Erotica Artist Ch. 01: Inferior Initiation

On another occasion my friends and I are exploring down by the Leeds-Liverpool canal, an ancient, forbidding death-trap that held a fascination because you could never see an inch beyond its caramel-colored surface. There's a sudden splash, and Terry, the youngest and smallest boy has slipped and tumbled the four feet from the embankment into the solemn depths.

He immediately resurfaces and is grabbed by the hair by one of the bigger boys and yanked up to safety. The next day young Terry's picture is in the local paper and I am mentioned as the newcomer the boys were showing around the neighborhood. My name is in print for the first time and I have experienced, within weeks of the big move, betrayal and humiliation and heroism and euphoria. I feel my horizons are broadening at last.

And there are glimpses of a wider world yet. Within a few months the family receives letters from North America, and not just from Aunt Dolly and Uncle Joe on the west coast, but from cousin Jamie, who has only stayed in small town British Columbia long enough to gather a grub-stake and then has headed south, way south, down to the forty ninth parallel and beyond, into the mystical, mythical US of A, where at last report he has enlisted in the US Air Force.

How anyone with UK citizenship can enter the US through Canada and enlist in the United States Armed Forces within a year of leaving the coal mines and slag heaps and cotton mills of Lancashire is beyond me, but this is the late 1950's and perhaps such things really are possible.

A month or so later there's a photograph Jamie has mailed with one of his always exhilarating letters: dark, handsome, suave, everything his younger brother Eddie is not, he poses in his US Air Force uniform beside a cream Cadillac convertible at some airbase in New Mexico. This is not some remote movie star, I muse, gazing raptly at the photograph. This is my cousin Jamie who once babysat me and Eddie while our parents attended a New Year's Eve party. My cousin Jamie beside a cream Cadillac in the blazing New Mexico desert! Maybe life did have possibilities after all. Maybe life could be exciting and liberating!

Within another year Jamie has been transferred to an airbase in the southern UK and he has shown up at our house one day, not in a cream Cadillac but in a black Volkswagen Beetle, on his way not to Las Vegas or L.A. but to Blackpool, that sleazy seaside resort forty miles away. He's with a friend from the American south who speaks with a jaw-breaking accent and he comes bearing gifts: Coca Cola in sexy bottles, Hershey bars, and mystery of mysteries, hard taco shells. "What the 'ell is this?" my bewildered father asks, "Mexican bread?"

Jamie's visits and his gifts become regular for a period of months and at Christmas he gives me something that would mean even more than the Hornby-Dublo electric train set that my parents had bought me when I was six or seven: a Grundig reel-to-reel tape recorder purchased from the airbase PX, along with several seven-inch reels taped Stateside and chock full of Elvis, Buddy Holly, Chuck Berry and Little Richard.

My parents have never been able to afford a record player, and over my years of isolation and painful school transitions one of my chief sources of comfort has been music on the radio. Nothing so culturally uplifting as classical music, though the grammar school morning assemblies have exposed me to some of the greatest hits. No, what has lightened my long evenings has been American pop heard on Radio Luxembourg. In the fifties and early sixties the BBC doesn't deign to play rock music, and no other UK stations seem to exist. But after six every night Radio Luxembourg broadcasts in English and UK record labels buy fifteen or thirty minute segments to expose new releases. Much of it was unutterably awful homegrown stuff but a percentage was the real thing: American pop and rhythm and blues that thrilled me to my marrow.

Entire songs are never played. Such are the time limitations only parts of each piece are aired. And as irritating as this was, and as typical of my overall deprivation, I did get to hear the first minute and a half of 'Shop-around' by the Miracles and 'Stay' by Maurice Williams and the Zodiacs and many of Phil Spector's epic productions. The heart and passion in those songs gave me reason to hope, as much as my glimpses of cousin Jamie's romantic life, that there was indeed another world to be explored out there, a world that maybe wasn't restricted or deprived, a world of thrills and excitement!

And now thanks to Jamie I could record those truncated gems of music and replay them over and over again. I could not have been given a more meaningful gift.

