SEVEN SPASTICS (Part Two)

Self-Explanatory Short Story Selection

SIX: Heroes Journey

Dartford, The Happy Valley, Dirtford, or quite simply for me, ‘home’, is a town in the South-East of England, known for its traffic tunnels under Old Father Thames, and more recently, it’s vertiginous bridge that brings you back when you’ve had enough of Essex. Although Junction 1A on the one hundred and seventeen mile ‘London Orbital Motorway’, (the M25), Dartford is in fact Kent. This often poses a problem when meeting someone new and being asked where I’m from. With the geographical knowledge of our countrymen being just short of atrocious (myself included, up until just recently I thought the ‘Midlands’ was everywhere between The North (which I thought was everywhere between The Midlands and Scotland) and London.) Apparently, it is not. Anyway, in answer to the dull but thankfully usually functional ice-breaker ‘Where are you from?’, when you say ‘Dartford’ they think ‘London’ and if you say ‘Kent’, they think of the ‘other Kent’, the Kent of Goudhurst and its oasthouses, or Fordwich with its weeping-willow banked boating river and quaint Tudor streets, not to mention its Michelin Star boozer. Dartford, these places are not. I often explain it thus: While Kent is known as ‘The Garden of England’, Dartford is the front garden of England, the front garden of an English council estate, one with a rusty old Ford Capri propped up on Thermalite blocks, a shopping trolley, and maybe a goat. With Old Father Thames at Dartford almost entirely consumed by chugging, air polluting industry, and a daily six-mile tailback of idle vehicles adding their fumes to the party, it really is a hole.

And yet it’s perhaps no coincidence that I, the nexus of this indulgence in spastification, grew up in Dartford, for it is not without its own history of mentalism, mentalists, and hospitals to house such people, by which I mean keep them the fuck away from the rest of us because they scare children and dribble and stuff. I can’t help think of a piece of writing by Antonin Artaud, “Van Gogh: The Man Suicided By Society” in which he states: “One can speak of the good mental health of Van Gogh who, in his whole life, cooked only one of his hands and did nothing else except once to cut off his left ear, in a world in which every day one eats vagina cooked in green sauce or penis of newborn child whipped and beaten to a pulp, just as it is when plucked from the sex of its mother. And this is not an image, but a fact abundantly and daily repeated and cultivated throughout the world. And this, however delirious this statement may seem, is how modern life maintains its old atmosphere of debauchery, anarchy, disorder, delirium, derangement, chronic insanity, bourgeois inertia, psychic anomaly (for it is not man but the world which has become abnormal), deliberate dishonesty and notorious hypocrisy, stingy contempt for everything that shows breeding, insistence on an entire order based on the fulfillment of a primitive injustice, in short, of organized crime.” That’s Dartford.

Indeed. Between 1877 and 1903 the number of hospital beds in Dartford reached an insane (lolz) ten thousand, which is quite the bed count in a town with a population of barely twenty thousand. If the whole place agreed to top and tail (which they almost certainly would after a standard weekend of bathtub speed and soap-bar hashish) the entire population could get a bed. In 1903 Dartford had the highest density of hospital beds per capita of any town or city in the whole of the UK – probably the world. And, as I knew from growing up there, a fair amount of these were for the mentally ill. Check out some of the names, there’s the ‘School & Asylum for Imbeciles’ (sounds just peachy), there was the delicately (and geographically incorrect) entitled ‘City of London Lunatic Asylum’ (further compounding the Sisyphean task of my ice-breaker struggles) and the wonderfully suggestive ‘Gore Farm Hospitals’ (upper and lower). “Where are you going?”, “Gore Farm”, “Oh, can I have your watch?”

In 1890 the government passed The Lunacy Act (“Can I have your watches?”) and good old Dartford got another madhouse, ‘The Heath Asylum’, built on land just next to Dartford Heath which was to house two thousand lunatics. That’s a lot of mad people. The City of London Lunatic Asylum eventually changed its name to ‘Stone House Mental Hospital’ and you can see their water tower from my mum’s front door. When I was a kid she’d say, ‘If you keep misbehaving, you’ll end up in there!’ which was absolutely on the money since I actually ended up in there four times, once they converted a ward into a drug detox center called ’The Hollies’, although I think she meant for playing knock down ginger, rather than shooting speedballs into a hole in my leg.

