Poison Donkey Rides

Education and Escape

You see they taught me to be lazy. They taught me that injustice rules. They taught me that the world was a place you blended into and pretended. That was my comprehensive state schooling. The problem was, after twelve years of it, an above average intelligence, and the sudden death of my father, as soon as I was set free from the clutches of their moronic idiot factories, there was only one place where I could utilize the hollow figure of what had become my personality. Through brute force, the maddening effect of endless contradictions, and an ugly but well disguised tyranny, my hateful years of state education had stripped me bare, and when you add to that the removal of the only authority figure I ever respected, well, there’s a panic, a frightened and slow clawing in the dark, looking for somewhere this genuinely artificial broken biscuit might get away with the single strategy with which I was left. Feel nothing, show no anger.

You see, once you’ve seen through the already transparent veneer of your so-called superiors, the men and women tasked with the job of educating you, you have no choice but to treat it like a game, essentially to fake it. Sure, I put up some resistance here and there, early on at least and usually motivated by frustration rather than trying to make a point, motivated by confusion rather than some Dead Poets Society vomitus. No, occasionally I just became so attacked by the whole fractured sensibility of it all, just being there threatened to suffocate me and a noise would come out. And when you stood your ground and argued your point, justified your noise, your squeak – the very thing you’d think they’d try to inspire in young students, you’d be punished for it. Not because I was wrong, (the crowd laughs) there’s no right or wrong in state education, such oppositions threaten the entire system, it was rather because I questioned something, that’s the crime. The facts are clear, the officers in this simplicity-policing were teachers in a state school. They didn’t want and were not able to do even the basics of the job. Not fit for purpose? You’re hired! No one chose that. No one wanted to do that. And sure, you can argue your cousin Suzanna had wanted to do be an English teacher from age thirteen and now loves her job; well done Suzanna you’ll probably die in a car crash, and it definitely won’t be suicide, because you definitely made all the right decisions in life. And her fiancé Gavin who teaches Geography in the same school and who went to a pretty good university (but never even suffered the polite courtesy of a rejection letter from all the cool geographic jobs he applied for, examples of which I couldn’t even guess at) now has on top of all that effort and failure, the love of his life, wrapped around the front axle of the car his parents bought them as an engagement present. Gavin’s drinking vodka all weekend now. Not because Suzanna died, but because he’s secretly a little bit glad – AKA Chuffed to fuck, AKA there is a God, AKA do this, do that, stop doing this, stop doing that. Guilty freedom. Because not even thirty yet and he’d only ever slept with one woman, Suzanna, and she cried after every unconvincing performance of what she thought was sex. People living under such conditions love the jobs they hate. They must. Feel nothing, show no anger.

So, he no longer teaches geography as much as enforces it into the general area of a mass of children who although to him have become one, just a noisy amorphous blob of life, a blob he resents for its youthful reserves of hope and joy, and the fact they are actually individuals with curiosity and a desire to learn and as such, because of him, or her, or the car, the engagement, the school, the lot, would cut their ears of a la Van Gogh to be doing anything else but listening to his droning voice talk at the frequency of nightmares about igneous rock. And when the bell rings, the entire class leaves the room knowing not what that igneous rock is, or even what it’s called. And so, they shouldn’t, there’s still signs of life fighting for space in their ever-constricting reality, and they’ll make the most of it in the playground with a fight, fingering Louise Barker, stealing something – anything to taste something that at least hinted at a future worth living. Except for little Danny, jangled on Ritalin, feeling something, showing anger, walking in ever decreasing circles until he couldn’t anymore so he strangled the new girl, and as the teachers finally noticed and it took four of them to wrench him from her dying body, he whispered, the wetness of his breath on her ear, “I love you”.

