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19/06/2013 19:27

 

BEGINNING

I was aged nine when I discovered a friction sore on my penis. Me, ginger-haired freckled Morgan Minerson- no interesting sexual abuse, no fascinating incest, no cruel screwing with the family pet. I have never loved cats that much. It was all my own fault; months of dedicated ‘orgasm chasing’ after lights out.

The point was it had reached the point where it hurt sufficiently and seemed to have passed the point of self repair; it was at that point of desperation of  where I thought it wise to let both my parents take a look. This was not an easy decision for a nine year old to reach. I had not yet seen my father naked, or another man, or another boy for that matter and they may think I was becoming deformed.

I knew about deformity.

I’d had no access to Films or Television or anything visually informative in respect of sexual matters.

I peeled back the sheets and let them gaze at it.

As always, their combined silence on matters below the belt, left me with no more information than I was obviously not dying. They would surely contact a Doctor on my behalf for that.

It was not a cancer of the cock given to me by a wrathful God for my wayward indulgences. The Welsh, our Welsh had always been low church, virtually non-believers.

I was already having a go at reading ‘The Peloponnesian Wars’ and felt suitably damned for that.

They left me to my thoughts- ma returning up the stairs almost instantly with a small tube of Germolene; a pink ointment with a hint of disinfectant and soothing. No smile. No kiss goodnight.

Almost immediately bathed in my particular aloneness I applied the cream to my prick and finally slept.

 

They say there is a hardly a fragment or a morsel of one’s experiences of life that you ever really forget- however meagre the feast appears to be. This, five decades or more later, bothers me greatly. Does it mean, I keep asking myself, that nothing is worthless; no, worse than that: does it mean that simply everything that is there to be remembered is priceless. If so that teeters on the sacred. Well, you can ‘fictionalise’ the truth without re-inventing a thing, I think. That is what is so striking about art.

 

Yes. In the deft hands of Curtis Price, Morgan Minerson will create his truth as art. Is it selfish of me to ‘out’ my voice? Put it this way- it is not an utterly selfless act. Is it in any way cathartic to ‘out’ my shameless voice? Oh yes. I feel a very overdue purification coming on and intend to enjoy every flayed to the bone second of it. If you detect a hint of a smirk that is also just a tad vengeful you would not be wrong. Revenge is best served cold, as the old adage goes, but I am rather warming to it and have every intention of making your face and bum cheeks glow.

 

I didn’t have a wank for at least a week. It worked. I can highly recommend the skin of youth and Germolene.

 

It is a deplorable situation being born the youngest of an otherwise grown-up family, a late-comer, a cuckoo and I was going to start this tale with this being the cause of much perceived malevolence. My eldest sibling, already a nurse in training, with ambitions greatly above her station, wanted me aborted, murdered before I was born. She had colluded with my da.

There was strict food rationing in force and we were poor.

This was in 1948- abortion was a serious crime then, it still is amongst the impoverished in strictly Catholic countries.

I have a distinct memory of me fearing this sister as she approached me in my cot. I was almost one year old. She was carrying a pillow and I knew for certain that the thought had crossed her mind to smother me with it.

Cot deaths were not investigated with any suspicion in 1949.

She is still alive.

She is in her mid eighties and still daily wishes me dead. She has even told my brother so on the telephone- “Has that monster taken his death pill yet?”

She deserves a whole chapter of her own.

It’s on its way.

 
20/06/2013 11:30

LOSS OF HETERO VIRGINITY

 

 

My biographer Curtis Price spoke at length with me. I was concerned about timelines, about how readers might expect a simple continuity of my life unfolding. He disagreed, saying “Where is the fun in that. It is so predictable.”

He was so right- the mind and the brain generally, of which we still know very little, is not exactly disposed to following mankind’s predisposition to OCD.

How can, what we don’t know three quarters of the workings of, be a tidy space, as we would wish. Add to that our uncertainty about what we believe we know.

And how can there be any right method of doing anything involving recall.

 

You will be fed but you will not be not be spoon-fed.

Yes, there is a beginning, but as yet there is no end.

 

I told him “So many people let their minds develop into half baked potatos when the least they started off with was a promising play dough- such a sad waste of potential.

I like to imagine that the finest minds are composed of universal creative clay in the hands of a genius like Picasso.

Get inside those and there would be something worth looking at.”

 

He said “Way to go!”

 

So there it is, no boring ‘as it happened’ slog through the slough of time, its arrow forever stuck in our backs. No, we shall go white water rafting, manoeuvring through whirlpools and flying over waterfalls.

Awash with our memories we sail on the great seas of them, swim in their rivers- we will not drown because day by day we will let this mystery unfold pretty much like the mind works.

I love the words scattalogical and serendipity. It is not madness. It is being human in the employ of universal creativity.

 

If you are one of those imprisoned souls who keeps a journal that dictates to you what you will be thinking of today and every other day then you may not last the course.

If the word cunt sticks in your ‘sophisticated’ craw then you will choke in the mud flats of your deluded self. I wouldn’t think that laying yourself as bare would suit you, though a daily dose of voyeurism might just do the trick.

How dysfunctional are you? How dysfunctional is your ‘treasured’ family?

 

So.

Why, as a boy of nine, was I wanking so much? I had never seen a cunt so there was no point in imagining it. Well, I had the pleasurable good fortune of having a foreskin, and all the increased sensitivity that comes with that. Just pulling it back and forth over the swelling of my glans penis was enough to thrill the immensely flexible spine of a boy from neck to coccyx.

I am right handed- statistics suggest that that is a factor that may give me a chance of a longer life. More time for genital pleasure. My right hand and my spittle and my erection in orchestra played the best of tunes. Orgasms and no spunk as yet.

 

There were dolls in the house, girl dolls. You could only get girl dolls then. And between the legs of these dolls there was nothing- an utterly blank hard plastic canvas. Not a frigger’s fodder in any respect.

By comparison I had it all- balls, a playstick and my erotic thoughts were concentrated on these babies. How would it grow? When would it spit? Would there be hair, what colour, what texture and where?

I was craving the outburst of my male sexuality and it was that warm and delicious prospect that was turning me on.

 

Put into this mix an emotionally distant father who rarely if ever held me close and you can begin joining dots.

The latest research suggests, very strongly, that regardless of pernicious and propagandist nurturing by bigoted parents, a child will innately decide the direction of their sexual preference between the ages of four and five.

Having said that, I never played with the dolls, I knew that there was something strangely dishonest about them- none of them was ugly and none of them had any genitals.

