Flesh
Constipation
There's something I want to say about myself, a confession, but I'm afraid that it might be taken the wrong way and that's not what I mean. It's more than that, and less than a scandal. But it's everything to me on the inside.
Where to begin. If you're a cynic you'll laugh like the oh so many hollow echoes that follow me. I have been mocked enough to know a sensitive subject when I see one.....absolutely ripe for misunderstanding and made public by my big mouth friend "A" who hated the way his father said 'why can't you be more like you-know-who'? Once I gave this friend a top secret porno story which I had written, and he gave it to his older female cousin whom we both were in love with. (I could've died). She said it was quite good actually.
She hardly looked up from the book of horses she had open on her lap while driving all us younger kids to school in a very fast Volvo while my friend tried to get a rise out of her saying, 'Gee you've got a big VULVA?' several times until she hit him. Him and my sister did their absolute best to drop me in it at every opportunity.
Mostly these events only mildly puzzled me, because I was a burning meteor, nothing could damp the fires that my father stoked in me and my mother cloaked and choked to no avail because it was her fire squeezing out between her tightly held together knees.......like a comedian holding down the lid of one pot and then the lid on the other pops off. Then he holds the other one down, and this one pops off. My mother held her lid tightly down and I was popping off all over the place...an unguided missile....occasionally deflected here and there by my dad's helping hand, but that only altered my trajectory. Hellbound is Hellbound.......no matter which way you're pointing.
My only hope is to tell all. But then who wants to listen. You? You've got a secret of your own that needs constant watching or the next thing it's running off down the street entertaining the neighbours. The truth makes cowards of us all. Anyway, here goes.
It was a lovely summers morning. The kind that just makes you want to get out there and smoke those cigarettes. I was 15 years old and the mealie fields were filled with bare breasted African maidens shaking D.D.T. into the funnels of the plants. And that's about as interesting as farm life gets - except for my horse, Rocket (Ha Ha) who would try and scrape me off his back along a barbed wire fence when, on those rarest of rare occasions, I could get him to move. He made me cry more than any woman ever did. Once he even threw me down a donga with a dead dog in the bottom. I sold him for a powder blue brand new electric guitar without an amplifier.
On the subject of not being able to let it all out, we used to have an outside loo. Mud bricks with a zinc roof and a plank with a hole in it, full of secret suffering. I never told anyone because I was too ashamed. I was the silent sort.
Anyway. Moving on from the anal stage we get to the next level of hell on earth.
Sex. Once I got hold of some randy pills (as they were called) at school and took them when I got home. I lay down on the bed and spent half an hour gripping the blankets in terror that I wouldn't be able to control my normal every-moment-of-the-waking-day urge of wanting to fuck anything and everything. In horror I could see myself moving on from the african maidens to the neighbours wives and daughters not to mention any cattle or sheep along the way.
I had a dog called Caesar and I used to masturbate him if I wasn't busy myself.
I tried to kill a lot of birds in those days. The lovely old couple on the next door farm (about a mile away) used to sit and listen to my bullets whistling through their windmill every evening. They only told me years later. My blood still runs cold when I think of it.....and I can still see those damn gun sights every time I look at a bird on a branch.
I was called an old fart the other day. Bloody old poof.....just because I wrote a poem to them (rather witty and designed not to anger, but to inform) complaining of the way they slammed the door in the middle of the night and how their howling dog is trying to dig it's way out through our ceiling because they leave it locked up day and night.
I'm an old man already and I haven't even gotten over my teens yet. Half of me seems stuck back there, a bit like a lifeline I suppose or else I'd just be this aging empty husk. The fire still burns but the body doesn't have the energy to get into so much trouble anymore.
Anyway. It's a lovely summers day and my father is screaming what's taking you so bloody long don't you have any brains I said a ring spanner not an open spanner you idiot rap on the knuckles now pick the bloody thing up do I always have to tell you everything twice jesus christ I nearly dropped a concrete block on his head once while he was digging a cesspit for the new indoor toilet.. Another time he was actually sitting on the newly installed indoor loo still bitching at me and I went and fetched the shotgun and aimed through the closed door at where I thought he was.
I'm glad I didn't pull the trigger though, because I would never have been free of him then.
And, as he told me on my eighteenth birthday......"Congratulations. You're a grown-up now. If you kill someone they can hang you." I wonder if he suspected? Anyway I'm bored with this chapter even if it is a bit short. Lets get onto the next.
CHAPTER TWO
TRAFFIC LIGHTS AT MIDNITE
I used to do a lot of walking home late at night. Solitary walks through empty suburb streets. The aloneness seemed empty and full at the same time. I wasn't a thinker then, I just drifted through it...feeling it.
And I came to set of traffic lights, click, silently changing in the dark misty night at a crossroads out in nowhere, for no-one, just me, to see and stand and watch and wonder...knowing it was a profound moment but not knowing why.
It was the regular changing......red-amber-green-amber mechanically on and on and everyone gone....
red for me.....
amber, no-one's coming......
green again, it shows the empty street that it is safe for ......
no cars to proceed........red...stop....but there's no-one there anyway......but it can't help itself staying red for the full allotted time and then changing to amber again.......just the repeat of the previous amber to nothingness......and I'm fascinated by it's impotence when no-one is about, and its larger than lifeness. And I still can't explain what I mean. The Incongruousness......the way it was flying in the face of nature. They should have switched it off maybe when all the cars had stopped. Wasting electricity......but then I would never have experienced this spectacle.