So, they’ve lost interest in their subjects, their objects, their lives, and even though it generally – although not always – happens on an unconscious level – they have become part of the useless, damaging, and abusive system of state education. Their jobs have become the act of steering you away from the subject the were hired to teach, and their dreary lives become their dreary subjects, and their dreary attempts to teach it, which usually means doing as little as possible, is as mundane as the tick in the box of their end of term curriculum spreadsheet. So, you do something as unbelievable and unwanted as question something, and you’re told you’re disrupting the class. Do it too many times (twice) and they’ll sit you outside on your own so as not to encourage others to disrupt the class. Which is obviously good for kids, discipline and punishment for asking questions, for expressing the natural and effervescent curiosity of a young child and expect a teacher to do his or her damn job. So, you sit in the corridor alone for two hours, going out of your mind with boredom, yet marveling at the luck of a temporary shard of light you can let move across your hand as you feel nothing and show no anger.

I had a history teacher who had it in for me from the first time he saw me. And three years later when he spat his frothy mouth jizz at me, threatening to kill me if he caught me stealing another Volkswagen logo from the front of a teacher’s car, I knew that even at 14 years old, I had so much frustration and rage bubbling up inside me I’d have bitten out his throat and watched the pipes flutter for air while his psoriasis riddled face fell to the floor, me writing ‘Thanks for the lesson” on the blackboard as he died. And when that’s what goes through your mind on the walk home from school, more seeds of a future of conformity – that is, fakery, are sewn.

I was caned at school, and I was told to touch my feet and had a slipper whacked over my six-year-old arse by a beast of a man who was probably wearing incontinence pants to keep all the sperm in, so many young boys he whacked thus on a daily basis. I had the edge of many rulers rapped across my knuckles for the crime of finishing the work in no time and then being expected to sit there for an hour in silence, doing nothing. Impossible. So, the pain on my knuckles, better than nothing. The split skin, the young blood of your precious innocence staining the cuffs on my one and only school shirt, a daily reminder of the pronouns, me and I and the confusing, widening gap between the two.

At eleven, these monsters tell you that you’ll amount to nothing, that you’re a waste of space, a loser, a weirdo, and other lovely, encouraging things these mentally crippled failures can muster without thinking because it becomes so necessary to their own sense of self. So, I built up a variety of defenses and protections – performances, essentially - and came out of the whole cunting bewilderness as someone who could pretend, someone who’d tucked away anything I could call myself, to leave space to fill with other things that people would recognize, things that fit the shape that had been allocated for me, however painful it was to squeeze into.

By about thirteen years old I realized you didn’t actually have to go to school. You’d turn up for the morning register then go do whatever you wanted. Come back for the after-dinner register and then off again. And no one would ever know, unless another student grassed on you, but that was rare as they kind of admired you for it. It gave them hope. But with the gargantuan contempt I’d now rightly developed for that bullying realm of cruelty and child brutality, off I went.

Sometimes we’d just go down the woods, sniff Tippex thinners, but that became quite a drag quite quickly. Then I discovered Robert Derry, one of my best friends, had a VHS video player, not because he was rich, but because his father was a thief. So, we’d sit amongst the squalor of his workless house, all available space piled high with various ill-gotten gains, watching the movie Quadrophenia, over and over, I must have seen that movie fifty times that term, identifying with young Jimmy, the protagonist of the movie. And although unlike Jimmy we didn’t have a motorbike, a job, nice suits, fights against rockers in Brighton and casual sex with the sexy checkout girl up an alley, we saw something in him, possibly something of our future. There’s no pay off in the movie, the suggestion of a suicide and that’s all. Feel nothing, show no anger. But it became quite ritualistic, like a kind of bible reading class. We’d both sit there watching the film, in near silence, mouthing the words of the classic lines. And when it had finished, we’d shuffle slowly back to school to catch the last lesson, to lessen the chance of getting caught, feeling somewhat stronger, a touch smug that we identified with Jimmy, and it was nothing to do with school or any of the disgraceful mugs entrusted with its brutal and damaging functioning.

