Sophie Papastargiadis, aged 25, and her mother, Rose, aged 64, are in Almeria, Southern Spain. A desert where immigrants work long hours in greenhouses at well over one-hundred degree Celsius heat and in humid conditions to produce tomatoes for stores in Europe. They are not tourist. They have rented a small beach-front property. Rose has re-mortgaged her London house to attend the Gomez clinic in the hope of a cure that has left her unable to walk. Sophie is her legs.
Sophie is the narrator. She has given up studying for an Phd in Anthropology to become her mother’s carer. She is making a study of her mother’s illness
‘History is the dark magician inside us, tearing at our liver.’
Rose’s medical history is the art of clinging to belief and disbelief. Like Carl Sagan’s baloney test about the ‘fire breathing dragon in my garage’, her symptoms are tested by Dr Gomez, but for every physical test, Rose offers an alternative view of why it hasn’t worked. She clings to her illness. Her daughter’s part of the fallout.
A Greek tragedy, like her marriage was, but with hints of matricide and rebellion.
Dr Gomez seems like a charlatan. A purveyor of false beliefs and miracle cures. Yet, he warns Sophie not to begin limping after her mother. He tells her mother’s symptoms are ‘spectral, like a ghost, they come and go. There are no physiological symptoms’.
Rose depends on Sophie. Sophie has become dependent on her mother. An unvirtuous circle in the hellish heat of the Spanish sun in which something has got to give. Read on.
You should never step into the book you’ve read before (or something like that). Sebastian Barry is a terrific writer. This book won the Costa Book of the Year 2008. The Secret Scripture is in many ways the story of Ireland after the Famine, with a centurion Roseanne McNulty providing the handwritten shape of her life played out against the Civil War years in Ireland and the world wars that also came to Sligo.
Roseanne’s testimony of herself is a narrative story of her girlhood and young adult life before she was incarcerated in Sligo’s Lunatic Asylum. The question of why she is there is implicit in her writing. But there is another narrative interbody with it. This comes from the psychiatrist who oversees her care, Dr Grene. The old hospital is closing. He is nearing retirement. In trying to decide about where Rosanne should go, the rights and wrongs of what has been done to her, he also has to map out the shape of his faltering marriage and what to do with his own life. One lies on and relies on the other. Judgement is dependent on knowing what you know and what you don’t know.
‘…it wasn’t so much whether she’d written the truth about herself or told the truth, or believed what she wrote or said was true, or even whether they were true things in themselves. The important thing seemed to me that the person who wrote and spoke was admirable, living and complete…from a psychiatric point of view I had totally failed to ‘help’ her to, to prise open the locked lids of the past…I preferred Roseann’s untruth to Fr Gaunt’s truth, because the former radiated health.’
Father Gaunt haunts Roseanne’s life as priests haunted Ireland. Roseanne was immediately suspect for being female. For priests such as Father Gaunt, even the Virgin Mary would have been suspect unless the Lord Jesus vouched for her. Roseanne was also suspect because she was extraordinarily beautiful. The kind of beauty that led men to temptation. Father Gaunt’s solution to marry a sixteen-year-old girl to a widower three times her age, had the merit of taking her out of circulation. And since she was Protestant destined for Hell, making her a follower not only of her husband, but the one true church and saving her soul.
Roseanne proved to be not as pliable material as Father Gaunt hoped. Her extraordinary story is not of failure, but of high spirits. A different kind of beauty. I can never remember what I wrote the last time, so I’ll reiterate it here, the ending was too chocolate-book for my liking. But this is a great story. Well worth the reading or re-reading. Read on.
Billy Moore, a working-class Liverpudlian, was born into poverty in 1973. He doted on his mum and hated his drunken dad for beating his mum, when he was a child. He too was bullied, but learned to use his fists, gave out some beatings. Joined the group of schoolboy bullies. Matriculated in theft and drug taking and graduated to Liverpool’s Young Offenders, were ironically, he ended up a lifetime later.
