Intimacy and the Renegade

[blitzen]

The Renegade 1997 GD

Part 1

Yesterday I was someone.

Plenty of people knew me.

Most respected me, some obeyed me.

A handful even listened to me an odd time.

I made a difference to the patterns that curled and twisted over and back upon themselves on the face of my world.

Today I am less than no-one.

I haven’t the will or the power to change the smallest, least important
detail in my own mind.

I am vulnerable, invisible…helpless.

Yesterday I was someone.

Today I am no-one.

It wasn’t sudden or recent, it just feels that way. Like the memory of a moment just gone, too soon to accept yet. I’m still me, the man I always was. Sometimes when I look in a mirror it surprises me to see the same old face I always saw, the one I was already bored with before I left school.

Nothing else around me is familiar, everything outside of me changed and became strange, in ways that I still can’t make any sense of, or begin to grasp. Sometimes the only thing I recognize is the face in the mirror, and one day I am afraid I won’t even be able to recognize that.

Yesterday I was someone, the way I remember it.

You were no-one.

Not to me, never, never think that, sometimes you were the only one who counted where I was concerned.

You were just one of the many things the world refused to see my way.

That must have been why I wasn’t afraid of you, at least not at first. I was only afraid of bringing blight from my world into your life.

Then there were the parts of me that threatened to rise from the grave I buried them in, so carefully, such a long time ago, faced with too many things I couldn’t handle, fight or hide from.

I was afraid of them right enough.

You are still no-one, one thing that hasn’t changed.
I have become less than no-one.

Less than you, and terrified of you. You are becoming an obsession that is the only life I have left to live.

I always had a horror of obsession or anything like it, especially in me, I was raised beside too much of it, I know well where obsession can lead. But this took me silently, from behind and rooted before I could stop it. Now it thrives, slowly taking possession of me and strangling what little is left of the past.

I watch you sometimes. Hiding in shadows, crouching by walls, squinting through the least crack of light between your curtains.

I steal a little more of your life every time.

I have seen you cry, I have seen you sleep, I have seen you naked, I have seen things no one has the right to see.

If I ever thought you knew it, I would curl up and die of shame.

No, worse, I would fall apart and in on myself, until all that was left was a hungry black hole…starving to death.

I have never called you just to hear the sound of your voice. But how many times have I picked up a phone and let my fingers stroke the keypad with a useless empty longing that is like nothing I ever knew before, too strong, and running too deep, to be ignored or denied.

If I try to press the keys I feel myself frozen and paralyzed. I would not alarm you with silence and you’d hardly remember me now, you barely knew me then.

Me, I have moments when I feel as if I know every tiny part of you so well that I have no need to remember any of you. Though the truth is that I know little or nothing for sure.

I am beginning to realize that if I know so little about you, I know even less about myself.

I can make a fair guess at your attitude to most things. I can even make a fair guess at what you will be doing in an hour, a week, or as much as a year, but I come unstuck when I try to do the same for myself. The next moment always catches me by surprise, the biggest part of the surprise is that the next moment comes at all.

Yesterday was so different. I knew it all then, past, present and future, I held them all in a tightly clenched fist.

Now I know nothing, only you.

I suppose most people would tell me to get a life. I would if someone would only tell me how or where.

I ran out of life the day I found myself left alone with nothing but the ticking of the clock, the heavy baggage of the past and a long hard road ahead, through nowhere, to nowhere. The day I stopped being someone.

You.

You are the last tie between the past and the present.

I could try to explain, if I knew a way to explain, if I could find the nerve to speak to you, if there was an outside chance of you believing a word of it.

How could you?

No-one could.

I don’t even believe it myself.

Sometimes I think the only reason the past is a part of me is that there is nothing else to put in its place.

I can imagine your reaction too well to ever want to see it. Better to just watch from the shadows when I can, and wonder about all the might have beans, supposing there was a time or a place where the world had not gone stark raving mad.

Is it the whole world?

Your world never seemed to add up either. I can’t fathom it however hard I try. Nothing I see when I look at you could happen in a sane world.

Is the whole world mad?

Or just the parts that I see?

I have started to notice how alone and worn out you are. I wish there was something, anything I could do to wipe away the tears you seem to freeze behind your eyes, some way I could fill the emptiness I see in your life.

All I can do is stand and watch, like a man bound and gagged, while you die a little more every minute.

Never, in all my life, did I feel so painfully useless. Me, the man who used to be able to fix just about anything if it mattered enough.

Now all that is left of me is a dazed lump of pain, you don’t need that to drain you even faster. I refuse to be the last push that finally sends you over the edge.

I could have given you everything once, and I would have, like a shot, if it hadn’t been…contaminated.

Even the nothing I have now is a very dangerous kind of nothing.

I never got around to counting the people who want my head. They seemed to crawl out of the woodwork, as soon as they saw it was safe.

I wish one of them would just get lucky and get it over with sometimes, if I haven’t become too invisible and non-existent to be worth the trouble, but I go on outsmarting them, staying one jump ahead, old habits on auto-pilot, or maybe just something to do with my time?

I don’t suppose that I would have expected anyone to be too pleased, if I had thought about it, but I didn’t have time to think, it was all too quick for thinking.

One day everything was the same as it had ever been, and the next I woke up too sickened by it all to go on.

It shocked me to find out how many people, not just strangers, people I had known for years, wanted me dead, just because I wanted out.

Then there were the others, the ones who only had to have a reason to stop being scared to want me dead.

Some of them were the very same people I could not bring myself to hurt any more, and never wanted to hurt in the first place.

