A Mutant's Tale

Posted by Mr. A. M. Utant. on October 7, 2004, at 15:17:05

Language Warning!

Language Warning!

Language Warning!

Adult Situations Warning!

Adult Situations Warning!

Adult Situations Warning!

WARNING WARNING!

WARNING WARNING!

WARNING WARNING!

...and of course, madman warning.

This is not going to come out very well without proper formating and so on.

None the less, I shall post. It begins... now.

.............................................

A dedication? A warning? A disclaimer?
Wednesday, 6 October 2004

To those who read this -

This story is for two kinds of people; those with a mental illness and those who would, for whatever reason, seek to understand them and their condition. In neither case should this be considered any kind of textbook however.

To those who know me -

You do not have to read this story. If you hold this these pages in your hand because I have sent them to you, this is not an indication that I have done so pointedly. If you choose to read them before handing these pages off to someone else, or to the bin, that is your choice.

You do not have to read this story.

And in general-

Everyone has a sad story of love and/or opportunity lost. I am not unique in this regard. This however, is one such story. Again, I stress that this is not my unique realm of experience. That I can, do and feel the need to record such a story is my curse. I seek only to alleviate that blight.

You do not have to read this story.

“Just remember this. All agents defect, and all resisters sell out. That's the sad truth, Bill. And a writer? A writer lives the sad truth like anyone else. The only difference is, he files a report on it.” – The Naked Lunch

Prologue

(The informative mutant).

The following tale is a completely true story. Except for a couple of things. In fact, to speak honestly, you would have to say, there are; two blatant lies, five distinct greys and at least half a dozen instances where accuracy has been waived in the interests of telling an entertaining story.

In the last case, this waiving does not in fact alter the course of the story in any way, it merely adds, as noted, to the entertainment value.

However, if you like to keep your truths simple, and your facts black and white, you will be forgiven for saying therefore, that there are in fact, no less than thirteen lies in this story.

I really do not give a rats.

If you recognise yourself in some part in this story, and you are uncomfortable with my reporting of your role therein, I invite you to take one of two options. You may use one of the, “lie” allowances allotted above, on your part and claim that my description of you and your part in my tale is one of them, or you may simply mutter, “nutbag” to yourself and dismiss me as the madman that I am.

That grunting sound you can hear is me trying hard to give a shit.

There is no set limit to the number of times the second option can be used.

I had not intended to write what I have. I had cause to start to pen a few pages explaining what medications I have used, why I was prescribed them, how I perceived their effectiveness, (or lack of) and where this meant I was in my life.

It did not transpire quite so simply. You don’t take a life and fix it with one simple thing, neither do you take a life and break it with one simple thing. My, “couple of pages”, an attempt to save myself some breath, became what is now before you over a week or more of very little sleep and quite a deal of time travelling.

“I’m nearly finished,” I would say blearily to my brother.

“You keep saying that,” he would invariably reply.

This is not a complete recounting of my experiences by any measure. It was never intended to be. It does not flow and make sense in any conventional style. Again, this was neither planned nor implemented by me in any deliberate manner.

I had always wanted to write something of my life. I did not know that it was actually happening until I was many pages and twenty four hours into my first session of writing this account. I had simply wanted to warn anyone, mentally ill or not, of the dangers of not asking for, or seeking help, before it’s too late.

“Too late,” is such a relative categorization isn’t it? When do things go, “too far,” when is the line of no return crossed?

When do you look at your fuel tank and realise it makes just as much sense to fly on over the ocean and hope that a new land is closer in front of you than the one you left behind because you most certainly do not have enough fuel to turn around and make it… “home?”

Who says landing in the water is such a bad thing anyway? Won’t the dolphins save you?

These are all relative questions. My own answers, or lack of them, are not your answers, neither are they a reason to stop looking. That is if you need to look. Not everyone does and many who don’t feel the need to look, find it difficult to understand how and why some do.

If I achieve one thing with my futile rambling, and if that one thing is that someone who reads this, stops just before, (or preferably, miles before) their own personal, “Point Of No Return,” then I will have at least achieved one thing in my life that I can present before God on Judgment Day and ask if that is mitigation enough for my erroneous existence.

“Everyone gets everything he wants. I wanted a mission, and for my sins, they gave me one.”

-The Assassin, Captain Willard. Apocalypse Now. (A tale of one man who went, “too far.”)

This story is rated <R> for adult situations, adult themes, sexual references, drug references and the numerous times I say, “fuck.”

“To whom it may concern,”
(or conversely)
“To no one in particular,”

“It could be that your life serves no other purpose than as a warning to others.”

From the mind of the mutant – A cautionary tale.

In February, 1990, after a long and secret battle with manic depression, I was arrested and imprisoned for arson, wilful destruction and armed robbery. The armed robbery was later reduced to, “assault with actual violence.” Why this is I, am not sure I was ever told. I could have been, I do not recall. Perhaps it had something to do with my complete and naïve cooperation. I am not sure. It does in fact have a lot to do with the fact that the truth of the matter was not known.

I say secret battle not because I actively hid the condition from others, but from myself. This was not a conscious attempt to delude myself. It simply didn’t occur to me that everyone else’s life wasn’t experienced in a similar fashion, a similar perception, to mine. This is a common symptom of mental illnesses in general and manic depression, or bipolar disorder in particular. So I am told.

I say long battle because from an early age, it was suspected that I had some form of “maladjustment” and was taken to a child psychologist as young as seven years old. I remember only one occasion, I am however informed there were several. I do not dispute this, I simply don’t recall. Regardless, no treatment was administered that I remember and no diagnosis pronounced.

The one occasion I do remember, I recall feeling I was, “under the microscope” and realising even then that I wasn’t quite right, I was on my very best behaviour for the psychologist. I got away with it apparently. I knew I was at the very least, slightly, “skew-if” and I didn’t want this to be discovered.

Always fearing the punishment. Again, this was subconscious and it is only upon reflection with an…I was going to say, “adult’s” mind…let us instead say only upon reflection with years of experience, can I look back and see how and perhaps why I thought and acted as I did.

My personal experience with manic depression was concerned mostly with mania until my arrest. After my arrest and subsequent incarceration, I also began to experience the depression component of the disease. This is perhaps not surprising. Some people only suffer the mania component and some experience only the depression. Apparently it is more usual however, for there to be a mixture, a see-sawing if you will, between the two.

No one knows exactly why people suffer from such malaises. Is it genetic? Is it conditioning? A result of what happens to you? The ages old “nature versus nurture” debate. I have no answers from my own experience living with the disease.

My father died when I was four and I was brought up by a single parent with problems of her own. Not the least of which was being widowed with a four and a two year old, plus being pregnant with her third. It is admirable that she kept food in our bellies and clothes on our backs, but one parent is still only one parent.

I am not going to cast stones here. Needless to say that I, as many others, would have chosen a different path into life than the one I actually walked, were I given a chance. My joke with myself is that I wish my soul hadn’t answered the, “renovator’s delight” ad when seeking a body to inhabit this time around. Such is life. Better luck next time?

This mania manifested itself in such a truly wonderful feeling of well being regardless of circumstance. Everything was cool, everything was exciting. People, although somehow alien, were interesting and talking to people was a source of endless intrigue and adventure. I moved in many circles and had a wide range of acquaintances if not actual friends.

I won several first places in Eisteddfods. A duologue called, “The Muddletown Express” was my first win. I was about fourteen, though I wasn’t in it to compete as such and it didn’t really hit home that I was actually good at it until I glued my gold medal and a picture I cut out of the paper of myself and my thespian cohort that told of our win, into a photo album.

I ended up being in many stage productions over the years. I found the experience of being on stage rewarding and fulfilling. I had actually gone to a drama school for about a year when I was about ten. Every Saturday morning on a train to North Sydney.

That was just one of the, “special abilities” afforded me by the mania. I took it for granted. It wasn’t just that though, it came out in many ways. I would see something as simple as a wooden balcony and marvel at the process that led from drawing board, to material gathering to actual construction. That somehow seemed almost magical and made me feel so warm and happy that people would do such a thing!

Sometimes traffic lights made me happy. Just the colours. I didn’t mind when the lights were red because it was different to green.

Yes, that’s right. It’s a mental illness and that kind of thought process happens to you all the time, whether you want these thoughts to occur to you or not. It occurs to you and uses up your thinking room. Not so much now though, and truly do I miss those days of utter naivety, of bliss for no reason at all except that I was alive and the world existed and I was in it. That was reason enough to smile and be elated. Not just to be happy, but ecstatic.

This might sound like an enviable situation, yes? Well, it would be if everyone thought that way. Nothing would get done though. Everyone would sit around and practice their, “oohs,” and, “ahhs,” while standing naked in the rain watching the lightning burst overhead, or lying on the grass watching the clouds make cool shapes.

Mind you, people wouldn’t be doing a lot of other stuff too…like lying, hurting each other with cowardice and stupidity and other such ridiculous behaviour that people somehow just seem to accept is a part of being human. It doesn’t have to be that way you know… things can be cool. You just have to be insane…apparently.

How does that work? That someone so happy to be here becomes an outcast? Is named, “defective”? How is that, in fact, sanity?

These questions started to occur to me as my teenage years wore on. The actual symptoms and effects and ins and outs of my life through those years would take many pages to fill and ultimately mean something only to me. Everyone has regrets, everyone has choices that they wish they could take back.

It’s just that I wasn’t even given a chance to make honest mistakes, or at least the kind of mistakes on the kind of level that means I could find empathy with the majority of other people around me.

“What drugs are you on?” was, (and remains) a common question. I was in fact, on none, although experimentation later in life has since revealed to me how I could have been perceived as being on some illicit substance at that stage. Psychosis is probably psychosis, regardless of it’s source. If you are cut with a knife, you bleed. If you are stabbed with a fork, you bleed. Different wound, same effect.

I did in fact become an outcast. Smart enough to cover it up, charismatic enough to move on to new groups when people came close enough to see that the differences were so blindingly obvious that even I could not smooth them over in my own mind.

I desperately tried to cling to my, “natural” state of happiness. I started to go out a lot. There were many weeks when I would go out three or four nights in a row. At first with other people, but more and more, by myself as I found it harder to reconcile the differences I felt between myself and those around me.

Manic depression + The psychosis from years of genuinely believing the world was in a fact a super cool place + Alcohol + little sleep over an extended time = _____?

The math is not that hard. I was a wretch. I was painfully thin. I have a photo of myself standing shirtless beside one of my motorbikes. I would have been eighteen or nineteen. I was like a grasshopper…I seriously looked like an insect. Hideous to the eye.

I only relatively recently discovered that photo. I simply had no idea I was in that shape. The mania and psychosis hid my true form from myself. I had no idea. I don’t remember ever looking in the mirror and making excuses. Not once did I say something like, “Well I sure am skinny but I feel healthy!” It’s called mental illness. I did not see.
The last year or so before I was arrested are kind of a blur. Drinking, going out, losing my job and repeatedly crashing and destroying several motorbikes. This I genuinely do not comprehend. I had two, maybe as many as three or even four major crashes, any one of which could, nay should have killed me.

I say should for a number of reasons…should because I know of one guy who had one bad accident and died and perhaps, should, because I genuinely was meant to die then and my continued pointless meandering through life is testimony to this. It’s not right in a way.