He got dressed in blue and played with toy lorries and trains- never messed with mother’s shoes, he even fucked girls, got married, had daughters and grandchildren but still ended up very happily homosexual, as he was always meant to be.

Back then men loving men brought shame on your family, made you an outcast, forced you to seek out gay ghettos and constantly live in fear of the homophobic police and incarceration. Consensual sex between two adult men then was illegal, even in private, and very often prosecuted and widely publicised.

The law has since changed but I remain in two minds as to whether society has truly reformed its ingrained attitudes to what was once perceived not only as a perversity but also as a mental health condition.

Boy babies are still celebrated with the colour blue. Girl babies are still celebrated with the colour pink. It is a palpably prejudicial bigotry at work from the outset. The fact is that despite these pathetic efforts to avoid ‘abnormality’ what will be will be. Humankind has always been quite unable to outwit nature despite what it believes in.

 

I probably wanted my father to sexually abuse me. I wanted to know what lay in secret below the black leather snake that gripped his trousers to his waist. I would have let him do anything to me just to know that he loved me. Simple.

Fact is he was not a paedophile.

His own history had ripped him of emotional empathy- well, selectively.

Just like the rock star Elton John mentioned in a television interview I was ripe to be groomed by a predatory male within my family but they didn’t exist. It was a childhood disappointment. I know I would have easily colluded. It was already in my nature not to resist.

 

When I first lost my virginity to a girl, a curate’s daughter, I’d been driven to it by curiosity and her manipulative guile. She’d been sleeping with a friend of mine- a fine artist on my A Level Course. I had fantasised about his cock and she would be able to furnish me with all the details.

Walking to her place for the ‘fuck me’ assignation I was reminded of when I must have found out about cunts. Chalk graffiti on Junior School toilet walls. I had gone home and undressed all the lying house dolls and drawn in indelible blue biro comic fannies on their blank plastic. There was the hairy truth; and now, here I was on my way to finally enter it with something very sacred to me.

 

She stood in the empty bath stark naked, covering her skin with baby oil. It was quite beyond me what the fuss was all about.

I let her undress me.

I was insistently asking her intimate questions about my friend.

She was answering them with an erotic frankness that gave me an erection.

 

She felt like a slippery fish beside me on her single bed. Claustrophobic.

Worried I’d go soft on her she decided to take control and ride me.

As my prick slid into the moist pink wound of her I felt significantly sick.

 

Reading my face she dismounted and vigorously masturbated me to climax.

Amazingly, despite my distaste, it became a regular gig.

For my birthday she bought me a leather bound copy of poems by Keats.

There is more. All beyond a complete understanding.

It was a pretty futile exploration of a prospective heterosexual man thing.

What was in it for her?

My big cock or my mind? You decide.

 

I now knew for sure my friend’s dick was way smaller than mine.

I also knew I’d been poisonously empowered.

Already steeped in Youth Theatre I could play-act at being straight as an essential survival mechanism to shield my illegal gayness.

Being gang-raped in prison has never been a fantasy of mine.

And yes, I have hated every day of this blatant lie that those circumstances forced upon me. Fucking hypocritical societies.

I loathe liars.

To this day I loathe liars and all deceptions.

In that sense I have always found it difficult to love myself- for having to live a lie for as long as I did.

 

My ‘arranged’ marriage was agreed to last 10 yrs. In fact it survived all manner of ills for thirteen.

 
28/06/2013 17:45

SAVING A LIFE

It was a late rehearsal. Past midnight it was way too late to let her walk home from the theatre on her own.

 

Morgan Minerson is recalling a former bisexual boyfriend’s latest girlfriend. A colorful blonde she was, almost his mirror image but with spinnaker tits and a voracious clitoris, full of youth and the same exploratory fearlessness. Shriekingly unfaithful to the confused besotted lad she had actually hit on Morgan, his former lover, in a very big reality show way.

 

Morgan blamed his social ineptitude with women, he had always been half blind to any insights concerning their sexual machinations.

 

Morgan thought that a coffee back at his place meant exactly that- a cup of coffee and a chat in his post divorce flat, the venue of many an extraordinary and odd escapade. He believed that the very weasily Kenton had finally been gotten shot of.

How greedy of the uppity little shit to believe there was such a thing as bisexuality.

 

What had the ridiculous boy been- oh yes, one of the very few fleshed out bridging points between living a heterosexual life and a homosexual one. At least he was not a fantasy- he had been real and ridiculously pro-active.

Gosh!

Where do the young and nubile get all this useful and pleasurable information from- internet porn sites? He had certainly rubbished the old adage that you can’t teach an old dog new tricks.

 

Not that Morgan was an old dog- though in some ways he always wished he had been. Never an STD. No visits to a GUM clinic ever.

This was a new life, it was just being freshly mapped, no more complicated than that.

Maria had said something about needing an agony uncle.

 

Morgan shared the top floor of a recently converted house in an army town. Across the hall from him there did live what you could describe as an old dog though she was not yet thirty. Sandy, just like drag-queens, could easily have done pantomime at Christmas- big hair, big make-up, a mouth like a fog-horn. Men, they were always behind her on her heat- whole squadrons of them but she was built like a shit house door and had taken it upon herself to be Morgan’s minder. It was kindness personified.

 

Morgan had never had a streetwise prostitute as a pugilist friend before- the novelty for her undoubted protection was a fair exchange. It made downing pints in local pubs a whole lot safer and she was interesting

 

Morgan joked with me- so the dream of being gang buggered by men in camouflage and fatigues went straight out of the window.

Did you ever dream that?

No?

 

I saw a gay porno once. I like the gang bang genre- you get a lot more cock for your money. More often than not all the colours in all the sizes. It certainly opened my eyes.

I must have looked a tad disapproving because he then added ‘Well. I didn’t know that exactly then but I do know it now. One of my favourite weeklies as a boy was Look And Learn. And porn, if it does nothing else, certainly makes you look. I’m bored of it now of course.’

 

Bored.

Yes dear, bored rigid. Seen it all. The appalling lot.

We’ll get to that later.

Hang on.

 

I was in James Street Brighton- slap bang in the middle of the gay quarter of ‘London by The Sea’. Loathe ghettoes me but I had a camera in my pocket and a full battery.

One of the drawbacks of Brighton is its pebble beach. At least there’s never any danger of getting sand trapped under your foreskin. Imagine the DNA that gets washed out into the briny every single day. No temperature is too low for the rainbow babes.

All the full moons of summer draw herds of gay pigs who just love it in the raw. Bears too.

That’s humans for you.

One whiff of opportunistic sex and they become a collective zoo of animals aching for release. They go clubbing just to wind up their greed for endorphins.

