Jackdaw, page 5
My guts went haywire too. I lost fluid from both ends and when I wasn’t puking or shitting, I was groaning from the pain as my belly went into spasm. I would have stopped, but I already knew that fluoxetine could do this in the beginning, so I rode it out.
And the dreams. Oh, boy.
If you ever go on an antidepressant, don’t load your subconscious with the paintings of Francis Bacon.
I woke up screaming every night for a month or so. Trap, who, night terrors aside, sleeps like the Qin Shi Huang’s Terracotta Army, had to stay in bed with Elise while I took the couch. Such was the nature of my shouting.
With all those side effects in play, and adjustments of living arrangements, did the compulsive masturbation disappear?
No, it did not.
7
Once, when she didn’t think I was in earshot, my mother described me at birth to a friend.
‘A soothing, less-healthy-than-average baby. A slime mould of the womb.’
Yeah, I was soothing all right. Mostly because I wouldn’t cry. I would wake up in the middle of the night, my eyes would be open, my nappy wet and my stomach empty. That’s what my auntie said to me, anyway.
I was wheezy with bronchiolitis early on, and later, possibly asthma. I wasn’t sporty as a child, but would take to physical activity as an adolescent.
Everybody knows growing old means becoming a puddle. You drip into this sludge, one muscle at a time. Your face droops like Indiana Jones’s Nazis. When did I become a puddle? I used to be a shoot with fibrous branches for arms. Now I’m a slow-motion capture of a man becoming liquid, flowing by the grace of gravity to the floor, melting like the Wicked Witch, belly and tits first. My face used to be tautly applied to the bone beneath, but now? It is sliding away from my skull. Nothing dramatic, though. It’s on the sly. One millimetre a year.
But this all came up because I had started to feel something different. I could feel parts of me dripping into something fleshy just outside my awareness. It was adjacent to reality, unfair in the way it cheated the senses. I could feel its efforts. I could feel its effects.
Have you ever had a dream so vivid you end up with memories of it for years afterwards? Decades pass and you wonder if it actually happened. Have you ever been to a place where you can hear the heartbeat of the world? There’s this thing called The Hum, a low, droning sound that very few people hear in a few places in the world. The Taos Hum. The poet in me wonders if it’s the engine behind reality, the unseen moving parts that keep things going. It’s probably tinnitus, but…
I used to be someone people liked, or at least someone people could like. Now I was just another old puddle hamstrung by age and domesticity. What the fuck did a guy like me have in common with Francis Bacon who was free to live as he pleased, drink as he pleased, gamble as he pleased, take a beating as he pleased?
I should ground this chapter in something, an actual occurrence, otherwise it becomes me waffling on about imponderables, but literary structure can suck my dick.
Fine.
While looking for a story line for the novella I stared at a man dragging a bag behind him from Stoke Newington bus station like a reverse Khepri, that self-created dung beetle god. I contemplated a tyre track that had solidified in dried mud. I saw my dusty books as a metaphor for old and obsolete methods of thinking.
None of this means anything. It is all about what it seems to be about. You might be trying to draw thematic meaning, and you are a well-trained reader who has been taught to do that, but you are in the zone of my subconscious now. This is free association, and any thematic coherence is purely accidental. Or is it?
I only ejaculated twice while writing this part.
The problem with the whole undertaking was my rationality. It never let me go enough to enter that state of mind that allowed the irrational. Losing it might have led me to the promised land that I sought, but my thinking self was too adherent. I was well defended, remember. This was William Blake’s ‘Urizen’, an obstacle to artistic expression.
Drugs, then. Entheogens. Chemistry at all costs!
Decades ago I smoked weed with a girl I liked. She was tall. Asian girl with typically long, glossy hair and beautiful brown skin. She didn’t like me that way, though. She did like me in some way and she hung out with me. She had never smoked cannabis and wanted to. I had some. Next to her, I was Freeway Rick or something. I wasn’t plugged in and I didn’t have a supplier. I couldn’t roll a joint if you put an Uzi to my head. No, I had weed because an ex-girlfriend of mine left some at my place. She had a guy who she would call and fifteen minutes later some kid on a bicycle would drop it off on the corner. But I didn’t tell my guest any of that.
I mixed the cannabis with tobacco, also my ex-girlfriend’s. Smoking had never been my thing.
Puff, puff, pass; puff, puff, pass.
On her, a spinning sensation. She went to my bed and fell asleep. Which was a damn shame because I had planned to attempt to kiss her. Couldn’t do that when she was asleep. Oh, the humanity! I had willpower back then, even when operating in a purple haze.
It took trust for her to just drop off in my place and I wanted to capture the moment, so I sketched her. It captured her low-riding jeans, the curve of her belly and the dome of one of her breasts in her low-cut blouse. And that hair, of course.
When the weed kicked in, my thoughts started racing, and I wrote a sprawling interpretation of ‘The Boy Who Cried Wolf’.
Puff, puff, pass.
You have heard this story before.
There is a small village, and in this village there is a shepherd boy and one day this shepherd boy is alone at night, watching his flock, when he sees a lone wolf approach. So he cries, ‘Wolf! Wolf!’ after which the villagers come running with machetes and cutlasses and pitchforks only to find there is no wolf.