Some of them were old friends I grew up with. People who were part of the furniture in my life.

I don’t think you would exactly cry at my funeral if you knew the truth, and you are the one person I am pretty sure I managed to avoid hurting at all.

Now there are days when I genuinely don’t know where I am, one place seems much the same as another.

Other days I find myself heading back for one more look at you. You have become my last link with myself.

The rest is just staying alive, more a reflex than a need.

You seem to be the only person I talk to, and I only talk to you where no-one can hear me, inside my head.

I’m not sure I could have a conversation now if I wanted to. I was never the best at that anyway, I never had any reason to be, there was never very much I wanted to say to anyone who wanted to hear it.

Unless I was with you. Then I would be bursting with things I wanted to share with you and questions I wanted to ask.

As often as not the words would just dry up on me and refuse to come out.

You must have thought I was a complete thick. Which I’m not, in fact I’m a very long way from it, but you’ll never know that now.

That hurts.

You were the last thing in the world I needed.

The worst thing that could possibly happen.

But one of the very few things I do not regret, or this long, drawn out end would be too much for me.

Selfish always was my middle name, it is a very real danger to you, the way I keep coming back. If just one of the wrong people noticed…

You could be the end of me as easily as I could be the end of you, and we don’t even really know each other.

In the really bad times I start to wonder if that is the worst thing that could happen, for either of us. I must be at least half crazy by now, but I will never be crazy enough to convince myself that I have the right to make that decision for both of us.

The hardest part is having no power over anything. I always loved power, for its own sake, and for the safety of it.

I always had power, in the last few years anyway.

Power is like a drug, you can get hooked on it, and I did.

To do without it is the worst thing that ever happened to me.

I used to fantasies about sharing it with you. In real terms you hate people like me for fun, I used to cringe inside every time you sounded off on that subject. The worst of it was the fear that you might realize something, that you might put me in a position where I had to…

You never seemed to know any of the unwritten rules, let alone play by them.

…I couldn’t have done it, I knew that. The problem would have been finding a way to stop anyone else from doing it.

I had everything you needed and I couldn’t risk giving it to you.

Still, I doubt if you would mean so much to me now if you were any different.

I often wonder if I would have let it all go if you would only have accepted it?

That’s where I start to wonder whether I have lost my mind…

…or found it at last?

I didn’t change anything. It all goes on just the same, regardless of whether I am the high king of the dung heap, or a maggot hiding under it.

It cost me everything to change exactly nothing.

Everything didn’t even buy me the right to touch you, or come clean with
you.

It certainly didn’t buy me the right to spy on you the way I do. Its all that’s left from the time when rights and wrongs weren’t something I worried about too much.

On the other hand, if the part of me that stalks you is the only part that is still alive. perhaps I do have the right?

Even I have a right to some kind of life, don’t I?

[blitzen]

The Renegade 1997 GD

Part 4

There must have been a child. I’m sure of that. I’ve seen the sign of it on you.

Not that I’m any kind of expert. The kind of women I knew weren’t exactly racing to point out stretch marks to me!

Maybe you think they are ugly, but they aren’t at all, not really.

More like the crazing on old china that shows you it did more in it’s time than sit on a shelf collecting dust.

Those things, the physical traces of other lives, other pasts, completely different to my own, always fascinated me.

The deep over waxed scars on an old table, the ruts worn into an old back road, even the dents in an old pan, all solid tangible memories than can be touched, if never
understood or told as stories. The same goes for the patterns of children on a woman’s belly.

I notice things like that quickly, maybe too quickly sometimes. I always expected you to mention the child sooner or later, but you never did, not once.

You don’t trust the world an inch, let alone enough to hand over a baby for adoption. Besides, you aren’t the type somehow. The women who have babies adopted are never
as strong as you, or as self contained.

I hope to God your baby is not dead. I’m sure you would have mentioned that. I wasn’t raised by monks. Women always talk about their dead children, their angels in
heaven, as often as the living. It is as if, by speaking of them they try to make them a part of the years they were denied a chance to share.

We were a tough breed at home. We could generally be relied upon to make it to our 17th birthdays fairly intact. Even a broken bone was an exotic and glamorous thing,
the mark of a hero. After our 17th birthdays, how long we lasted was anybody’s guess, sometimes from day to day.

But no matter, we expected our children to make it that far at least. If a child fell short of it, for any reason, sickness is just as cruel as any stray bullet, the whole place
would feel cheated, hurt, and raging with anger for weeks after it.

I suppose anyone would expect me, of all people to be immune to that, but I’m not. I have punched dents in walls over the death of innocent wains I barely knew. Life can
be too cruel and death too common where I come from, to watch it trespass on the sacred soil of childhood and remain untouched.

My brother has a dead son, my nephew, who never even opened his eyes on the world. And my sister, her second daughter, prettiest wee thing you could ever hope to
see, she reckons she’ll marry me when she grows up. She probably won’t get that far, she hardly ever has any hair from the chemotherapy. I don’t know for sure even now
if…

Bullets don’t seem to stray as often as they did when I was a lad, but another nephew, not 16, crazy young bugger, decided to run someone else’s car through a crash
barrier without anybody’s permission one night.

They chased him of course, and they fired on him. I can’t blame them, if it was my job I would have done the same. It wasn’t only himself he was looking to kill the way he
drove that car, he’d taken something, not just drink, some kind of pills. They weren’t shooting to kill, just stop him. When they did one of those same men who fired on him
risked his life to pull him clear before the tank caught, and nearly didn’t get away with it. If they hadn’t driven him to the Hospital as fast as though the were their own flesh
and blood he would have bled to death.