Oh, I do so recommend a long-term relationship- they generally hold the key to taming the unbridled beast.

I met my man, the love of my life, in a gay pub- The  Greyhound it was, all the locals referred to the place dryly as The Whippet Inn. That’s a whole new can of sins, a whole other story.

 

Sandy or James Street?

 

Sandy would take ages to get herself all dolled up to go out on the pull, a big girl on a mission, she knew how to say available loudly with remarkably sparse clothing, virtuality stage makeup and body language readable in any language.

She’d been with Gurkhas, fierce height-challenged men who always hunted cunt in packs.

It was Sandy who knew the town’s reputation in almost every detail.

 

Some prostitute held the current record then at fourteen Gurkhas in one night. Telling that story people always added- well she obviously had a load of spunk and they were virtually midgets. [For any Americans reading, that means in English English- come, cum, gizzum, jizz,semen, ejaculate, balls, bravery or chutzpah; all of the above.] Yes I am mildly fascinated by midgets.

My mother always loathed short men- her father was short and a right cunt.

 

Sandy could not process herself however from a drab into a diva without listening to the irritating rock ballad The Power Of Love, at full volume, over and over. It did everyone’s head in except hers.

She was ready when silence overcame the house like a lewd fog.

She’d carry her scarlet high heels down the stairs and click her heels in the small hallway.

 

There was an avid budgie keeper in the ground floor flat, someone short of a few cells, just a few but it was massively noticeable. He would always hear her going out of an evening and I imagined him grinning with an audible purr and slightly dribbling.

Of course he did, he’d rock in his arm chair, rubbing his thighs.

 

Sandy would always return at about midnight and not bother to take off her shoes. She wouldn’t bother to make the punter a coffee.

Often it was punters plural. I can count footsteps on stairways without much bother.

Within six feet of me she’d be being fucked for money by maybe three army blokes who had no pubic secrets from each other.

I reckoned as much. It was a thrill reckoning that. They wanked each other off on occasion- circumstantial homosexualty. They probably enjoyed the odd prostrate gland massage from some killing tool.

 

Rationalising her prostitution to me once she told me, in a pub, that it was strictly business- no-one ever saw her tits, no-one ever kissed her.

That was pure class.

On that occasion she pointed out a short silent type to me brooding over his pint. “ See him” she said, “He doesn’t look much but he’s hung like a donkey.”

It was hard for me to disguise a brief flicker of interest.

She went on- “Now, my cunt’s a bit on the small side, as some are, we don’t all come out of the same box and that session with him, I shall never forget it, it was painful, gruelling.”

Sandy- life love her, if she’s still alive and I hope she is, then I also hope she got her wish and married a millionaire.

She did play a key part in my courtship of Paulo Delio. It’s for another day.

 

James Street.

Oh I was there one day shopping with my man Paulo. We popped into Prowler- a chain of stores that specialises in retailing what gay men want; always with a rather diminutive lesbian section.

Paulo wanted designer underpants, kecks with high tech specifications.

I wanted a Gay Times and some gay club flyers- serious all that flyer artwork in Brighton and free in Prowler along with The Pink Paper.

I wanted to peruse the very adult porn hoping for something dedicating itself to an all man gang-bang in Brazil. Brazil the biggest melting pot of human genes on the planet.

 

Well, in behind us had slipped this couple- a fit bit of gay eyecandy accompanied by his almost worshipful fag-hag; a boring woman trying to spice her life up with a walk on the almost but not quite wild side.

He was clearly no stranger to the gym. Ripped muscles, chiselled features, dark and brooding but although looking like Tarzan, inevitably talking like Jane.

 

We’d had a similar encounter in Hollywood- later.

This young guy in Brighton was pointing out with pretentiously loud glee which of the porn movies on the shelves he had actually starred in. Just a lad really, probably driving an Aston Martin.

Not a bad career move if you are addicted to consumer stuff.

 

On Melrose Avenue in Hollywood, I seldom break a promise, we’d gone into an innocuous  postcard shop- very tiny. Once we were in we spotted a Narnia doorway- no door, announcing that you had to be over eighteen years to enter.

You could not resist. A Narnia for adults.

 

Through there it opened up to something the size of an aircraft hangar which was full to bursting with every imaginable item of gay porn accessories. Now that was a hoot. Though there was something gob-stopping in a glass cabinet- it was the size and shape of a traffic cone. I found that profoundly disturbing.

 

We decided to buy one of the ubiquitous or iconic, depending which way you look at it, souvenier male dolls called Billy. The Billy dolls are supplied in a multiple of types. I chose the Banker Billy, the repro of a stud Wall Street wanker, in a grey flannel suit.

Consistent with the whole range of Billy doll’s is their improbable plastic genitalia, highly exaggerated in a Tom Of Finland way and barely hidden behind a fully working zipper. Cool. Packaged nicely. An ice-breaker for family parties.

 

We took the empty package to the till and asked if we could purchase one of these. Serving behind the counter was a huge guy- obviously no stranger to the Muscle Beach in Santa Monica. All he was wearing, besides his tan, was a white wife-beater T and black shorts, a mountain of a man.

He still ranks as the worst case of ‘looks like Tarzan but sounds like Jane’ my man and I have ever encountered.

“Oh my dear boys” he falsettoed, “The Banker’s been so popular we’re all out of him. It must be the cut of his clothes- very Tom Ford.”

 

Suppressing fits of giggles, we quickly bought a Sailor Billy instead because he was dressed in an authentic vintage uniform like someone out of a story by Jean Genet.

My choice- literary.

Now and and again we get him out for visitors- just for the shock value. Every woman who has ever encountered him just couldn’t wait to spy behind his fly. Why are their hetero husbands keeping them all so hungry?

Or did they take it as a yardstick?

In that case I feel sorry for their husbands because no man in the world has ever wielded the semi-erect proportions of Sailor Billy.

That’s a lot of cock to live up to.

In that sense all porn, straight or gay, is a minefield for men to watch.

If their dick is not going to seem inadequate, their staying power and technique is going to be.

It is a very distorted tool for sex education.

Parents beware or at least have the good sense to be aware.

Porn is always at the extreme edges of what it is to be normal. But do bear in mind that mankind and womankind has always been and will be, forever and a day, in love with freak shows.

 

So the guy in the shop in St James Street has a big cock. So what. I guess he imagines he has been blessed.

Plain fact is he was boring and did not tick any one of my pleasure boxes.

It takes all sorts. It certainly does.