How the hell did I bounce off all that stuff and live? How did I ride a bike into trees and a barbed wire fence at 100+ km/hr and live? Not once…I did this multiple times. I bounced off a Celica, flew through the air, crashed into a telephone pole and slid to the footpath, unconscious…

The doctors said I would likely never move my left arm again, yet it healed against all medical possibility. I just didn’t hear them say it. I didn’t deliberately say, “No, you are wrong,” I just chose not to acknowledge their opinion.

I saw a neurologist in Wickham St, Brisbane. He stuck electrodes in me and clicked his tongue at me, preaching the dangers of motorbikes.

HELLO!? Can’t move my arm, thanks for the heads up.

There is a part of me now that feels that my life since then is just this receding vibration, and that I did indeed die back then, that I am sort of just slowly leaving this world like an echo dying away in a canyon and no one will “reyell” me.

Like this is all just one long dream and I am about to wake up in hospital in 1989, with my arm torn off and bleeding to death, as if it wasn’t nerve damage, but that I did in fact lose my arm. It is actually a far more likely outcome that the relative “scott free” result that purports to be reality.

People talk about “testing your mortality”. This I did not do intentionally. I did not consciously decide to run into things and fall off my bike at high speed to see if I would die. It simply never entered my head.

Looking back now it’s weird, I would buy a motorbike, crash, heal, buy another motorbike and repeat. I have crashed 66% of all the bikes I have owned. I did not have a death wish. I was not suicidal. It’s called mental illness. I did not know.

I was briefly in the Army Reserve. Oddly, in this time of trouble, it was the one thing I was good at. I got Top Shot of my recruit course and led my fellow recruits on a successful exercise when we were left to our own devices, with no guidance from any training staff. I knew of course what they, (the training staff) were doing. It was obvious they wanted to abandon us to ourselves and see who took over. Simple. I did.

One recruit put up a fight, incomprehensibly, not to claim leadership for himself, but to simply ask me why I should be leader. I hit him in the stomach with the butt of my rifle. It seemed the right thing to do at the time. He shut up and I lead the recruits to success.

At some stage of the exercise, one of the other recruits appeared behind me and fell into the role of second in command. I didn’t ask him or invite him to but that was completely irrelevant. He could and he did. It worked.

Later, on the bush part of the recruit course, I shared a hootchie with him and he was the very soul of discretion when the cute blonde recruit came down to visit me. Thanks man, but the Corporal came by and sent her on her way.

It was honest and straight forward. Contrived perhaps, but understandable. I got along very well with the officers, both commissioned and non and was recommended to “get my courses up” and become a Corporal after being in for less that a year. (I overstate my perceived ability here because the Regiment was short of Corporals anyway).

My training Lieutenant wrote me a letter of recommendation should I decide to join the regular Army. It doubled as a letter of invitation to join his troop as a signaller. Thank you, Sir. (May I have another?)

It was in fact during this time that I injured my arm and could not move it. I attended Exercise Kangaroo ’89 as a signaller and concealed the fact that I couldn’t move my left arm. It’s not as hard as you think.

When marching or moving about, it is tradition to hold anything you are carrying in your left hand, and when doing so, you do not swing your left arm. It leaves your right arm free for saluting. It’s not that hard, I just always made sure I was carrying something. (My hand worked, but my shoulder was dead).

I climbed some pretty steep slopes carrying, and to set up radio equipment during that exercise. I was in fact, rather chuffed with myself for achieving that feat with one arm.

I came unstuck at the end of the exercise however. I had earlier attended AASAM 89 (Australian Army Skill at Arms Meet), a competition held as a test of firearms skill. I had received an award and was to be presented with it, in front of the Regiment at the end of Kangaroo 89.

I did not know this and was not prepared. I had to march out in front of the whole Regiment without anything to carry and without swinging my left arm. The first Tuesday night after we returned from exercise, one of the Corporals jumped on me and demanded an explanation.

I tendered my resignation letter…and withdrew my application from the regular Army, which was at the, “come and see us, if you have two arms, two legs and one head, you’re in,” stage. I was a shoe in, oh except for the two arms bit.

That probably would have saved me you know. I had lit the first couple of fires by that stage, but I probably could have both gotten away with them and gotten over them in my own mind.

I had poured over war books (fiction and non) growing up. I had been in the Boy Scouts and Air Cadets then of course the Reserves. The only thing that made sense to me was defending what you thought was right, and being willing to risk your life for that. It was the only thing that really stuck. Ever. It was so honest, so simple, and my brief contact with it was the only real success I feel I have ever had.

Kind of screwed that up though didn’t I?

It remains my second biggest regret, and after that, I was gone. I was lost down my path of utter denial. The world is cool, the world is shit. The world is cool, the world is shit.

My psychosis said there was nothing to worry about yet the increasing invasion of reality clashed daily with it. I quite literally went insane. Screaming into my own mind without knowing why. Still I covered it up, though not too well anymore and the distances grew.

Several times I was physically attacked by people who perceived me as some kind of threat. I did not intentionally provoke them and certainly did not strike them first. They probably found it odd to hit me in the face and have me stand there and look at them perturbed, trying to work out what had led to someone smashing me in the head for no reason other than I was trying to engage them in some kind of fun.

I knew what it was to be hit and for some reason I pitied them, and didn’t want to inflict that on them, even if they did it to me. It’s not like I ran away or anything, I just stood there and looked at them, confused. I genuinely did not understand what I had done wrong. I have since thought about tracking them down and killing them.

Healthier perhaps to have just lashed out at them at the time, instead of thinking about it, instead of finding reasons to be anything except violent. That good old ball of anger in your stomach can do wonders for your rational thought processes. Not.

Odd how your memory plays tricks with you. You see in my mind, they didn’t even hurt me. They hit me, (about three or four times this happened) hard in the head and I don’t even remember my head rocking back, as if I was shielded, as if in my utter insanity, yet innocence, I was protected.

Each time, they looked at me after hitting me with…incredulity? Each time they looked at me as if they knew that something had stopped them hurting me. I felt it, but no more than a slap. One laughed a quiet nervous laugh as I looked back at him and continued speaking as if he had not struck me.

The first, “ha,” was one of victory, but the second and third were accompanied by the knowledge that he had just slammed me hard in the face and I simply paused, and then carried on the same train of thought. Something about asking him to not flick soap at me.
He did the classic, “not break eye contact with the madman as you slowly back away from him,” move. They say he was a boxer. I am not bald, I am not two dimensional, but I do say, “Doh!” a lot.

Only once did I feel anything serious, one of them hit me in the throat. That crippled me severely for half an hour. I must remember that, if I do end up tracking them down, I best keep my chin down. Thought I doubt my, “shield of innocence” will endure should I deliberately set out to end them. Luckily, though innocence passes, I retain other faculties.

I just wish I wasn’t honour bound to seek vengeance, (if it does eventuate) in hand to hand. I can’t justify a 300 yard retaliation, (you don’t always hit a bullseye over iron sights at 300 yards, but my grouping was never larger than a human torso at that range) even though that would afford more opportunities to decamp unnoticed.

“Escape is not his plan. I must face him alone,”

-Darth Vader. A New Hope.

I didn’t start it. Isn’t that the excuse for using the best brains on the planet to come up with a method of vaporising a city, exterminating 60,000 civilians and horribly burning untold others in single flash of atomic retribution? Yeah, Hitler was evil. Oh wait a second, who dropped the first atomic bomb on human beings?

“You’re black.”

-The Pot.

I wonder what they saw in me, to attack me so. They obviously felt some sort of fear or disgust, some sort of repulsion or danger. I wonder what people see when they look at me. It is not what I see when I look at myself, this much I know for fact.

Perhaps all they see is the crippled mind, the, “incorrect” thought processes and not in fact my spirit. That is not their fault I suppose. I have taken that into consideration. I am probably just more annoying than I care to admit.

The first fire was genuine curiosity. I was very drunk and needed to relieve myself (I almost typed “relive” myself. How very Freudian of me). I stepped down an alley in town, actually quite near the rear of the shops in which my work as a jeweller was located.

I relieved myself (I did type relive that time). I saw one of the, (then new) council wheelie bins and for some reason I wondered to myself, do they make them out of fireproof material?

I held my lighter to it. Down low. Indecently, a cigarette lighter is all you need to set a fire. The once or twice I actually used improvised accelerants, the fire didn’t take. Better to choose a good low spot and work on that for a while. If you can bust up the wood a little, that helps too. Plus you have to really want it to burn.
It burnt. It occurred to me that not making wheelie bins out of a fire proof material was stupid.

Ironic. It wouldn’t have mattered what they were made of if I had never been born.

After it was a cheery little blaze in the back alley I pushed it against a wooden door.

You see, my twisted curiosity now wanted to know if a weathered wooden door in the alley would provide a rough enough surface for the flames from the wheelie bin to, “grab hold of”.

It burnt. I cannot honestly say how many cats have truly succumbed to curiosity. However, as the wooden door was the only barrier between my flames and a storeroom full of glue and paint for a carpet warehouse, I can assure you that curiosity definitely ended the first incarnation of Ron Maher’s floor covering business.

I had seen enough TV shows to know what to do next. I walked slowly away from the fire and stood over the other side of the road and mingled with the people leaving the nightclub nearby as they observed the flames beginning to leap from the warehouse.

Not one fireman or policeman came and looked into the crowd. I guess they don’t watch the same TV shows as I do. I stood there like the rules say and waited to be spotted by the hero cop or hero fireman who would later see me at another fire and put two and two together.

Psychiatrists, (multiple) always ask the same thing at this point upon telling them this story. It was funny at first, and, I guess, to be expected but it actually became quite depressing as I realised that psychiatrists don’t know any better of the human condition than anyone else. They just fill in a perceived gap that stops peoples’ fear of the unknown. As if the shrinks somehow stand between the general public and the mad people. We are already among you, Mulder…

They (the shrinks) always wanted to know if I became sexually aroused. Like I said, this was funny at first but partially worried me that I had gotten it wrong. Oh dear, I was meant to masturbate after lighting a fire? Why, is that what you would do if you lit such an inferno? I thought at the time that was the missing link, that was why I did it, seeking a sexual rush.

It was quite the opposite if the truth be known. It started partly because going out, getting drunk and screwing some random female almost completely lost it’s attraction. I don’t knock anyone who genuinely can go out and fuck for fun, but looking back I was actually looking for a connection, not a quick drunken release of bodily fluids. (Sometimes quicker than others, sorry about that girls.)

So that’s where it started. Until then, I and my misfiring brain had hurt no one except myself. Well that’s a lie actually. I had a few relationships go belly up in rather nasty fashion though my insanity allowed me, at the time, to walk away smiling. Sometimes quite callously. Including the most important one of all. The weight of karma sags heavily upon me now though and I feel that some hurts I am yet to repay.

Sexual excitement? Do people really get turned on by arson? (Quite the homonym there... Homonym? Arson?). I suppose people get turned on by all kinds of things, but for me, arson was not, and is not one of them. I racked my brain for years trying to work out why I did it.

Oh multiple minor accruable subconscious reasons abound, but I, like everyone, like to be able to wrap things up neatly in a half hour or one hour package of goodness. Isn’t that how easily all of our problems can be solved?

It became about the secret. The secret of fire, not the fire itself. I enjoy a good fire as much as anyone else, (note from subconscious: stop stating the bloody obvious) but probably not more than anyone else who likes to stare into a campfire on the beach for hours.

