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.
Easy to see why, looking back. Never mind that he wasn’t a very good actor—too self-conscious and too unnatural—he wasn’t handsome enough to stand out in the crowd. He had a ragamuffin look, more unkempt with each passing day.
Not that he could see this at the time. If he had, he might have swallowed his pride, gone home with his tail between his legs—and come to much less grief.
As it was, the kid reassured himself success was just around the corner. He just had to tough it out for a while longer, that’s all.
Unfortunately he soon ran out of what little money he had. He was now penniless and kicked out of the youth hostel in King’s Cross where he’d been staying.
That’s when things got really bad, really fast.
You wouldn’t think it, now it’s gentrified and cleaned up—all gleaming steel and exposed brick—but back then, my God, King’s Cross was rough. A shadowy place, full of danger—a Dickensian underworld, populated by drug dealers, prostitutes, and homeless kids.
It makes me shudder now, to think of him there, alone, so spectacularly ill-equipped to survive. He was now destitute, and sleeping on benches in parks—until his luck changed, during a rainstorm, when he found refuge in Euston Cemetery.
He climbed over the wall into the graveyard, looking for shelter. He discovered, along one side of the church, a subterranean bunker—a dug-out concrete space—big enough for two or three people to lie down comfortably. Well, as comfortable as you can get in an empty crypt—for that’s what it was. But it provided a level of protection. For the kid, this was a minor miracle.
He was a little unhinged, by this point. He was hungry, scared, paranoid—and increasingly cut off from the world. He felt dirty, like he stank—he probably did—and he didn’t like getting too close to people.
But he was desperate—and so he did some things for money that he—
No, I can’t bring myself to write about that.
I’m sorry—I don’t mean to be coy. I’m sure you have a few things you’d rather not tell me about. We all have a skeleton or two in our closet—so to speak. Let this be mine.
The first time he did it, he felt entirely disassociated and blanked it out, as if it were happening to someone else.
The second time it was much worse; so he shut his eyes and thought of the madwoman who lived on the church steps, shouting at passersby to fling themselves into the arms of Jesus. He imagined throwing himself into Jesus’s arms, and being saved. But somehow salvation felt a long way off.