The Betrayal Of Ancient Dysfunction: Finding A Story To Fit

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Everyone has a holy place, a refuge, where their heart is purer, their mind clearer, where they feel closer to God or love or truth or whatever it is they happen to worship. For better or worse my holy place was Steve's bar. And because I found it in my youth, the bar was that much more sacred, its image clouded by that special reverence children accord those places where they feel safe. Others might feel this way about a classroom or playground, a theater or church, a laboratory or library or stadium. Even a home. But none of these places claimed me. We exalt what is at hand. Had I grown up beside a river or an ocean, some natural avenue of self-discovery and escape, I might have mythologized it. Instead I grew up 142 steps from a glorious old American tavern, and that has made all the difference.

I didn't spend every waking minute in the bar. I went into the world, worked and failed, fell in love, played the fool, had my heart broken and my threshold tested. But because of Steve's bar each rite of passage felt linked to the last, and the next, as did each person I met. For the first twenty-five years of my life everyone I knew either sent me to the bar, drove me to the bar, accompanied me to the bar, rescued me from the bar, or was in the bar when I arrived, as if waiting for me since the day I was born.

J.R. Moehringer The Tender Bar.

The urgency of unfinished projects now overwhelmed him. History had a habit of repeating its own mistakes. Only he could stop this. Only he could stand up against the inevitable tide of facism. Of hysterical anti-male anti-family rhetoric which was consuming the everyday, so that Orwell's 1984 was doomed to repeat time and again. He couldn't have been less worthy. Rarely sober, much of his life had disappeared in an internal looking cloud, the fussing and fiddling of the masses not even of interest in a cloaked and muffled world where the cushioned sounds of falling leaves in a vacuum was all that he had ever known. The vast gaps. He didn't know who he was anymore. He hadn't made up a story to suit the moment. He hadn't donned a mask which would reflect well, or create attention, or divert the ill wishers. He hadn't been born again, yet, and as a malformed, splintered, half sprung creature he could not grasp what was happening to him, or why they felt so injured by a past which was so long ago.

I was a boy from the suburbs and I, too, thought I had arrived in paradise when I landed in the Cross, when there were stories of the dead who did not obey, of bouncers who killed people, gangsters who made their toy boys dig their own graves in the National Park south of the city, when terrified children shook in the wet dewy dawns, the smell of eucalyptus all around them, the shape of the grave taking place in front of them. It was hard to separate fact from fiction anymore. The things which had meant so much to him were nothing to anyone else, there were no reference points, no common knowledge. It's interesting to hear about all that stuff, the man said, when the subject of the Rex Hotel and the Bottom's Up bar came up, and damaged souls in adult male bodies looked back and felt sorry for the adolescents they had once been.

He looked back and felt pity, but having never communicated what really happened, and having been pissed as a newt for most of it, he was not so damaged as he might have liked to have been. Instead he had regarded it all as a great adventure - something to be, something to say you had been. Something which marked him as an adventurer, as someone different from the dreary, blank, unresponsive masses of the suburb from which he came. They marched in cardres, like mini-soldiers, in their cold uniforms in the midst of winter. They never ventured to be different, for to be different was to be singled out and ridiculed. And of course caned by the teachers or beaten at home. So he settled behind the conformist mask, shivered in the cold in their neat, grey shorts, and prayed for relief. This couldn't be all there is. Surely he wasn't expected to stand on his own two feet, to defy rescue, to grow up?

But of course that was exactly what life demanded. He had always wanted to be rescued, for someone else to look after him; and in those early yeears the sugar daddies had queued up to perform the role. Now, a man in his 50s, the whole adventure lacked glamour; a man with grey hair telling a story from long ago. Decades after anyone had fancied him, or paid to see him take his clothes off. Damp with excitement. He always insisted there was a bottle of whisky in the hotel room when he arrived, it was part of the deal. And, already drunk from the bar, he would proceed to demolish the whisky so that when the fateful moment came and he was expected to join the client in the bed, he was so sloshed he had no idea what he was doing, and lay there while they worked away at his young flesh. Give as little as possible, get out as soon as you can, always, always, make sure they pay for it. The attitude was not professional.