It’s hypnotic and alive, and big ones, I mean really big ones are even more so. Especially when you set fire to the science block at the high school and the chemical storage room goes up. Now that was just pretty.

The secret. In a time when everything in my mind was changing and hurting me, and I couldn’t get a grasp on anything, I had one constant; the secret of fire. It was mine, no one knew and no one could take it away from me.

Each morning after lighting a fire I would wake up, (there were almost 30 fires in total over approximately a year, only five good ones though) and it was as if my best friend had done it and I couldn’t possibly get him into trouble.

It was as if he had come home and told me every aspect of lighting the fire in such graphic detail, that it was like I had actually gone and lit the fire myself.

Recently, I fantasised that I was an empath, and this is truly what happened. I imagined that someone or something evil had lit the fires but it or they discovered that I was an, “open mind,” and they channelled the memory of the fires into me, ridding themselves of guilt.

I thought maybe, that as I slept, or was passed out drunk somewhere, they established the link and fed it to me live sometimes. I wondered if there were positive aspects to this, that I might voluntarily be able to absorb things from people’s minds that they didn’t want or couldn’t handle, that I was capable of dealing with or extinguishing.

Maybe that’s why I have been through all this? I thought. Maybe that’s why I survived? I have spoken to many women who have an experience or several from their childhoods that they would rather be without. Perhaps I just constructed a fantasy where I could be a saviour instead of a devil?

I think the real message here is that things like drugs and alcohol leave you open to things like this real or imagined.

I didn’t keep newspaper clippings or anything. I knew better than to keep any evidence. I mean how many times would the detective have walked into the abductor’s flat and just walked out again if not for the wall plastered with pictures of the missing super model with all the eyes painted black or something?

I was insane not stupid.

I kept it a really good secret for a long time. I didn’t enjoy the actual fact of lighting the fires as such and never did I plan it.

I considered at one stage getting a couple of 375ml spirit bottles and filling them with petrol or something, you know, stash them in my socks when I went out so later, when I was completely sozzled, I could simply pour and apply flame. Kind of like.. here’s one I prepared earlier…

I never did though. I used to like to dance and I didn’t think that 750ml of fuel in my socks would be very conducive to moving on the dance floor. Anyway, I never actually decided before going out that I would, “make another secret” that night.

Often I would sit in the nightclub, between dances and just drink and wonder if I was going to though. Sometimes I prayed that I would pick up so that I would have an excuse not to light one. Occasionally I did.

This one time…at band camp…errr. This one time, I was so drunk at about ten to three, (am) that I staggered up to the bar and asked for five lighters. (Sometimes when you hold a lighter on for a long time, it heats up the metal so hot that it melts the plastic of the lighter and the whole metal assembly is propelled off the lighter with a whoosh of flame. It’s the downside of not using accelerants. It pays to have backups kids).

There had been quite a few fires by this time. They all happened at about the same time. My window of opportunity extended from anytime between 2am and sunup. Sometimes I would wander off and fall asleep somewhere and only just wake up in time to remember what I had set out to do and get in a quickie before sunrise. Other times I got drunker faster, or the music was crap, or there weren’t many other people out.

So there I was, 3am, drunk, buying five lighters in a night club, in a town where someone is wandering around lighting fires in the wee hours of the morning. Come on people, it’s not hard. She paused ever so momentarily, but shrugged and sold me my incendiaries anyway.

Where was the girlfriend of that hero fire fighter who saw me at the first fire, waiting beside me at the bar and sees me doing this but thinks nothing more of it at the time?

TV Switch on.

A few days later, she is in the shower while her boyfriend is shaving beside her. (It’s a PG show, on at 8.30 so you don’t see anything, sorry).

He is looking seriously into the mirror as he remarks how they have just spent two days painstakingly combing through the ashes of the latest arson attack. He didn’t need to help but he is dedicated.

He tells her how they have catalogued every last piece of evidence they found, including the metal remains of three cigarette lighters. She stops showering and leans out of the cubicle as she remembers my multiple lighter purchases. She tells him. They look at each other for a moment and their eyes open up wide. (The shower curtain clings to her full pert breasts and it seems she likes cold showers).

She is an amateur detective and they rush down to the evidence room. Sure enough, they cross reference the lighter serial numbers with a purchase order that matches a batch of lighters sold to the nightclub that I bought all my lighters from. She remembers my face and they go and see a police sketch artist.

The artist is good, damn good and she has a great memory. (As she is leaning down to indicate something on the sketch, we get a great cleavage shot). The hero fireman looks at the sketch. Leaping fire hoses! He knows that face, but from where?

Later that night he is tossing and turning. He can’t remember where he saw me and he is tormented by my face. He is a dedicated man and he can’t sleep. His girlfriend gives him a massage…in a lacy pink satin nightie that… I said it’s PG.

He can’t remember seeing me at the first fire, but they are onto me… fade into a dream sequence where my ethereal face, horned now with a little goatee, dances around him as he is in an inferno, his hose goes limp, (!) and he is trapped in the fire with no water as I laugh at him maniacally.

TV Switch off.

At first there was some…reward of a kind, in a perverse, covert way, but eventually I lost even that. It started becoming someone or something else’s choice. To light the fires I mean. I started to dread walking out of the nightclub at 3am.

Often, as I walked out of the light of the nightclub, and into the darkness, I could feel a weight descend on me and all my free will would be slowly forced down into my shoes, into my feet which is where I resisted….a feeble attempt you might agree. I tried to be as heavy as lead, to drag my whole body down so it couldn’t be used by… “it”.

In effect, all I did was allow the “whatever” the luxury of an excuse within itself to walk slowly, check out the situation and look for a target of opportunity. These were many and varied, anywhere I could get out of line of sight, I would strike. Cars, wheelie bins, (the nostalgic favourite) school buildings, TAFE buildings, anything.

One fire was pointed and deliberate. It alone stands in my memory in higher horror than all the others. I burned the Central School library. I broke in first and had a look around, seeking stationery probably. I saw all the drawings on the wall done by the children. Contemptibly, as the building burned, I pictured the sad and distraught faces of the children when they came in the next day to see the library, and all their proud work, destroyed by my evil.

I was chased twice. Once by police and once by a taxi driver, both times on foot and both times I escaped. I do not know how. I headed for alleys and backstreets. I suppose I did know them, after all I had stalked them for long enough seeking unguarded flammables.

My really big success, the last fire, the Town Hall, I had to do some undercover work for. You see I knew how to get into the place, (I had been in many productions there remember) but the place I had to climb, (with one arm) was in plain view of the city taxi rank and there were four cabs there. Two from each of the local companies.

I used a phone box in plain sight of them, (best place to hide is in plain sight, aren’t I the clever one?) and called for a pickup for eight people from the other side of town. Once one company had despatched their two cabs, I repeated the process and rid myself of two more would be witnesses.

I sent them to the same place. I was very drunk you understand, and the furthest place I could picture in my mind and still have it as a believable location for myself to refer to, (all important to convince yourself of a lie before trying it on others) was, “the first house on the right after you turn into Teddington Weir Road”.

So as I clambered in to do incendiary naughtiness to the Town Hall, somewhere out on Teddington Weir Road there were four cabbies and an irate, “first on the right” dude wondering what was going on. Sorry about that fellas. If only that were the worst peril I had placed a taxi driver in.

In the Town Hall I found renovations. Paint, thinners, sheets of plastic….

…

The demon in me made Homer Simpson’s drooling sound of utter wanton pleasure.

You know the one.

I seem to remember the clock striking thirteen as the flames clawed their way up into the bell tower. I was already walking away by then. I didn’t care. The deed was done, the demon had released me and I walked slowly home. You see, as fire engines race past you on their way to extinguish the destruction you called into being, it doesn’t pay to look around nervously and flee. Deadset makes you a suspect that does.

No, instead, pause, act as if you are drunk and trying to focus on the big red noisy thing as it hurtles past you, (or not act as the case may be) and then, after it’s gone, slowly amble on your way. Also, you don’t know if a police car was off on the other side of town and is just about to appear out of the night on it’s way to your pyre and spot you and ask what you are doing. Just another drunk, wandering the night.

As I wandered away from the Town Hall, and the smoke quite dramatically, (and inexplicably) came down and rolled slowly along the street behind me, I quietly drifted past a couple of garbagemen about to set out on their rounds from the council vehicle yard.

“Looks like there’s a fog gathering,” I heard one of them say to the other of my silent billowing partner as I crept off into the night. That’s actually quite spooky thinking back now. Must have been one of those inversions trapping warm air under cold, forcing it down? I don’t know. I liked Armageddon but I am no meteorologist.

TV Switch On.

As the fire engine screams past me, the hero fire fighter, (hanging out of the side of the truck, very dangerously so he can be first out and at it) spots me and recognises me. He leaps off the fire truck and rolls neatly to a stop, coming to a crouching position on the footpath.

I sense something is wrong and I run.

He coils up the hose he has, “bandoliered” over his shoulder and loops it into a crude lasso. He throws it at me and brings me down. He runs over, trusses me up, throws me over his shoulder and delivers me to the cops who all cheer and say, “hurrah.”

The closing scene where his girlfriend, (white teddy, one shoulder strap off already) says a lot of stuff that means, “reward,” pushes the boundaries of the time slot.

Fade to a flashback as the hero trusses me up. The camera is inside the cloud of smoke. It’s a handheld shot and obviously so. The camera moves along at the speed of the cloud as it slowly wafts past me as I am being lifted up by the fireman.

As the screen fades to credits, soft maniacal laughter, identical to the sound the fire fighter perceived in his nightmare is heard. The evil chortle moves slightly left and right if you have a stereo TV.

TV Switch Off.

I invited the secret of fire into myself and for that I am to blame, though in the end, it became master. Does that sound a tad too dramatic? Fuck off. You didn’t live it. It was dramatic enough.

I told three people that I can remember. Eventually that is. Whether one of these people told the police what I was doing or not, I do not know. More likely one of them told someone else who then told the police. There was a $26,000 reward after all. One group put up $25,000 and someone else put up $1000.

I literally had a price on my head.

About a week later, came my last night of freedom. That’s if you can call the head I was trapped in, freedom.

I had $100 in my pocket and I went out. I was drinking Southern Comfort. I got destroyed. The next day, as the cops were counting out my money to put my wallet into, “prisoners property,” there was $15 left in it. I remember buying a few drinks for someone else, but most of that I drank myself. More? Less than you can drink? It was enough for me.

I staggered away from the nightclub. No fire? Read on.

I got home and started talking to my housemate. Although, “talking,” is an extremely generous way of describing the rubbish I blathered on with. I was lost, gone, in a world of fantasy. Some say that Dungeons and Dragons contributed at the least to my insanity.

If you don’t have white sugar, you can use brown on your cereal, either way, you are going to eat. If it wasn’t sword and sorcery flashing through my mind, it would have been something else. It was the actual fact that I was insane that meant that I was insane. Cake is cake no matter what the decorations are.

My fires had failed me, whatever their origin or whatever it was that made me keep doing it. I needed more. I needed to kill. Too many people knew about the fires, it was no longer my secret. As for the thrill of the fires? What little there was, was gone.