Full time enemies are the exception rather than the rule in truth. When the shooting stops a man just reverts to being human, if he is still any kind of a man at all.

However much hate there is at 10 yards, or behind a riot shield, or a gun, there is very little hate up close, eye to eye.

What is there to hate in those soldiers anyway? They are only trying to beat the dole queue like any of the lads at home.

After it, I bent a few rules wild out of shape and used a recognized code word, so they would know it was official, and called the C.O. to ask him to thank them.

If anyone had ever found out some queer questions would have been asked, I can tell you!

I felt I had to do it, I’ve never been sure why.

I would not have considered canceling an operation, or even delaying it to save the lives of those same men. But I would always hope that, face to face, one man to
another, I would have the courage and humanity to do for them, or anyone, as much as they had done for my nephew. I wanted them to know that, personally.

I didn’t get to sit down and talk sense to my nephew either after that. I took one hell of a belting from my sister on his behalf though. She caught me before I even rang the
doorbell and backhanded me a few times right out in the street.

The bottom line was that I was his hero, and it was all my fault. Every time I spoke to him, usually on the phone, he came back worse than before, as if, for every half
cracked, half baked, born rotten thing I did at his age, he had to try and do it twice.

I’m not arguing with that, except whoever told him all that stuff it surely wasn’t me!

I’m good at being a respectable Uncle. All I ever did was ask how he was doing at school (and pretend to believe the answers). Would he make the team again this year?
The things Uncles are supposed to say. But I kept my peace and took the punishment. She needed to beat up on someone that day, and he was still too weak, so I was
the next best target.

When I had been the guilty party, all those years ago, she had been away off in a world of dance halls, pop stars and ways to work out if a boy was one of our own before
you fancied him too much. She would never have belted me then. For one thing, she might have broken a fingernail!

The last of her fingernails broke off with hard work years ago, and she gave me a few that had my ears ringing for hours.

The lads waiting in the car nearly disgraced themselves with laughing at it. By then we knew the “hero” of it all was going to be fine, until we knew that they had been nigh
as shattered as me waiting for news.

For ever after it, if I ever took one of my turns, nothing serious, just getting out of the wrong side of the bed, and being a thundercloud raining sharp remarks on anyone in
range all day for no real reason, someone would always threaten to fetch my sister to fix me.

Which would crack everybody up, including me, and put an end to it. Tell me I’m out of order and I usually switch it off like a light. I’m not really a very moody person. In
another life I probably would have been fairly easygoing. But as it was, anyone who didn’t know me would be scared to death of one of my “funny turns”. I reckon a lot of
them were totally convinced they were lucky to come out of it alive.

I suppose I got a nasty, cheap little buzz out of that sometimes. You’d have to know how naturally obnoxious some of the people I had to deal with just naturally were, to
know I had plenty of excuse for it.

It wasn’t the nicest part of my nature though, I’ll admit that.

You never saw it at all, though you would have one day, and probably just ignored me blind, or told me to “grow up”.

I got the funny feeling none of the things about me that signified to others would ever cut any ice with you.

[blitzen]

The Renegade 1997 GD

Part 5

If you ever described me to anyone, even those who knew me for years, just as I was with you, they wouldn’t recognize me. I was just about me with you, or almost me if my confidence wasn’t up to it on the day.

It’s frightening to be nothing but yourself with someone. It doesn’t leave you an escape clause on any judgment they make.

The assessment is permanent.

I’ll never know for sure, but I got the feeling I wasn’t doing too badly at all with you. Funny, because I wouldn’t have ever expected that. Things kept popping out of me before I had even thought about them. I’d hear them, and cringe inside, wondering what on earth you must be thinking of me. But something was definitely going down well with you.

Or am I just seeing what I wanted to see, remembering what I want to remember?

So many times I wanted to sit down with you somewhere quiet and start telling you everything, not stopping until you knew it all. Sometime I was seriously afraid I would do that, before I could stop myself. That was, of course, something that must never happen, out of the question.

Besides, how well would that have gone down?

If I could have told you, I would have felt I had to. It was a relief that I couldn’t. I’m sure you would have shrunk from me as though I were a horribly deformed monster. Who knows? Maybe you would be right? But I don’t feel like one inside.

Now I think of it, there is nothing to stop me telling you everything now. Perhaps that is a big part of the reason I can never approach you, a big and selfish part? Knowing I would have to tell you now, and knowing that would be the end, if there was anything at all to put an end to anyway.

How would you ever understand that you have to be deformed, deep inside, to be able to do the things I have done, live the life I have lived? At the time I didn’t see it, it was all my normality. I see it now though, here on the outside, at a distance, looking in. I didn’t ask to be a monster, and I didn’t deform myself, none of us did.

I had to live that life, and the more I lived it, in a sense the more deformed I became. Not in every sense, though many did. Some parts of me remained untouched. I knew that was unusual. That why I always kept a lot of myself apart. While I was the king of the dung heap, most of me wasn’t really a part of it at all.

It really was the only way I was given to life. I would have sold my soul for another one if anyone were willing to do that deal.

Would there be a way to make you see what it was like?

To be tagged second-rate from birth, quite officially, disabled by nothing more than your name and the rest of your birthright. I was born to be fair game, and so were the rest of us. Whatever you did, whoever you became, however hard you tried there was no hope of being promoted to first rate, or even full membership of the human race.

It must be hard to believe, but I’m not prejudiced or bigoted about anyone. Of course I was right enough as a kid, about a redhead child with freckles, or another gang than your own. Being pretty bigoted seems to be part of being a kid. I’m sure you are supposed to grow out of it, but too many refuse to.