It helped make the first two lonely years at the grammar school bearable, for none of my neighborhood friends attended. The only person I knew was pretty, blue-eyed Susan Tomlinson from my old school and we were at an age and from an environment where boys and girls didn't easily become friends.

Or so I found it. For even when Susan showed an interest in knowing me better, I was too inept and self-conscious and lacking in confidence to respond. And then of course I suffered agonies when she quickly hooked up with someone less inhibited.

I was far too immature and shy to take advantage of what was on offer. Though what, after all, was on offer? Some hand-holding and kisses maybe, for a couple of thirteen-year-olds in 1960, 1961.

For Susan and her sisters are decent, well brought-up young girls. At least they appear so, in their prim navy blue skirts and blazers, with their crisp white blouses and white ankle socks and straw boaters

So while I may have had crushes on any number of lovely girls, actually talking to one and going on a date was never an option as the sixties got underway.

Until some time in my third year when enough boys have enough crushes on enough girls to go out on one bizarre group date, to see John Wayne in 'The Alamo' as I recall. And I find myself paired with the current flame of my heart, one Jennifer Kay, and the thrilling climax of the evening is walking Jennifer to her door and kissing her hotly, clumsily, by her front gate before rushing home in blissful delirium.

Apart from one party I attend with a friend which also culminates in a sweet necking session with Jennifer, this is the only date of my teenage years. For though I am about to embark on the most expansive and exhilarating change of my life, my social experience does not blossom. Quite the opposite.

Negotiations have been underway for some time between cousin Jamie's family in British Columbia and my own parents for a possible move to Canada. And in spite of yet more hesitation from dear old dad, who is content with his two or three old cronies and his ill-paying, dreary seasonal work as a bricklayer, which plays hell with his sciatica, sponsorship has been set up, applications have been made and approved, and one raw March afternoon, in his forty second year, my father boards an airplane for the very first time, at Manchester Ringway, and jets to the other side of the world.

Whatever problems I have had with school, with my social life, with loneliness, isolation and deprivation, all are beside the point: my sister and mother and myself have a berth on the Empress of Canada leaving Liverpool for Montreal in early July. Miracle number three, and this one not so minor. The New World beckons. Freedom beckons. I'm through the bars and over the wall at last, and I am ecstatic.

I regret leaving my few friends, but my erstwhile date Jennifer, I know, has no serious interest in me and I have no qualms on that score. The heavy workload of grammar school I'll be glad to be rid of. What's to mourn? I have a chance of a lifetime and I feel utterly blessed. I count down the days till July and the sailing date. And then one morning I finally take that one way trip to Liverpool, courtesy of the one distant cousin of my mother's who owns a car, and board an ocean liner for North America.

I recall very little of this monumental journey. My sister and I being gently turned out of the first class library after wandering into the wrong part of the ship. Being corralled into an inept public display of affection toward some older girl who needed a partner in a game of charades in the ballroom one evening. Seeing my very first Billy Wilder movie, 'One, Two, Three,' in the ship's tiny theater. Three small occurrences encapsulating my past and future: both my sense of my inferiority and my clumsiness in social situations, balanced by a compensatory taste of the lifelong devotion I would develop toward the lunatic artistry of an Austrian- Jewish director transplanted, in an earlier era, to the west coast of North America.

The trip is over almost before it's begun. But this voyage into freedom, this apparent laying aside of my pathetic and deprived heritage, does not come with a corresponding expansion of personal horizons. Within days I find myself in a prison as isolated and desolate as any I am ever to know.

* * *

I travel west across the Atlantic, west on an endless diesel train - no more of my beloved steam anymore of course - across the plains and mountains of North America, west across the entire continent, far enough to be in one of the latest time zones on earth, so far west I can go no further without crossing another ocean.

And in fact the Pacific salt-chuck does lap along the fir-lined coves of my final destination, to within a few hundred yards of the lovely, rented, centrally-heated house the family finally settles into in rain-soaked, utterly isolated Beaver Falls, two hundred and fifty miles up the coast of British Columbia.

Instead of the rolling blue-foam breakers of the Pacific that I had dreamily anticipated, there's the polluted, log-choked backwater at the dead-end of a fjord with a pulp and paper mill its only reason for being. The air is sulfurous and there is no road to the outside world. The only access is by daily seaplane, weather permitting, or weekly passenger/freight boat plying between Vancouver and Prince Rupert. Both exits are prohibitively expensive. No way out. No escape.