There are lots of books out there about hard men and how they became the hardest of the hard. Some such as Jimmy Boyle, A Sense of Freedom, and Paul Ferris, The Wee Man that glorify their journey to becoming who they now are, which is minor celebrities, with a wink and wry nod—I’m not like that now—and are marketed as Redemption stories. Bob Marley’s line, ‘I fought the law and the law won’, but in a smug way, I really won.
I hadn’t heard of Billy Moore. But then, again, I’m a Glaswegian. I can tell you who the local gangsters are and I can even have a laugh and joke with them. We’ve had similar up- bringings. My partner even worked with Paul Ferris’s sister. Perhaps Billy Moore is infamous in Liverpool in the same way. A known face.
‘Prologue’—I’m never sure why books have prologues — I guess it’s setting the tone. Here’s the setup. Billy’s at Cannes International Film Festival. He’s stepping out of a stretch limo. The story of his life onscreen. A Prayer Before Dawn. In the final fight scene, actor Joe Cole, who takes the part of Billy Moore, is in the ring as hundreds of inmates of Klong Phen Prison (the Bangkok Hilton) in Thailand watch him take on the local heavy. Billy sits with the French director as the audience in the cinema cheer.
Fighting for my life begins each Chapter with a Shakespearian quote. Prisoner ‘Moore A7853AP’ is getting released from Wandsworth Prison, where he finished his time after getting deported from the Thailand prison system.
He’s scared for good reason. In the United Kingdom, there are 141 currently dilapidated prisons spread across the three legal systems: England and Wales (122 prisons), Scotland (15 prisons), and Northern Ireland (4 prisons). Additionally, there are historical prisons no longer in use. The total prison population in the UK (England, Wales, Scotland, and Northern Ireland combined) stands at roughly 87,000, making it one of the largest in the Western world.
Experts expect the UK’s prison population to reach almost 110,000 by 2026 due to law changes and a national prison building program. We follow the American model. The United States leads the world in total number of people incarcerated, with over 2 million prisoners. I had to pause when reading about a gangster and murdered in Patrick Radden Keefe (2022) Rogues: True Stories of Grifters, Killers Rebels and Crooks, not because of his crimes. Like Britain, Thailand and the United States, three-quarters are drug or alcohol related and most prisoners have a mental health problem, but because Radden Keefe stated with an increase in post-war affluence and a functioning welfare state crime had decreased and the Dutch were shutting prisons, not opening new ones.
Moore A7853AP was released with a travel pass to Liverpool. No real backup. No real plan. No great surprise our recidivism rate is around seventy percent. If you can’t take care of yourself inside, and have mental health and drug problems, there’s little chance you’ll take care of yourself outside. Tory scum suggested the solution was to privatise services and criminalise the poor, step in step with an increase in prison population with a withdrawal of funding.
Moore A7853AP was soon back to his old life and using. Heroin and crack cocaine filled the hole in his life. He got on the script, the methadone script. But for Moore that’s pedalling the same old lies. He acknowledges rehab in a locked ward wasn’t for everybody. In fact, two-thirds failed. He passed the test and was clean. He even got a job counselling other users.
Moore is good on what brings you down. The 12 steps are never enough. Like is attracted to like. Lust can feel like love. Toxic relationships and then that snakes-and-ladder moment when they take a hit—sure it’ll be OK. Rock bottom is where you find yourself.
Moore’s case became complicated with a cancer diagnosis. He was literally fighting for his life on two fronts. Cancer and his addictive tendencies. He’s on the cover. It’s a story of redemption. We know he wins, but it’s the journey that counts. And it’s one day at a time. Perhaps tomorrow he’ll not win. Read on.
Yellowface wowed me and as a reader (and sometimes writer) I’m not easily wowed. It offers both an insider and outsider account of the publishing industry masquerading as satire. Everyone that had hoped to have something published by the big four publishing companies, get an agent, or somehow get something published online or in print, should read Yellowface.
