Culture Sucks Down Words

Here lies another `commisioned` piece intended for either `openwide` magazine or Transmission, whichever replies first. It is another 1000 word discipline (my discipline this time...how silly) Thoughts, criticisms, etc to the same bruised ego!
A knowledge of the Manic Street Preachers oeure is not essential. I`m afraid it is fiction (except for the bangles)



JOYS ARE COUNTERFEIT

I knew all the words to `Motorcycle Emptiness`, that`s how I won her heart. It was no big thing; the lyrics were on the inlay to the album. We`d sit in her darkened rented room and watch videos; `Rumblefish`, `Betty Blue`, `Streetcar Named Desire` or `One Flew Over The Cuckoo`s Nest` with the flickering screen bathing her in a half light. If the film was `Betty Blue`, we would be illuminating the room with our pale bodies by the midway point. I would look into her eyes at the final moments, until then it proved too much for my erogenous zones to bear. If ever I see bangles rattling on a woman`s wrists, I always think of her, or of Beatrice Dalle, and I have to sit down.

We were two seventeen year old Kohl eyed souls craving acceptance. As far as the Manics went, I was playing at it, but she was besotted. The reverse was true of our relationship. She was studying Humanities, her father had a prime position lined up for her, post-graduate, but she hung with the Philosophy crowd. They initially didn`t take her seriously, but when she, just the once, removed those omnipresent bangles to reveal thin, hard red lines on her lower arms which she scrubbed at in nervous sweeps, well that all changed. That it took this to make them respect her said a lot about the circles we moved in.

Once a week, on Darkside night at `C`est La Vie’, she`d grip her cider and black tightly and gaze up at me adoringly. I was tall and underfed, my graffitied shirt hung from my coat hanger frame and my pipe cleaner legs appeared from beneath in tight white Wranglers. She made me drink Brandy and Babycham. On our first date at C`est La Vie, I had requested a pint of bitter, not knowing what to order. “Bitter?” she scoffed, those hard `t``s never harder “Bitter? That`s the drink of a fat racist in the Conservative Club. Vodka?” But I hated the chemical taste and opted for her second choice.

I most fondly remember the day we traipsed up to the Tower for a picnic. I was on a strict ration of sliced Quorn sausage and tossed salad, but I feasted on her beauty. Her hair tossed, not unlike the salad although infinitely more palatable, in the brisk wind of altitude. All the time we were there the sky was as clear as an infant’s conscience. Just as we emerged from the long, mile long winding path, the sky turned battleship grey and the heavens opened just as we settled into the ramshackle bus shelter. The crash of the rain on the prefabricated roof and the streaming windows whispered `romance` and created a rudimentary heart in clean drops on my shoe. On the bus I wrote our names inside an ostentatiously large love heart in the window mist. She smiled indulgently and gazed, head slightly angled, as if on a child who had attempted a tricky maths problem and valiantly got it wrong.

The nights walking to, and from, her room were amongst the best of my life. The late night October rain gave the streets a look of black marble and my Walkman would seep words of endearment into my ears, words she never deigned to say. It wasn`t the Manics of course; they didn`t do love songs. I used to secrete a Motown tape in the stairwell before I climbed the four flights to her room.
I`d no more subscribed to the whole `Motown Junk` thing than I had temperamental lifts
In the doomy room, she`d read Situationist literature or Tennessee Williams under an angle poise lamp, whilst I focused hard on her studied look of concentration. Her face, in repose, made her look so self-possessed that it broke a thousand unwritten laws. The Pope would have whimpered longingly.

I knew I had only snagged her through my resemblance to a drainpipe and autistic perusal of sleeve notes. I was training to be an electrician. The prosaic nature of my calling gave her chance to vent `working class hero/ dignity of labour` diatribes at folk.

I met her mother only the once and I joined in the silence. She fixed her mother with a blank look. There seemed real defiance in her grip on my hand. I suspected she returned there on some nights for matters of hygiene and finance, but she seemed to resent her mother simply for being there and her father for his long absences.

I tried to keep it together, but I was forever walking on eggshells. I knew she was out of my league and I suppose my lack of confidence showed through in my gauche demeanour. I mean, I was so proud of her winning a bar room debate about the negative influence of the Americanization of the world, purely on a passionate defence of the VietCong that I showed my own passion by kissing her hungrily, post-debate. She thought this demeaned her stance by compromising her equality. I just thought her wonderful. We agreed to differ. She had proved she was more than adept at arguments.

One day, I told her a joke I had heard on the radio. She glared at me wordlessly. I still don`t know if it was the crass humour or the fact I had been listening to Radio One. In the uneasy silence her stencilled t-shirt said it all: Spectators of Suicide. I was watching love slowly loop a rope around its neck and slowly twist away on a hook. She had even loaned her `Betty Blue` video to Julia form C`est La Vie. I knew the consequences of that.