Only one place on the entire Pacific coast of North and South America receives more measurable rainfall each year, I learn, and that's some burg down the rain-coast of Chile. And the low-hanging mists and perpetual drizzle that shroud Beaver Falls all fall and winter match my mood during the first months of my stay there.

I'm fifteen years old and after so many months of excited anticipation I find myself pining for my few friends back in the UK. I experience a desolation and loneliness that I'm to feel so deeply only once or twice again in my whole life. You think you know loneliness and isolation? I taunt myself. You think you know deprivation and imprisonment? Check this place out!

I know no one but my cousin Eddie and my aunt and uncle who have sponsored this mighty excursion. Poor Eddie, who is so immature and socially inept at age thirteen that he makes me look like the Playboy of the Western World. We have nothing in common but some fond family memories of shared vacations on the Isle of Man back when we were both children. And what strikes me still is Eddie's constant rudeness and irritability toward his doting father. Eight or ten years younger than his handsome, dark-eyed brother Jamie, Eddie is the freckled, blue-eyed baby of the family, the apple of daddy's eye. Yet he rarely gives Joe the time of day and shrugs off his endearments with an abruptness that shocks me. Sometimes I wish my own father were half as demonstrative in his affection as Joe.

And I know, deep down, I would never have rejected such warmth, even as a deeply reserved and easily embarrassed teenager.

It's the early sixties and I'm not yet aware of the autism spectrum. Now, having lived for so long with a daughter with Asperger's, I can speculate with some degree of accuracy that Eddie was doubtless on the spectrum. Only later, much later, did I also wonder if maybe Eddie possessed some weird perspicacity. For all those years of rudeness and rejection could never really redress Joe's ultimate bequest to his favorite son.

My father's legacy to me was one thing: a bottomless sense of inferiority and guilt that would perhaps last a lifetime. But at least I'd have a lifetime, in all probability, in which to deal with this burden. Eddie would enjoy no such luxury.

I had wondered, from early on, how Jamie and Eddie could possibly be brothers: the one so dark and handsome, adventurous and dashing, the other fair and freckled, callow and oh-so-irritating. Though soon enough I learn that the dashing US airman Jamie has had rather a bumpy landing back to real life. His tour in the Air Force at an end, he has married the peroxide blonde he has met in romantic Blackpool, and he's already fathered two children. Two more kids were to arrive within the next three years, and Jamie and Doreen would end up settling back in northern England, within a half hour drive of where he grew up. He was to labor at menial jobs, the most exciting of which was limousine chauffeur, for the rest of his working life. So much for my romantic, swashbuckling ideal.

Though there was one last touch of romance and bravado to Jamie's story before he came down to earth. He ended up stranded Stateside somehow, virtually penniless, unable to afford his flight back to his bride-to-be in the UK, and he made his passage as a stowaway on one of the Queen Mary's last trips across the Atlantic. He paid a steward enough to hide him away and lend him various uniforms and show him which cubby-holes to sleep in and thus made the five day trip in one piece. Poor Jamie. All the romance of his life packed into five short years.

"The best place in the world is always the next one down the road," he always said, without a trace of irony. But for Jamie family life and menial jobs in England's north west were the end of the line, and they came way too soon.

The end of the line for Eddie would be even more conclusive. One year after my family's move to Beaver Falls, uncle Joe dies of a virulent form of colon cancer that seems to be hereditary. Joe dead at fifty three. His brother had apparently succumbed to the same complaint in his early thirties. Eddie, poor bastard, got to split the difference. He managed to escape Beaver Falls and work in various logging camps on Vancouver Island through his twenties and thirties. But he died at age forty two of the same voracious cancer that killed his father and uncle.

It would make a neat and tidy, if grim tale to say the doting father wreaked a poetic revenge on the cold and unresponsive son. But that's all it would be: a fanciful tale.

Eddie didn't possess a weird perspicacity. He was just immature and mean-spirited, if undiagnosed as on the spectrum. Joe didn't wreak any vengeance. He just passed on an incurable disease.

