation helped make my mother who she was and was passed on to me, to make me who I am. I responded to this pressure with resistance. Some schools tried to seduce me, some ridiculed me, some ignored me, and some brutalised me.
St. Anne’s Prep School for Boys would have to be placed decisively in the ‘brutalising’ category. The school was all about violence, the strong inflicting suffering on the weak, the master bullying the boy, the boy bulling the smaller boy. Brute force, power through the threat of physical pain; it coloured everything, or, more accurately, removed colour from everything. Masters might smile and crack a joke or cajole, but such amity was pure hypocrisy. In the end, if they didn’t get what they wanted, out came the stick—or sticks if it was one of the old homos—and down came the grubby white underpants.
In later life, I endured many vicious places, one of which brought me in contact with some of the most violent criminals in London, but St. Anne’s was the most vicious of them all, a vile institution infested with tweed-clad homosexuals, sadistic, dictatorial inadequates who voted Conservative and pulled you against their erections as they were about to beat you, all this ruled over by a cold, bullying, power-mad headmaster so dry and heartless that many years later when I had an opportunity to run him down while taking my driving test I was instantly inclined to do so, although he was now an old man with a stick and it would have meant my not getting a licence which I desperately wanted. But he moved too fast and the moment, regrettably, passed.
The school was a series of ugly red-brick buildings set back from a broad but quiet road on the outskirts of Cambridge. I was a day boy and started there at the age of seven in 1957. I would get there each morning by catching the 108, a double-decker bus which I scaled in my village and descended from eight miles later, about a hundred yards from the school. On my first day, my mother drove me there in her small red Mini Minor and was about to leave me at the main entrance when both of us lost our nerve. So many boys, so many caps covering so many bullet-like heads, such intimations of abuse …
She drove on and parked around the corner.
‘It’s going to be all right,’ she told me.
‘I know,’ I lied, ‘but if I don’t like it, can I go back to Mrs. Marshall’s?’
‘We’d have to think about that,’ she replied, an answer which I knew meant no.
She took out a handkerchief, licked a corner of it, and wiped some dirt off my face. I carried the smell of her sweet, nicotinic spittle throughout the rest of the day and carry it still in my memory.
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‘We’re early,’ she said. ‘I’m going to have a cigarette.’
I sat next to her in the smoke-filled car, scratching anxiously at my scabs and watching the cigarette burn down. She took one last drag and threw it out the window.
‘Okay, let’s try again.’
She turned the car around and five minutes later I was striding bravely in through the gates while she waved bravely from the smoky confines of her minuscule car.
The absence of girls was shocking. Why had I not thought of this? Wherever I looked there were armies of fierce boys or skulking loners as terrified as me. I’d gone from pink round bottoms and ‘All Things Bright and Beautiful’ to the stench of grey socks and ‘How would you like a kick in the balls?’ The conformists were happy in their sadism. The rest plodded along miserably. I was afraid all the time. I did not want to learn and pretty soon I could not learn. Even drawing and painting, which I’d always loved—even language—ceased to be interesting. Art and artists were despised. This was boot camp for future colonels, estate agents, pig farmers, and Tories.
I missed girls so much that when a master began to speak, my head would turn involuntarily toward the window to stare at the swaying oaks, and I could feel myself in the arms of a warm, soft, soap-scented imaginary sweetheart who loved and admired me. When I was forced to study, particularly mathematics or Latin, another reaction set in: the consequences of failure were so disagreeable my mind skipped over the possibility of comprehension and fixed directly on the violence which incomprehension would bring, and then it went completely blank. The sensation was similar to that of the first drag of a cigarette after a long period of abstinence: tension overwhelmed by the bitter, masochistic joy of defeat. A despairing miasma folded around me, temporarily shielding me from reality. I might as well have been blind and deaf.
Because my sister was the only female around, she became the object of my frustrated desires from the age of seven to ten. We both slept in rooms up in the attic. As I have said, it was a tall, three-storey house, so when I crawled out of my window onto the pitched roof, I was at least forty feet up. I would do this in any weather. Hands and feet spread for maximum traction, I edged my way across, old tiles cracking and shifting under me, until I reached her window. Clinging by my fingers to the wooden ledge, I would try to catch a glimpse of her as she undressed.
Had I fallen, I would have died. There was absolutely no question about this. I knew it then and didn’t care. The power of my sexual fascination was so overwhelming I was willing to take that risk. If you offered me a million pounds to do the same now, I wouldn’t put so much as half a leg outside the window. Eventually, she caught me during a rain storm and asked me what I was doing. I told her I was plucking moss off the tiles and throwing it onto the roof of my mother’s car, which was parked below, because I liked the sound it made.
Unsurprisingly, she didn’t buy it. From then on, her curtains were tightly drawn.
I drilled a hole in the bathroom door, right up in one corner where the panel met the frame. It was a discreet, perfectly aimed little hole focused on the tub. Now whenever she took a bath, I would find an excuse to rush upstairs and spy on her. One day I brought my eye to the hole and saw a gigantic mouth hurtling toward me. There was a vehement hawking sound and, next thing I knew, my eye was shot with spittle and little bits of sawdust. After which the hole was filled. Now I would go out in the coldest winter night and lurk on the other side of the river in the hopes of a distant shimmer of breast seen through a steamed-up, lace curtain-covered window.
