OUTING MY SHAMELESS VOICE [4]

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.