She left me the week later for a taller, thinner boy who knew the words to `Soul Contamination`. I couldn`t compete. It was a B-side and not on the album. I reacted badly. I did something profoundly stupid. I went home and listened to Lionel Richie. I guess I should have known all along we weren`t 4 Real.

Palindromic 1500 words

PALINDROMIC


The trick cyclist called it lack of emotional nourishment. Jake liked that, it spoke of something that could be solved with a trip to a chip shop rather than recourse to self harm. Jake thought how easy the trick cyclist made it sound.

The trick cyclist spoke like he understood, but how could he? Jake once asked him whether he had ever contemplated waging war on himself and the world. Had he ever wanted to introduce Auntie Lighter to Uncle Petrol in the centre of the family home whilst his parents slept and dance in the spreading light of the flames? `No`, came the answer, as the trick cyclist, with a concerned frown, inputted this development into the Mac, `No, I haven’t`. Jake nodded patronizingly, as if to say `Ah, well, each to their own`.

Jake entertained these possibilities not because his parents abused him, nor because Jake hated them. He had these flashes of red anger because they ignored him and had done for the last four years. Jake had grown increasingly unhappy since he turned thirteen and they`d moved here. Jake`s dad got a better job, Jake`s mum got a full time job, they bought a bigger house and somehow they lost Jake in it. Some parents smother you with love, some crush you with hate, but Jake’s parents ground him down with indifference. The timing was bad as his hormones were raging and, with little in the way of female attention, they manifested as frustrated anger which then turned back inside at his self. He was a tall, stocky boy, but could never bring himself to hurt another with his strength, only himself with his weakness.

One incident on his sixteenth birthday with his left wrist, a jagged Vodka bottle (recently emptied inside him) and a genuinely scared policeman had led to his mother booking him in for a `session` with the trick cyclist. Jake discovered this fact by the brown Manilla envelope that dropped through the door. His parents had not spoken to him since, not that Jake noticed the difference.

The real problems had started when he was fifteen. Jake joined a group of younger boys on the rec some evenings. Each time he did, some form of passive aggressive bullying tactic would be played out. Then things got less passive.

Jake was sat idly on the Spiders Web, a roundabout that had four small sections in the middle, spanning out to four larger ones, then four even larger on the edge. The small sections could be straddled, one leg in one section, and the Web spun at great speed by this central propulsion. The further out towards the edge you were, the faster you went.

Jake was perched on the edge when the pace suddenly picked up from trundling to dizzying. All the other boys jumped off, but Jake’s grip was tenuous, he had no time to get a better hold, nor the position to get off. The boy in the middle was an eleven year old brother of one of Jake’s classmates, although mate infers a sort of friendship. Jake’s body propelled with the movement of the Web. If you were sat in the middle, you just moved your feet and surveyed the world going by. The boys sensed blood sport. How better not be the weakest than to prey on someone else and browbeat them weak?

The child pedalled his feet into the hard granite floor in time to the cheers and Jake became almost parallel to that harsh ground as his knuckles whitened to match his face. His shaky hold on the rail was loosening as the chipped paint dug underneath his fingernails and blood ebbed down his fingers and splashed his bare arms. This was what called a halt to matters. The humanity of an eleven year old boy far outweighs that of a fourteen year old. Seeing the blood, the young boy slowed the Web to a halt. He quickly jumped out, away from the wheel and the gently sliding body of Jake and into the circle of backslaps and cheers from the older boys.
It wasn’t until one of the boys turned and jeered at Jake that the other boys followed his pointed finger to see Jake slumped over the `ride`, sobbing deeply and crying into bloodied hands. They mocked briefly and skipped away laughing at the fact that Jake was so scared.

The brevity of the mocking didn’t stretch to others though. From the next day at school, Jake was the whipping boy. An eleven year old had made him cry. It became an entry level game for any gang. You wanna be one of us? You make Jake cry. They always did.

The reason Jake cried was not through fear or intolerance of pain. It was not through the pain of hanging on, nor the pain of shards of paint drawing blood from his cuticles. It was the same reason he cried when those kids came up and hit him softly with limp fists on a daily basis. It was because he couldn’t understand why people hated him so much when he offered no harm or threat to them. He cried to make them go away, because they always stopped raining punches when he cried. No one ever left a mark on Jake`s body with their assaults. Only Jake ever did that.

If, like the boys thought, he cried because of the pain, why did he not cry when he sliced thin, but hard lines into his skin with his father’s old Bic razors? He only succumbed to tears when his father showed no interest in forging a bond by playing noughts and crosses. They could have played on either of the red grids marked on Jake’s forearms.

In his last year Jake began to eschew school for somewhere warmer. The library offered solace and education. By the time he was sixteen and leaving school with nothing but relief, he had knowledge that could not be measured by the GCSE syllabus. The employers of the area seemed to set great stock by it, however, and Jake`s career options boiled down to picking/packing footwear manufactured in sweat shops.

