The cretins are going to bring the roof down! My fondness for the Flood theory (or any other for that matter) diminishes with every second. I simply want to leave, to be above ground, anything rather than this pressing sense of entombment.
We reach some central point, a column of particular interest (to them, not me), and slump down to listen to a lecture. I remember none of it. Erica is just ahead of me on her belly. The Ikthus is visible in the gap between her pants and sweater. I concentrate on the fish and manage to quell my urge to blunder out backward and rush howling through the tunnels in search of light.
Finally, finally, we’re backing out, twisting and turning to the sound of Erica’s helmet cracking and scratching against the ceiling, and soon we escape the jaws of the parallel slabs and are on our way. The mood lightens immediately, suggesting that perhaps I was not alone in my claustrophobic terror. The girls become chatty. One of them teases another for having a crush on the guy who washes the windows at Bryan College.
‘Oh, great,’ says the girl, ‘thank you for telling all my secrets, why don’t you just give me a paper-cut and have done with it?’ Another pair discuss a movie they like. A third confides that several romances have been born in the last week or two.
I ask what the rules are. Most of them are obvious, no drugs, no cigarettes, no alcohol. A girl fills me in on the dress code. ‘No tank tops, no tube tops, no halter tops, no spaghetti straps, no short shorts, and you have to have a one-piece bathing suit.’
‘Anyone breaking the rules?’ I ask. ‘Anyone taking drugs, smoking?’
‘Of course not,’ says Mordant-Boy, ‘there’s no pot two rooms down from me. Which I can’t smell most nights.’
Kurt shoots out of a hole in the wall, and stares at us, as if counting. He looks fractionally calmer than last time.
‘Did you lose anyone yet?’ I ask, jovially.
‘No, I don’t think so,’ he says, blinking and smiling in the light, and then he darts off again, scrambling away along the canyon. At a more leisurely pace, we follow. Seeming younger than their age to begin with, the prospect of getting out makes the students seem almost childlike.
Erica starts to sing:
‘Who’s the king of the jungle?
Hoo, hoo, hoo!
Who’s the king of the sea?
Bubble, bubble, bubble!
Who’s the king of the Universe?
And who’s the king of me?
His name is
J—E—S—U—S! Yes!
He’s the king of the jungle,
He’s the king of the sea,
He’s the king of the Universe
And he’s the king of me!’
As we leave the stomach of the cave and wind our way up through the oesophagus toward the promise of daylight, the girls become almost evanescent. One of them asks me if I’m a believer. I guess they’ve rumbled me.
‘Maybe,’ I say, smiling.
‘Mebbe,’ Erica repeats, imitating my accent.
‘You’re not, are you?’ the first girl suggests in a sly, almost flirtatious tone of voice.
‘Well …’ I say, and say no more.
‘You should come and sit in on some of our classes,’ she says. ‘It would be really helpful.’
We’re in one of those rare areas of the cave wide enough for two people to walk side by side, and Erica now pulls alongside and gives me a sincere squint from under her bike helmet.
‘Do you know what, Matthew, I have the most incredibly sceptic mind, but there’s no way I can refute creation and biblical Christianity because there are no contradictions within the Bible.’
‘Okay,’ I say, ‘so let me ask you a question. “Thou Shalt Not Kill.” There’s absolutely no qualification in that, is there?’
‘Not in that part of the Bible, but in other parts of the Bible there are.’
‘So then there are contradictions because “Thou Shalt Not Kill” is an absolute statement.’
For once, there is a moment of silence.
‘“Thou Shalt Not Kill” is a commandment,’ says Erica, as if it made a difference.
‘It’s a commandment direct from God, right?’
‘Yes.’
‘So “Thou Shalt Not Kill” must be what He means.’
‘But in other places in the Bible …’ says the girl who started the conversation, and then flounders to a halt.
‘In other places in the Bible there are clarifications of that,’ states Erica, with a slight edge in her voice.
‘But what needs clarifying?’ I ask. “Thou Shalt Not Kill”—it’s pretty definitive, isn’t it? Besides, it seems like a good commandment to me. What’s the problem?’