As a man I could never take prejudice seriously, though it is serious enough. It’s all a horrible sick joke, or a mental illness to me. I couldn’t ever have sat quiet on the receiving end if I had tried to.

It made me angry, and it made me feel ill.

I wanted, needed, to roar at them:

YOU ARE OUT OF YOUR TINY MINDS!

But who would have listened, or cared?

So I had to find a way to roar that as loud as I could, a way they would pay attention to.

I could never even come to grips with a world where other people, who didn’t even know me or want to, tied to tell me who I was, what I was worth, where I belonged.

It’s nothing to do with religion. Last time I went to church was to collect my confirmation money. Now to me, THAT was serious. You’d never catch me missing out, nor wasting a few hours on a weekend, in a stiff suit that was last used by the last brother, with my hair plastered in place with half a can of my sister’s hairspray. I went mysteriously “missing” when Da was going to take me to have it cut. Now that was a family controversy if ever there was one. Ma nearly took apoplexy. All the other boys, neat and tidy like so many sheared sheep, and me with the hair half down my back. I thought I looked like a rock star, but when I see the old photos, Ma keeps them on the wall in the parlor, all of us, side by side, in a row, above the first communions, and below the weddings, I honestly just look…like a kid with a misguided idea that he looks like a rock star.

I’m not sure it is about nationality either. I don’t think I’d give a blow if Walt Disney owned the whole province as a theme park, as long as I knew I had the same rights as anyone else, the same claim on my own life and potential, and that guaranteed to be automatic.

Truth is, I’m such a domineering sod I doubt if I’d be too thrilled unless I was let to run it all myself, and there’s no chance of that, but I’d grumble and let it be, like at lot I suppose.

I’m not naturally aggressive. I don’t like trouble and I never start it. I didn’t start this strife, but I’m not made the way of one who could live by ignoring it.

I’m no coward either. I get afraid, very afraid, more now than at any other time I can remember. But where is the courage if there is no fear?

Without fear you are nothing but a soulless psychopath. Fear is part of caring, part of being human.

I’ve seen them, too many of them, dangerous beggars. I’ve had to deal with them, the best thing to do with them is to send them somewhere no one is likely to come back from. It didn’t seem to worry them too much so why should it worry me?

Strange thing, the usually came back, against the odds, if anyone did.

They love it for it’s own sake. Win or lose it’s all a game to them. They don’t even care which side they are on as long as they can play.

That’s part of what I’m glad to be out of.

I couldn’t carry it any more.

I can’t bring myself to condemn it though. If everything stopped then nothing would ever change. Things would stay the way they are, and start to slide back to the worst way they used to be.

I don’t think it’s even about winning, more about being seen and heard, not used and abused. The rules were made by the opposition, they decided how far we would have to go to score.

I can condemn anyone who gets a kick out of it though.

It’s too horrible for kicks.

Scoring a point can be the most horrible part. I have mourned “great victories” before now, and never felt inclined to celebrate them.

Someone always seems to get hurt, no matter how careful you are, and only a very few people deserve that, if anyone does at all.

Some of the people who got hurt were close to me, most were strangers, but worth none the less for that. It always hurt in some way.

People get hurt just the same without me, I’m not saving or sparing anyone.

It is still horrible.

At least I don’t have to watch any more.

So I turn to look at a lot of other things instead. Things I never really saw before. Watching, at a distance, from the far side.

Seeing people, ordinary people, living ordinary charmed lives.

The lives we were denied

[blitzen]

By way of explanation for the above…

I was asked about intimacy and Asperger Syndrome, here is the rest of the answer:

---

I just posted the whole of a piece which explores that part of me in the context of an, understandably, heavily fictionalised person I really knew…

If you are curious, he looked exactly like Rod Argent (I had three like him in my life, must be “my type”?) and came across so much like Daniel Day Lewis in “The Boxer” that it gets a little creepy to watch…

His reflections are partly my own, partly drawn from the man himself, and, perversely, partly drawn from a former British Intelligence operative I once lived with.

His biography is drawn from Belfast…what little I knew of the real man was quite different in specifics if not spirit.

To answer your questions:

---

You just dont allow yourself any attachments to people…none at all?

---

It is not a question of “allowing myself” - the option is not available to me. Just as the option of performing impromptu brain surgery is not available to me. You cannot “allow yourself” the impossible.

---

I’m curious, are you thankful you are that way, or do you ever look around and wonder what youre missing?

---

Am I thankful I have blue/grey eyes and not brown ones? Don’t we all look around the world and wonder what we are missing, for, surely we are all missing something? But you cannot truly miss what you can never know.

Go and meet the Renegade…

It is a question and answer woven together…both are very complicated…

I have no idea whether he was an Aspie…it seems possible…and I only came to know him at all because circumstances made it even harder to avoid him entirely…his position was much as I describe it in the story, he couldn’t afford a relationship, and an achilless heel at all.

It was 18 months after the last time I saw him (when I had no choice but find words to send him away for a long time, if not for good, for his own safety, at the expense of mine, another story again), when there was no chance of ever running into him again before I could admit to myself, that if I were more normal, in a more normal world, I could have loved him for a lifetime.

I never really had another lover since…no one could match him, he set the bar too high, and after that I would not insult myself with less.