Finally, the time came to leave that rotten pit, which for all its darkness and tyranny, posed a new problem. What to do now. Who to be? How to be. My personality, rusty and seized-up from lack of use, found a place to stay deep in my unconscious and only came out only while I slept to torture me with horrific nightmares for giving in. I didn’t blame it, and with my dad’s death I thought it fair to give him some time to sit alone and fester, I had a performance to be getting on with, a personality to contrive, a self to invent. Work wasn’t an option. Why? Don’t be silly. I could already see that would be much the same as school, but with a license for the authority figures to up the stakes since they’d throw a few pennies at me. I needed somewhere my confused, fraudulent, and selfish show of a life might shine, somewhere that itself was a confidence trick, an arena full of people who’d already proven themselves easily tricked. There was only one place for it.

Art School. Three in total, spread over five years to successfully whip me out of shape in preparation for a two-year Master’s Degree in Cultural Studies, AKA Social Justice, AKA, Marxism, AKA Communist Boot Camp. Now don’t get me wrong, there was lots of fun to be had, but if I had the choice again, I’d have chosen an education opposed to just fucking, drugs and trying get my hands on a slice of the means of production. At least it was pretty much free. They say students are broke, but we were getting grants then and with a few chemical side hustles, and a bit of dole blagging, I had a surprising amount of das kapital. But that’s another story, a different performance, a dank and slippery shit to tread on far later. For now, I knew, if you’re looking for a place where the easily tricked congregate, a place where people have already proven themselves weak in the face of fraud, it doesn’t get much better, much worse, than art school.

Top of the reading list for my Bachelor’s degree was Baudrillard’s ‘Simulations and Simulacra’, followed by Jean Francois Lyotard’s ‘The Postmodern Condition’. Lyotard said we “lived a life in quotes”, crikey, I hadn’t even started padding out my character and he was already onto me. I even told that to a girl on freshers’ night, that we “”lived a life in quotes””. PO-MO-IRO 101. Spending all my free time reading those books, I wasn’t even sure if I was pretending any more, or if I was pretending I was pretending. I pondered the chance of that meaning I’d achieved ‘the real’, but a visiting lecturer told me Nietzsche said the real was lost in the desert, never to be seen again, another said it was the end of history. What terrible timing.

I soon had dreadlocks, army clothes, bits of string tied round my neck, I’d even sport a two-button penguin suit jacket occasionally, with ‘Don’t panic it’s only Samsaric’ painted on the back. Quite the look. I moved into a caravan, which I shared with another art student. It was a twelve-foot Sprite model that we pulled up on a disgusting New Age Traveler’s site called Steamer Quay. Luckily, part of my pretending included a rampant sex drive, meaning I stayed in the caravan precisely one night all year. Of course, the rampant sex drive didn’t exist. I just liked the company of women and wanted to be with them, drink gin with them and talk about the trials and fears of the futures upon the edge of which we found ourselves. Unfortunately, I didn’t have that bit so well practiced, and on the back of a concoction of alcohol, cannabis, occasionally speed and LSD, we’d always end up fucking, my face stuffed in the pillow, pumping away, half aroused, but a bigger half wondering how yet another night out – which was supposed to be leisure - ended up with me doing some pretty intense exercise with a sweaty, nameless girl groaning underneath me.

One morning I woke up in such a girl’s room in the college halls and just as I was opening my eyes to see where in Hell I was, she took the duvet out of the cover, put the cover over my head and torso, tied it to me in such a way that it restricted the movement of my arms and gave me a blow-job. A long, boring, drawn-out blow-job that even had me considering faking an orgasm. I’d faked orgasms with plenty of women, and I think most of them knew, but I knew they wouldn’t mention it. Feel nothing, show no anger. Once it finished, she left me there all tied up for about ten minutes, my ghastly hangover deciding it best to just stay there rather than to attempt and potentially fail to get out, get myself into a massive claustrophobic panic and weakly shout for someone to come and get me out of this unpleasant, sweaty, DIY bondage. When she eventually did come back and untie me, she’d made me a full English breakfast, complete with a cup of tea and an orange juice. It was wonderful, but it would have been better without the blow-job, the one my fraudulent character had convinced her I wanted, that would make me like her more, even though it sealed the deal that I would try to never acknowledge her again, let alone risk another unwanted sexual encounter with her, and the sad, broken look in her eyes when she realized this, burnt holes in my heart and I’d have done anything to put right if only I had anything authentic with which to work.