The setup is simple. Imagine Jesus was hanging about Galilee. Judas comes visiting and notices a manuscript that looks very much like Aramaic notation in Jesus’s copperplate handwriting. He makes off with it, knowing they’ll crucify him for it when he brings it out as his own Biblical book and call it Apocryphal.
‘The night I watch Athena Liu die, we’re celebrating her deal with Netflix.’
That’s a first line to die for. But there’s still another 319 pages to fill. I was discussing book theft or plagiarism with another writing buddy on ABCtales. Mark’s latest book, I told him, sounded remarkably similar to mine. I claimed ownership on the basis I was here first. Since neither of us are likely to sell over ten books in our lifetime, there’s lots of room for saving grace. But we both agreed if the devil came up behind us and told us we’d be an international number 1, New York Times Best Seller and not need to worry about cash again—if we stole our fellow scribbler’s manuscript—we’d jump at the chance. Of course we would. The only question would be if we could use smartphones to sign our contracts with the devil or would we need to use the old-fashioned cloak and dagger and signed in blood with an agreement date of when to collect out soul?
June Hayward knows what it’s like. ‘Every writer I know feels this way about someone else. Writing is such a solitary activity. You have no assurance that what you’re creating has any value, and any indication that you’re behind in the rat race sends you spiraling into the pits of despair. Keep your eyes on your own paper, they say. But that’s hard to do when everyone else’s papers are flapping constantly in your face.’
Narrator, June Hayward (Song) is an unknown writer. Her Yaley friend Athena Liu is on a different stratosphere when they move to New York. ‘It’s so hard for white writers to catch a break these days,’
June’s worldview comes right out of the Trump’s handbook of cultural malapropisms and cultural appropriation of grievances. The Great Replacement theory, also known as the white genocide conspiracy theory, posits that there is a deliberate plot (or conspiracy) to replace white populations in predominantly white countries with non-white immigrants, leading to the extinction of white culture and identity. The theory has its roots in far-right ideologies and has been propagated by various white supremacist groups and individuals.
‘Reading lets us live in someone else’s shoes. Literature builds bridges; it makes our world larger, not smaller.’
No surprise that Trump claimed to not read books while claiming to have written one (The Art of the Deal).
This tongue-in-cheek references are more feelings than fact mapped by Rebecca F.Kuang’s narrator June and feed her belief that she—and not her literary work—is being discriminated again. She is not part of the quota system.
For this belief to be true, she has to suppress another belief, which she also knows to be true. White, middle-class writers have dominated the publishing industry. They have had and continue to have more opportunities to publish their work than writers of colour.
June Hayward changes her name to June Song (a middle name handed down by a then hippy mom). In ‘The Last Front’ she writes outside her cultural niche about an indentured Chinese Labour Battalion in the first world war she can straddle two belief systems. But the centre cannot hold being Song, but not truly Asian. Like Al Jolson blacking up and singing about ‘Alabammy’ and ‘Mammy’.
‘This industry is built on silencing us, stomping us into the ground, and hurling money at white people to produce racist stereotypes of us’ she is told by her Asian nemesis, Candice.
She’s on the wrong side, because she’s no longer able to write, which, as any writer knows, is a different circle of hell. ‘Writing is the closest thing we have to real magic’ is what her life had been about.
Her persona appropriated and aligned with the perspectives of snowflakes or Asian backlash (choose your silo).
A whydunnit combined with old-fashioned morality tales which crawl up inside the publishing industry and readily show its Janus face. A satirical expose of class and racism in the publishing industry and online literary spaces. Read on.
‘I’m not homeless, I’m houseless,’ Fern (Frances McDormand) corrects a young girl she’d tutored after a chance meeting in a superstore, who’d heard she was homeless. In other words, Fern had gone from being one of us to one of them. A person to be feared and derided.
‘I want to work,’ Fern tells a job advisor. She lists all the things she can do and has done. The job advisor remains sceptical. Fern is old.