There were one or two sad, desperate men who couldn’t get anyone else, who helped keep me alive…and two others who made me feel so guilty for being the source of their affected “unrequited devotion” that they had me wrapped around their finger to an extent…

Until very recently, when I am beginning to fear that someone could have matched, and raised him under even more impossible circumstances…

It should be impossible but I suspect it really happened…especially when I read the story again for the first time in many years…to write it I edited the real man to be as close to my ideal as possible…and it stuns me how close I came…

---

I know I dreamed you a sin and a lie
I have my freedom but I dont have much time

---

I have no option at all but to walk away (not only from one man, but temporarily, at least, from most of my acquaintanceship to avoid him)…if I try to do anything else I just freeze…and cannot even function in any normal way. He does not even know and I shall never tell. I have it covered already.

So I shall spend this Christmas feeling like a child who finally got the puppy she always wanted and adored only to have to take it to the dog pound right away because she was allergic to it.

---

GD

[blitzen]

The Renegade 1997 GD

Part 2

No-one was ever going to matter.

That was the deal I made with myself.

I’d take the only chance or choice I was given, and I’d be as big a bastard as I had to be to claw my way to the top of it.

I’d never let myself drag anyone else in with me, and if I had ever let anyone matter, I’m human enough, too human in ways, that I would have tried, so no-one from outside must ever matter, and the ones on the inside, who belonged there in their own right, could never matter, not to me.

I had to find my way to the top of the pile because I thought that way I would be left alone. That way I could go on being some part of myself at least.

Failing that, there was no way I was going to let anyone else control my life or demand respect that was not deserved. No way would I ever be able to live a lie, pretending that the people above me were better or wiser than me. Not when some of them weren’t any more than human garbage, though others were finer human beings than anyone would suspect.

I needed to belong to myself, and to belong to myself I needed to be at the top. Anyway that’s what I thought, until I made it and came to see that, in many ways, I belonged even less to myself than I would at the very bottom.

I hate hurting anyone.

I can see why nobody will ever believe that, but it is the truth. Hating to do something is no guarantee that you will find a way to avoid it.

Often hurting one person avoids having to hurt many.

I hurt a lot of people.

No, I won’t talk around it, people died, not always quickly or cleanly.

I never really faced it and I don’t think I ever will.

It never seemed real, more like a game where nobody was ever really hurt or killed, whatever happened was just part of the game.

I live with it by telling myself it wasn’t real.

Nobody ever got hurt if I had a choice.

Unless there was a mistake, and there were all too many of those.

Those were the only times it was real to me.

A sour place inside me where I despise myself, and a guilt I can’t offload. I wouldn’t want to, that guilt played a big part in keeping me human. It is the only fuel I have for my stifled feelings. It stopped me from becoming numb and kept my compassion alive.

It kept me from crossing the line past which I would lose myself, and all humanity, forever.

Sex was a place where I always had the choice, and I can honestly say I never hurt anyone, which seems rare enough. As far as I can see when it comes to that, men and women both, more often than not, throw every scrap of decency out the window along with the book of rules.

I never let a woman near enough to be attracted to me, I never looked for long enough to be attracted to them.

It seemed fairer to pay in cash than with false promises and I couldn’t have cared less what anyone thought.

I kept it all very much to myself anyway.

Some people have this look, like an engaged sign, it wards people off, says that you aren’t in the market. Very few will try to go past that, unless its a piece of mischief. I learned how to fake that look. I think people assumed I had someone tucked away. I don’t know because if anybody ever asked, they didn’t ask me.

It’s funny, now I think of it I never even found out if I could have, I might have got a very rude awakening!

But I’d the same blood in my veins as anyone else, sometimes that got to me, and I’d have to do something about it so I could think straight again.

Then it was always casual and off hand, hardly ever the same one twice, and almost never without hard cash changing hands. I remember more names than faces, and I only remember a handful of names.

I don’t know women very well, but I like what little I know. Women have a gentleness about them that I have somewhere in me too. As long as I did not let them close I could afford to be that gentle part of myself with them.

They told me who I was more often than they asked me. I was definitely married for starters. It was like marriage guidance counseling without having a wife. I got told more than once that whatever it was I ought to get her to sort it out properly!

I played along, not to deceive them, certainly not for sympathy, but because I didn’t want to embarrass the genuine kindness and concern of them.

I can’t be all that bad, because once or twice I was told I was probably too soft for my own good. I was told I was a fine thing too, slightly more often.

So perhaps if I had ever chanced my arm I wouldn’t have been a total disaster?

“Soft” is not a word anyone else would associate with me, far from it. I could only afford to be soft with these faceless souls who were nigh as lost as myself.

Kindness breeds kindness at a frightening rate in me, which is why I often hide from it. I never saw too much of it anyway, apart from those women.

There wasn’t much room for kindness where I came from, I doubt if many people would even have a notion of it.

There were times when I needed that kindness, just for its own sake, far more than I needed sex. Anyway, they couldn’t seem to give me the sex without a dose of kindness. God knows where that kindness came from, it beats me, the lives they lived must have been so cruel. Unable to escape it I reveled in it, and was humbled and shamed by it too. It balanced me and stopped me becoming too cynical.

I owe them and I always will.

How cruel is your life?

It kills me, not knowing.

I know some of it, we are about the same age, we grew up with some of the same things. The same music, the same fashions, even the same television.

It gets to me that I know I was in bed with measles when they shot John Kennedy, but I haven’t got a clue what you were doing. All the biker rock music that takes me back to a time when the height of it was smoking in the back alley, with every drag nearly costing me my lungs and my lunch, and every bit of will focused on looking cool, I always had a bloody stubborn
nature. I don’t know what memories that brings back for you, or if it brings any at all.

That kills me, not knowing.