And why didn't Jamie and his children ever develop this scourge? Two of his four kids did spend decades undergoing uncomfortable screening tests and nothing was ever detected. And this in spite of an uncharacteristic offer of comfort from Eddie as he lay on his death-bed.

"Don't ever worry about it," he wrote to Tracy, Jamie's beautiful, brown-eyed older daughter, " I don't think Jamie and I are full brothers. Joe wasn't Jamie's father."

Was this true? It certainly made sense, if you ever saw the two brothers side by side. It would be hard to imagine two more dissimilar specimens. And Dolly had once told my mother, in her typically conceited, arrogant manner, that she had a secret that she would take to her grave.

"If you're going to take it to your grave, you old bitch, why mention it?" I would like to have howled, but I only learned of this little piece of effrontery years down the line, when it was too late. There was only one reason she'd mention a secret, of course, and that was to make my poor mother feel even more out of the loop than she already was.

Was Jamie's parentage her big secret? And if indeed she had had a fling in her youth that resulted in Jamie, then married Joe and had Eddie, why did she never speak to Jamie and her grandchildren and set their minds at rest regarding a possibly hereditary cancer? Why would she allow them to worry for an entire lifetime that they might be stricken with Joe's deadly disease? Was she really so ignorant of basic genetics, or was her stupid secret more important than the health and happiness of her four grandchildren?

Perhaps both, but most likely the former. In any event, Dolly did as she'd promised:

she took her secret to her grave. Upon which, I thought, if I were her grandson, I would have danced.

* * *

Attitude is everything, of course, when you're fifteen. And I realized later that had I modified my own only slightly, the three years I spent in Beaver Falls, those three precious, irretrievable teenage years, would have been tolerable if not pleasant. With very few exceptions, my schoolmates were as warm and welcoming as had been my friends in my second UK home, one Alan Knowles the only real negative, and this limited to his greeting me on my first visit to the local swimming pool by spitting water in my face.

One or two girls found my foreignness appealing and let me know it. One in particular actually put me off by leaving notes on my locker and assuming I'd be her date for an upcoming dance in the gym. She had no appeal for me physically at all, that being the most over-riding concern at my age, and her aggressiveness caused me cruelly to ignore her overtures, something which causes me pangs of regret to this day. But I was still in the throes of puberty and was self-conscious and embarrassed about everything, especially my accent. I felt every inch an alien.

The very smallness of the town, and the fact that I was something of a curiosity, made me even more shy, even more self-conscious. I didn't want to be a source of anyone's curiosity. This was the last thing I wanted. But there was no escape, nowhere to hide, and I wanted to do both. There was nowhere to go, in fact, but inwards, and as always when under pressure, this is where I went: I withdrew deeper into myself.

Communication had never been my strong point. Now the spoken word, language itself, was more than ever the glaring symbol of my alienation. For I had heard, with a shock of embarrassment, my own voice piping back to me from Jamie's PX tape recorder. Never had I heard anything so ugly as that broad, nasal, ungainly Lancashire accent. And once in Canada, engulfed in the lilting, crystal clear cadences of North Americanese, I wished only to shut my mouth and stay silent.

If only I'd relaxed, people would have either been indifferent or maybe even charmed by my weird brogue. If I'd just accepted myself as I was, I could have had dates with at least one or two interested girls. Two years later a Liverpool accent would become one of the most beguiling on the planet.

But I was both ahead of my time and as surly and hypersensitive a fifteen-year-old as anyone could have the misfortune to meet. I withdrew to my self-imposed prison again, and for good measure I was trapped at the end of an isolated inlet in the BC wilderness hundreds of miles from anywhere. Why couldn't they just throw away the key and let me remain mute?

But no, they had to make me talk. In grade ten they forced me to give book reports in front of the class. For anyone in my current state of emotional turmoil and frustration, no more exquisite torture could have been devised. I would have nightmares for years afterwards about those traumatic minutes when I had to stand trembling and dry-mouthed before my peers. I would never forgive the teachers of this sadistic curriculum for forcing me through this agony and humiliation if I lived to be a thousand.