Cannot afford to stop working, or retire, but cannot afford to pay rent. Nomads are presented in a positive way. It’s the journey that matters and living hand-to-mouth is the price they have to pay. Fern’s sisters says much the same thing when Fern has to ask her for her a loan to get her van out of a garage after it has done too many journeys and broken down.
Who does the shitty and worst paid jobs when everyone else has gone home? People like Fern. Jeff Bezos, one of the richest men in the world, makes use of transient labour. An estimate of one-in-four RV and those who live in cars help make him wealthier. They actively recruit such workers. They are the Joads of modern America, as in John Steinbeck’s classic novel The Grapes of Wrath, without the wrath. Used up and spat out again by middle- class Americans.
There was a real hatred for the Okies and the mobile poor in Depression-era America. States with larger urban areas and high housing costs, such as California, Washington, Oregon, Hawaii, and New York, have been reported to have relatively higher numbers of people living not only in RVs but mostly cars. Their presence, as with the Okies, has been criminalised.
Fern goes to a show and sits in Camper Van or a house on wheels. She makes brumming noises like a kid. The average cost of a new single-wide manufactured home can range from around $50,000 to $100,000 or more, while double-wide homes or larger models can cost upwards of $100,000. The Okies had to sell their mules at a carrion price that had once helped them plough a field. Those living in cars or camper vans are as likely to buy a mule as being able to pay for those creature comforts.
The selling point here is Frances McDormand. Without her helping raise the money to make the film, there is no film. Without her as the main character, there is no film. But with or without McDormand an increasing number of Americans are being criminalised for being poor and homeless. I don’t expect the moron’s moron Trump to win the next election, but if he does, shit flows downhill. There’s an in-film joke in a scene about different-sized containers and taking care of your own shit in cars and RVs. My worry would be closer to home. But my kinship and compassion would increase for people like me. The nomads, immigrants, outcasts and Okies of our modern world, when state-sanctioned hatred grows exponentially into a black hole that swallows us all and benefits only the super wealthy. We’ve already lost the propaganda war to the super-rich like the Koch brother’s shrink-tank tactics and sponsors of Trump’s hatred and lies. We’re already on that road. Nomadland is a feel-good stopping-off point.
Robert Kolker (2020) Hidden Family Road: Inside the Mind of an American Family.
I once asked my cousin, Wullie, how they managed at tea time. He said they ate in shifts. Big ones and wee ones. Six and six. Another cousin, Paul, said when he was growing up (one of the youngest) he believed his mum, my Auntie Cathie, never slept. She was there when he got up and also there when he went to bed. Their dad died when they were young. Mum plugged the gap as typical Catholic working-class mothers did in the baby boom years after the Second World War.
Cheaper by the Dozen, a Twentieth Century Fox 1950 film offered a whimsical look at bringing up white, middle-class children in New Jersey. Based on the adaptation of a book published by the son and daughter of time-and-motion and therefore child-rearing experts, Frank Gilbreth and Lillian Gilbreth, it seemed the template for patriarch and matriarch Don and Mimi Galvin in their pursuit of upward mobility and the American Dream.
The front and back cover of Hidden Valley Road, which was their address, a home built to their specifications, near the Air Force in Colorado—show this graphically in a photograph. Don stands at the top of the staircase in his officer’s uniform. Mimi stands in front of him, dressed to the nines. On each step, all the way down, stands a son in shirt and tie are the ten Galvin boys. Donald, the oldest of the bunch, is holding the latest baby boy, Peter. This means it is 1960. Because Donald was born in 1945. Mima delivered a son every year afterwards. Don joked that he wouldn’t stop until he had a hockey team. And that did happen. In one hockey match, on the airport base, the commentator intoned Galvin to Galvin to Galvin to Galvin. Mimi went against medical advice and had two more children. Two more girls. Twelve children.