My history gets a bit wispy here, but I think smallpox got busy and a lot of these hospitals ended up watching people die rather than shackling people to the radiators and feeding them experimental drugs (aren’t’ they all?). But growing up, I knew Stone House was for the mentally ill, Darenth Park Mental Hospital was too, well, obviously, and there was a couple of others whose names escape me. You have to ask though, with all these hospitals suddenly having to cater for a swarm of smallpoxers as I’ve just decided I like to call them, what did they do with all the – in their own words – ‘lunatics’? And I think we now know why Dartford is now a ‘special’ place, for ‘special’ people. Because ‘Care in the Community’ only works when there’s a community to care for them, and with the disappearance of communities, catalyzed by rampant capitalism combined with a barbaric individualism, it actually meant, ‘care in the streets’, which is no care at all.

As a young teenager, in those glorious years of puberty, (during which I was excessively late, my voice hadn’t broken and I didn’t have a pubic hair on my body until I was well into my fifteenth year, sitting next to a bloke in maths class with a fucking beard and tales of ‘doing Debbie in the dirt-box’ and other activities I knew not of) the town was divided up into the estates, the last whiff of anything like a community was thus defined. There was Newtown, where I lived, which, true to form of the whole strangeness of the place was the oldest part of town. Tree estate, which was kind of grubby, but had its share of characters, and were generally a nice bunch. Then there’s Temple Hill, domestic violence, glue sniffing, teenage orgies, and hard kids, because their dads taught them to stick up for themselves by making them stick up for themselves by throwing another plate of dinner at the wall, the wife, and them, etc., on a Friday night, and Fleet Estate, who thought they were a bit above everyone else because, and I hate to admit it, they were. Not where it counted of course, they were largely obnoxious, spoilt, low IQ fools. But they had money – a little bit of money anyway – and thus thought themselves better than everyone else. Some of them even had two televisions, even two cars, in an era where some families (think Temple Hill) had neither of either. Temple Hill did have the first pre-fabricated houses built after the war, half tongue and groove concrete, half corrugated metal sheets. Hideous places really, which predictably have now become somewhat desirable.

So, I am at some kind of youth-center party on Fleet Estate, where the roads are named after trees or flowers, some shit like that and it’s chucking-out time. The walk to Newtown isn’t far and I’m loitering outside on the off-chance of speaking to Joanne Tarr, who had a red-hot sister and was kind of orange-hot herself. But as the night is coming to an end, the lights in the hall go out, and the exterior plunges into darkness, a situation is unfolding. There’s a kid from my year who has clunky, metal, calipers on his lower left leg that clank and clunk as he walks. It’s held together with tatty, leather straps and buckles, and draws attention to the shoe that’s got a heel stacked about four inches higher than his other shoe to compensate for the shorter, malformed leg. When he walks, his right hip and shoulder drop each time he scrapes the cluttered foot along the ground, and for all these adaptations and hardware it’s hard to see how it’s in any way assisting him. Perhaps beneath it all there’s horrors far worse than I can imagine, and if it’s the difference between being able to walk or not walk, then it’s worth the Hell his school life has been and will continue to be. Kids would sweep his right foot from under him causing him to collapse on the spot. A teacher once even referred to him in front of the entire class as ‘Short John Silver’, while another teacher went for the slightly more inventive play on the television hero of the age, Steve Austin, The Bionic Man, by calling him the ‘Six Million Pence Boy’, which although is still sixty grand, the point was made and much laughter ensued.