Gone because, in my mind, anyway, I had despatched the taxis too easily, and climbed into the Town Hall over the road from the Police Station and calmly lit a fire and then walked out of the front doors of the Town Hall into the well lit street before wandering off, followed only by my guilty, smoky conscience.

Too easy. That’s something I sobbed to the Police when I first confessed. It was all too easy.

Stage two in my descent. I brought my housemate to tears by thrusting the urn that contained his father’s ashes in them into his hands and screaming at him, “THERE’S YOUR FAMILY! THERE’S YOUR FAMILY!”. Tasteful. Sorry about that mate. Maybe I wanted to hurt him for having a father. Well longer than I did anyway.

Stage three, it’s almost endgame here. I collect the semi automatic .22 sawn off rifle that’s in the house and fill my pockets full of ammo. I have over a hundred rounds on me. Over.

I take my, “combat” knife that I bought for taking on Reserve bivouacs and thrust it down my jeans. I take a large denim jacket and put it on, testing it for size, not size on me, size as far as concealing a sawn off rifle. It works a treat. Great. I stand in front of the mirror.

I look at myself, swaying. To my eyes, I am nothing more than a drunk with a jacket on that maybe looks a little big for me, but hey, it’s the eighties, (still, kind of) and we all know the fashion mistakes that we are trying to leave behind in the eighties. There is no evidence I am a murderer about to happen. Not to the naked eye.

Use your third on eye me then and you would have peered at Lucifer’s shaking belly.

Shaking? Why shaking?

Because he was laughing with such uncontrolled glee at the expectation of soon winning another soul.

Satisfied with my appearance, I set off for town, and, you guessed it - the taxi rank. Time to murder me an innocent. Nothing personal. I just want to kill you. See what it feels like. I am genuinely curious. What will happen?

I found him at the taxi rank as the sun’s rays first began to streak the sky. I got in the back of the cab and greeted him as normally as possible. I tried not to seem as if I wanted to blow his brains out. It wasn’t hard. Apparently most killings happen in some state of emotional agitation. I wasn’t agitated, just curious. Psychotic. This is not a TV show anymore people.

This is one of the possibilities when madmen are allowed to lay their hands on firearms.

I asked him to take me to the “Bay”, Hervey Bay, twenty, twenty five kilometres away on what I assumed would be a deserted road at that hour of the morning. I chatted on with what I thought sounded like casual banter, attempting to reassure him that everything was ok and that he wasn’t in the last ten minutes of his life. He didn’t ask me if I was about to kill him so I guess I got away with it.

I told him I was going to see a, (non existent) girlfriend with whom I had had an argument, and was going down to sort it out. Funny how it seemed to be more natural to comment that I was having relationship problems rather than going to see my girlfriend with whom, “I have no problems, probably marry and live happily ever after with thanks.”

(Odd how the cops harped on about this…as if it was really important to tell them exactly what I had said to the taxi driver…I would understand if they were trying to establish evidence, but I had already said that I did it.)

Easier to lie from, and hide within, bad news. People believe it more readily. While they enjoy the fact that someone else is having a bad time too, they almost absently just absorb whatever else you feed them. Maybe you activate a trigger in them that momentarily stuns them.
Maybe, and this is pure hypothesis to expound an interpersonal theory, the taxi driver was also having relationship problems and bringing up the subject was like touching a fresh scar every so slightly so that his judgement was momentarily sidetracked as he reflected upon his own personal issues causing him to metaphorically recoil or at least divert his perception for long enough so he that didn’t see the sawn-off stock appear from out of my jacket just for a second as I got into the cab and that he didn’t in fact pick up on my intention at all.

Therefore, as we drove out of town, he didn’t leap screaming from the taxi as premonition crept upon him. Good for him. You can get nasty scarring from leaving a vehicle at that speed.

As we travelled along, “the straight,” (a well known piece of road on the…. err… road), I asked him to pull over. I can’t remember if I said I needed to vomit or relive myself (I did it on purpose that time, were you watching?).

Regardless, he stopped the cab. I got out of the back, produced the firearm and stood beside him as he sat in the driver’s seat. I levelled the weapon at his head and as he turned towards me and his eyes opened in terror and realisation, I pulled the trigger.

The next sound was most unexpected. Different firearms have different sounds, obviously. My personal favourite is the old SLR used by the army for many years.

It pops up in reruns of Dr Who when he ponces about with U.N.I.T. if you must know.

"Miss Shaw may have the misfortune to work for you, Brigadier. I am a free agent.”

-The Third Doctor.

R.I.P. Worzel. He died on my birthday in 1996.

From behind, as you fire it, it has a real metallic, mechanical crunch to it as it fires, recoils and picks up another round ready to fire. You hardly hear a “bang” at all. From the front, (well not right in front obviously) you get the classic bang. Oh, and it’s not a “DOOSCH!” like you hear on the movies or TV either, it’s more of a sharp crack, or someone clapping their hands really loudly.

A, “pop” if you will.

So what sound did my murder weapon make?

Click.

Yes, that’s right. Click.

The firing pin, released from it’s abode in the recesses of the breech, came hurtling down it’s short little pathway and crashed into the rim of the .22 cartridge I had carefully placed there for it to beat itself on…and there it stayed.

Were the sound to be instead say, Bang, then the detonation of the gunpowder (not actually powder, coarser than powder) would have achieved two things;

1. Blowing back the semi automatic mechanism of the rifle, causing a small hook like device to catch on the rim of the now empty shell, drawing it out of the firing chamber and hurling it away clear of the mechanism, which by now would be sliding back forwards, picking up another fresh cartridge from the magazine and pushing it home into the firing chamber. The firing pin however would have stayed behind, driven back there by the force of the blowback and waited for me to squeeze the trigger again, allowing it to begin it’s short journey all over again, as many times as I squeezed the trigger.

2. Propelling a small measure of lead out of the barrel and more than likely, into the head of the taxi driver. I say more than likely because I was drunk, but at that range, an unsuspecting target is unlikely to move fast enough to make hitting it very difficult.

After that? Who can tell? Death probably. Although I met a guy in jail who killed his wife and then turned the gun on himself. The bullet left a very nasty scar in his forehead but he didn’t die.

Click.

Not bang.

Click.

A dud.

I had used the weapon in the past week. We used to throw cans in the air and try to shoot them. I do not recall ever hitting one. The weapon worked. I had not had a single dud with this weapon while firing it. As a matter of fact, in all the rounds I have fired in my life, I can count on one hand the number of duds I have experienced. (Including this occasion doesn’t use up all the fingers on that one hand).

I stood dumbfounded. I hadn’t thought this far. The, “tilt, cock, lock, look” drill I had been taught in the army didn’t even figure into it. On my recruit course, while firing blanks to get used to the weapon, I had a stoppage, a dud. Damn French rounds. Immediately I went into the stoppage drill, cleared my weapon and continued with the exercise.

Not this time. In his statement, he said he heard me, “cock the weapon.” That wasn’t a weapon being cocked. That was the sound of the rest of your life starting.

I stood there as he opened the door and got out, saying, “It’s all right mate, it’s all right, there’s no problem, it’s all yours!” or words to that effect. I think he had to actually shove past me as I stood there.

I didn’t move until he was over the other side of the road. He could have reached out, calmly taken the weapon from my shaking hands, re-cocked it, turned it on me and shot me.

I came to and took his lead, getting into the cab. I think the demon was even more surprised than me and released me to my own devices. I didn’t know what I was doing. I drove off towards the bay at an ever increasing speed. It was the latest model Falcon and I decided I should see how fast it goes.

One problem. I couldn’t turn the interior light off. Somehow he had turned it on as he got out and I couldn’t find the switch. Some form of taxi distress signal?

As I continued to accelerate, (160?) I took the rifle from the passenger’s seat where I had tossed it, and started trying to shoot the light out. I can’t remember if I re-cocked it or just kept impotently pulling the trigger with no effect.

That rapidly became irrelevant as I found myself hurtling off the left hand side of the road, trying to clear a failed firearm at over 150 km/hr, drunk, in the dirt, with one arm not working.

I heaved the wheel hard over to the right and the taxi screamed out it’s protest of exploding rubber and shrieking metal as the two left hand side tyres blew and shredded down my port side.

I came to a halt, on the other side of the road, pointed back the way I came. I had bashed one of my legs hard against something and it was hurting. Maybe I should have put a seat belt on. I have a slight limp for a few weeks.

A slight limp? A slight limp!?

I just got a vision of the cab self destructed on a tree, dust and smoke waft in the air, with my head smeared all over the inside of the shattered windscreen. Blood fills the shatter lines of the glass and slowly drips off the rounded edges of the dashboard to pool below on the floor of the taxi. How did that not happen?

The taxi was crippled. I turned it back towards the bay and limped along the road with metal grinding and tyres continuing to peel off. I found a dirt road and took the cab down there some distance. I was starting to feel a bit sober. Experiences like that are quite sobering. Adrenalin had finally kicked in too. Probably back about the time I was going sideways at 100+ losing tyres fast.

The cops say I tried to burn the cab. I do not dispute this but neither do I remember it.

I left the vehicle there and walked back towards the main road. Somewhere along the way I dropped the rifle, all the ammo and the knife. I went back later with the cops to try to find them, but I honestly could not recall where had I left them.

Why did I take so much ammo? I think in my mind it seemed, “better to take ammo and not need it, than not take it and need it.” If the truth be known, Martin Bryant may have opened up in competition with me but for that one dud. Cheers you psycho.
I got to the main road and hitchhiked back to town. That was surreal. I just got into this guy’s car and erased what I had just done from my mind. Chatted casually. I am a complete nutjob.

(Give me a foot long blade, (black, serrated on one side) a pistol with the best combination of magazine capacity vs calibre, (P228 .357?) a short barrel Steyr (original carbine config?), a couple of days rations, (actually one will do, more room for ammo and trophies) a parachute, and toss me out over Afghanistan. Taliban? What Taliban? Hey, they use their nutjobs. If I make it out, it will be with heads. Oh if you can spare some light amp gear that would be good but isn’t necessary. The night is my friend).

(Actually, when the first Gulf War started, I continually hassled one of the ex servie screws about organising a Penal Legion).

The next morning, later that morning actually, it was on the front page of the paper. No shock. My housemate asked me if I knew anything about it. I offered an unconvincing, “no”.

Later still, two detectives came to the house. They said they wanted to speak to me about some fires. I looked at them, I have no idea how I appeared to them. I was fresh from nearly killing someone and myself. My first reaction was actually one of elation. The weight of more than a year of guilt lifted from me somewhat and I said to myself;

“Thank God it’s over.”

…conveniently forgetting about the whole attempted murder business. Priorities you know.

They took me down to the Police Station and what happened next is up for…well it’s not up for anything is it? What is one madman’s word against the unassailable juggernaut that is the justice of the Queensland Police?

They claim I went through the whole, “you can’t hold me, you have no proof but you will try to shoot me if I try to leave,” scenario. Nice.

Why they said I went off like this is beyond me. Unless they wanted to believe I was like that and couldn’t believe I that I sat there meekly waiting for Death to appear with a petrol tin and say, “It’s time. I brought this for reasons of continuity, you can however chose hanging, shooting or lethal injection.”

I do not recall wondering if being chased off a cliff by topless female roller skaters was an option. Shame, I could have done with a smile right about then.