Well. That chapter was a fuck-up. Lets try another.
CHAPTER THREE
A few years later my mother put that shotgun to her chest and left a brown stain on the floor.
My father tried to scrub it off but you could still see it.
CHAPTER FOUR
HELLO SHIT HOUSE
I did try to get away from the subject but it hasn't run it's course it seems.
This was my mothers greeting to anyone she met. Even to a complete stranger once in a chemist shop in a one-ostrich town called Petit about five miles from the farm. The school bus (more about that later) only brought us this far. The Ostrich belonged to my standard-six teacher who had a little plot of land there. If my ma couldn't fetch us from school we had to wait there for my dad to pick us up on his way home from work some four hours later. After two minutes an ostrich is very boring. She (the teacher) also had geese. Lots of birds with big biting beaks. She was feared at school but very pleasant to us in a non-engaging sort of way. She made us do our homework inside her cool dark mahogany mausoleum, in the dustless, lightless, loneliness that was her home. Terrible, wasted afternoons those.......just waiting in our best behavior.
Anyway this guy in the chemist was at first shocked then speechless then did the gentlemanly thing and ate out of her hand. She was of course flirting (innocently I may add......although my dad did once punch her on the nose for being too friendly with a guy she was dancing with. The big blue blob on her face the next morning was explained as a collision with the dashboard) and vivacious as she usually is. Red hi-heels red toenails red dress red fingernails red lipstick red hair and hemmed in by rednecks. Click for Tears (You can minimize Media Player and keep on reading.)
MIDNITE SKINNY DIPPING IN THE DAM
With my so-called friend from the next farm who wasn't very physical but very clever. I also used to ride my horse bareback in the nude when the moon lit up the fields like daylight. I loved the weird atmosphere and the feel of the horse and the wind on my whole body and even the horse must have enjoyed it cause he never gave me any trouble then. I suppose I can thank my father for sparing me the humiliation of buying me a mare. Though a gelding isn't so much better. He used to pin me against the wall of his shed at feeding time and try to kick the shit out of me. I loved brushing him with a curry comb though. He'd get all smooth and shiny and contented and sometimes we could even talk to each other.
Those were the only times he'd be sympathetic to my sorrows and he'd look at me as if I was a fellow creature. There was such sadness in his big beautiful shiny eyes.... he seemed to somehow share the worlds woe. Sometimes I'd cry and he'd nuzzle me and snort his hot breath on me and nibble at my shirt. Without him and the dog I'd never have made it. But even in the heat of the moment I had to be careful to keep my fingers out of his mouth. He never missed a chance.
Once, a friend of mine commented that my experience of the horse.....was my dad's experience of me. Sulky, stubborn, destructive, unobedient.......no matter how much you thrashed them with a stick. One night we had to work through the night with the combine harvester reaping the mealies.
Golden dust from the dry leaves glittering in the silver moonlight air everywhere hanging like fairy twinkles...... bags of corn piled at intervals..... their synthetic weave glowing like silver satin pillows on the stubble ground.
I worked as if in a trance and by five the next morning I was burning with fever. Why didn't you tell me you were sick my father shouted. You shouldn't be working like that. I wouldn't have missed it for the world. So it's come to this. But I'll stop now at the moment of truth. I need to go and have a wee and phone a guy about why I can't hear my audio tracks on the computer.
Four days later on the 17th of the 9th 1999.
THE MEAT OF THE MATTER or
Goodness me, all the girls are smelling pretty today. It must be Thursday.
(because "Thursday night is Noodle night". Excerpt from a radio commercial for spaghetti.)
I've just made an appointment to see a doctor. First time in 30 years. I used to go a lot.
For penicillin. Just in case.
Boy who walks in fathers' shoes
sleeps in mothers' beds
How's that for Zen. I'm feeling brief at the moment, as opposed to short, because I'm actually quite tall, 6'4 blond hair blue eyes sensitive and a complete fuck-up. A German friend once told his little daughter to tell me that I was Ubergekocht. Which is German for 'burnt sausage'.
My father likes his meat slightly charred. Black, like the thoughts behind the burnt and furrowed brow.
South Africa. Sunshine and whips, cattle dips and the smell of roasting flesh. Children kicking up hell, as little devils do. Make a man of him. Or a cunt.
I've seen a Doberman Pinscher driven till his nerve broke. Now he just shivers in the corner.
There are those, and there are others, one of whom I met in Holland in 1982. The unknown genius and honest heart of the age. He taught me to see and speak. I could already hear. My father had opened my ears with poems he used to recite at odd moments.
In Xanadu did Kublai Khan a stately pleasure dome decree
where Alf the sacred river ran
in caverns measureless to man.
I feel sad. I don't think my lungs will last much longer. I'll feel sad to go. So much to do...so many songs to sing. Just one of the many people dying. At least I'm not suffering like some....it's just
uncomfortable in the mornings...gotta go slow - it's the rush to the loo that nearly kills me.
When you gotta go you gotta go. I hope I don't go before I've gone - or been - or go going - you know, with dignity, which is difficult to maintain when the centre cannot hold anymore.
Life calls...and death answers. Once more....through the door.
I was born just after Hitler died. Men who make their mark are the result of others who made their mark on them. Mr Hitler apparently made quite a big impression on little Adolf.
I wonder who I'll choose next time.