The dark side of Cheaper by the Dozen was Frank Gilbreth and Lillian Gilbreth were keen advocates of eugenics, as were the industrialists who employed them. Hitler didn’t invent the idea of the master race. Six of the ten Galvin boys that developed schizophrenia would be deemed in the taxonomy of white supremacy, a sub-category: ‘life unworthy of life’.
Kolker asks what the prognosis would be in the twenty-first century. Research and treatment has flat lined, but the ‘one-size fits all definition’ no longer sits comfortably with a changing awareness of mental health.
‘Each passing year brings more evidence that psychosis exists on a spectrum, with new genetic studies showing overlap between schizophrenia and bipolar disorder. The most recent research suggests that a surprising number of us may be a little bit mentally ill. One meta-analysis, published in 2013, found that 7.2 percent of the general population had experienced hallucinations or delusions, another study in 2015 put the figure at 5.8 percent.’
The Galvin family with the Genain sisters—quadruplets born in the Hungry Thirties that experienced psychotic breaks one after the other in the girls’ twenties—were ideal families, currency, for those debating what schizophrenia was and by implication how it would be cured?
Nature or Nurture? A single illness or a syndrome? DNA samples. Genome testing. Dementia praecox, which we now associate with older people, but in 1903 was renamed schizophrenia. Unlike senility, praecox had the Latin root, precious. Old people have nothing precious to say, but hints of insight and Richard Nash’s ABeautiful Mind spilled over from a different era and worldview.
Mary, the youngest girl in the family (who changed her name to Lindsay) didn’t care about these things. She just wanted to fit in and be normal like everyone else. King Saul ate grass like a cow. Like Joan of Arc, he heard voices, he couldn’t resist acting on. Jung, Freud and Alder clashed not over soul murder but whether formative childhood experiences—‘psychogenic experiences—moulded the brain. Jung argument that not everything was to do with sex and libido, which was a break from his older mentor.
But Mary/Linday’s sexual molestation and rape by her brother Jim, who also molested and raped her other sister and her brother Peter, would suggest that sex and libido do play a large part in brain plasticity. Neither her sister, or herself, however, became schizophrenic. Peter did. Evidence too shows plasticity.
Donald, the oldest brother at the top of the staircase, and the first to exhibit symptoms. He too was sexually abused by a Catholic priest and family friend. Mimi later berated herself for being so naïve as to let Freudy, Father Robert Freudenstein access to her boys, and the pick of the cookie jar. But she was a Jewish convert to her husband’s faith and he, with his louche ways, seemed a fitting audience for their ascent to the top of society.
She wanted everything and everyone to be perfect. Fitted snuggly as a glove into the Freudian theory of the psychogenic mum. Her ‘schizophrenogenic’ input poisoned family life. Later versions such as ‘refrigerator mom’ and ‘dragon mom’ still pop up today to explain autism or most other isms. ‘The double-bind theory’ (still with us) argued prim and proper wives were also taking on the husband’s role and easing them out of family life and leaving them redundant, with no place in society.
With brothers threatening to kill each other. Don, who tried to kill his wife, and never gave up trying to find and harass her, to own her. Brian, the fourth brother born and the best looking, was also a musical prodigy. He could have made it big in the sixties band scene. Instead, he was dead. After murdering his ex-girlfriend, he committed suicide. Freud had a lot to answer for but he didn’t put the trigger.
Mary, when she tied her older brother to a tree, wanted to set him on fire. But even as a girl that hadn’t yet reached puberty, she knew it was wrong. She knew she wouldn’t. She was unaware of the anti-psychiatric movement, including Thomas Szass and R.D. Laing’s book, The Divided Self. The counter-culture movement that those that were locked up in loony bins should be set free and those locking them up imprisoned instead, for their damage to the soul of the patients with their frontal lobotomies, insulin comas, shock treatment and mass medication using tranquillisers as documented in Ervin Goffman’s Asylums. Mary didn’t care about any of that. She just wanted a life away from the madness. But it was too much to ask.