I actually dreamed I was executed by lethal injection once. But I woke up in the morgue and danced around the bemused prison officials and sang, “You can’t kill me, you can’t kill me!”

Woke up, from death, in a dream.
I just wanted to sign the paperwork. Just get me the paperwork. “I do hereby declare my life forfeit. I leave my body to science.”

But they wanted to play the, “evidence,” game. You see I could not bring myself to speak up and admit. They wanted my fingerprints. They said I didn’t have to give them because I wasn’t under arrest yet. In retrospect, the first detective I spoke to was definitely the, “bad cop”.

They said that even though I didn’t have to, if I did, it might, “clear me.” That sounded odd. Nice policemen dragging me down to the Police Station to clear me. Phew. I submitted with mixed feelings. A small spark…what if they do, “clear me.”

“Sorry about this son, it turns out it wasn’t you! Off you go then, there’s a good chap.”

Why am I superimposing, “The Bill,” over my actual experiences? Oh that’s right. Mental illness. I always liked the English accent anyway.

They took my fingerprints with my permission. I wanted them to hang me, but instead they took my fingerprints. I wanted them to chant prayers and drive the demons from my soul. But no, just fingerprints.

They came back later with some things that looked like photographs and my fingerprints.

“This is a picture of fingerprints from a wheelie bin,” (typical), “that we took from the council shed in the park where a fire was set. We can send these away with your fingerprints and prove that they match.”

How much he meant to say, “make them,” instead of, “prove that they,” is anyone’s guess.

I was rattled. I was on the verge. I was about to cave in. Fess up. Spill my guts.

Hang on…every wheelie bin I ever touched burned to the ground! How could they get fingerprints? Close but no doughnut copper.

I stayed shut the fuck up and just sat there, looking at them. The proverbial bunny in the spotties. Actually that may not be true. I think I did actually feebly offer a, “it wasn’t me,” or two somewhere along the way. Details are sketchy.

I definitely do not remember going all, “righteous TV crim,” demanding that, “I know my rights.” Because I didn’t. Not a clue. Wanted to die. Thought they would kill me, thought I deserved it. Just wanted it over and done with.

Just send me the paperwork. Let’s get this thing done.

They dropped the fingerprint angle.
The detective started to go off a wee bit. He insisted that an anonymous female had rung and said that when they went to dinner at about seven I was sitting on the Town Hall steps, (night of the Town Hall fire obviously).

The cops further claim that this anonymous person further claimed that when they had finished dinner, I was still sitting on the Town Hall steps. Allegedly.

Well that’s just insulting, pure and simple. Insane not stupid remember? That galvanised me a little because I knew that to be sheer fabrication on someone’s behalf. Whose, I did not know, but a lie none the less. I said nothing. I knew that some people knew. Who else knew? Were the cops lying? Was someone lying to the cops?

Do cops lie!?

“Aren’t you…the Good, Man?”

-Roy Batty, Bladerunner.

For myself, I cared nothing, but against the lie, I rallied.

I sat and said nothing.

This made the detective angrier and he insisted to know why I wasn’t demanding a lawyer.

Errr, because I didn’t think of it? I already said that didn’t I? I didn’t know my rights?

OK, maybe a little stupid to go with the insanity. Things not looking too bright for our hero. I said nothing. They took me home.

What?

They took me home. Not dead. Not arrested. Not anything. I needed some sleep so I had some.

“The first thing I learned on the job, know what it was? How to spot a murderer. Let's say you arrest three guys for the same killing. Put them all in jail overnight. The next morning, whoever is sleeping is your man. If you're guilty, you know you're caught, you get some rest - let your guard down, you follow?”

-Dave Kujan, US Customs. The Usual Suspects.

You see, they had nothing on me. Not one thing. Oh they knew, and I knew, and facts were facts, but they did in fact, not have, and never did have, anything except my own confession to convict me with.

“Yeah. Wow. That sounds like a real good deal. But I think I have a better one. How about I give you the finger - and you can cram that file up your Secret Service sphincter.”

-Neo. The Matrix.

My bank account number to deposit the reward in is…

A few hours later, they came and got me again. I can’t remember if it was the same ones or another two, regardless, back at the station, things got heavy. There were four detectives now. Not small chaps either. Well the first one wasn’t that big. Maybe that’s why he always had to play, “bad cop”? I have no idea.

I tried to tell them how I wasn’t sitting on the Town Hall steps as alleged. I tried to tell them the truth, that I was cutting doughnuts in a yellow valiant on a dirt road miles away at that time.

That is the truth. A guy I knew, (quite a good driver as I remember) used to drive really fast down dirt roads and I would call out, “betcha can’t do a uey right now!” He usually could.

They implied that I had had plenty of time to construct an alibi by then, after hearing what was alleged against me. Check my phone records from that day and ask my housemate if I did anything except sleep between when they dropped me off and picked me up again. The guilty always sleep remember?

I still could not voice my incredulity that someone would say I was so dumb as to sit and advertise my unholy intentions like that. Evil hides in the darkness and strikes from there with cowardice. It does not casually wait in the light to be seen near it’s intended temple of destruction.

Ergh. Still no death? Still talking? One of the cops made fun of the name of a motorcycle retailer on my shirt. Classy. Do they teach that in cop school? Mind you, it was a rather silly name to start with and begging for ridicule. He just succumbed that’s all.

I cannot remember exactly what happened for the next little while. Although to observe the scene it was lacking only two things; the spotlight lamp and the violence.

Oops, only missing one thing now. The lamp.

One of the detectives grabbed a handful of my hair from behind as I sat there slowly and feebly shaking my head at everything they were saying to me.

He pulled my head back hard and snarled into my face and said something like, “Go on admit it! You did it didn’t you!?” Inventive. Inspired improvisation. Rewrite the textbooks.

Well that was me done. I thought it was the end. I mean really. Not being dramatic. That was it. I thought a quick, “Do you have any last requests?” was in order but apparently not. As the words left my mouth I fully expected the fists to fall.

Stupid, insane, complete sociopathic young fuckwit. Why not kill it? It serves no purpose. Batter it til it stops moving, bag it and dump it in the ocean. Good riddance.

Still, burnt at the stake would have been far more fitting.

“I did it,” I sobbed…and sobbed….and sobbed. Pathetic really. If I could go back in time I would flog fuck out of myself. Hell, I should do it now. Hate worthy wretch.

With well practised ease, the detectives switched from avenging angels of justice bent on my extermination to my very best pals in the whole world. Golly, with a friend or two like this a few years back, a taxi driver wouldn’t be just about to yell, “THAT’S HIM!!!!” at me as he sees me in the Police Station.

“THAT’S HIM!!!!”

(…at me…)

Told ya.

The next 24 hours are weird. A complete purging and confession on my behalf and the single greatest travesty of face value justice I have experienced.

I say face value because everything has a face value doesn’t it? You judge something by looking at it, from it’s face, the face it presents to you? What if you took a twenty dollar note to the shop and could only get ten dollars worth of goods? What if the face value was a lie?

How much does that lie matter? Everyone might get used to it. So you would remember that twenty dollars is really ten dollars. What is ten dollars then? Why not just have things as they claim to be? Or is that an insane concept?

I ignored that 24 hours until quite recently, well actually it comes down to one moment. The moment when the friendly detective smiles at me as I enquire about my legal rights and I am told, “Oh no, you don’t need a lawyer, all we are going to do is just write down what you have told us.”

They are my best friends. You trust your best friends. Is this a method of deception that is taught to police or do just those capable of employing this technique do it? I cannot imagine that everyone is gifted, (or ethically bereft) enough to execute this psychological contrivance.

I took them for a walk. I showed them each location of the fires I could recall and how I did them. They seem to share in my pride, they seem interested in my accomplishments. They are, after all, good friends. We tried to find the armaments from the taxi debacle.
I don’t think I was under arrest at first. I honestly do not remember. Mental Illness. They may very well have explained everything to me, probably did, because I remember feeling at ease for the first time in years. After the sobbing that is.

(Note to self: buy bat, apply liberally to own head, you deserve it).

My life could have gone in any number of directions from that moment.

“You do not need a lawyer.”

-a real detective. Real Life.

Are you fucking kidding!? How did they get away with that!? The justice system has a face value, but it’s not it’s real value. Say I was a mutant. Say I was a freak. (What’s all this past tense that you’ve got going on here?) Say that I deserved to die, or worse. Do it, do it now, do it right now I don’t care.

But do NOT, “apply justice,” with the same insanity, self duping and psychological manipulation that I have operated from within all my life.

If justice isn’t better, higher, more moral and more just that the, “enemy,” it strives to keep down it is in fact engaging in little more than a common brawl, an “all in,” that the organised, the status quo wins, and not the truly just.

That is a far greater evil than anything I have done. (That would be up for debate if not for the dud, but meh, things are as they are).

Somewhere in between my confession and being locked up in the watch house, I had a choice. There was a moment where, by rights, the right of an Australian, the rights of the country I was born in, I could, should have had a lawyer. That’s what the law says. It is, in bare fact, as experienced by me personally, a lie.

What do you think a lawyer would have thought of the situation? No evidence, (yeah yeah sure sure, the wheelie bins are on my side fucker) nothing tying me to the arsons and an anonymous tip that was in fact, complete and utter fabrication no matter whose lie it was.

No motive, no reason, no rhyme, ka-ching! He’s bonkers your honour! Even with the taxi driver, (well yes he ID’d me), no one but me knew it was anything more than armed robbery, not even that. Apparently I left almost $200 in the taxi. Didn’t even look for it.

Is that justice? I could actually argue on either side, that’s my right as a madman, but taking into account that no one really cares what happens to me except me…well ok, no one cares what happens to me but someone should speak for me. Isn’t that justice? Yes? No?

Point is this. I ended up in maximum security, Boggo Road as it turned out, one of the last. Is that justice? If I had wantonly and deliberately set out to simply destroy or kill or rob as an act of free and unclouded will, (there’s a debate for you) then sure. Easier to judge, if say, I shot the cabby, took his money and sold the cab…fair enough.

Fact is, I was, and am, insane. Oh I can type? I can tell a story? Big deal. Come inside, have a look. I dare you, I DOUBLE dare you mother fucker.

Take a breath.

Take another.

Who cares, it won’t change anything. Besides, it probably works in most cases. The system I mean. Point is I did it. Call the response of the authorities punitive if you will, but do not name it justice.

If you could press a button that killed 999 murderers and one innocent man, would you?

I did it and for my part, as much as I can take upon myself, I do accept responsibility. What do you think that means? That I’m sorry? Let’s just say I am doing my darndest not to live in denial for the moment shall we? I loathe the lie, the deception, the twisted form reality takes when it’s used to cover and shield the truth. Existence becomes, “unbeautiful”.

Let’s move on shall we?

Yes, let’s.

Jail. I am put into a cell with a fat smelly man who seems to have no problem with having multiple kids to multiple women and leaving them to their own devices while he traipses in and out of jail for fines, assault or bad personal hygiene . He could of course be lying. He does smell quite bad.

Back up a bit. I’ve calmed down now.

After the cops make me feel all warm with my decision to abandon my rights, (I did feel quite ok with it until recently by the way) everything is strangely cool for a while. People come and see me in the watch house. An old friend declares that she wants us to get married and grow old together. Old girlfriends come and visit, leaving me cards and pictures of themselves with things like, “Never forget me, I love you,” written on the back.