The one great satisfaction I got from reading a victorian edition of the Karma Sutra was the discovery that cocks and cunts come in a whole variety of shapes and sizes. I was a boy, eleven or thereabouts. A recidivist masturbator. Slightly puzzled, just like today, that people rattle on so about cock size but almost never a mention of cunt variables- lengths, widths, fat pads, hair and lip dangles.

Totally mad, sexist, unequal.

But the Indians of the sub-continent- they had it all sussed and not even in their religions or the decorations to their temples did the subject of sex ever non-plus them.

I must have fallen in love with India when I was eleven.

 

The former bi-sexual boyfriend’s, inquisitive girl-friend.

Oh she stayed the night.

 

I slept on the floor. All desire took flight, as I knew it would, when I told her rudely that unless she took it up the arse I wasn’t the least interested.

 

The odd thing was that she kept on prying about my dick- what was in it that had held Kenton’s interest for so long, and clearly still did, off and on?

I remember saying- “It’s a man thing. You would just never understand.”

 

She must have slept a venomous and shameful sleep.

 

I took her to the railway station the following morning and, being the gentleman that I am, I pecked her on the cheek goodbye.

One of my ex-wife’s knitting mates spotted that kiss. I saw her spot it, watched the glee light up her ugly face. You just knew she couldn’t wait to spread it around that I was playing the field with both genders.

Somedays you see only what you want to see.

A lot of times people misread what is printed in front of them.

 

On another late night after another late rehearsal I followed that same girl- not deliberately.

A car had cruised her, it had two guys in it, they stopped to invite her to a party.

I grabbed her from their dark clutches.

She didn’t know them. They could have been anybody with a myriad of unknown intentions. They drove off.

Maybe I saved her life.

 

No this wasn’t in LA, this was at home, in an army town, and how many ex-soldiers have turned to recreational killing just for the crack?

The chilly memory of it makes me feel unsafe even today.

What kind of a girl would be stupid enough to get into a car with two strange men that had cruised her, obviously targeted her?

Sad to say any one of my three daughters if they were drunk enough or drugged up enough.

 

Hey, so maybe, that’s why I watch cop shows and have an ambition to write one.

Criminal Minds- Behavioural Analysis Unit.

Luther.

Silent Witness.

 

I do like a spot of physical and psychological forensics. Have I been honing my parenting skills? What for?

My offspring don’t need me. They never contact me.

I think girls in particular have great trouble having a gay dad. And a successful gay dad in a very long term relationship- they must think that is just taking the piss.

They’ve all made bad choices, taken dangerous roads.

 

People should really take immense care not to become a victim, whatever it takes. Nobody goes scuba-diving without the training and an oxygen tank.

Kids these days, they have no idea when they are getting out of their depth.

And you can’t tell them.

You are not permitted to tell them a thing.

 
10/07/2013 19:01

 

ATTACK OF THE FLASH-BACKS

 

‘No way can we say ever that enough is enough. Life in itself is a responsibility- a burden to us burdened by thought, too often a burdensome burden. Oh, it may well be that no burden exists without a purpose.

Yes, but when we exchanged our pantheist freedoms, our total integration with nature, for the ‘awareness’ particular to mankind did anyone read the small print? And was the schism worth it?

The added powers made us immensely dangerous and we have made hay whilst playing with them as if there would be no consequences.

There are, of course, terrible consequences- when we become too burdensome for the earth and the universe we will be got rid of. Nature is not beyond behaving far worse than a she-bear with new cubs, she mirrors wrathful gods.

Twenty first century man has lost the maps and compass to circumnavigate her rage.’ Morgan Minerson.

 

FLASH.

 

The family next door.

Where I lived as a boy in a rented three bedroomed terrace the neighbours were fond of boiled marrow and boiled cabbage. If they opened a door you’d be immediately assaulted by the appalling smell of boiled marrow and boiled cabbage. The mother and son who lived there both had breath that reeked of boiled marrow and boiled cabbage. She was enormous and always dressed in a pinafore, her hair up in a turban. He was twenty-one and very backward. Stunted brain development and gentle- just like my sister Joan, his abnormality loud and shrouded in secrecy, like hers was.

How on earth did these people come to be?

Joan was born a blue baby- starved of oxygen and left by the Doctor and the Midwife for dead. Ma saved her, took on the burden of her. Joan made it to fifty years but not much more. Abdominal cancer. She maybe should have eaten more vegetables.

Sid was great at gardening, epic at growing marrows and cabbage. He dressed with a cap and an armpit waist.

 

When I was nine I showed him my erection. He looked deeply bewildered.

He’d already seen it before in other circumstances.

 

I’d kept bantam hens and would often pet them. On the day that they were plagued with chicken fleas- grey, the size of pinheads, I ran to our back-door covered in them, both legs a writhing mass of overlapping grey pimples. My mam prevented me from entering. Planted me in the hard earth yard.

She stripped me naked.

Hosed me down with cold water.

My shrieking like a girl brought all the six neighbours to enjoy the fuss. Sid was there.

For some reason, in front of this eagle-eyed audience, I got a massive stiffie. The boners of young lads always appear disproportionately large. I remember their gasps but none of them averted their eyes.

Smirking took the place of suppressed applause.

Ma appeared to be brimful of pride.

 

It could have made me an exhibitionist.

Maybe that is why, almost a year later, I showed Sid my erection once more.

What did I expect?

 

Well, I expected a fair exchange- I wanted to see his but he never showed me it. One of the many roots of the disappointment and rejection tree.

A very leggy shrub with switches of wood you could make bows and arrows and whips with, it has always dogged me. I’ve tried to rid myself of it a thousand times- slash and burn and poison, but it has all the resilience of Japanese Knotweed.

 

Just a few samples of Japanese Knotweed crushed on your shoe and you make it widespread. Disappointment and rejection indeed widespread in my life- not so much a plague as a theme.

Life is nowhere near as obliging as Windows 7. Changing the home-screen then was not even a dream for anyone.

 

Sid was not a dangerous or sexually voracious man. That was pretty lucky for me- I guess.

But even if he had showed me his dick it would have been no real substitute for what I really wanted- the sight of dad’s old man.

 

When that finally happened I fainted. I was twelve. It seeded my fascination with pubic hair.

 

FLASH.

 

I sold high end carpets and rugs in Bournemouth for a while. It was bound not to last because of my full blown asthma.

It lasted long enough to be of some interest.

The overweight manager in a cheap suit, in slack moments, would sit behind the till reading his well thumbed and unexpurgated version of the pornographic novel Justine. I used to read it on his day’s off and on his sick days.

He wasn’t a sicko in any way, just human and wanting.