‘Well, what about capital punishment? What if somebody bad kills someone?’
‘“Thou Shalt Not Kill,” ’ I say, and shrug apologetically. ‘That’s what it says.’
‘But everyone deserves to die …’
‘Yeah, we all deserve to die,’ chimes in another female voice.
‘But do we deserve to die by each other’s hand, or by God’s?’ I ask.
‘By God’s hand.’
‘Well, there you go then.’
‘But sometimes God works through man.’
‘Yeah? And how do you know when God’s working through a man and when the man is just saying God’s working through him?’
‘Well …’ Erica says, as we round a bend and enter the cave’s throat.
I turn and look at her in the light of the approaching mouth, waiting for some further disputation. But there is none. She moves from my side and walks ahead. I glance around at the other students. The girl who asked me if I was a believer offers a tight smile, the rest don’t meet my eye.
As you exit a matinee and are surprised to find it’s still day outside, so we at last crawl up out of our hole and emerge blinking into the heat and light of the afternoon.
Erica has decided to find a place in another van, but I continue to talk about religion with the remaining kids as we drive back toward Bryan College. The atmosphere is friendlier than it was on the way here. They know who I am, they’ve absorbed it, and are willing to talk freely about themselves and their beliefs. Their religion, they tell me, is the only true religion, unique because Jesus Christ, the son of God, set foot on earth. No other religion can make that claim. The girls state categorically that they would not marry a non-believer. In fact, they wouldn’t even marry a Catholic unless he was born-again because it would be hard to live with someone who you knew was going to hell.
Of all their beliefs, I tell them, this born-again-or-go-to-hell thing is the one I find hardest to take. If God is so perfect, why would he care whether you believed in him or not? It seems so petty.
By mutual consent—accurate or not 1 do not know—we agree that one quarter of the world is Christian and of that quarter, half are born-again Christians who’ll go to heaven. This means, I point out, that seven-eighths of the population of the world is damned to eternal hell.
They nod. Yes, this is true.
‘What about a child, in rural China say, who’s had no opportunity to hear your message? He doesn’t even know what “born again” means—and he dies. And God throws him into a lake of fire? I mean, what kind of a God is that?’
There’s a silence. The girls appear not to have considered this. They have nothing to say. A faint shadow of anxiety is visible, of doubt even.
‘It’s not like God chooses some people to die,’ says a boy up front, meaning ‘die’ in the sense of being condemned to eternal hell. ‘All people are basically bad and we cannot hope to get into heaven by ourselves. Jesus was the only one who was pure enough to take on our sins and erase them, and the question is not really “Will some people go to hell?” the question is “Why were we chosen to go to heaven?” ’
I cannot help but think of Hitler’s Mein Kampf and a phrase which I found so chilling I still remember it twenty years after I read it. It describes the first time Adolf saw an Orthodox Jew. ‘My fi
rst thought was: Is that a Jew? But the longer I stared at that strange countenance, the more the question in a different form turned in my brain: Is that a German?’
I’m not saying these kids are Nazis—I like them, in fact—but … believing in a literal hell, a burning lake, an inferno of unimaginable suffering, they accept with equanimity that seven-eighths of the world, including me, will end up in it.
Forever.
Either they don’t really believe this or in fact there is something Nazi-like about them: their Final Solution is one of extraordinary scope and brutality; a holocaust of souls which makes the Führer’s merely physical extermination of the Jews seem positively amateur. ‘Our Father’ is far more ambitious: he’s going for the eternal destruction of not just Jews, but Hindus, Homos, Muslims, Buddhists, Catholics, atheists, agnostics, and presumably Scientologists and others on the lunatic fringe. Seven-eighths of the people He creates, He then destroys. The only place you get worse odds is in the abattoir.
The girl I’m looking at as I’m thinking this is an accounting major. How on earth can she become an accountant? Then what? A mother? Little League? A nice home? One of those vans with a sliding door down the side? Knowing what she knows, how can she even contemplate this? How could you enjoy the comforts of a suburban life knowing that your God is going to flambé just about everyone you meet? But there she sits, as optimistic and contented as any teenager I ever met.