How sentimental, and all so transient. Pah, forgotten and cast off as I knew I would be, nay, should be. Why did they torment me? Oh that’s right. I deserve it. “We will write to you every week!” a couple of girls promised. Better to never turn up in the first place than promise me something that never, ever eventuates. Not once. Lying slatterns. Come see the beast in his cage. Watch him dance to your tune as you offer your affections. Raaahhhh.

I am too harsh, many did write for a while. Many did try and I am truly touched that they should do this. A good friend of an ex girlfriend, a very special ex girlfriend, wrote to me for… years? That is until he got married. Bye, thanks anyway.

Again, too harsh. Why should anyone be expected to be a life support system for a mutant?

My housemate begs the cops to let him come and stay with me in the watch house. Thanks man. That was actually really cool. After all that shit I put you through. There is another suspicious fire while I am in the watch house. Maybe he wanted too much to come and stay for a while?

People try to cash in on my, “fame”. People who I know, tell me about all these people who they know don’t know me, yet insist they know me personally? Why do people think insanity is cool? Why is it cooler to know one of the fallen than see a falling star? I don’t get it. Surrender your freedom for three years and see how cool it is.

The hubbub dies down. Somehow the mania comes back for a while and I genuinely become enthused about this whole, “jail experience,” coming up. Yeah, that’s right, you heard me. Remember? Mental illness? You don’t get to choose the see saw. You just go up and down on it.

Not all of the cops are my friend, like me, or even pretend too. This is to be expected. I however, am polite and do as I’m told. This seems to infuriate several of them as I do not drop to the ground and start tearing my hair out or whatever it is they expected me to do.

I would expect a few gruff, “get in theres,” and a bit of a shove or something as they put me in a watch house cell, or even throw my food at me or something. I don’t know, just some sort of intimidatory aggression like that. I am not in there for overdue library books after all. I am a destructive psycho. I expect to be physically threatened to, “stay in line.”

But that’s the problem, isn’t it? I do stay in line and as I said, this just seems to infuriate them even more. I don’t know why. They got me, they won. Why not be pleased with that?

At least three of them taunt me as best they can. They are simple men perhaps and do not fully understand psychological warfare on such a level but they give it their best shot. As I say, it probably works most of the time.

When I first went into the watch house, and while strip searching me, one of them, (a really fat cop) looks at me naked and says quietly, wistfully, almost sadly, “it’s bigger than mine.” (I shit you not, he stood there, looking at my dick and said that). Then the other one, (the watch house master…whatever rank he was) who was standing there said words to the effect of;

“You better get in there,” he motions to the cells I am just about to go into, “and bust your own face up good, because it’s about the only way you can try to stop the things that are going to happen to a pretty boy like you when you get to jail.”

“Yay, I’m a pretty boy,” I think to myself. I look at him as if he has just complimented me.

I smile at him. Just for a moment I rally again. You see that happens when people blatantly reveal their own demons, or their own evil, or their own, wrongness. It gives me something to fight against.

I am Ghandi. I am Buddha. I say, “what you are saying may or may not be true or going to happen. What am I to do until I find myself in that situation? Why do you want me to worry about it now?”

He does not answer.

At some stage, (I cannot remember, it may have been at that same time but I don’t think so) another cop taunts me. Just walks up and laughs at me, saying something like,

“By the time you get out, there will be hover bikes!!!” He was a bike cop. Anyone from Maryborough in that era will know exactly who I am talking about.

HELLO!!!??? I’m out!!! Where is my hover bike!?

Never in my whole experience from the very moment I was arrested until now, have I ever addressed a policeman or screw with the words, “Copper/Screw scum dog,” or asked them how their wife and my kids were. Enough other crims say stuff like that to them all the time.

It seems to confuse the absolute hell out of them that I could in fact, be a criminal, a sociopathic destroyer and yet manage a smile and manners when dealing with them. I imagine it must have seemed surreal enough to them, to the point where their struggling consciousness, (or subconsciousness) could only come up with one option… prod and poke me until they got a reaction they could understand or relate to.

There is a movie that deals with this. Ghosts of the Civil Dead from none other than Mr. Nick Cave. (How are ya, ya dastardly old Dark Prince?) I only saw it once, shown to me by a woman who I think was trying to make me aware of such phenomena.

I will have to watch it again. It basically infers a deliberate attempt by prisons and the whole, “justice” system, to continue to fuck up, as much as they can, everyone who passes through the system. I really only remember the, “that’s when they brought in the psychos,” line. Funny that.

Why they do this, I cannot honestly recall, I will have to watch it again. It is just one of the things, upon reflection, that I can now see that this one chick showed me to try to make me aware of the shit that I had gone through and been exposed to and why it ended up driving me completely around the loop. More on her later.

What if I really am fucking sorry you fuckheads? What if I am fucking insane and genuinely didn’t know how to stop myself, but upon being faced with the Blue Knights of the Law, surrender without a fight, only to find their own submission to petty demons of torment and unquiet? You fucking copper dog scum. Hey that felt good! Any wonder so many people yell shit like that.

I end up in Boggo Road. I am examined for tattoos. I have none. They double check to be sure. I am thought odd. I start to try to think of something cool to get tattooed on me.

A….girl, no a boy…err no a…well, it’s a true transsexual, walks past. It is on it’s way from male to female but somehow on it’s way, it got caught for something and here it is. It is extremely effeminate and attractive in a way, I must be honest. It has breasts but also a functional penis and so it has to go in the men’s prison. In protection of course.

One of the actual male inmates kisses it. I can tell he is an actual because he is bearded. It titters slightly and coyly slides away from him. They are an item apparently. He is in for Death by Misadventure. His last partner, (presumably a proper female…funny how easily these things become blurred in my mind now) died in some sling like contraption they had hanging over their bed. Somehow it was at least partially his fault. Death by Misadventure. Argh me hearties, time for some Death by Misadventure. Ah Keira you gorgeous, gorgeous creature. Talk about wanting to do it nightly…

He has a lot of tattoos. Maybe he knows someone who can help me. Later, in the coming months, I get to know him a little. Not a bad guy but I wouldn’t let him put me in a sling.

One of the screws informs me, (after seeing my two pages of arsons) that should I continue my habits here, he will burn me. I consider his offer. I decide to comply with his mutual non-incineration treaty. He gives me two pouches of tobacco and a box of matches. Bewdy.

Jail stops being fun after 43 minutes.

It’s not actual, “going to die in the next five seconds,” bad, but it’s bad. There does however seem to be a distinct lack of rioting and whatnot. Impressed. “What will happen to me in jail,” as prophesied by the watch house master never leaves my mind for the whole time I am in jail and for years afterwards. I was only Ghandi for a moment.

There is a wide range of guys here. I mean everything. Young, old, black, white etc etc etc. I don’t really talk to anyone but I do deals for rollies. I don’t know how to roll you see. They roll me one, and then one for themselves, from my supplies. I don’t smoke much so I am in front. You get given tobacco.

I learn how to roll cigarettes.

Nothing else to do.

After a couple of days I know alllllll about jail. I have got it sussed.

After a couple of weeks I laugh at myself for thinking I knew it all after a couple of days and am now confident I have seen it all and I know what it’s all about.

After a couple of months…

…I know nothing.

I begin working on who I am now. I mean right now. My genesis began then, based in jail, and who I had to be to survive. The person I am now built his foundations in Boggo Road prison. Up until then I had escapes, avenues, could get away metaphorically or literally.

No longer. Now I had to sink or swim, do or die. All that good gear. I withdrew completely. My greatest asset and simultaneously my greatest vulnerability was the fact I knew no one, but was known by no one. Most people in jail have been there before or will be again. At twenty, I was a late starter.

Vulnerability. After, how long, months? One day I walked out of my cell. I had scored one to myself on one of the upper rows. Neat. I could see the lights of the city and everything. My first F1-11, “dump and burn,” was witnessed from Boggo Road. As you can imagine the huge fire in the sky impressed me.

I walked out and four….(sigh, ok lets be nice)…aboriginals walked in. Brazen. Didn’t even wait for me to get out of sight. Looked at me, made eye contact as they walked in. Four. They weren’t big, well one was but he had the skinniest legs. Common design fault if you have a look at them.

Four of them. I stopped. I slumped. I thought. I weighed up. By this stage I had been over to C block once but I slept in one Saturday and you can only live in C block if you work in the laundry, and sleeping in on Saturday doesn’t count as working. Bam, back to H block with the errr…dregs? Because there is such a distinct class system. Oh C block was a castle! Hmmm. Not.

I am still on remand. It has been months now, and still I haven’t been to court. Still on remand. Limbo. I have no idea what my sentence is going to be. Arson carries life and I have two pages of them. Starting to wonder if you get the old age pension in jail.

In those months I begin to really experience the depression. As I alluded to earlier, no surprise there. I honestly begin to believe I will die in jail, probably killed horribly. I stand away from other people, marking myself more and more as the lone target…and I am. I have a few scuffles, though more in jest that anything else.

Somehow, with one arm, I win a wrestling match with a Maori. (Almost every single Maori who I saw or met in jail had a smile on his face and was genuinely friendly. Let the Kiwis come I say). Don’t ask me how, but I pin him down. He struggles and I see what is developing even as I hold him down. Other guys see me holding him down…it begins here… or it ends here.

I loosen my grip ever so slightly and he breaks free, he flips me over and leans on my throat, I tell him he has won but he is not happy, he leans his forearm into my neck and I can’t breathe. Eventually, satisfied he lets me up. I slink away, safe from the pecking order, a challenge to, and challenged by, no one.

But these…blacks… are in my cell, my only home, the only space that is mine. It is an invasion. Hmff.. I guess they know how that feels. Racially anyway. I decide to face them. It’s my own fault. I can’t help but collect stuff, you know, real luxuries like soap, shampoo and orange juice.

It makes me a target, especially for the nomadic black folk who carry only as much as they can take from someone else. Though sniffing them makes me wonder why they would want to learn about soap at this late stage of their lives.

I experimentally close my fists as I approach the defence of my cell. It’s not going to go well I can tell, for starters I cannot seem to get fired up very easily in defence of myself. Deep down I know I am a mutant and deserve all that I get. I have a tendency to let people hit me until they get bored. Unless I am defending something external to myself that is. Someone else, or an ideal. Somehow it occurred to me that I was defending an ideal, an ideal of one safe place rather than myself personally. Everyone needs a safe place. They were in mine.

I stepped into the…my cell and in between all of them, out of sight of the screws. I was ready.

“But you could have heard a pin drop, when Tommy stopped, and locked the door…”

-Kenny Rogers. The Coward of the County.

I talked my way out of it. They pretended to want to buy stuff but I explained my need for all that I had and nothing was spare. I thought I was being nice, but then again, people don’t see me how I see me.

Maybe they saw fire in my eyes. Maybe they saw themselves, as they were in my mind at that moment, writhing on the ground wreathed in my flames and screaming in utter pain as their black flesh burnt like coal at my bidding while I look on with evil satisfaction.

That would have been cool though…and poetic…and just…the fire that nearly destroyed me offers itself up to me as my defender…

What a load of crap, I don’t know what happened. As with any pack animal, if you stand up to the leader the rest of the cowardly scum will shrink back from you. I guess.