 

In those few weeks there I fell in thrall to Indian hand-made floor coverings and consequently caught some form of an attachment to India which has continued to grow and persists today. Most Indian craftsmen and artists would not have batted an eyelid at the contents of Justine. I had already read the Karma Sutra and studied the carvings on Indian temples.

 

Bournemouth ladies who regularly bought silk carpets from me would have feigned horror at the sight of it. The hit you get from excessive consumerism diverts the ever present thrust of lust and converts it into moral indignation. I spotted that aged sixteen.

I have never had much money or the means to be insatiably consumerist- it has left my lusts well alone, allowed me to be honestly awash with lust.

 

Bournemouth was a fruitful playground then if all your favourite toys were lust based. Large coastal town with a beach and a growing gay underground culture easily accessible via public toilets, cafes, clubs and the beach, it remains a hotbed of pleasurable infamies; party political conferences; vacations; hedonism feeding all sensations in all the colours and all the sizes: a slightly less lewd sister to Brighton, known as London by the sea.

There has always been a stretch of nudist sand at Studland Bay; now, in terms of real estate, Chelsea or Knightsbridge by the sea.

Follow the money and you’ll find ghettos of every type.

 

FLASH.

 

Grammar school lunch. A mixed group of us crossed the boundary fence and disappeared beneath the railway through a dark tunnel. We lounged in a perceived freedom on a warm grassy bank hidden from every eyrie.

Colin unzipped himself in preparation for his special trick. Two girls were picking stalks of wild plantain. After he’d wanked up his famed erection he’d let them push these stems gently down his urethra. They giggled. They giggled like girls.

The girls always spoiled this event for me.

I wanted to do to him what they did but the bastard never let me.

 

Watching was only ever half satisfactory.

 

He wanted the sight of lipstick on his cock, he often said that, but he never got it then, not in the lunch hours, not to my knowledge. Wearing lipstick at school was against the rules.

He’s probably a grandfather now- his wife, despite her age, still made to shop in soft-porn stores like Anne Summers.

 

The spare girl with us on those occasions was the daughter of a world famous playwright; creative, hugely talented, borderline insane, she was destined to be a long standing friend and a future suicide; a travelling companion on the school bus, someone whose eventual chilly husband would shag my ex-wife on the days she stayed at their home without me.

Do stonemason’s have gentle hands? He was very handsome, chipped away at things with bit and hammer until he got the finish he desired.

 

FLASH.

 

Always been dogged by disappointment, rejection and famous people, famous or very wealthy people, famous or very wealthy and influential people. These people, to a person, have always promised much and delivered nothing.

Lesser, equally pathetic, lights have done much the same, promised a great deal and delivered zilch. I must have a flashing neon sign on my forehead that shouts ‘Abuse Me’.

 

In Beverley Hills, LA, I was once introduced to the white, strawberry blonde wife of an American music legend- a massive black Motown star, a singer-songwriter. And, being naive and on my first trip to California I never sniffed an agenda- but women always have them don’t they, Californian women moulded into clones by plastic surgeons always do; they are always in pursuit of some angle or another.

Her husband needed a lyricist. I took the bait.

 

He met with me privately in the mansion I was staying in. It has a significant musical history.

We visited their home twice. We wrote five songs together.

I have them recorded on tape.

Supposedly a Godly man, he told me, that his God had delivered me to him, that he was being given the lyricist he had always craved.

He was vast, blue black, made magic at the keys, drank red wine and drove a personalised Mercedes.

He was also the idol of the famous rock-star I had known for years- the multi-millionaire guy whose house I was staying in. There was this high-level six degrees of separation vibe kicking in.

It got me envisioning another album.

 

CURTIS PRICE: Another album?

MORGAN: Yes. The multi-millionaire had sworn to me on his daughter’s life that he would write an album with me. Undoubtedly, if that album materialised, I would be made comparatively rich.

CURTIS PRICE: And this new offer was an additional fantastic opportunity.

MORGAN: Exactly. I thought I had dovetailed into something truly big.

 

Corruption is insidious, with its weaponry of lies and deception it penetrates the muscle of your dreams with flesh-eating insects, grubs, worms. My multiple brushes with people who offered me fabulous things have always turned out to be a can of worms.

I was being played, not grandly but rather like an upright honky tonk in a basement full of barflies. Being naive, the tunes beguiled me and my man.

 

The trophy wife was being, in parallel, oleaginous with my vacation hostess- the former spouse of the multi-millionaire. And there was lust in the air those numerous nights- a subtle overbearing lust for liquid money. I know that now but there was no-way that I could see it then.

I had been hard wired to trust people.

That achilles heel has been the ‘death’ of me so many times that it’s become impossible to dismiss thoughts of a spiritual or satanic conspiracy against me.

Mad.

 

The trophy wife, a chattel of a black icon, avidly collected fascist memorabilia and any ephemera connected to the Klu Klux Klan. She was the manipulative power behind a shaky throne in grave need of an enormous cash injection.

Unbelievably mad.

 

She was fishing for a loan of one million dollars minimum.

 

Caught in the cross-sights of the rich and those pretending to be rich I was a sitting duck, a cog in a hastily made device for the execution of wealth sharing.

Well, the machinery was cracked. Her plan failed.

That album of 21st Century Motown was not going to materialise.

Swiftly they stopped taking my calls.

 

And the prior album with the multi-millionaire was never ever going to materialise.

What kind of a man swears, in front of his daughter, on his daughter’s life, that he will work with me on a life-changing project? Is there a level of wealth that you reach where your promises have no currency?

Yes. And equally, there is a level of moral and ethical impoverishment that all manner of people reach beyond which promises carry no weight.

 

The multi-millionaire’s daughter is now famous in her own right. We are close friends and will always be. The very idea of her meeting her demise on account of her father’s broken promise is just not feasible.

Clearly he was confident of that when he made it. It makes me ask the question, what is it that wealthy people know that we don’t? The tip of the iceberg appears to be that they know this- what billions of people are taught to live by such as honesty, caring, sharing, goodness, they all matter didley squat.

What else are the filthy rich hiding?

 

What I do know is that the persistent disparity between the lifestyles of the western consumerist rich and the poor is an economic model that is globally unsustainable without the rich getting richer and the poor getting poorer.

That is a fact. That is a fact that a lot of us seem to find totally palatable.

So many gravitate to being greedy uncaring fuckers- burdened by little but holding on to their fiscal advantages.

 

So many, bored by the usual hedonism, deviate because they can get away with it and they embrace substance and emotional addictions with consummate ease. Quite deliberately they seek to set themselves apart from the herd, inhabiting an altogether separate world where rules applied to them are never transferred to us.

They become godly.

It is an ineffable form of faux godliness loved by both the rich and delusional and the impoverished richly delusional who aspire to things irrational.