I remember watching an interview with a Holocaust survivor in which the interviewer asked if, while in the camp, she knew about the extermination. ‘We couldn’t believe it,’ she replied. ‘But wasn’t there evidence all around?’ the interviewer asked. ‘No, no, you don’t understand,’ the woman objected. ‘We couldn’t believe it.’ Meaning that as a matter of survival, they could not allow the horrific truth to penetrate. And perhaps that’s how these Christians handle it too. In a different way I do the same. When I sign the credit card slip at an overpriced restaurant and groan at the pains of overindulgence, my white face is turned from the Southern Hemisphere where a black mother buries a black infant in a bag which wouldn’t fit a Big Mac.
I let the subject drop and am glad to arrive back at the college to be offered hot dogs off a barbecue grill.
(The flames! The flames!)
I take my food over to a patch of grass and sit down next to a couple of fellow cave-survivors in a loose circle of other students. One of them, who I have not seen before, a young woman with short blonde hair and a ring in her nose, asks me what I’m doing down here. I speak about the book and then, exhausted and vaguely depressed, I go find Kurt, thank him, and leave.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
Consenting Adults
I drive back to the motel, looping up behind the town to cross the railroad track at 11th Street. I park and get out. A wreath on a stick marks the spot where Gary met his end. It’s as colourful as a child’s birthday cake, a white dove surrounded by clashing flowers, but out here beside the tracks there’s something especially sad and hopeless about it and I drive away dispirited, thinking of heaven and hell and dead friends and relatives who I’m sure are in neither.
Back in my room, I locate the Gideon Bible and search for the phrase in Deuteronomy about women’s clothing. Deuteronomy is known as the Second Law, the Ten Commandments in Exodus being the first. This more recent set of instructions was, like the first, given to Moses directly by God. By this time, however, Moses had been wandering in the wilderness for forty years, which may explain why some of it seems a little off. One wonders if the old man didn’t put his own demented spin on things before passing it on to his flock.
It takes me a while to locate the exact passage about cross-dressing and along the way the surrealism of the ‘laws’ begins to cheer me up. At times, I laugh out loud.
In chapter 21, verses 10 to 14, you are told that if after a battle you see a female captive whom you find attractive, you should take her home, shave her head, let her mourn her mother and father for a month, and then go in and have her. If you don’t like the experience you can kick her out, but, in a concession to feminism I suppose, you are not allowed to sell her.
Chapter 21, verses 18 to 21 suggests the following remedial treatment for your delinquent son: take the boy to ‘the elders of his city and say unto them, “This our son is stubborn and rebellious, he will not obey our voice; he is a glutton and a drunkard.” And all the men of his city shall stone him with stones that he die.’
If you ‘find no favour’ in your wife, we are told in chapter 24, or discover some ‘uncleanness in her,’ all you have to do is write her a ‘bill of divorcement’ and show her the door. The woman can then get another husband but if he doesn’t like her either and divorces her, you can’t take her back because ‘after that she is defiled; for that is an abomination before the Lord.’
Chapter 25, verse 11 warns that if a woman sees her husband fighting with another man and interferes ‘then thou shalt cut off her hand, thine eye shall not pity her.’
Finally, I find the verse I’m looking for: 22:5. ‘The woman shall not wear that which pertaineth unto man, neither shall a man put on a woman’s garment: for all that do so are abomination unto the Lord.’
How ironic it is, I think, that the Bible, which has enabled Christianity to survive so long, will eventually be its downfall. I saw a debate on television recently on homosexuality. There was a gay man, a lesbian, Jerry Falwell, and some other smooth-faced Baptist minister. Falwell was spouting ‘Love the sinner not the sin,’ and quoting from one part of the Bible that condemns homosexuality and the other preacher was quoting from some other part.
And the gays were quoting biblical stuff right back!