As you know he does this three times and the third time the wolf persists, but the villagers do not respond. The wolf attacks and kills the sheep and the boy weeps, not, as most would have you believe, because he is ashamed of having tricked the other villagers, for he did not, but because he has lost his livelihood.
Without the means of making a living the boy goes into the village to beg for money. He hopes to build a new flock from scratch. What transpires is he sees things around each person. As they drop money in his bowl he perceives spirits, hobgoblins, ghosts, familiars, and, from time to time, Death itself. Though frightened, he learns to take chances and tell people what he sees. They do not always respond with gratitude, but, however humble, they always provide remuneration. In this manner his reputation grows and he begins to tell fortunes. One day, while looking at his own reflection in a brook, he sees the whole wolf episode again. The first few times he cried wolf were premonitions, but it looked so real that he was frightened. He remembers the smell of wet pelt on the phantom wolf, the drip of saliva from snout.
He lives for many years as an oracle in the village, one with unparalleled accuracy. He marries the butcher’s daughter, a busty, corpulent girl who smells of the earth and whose heart is full of wonderful delicacies that he often intuits. Sometimes when they lie together his gift spreads out its tendrils and he dreams of the beautiful contrivances of her soul. In such a state he is able to see time itself stretch out in a grand curve, an arc over the sphere of space.
Given enough time, space and unlimited energy, that which curves will return to its origin. The oracle, who always thinks of himself as a shepherd, sees his own end.
In his fortieth winter the priest of a new god comes to the village. This god is malignant, spreading metastatic claws, driving other fetishes and idols out, insisting on adoption of its tortured man-child. The priest, who insists on being called a father, declares the former shepherd a witch and commands his followers to execute him. The auto-da-fé is calm, and the oracle serene as he burns to death. His wife, who knows this day has been foretold, observes the proceedings with veiled rage. People point her out in the observing crowd. She is never seen again afterwards.
After this, as is the custom, the priest rewrites the account, and the story of the shepherd boy turns into a cautionary tale for pranksters and his great life as an oracle is lost into eternity.
Puff, puff, pass.
I got hungry and I ate pasta al dente, not because I was a fancy-pants epicurean, but because I had no patience.
I covered my guest with a blanket.
She left the next morning, good girl tourist to the sordid land of hard drugs.
I failed in my attempt to make this a dream-logic exploration. My mind still tried to impose order, logic, pattern, system.
But I am telling you, this means nothing.
8
Being human, I adapted.
I left home with two sets of spare underwear and a lot of moist wipes. I took my rucksack everywhere. The original purpose of this was to heft books. I was, for my sins, a reader and my worst nightmare was to become stranded somewhere without a book to read. Like many bookworms, I couldn’t tell you which book I would need, so I’d take more than one. E-book readers sorted out that problem for a while, but they fell out of my favour when research showed people retain less information when a thing is read digitally. Besides, I like the smell of print, and to stare at good cover art. I like how books fall open to frequently read passages. Judge me if you like.
Instead of reading material, I had sanitiser and small plastic bags so that I could take my rubbish home with me. The last thing anybody wanted was wads of semen-laden tissue in domestic waste baskets. That shit is biohazardous, or should be labelled so.
After weeks of use, the fluoxetine took the frantic edge off my compulsions, but I worked with people, and regardless of what you may have been told, people aren’t stupid. Our speech is neutered at work because of policies and guidelines and culture and suchlike, but even if the flow of truth is like swimming through molasses, it does at least swim. So it was that concerns about me sluggishly made their way through the corporate structure to the people who were tasked with holding doctors to account. It moved by memos and corridor conversations and gossip and half-truths and meaningless, meaningful meetings.
In time, they summoned me.
It doesn’t matter who ‘they’ were. What matters is that I answered to them and had to go when they called.
These things happen in a series of meetings. The first is a ‘friendly’ chat, an informal formal meeting. It’s called informal, but it’s minuted and filed away somewhere. This is Orwellian shit, where a thing doesn’t mean a thing, where words are divorced from referents. You know what I’m talking about. You also see it daily.
I arrived at work and the department PA gave me an internal letter. I knew it was a problem because by then everything good came by email, everything bad in hard copy.
The meeting was by-the-numbers. We sat around a circular table, King Arthur style, innit? Nobody at the head of the table, eliminating hierarchical gradient from the meeting, which is bullshit. As I mentioned above, I am human, and we tend to know who the big primate is. This is just some nonsense corporate psychologists came up with to make themselves feel better about disempowering workers. The weaker workers are, the more elaborate these meaningless concessions to cosmetically flattened hierarchy are.
Jessie Lightfoot stood in the corner behind one of the bosses.
I made them wait as if I was answering an important text, but in fact I was placing a bet on my poker app. I resolved to put a betting limit on later.
‘Thank you for coming in,’ one of them said, on cue.
‘Why am I here? I have work to do,’ I said. That led to a small frown. It wasn’t on the script. I was supposed to nod politely and wait for their questions.
‘How’s work?’