While he had met professional workers since, perhaps even paid for their services on the rare occasion, that was not his story. And so the deep hurts of a fragmented childhood continued drifting to the surface; and he shrugged, there were lots worse stories than his. He felt like exaggerating, to make more readable the tragic tale of his isolation, the brutality, the bruises, the belts, the horrific beltings he endured on a daily basis. There was no need to exaggerate; and yet he felt like lying on the ground and kicking and screaming, look at me, look at me, look at what you have done, they have done, the world has done, bastards. No one could care less. These crimes against nature were committed long ago. If he was to find salvation, it was not going to be in memory, or even in story telling. It was in reaching out to other human beings, picking up the phone, being a decent friend. The isolation which had haunted his every waking moment, the dysfunction and overwhelming despair which had crippled his every action and so severely distorted his public persona, all of it was about to fade as he became busier than he had ever been. There was much to do, and little time in which to do it.

THE BIGGER STORY:

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/politics/article6726147.ece

Parliament's youngest MP was today chosen by voters to represent Norwich North after support for Labour plunged in the first by-election since the MPs expenses scandal.

The Conservative, Chloë Smith, 27, won a bigger than expected 7,348 majority, overturning Labour's lead of 5,459 in the 2005 general election.

Labour was down 26.7 per cent on the general election, with 14,854 voters deserting the party since 2005. The turnout was 45.8 per cent amid suspicions the Labour vote failed to turn out.

The result will delight the Tories, who had been briefing they expected a majority of less than 4,000 as recently as Tuesday.

Ms Smith, a Deloitte consultant seconded to the Conservatives, will now take the crown of youngest MP from Jo Swinson, the 29-year old Liberal Democrat.

Ms Smith said that this has been victory for "honest politics".

"They have voted for change and sent a message for Gordon Brown," she told the count.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2009/jul/24/norwich-north-byelection-result

David Cameron has inflicted a humiliating byelection defeat on Gordon Brown as the Conservatives beat Labour into second place in Norwich North.

In the first electoral test since the MPs' expenses scandal rocked Westminster, the Tories' Chloe Smith won the Norfolk seat with a majority of 7,348 and, aged just 27, becomes the youngest MP in the Commons.

Labour's defeat, in a seat held comfortably by the party since 1997, is the fifth byelection blow Brown has suffered since he took over at No 10.

If the result was repeated across the country in a general election, the Tories would be swept to power with a Commons majority of 218, analysis by the Press Association news agency showed.

The Tories would have 434 MPs, with Labour on 107, the Liberal Democrats 79, and others 30.

Responding to the news, the prime minister admitted it was a disappointing result but said no party could take a "great deal of cheer" from it because all three of the main parties had lost votes.

http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2009/07/24/2636081.htm?section=business

Federal Opposition Leader Malcolm Turnbull has unveiled the details of a significant policy shift on the Government's emissions trading scheme.

The shadow cabinet held a phone hook-up this afternoon and has agreed to vote for the legislation this year if the Government agrees to a number of amendments.

All this is aimed at avoiding turning the legislation into a trigger for a double dissolution election.

But there is concern in both the Liberal and National parties at the untidiness of a week, which saw one MP calling Malcolm Turnbull arrogant and inexperienced.

As a staunch Catholic and one who once began training for the priesthood, Tony Abbott is obviously someone who believes in conversions.

Last year he championed the cause of three men: Brendan Nelson, Malcolm Turnbull and Peter Costello, all in the one week.

And now he has turned his talents to emissions trading.

In the last two months he has expressed wariness about an emissions trading scheme, calling it an expensive and futile gesture, and saying a straight carbon tax or charge would be more transparent.

But this morning he came on board Mr Turnbull's push for the Coalition to amend and then pass the Government's Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme when it comes to a vote in the Senate, either the first due in August or the second due in November.

Mr Abbot says opposing it would set it up as a double dissolution election trigger and it is Mr Turnbull's assessment that it is a fight the Coalition can not win.