I still cannot pass a lit window without stopping, and if the person or people within don’t know they’re being watched, I find even scenes of mundane domesticity mesmerising. I once lived in the top half of a beach house in Venice, California. Directly below lived a somewhat attractive young woman. Whoever had lived in the house before had poked a hole in the wooden floorboards. If you looked though it you saw her bed, or to be more accurate, some of her bed, because she’d built the bed up onto a platform and so it was too close. If you pressed your eye to the hole when she was having sex with her boyfriend, which I must confess I did once or twice, what you saw was completely incomprehensible. Was one becoming aroused by her thigh or a section of his upper arm? Which portion of whose left buttock was that, if indeed it was a buttock?
This curiosity remains, intellectualised to some extent, used in the pursuit of my career—and not. If one must use the word ‘art,’ is this where it comes from? In my case, unquestionably. I am a voyeur in search of respect through the fetishistic organisation of glimpsed details.
In the early part of my sentence to St. Anne’s, someone made a prediction that the earth was going to end on a particular day and the newspapers, as gullible then as they are now, printed the story. The world was about to fall out of orbit. Gravity would cease to exist and we’d all scatter into space like breadcrumbs. With the Cold War in full swing and marches against the nuclear bomb under way, the idea of a natural conclusion to the world seemed almost quaint. None of us quite believed it, but no one was entirely unafraid either. I and another boy sat on a bench at the appointed hour, wanting something to cling onto should we be cast adrift. The hour came and went and we immediately returned to our petty cruelties, unenlightened by our brush with death.
I did so badly at school, I was held back a year. I managed to retain some of my alliances with the few reprobates and misfits I’d encountered in the first year, but could only keep their respect by becoming increasingly rebellious and violent. By the end of that year of repetition, my brain was numb and my emotions dulled.
My only friends were my cousins, sons of my mother’s brother, Hugh, a doctor, who also lived in Cambridge. Dan and Ste would come over to play sometimes, Hide and Seek and Kick the Can and throwing stones at things. English boys of my generation had a passion for throwing, probably because of cricket, and if you lived in the country, what you usually threw was stones. You threw them at birds, at bottles, at the water, into the sky, and if you could find some windows to smash, there was no greater pleasure—none, that is, short of going to the newsagents and stealing a copy of Health and Efficiency, the official magazine of the English nudists, and masturbating yourself into a daze while imagining what lay beneath the airbrushed bits. Health and Efficiency! Who but the English would give that title to pornography?
Dan was a couple of years older than me, Ste about the same age. When my grandmother, Frances Cornford, died, we were left alone while the grown-ups went to the funeral. We were lurking around the grounds when we heard some village boys shouting downriver. I did not go to the local school so had never become friendly with these boys and, for reasons I have now forgotten, but probably stemming from a mixture of snobbery and fear, considered them the enemy and was so considered by them. We stalked down to the bank of the river and peeked through a tall hedge. The boys were lounging on a footbridge about a hundred and fifty feet away. We backed up into the apple orchard to formulate a plan. From where we now were, the boys were obscured by the hedge. We could not see them and they could not see us. We, however, had ammunition. We took down a load of apples from one of the fifteen trees and then I went back down to the end of the hedge. Looking through a hole in the foliage, I could see the boys. Aiming from memory, Dan lobbed up some apples, handed to him in rapid succession by his brother. They fell in the water just short of the bridge. From my vantage point, I signalled to Dan to throw a little longer. Soon a lethal fusillade rained down upon the boys, who ran this way and that in utter confusion as apples smacked into the bridge and exploded. Of course, they soon worked out where this unprovoked and invisible attack was coming from and moved into sight. Now we threw apples directly at them and they picked them up and threw them back. The battle lasted for hours.
By the time my parents returned from the funeral not a single apple remained in the orchard. It was midsummer and the trees were as bare as winter.
Around this time I invented a new method of inf
licting pain at school. There was a boarder, an unfortunate, obnoxious fat boy so lacking in either physical strength or humour that he decided, wrongly, that his only chance of survival was to completely align himself with the teachers. He was, or had become, an arse-licking toady and sneak and everyone hated him, particularly those like myself who were inclined toward insurrection and destruction. I cannot remember what enabled him to get me in trouble, but he had seized the opportunity and I had been punished.
In class, I sat on the outside line of desks almost against the wall. Directly in front of me sat another boy I did not like and then came the fat rat. One day, as the teacher droned on, I removed my right shoe and pushed a thumbtack through the toe from the inside so the point stuck out about an eighth of an inch. I then cautiously stretched my leg past the intervening desk, jabbed the pin through the sneak’s little grey trousers, stretched tight over his endomorphic frame, and with an adroit flick of the ankle, gave his plump backside a good scratch. By the time everyone turned to stare at the screaming boy, my foot was back under my desk and a frown of surprise and curiosity was on my brow. I was not discovered and the boy in front of me was punished. I kept a pin in the toe of each shoe from then on and used them whenever the mood took me until, inevitably, I was caught.
Three years went by, during which I never stopped pining for girls. Long before it became a general symbol of defiance in England, I had started to grow my hair long. As early as 1958, this was an issue. My parents were called in to discuss the matter with the ghastly Mr. White and, though irritated by the whole thing, largely supported my point of view. What effect, they argued, did the hair on my head have on the brain which lay below? The school, in partial concession, said that in that case if it was to be this long I’d have to wear bows in it. I cut an inch or two off.
Trials of the Monkey Page 13
