Having a child was no doubt an inconvenience to his parents. A failed experiment, never to be repeated. They provided him with food and shelter, but gave him precious little else—apart from occasional lessons in drunkenness and brutality.
Home was bad. School was worse. The kid wasn’t popular. He wasn’t sporty, or cool, or clever. He was shy and withdrawn, and lonely. The only classmates who spoke to him with any regularity were the bullies—a gang of four mean boys in his class. He nicknamed them the Neanderthals.
The Neanderthals would wait for the kid every morning by the school gates and empty his pockets, taking his lunch money, shoving him, tripping him up, and playing other pranks. They had a fondness for kicking footballs at his head—attempting to knock him over—while hurling insults at him, like weirdo and freak, or worse.
And when he was face down in the dirt, there was always, behind his back, a chorus of laughter. High-pitched children’s laughter. Jeering and malevolent.
I read somewhere that laughter is evil in origin—as it requires an object of ridicule, a butt, a fool. A bully is never the butt of his own jokes, is he?
The leader of the Neanderthals was a real joker, called Paul. He was popular, in that way mean kids can be. He was a wag, a prankster. He sat at the back of the class, mocking teachers and students alike.
Demonstrating a precocious grasp of psychological warfare, Paul decided that none of his classmates were allowed to speak to the kid. He was deemed a leper—too disgusting, too gross, too smelly, and too damn weird to be talked to, acknowledged, or touched. He must be avoided at any cost.
From then on, girls would delight in running off, in fits of excited giggles and screams, if the kid neared them on the playground. Boys would pull faces and make retching noises if they passed him on the stairs. Cruel notes, wishing him harm, were left in his desk for him to find. And always, behind his back, that high-pitched mocking laughter.
There were occasional respites from this misery.
When he was twelve years old, he was in a play for the first time. A school production of that glorious old American warhorse—Our Town by Thornton Wilder. Possibly an odd choice of play for a comprehensive school outside London, but his drama teacher, Cassandra, hailed from the United States. She was probably homesick when she decided to stage this love letter to small-town America in Basildon, Essex.
The kid liked Cassandra. She had a friendly horse face and wore a necklace of amber beads with prehistoric flies trapped in them. She gave him some of the closest moments he had ever known to happiness.
She cast him (presumably without irony) as Simon Stimson, a cynical alcoholic choirmaster who ends up hanging himself. The kid relished the part to the full. Existential angst, sarcasm, despair—he had no idea what his lines meant literally, but trust me, he got the gist.
That first night of the performance, the kid experienced applause for the first time in his life. He’d never known anything like it—it felt like a wave of affection, of love, flooding the stage, drenching him. The kid shut his eyes and drank it in.
But then he opened his eyes—and saw Paul, and the other Neanderthals, sitting in the back row, laughing, making faces and obscene gestures. Their vengeful expressions told him there’d be a price to pay for his brief moment of happiness.
He didn’t have to wait long. The following morning, at break time, he was dragged into the boys’ locker room. He was told he was going to be punished, for showing off. For thinking he was special.
One Neanderthal stood guard by the door, making sure they weren’t disturbed. The other two pushed the kid down, onto his knees, and held him there, by the stinking urinal.
Paul reached into his locker. He produced, with a magician’s flourish, a large carton of milk.
I’ve been saving this for weeks, he said, brewing it—for a special occasion.
He opened the carton slightly, cautiously sniffing it—then pulled a disgusted face, like he might throw up. The other boys tittered in anticipation.
Get ready, said Paul. He ripped open the carton—and he was about to turn it upside down, over the kid’s head—when he suddenly had a better idea.
He held the carton out to the kid. “You do it.”
The kid shook his head, trying not to cry.
“No. Please … no, please…”
“It’s your punishment. Do it.”
“No—”
“Do it.”
I wish I could say the kid fought back. But he didn’t. He took hold of the carton that was being thrust into his hands.
And, slowly, ceremoniously, under Paul’s supervision, the kid poured the contents over his head. Rotten milk, white, sludgy, green, foul-smelling slime slid down his face—covering his eyes, filling his mouth. He gagged on it.
He could hear the boys laughing; shrieking. Their sidesplitting laughter was almost as cruel as the punishment itself.
Nothing can be worse than this, he thought. The shame, the humiliation, the anger bubbling inside—nothing could ever be as bad.
He was wrong, of course. He had so much further to fall.
Writing this, I feel such anger. Such outrage on his behalf. Even though it’s too late, and even though it’s only me, I’m glad someone is at last empathizing with him. No one else did—least of all himself.
Heracleitus was right, you see—character is fate. Other children who had more successful childhoods, brought up to respect and stand up for themselves, might have fought back or at least alerted the authorities. But in the kid’s case, sadly, every time he took a beating, he felt he deserved it.
He started skipping school after that. He’d hang around alone in town, at the mall, or sneak into the movies.
And it was there, in the dark, he first encountered Lana Farrar.
Lana was only a few years older than him; barely more than a child herself. It was one of Lana’s first films he saw, Starstruck, an early misfire—an unfunny romantic comedy about a movie starlet falling in love with a paparazzo, played by an actor old enough to be her father.
The kid was oblivious of all the sexist jokes and contrived comic situations. All he could see was her. Those eyes, that face—projected up on the screen, thirty feet high—the loveliest face he’d ever seen. As every cinematographer who worked with her discovered, Lana had no bad angles; just perfect planes—the face of a Greek goddess.
She cast a spell on the kid in that moment. He never recovered.
He kept going back to the cinema. Just to see her, to gaze at her. He saw every film she made—and God knows, she churned them out in those early days. Their variable quality was of little interest to him. He happily watched them all, again and again.
The kid was at his lowest ebb when he encountered Lana. He was close to despair. And she gave him beauty. She gave him joy. It wasn’t much, perhaps. But it was enough to sustain him; to keep him alive.
He would sit alone, in the middle of the movie theater, in the fifteenth row, and gaze at Lana in the dark.
No one could see it, but there was a smile on his face.
3
Nothing lasts forever. Not even an unhappy childhood.
The years passed; and the kid grew older. As he grew, a flood of hormones signaled growth spurts in all kinds of peculiar places.
The need to shave was something he agonized over for months. He’d stare despondently at his ever-increasing beard in the mirror; dimly aware that learning to shave was some kind of ancient masculine rite of passage—a bonding moment between father and son, initiating the boy into manhood. The thought of sharing that rite with his own father made him feel physically sick.
The kid decided to circumnavigate embarrassment by sneaking off to the corner shop and buying razors and shaving foam—which he kept hidden like porn, in his bedside drawer.
He permitted himself one question to his father. He felt it was innocuous enough.
“How do you not cut yourself?” he said, casually. “When you’re shaving, I mean—do you make sure the razor’s not too sharp?”