So, he’s standing there with no one, and - no doubt based on experience – with no hope of acquiring anyone, much like all evening in the disco, much like his entire school life. He was just there, looking around at the other kids and how they were part of groups, how they had friends, had social skills – or more honestly – didn’t wear some Victorian contraption that like some spiteful pharmakon (aren’t they all?) gave him movement but no reason to go anywhere. The sadness in his expression reached new depths as he watched a young couple kissing. Admittedly, I was also saddened by this kiss as it was Joanne Tarr, and of all people Alan Glazebrook, a monkey of a boy who could barely string a sentence together and always seemed to look somewhat electrocuted. That was my cue to leave, to disappear over the horizon of my own, lonely, teenage life, the calipers of my yet to arrive puberty, taking the spring out of my sexual step. And then someone sucker punched our sixth spastic. There are few things someone can do in life so cowardly and outright vicious as whacking someone in the face from behind – especially in such a situation when it was done just to make people laugh – which they did, the whole pack of them, the Fleet Estate crowd, in their Lyle & Scott jumpers, Lacoste T-shirts, Levis jeans, and clean, white trainers. And once the Rubicon of bullying the spastic had been crossed, by an ugly, smut of a child, Chas Tutton, it was all in, and they started throwing their half-drunk cans of cola at him, or picking things off the floor and tossing it into his general direction. One kid, a fat, chin-necked, blob of space-wasting flesh called Barry Adams even walked over and poured his cola directly over the spastic kid’s head, and he just stood there and took it, the remaining people outside the youth center, as well as Chas Tutton’s little clique of scared, leader-hungry twats, all laughing as it dripped off his nose and chin; like Dartford’s own Carrie moment, but cheap cola instead of pig-blood, the nervous clanking of a metal caliper instead of  supernatural powers.

Now let’s get this right, I am no hero, and I am no fighter. I have never been either. But one thing state schooling had taught me, one thing it had engraved into my consciousness, was the pain of injustice. I hated Chaz Tutton, but more than him even, I hated his petty crew of sidekicks and hangers on. The ones who actually identified with the crippled victim and rather than admit that – just to themselves, found someone to hide behind, found a crowd to disappear into. And with every other attack on that poor kid, their nervous giggling confirmed, however delicately and weak, that they’d made (in the short term at least) the right choice. And that’s when I snapped. What’s the worst that could happen? I’d get the shit kicked out of me? So what. It would take the attention away from spaz, who’d not only obviously had enough, but also because it was the right thing to do. But in truth I knew they’d do nothing if I confronted them. So lost in their own feeble need to establish themselves as superior, they’d picked the lowest person of the present pecking order. It would appear anyone with say, two normal legs were out of their league, and last time I’d checked I had two normalish, legs. And while I can’t remember exactly what I said, it being nearly forty years ago, this is the gist….

CUT TO:

EXT. OUTSIDE YOUTH CLUB – EVENING

A group of young teenage boys stands facing a crippled boy with calipers on one leg. He is drenched in cola. Another boy approaches the situation.

HERO

(Angry, shouting)

What a bunch of cunts you really are. Look at him, could you have picked on anyone less threatening? Fucking pathetic. Look at you, a bunch of wankers!

CHAZ TUTTON

(Surprised, unsure)

Fuck off!

CHAZ looks nervously at his gang

HERO

No, you fuck off! And take your little gang of girls with you. Look at him, don’t you think his life is hard enough without you bunch of cunts making it worse? And for what, a little giggle? You’re all wankers, I’ll fight you now, let’s go! I’ll fight any of you, I’ll fight all of you, come on, let’s go! Anyone?

CHAZ steps backwards into his gang

HERO

I didn’t think so, because you’re nothing, the lot of you. You pick on the weak because you’re weak. Fucking pricks!

HERO walks over to the crippled kid

HERO

Come on, let’s go. I’ll walk you home.

The HERO and the CRIPPLE turn and walk away, crossing the road and walking up an alley.

CUT TO:

EXT. A DIMLY LIT ALLEYWAY - EVENING

CRIPPLE

Thank you.

HERO

Fuck ‘thank you’, you’ve got to stand up for yourself or the likes of those cunts are going to make your life Hell, and I’m guessing it’s already pretty bad.

CRIPPLE looks at the ground as he walks, his leg dragging along the floor

CUT TO:

INT. GRUBBY STAIRWELL IN BLOCK OF FLATS – EVENING

HERO looks at the squalor of the stairwell and the graffiti that covers the walls. CRIPPLE stands in front of a door, his keys in hand.

HERO

You live here?

CRIPPLE

Yeah, just me and my mum. I’d ask you in…but….

HERO

It’s alright. Look after yourself.

FADE OUT.