By the time I’d reached the third year of my bachelor’s degree I played trumpet in a free jazz band called ‘Roland’s Bath’, and keyboards in a free jazz band called ‘Spontaneous Tongue’. Not being able to play keyboards or trumpet didn’t matter, I was just making noises, pretending – a technique that conveniently lends itself to free jazz. But in the no man’s land between leaving school and starting my first art school it was all about Ozric Tentacles. They fit my artificial persona perfectly. Being hippies, you see, there was no need for anything sophisticated, no requirements for what we might loosely call truth. There’s no consistency to the aesthetic, just a bit of this, a bit of that, anything vaguely esoteric or something from a foreign destination where these slimy liars have previously - or are currently -congregating. Some Moroccan slippers, a llama wool jumper from Peru, some beads that ‘LIKE, a shaman in the LIKE Parvati Valley made for me LIKE after we saw three shooting stars, one for me, LIKE one for him, and LIKE one for love’. And then he fucked her, which she didn’t enjoy, like.

So, Ozric Tentacles were the noise of choice for the character I was composing for my journey into adulthood. I’d see them live all over the place. I’d take acid, smoke weed, and dance. Dance! Can you imagine. Shocking. The hippy girls liked it. Unfortunately, I didn’t like them. It was a glitch in my matrix. Although I was doing a pretty good job of constructing myself, anything artificial will occasionally crash into something unwilling to play the game of bluff and though I was a dreadlocked, military surplused, blue face painted twat, the girls that had imprinted onto my young libido when I found dads porn mags were the likes of the miniskirt and stiletto wearing, big haired, big breasted Maria Whittaker, and Debbie Ashby, not the waif-like, anorexic, self-harming hippy girls, covered in scars and cigarette burns, who stunk of patchouli oil whilst wearing men’s clothes, and genitals like an untreated stab wound in the back of a hamster.

But The Ozrics, with their unconvincing blend of eastern modes and 1970s analogue synthesizers my picture was complete, a turned on, tuned in, fucked up fool with no idea who he was but an almost idiot savant ability to give the opposite impression. Confident, head-strong, outspoken, sexually permissive XL, and not a care in the world about what I was going to do with the life I’d been lumbered with.

They were my heroes. The symbolized who I was, who I wasn’t, you get the picture by now. I looked up to them, I’d smoke copious amounts of weed and listen to their terrible music that had – like me – no authenticity whatsoever, just a hotchpotch of things hippies had liked since them and their stench crawled out of the sewer systems circa 1966. Runes, beads, joss-sticks, anything not European, endless subtle and arrogant references to mind altering substances, the list goes on, you know the type. That smelly bastard who went to every squat party from 1989 to 1998 and managed to trap you on the stairs and talk you through his ketamine trip in real – dull as mud – time. If other people’s dreams are boring and of no use to other people then a ketamine trip – or any drug fueled trip – is that times a thousand. And as their eyes sink further and further back into their head you look at them and realise they’re not even talking to you anymore and you may as well be the picture hanging on the wall of the girl with a teardrop that someone nicked from the charity shop. Well, that man is your Ozrics fan, and that Ozrics fan was me.

And then I met hippy Dave, with his hippy hair and his hippy bongos, his beads and his trips to India. Hippy Dave who failed his dissertation which was some stoned no-thought to do with the symbolic similarity between the question mark and the spiral, which turned out to exist only in his head, and even then, only on a slight resemblance between two shapes. Hardly the stuff of a survey of literature, the present means of intellectual production - hypothesis, thesis, antithesis, conclusion - which although in itself is just an obsolete comparison of two filing systems, certainly had a touch more sophistication and investigation than two swirls and a dot.