We grew up in the same times, but not in the same world.

Somehow I can’t picture you walking out of the local grocers with three frozen kippers stuffed down the front of your strides for a dare.

Much less tanking up like a real man on six whole bottles of Babycham (those weren’t exactly paid for either) and rounding off the evening by thieving an old Ford that had the sense to run out of petrol, before I got it to the main road and ran out of driving skills!

I wasn’t much more than 10 then, and it only got worse with age, I think if I ever had a son like me I’d probably strangle him and be done with it!

I managed to get away with it, or talk my way out of it though, except when I didn’t of course. I was a lot better at the old chat than I am now, and bullshit? It seemed as if all I had to do was open my mouth and it came naturally pouring out.

I’m not about to go blaming it on a deprived background, it wasn’t, except that it was a tough world, there were a lot of us, and there wasn’t a lot of money, or energy and supervision, to go around us all. After a point we were left to go to hell in our own ways if we insisted.

Not exactly a die-hard Republican background, Mam and Da had too many other things on their plate to even think about it.

They just seemed to ignore it whenever they could, and run it out of the house if they had to.

They ran me years ago in theory. But never in practice.

When I think about it…

I was a walking front line. They must have been scared to death, but I was always welcome for breakfast, dinner and tea, if I’d take it, and not for what I gave them, because they wouldn’t take anything. They are proud people too, same as me.

Da never committed a crime nor hurt anybody in his life. His idea of wandering wild was getting pissed after a match and falling asleep in the front parlor. Nobody got it from him, least of all me. I think in those times it got into the air we breathed and the tap water, and everybody grew up wild or savage one way or another.

You didn’t grow up that way, and I can’t guess it any way that adds up.

But I know that somewhere there are some facts that add up, because you are so real.

Not a plastic bit in sight.

If I had the time again I’d probably just sit and fire questions at you.

Then I thought the less I knew about you the less you could matter. Now you matter more than anything, and I am left not knowing what it is that matters to me so much.

I only know how much you matter.

That leaves me standing condemned to finding it impossible to understand what I most need and value, what signifies, what is important to me in any sense. How can I aim for something without knowing what it is? Even if the only place I aim to have it is inside myself?

I want whatever it is you have, but I don’t know what it is, let alone how to find it. I can’t identify what it is in me that draws me to you, so I can’t know what I am trying to become.

There are very few hints or clues, half the reason I do this, spy on you this way, is to find more clues. The other half is that I cannot stop myself. I know I’ll never go over the edge and do anything that might seem sinister, but even what I am doing is pretty sinister and sick to me.

I just can’t stop.

I never asked you any questions. If you ask questions in words you get answers in words, sooner or later you wind up with a truth you cannot run away from.

It seemed safe to lose myself in you and let our bodies discuss anything that needed to be said. It relieved the pressure, without letting the words escape into the open where I would have to hear them and deal with them.

Where they would take on a life of their own and become too real to deny.

Where did I ever get the crazy idea that was safe?

Now I can’t deny it anyway and I can’t describe it or give it a name that I might be able to grasp and take into myself or tell to you.

Speak for too long without words and even your mind becomes mute, while every nerve sings and every muscle aches to express the feelings in the only language you can still speak. A language that does not translate.

There are no laws against the things I want to tell you, but maybe a fair few against the only way I would have to tell them.

This feeling was my greatest fear, worse than death, madness, or paralysis.

Now I have it seems to be an old familiar part of me and a comfort.

I expected hell on earth, and found a warm place to hide instead. Even in spite of the despair, the helplessness.

Nobody told me this was on the agenda, it wasn’t in the small print of any contract I signed. But thank God I have it.

Somebody, somewhere, must have loved you very much. Caught you every time you fell, wrapped you in cotton wool. That would be so easy to do, somebody must have done it once. So what went wrong? What did this to you?

Do you know you only smile when someone is looking? All your smile seems to mean is that you are not alone, not at ease, on stage again.

It hurts less to see you cry.

Do you know men are more frightened of tears than they are of bullets? The lengths we will go to to avoid them.

But it’s your smile that scares me. I would give my life, here and now, to see you smile in private, alone, happy.

You could bring me your tears until they ran dry and I would thank you for them.

As for my own?

Definitely no comment.

I am too much of a coward to cry yet.

When I was very small, before I even discovered minor crimes, just a little fella in short pants, always a bit grubby and cold, I had an embarrassing problem. The tears used to come whenever they felt like it, without waiting
for any direct order from my head.

It mortified me!

There was never a place to hide it. Every dark corner seemed to have another tenant. I had one brother, Conor was his name, he took to calling me his little sister Faucet. Even when I tied to hold it in he’d start, “Fetch a bucket Mam, the pressure’s building, I can see it”. Sometimes I prayed to God in my head to make him stop jeering me. Sometimes I got belted for crying too, but never by Conor.

Conor gave me my first drink, and gave me the low-down on girls. Not the most politically correct explanation I admit, but reasonably technically accurate. Conor got himself half killed standing up for me an odd time, then reckoned it was only because it suited him better than the risk of drowning!

I was terrified of him.

I would have died for him.

I loved him.

So I finally found a way to stifle the tears to please him somehow.

Even when they buried him.

The same Conor who fell in the door blind drunk, singing at the top of his voice, and woke the whole house on Friday night, was being lowered into the ground in a box on Wednesday morning. There was no sense or reason to it.

Nobody gained a thing by it.

It wouldn’t be safe now, but I used to visit his grave sometimes. Just to show him I still wouldn’t cry. Man and boy, dry eyed I went on showing him my love and my loss, the part of him I kept alive in me, the learning of the toughest lesson he ever taught me.