I offer one of them a tailor made to smooth the situation over. He takes about four. That’s a cheap alternative considering I was plotting my path from after clubbing him in the side of the head with a spinning back fist before dropping down and rolling between the two against the far wall and leg sweeping them both in one stroke.

Then, after dropping down on one with an elbow to the neck I would have come up with a precise uppercut to the other one that would have lifted him over the…

“Everybody was kung fu fightin’. That mutant was fast as lightnin’…”

-Apologies to Carl Douglas.

In a way I feel proud, but at the same time I despair. One more challenge overcome just means at least one more to deal with. Will the next be the last? I see some stuff. I see something I am not meant to see. I go to get my medication one night and….oh wait, I didn’t tell you about the, “big diagnosis.”

I am sent to the jail shrink for a pre-trial report. He rapidly diagnoses me as bipolar. I start on lithium which I have been on and off of ever since. For a while I am happy again. Although how asking me the meanings of certain proverbs and getting me to count backwards in multiples of seven diagnoses me as bi polar I do not know.

There is finally a reason. I am ill. Mentally Ill. There is medication though and you are going to be ooooook. (That’s a long “O” sound rather than a monkey sound. As it turns out, the monkey sound is more apt). Now you just have to survive jail. Dandy.

I can’t go home? But it isn’t my fault. You just said I am mentally ill? Oh. I see.

I am actually OK for a bit. The lithium settles in and for the FIRST. TIME. EVER. I can actually think straight. It is a revelation. It’s like discovering that you had two spark plug leads missing.

And where am I to use my new mental faculties? And what do I have to think about?

Fuck.

I am given my wings only to bash repeatedly into the razor wired ceiling. I discover a new way for my brain to bleed. Right with ya Peppers. I am in jail and I have my sentencing to think about. I try to take my mind off things, I try to talk to the other prisoners.

Whoops. The first of many guys come onto me. Not in a, “bend over or die,” sort of a way. More in a, “didn’t you ever think that as a bisexual you double your chances of picking up at any given location?” It becomes an option. One guy in particular spends a lot of time with me. He has an odd look but not altogether unattractive. He is a few years older than me. Maybe ten. Ironic.

I am back in C block by now. We play cards and the talk becomes increasingly more sexual. I start to feel like any one of the girls I have chatted up. Some girls do, some girls don’t…will I? It’s going to happen anyway apparently, shouldn’t I control the fall?

This had sort of come up before. I did do a lot of theatre you know. I had been propositioned and even mildly groped before now. By guys I mean. I ran away from it. It was too fascinating but I didn’t know what it meant. I didn’t know anyone, “like that,” who I found attractive enough and who I was comfortable enough with to look into it.

If I had run out of women I might have strayed earlier. What I liked in women came to me more readily anyway. Less of an effort. More acceptable. You know what I mean. (Playing Frank-n-Furter at a New Years Eve party is quite the blast but as a rule I try not to string people out by the way I look).

It was all only speculation anyway. Doesn’t everyone have cause to question their sexuality every now and then? Sometimes situations come up when it actually becomes a relevant and poignant issue. I assume that for most people that situation never arises.

There are two of them who I spend time with now. This redheaded guy and his friend. Although I think his friend is just gay rather than bisexual. I get the feeling I am perceived as…a threat!? A threat to his affections for the bisexual guy? The fag is a bit bitchy.

The bisexual guy is really quite suave in a rough sort of way. I actually start to see what chicks see in blokes. Maybe. Who knows. Is what a guy sees in a bloke the same as a chick does? Maybe it’s just personality and everyone is attracted to a strong personality regardless of sex or sexual preference.

Might as well happen of my choosing with someone I do actually see something in. What better than an actually interesting person with whom I do feel a genuine attraction personality wise? Control the fall while there is still some air left in your ‘chute.

My associations are noticed and some derision comes my way from other guys in the yard. Not nasty, just a sort of, “oh, you’re one of them are you!?” But I wasn’t, not yet anyway. Though it did feel good to have something to belong to. Being as I was an arsonist, armed robber (at best) and an insane person, it didn’t seem to matter to me what I did in there anyway. Phew, I seem to see some soft ground to fall on.

So we are playing cards and the redhead starts doing tricks, seen them all before, don’t know how they are done though. He does a, “which card did I look at put back and not tell him what it was,” trick. He starts thumbing the cards back through and stops, I have seen him go past my card, but it is obvious it is a ruse of some kind, too neat, too…obvious…as are his intentions.

“Would you bet a headjob that the next card I touch is your card?”

He looks at me with a sort of expectant smile. He doesn’t think he has duped me at all, he is simply giving me an opportunity and seeing if I will take it. I decline. But bugger me if this isn’t exciting, playing the quarry instead of the hunter! I have some things to learn from this man. It is, dare I say, flattering?

We know it wasn’t a real challenge of wits. I sense he is becoming frustrated? With me? Once again I empathise with females I have pursued. This is a real learning experience…of all the places to come to learn about the nuances of courting.

Exactly how it happens I am not sure but we close the cell door, only a sign to others around as there is plexiglass aplenty and there is no privacy. But it’s a request for discretion from the rest of the yard. My feet touch down and my ‘chute falls slowly to the ground around me.

We lie on my bed and he lies behind me and I face away from him. It doesn’t go very far. He is extremely affectionate and genuinely bisexual, not just trying to fuck the stupid new guy. At least that’s how it appears. It’s a different world in there.

He nuzzles my neck. Stubble does NOT feel sexy against the back of your neck does it girls? Or maybe it does for you. Different strokes. He rubs my crotch but has difficulty getting his hands in my far too tight prison shorts…that was NOT deliberate…all my others were in the washing. Anyway fuck you, what if I was wearing shorts too tight? I have been told by males and females that I have a nice arse. Back then anyway.

It’s only the tight shorts that stop proceedings. I lie there, sort of…err…like, what do you do!? Godammit! I am a bisexual starfish! I think once more to the number of times I have had a female in this situation…often I backed off when they didn’t react, hmmm maybe they were just waiting for me to take the lead?

He does the same. He is frustrated but patient. I would actually have had a raging erection but for the tight shorts. It got a bit painful actually.

It doesn’t go well after that. I don’t talk to him/them very much. I try to but it’s awkward. I am intrigued enough to want another go, but he seems content to go back to his fag. (Who treats me with scorn now. What a delightful man.)
I’m not down, I only closed my eyes and imagined what it would have been like to land there as I continue my fall with torn ‘chute.

This heralds a new and dangerous time for me. I am, “noticed” by those who notice such things. I briefly become a heslut. Nothing physical, well there is a touch once but it is weird and I have no idea where he is coming from so I leave well alone.

I just become overfriendly, all of a sudden I felt happy again. Lithium is not perfect and was still new to me…you have times of see saw regardless. So I am overfriendly…I think I have just, “come out,” and I am in jail…err…wise move. Not.

I am chased around the laundry, (yes back in the laundry now) by a guy booming at me, “ever been fucked by a man with a beard!?” I have no idea if he is serious or not. Just in case, I don’t let him catch me.

Things go bad, I become a bit of a laughing stock. It’s my own stupid fault. I should have kept my head in. Dickhead. As usual I deserve all I get. Or shouldn’t be mad or something. I am sure my raping is being booked.

That’s when, “he,” approaches me. I had seen him in the laundry. Real cushy job that he has. Always really sure of himself. Drug dealer apparently. Upper end of the market or food chain. Not a big guy, but he had this other guy always hanging around. Looked like a bodyguard if you ask me but what do I know? I had actually spoken to him before, he seemed to know his way around.

I was starting to despair at this stage. I had no idea who I was, what lying with a guy in bed and voluntarily being fondled meant, if anything and what everyone else was saying about me... HELLO! ah another lifelong friend I picked up in jail.. paranoia. I sank back into my, “going to die in jail,” gloom. It became fact for me. Stark reality. If only forward were a possibility.

My past life was gone. Given away by my own idiocy. I had nothing to look forward to….yessss….now you can start talking suicidal tendencies and death wishes…

This was the first time a cellmate left blood for me to clean up. It wasn’t the last. He was a rapist. He had no idea how what he had done was wrong. “I just asked her for a cigarette, she could have given me a cigarette…” He had a girlfriend. Don’t ask, I don’t know.

He couldn’t write much above grade one or two level. I helped him write letters to her. He could read hers…slowly. He got two eyes tattooed on his arse cheeks so he could, “watch what she was doing back there”. Again, don’t ask. I don’t know.

She wrote in a letter asking him to thank me for helping him write to her. He went off, I seriously thought it would come to blows.

“WHAT THE FUCK IS SHE WRITING TO YOU FOR!!?!?!?!?”

Oh dear. I can’t remember what I said to him. I don’t recall placating him very effectively. But here’s a man who thinks, “no”, in response to, “can I have a cigarette please,” actually means, “hurl me to the ground and violate me.”

I came back to my cell soon after that to find him being dragged across the jail to the infirmary. There was blood. I figured the screws had bashed him for something…something I actually did not see much of. But no, he was crying and the blood was pouring from the wounds on his wrists. The screws wave me away impatiently as I go to see how he is.

The cell wasn’t too bad for someone slashing up so determinedly. I have seen the various attention scars on people during my two visits to psyche wards since getting out of jail. These were not attention wounds. Though they say the truly serious don’t go for the wrists. More on that later.

Settling and calming place, jail. Nothing ever happens that’s nasty. So, there I was one night getting my medication, (you thought I had forgotten about this thread didn’t you?) and the door to the surgery is open. There is a guy lying face down on the operating table. He looks strangely calm and unperturbed for someone with so much blood on his arse. Funny, he doesn’t look pretty to me?

A nurse scowls at me and closes the door. I seem to remember glass and a rumour that someone had gotten a hold of a glass jar or something, shoved it up his arse and smashed it. Memory is a funny thing though isn’t it? Can’t remember where I first heard that.

Where were we….? Oh yeah, death wish, going to die, no chance doom, doom and more doom. Then I start talking to him. It was my own fault. I didn’t learn. I should have locked myself away and ignored everyone and everything. How could I possibly think that interacting with anyone was going to lead to happy places? Fuckhead. You deserve all you get.

It was about this time I first started to have full conversations with friends who weren’t there. I would imagine a situation and start talking to them about it, making their answers for them of course. I still do this. I have a conversation with someone in my mind and their responses are based on what I think they would respond with. I then have my own input and so on.

It means there are untold things I haven’t said, don’t say, and won’t say to people because these conversations do not take very long. I try desperately not to have them, and when I am alone, I often hold my hands over my ears and chant, “la, la, la not listening,” as these conversations come upon me. It doesn’t work. I am going to need something that pierces a bit deeper to stop those conversations.

Sometimes chanting the Banana Splits theme song helps stave off unwanted thoughts.

Oh it was only because I was insanely lonely and missed my past life to the point of wanting to die that I started doing it. Nothing serious. It became part of me. I cannot turn it off. I want to. I can’t.

I have lost count of the number of times I haven’t said things like, “I love you,” or, “You are important to me and I need you in my life,” because in my own mind I have already said them. Lucky it wasn’t anything important I didn’t say. It’s hard to start a conversation you have already had. Feels like you are repeating yourself.
So I ended up in his cell. This cell was decked. Multiple stereos, decorations a million. He offered to pay my bail and, “leave them with it,” and meet up with him on the outside. He told me how evil women are and how everyone is in jail because women told on them. (After all, the cops said one dobbed me in).You can only trust men, only love men. He had books with really cool boats for sale in them. Big ones. “Pick one,” he said. I sucked it all up.