 

That nature might now despise us comes as no surprise to me.

 

FLASH.

 

My first real love was a bi-sexual man.

How very foolish of me.

The situation was more than a diary note but not yet a novella. It had disappointment and rejection written all over it.

A curious lothario, he did reciprocate sexually- intermittently. His body proved to be a disappointment to me.

Hopeless at disguising my feelings- I was not turned on by his undersized uncut cock, he must have read my lack of enthusiasm for it, that and the sharing of him with moist cunts. Inevitably rejection followed.

 

Years later I visited him shortly after his bitter divorce and custody battle.

A defeated personality, he didn’t raid the guest-room.

That rejection was not unexpected and, in truth, was not in the least disappointing. I have never been one for playing halfway House and Gardens.

 

There is a place for uncommitted sexual expression- with no relationship or responsibility attached to it, you’d be insane to experience disappointment or rejection because of it. All it is is an uber-wank.

Wanking is something I have never been ashamed of.

I have never been driven to make my right hand the object of my wrath.

 

Befriend me and promise me things if you must but never fuck me over because I shall never forget it.

I shoulder the burden of a near photographic memory, a memory that soaks up all facts even the seemingly meaningless ones. That kind of memory drives you to organise your brain to possess a vast chamber of files- all of them relatively easy to access.

If you have ever said something to me I will remember it verbatim, word for every evidential word.

 

That first love was intimidated by my brain-power and the size of my cock- being half-heterosexual he just couldn’t live with it.

 

I recall his ghastly pallid skin, the holistic sickliness so beloved by the romantic poets. In one thing he had succeeded, he had seeded my favourite pre-disposition to men of colour. By some means or another our tastes will plant themselves in the proper place. Wise people tend to them and make them flourish- they are preferences and not prejudices.

 

On the morning of my marriage, he had pleaded with me, don’t do this. If I had listened to him the consequences of my fucking against type would never had existed.

 

FLASH.

 

I was ten when a grown-up cousin flashed me his erection. How could I forget my intake of breath. It appeared huge to me.

 

My family had family a bus-ride north of us. We would occasionally visit them for tea.

They had followed my folks migration from the South Wales valleys to the New Forest edge towards the end of the second world war. They first settled within a mile but then later moved the bus-ride away.

 

As the story went, they had the chimneys of their first house taken out by a striken German aircraft heading to crashland in the water meadows. That night you could see the orange glow of Southampton burning from all sides of the forest.

Excited kids, including my elder brother, went searching the water meadows for souvenirs. Who knows? Some such things may have ended up in the hands of the freckle faced trophy-wife of a black American superstar.

I was not even born then.

Serendipity pays no heed to the timeline of the generations.

 

People said that the pilot of the crashed aircraft must have been a kind German, that he could have let his bombs fall on the town but chose to jettison them in open fields. The plane exploded on impact. The spread of bits to cherish was a wide one. They said the cockpit part survived and that he remained in his seat, a charred man eaten by fire. Kids had no digital cameras or smartphones back then. I have never seen any photographic evidence of it, but the story of it was related often with subtle variants. It was these typically human variants that gave the tale a real authenticity.

 

Shortly after I was born my uncle’s family left the house of the toppled stacks and moved eight miles north into Wiltshire.

 

After tea his slightly disabled son took me for a work across a wheat field to a small copse of five trees recently felled and partly logged. I climbed.

Seeing that I could see him from above he took a piss and as I looked on in astonishment his prick grew bigger, stiffer, like a tree branch.

He smiled at me as he stroked it. Then he put it away

Nothing else happened.

He held my hand gently and walked me back, talking at nine to the dozen about nothing and everything he knew besides sex. It was a failed attempt at erasing the chalk drawings from the blackboard of my mind.

 
18/07/2013 12:52

 

5]

 

The terrace in Southampton Road is long demolished and buried beneath a by-pass that made shopping in the town very much safer. That bypass still takes a huge volume of traffic headed for Bournemouth and the seaside.

Born, at home not in the Fordingbridge Cottage-Hospital- my mother being in her mid forties with a history of problematic births including the death of one, I survived a strangle moment in the birth canal and lived there until I reached fourteen.

They said, unkindly I think, of ‘late’ pregnancies like mine that they split fifty-fifty between producing idiots or geniuses.

Working class families did not want either because both sorts would be burdensome. They needed a hard-working, income bringing offspring to reward all the necessary nourishing.

A new mouth meant sacrifices.

When I went to grammar school, aged eleven, I was the child with the second oldest father; old parents who never visited the place. The oldest father there was in his eighties: his son was a short lad, a sprightly wicket-keeper at cricket, a friend of mine on schooldays only.

 

Behind the simple terrace was a dirt and cinders yard and a range of brick buildings- the shed come coal-shed and the outside lavatory. There was no inside lavatory, no bathroom. A large galvanised bath, hung against the red brick of the shed wall, was the focus of the families cleansing rituals.

Behind the brick outbuildings lay the longest imaginable allotment garden, south-west facing and terminating at a line of conifers that made a boundary fence for a small farm.

I loved it.

As a toddler I would sit in the long biscuit grass of summer with my back to the evergreen trees. It would give me a view with a massive perspective- home, seemingly small and faraway, creating an horizon; between it and me the orderly stretch of chicken huts and wire runs, rows of all the staple vegetables and there, where it all butted against the privy, a width of  bright colour where ma grew flowers.

Here, in the tall grass, there was silence for me, safety and secrecy; unimaginable now.

 

In our yard, outside the lean-to kitchen was another smaller flower border. Ma always grew morning-glories, heaven’s trumpet vine, up the rainwater down pipes there. And that space was otherwise filled with scented flowers- wall-flowers, night-scented stock and white mignonette and there were scented leaved pelargoniums in terracotta pots.

It was nothing posh, just a method of filtering sweet freshness through the dark interior of home.

 

My back bedroom window opened up to capture these keynotes of spring and summer. It was a window with a very deep window-ledge where I could sit, the curtains drawn behind me, effectively disappeared, breathing in the perfume of the night-scented stock, after lights out, as I wondered about the stars and the universe, how far life spread. Easy to see then- the pollution negligible; London very distant in the grip of post war growth, a second wave of industrial revolution and smog; grounded clouds grabbing handfuls of smoke with sticky mits acting as magnets for the burned coal particles, the fumes of combustion engines, cigarettes and very stressed drains. I’d read it was deadly.

 

No-one had diagnosed my asthma then and there was no allergy testing. Rheumatic Fever had plagued me and robbed my lungs of juvenile perfection.