Jake barely afforded the flat he moved into, but he was happier and was trying to put his rage and the disappointment at the last few years behind him. These days the trick cyclist`s office just reminded him of the past.

So why did Jake still come to see him each Tuesday? Well, on two of the last seven occasions he had been here, he had noticed a pale, but pretty young girl staring at her shoes, cradling her arms around her thin body and rocking slightly. He always hoped he’d see her again. The first time he was too busy trying not to stare and the second time he was unprepared and the therapy session had not gone well; Jake had briefly encountered a `school friend` at work.
Then he struck lucky.

He opened the door to leave and there she was, still cradling herself, but looking slightly brighter. The trick cyclist came out and said "Hannah, do you want to come in?" Jake forgot his prepared speech and said "Hannah. That’s palindromic." As she looked at Jake, unsure what he meant and fearful of aggression, she saw by his eyes that he was nervous, although smiling sweetly and `palindromic` was obviously some kind of endearment. There had not been many in her life. Hannah’s returned smile ignited feelings in Jake he didn’t know were there. When he was still sat there after her half hour session, she felt comfortable enough in his glowing presence to walk to the bus stop with him. The next evening he took her out to the chip shop, but all the emotional nourishment they needed was already growing inside them.

The two of them felt so fragile individually, so scared that life would just blow them away into the ether. Together they had enough ballast to keep them steady. They found another shabby, but bigger flat in a nearby town, packed a shabby suitcase each and started living.

Once the cigarette burns on Hannah’s arms finally faded, they put the banns up at the registry office and sought out suit and dress. Asking the elderly couple who had married before them to act as witnesses, they became man and wife. Mr. and Mrs. Jake Noon.
Yes, Hannah Noon. "That’s palindromic" said the elderly woman as they sat in a cafe, post ceremony, sipping tea. Hannah and Jake smiled, today, at least, their eyes alive with happiness.
On that first date, sat on a bench sharing fish and chips, Hannah had asked Jake what a palindrome was. “Something that reads the same backwards as forwards” he said. But, Hannah knows that whatever is thrown at them, they are only going one way; forwards. “Anyway”, she says to the woman, without malice “It doesn’t work going backwards, Noon Hannah is a silly name.”

Palindromes

If anyone can spare five minutes, could you please critique this piece. It is for a commisioned submission that needs to be in tomorrow evening and it is far from my usual style and I fear it may be mawkish or worse, boring.

One England, One Book

On my recent trip to Philadelphia for a Finance Conference, I found time to head south to Baltimore. It just happened to be the same day that the city was holding the Baltimore Book Festival.

I walked through Mount Vernon Square, peered into the many white tents set up around the square, looked in on book stalls, author readings and book signings. I noticed a board detailing the line up of events in the main authors tent and scanned it for any recognisable names. Walter Mosley was on the following day - that would've been something to see - but I was heading back to London that day, so I didn't have the time. I decided, given my busy Baltimore schedule of shopping, eating and taking photos of the police station used in filming Homicide: Life on the Street, I should just catch the next author in the lineup.

It was Ron Suskind, an author I had never heard of. He was entertaining though and very energetic, almost like an enthusiastic preacher, when speaking about his book, "A Hope in the Unseen", about a student growing up in a dangerous D.C. neighborhood who realises his ambition to make it to University. An inspiring story indeed and I immediately bought a copy. I haven't read it yet, but look forward to doing so.

The interesting aspect of this book is that it has been selected for One Maryland, One Book, a statewide community reading program; a kind of book club for the whole state. It runs for a whole year, with this one book being read and discussed across Maryland by students, teenagers, the unemployed, families, everyone. It's aimed at connecting communities across the state through the medium of one book, encouraging people to read and debate issues in the process.

As the First Lady of Maryland, Katie O'Malley, introduced Ron Suskind at the Baltimore Book Festival that very wet and rainy day, she explained the concept of the One Maryland, One Book program and it got me thinking: what book would be fitting for a similar program in England?

It would have to be a book that had something important to say, something that would resonate with all people in England, touch on the issues that are important to the communities within.

What book could entice people from all walks of life to pick it up and start reading? What book could create healthy debate and discussion among English communities about the issues relevant to them?

Any ideas?

Time and tide

Well, it's almost another year over and I've still not really managed to keep up with fiends and neighbores.

Anyway, you don't want to hear all about me. I could tell you of the mentalness of time not being at all as stretchy as you'd expect.

The Nature Of The Beast

Coming soon to a car boot near you

NaNoWriMo

It's almost that time of year again. I know Sammo & Smudge are taking part, so I will endeavour to get some widgety item set up so you can keep track of them.

As for me, well I want to participate, but....