Now, while I understand this is treading a very fine line between a moment of semi-credible pathos and a rightly deleted scene from The Wonder Years, it profoundly affected me; I’d like to say (and am about to) that it drove a stake through the black heart of my unconscious, but aged eleven it actually just got me thinking, and flirting somewhat with that ugliest of all thoughts; regret. Had I helped him in any way? Or had I just been another part of the unpleasant and unfair fabric of his life? I mean if you were saved, defended, rescued, whatever, by my twenty-five kilograms, jaundiced and anemic whisper of a boy, would that improve such a situation, or did it piss into and stretch open the already deep wound, and thus actually added to the impact of the cicatrix that no doubt joined a collection of many similar remains; memories etched and healed into what by adulthood would almost certainly consist of the majority of his - nearly dead by a thousand cuts - ego-ideal?

Well, it’s hard to get a measure of such a thing, and as he slowly moved to the periphery of my life, the memory and possible regret of that night slipping into insignificance as life went on, a new arcade game appeared in the kebab shop, or Michaela Goodwin’s massive tits found their way into my nervous but flesh-hungry hands, I assumed it had run its course. Until that is I was walking through the aisles in B&Q about ten years later looking for something to steal, and there he was, still dragging along that foot and its shackles, carrying a few more kilos, taller, and his face absolutely riddled with a mess of totally unsurprising, angry, and generous acne. He worked there, he was wearing the apron and silly baseball cap. I watched him wiping snot from his nose and admiring the damp streaks on his forearm while a customer was asking him something. It appeared he couldn’t help her – or didn’t want to - and just kind of crippled away while she was midsentence, a look of – admittedly understandable – complete disinterest in her questions about paint, coving, drywall-anchors, or whatever it is people ask for in those places, written all over his suppurate face.  I watched it all, and as he approached me – not coming towards me as such, just in my general direction - he spat on the floor, wiped his mouth on his previously snotted forearm and said “Fat bitch!”

SEVEN: Lobster Girl

Fucking a girl who has no hands - when you’re tripping on LSD - has its challenges. Also, by a weird twist of fate/LSD I’d also convinced myself the future of humanity rested on the ability of my intoxicant laden balls to successfully inject spermatozoa into said girl, which somewhat compounded the challenge. But I didn’t end up here by accident, just a series of really bad decisions, so I’m not going to just stop and say ‘I can’t do it’. I chose this. I wanted it. Not necessarily saving humanity, admittedly, but rough with the smooth and all that.

It was meant to be a relaxing night in, having my mum’s house to myself for the weekend during the summer holidays from art-school was a rarity, I’d smoke a bit of weed and that would be that, watch a movie, listen to some music, do very little. But after a friend asked if I could sort out a couple of his mates with some LSD, the wheel of misfortune started to turn. I was selling the stuff at the time and had a few bottles of it in liquid form. Tiny bottles, which originally contained some kind of tooth-whitener from what I could make out from what remained of the printed lettering, that and the slightly minty taste everyone who took it commented on. “It’s got a slightly minty taste”, he said, as he licked the couple of drops I’d put on back of his hand. That’s how I sold it. Five quid a drop, a drop being about 400 millionths of a gram of LSD. I knew this because it was a guess and no one ever questioned it. “It has got a slightly minty taste” said the other one. “You might as well finish it off” I said, as the last bit spat on the back of his hand. “So, what are you boys up to tonight?”, “There’s a house party. Well, not a house party as in house music, a party in a house. It’s the flat above the fish and chip shop on East Hill. Come along if you want.” I looked them both up and down. Fifteen, sixteen maybe, just a few years younger than me but either they were young for their age, or I was old for mine. I’d like to say it was probably a bit of both, but no, I’d already given up on things they hadn’t yet even thought about. Not because I was special or different, but because I was neither. “A quick livener?” said one, pulling a bottle of vodka from the inside of his coat. What a terrible idea. “Why not?” I said as I unscrewed the lid and took a good four or five gulps into my empty and now none to pleased stomach. As they took their turns on the poison, I scraped at the sediment in the otherwise empty bottle of LSD with a matchstick. “I doubt there’s much actual acid in this detritus” I said, as I wiped it on my tongue. There’s something about guessing that you can only learn through guessing incorrectly, and even then, only when the consequences are severe enough to etch the arrogance of guessing into your brain. Telling punters it was about 400 micrograms a drop didn’t really cause any problems. Getting it wrong had no consequences. It worked. You tripped. No one cared. But guessing there probably wasn’t much actual acid left in the scrape, had huge consequences. I would like to refer you back to having sex with the girl with no hands, and the fate of humanity etc. In short, there’s was absolutely loads of actual acid in the detritus. Oops.