Unknown to anyone I was at high risk from all that grass and the not uncommon sensation of drowning in air.

Today the family of grasses are among my favourite plants, along with ivies and buddleias; all the wonders of these enemies to my well-being I have always kept close.

How alien to earth can it really get- allergic to the whole planet? Not much.

Ginger, pale and freckled skin- I do enjoy the sun but it has never been a friend to me, a life-giver yes but not a friend.

My brother has survived skin cancer.

Warm dry climates suit me fine- in them I can wear hats without looking weird.

 

Ever since I was sixteen I’ve been medicated for asthma and allergies. No great details here but in ‘Intensive Carelessness’, the companion volume to this.

A cough was just a cough then, even if it was virtually constant. My childhood was a litany of foul-smelling and tasting spoons full of what they called medicine, expectorants, that’s the word. That a Calamine lotion for sunburn.

Mine was a Vics chest-rub infancy. Menthol. Mint. Clothes smelling of mothballs, a peculiar sour lavender, were laundered and tidied away along with bleached white bedding alive with ozone.

 

Dust. Mankind manufactures it. Skin cells and other detritus. Boot soles full of mud and seeds- reproduction and all the conditions necessary for it, nature’s top priority. A buddleia needs little more than hoover dust and a crack in the cement at the top of a shop-front.

We used to need the barest minimum- shelter and a source of water.

Back then, 1950’s, you went shopping and brought things home wrapped in paper.

Silk stockings were the thing but nylons were creeping in and bad plastic goods- dripping with modernity and post-war design.

Not so long ago I purchased an art-deco radio in an antiques fair- petroleum oil made malleable. Desirable plastic.

 

The smell of shit was way across the yard, always mingling with the reek of white distemper and Izal loo-rolls; or, when the hard Izal disinfected loo roll had run out, the distinct scent of damp newsprint. The Daily Mirror. And if you left the privy door ajar aromas of coal, paraffin, cans of paint, wood and wood oil would infiltrate along with the general dark of the cavernous shed where chickens were frequently beheaded and hung up to bleed out.

The porcelain pan was white, cold, bleached with a wooden seat. As a child it was too big for my bum and my feet could not touch the floor.

Dad would smoke in there, Woodbines or roll-ups. You never forget the odour of that mix- fag-ash and alpha-male piss.

 

He scared me- that was the done thing then and, frightened as I often was, I could not resist testing my boundaries and his temper. It was a great game- usually ending with my running away as he chased me, me screaming ‘Help. There’s a madman after me.’ He believed the devil was in me and that I did magic or satanic things. He’d wave a rake or garden fork at me and look like something mythical and monstrous.

Ma would always rescue me from him.

I remember thinking was this just a game- was it, or was it something deeper, something deep enough to be above mentioning? They’d keep me guessing about that- always keeping me guessing about how much of an irritant I actually was, whether or not I really fitted in.

 

Their first born child was a grown woman who never left me in any doubt that I was an irritant, a leech, and that I didn’t fit in. She was a greedy, paranoid and poisonous, occasional visitor that always brought grief with her; grief for my ma, grief for me and, by contrast, a deliberate and cruel adoration of my father. For that he allowed her to be manipulative and dividing. She was given free rein to exercise her true nature by her ‘hero’.

It always made my ma chew on a wasp and spit lemon juice.

 

Once in awhile their undisguised rancour for each other would boil over into physical rage. Fisticuffs. It was no way for grown women to behave in front of a small boy- brawling with each other, tearing each other’s hair out. They would audibly wish each other dead. Then my sister would leave- her vicious haughty head held high, always. Always. Always the victor, triumphant in her own mind, always right, incapable of swallowing any notion of wrongdoing, a bigot on the rise; a racist and a homophobic American Republican hypocrite in the making. A proper jumped up snooty bitch with a will of iron that she had bended to wilfully do her bidding in all weathers and circumstances. She calls herself a Christian and I am not the least surprised.

 

Then my ma would always set to spring cleaning the house in silence. I would have to not be in the way and be my own company, my own entertainment.

Not a one off experience but an oft repeated one. How can that not be formative in an unconstructive way? Today, without question, any social worker would refer to it as abuse.

We are mollycoddled now, encouraged to invent some medical diagnosis or other in order to excuse misbehaviours.

 

My sister had her own line in gardens around a detached bungalow- hedges that never dare be scraggy, lawns without daisies, rustic wood supports for precious roses. There had to be roses. Always.

I call that fascist gardening- lace-trimmed rubber gloves and poisonous pest spray. You just can’t keep a control freak down.
Her husband attempted to cultivate mushrooms and failed miserably. Growing mushrooms for financial gain was such a pretentious challenge.

My mother uttered ‘Oh dear.’

Ma had legendary green thumbs- her cuttings always rooted. She was good with dianthus pippings.

 

My sister’s plot of soil was a place where weeds never dare grow; deadheading as she worked her way through her Doris Day repertoire, uprooting whatever irritated her model life. Lipstick horticulture.

What a notable stinging nettle I must have been to her.

 

It happens that I still am as a matter of fact, still the mad hornet in her head, the permed head that daily wishes me dead. It is a breathtaking insanity. Untreated, hidden, never diagnosed.

No way to occupy your eighties blessed with wealth and grandsons who would find it totally impossible to be homosexual, quite out of the question. According to their grandmother there are no gays in the whole of Michigan State.

Excuse me- pass that nugget of knowledge past me one more time.

I am still alive though, happily gay and very happily not living in Michigan, and living a life that’s way more alive than her dying breed could ever dream of.

 

My dad loved her, loved this dreadful creature openly, in all the ways that he could never love me, he probably loved her far more than he did my mother. After my birth I guess all further sexual congress terminated.

Something had emotionally retarded him, disabled his affections.

Wartime in the service of the country, down the coal mines of Lancashire, training conscientious objectors to armed conflict, in the skills of hewing coal- two days travel from home.

Whatever did he get up to? There was the spare time.

What did life get up to with him?

And I really tried so hard to grab some shard of attention from him.

When he was sleeping I would sometimes gently stroke his eyebrows against the grain. Yes.

How very irritating of me.

 

I actually wanted to run my fingers through his pubic hair. He was having none of it. He was having none of a four to five year old son targeting him with sexual intent out of desperation for some sign of love from him.

There’s an admission. The earliest sexual rejection. The challenge of some surrogate success at it fixed for the future.

It has always made me question in child sexual abuse cases why it is always assumed that the adult is the one to have made the first move.