Hidden Valley Road is a battleground over ideas and what it means to be normal. What it means to be insane. How we in society deal with it. Not very well, as the sane ones among us know. The insane one among us quickly finds our default setting of stigma and isolation. It allows me to use that old joke: I’ve a letter from my psychiatrist saying I was to give this to you if you think I’m insane.
Rick Rien (a pseudonym) sent me a copy of his book, Viva Nothing. The title comes from a virtual race. He fancied the name, placed a bet, and won. Usually, he loses. It’s in the title.
Rick’s addiction is gambling. Most of us know someone that is addicted to something. ‘Some of my best mates are drunk drivers,’ is a line I used in one of my longer stories, Ugly Puggly. Smoking and drinking used to be the big-hitters. Drugs (legal, illegal or both) coming on the outside rail. Hash to help you sleep, medicinal and non-medicinal. Gambling and porn. They’re not kept in different pots. Rick reckons he’s had a bash at most of them. He also reckons he’s clinically depressed and suicidal.
Queen Elizabeth II died 2022. Rick’s 200 page journal was near completion. He’d a bit of success with an illustrated children’s book with Queen Elizabeth as the main character. The illustrator that did his graphics had also died that year.
Rick also name checked the writing site he belonged to: ABCtales. I also belong to it. So I was familiar with his backstory. We’d already met on the page and are around the same age. He reminded me of one of my best mates, Laughing Boy. I’ve known him about thirty years. He’s also a painter. The Ragged Trousered Philanthropist tended to think everybody he worked with was an arsehole, and if they’d just get out of the way, he’d finish the job. Laughing Boy has worked offshore, in shipyards, and painting submarines. When he talks about work, I get that sinking feeling.
I’ll also say to Laughing Boy, what are you putting all your money into a machine for? Rick knows the answer to that better than me.
He started like LB on the fruit machines, when he was a boy, winning big. He believes in beginners’ luck, like others believe in poltergeists. Then followed the demonic curve of infestation, oppression and possession.
‘This is the stage where the entity takes control of the individual’s body or mind. Signs of possession can vary widely and may include speaking in strange languages.’
Rick’s mate, and fellow gambler, Kieran, for example, trying to convince him not to go into rehab.
‘You’re fine with a few drinks mate.’
I was a fool and I’d have my personality gouged out of me.
‘They’ll turn your brain to mush mate. I’ve seen it dozens of times.’
Rick had sent his (unpublished) journal to a charity that specialised in helping addicts. Rick lives in London and supports Arsenal. I’m never sure how anybody can afford to live in London. Rick isn’t Paul Merson that had blown around £7 million in bets, nor John Hartson, or Tony Adams. He was living hand-to-mouth and couldn’t afford their charitable fees. The best he could hope for was the cops that pulled him over didn’t breathalyse him or fine him for speeding. He’d been in rehab before. But that was mainly for alcohol.
It had been around the time he’d split up with his wife. He’d lost access to his two daughters. It still enrages him twenty years later.
Laughing Boy experienced a similar split. Rick Rein has a Lady friend. The language is antiquated and harks back to a time that didn’t exist. If it was Laughing Boy, I’d just say to him yer shagging a married woman. She’s got a house and kids and she’s no gonnae leave him for an arsehole like you.
Women fall off pedestals. Usually they’re pushed. Laughing Boy’s partner, who was a Lady, suddenly became a fucking cow. All her foibles were out there. He didn’t want to speak to her again. When I read Rick Rein, I think of my sister’s husband. They never bothered divorcing. He’s in Australia. That’s near enough.
Viva Nothing shows he may think he’d make a great father, but the evidence is on the page. Like my sister’s son, his children are adults. They can make their own mind up.
The guy in rehab asked a simple question. What do you hope to achieve by sending this book to me?
Rein wasn’t sure. ABCtales has just over 20 000 authors, who have published virtual stories, including him and me. My dream around ten years ago was to make a living from writing. I no longer think that way. Rein’s dream was in boldface: the book, the film, the success story.