Insanity! Don’t kiss the stick that’s beating you, don’t examine it and say, ‘Well, there’s no nails at this end.’ Of course not, that’s the handle! Reject it absolutely, the entire billy club, the cudgel from end to end. Would you listen to medical advice from the same era? Does one argue about the composition of Mars with an astrologer?
My uncle has lived with the same man now for forty-five years and they were an integral part of my childhood. They were elegant, kind, and witty, and—further endearing themselves to me as a teenager—had a bachelor pad in Mayfair where I would sometimes stay. They were interested in and amused by each other, they were solicitous and respectful, and never bickered like the heterosexual couples. In terms of how two people should live together they were, and remain, by far the best role models available. For much of their life together, their homosexuality was a crime punishable by imprisonment.
And where does all this prejudice and violence come from, or where at least does it acquire what little dignity it has? Directly from the Bible. Recently the Pope reiterated the church’s position. ‘Homosexual acts,’ he stated without equivocation, ‘go against natural law.’
I lie back on the bed and think about the kids in the van. A phrase from Deuteronomy stopped them from dressing up as women. But what about the rest of it? If 22:5, the cross-dressing rule, is a rule to live by, then why not 25:5, which allows you to rape your widowed sister-in-law? Or 25:11, which lets you chop your wife’s hand off in the highly unlikely event she feels inclined to interfere when someone beats you up?
According to these Christians, the laws were proclaimed by God. As far as I know, no one has heard Him repeal them. How, then, can you argue that one is sacred and to be obeyed but not the others? Do these young Christians therefore believe in stoning rebellious boys to death and raping and mutilating women? It seems unlikely, but then how can they not see the inconsistency, not to mention the absurdity, of it all?
I start typing out my notes.
When I’ve finished, it’s getting late, but I feel guilty about the screenplay, so I start working on it. I work for an hour or so on a big action scene at the end. It’s preposterous, involving a giant balloon escaping from the Thanksgiving Day Parade in Manhattan with my hero and villainess on top of it. I enjoy this kind of thing, but it is
n’t exactly what I set out to do when I started writing, and I remember how I felt during my first year in Hollywood when I learned there were people who did what I now do: men in their forties earning hundreds of thousands of dollars to write scripts like this. How sad they seemed, these rich men up in the hills, writers of real talent having it leached out of them as they sat wrinkling in their hot tubs or dining at Dan Tana’s or Chasens or The Palm. They made me sad, but they also enraged me. If they had given up, why couldn’t they make way for me, constantly broke and full of artistic conviction? What I now realise is they were even sadder than I thought. The way they swaggered around, the latest European actress on their arms, their uneasy charm, their talk of dinner parties with Jack Nicholson, all this was nothing but a veil for their embarrassment. They had fallen into the golden trap and knew it, but they had not given up. They still believed that with a little luck they could turn it all to their advantage.
Yet again.
When I moved to Hollywood, I was thirty-one. After directing Violent Summer at the age of twenty-five, I did not make another film until Hussy when I was twenty-eight. In between, I wrote a script for David Puttnam with my friend Bruce Robinson, who a few years later wrote and directed the classic Withnail and I. We rented an office on Denmark Street and drank a lot. Then I wrote other scripts, some for myself, one or two for other directors, but none of them worked out.
Hussy, which starred John Shea and Helen Mirren, was a glamorised version of my eighteenth year, when I worked as a spotlight boy in Churchill’s, a cabaret nightclub on New Bond Street, and had an affair with one of the ‘hostesses.’ Had I told the real story, which does not reflect well on me and did not have a happy ending, it would have been more interesting.
By this time, 1978, I was living with an English actress, Victoria Tennant. She had been in one film when she was seventeen or eighteen, but then married and abandoned her career for almost ten years. When I met her in New York, where her husband owned and ran one of the leading discos of the late ’70s, she was ready to go back to work. I was in America doing research for an updated film version of the 1731 novel Manon Lescaut. In the book, Manon is exiled to New Orleans. I had substituted Las Vegas and was on my way there with my producer, an appetitive Englishman known as The Body, to check it out. I was drunk most of the time, as was he. He knew Victoria and we all went out to dinner.
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