But hippy Dave knew the Ozric Tentacles, and as soon as I found that out, I knew I would meet them. I would use all the manipulative, scheming, downright slippery and unpleasant skills my lying persona had at my disposal to make that happen. From there I would charm one of them, maybe two, become friends, maybe become part of one of their many offshoot bands that twenty other people like myself had already managed to do. I’d give them what they wanted, I’d feed them weird things, I’d achieve an amount of kudos unknown to anyone in my hometown or superficial social groups within which I got on with playing my part. It took a couple of visits to Dave’s house in South West London to make it happen, we tripped both times, the whole of Epsom looked like a care in the community experiment (perhaps it was) and the stand out moment of the second trip being a funeral we ran into that had to be a mafia funeral because everyone wore black and there were black hearses parked all around. Like all funerals. Good old Acid. Hardly understanding the key to the universe.

And when Dave casually – but well aware of the thunderous gravitas with which it would affect me – invited me up to The Hand in Hand pub on Wimbledon Common for a few beers with ‘The Ozrics’, I was on fire. The thought of hanging out with the kings of the modern-day wasters, of which I’d become a disciple, incredible.

In fairness Dave wasn’t a bad bloke, sure he’d lost himself to the hippy thing, he actually believed there was something out there. He read The Tibetan Book of The Dead and while the rest of us didn’t have a clue what it was going on about, Dave aggressively, necessarily, extracted meaning, made sure it meant something. Like everything else in his life that in actuality was a symbol of the marketing that described it, Dave made a point of wringing out more, he was looking for something, and not knowing what, pretty much anything would do. If you can write twenty thousand words on the symbolic similarity of the question mark and the spiral, you deserve some credit, just for persistence.

But when you get older and start acquiring responsibilities and the profound stresses of adult life, an ability to find meaning among the barbaric meaninglessness of the modern culture industry, you find yourself, well that’s a strategy that might just get you through. Of course, it’s a trap. And should the delicate shell in which it exists crack, you’ll enter that kind of schizophrenic persona, so prevalent in the information age, the more meaning you absorb, the less you know, because just like with schizophrenics, signifiers fail to line up in coherent sequences and associative chains of meaning crumble, leaving you frantically clawing the near future for something that simply makes sense. And the panic that characterizes every social interaction in a culture where you’re effectively not allowed – according to some unspoken code – to get bored, a kind of vacuum is always two steps behind people like Dave, and it will one day swallow him whole, and by that time he’ll barely notice. Because although life had spun him round in circles, he was going to pin the tail of his lumpen hippy discoveries on some donkey or other, maybe even Madame Blavatsky’s Baboon, however much faith it would necessarily require him invest in gurus, spiritual guides, shaman, mystics and the like; the usual suspects who’ve been hustling Europeans since the Victorians visited India and thought it all very charming.

So, we made our way up to Wimbledon Common, to The Hand in Hand pub, with its real ales, ‘famous pies’, and actually a nice slice of upper middle-class life away from the capital city which had become so void of the character that made me once adore it, I just shut my eyes and considered the afternoon ahead of me, slightly concerned this might not go according to plan, and leave me emptier than when I arrived. In fact, the thought of the emptiness I’d become so familiar with might be confirmed, might somehow be branded into my future, made me feel like a child, which had such an impact on me I began starting to unravel, like I’d forgotten my lines, or wasn’t even quite sure what the performance was for. And it wasn’t even that which scared me, it was the familiarity of it. This is how I approached everything, with a fraudulent social strategy that made itself most hideously apparent whenever it was about to be put into gear. Stage fright, so to speak.

I was struck by the clientele of The Hand in Hand. These were well to do people, young families who exuded a successful life in advertising, public relations, interior designers, and other jobs that were waiting for them from family, family friends, or other nepotistic arrangements that greased the cogs of their utterly pleasant lives. Nothing wrong with that, the bastards.