There’s a meeting with a spiritualist who tells him he’s on the right path. Viva Nothing is a punt. Somebody up there likes me. With over four million books published by Amazon every year, I just hope it’s their algorithm. Read on.
I don’t usually re-read books. I usually come out with trite statements such as life is too short and books are too long for War and Peace. Amazon alone publishes around four million books every year. You do the math. I came back to The Alchemist because of a blog post. It was listed in the top five business posts of all times. Hmmmm?
In the fusion of my confusions I’m not sure I’ve read the Alchemist before? I’m pretty sure I have and was underwhelmed. I could check by looking back at my blog posts. The Alchemist is one of those outlier books that sells around 100 million copies worldwide. As a writer trying to sell my writing that phenomena interests me.
You could accuse me of jealousy. And you’d be right and wrong at the same time. It would be like accusing an overweight, older guy, playing five-a-sides with his mates of being jealous of Messi. We’re on different planets, although we play the same blood sport. Writing a book is the easy part. Selling it, the impossible.
Paulo Coelho offers clues. Learning by doing. He tells his readers in ‘The Foreword’.
‘When The Alchemist was first published thirty years ago in my native Brazil, no one noticed.’
Coelho said he sold one copy. Many of us in the self-publishing industry or those outside the big five publishing houses know how that feels. It feels normal. But if you’ve any ambition, you’ll want to sell two copies. Or double your sales total.
Coelho did exactly that.
‘By the end of the year, it was clear to everyone that The Alchemist wasn’t working. My original publisher decided to cut our losses and cancelled our contract. They wiped their hands of the project and let me take my book with me. I was forty-one and desperate.’
Notice the way a book has become a project. Coelho offers some advice. Not about the project but about his book and life in general.
‘But I never lost faith in the book or even wavered in my vision. Why? Because it was me in there, all of my heart and soul. I was living my own metaphor. A man sets out in a journey dreaming of a beautiful or magical place, in pursuit of some unknown treasure. At the end of his journey the man realizes the entire time. I was following my Personal Legend, and my treasure was my capacity to write. And I wanted to share my treasure with the world.’
As I wrote in The Alchemist, when you want something, the whole universe conspires to help you.’
This makes me think if Paulo Coelho was a camel he’d pat both his backs. If you’re a businessman or astronaut, you like to think you’re the right stuff. If you’re a writer with one book sale, you’re the wrong stuff. Not because of what you’ve written. It’s because you didn’t believe enough in your Personal Legend.
I’ve been trying to talk about myself in capital letters for years, but never quite mastered the skill, in the same way Margaret Thatcher never quite managed to talk with the Royal ‘We’ until the troops returned from the Falklands. The toxic side of not being a person with capital letters is you’re a failure not only at what you do, but what you could have been. You have settled for mediocrity.
Or worse, you have cancer and decide to follow your Personal Legend and take yourself off conventional drugs, because they are toxic—which they are—and because they don’t cure you, which they don’t, because everyone dies someday. For those that die of cancer—their deaths mourned, their failures confirmed…if only they had more belief and stuck to carrot-juice enemas.
In the quest for quests, little wonder Coelho’s fable of magical thinking and toughing it out appeal to the business community when valuing property of filling out tax returns. Turning base people into gold. Try Trump town.
What happened next?
‘Eight months later, an American visiting Brazil picked up a copy of The Alchemist in the local bookstore.
‘…And then one day Bill Clinton was photographed leaving the White House with a copy. Then Madonna raved about the book to Vanity Fair…’
Shit, I couldn’t get Bill Clinton to read my book even when I dressed as an intern and offered to pour coffee and light his cigars. As for Madonna, she no longer reads books but now inhales words without their contaminated meanings. She was on the third prajñā of the day, which can give rise to the subtle knife of 84,000 unconventional wisdoms, so I didn’t want to interrupt her with my base grovelling.