By the time we arrived at the party I could barely see for synesthesia and other audio-visual distortions that occupied what was left of my primary senses. It took the three of us about twenty minutes to walk up the flight of stairs at the back of the chip shop, giggling like lunatics, and hindering each other when trying to help each other negotiate what seemed to be quite the obstacle course. Thankfully the door was open, so there would be no two-hour debate about who was going to knock, who was going to speak, how the knock would be knocked and what speaking would be spoken.

There was a short debate about who would walk in first, but by this time, with my superego lost somewhere on the stairs, I dug-deep, took a breath and managed to summon the required courage to walk into a party.  The change in light, temperature, sound, eyes, lizards, tables made of “Broken leather”, “Eh?” and the general difference of an outside/inside transition felt like we’d slipped into some Zarathustrian portal, and I guess a door is a portal, and I guess time was my only contemporary. That’s not a guess, that’s a quote, but I doubt they’re mutually exclusive. What’s that whistling noise?

Soon, the three of us were partying. To. The. Max. That’s right, the three of us huddled in the corner, taking turns to swig back vodka and doing our best to not make eye-contact – or any other contact – with anyone else there. Our cover was blown by a goth of all people. A pretty girl, very short and adorned in a beautiful black cloak and silver jewelry that echoed all over her…I have to say it….aura. It was fascinating watching her trying to make conversation with the other two. I could tell they were scared of her sexuality, which – as it’s prone to do on LSD – emanated from her. What a thing to be a beautiful woman and have to deal with men pretending it’s not always dominating the entire exchange. Their intentions of course were to be admired, but their execution, terrible. It was like the acid had taken away the bullshit that would usually fill the void when avoiding the obvious. I, however, had nothing to lose, I didn’t even know my name, or didn’t care about it, or the free-jazz bands playing somewhere in this flat, or the string quartet playing somewhere in this room, or the footprints all over the ceiling, or the pulsing multi-level, tessellation Hell of a carpet that somehow didn’t seem to be causing anyone to fall over, or the art-piece I was going to make with a bucket of water and a boxing glove, or the way people took geometry so seriously and that I was proud of them for doing so, or the smell of Jasmin that escaped me every time the room went a bright, sunlight, yellow. All of that and more, and less, and none of it, and the way her eye make-up made her look like an Egyptian queen and when I said “Let’s go somewhere where we can talk, it’s too…” I looked around at the four or five other people in the large room, “…kinetic in here”, “Sure, I have a room upstairs.” And then I had my mind blown following the undulating, liquid infinity of her dress as it floated in front of me as we walked up and round a spiral staircase, her little boots occasionally appearing ahead of me, giving me the impression she was some kind of elf, or pixie. Had I been asked what I’d like to happen on this trip before I got on it, I’d have said something much like this.

“We can talk if you want?” she said, as I turned from the Gustav Klimt prints on the wall and the row of Egon Schiele portraits which seemed to show him in increasing states of nakedness before turning into a woman. And as I was about to say something about talking and wanting, I was struck by the stark sexual immediacy of her on all fours on the bed, a pulsating infinity of cloth, linen, lace – a brief history of textiles hitched up over her back, giving me the impression it was her cunt doing the talking, which in a way it was. I unbuttoned the fly on my jeans, essentially a product of the 1853 gold rush in the West; with denim being a failed attempt by French textile workers in (De Nim)es to imitate the fine but durable Italian corduroy of the time. I popped my cock through the otherwise unused buttoned fly on my underpants. I never used it for pissing, I just yanked the entire underpants down, so what else is the button fly there for?

Glans a throbbin’ and strangely separate from the rest of my body, I quickly climbed onto the bed, spat into my hand, lubed him up and slipped the angry little fucker in, and although I wasn’t really sure why, I knew sex was good and it certainly repaid me with wave upon wave of some kind of ecstatic cellular symphony, an orchestra of pleasure; grandiose, musical physicality losing itself to an unknowable sensation disguised as living by a concoction of drugs and seduction disguised as having a good time. It was then that I noticed she had no hands.