Below the age of criminal responsibility every child is automatically given the benefit of the doubt. None of us like the concept of infantile protagonists because we never allow ourselves to give up the guilt trip we bear for our own loss of innocence, probably not a good experience, swift, dirty; even for those irresponsible mothers who dress their daughters up as crack whores.

Brain dead indignation when such a honey trap gets raped. I don’t buy it. It is shot through with delusion.

There are women capable of hiring out their kids to paedophiles. Fact. There are known hourly rates.

My upbringing and subsequent life experience, has taught me- for good or for ill, that the special status traditionally accorded to women is very transparent foolhardiness; they are no more deserving of that than the rest of us. No blanket favours. Treat every case as it comes.

We all of us bleed individually.

Do not jump to hasty or ubiquitous conclusions- I have managed to build constructive lasting relationships with highly intuitive women, so long as they can be trusted.

And there’s the rub.

What controls our mechanisms of trust- is it intuition or a lifetime’s repeat incidence of conditioning experiences and stand-offs with the gentle sex baring her she-bear teeth?

 

That aeons old war between the sexes? It’s a thing we should not be proud of.

Just shut the fuck up and evolve to the point where the person who you are is way more important than your gender.

Ideological genderism will be the death of us. I believe it.

 

Dad would dig long rows of trenches to put his seed potatoes in and I would watch him, watching how his ingrained method of doing this would slowly and habitually unfold. He would dig strictly parallel trenches using dibber sticks and miles of twine that smelled of preservative, always carefully spading the spare earth to his left side. And he would do this robotically for four long trenches. Then he would get his large stack of seed potatoes from the boxes in the dark where they’d sprouted a little. He’d leave three shoots on each spudling. Almost always he would undertake this annual process in complete silence, being almost reverential or lost in a world of his own.

At times like that I became perfectly invisible to him- a child always in his blind spot, a very bright son cloaked in curiosity.

 

Ma grew flowers and baked and cleaned and did the laundry. She did a good batch of potato cakes. She did good batches of most things

Ma and me used to dig up fresh potatoes together- a shiny fork, a crumbling soil from which tumbled new nuggets of gold that smelled of death as their hold onto the old nest broke. Put midday heat into the mix- it becomes a heady thing. Let the ground fruits tumble into a galvanised bucket- I loved the process.

 

Once I found a form of wild datura flowering on the allotment- way too exotic and out of place, an alien species. I feared its poison. We even had the local constable take a look at it- just in case.

A seed shot out in bird poo, something digested from a visit to a patio adjacent to a victorian conservatory somewhere in the forest. Most likely a big house.

Recalling reading when very young Wells’ War Of The Worlds.

Later- much later, my fascination with the Quatermass series on black and white TV.

 

Eventually dad had his finished trenches and a pile of his chitted seed potatoes waited in a wooden wheelbarrow anticipating being hugged in the dark by friable soil. Dad’s habit was to place each seed potato equi-distant for the four lengths of burial ditches. I followed him closely from behind. He would place a spud, measure the space and move on. Every spud he placed I secretly removed and put on the top of the adjacent dirt. We did this for all four trenches.

Finally dad stood up to assess his neat work and to ready himself for shovelling the earth back in the gaping hollows.

He was first confused by what was obviously wrong, head scratching, tutting.

Putting two and together he turned towards me.

I was the culprit. It was me- the innocent irritant.

I ran for my life screaming- “Help! There’s a mad man chasing me.”

 

I did something similar with the tulips- regimented bulbs planted by dad for cutting for the house.

Mum needing a fresh bunch was the thought that had gripped me.

I harvested them all but then had grievous second thoughts. I had cleared the whole bed of colour. It was a ghastly sight.

In a vain attempt to put things right I planted every bloom back in the soil- no roots of course, just bare stalks.

Betraying me, within ten minutes, they all began to droop.

I remember owning up to the offense then keeping quiet for hours. It was a sunday and the house was full- everyone  caught the dismal mood and went about their business in silence. Those deliberate silences always were a powerful punishment.

I’d have preferred my father to smack my arse- it would have been an unusual intimacy for me.

 

I was ten when my friend Janet took me into the largest of the hen-houses sited there. In the dim lit heat of that wooden shack, she showed me the secret in her green knickers and I was not at all impressed. Suffering a profound disappointment, I refused to let her see mine. That nothingness was not impressive. Her ‘noo-noo’ was not the holy grail. She was livid. She burst into tears. She was dangerous.

I got the blame for her tear-stained face. She never ever visited again. So much for friendship.

I dimly remember making my choice, my choice; there was no measure of intended rejection in it. But, of course, sweet Janet believed she had been rejected, her magic and mystery had failed to perform in the way that she’d become used to. How did that make her behave- like a very spoiled brat.

Note to self: not doing what a girl wants you to will make her feel rejected; rejected girls throw their toys out of the pram and render you invisible, effectively they murder you and never hang for it. How can they be trusted.

My grown-up sister, she was a girl and, yes, there was no trusting her.

I trusted my mother though and that confused things.

I trusted her until she took a knife to me when I was fifteen. Irritated by my need for friends outside the family and my ambition, she suddenly attacked me with a kitchen knife in plain-sight of my bland dad who never moved a muscle; he just sat at the dining table reading his Daily Mirror. Not so much as a flinch from him.

I will revisit it. It always repeat visits me.

 

My ma always poured boiling water on ants nests in the summer.

My da decapitated chickens on an oak-chopping block.

I once found myself incinerating ants with sunshine and a magnifying glass. Bored with that, I took a tack-hammer to them. It made me feel strangely sick.

I could never stamp on spiders.

I would never be the sort of boy to pull the wings off flies.

 

And that long allotment garden was the venue for many an innocent bromance. We’d dig hollows and roof them with canvass and sticks. We’d make camp; set fires; boil water and make foul tea. We’d whittle branches and make bows and arrows.

None of those boys and me ever shared the grail secret of the ants in our pants. We never dared compare things.

No mutual masturbation, not there, not then, years before the building of the town lido. But we did experience the pure joy of uncluttered friendship, something utterly constructive that avidly fed our hungry imaginations.

It was a spam time, way before the troublesome intrigue wrought by the arrival of pubic hair. Girls, a virtually alien species, hardly registered on our radar.

 

Forward Janet, sexually precocious, driven by something quite beyond me, had effectively entrapped me. She had been demanding, domineering. A child is more than capable of sexually abusing another child, a submissive child.

Knowing what you want, being capable of making your own choice, is not symptomatic of submission.

She hated me for that.

Some years later, any sight of her older brother would make me swoon.

I once saw him stark naked in the lido changing room.

As far as I was concerned that was us done, an item fully consummated. Well, in my wet dreams.

 
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