The Fury(44)

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?”

His father threw him a look of contempt. “It’s a blunt razor that cuts you, idiot, not a sharp one.”

That ended their conversation. So, with no other recourse in that pre-internet age, the kid smuggled the foam and razors into the bathroom. Through trial and bloody error, he taught himself how to be a man.

He left home soon after that. He ran away, a few days after his seventeenth birthday.

He went to London, like Dick Whittington, in search of fame and fortune.

The kid wanted to be an actor. He assumed all he had to do was appear at one of the cattle-call auditions advertised in the back pages of The Stage, and he would be discovered and catapulted to stardom. It didn’t work out quite like that.