How she’d managed to keep this little metacarpal mystery a secret from me for the last however many minutes I don’t know. Maybe she hadn’t? Maybe I had? Maybe hands – or the lack of them – were outside of my list of priorities. Either way it was an unsexy spanner in the hard-on works. I had to squint somewhat to focus, to cut out some of the light that was no doubt fueling the patterned air that distorted everything beyond it. It kind of worked and I soon gleaned she had hands of a sort, it was just that all her fingers were fused together into some kind of Gigeresque mother-riddle; a potentially proboscic protuberance with surplus skin that rippled and bunched-up at the tips of whatever those things were that hung out the end.

How she caught me looking at them I don’t know, a mirror perhaps strategically placed for such a thing, or maybe she just knew at some point, whatever drugs you’re on, or off, such things will become apparent. I made a half-hearted attempt to cover one not-hand with the duvet, but fucking, tripping, and trying to secretly cover such a thing is one thing too many. But like I say, she was onto me anyway, and it didn’t in the least bit surprise me when she said “Take the piss out of my hands!” I’m being sarcastic of course, surprise was an understatement, my libido was instantly propelled into a world without signs, a world without language when it needed that very thing – and quickly. A referenceless abundance of signals that indicated the ever complex idea of nothingness. Hot.

I started weak, and while I can’t remember exactly what I said I know it was something like “Your hands….they’re really weird…..bitch.” She wasn’t impressed. I wasn’t impressed. And that’s when it hit me – the universe wasn’t impressed. And when the universe has decided to join you mid-coitus, like it’s served you some spasti-celestial threesome lemons, well, it’s time to make some spasti-celestial threesome lemonade.

It was overwhelming like no overwhelming had ever before been. I don’t know if it was the potential emasculation of the situation, or the thought of being yet another male on her list of conquests who when he saw the complete picture, couldn’t finish the job. Anyway, it’s pointless trying to fathom the tangled web we weave when first we practice LSD. All I know is that if I didn’t perform, and perform fully, there would be negative consequences for humanity. That at least I was sure of – almost as if I needed something heavy to hold onto psychologically. “Take the piss out of them, go on! What are you, some kind of pussy?”, “Hey spastic, shut it!” I said, giving her ripe, round, arse a slap that bounced off all four walls and then some, like it got caught in a hall of audio mirrors. She shrieked, in pleasure, I presumed, and gave her some more: “You fucking lobster!” She shrieked, harder and louder. “You filthy crustacean whore!” followed by another slap, and more multi-dimensional echoes. She was really getting into it now. And like the photograph in Back to The Future that shows George and Lorraine Baines Mc Fly and their three children coming in and out of their emulsion exposed existence, the more she shrieked and groaned, and the more I could feel my balls preparing to get busy, and the less I worried about humanity and everything was going to be OK. Admittedly, “I’ll cook you for dinner afterwards” didn’t go down so well, but when I came back quick with, “Face-fuck yourself with one of those disgusting flippers” and she did, digging it deep into her own throat and gagging on it, saliva dripping from the glistening menace as she coughed it up, humanity was saved, and she bucked like a wild spastic horse, me filling her with what felt like gallons of vodka diluted, LSD laced, skunk deranged, jism. The little baby-makers probably swimming in circles, chasing their tails, or even trying to fuck each other, trying to make their own baby sperms.

I collapsed on top of her, the sound of our combined exhaustion filling the room and feeling like success. I rolled off of her and pulled a pre-rolled joint out of my jeans pocket. I straightened it out and lit it, watching the smoke dance about like a ghost as I exhaled. “Are you going to smoke all of that?” she said, and just before I held it out, I realised that was dumb, and that I’d been pretty much dumb since I done the dumb thing of guessing there was no actual LSD in the actual LSD. I held the joint in her mouth, the cacophony of silver jewelry that lay across her breasts, itself breathing as it gently rose and gently fell, her own beautiful ghosts filling the air as she exhaled - in a manner fitting for someone who didn’t know she’d just played an important part in saving the world.

THE END

Chris Dangerfield

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