Every time they called me a hard bastard, they proved to me that I loved Conor, my brother, and that he could never be completely dead in me.

Long after he was no more than another name on the list of might-have-been lives to anyone else.

It isn’t how you show love that counts, it’s what it means to the one you show it to. Did any of the ways I showed it to you mean anything? If any did, they weren’t meant to, but there were thousands if you only knew it. I didn’t want you to understand, I just wanted to stop myself from exploding.

Anyway, that list of names got longer since and hasn’t stopped growing. So many familiar names. Decent souls or rotten bastards, it never seems to matter in the end, the loss is still the same. Each life fed into a pointless people mill that just goes on grinding. I can’t see when it will stop and I can’t seem to work out when it began or why either.

Is it something in the genes? A taint of madness that doesn’t need a reason any more, if it ever did.

It took my life too, but the worst way, the way that doesn’t kill you.

I hate the monster I rode for most of my life, but away from it I am like a lost wain, unable to walk and talk for myself, alone in a cold dark unknown, with no-one to cry out for. I should wish it was over, sometimes I do, but more times I get sick with fear that for me, the worst is only beginning.

Is that what I need from you?

Some kind of rescue?

Or just a temporary reprieve and a partial absolution? A chance to know and prove to myself who I really am, before the clock stops ticking and my time runs out?

I doubt if I am afraid of dying, I know too many who went that road before me.

I might be afraid of never being alive.

Even if truly being alive is the most God-awful frightening thing I can think of?

[blitzen]

The Renegade 1997 GD

Part 3

I never did pin down what it was that made me notice you, what made you different.

I don’t think you are that extraordinarily good looking. Well, you might be for all I know. You always just looked like you to me, and that was all I ever wanted you to look like, but you certainly did not look all that great the first time I saw you.

I don’t mean you looked bad either, you never do, not bad, just tired, and as if you haven’t exactly gone to a lot of trouble. You looked like the kind of woman I would expect to see in the middle of the day, maybe popping to the shops in a little country town. A woman who wasn’t looking particularly attractive because there was no earthly reason for her to want to attract anyone.

Looking back that, I suppose that was a bit odd, considering the circumstances.

You looked exactly way I see you look now, on the rare occasions you emerge in the morning.

I don’t think you have quite come to terms with morning yet. Maybe you never will. Sometimes I have seen you look so good I have had to stare to be sure it is really you, or even really someone who is prepared to have anything to do with me.

But you don’t look that good all the time, and you certainly didn’t the night I met you. I don’t even understand why I did meet you, let’s just say there was a lot more blatant, in your face, talent about!

You looked so bloody respectable. I suppose that made me get curious. You actually looked like someone I could take home to Mam, except Mam would be scared to death of you, in her terms you look like a probation officer, or a solicitor, and with Mam, if it looks like a duck it is a duck. In spite of all the far worse things than probation some of us managed to collect, a probation officer still puts Mam sideways, same with a social worker, or
even a lady lawyer.

I don’t suppose anyone ever loses their fear of the first thing that scares them half to death. At any rate Mam never did.

Worse, you talk like one.

It took me a long time to see it, but the truth is that the only women I ever had anything resembling an actual conversation with, who talked like you, were probation officers.

Not my own, at least, not often. I developed a talent for sorting things out for people at quite a young age. Sorting out things like probation officers. They listened to me better than they did to anyone else. I could manage to speak something like their language at a
push. So I was often asked to do my party piece. At first, it was the lads who asked, then it was the mothers, then it was girlfriends and wives. I suppose one-day the girlfriends and wives would have come back as mothers and the whole cycle would have started again. I wasn’t exactly looking forward to it.

In a way it had already started. Just once, as a favor to his dad.

This kid was getting wild, acting the hard man, and nothing was getting through. We set him up so that he would be alone in the house. The idea was that I called up in this big black car (which was actually borrowed) parked right across the front gate. I was dressed all in black, wrap-around shades, the lot.

I felt like a complete idiot, and looked worse!

So I knocked on the door.

The hard man himself (with his eyes standing on stalks) opened it.

I push past him, lean against the stairs and take off the shades, very slowly. Then after giving him a long hard stare I ask if he knows who I am.

5 ft-nothing-much, of, very suddenly, retired, hard man, manages to look up at me and stammer out “I’m not sure sir”.

Sir!

I think that was the only time in my life anyone ever called me sir, unless they were trying to sell me something!

Anyway, I give him this even longer, harder, stare, mostly because I’m trying not to laugh, and tell him that’s the way he would want to keep it.

Then I tell him that I’m hearing things about him, things I don’t like, and if I hear any more, I am going get annoyed, very annoyed.

Then I walk out, get in the car, drive round the corner and crack up laughing.

Last I heard it worked like a charm.

Later, that same night, alone in my bed, it bothered me.

No matter how good the cause, and that particular genius was heading for a bad end at Mach One, I did not like being the bogeyman who scared little boys. Although, what scared him was the emptiest threat in the world.

I never had anything to do with that end of things. The “punishment beatings”.

Nobody who signified ever did.

I wouldn’t have had the heart for it, hardly any of those kids were anywhere near as bad as I had been. Nobody ever knocked the stuffing out of me.

I wasn’t the only one, nobody else I knew had the heart for it either.

Right or wrong, and because there is nothing else, I suppose it must be right, in a way, even if it can’t be, it takes a very special kind of moron to actually do it.

The kind of thug who needs to hurt and scare little children to feel like a man.