First the support acts arrived. I think it was the drummer, someone from Senser anyway, a hip-hop, dub, punk, rock, jazz, ethnic fusion band that kind of gigged in the shadow of The Ozrics. He sat with me and Dave on the grass with about a hundred other people enjoying a summers day at The Hand in Hand. He talked about their next album, which was apparently the level they’ve been looking for, something they found but didn’t even know they were looking for. Cool. Next, a couple of people from another band arrived, a hip-hop, dub, punk, rock, jazz, ethnic fusion band who formed while squatting. They were working on some new tracks that were like nothing they’d made before, apparently it was like they’d found their communal voice and it was singing pure music. Cool.

After a couple of beers, and some more chat about music that didn’t communicate anything as such, just allowed failed musicians to talk about their ‘work’ like it counted, I saw The Ozrics on the horizon. I recognized them immediately, their identical wavy long hair, almost hiding their faces on the breeze, and the confident strut of people who, at least in the tiny world they existed, were the kings.

And then I saw a few children and women with them, and then I heard the well-spoken accents. John Egan, the band’s flute player and due to his place on the stage, their ‘front-man’ was calling for his kid Po, or Bo, or Zo, something like that, I was having trouble concentrating at this time as something inside of me was crumbling. “Po!” We’ll go with that. “Didn’t daddy tell you to stay by my side when there’s roads near?” A sulking Po slowly made his way back to John’s side. I looked around and failed to see a road, or even hear any vehicles. Oh well, maybe he’s tripping and being extra cautious. “Here they come” said another band member from another hip-hop, dub, punk, rock, jazz, ethnic fusion band. “Let the arse-licking begin”.

It quickly became clear to me The Ozrics joined that disappointing list of musicians that were essentially loaded and grew up in a very different way to the hordes of young working-class wasters they entertained and – let’s face it - encouraged to drop out and take drugs. I barely said a word after that. I was thinking about all the kids that followed them around the country, taking copious amounts of LSD, alcohol, and anything else their pocket money or dole could afford. I thought of all the crusties with their dreadlocks, and other accoutrements that made them unemployable and rejected by society. Barely sixteen and they’d already given up on the one thing that makes the struggle of life worth struggling: Responsibilities. These kids weren’t going to have families, get jobs, get clean and make something of themselves. They had heroes who with their light shows and analogue synths were showing these kids the way nowhere and in droves they were taking it.

Ed Wynne, the guitarist and keyboard player in Ozrics was the son of a famous, sculptor who among other things made the bronze Beatles heads and the fifty pence coin with the circle of holding hands, add to that he lived next to the Bob Dylan accidental tribute act Donovan, in what I’m sure wasn’t a council estate hovel their army of failures came from and thanks to their heroes would now probably never leave. I picked all this up from one of the other musicians who’d joined us while The Ozrics talked about getting extensions to their conservatories and flipping properties.

I also found out Ed Wynne made music for the BBC’s holiday program and The Ozric Tentacles made incidental music for the BBC’s kids’ program Byker Grove. Cool.

It was quite the afternoon, sitting there in the belly of the bull-shitters, members of the other bands lapping up every word, even the damn interior design stuff like they had any connection with such things, although I guess you can introduce subtle hints of Morocco into your squat juxtaposed with some bold and committed modern lines.

I felt something, and it wasn’t anger. I felt something deep inside, and although barely a trace, it was there, like an echo, but enough to release me from a sense of self I thought I’d developed to protect me, the pretense; when in reality it was just me trying adapt to my environment in such a way I would be engaging, which isn’t pretending at all, it’s what you do to be socially successful, which makes the social exist at all. I felt everything they took away from me at school, what they identified in me and pounced on in case it might spread. I’d convinced myself I was but a pretender, a performer, a fraud without a real, a copy without an original, when in truth I was just a young man, trying to loosen the shackles of a failed and barbaric education system and move into adulthood in a culture with no adequate rituals to make the transition as symbolic and significant as it should be.

The End

Chris Dangerfield

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