‘Again,’ I said, ‘can we get to the point? Don’t buy me dinner. Let’s get to the checking if we have prophylactics.’
Frowns on both faces now. A part of me envisaged a cliff and me dancing on the edge of some cataract. But fuck them. I wasn’t going to make it easy for them, no matter what. Blow, you cataracts and hurricanoes! Fuck you, managers, with your thought-executing patois and your sulphurous guidelines! Not quite what the Bard would say, but then again, he never had to deal with HR at the Globe.
‘We’ve had some concerning reports about you,’ one of them finally said.
‘Unreliable, arriving late, leaving ward rounds without warning,’ said the other, almost visibly hostile.
‘I compliment you on allowing your amiability to slip,’ I said.
‘At least two staff members report seeing you in a state of… erm…’
‘…Tumescence,’ said the other.
‘It was apparently very distressing.’
I knew what they were talking about. It had happened a week prior. The men’s room had been occupied, so I went into the day room waiting for whoever was in there to get out. I turned to the wall when the women came in, but obviously not fast enough. None of that meant I had to play this game, though.
‘I see. So, they were staring at my crotch?’ I asked.
‘What?’
‘If there was tumescence, they must have been staring at my crotch.’
‘I don’t—’
‘Did they take a photograph?’
‘No, but—’
‘Did they write statements to this effect? Signed and notarised?’
‘We’re just having a friendly chat.’
‘So, you have the word of two staff members that I had… tumescence. You don’t have photos or statements. You don’t know if both of them colluded to get me in some kind of trouble.’
‘I—’
‘And they stared at my crotch. I find that offensive,’ I said. ‘I’d like to complain about this. In writing.’
‘Well, hang on—’
‘Exactly how tumescent was I supposed to have been? Did I have a semi or was it full-glory morning wood? I’d like to get it right when I tell my representative.’
I should have stopped there. The Bard should have whispered to me about protesting too much. I probably wouldn’t have listened, but it would have been worth a try. But I worked myself up, got the old adrenalin going and the heartbeat pumping.
One of them coughed meaningfully.
I looked down.
My trousers were tented.
Damn.
And it was all going so well, too.
I drove home way under the speed limit.
Not a terrible outcome.
Two weeks of sick leave, although I wondered what meaning of ‘sick’ we were subscribing to. I had to disclose that I was being medicated for compulsions. They were understanding, but said I had to get the fuck out of there as one couldn’t go around with a wooden willy searing all the delicate eyes of the nurses and support workers. Which is a load of crap. Let me tell you, hospital workers have seen it all. No person’s junk bothers us.
The good news was I had free time to concentrate solely on Francis Bacon.
I looked in the rearview mirror, at Jessie Lightfoot. ‘I’d offer you a high five, but I have to keep my hands on the steering wheel.’
I decided from the start I wasn’t going to tell Elise about the sick leave. It would lead to too many questions that I wasn’t prepared to answer. Like how far this thing had gone and for how long.
I didn’t go home. I went to a café near the closest university to me and thought about Bacon. I needed to find another way to walk in his shoes. I knew I had to confront his masochism.
Why not now?
His father didn’t know what to do with him. Daddy Bacon kept horses, trained them, even. He had some of the stable boys whip Francis. But Francis subsequently seduced them. His father then sent him to live with a friend who he thought would be a stabilising influence. Wholesome. Yeah, that didn’t happen. What did happen is the guy started having sex with Francis and fell in love with him. Francis, for what it’s worth, was sexually attracted to his own father.
I didn’t know horses, I didn’t know stable boys and, as far as I could tell, had no sexual urges towards my father. I had been whipped before, by my father, with a koboko, which is a piece of twisted leather that Yoruba people use on goats and children and rioting students. It hurts and leaves a welt.
I’d never solicited a beating, though. My reading told me Francis would wake up and paint each morning, then, early evening, he’d go gamble. Then he’d get himself good and beaten, buggered before or after. We’re talking real lashings and punches here. He often turned up sporting black eyes and bruises. Peter Lacy, his first real love, almost killed him one time when he fell or was thrown through a plate glass window. This dude wasn’t fucking around.
I didn’t know if I wanted to go to find the whole BDSM scene. I didn’t know if that was a step I was willing to explore. I had brushed against it before. Twice.
Once, a girlfriend had asked if I was open-minded.
‘In what way do you mean?’ I asked.
She pointed under her mattress.
She had handcuffs, chains and manacles. She had something that looked suspiciously like a bear trap.
‘I’d like to restrain you and inflict some mild correction,’ she said. ‘Mild.’
‘What is “correction”?’ I asked.
‘Mild aversive stimulation,’ she said. ‘And I won’t break skin.’
I did not want restraint and correction. I was a lot younger, and quite satisfied with vanilla sex, thank you very much. Which I had one last time and ran the fuck out of there. I had always been a live-and-let-live kind of guy, but I didn’t like being tied up and I certainly didn’t enjoy pain. I also wondered what kind of fantasy the woman harboured. A black African man chained up and being whipped by a white woman had connotations beyond sex. To me, at least. To me at that time. And she couldn’t have been blind to that.