I couldn’t hurt a kid if you put a gun to my head, let alone get a buzz out of it.

This was one time when it had to be done. It really was a desperate last resort. A handful of the right words and the little bugger was practically pissing his pants.

If I hadn’t done it there would have been something worse, and sooner rather than later.

I know, I am the expert on juvenile delinquency.

Of course you don’t want to scald your mother’s heart, but it’s up to her to wise up and toughen up isn’t it?

Up to her to have a bit of faith in you.

Up to her to see that you can handle the heat when you have to, and are far too smart to have to handle it very often.

As for your Da, between quiet man to man talks, that never make much sense, and dire threats, that don’t even half scare you, Da is that the lump in front of the telly, when he isn’t in the pub.

What does he know?

He got it all wrong himself, and it shows.

Apart from which, you are pretty sure you could flatten him if you really wanted to, which you don’t, because you are too fond of the old sod.

You can run much too fast for there to be any risk of him flattening you.

It takes one hell of a lot to make you stop and reconsider.

Mortal terror usually does the trick, though not always (I can’t remember it affecting me much) but it did the trick this time.

I am sure there must be a better way. I realized that I would rather have sat down with this queer genius and tried to find one, rather than find a way to scare him shitless.
Anyway, the last word I heard, came by way of another father, who lives in an old terrace with very thin walls, and very few secrets. The word out on the playground is that I told him I was very impressed and asked him to cool it, because I had plans for him!

Can you beat that? Little tyke!!

I bet he keeps that to himself now. I’ve doubt if he sees any reason to behave himself anymore either.

If I could have really talked to him, for as long as it took to make him see some sense, he might still see a reason to behave himself. As it is, he’s probably back out, running around, looking for the local variation on baseball, if he hasn’t already found himself a
game.

When I was with you, I felt just like a kid, mad to impress you. I wanted to tell you about some of the people I have had very long, serious conversations with.

If I had you would have been very impressed indeed. Sometimes I wanted to tell you so bad that I nearly did, which was out of the question.

But no matter who I talked to, I never got to talk to their wives.

You would think that was a very sexist things to say, but the truth is, all the people I talked to were men. That is just the way these things are done.

So, apart from probation officers, I hardly ever had any kind of conversation with a woman like you, let alone a personal one

The night I met you I could have talked with you for a week, just for the hell of it.

It was a very good thing you were in a hurry, I was pretty pushed for time too, but I kept forgetting that.

I noticed you all right.

You didn’t seem interested in mothering me, or being kind to me either.

Even so, I got this feeling you liked me, in spite of yourself. I also got a distinct feeling that if I pushed it, ever so slightly, with you I’d get a very long way.

I wasn’t going to push it, partly because getting a very long way was not a good idea, and, maybe mostly, because I was afraid I might find and that I was mistaken and get a clip round the ears for it!

I really, really, liked you, and I made it my business to know your face and your name in seconds flat.

I never forgot either of them, not for a moment.

I was never going to see you again.

I hardly ever saw anyone again, but, something told me, especially not you, and that made me sad, especially seeing that you were in so much of a hurry.

At any rate, I came away with the first clear picture I ever had of what kind of woman I would have had if things had been different, or, more likely, what kind I would have wanted to have and never got within a mile of!

The kind of woman I could be happy with.

I didn’t know if knowing that was a good thing or a bad thing, it wasn’t very important, just interesting.

Besides, just how different would things have to be for someone like you to even look at me?

You certainly wouldn’t if I was just plodding along like some of the lads I went to school with. I think they are specially designed to fit into council houses, and third hand family saloon cars.

I suppose I was almost designed that way too.

I was certainly trained for it!

But I was a Friday afternoon human being, with an incurable factory fault, that made me keep on thinking more, and faster, than I should have, needing more, getting more. It wasn’t about money, despite your theories on the one true regional religion in Ulster. I don’t think I have ever been too bothered about money.

I might be if there was any risk of risk doing without it for too long. It might come to that soon.

Still, I did without enough when I was a kid, and if it didn’t kill me then, it will hardly kill me now.

It was other things I needed.

Power was one, and respect for all that I am capable of.

Where I came from there wasn’t a regular bus route to any of those things in the normal respectable world.

I have a lot of ability, I need to use it, and would probably be willing to pay serious money to be able to use it.

Most things come easily to me, I can never get the hang of why the same things don’t come so easily to everyone.

Now there will probably never be anymore of that.

Just like that.

Cut off.

So, all I can to show for my life, officially, are a couple of prison sentences, and those aren’t exactly spectacular, just silly stuff.

But in reality, I have done more, achieved more, and know more about what I am doing than most of the people they pay a lot of money and respect to for dithering around, not quite messing it up, and not quite getting it right either.

A lot of them really try their best, a lot of the time, whichever side they are on.

It would surprise you. It surely surprised me when I first saw it. It isn’t for the want of trying, but they just don’t know or understand enough about what they are trying to do.

People like me who do, are only allowed to play as long as they are the bogeyman.

Though I learned how to be very good at being the bogeyman.

I still could have been a lot better at other things, and a lot happier.

I could have been almost the exact kind of different I would have wanted to be to have someone like you.

If I was only let, but I never was and I doubt if me, or anyone like me, ever will be.

That, I am afraid, is the one concession all sides agree will never be made.

Even if it is the only one that might just work.

[requestingaccountdel]

Please delete this…

The real life inspiration for “The Renegade” would lose his lunch if he saw all the petty spite, head games and hypocrasy here.

I loved him, and I always will.

I wouldn’t leave anything I loved in a place like this.

GD