I started writing a review of Paulo Coelho’s The Alchemist and got lost in the desert of my discontent. Read on. This is one road less travelled, I’ll not be returning to any lifetime soon.
There is a low glow in the sky, overcast, as we wait to get in. The queue is orderly, with a smattering of middle-aged black women tending to stick together, coats bright and pretty as flags and talking in low muttering voices. Inside the Western Division of the United States Court House, Los Angeles, the City of Angels, the Honourable Keller Percy leans over and the microphone splutters into life. Without preamble, or a perfunctory greeting he calls the court to order in the $125 million lawsuit against Donald Trump brought by Waulkmill Tempandy. What is at stake is not only the Republican candidates Presidential ambitions, but twelve other similar lawsuits that have also been filed—success here and others would follow—that would leave the accused struggling to stay solvent and out of jail.
Cameras pans in on the face of Waulkmill Tempandy. They won’t show how small she is, petite, chestnut skin, finely wrought features. Simple black jacket and matching pants. She’s dressed for a funeral. She talks fast, too fast, in her eagerness to get it all out she sometimes stutters, which she covers with a high-pitched falsetto laugh and a ‘yeh, know’ added with a sweet smile to soften the exchange.
Tears and it’s a little girl’s voice that comes through very clearly. Call it what you will, hypnosis, which she claims helped her remember in detail textures and tastes, but there’s something in the way she speaks that makes the hairs on the back of your neck hackle.
‘Felt it was a punishment for being pretty, yeh know, with boys always fixing and fussing at you. It got worse when mum split from dad and moved us to the other side of city. With no place to go we ended up in detached house split up into units. We were in the upper one. I was in the fourth grade. Mum sometimes had to keep me off school to watch my younger sisters. The landlord was mean. We sure scared of him, but his wife was even worse. He didn’t fix anything. More cockroaches than you could shake a stick at and we didn’t have a bath or sink. But for us that was normal. We were behind with rent. Behind with food. Behind with most everything. Behind with utilities. Caught stealing electricity. Got a notice of eviction, with all kind of shit added on for damages. Old woman used to offer me shoes to wear, but I didn’t want them old-woman shoes, it was the only freedom I had walking barefoot in the neighbourhood. ’ She laughs, looks at the packed benches. ‘Damages, to a door and mould on the window, yeh know burning down that place couldn’t have damaged it.’
Waulkmill is reminded by her lawyer, Mr Whelan, who smiles at her, why she is here. Shrug of the shoulders and she’s quickly back on track.
‘It was Mum’s boyfriend Mikey that done it. He told me how it was up to me to get the rent and he knew somebody that could arrange things, yeh know. After that, things moved real fast. I met Donald Trump when I was thirteen. There were other girls my age in other rooms with other men. I guess, I get the short straw. He was standing by the bed waiting for me, impatient, wearing a blue silk gown tied at the front. I’ve a nice jacket and dress, stylish, but I can see he’s not interested in those. I peel them off and leave them lying on the floor and slide across the bed, away from him. The sheets are black and mighty fine and I lie naked with my head on the bolster. He’s watching me and I’m not sure what to do, so I tried making conversation. But he doesn’t answer. Drop the robe from his shoulders, bloated white belly, sticks his hand down his muck and motions me across. His cock is an angry, red, stubby, like him, which I’m glad of because it ain’t big enough to hurt me. He motions that I should put it in my mouth. And he grabs the back of my hair and jerks my head up and down as I masturbate him with my mouth. I choke on that angry little thing. And when I stop and look up at him, he slaps me hard across the face, so I know not to do that. He lies on top of me and puts his cock inside me, but after a few jerks he grunts and goes soft.
‘That’s us done,’ he says, rolling off me and going into the bathroom.
I quickly gather my stuff up and leave.
‘Did Mr Trump suggest using a condom?’ asks Mr Whelan.
‘No, he did not.’ Waulkmill stands up straight, honey-coloured eyes blazing. ‘Was too scared to ask.’
odonnellgrunting 