This young man
He played wise
Went to market
To make a life
Fashioned himself
With suit and tie
Now he's dead
By 35
(and he didn’t even need a coffin, stopped living long before the undertaker came)
A little epitaph for the gentleman in the last entry and perhaps for me. Forays into the world of work have so far been unencouraging, which is inconvenient because I like to eat.
The brief history goes:
In my final year of study there grew a tenacious civic nihilism, that recognised that life consisted in many fine things but couldn't see many of these about me. I'd spent years railing the capitalist order and this was coupled with the observation that almost all of my peers were debasing themselves in the rush to get an honest career.
Seriously, I know I'm a dreamer but this was appalling. You've got beautiful shiny ones perverted and contorted to making grey-faced excuses for a world they don’t understand.
At the time I was in the company of some gentlemen and considered ourselves enlightened. Actually, we believed the bohemian counter-revolution had begun in our brown-carpeted flat on Clerk St, Edinburgh. The communist manifesto sat in the toilet, art of the flat's inhabitants was on the walls. We would entertain weekly with outrageous drunken parties and never received a return invitation.
But there was something we were driving at, a shock to show the rest what they had missed. In the event they found us mostly offensive and retreated to their career paths. We're talking drama students turning credit analysts. Diamond beauties turning into dense clay sods - the better to be moulded.
We were spinning the kind of philosophy that drives poets to madness and greatness and for the majority it was decided we should be stopped. We became social outcasts, appearance at events almost considered a rebuke. And rightly, we were offensive. How do you contain an enlightened being when he's so keen to show how lowly you are. The social retribution was evidence in our eyes that the mustard seed of truth sprouted more willingly in our hearts and gave us cause to sprinkle it more.
Consolation of dire consequences you could call it.
So, political aspirations were put on hold. No, wait. I gave them a go, spending six months with the Scottish Green Party where I dribbled out an article on
social enterprise. I would sit in a redundant gloomy alcove of Holyrood - a twisted concrete labrynth like the Sim City
Arcologies that were considered victories - feigning an economic stupor while I researched apocalyptic predictions of 2012 and the best uses of Amethyst crystal.
My passion for alternative healing was born. I loved it because it was peaceful, presented an alternative to a world that I'd seen into too deeply for comfort and didn't involve drugs and alcohol which by that time had had quite their wicked way with me. Winding hands through an aura's psychic debris and soothing bruised emotions, it seemed that this was to be my Great Work. That 99% of the world thought it was barmy was more tantalising than I was prepared to admit at the time.
This ensued my first brush with Mr Market and His Method. Conclusion: He doesn't like Reiki.
Six months later and in a pit of despair about how this wounded soul could rub two coppers together without feeling like tw’penny whore, I was approached by a six foot tall, just as wide, Icelandic man with a short-cropped beard that went the name of Inky.
Mr Market had decided to take me by a firmer hand.
The ploy was to supply Reiki and massages for people in their hotel rooms - a wheeze no one had tried on a wide scale in Edinburgh at the time. Inky was the money and I was the gopher, securing deals and networking with therapists to make sure we had a steady supply. In the way of green-jacketed battalions in 1914, we thought we would be millionaires by Christmas.
Somehow the monetary onslaught didn’t sit too well with me. After a month I was slumped in a hotel lobby, knees held tight against an aching body, minutes after closing a deal and wondering why it didn’t feel too good.
It seemed that Mr Market had decided to teach me in six months what it usually takes a 25 year career culminating in divorce, suicide or unsavoury relations with your children’s au pair. Gratitude, however, has been a little slow in coming.
Inky, by the way, was a master of his sullied field. A ‘bottle a day man’ into his forties, he was a bulldozer of a businessman. He had a way of getting people to do precisely as he wanted and made them feel like he was doing them a favour. Every deal simply went his way. It was enough for him to wish it. It was as though those years spent on the bottle had submerged a quiet power, which now unleashed, was as devastating as he willed it to be. Luckily he was a beautiful man, making an art form of monetary prowess, and the world was spared the effects of what might have been a terrible rage.
His trophy wife was Freyja, who had survived the depths of alcoholism with him, herself putting it away like a tank. Now an artist, she'd have the oven on and kettle boiling the second I stepped through the door. Even after the collapse they remained dear friends. I made it a point to see them for a fortnightly breakfast.
To fill in the chronology, I got by as a care worker for a 21 year old named Stephan who suffered from cerebral palsy. A gem of a boy, I thought I was pretty good at the work, although my boss hated me. Couldn't understand why I didn’t make endless conversation with the guy while he was watching TV or playing his Playstation3 and filing suggestions to do otherwise in the garbage can.
OK - I didn't really make the suggestions too forcefully. I suggested walks when it was a rainy day and the cinema when I knew he didn’t have any money; and spent the hours he spent electronically entertained reading, writing, meditating and sleeping and getting paid £7.50 an hour for the privilege. It really was a fantastic job.
And there were a couple of moments each day, driving back from school or hosing him in the shower when we'd be singing along to Queen or Newton Falconer and I'd put my cultural cynic aside and enjoy the bliss these songs were giving him, start shouting the lyrics and make my voice go funny in the electonic segments, which caused him to roar with laughter.
In fact, some of the funniest moments of my life were when I was hauling shit from his arse with a rubber begloved hand as he sat suspended in a sling above the toilet.
So the boss got in the way. Got upset and started poisoning Stephan's mind against me. It was really quite sick. The guy's attitude completely hardened and my last months were spent trying to serve a man who didn't want to be served. Finally understood something of the pains of my mother, and a number of despairing lady friends.
So trust broke down and with it any capacity to do the job. I feel sorry for the boss though. She genuinely didn't understand. The frustration of ignorance taken out on the educated Englishman where, in this wild and rugged North, it was customary for him not to be understood.
I play this role as an innocent victim, but I knew I was driving her crazy and knew just as well that I was powerless to do anything about it. My facial angelicism has long been seen as a mocking wall of silence. I didn't say a thing and irritated her beyond redemption.
Just like this ball hanging in the blackness upon which we take step. Our favoured prayer is to scream into the void and confuse its silent reply that we're not shouting loud enough.
I think Mr Market is a shouting man, soon to be submerged by Mother Gaia.
And, man, won't He then know the meaning of roar.