Fuck you. Go be insane and lonely somewhere cut off from everything and everyone because you are a goddammed fuckhead mutant. Surround yourself with people who want to do God knows what to you and toss in an impending court case, with life as the likely sentence and see what kind of irrational ideas you are presented with and how you allow them to give you solace.

He said if you aren’t in a clique in jail, you die. I think of his bodyguard. I wonder if this is a threat. I knew I was going to die there but I didn’t want it to be because I was too stupid to know the rules. Suddenly my ‘chute is gone, the ropes slashed away and I fall, face first into a prison bed and I lie there as it happens. At least it’s a soft landing.

Fortunately, he had an extremely small dick, I actually barely felt it. It was, in reality, far more, “annoying,” than painful as he thrust into me. I never saw it. I certainly didn’t look around to see it when he fucked me…a couple of times. Yeah I went back for more. Fuck you.

Kind of sad really…both my first times were shit.

When he said, “Next time you can do it to me,” I stopped going. I didn’t want to hurt him.

If you throw a naughty child into a wolves pit, at least one of them is going to maul it. That’s nature.

(Consulting the measurement of, “average,” indicates I am only slightly larger than. I have however, received many, “Oh my gods,” and, “please be gentles,” as I loosen my tackle and prepare to engage. However I tend to think that’s about as authentic as, “Oh no, I am actually pleased you have small tits.”)

“…too big to fit in there…”

-Christina, Courtney and Jane. The Sweetest Thing.

Guess what? You were partially correct it seems, you copper dog scum. I still have a bigger dick though. Nyah, nyah. (If you lost some weight you might get some better penetration).

My twenty first birthday comes. Some friends come to visit me. It’s one of my mates from the Reserves, his girlfriend and another friend. A chick. I don’t want them to worry so I tell them how great I’m doing and actually how easy jail is. They tell me someone claims to have found my, “list of targets,” and the Reserve Base is on it.

Patently ridiculous. There was no list.

They ask me what I am going to do for my birthday. I think they are serious… I joke and tell them I am going to stick 21 matches in a cherry ripe and sing happy birthday to myself. We synchronise. They say they will do the same at seven o’clock that evening. I laugh and say ok.

I don’t believe them. I have my own little ceremony anyway. I get out a cherry ripe from my buy up and stick 21 matches in it. I ask a screw for the time. I go back to my cell and at about 7 o’clock, I light the matches and sing happy birthday to myself.

I don’t let the matches burn out. I keep them in an envelope. Years later I burn them in a ritualistic attempt to purge the fact I spent my 21st birthday in jail from existence. It doesn’t work.

I eat my birthday cake. Salty water does not make cherry ripes taste better.

I asked to see a psychologist before my court case, I was really freaked out by now after everything. He was cool actually. He reduced it to a, “don’t worry about it until it’s happened,” thing. Easy to suggest, harder to implement for the fucked up mutant that I had become. But he was cool. I heard a rumour he got the sack for being an occultist. Figures.

The friends who visited me on my birthday send me a picture. In it they are gathered around a cherry ripe on a table. They are smiling and lighting the 21 matches they have put in it. It appears to be dark. Possibly about seven o’clock.

Came the big day. Six months of Boggo Road and I was heading back to Maryborough to district court. It took weeks and weeks to come before the judge.

Word was he had his family with him and they were all staying on Fraser Island. No need to rush these court thingies you know…take it nice and slow, get it right the first time...

Back to the Maryborough watch house and baked beans every morning. Super. There was an interesting little happening while I was there, lets see if I can remember exactly what happened.

I remember being in there with this older guy. Kinda Zen in a grizzled old crim sort of way. Worldly wise. He didn’t like me very much, but he suffered my company for which I was grateful. There were a couple of others there, but they don’t ring any great bells of memory and shall be considered irrelevant to this story.

However, there were newcomers. A small group of teenagers stole a car on the Gold Coast and drove north. Welcome to Maryborough, your new lodgings are behind the police station…no, no, no, we couldn’t possibly have you stay anywhere else! We insist…

They were kind of entertaining. I remember that one of them came up with a name game that kept us going for ages. Speaking of word games, I had left a favourite novel behind in the watch house from when I was first arrested. It had been torn apart, and reassembled and held together with an elastic band.

Also, every instance of the word, “the,” had been underlined throughout the entire book. Curious. I was just glad to have it back. It was now a mutant book. It suited me. I read it again. Actually I skimmed. I had got the gist of it the first couple of times I read it.

It was the first Driz’zt Do’Urden Book – The Crystal Shard. In later years I abuse people playing Counter-Strike for using his name.

“Wow, how did you get from Faerun to Earth to play Counter-Strike, man!?”

While the boys were there, either they, or someone else was picked up at about four in the morning. I woke to hear the doors opening, thought nothing of it, (we knew they were going) and went back to sleep.

I was in the same cell as Grizzly Zen when one of the other guys woke us up not long after. The sun was barely up.

“The doors are all open and there’s no cops around.”

Sure, sure I thought. I rolled over and tried to sleep. Grizzly Zen went to investigate and came back moments later to get his things.

“Right. I’m off,” he declared with a minimalist wave.

That made me get up. It was true, I walked straight out of my cell, through the door that led into the, (unmanned) watch house office and looked out to freedom beyond.

Grizzly Zen was long gone. The back of the police station was dark and quiet. I looked at the office and briefly considered stealing some pens. I really love stationery. (…and Magnum Almonds. But they hadn’t been invented yet).

Snorting, “snipers,” to myself, I went back to bed. I knew it was a trap. I had already been told by the police on the way down to Boggo Road that there are only two situations where they are allowed to, “shoot to kill,” so as to speak.

One is when someone is actively involved in killing someone else, or two, escaping prisoners. I took them at face value on this one. Chivalric of them to have warned me.

The boss/commander/captain/whatever of the Police Station came to talk to those of us who remained in the watch house. He was in plain clothes. If I were boss/commander/captain/whatever I would have a cool uniform.

I can’t remember exactly what he said. I think it was something about, “secret,” maybe he said, “our,” and perhaps at some stage he might have mentioned, “little.”
I seriously do not remember accurately. I think they also asked if Grizzly had said anything about where he was going. Yeah, that’s what he did.

“Right, I’m off. If the cops ask where I am, I’ve gone to my girlfriend’s house, but after a quick shag I will be off to the pub. Should be back by tea time.”

I don’t remember anything like, “Thanks for not running away too, meaning we would have had to try and round up two prisoners who escaped because of our simple ineptitude.”

…and what would the insane Maryborough arsonist have done, given a fleeting moment of freedom…?

I have actually thought about it. I rather like the bit of Queens Park down by the cannons. I would have gone and sat there for a while.

I first saw an utterly gorgeous chick there once at a Spring Festival. One of the most stunning females I have ever been with. I mustered cattle with her once from horseback. So pretty. Her that is. Not the horse, or the cattle. Although as far as horses and cattle go… sorry, I will get back to it. It’s just that she was so beautiful.

But they didn’t say thank you.

That’s because they wanted to shoot me and were secretly pissed off.

OR

They are rude and they did in fact just fuck up. Either way, it is not a good look.

Maybe Grizzly Zen was in on it, maybe they didn’t want him… anyway… they did in fact pick him up later that day from his girlfriend’s not far away. He went back to jail with a bigger grin on his face than any of us. A Zen experience. (I don’t think he did make it to the pub).

It was either now, or back when I was first arrested that I was interviewed by the local TV station. Before the interview was taped, the detective who had grabbed my hair hung around and suggested quite pointedly that I say on the interview how well I had been treated by the police. I did so and I hope it sounded as contrived as it was.

Court. Finally. I was kept until last. I said, “guilty”. The prosecution was at a loss as to how to sink me lower than I had laid myself. Take lessons from the master mutant, buddy. I am your Lord.

The Judge looked like he was in a constant state of “harrumph”. Don’t ask, I can’t explain it. Maybe he cottoned on that there was something not quite right? …and what? Wanted to cover it up? Wanted to know more?

Judge Botting. You know what? I didn’t even smirk once. I was judged by a Botting.

Do they seriously look in the mirror, straighten their wigs and walk into the courtroom thinking that they look just fine?

Two words;

Mardi. Gras.

Kylie you got some ‘splaining to do.

It didn’t last long. I spent the whole time playing with a pendant of a platinum dragon given to me for good luck by the friend of that ex I mentioned earlier. Bahamut, or Paladine, God of the Good Dragons. Well whattya know, the mutant has a few ideals above his own pitiful station. Isn’t that sweet.

It was kind of cool. The last great show of solidarity. A group of motorbikes escorted the police car that carried me, a convicted arsonist back to the watch house and onwards to my doom.

The photo still makes me smile. I look at myself in that photo, outside the courtroom surrounded by friends, what I was, were I had just been, what was happening to me…and I am just like, standing there, smiling. You can’t see any of it. Not a thing. I actually look happy. Sort of close to normal. Not a bad cover up. Story of my life.

Nine years. Two fives and two sevens. All concurrent. Don’t ask me what the little fires netted me. As the full story about the taxi wasn’t known, that was reduced to assault with actual violence, (point a loaded weapon at someone) and the six months on remand was considered time enough for that.

However, I lost my license absolutely. Apparently trying to “crab” taxis at a speed better suited to conventional travel is frowned upon in justice circles. It would take me ten years to get my license back.

Recommendation for parole after 33 months. That was not too bad. For what it was. I mean I was still in maximum security but at least I knew what I was up for. Mind you people can actually kill and get less. Don’t start me…oh don’t worry I will later anyway.

Bye, bye everyone. For some the last I will ever see of you. Back to jail.

I wasn’t there long. Now that I was sentenced, it was off to Sir David Longlands.

Maximum Security. To spend a year at least there.

The joy of sentencing soon passed. I had no visits and no mail. All new people, which was back to it’s usual blessing and curse. A black guy picked me. No fire erupts from my eyes to scorch him. I backed down. I did nothing to him but we all know what kind of defence that is don’t we kiddies?

My innocence shield hadn’t occurred to me at that stage. I think it was kind of penetrated by then anyway.
I see someone use heroin for the first time. (But not the last time in my voyage through Queensland Prisons). He seems to have a really good time for about six hours and then a shit one for twenty four. Is it worth the trade off?

He brags about the details of the armed robbery he has been arrested for. Apparently this makes him a, “goose” in the words of some of the veterans.

I was befriended by a fellow lunatic and I was glad of it. Religious madman. Great stuff. I was in no state to fully appreciate it but I listened to his rantings and preachings. Solid guy too. Carried a Bible with him always. Made the blacks nervous.

He used to say to me aloud, and in full earshot of them, “Do you know what the blacks are? They are demons sent by the Devil to test us.” It was funny to hear that same black guy who picked me, beg of him to stop making it hard for them. There’s always a bigger fish. I just really like it when the biggest fish is a religious loony on your side. Works for me.

Sadly, this wasn’t enough to stop me from wanting to kill myself. The whole weight of it came down upon me and I just stood blankly listening to the preacher. It was better to have some words, rather than no words to go through me. Wretched abandoned mutant. Die, DIE, DIE!

I found a Bible in my cell that some half literate had scrawled in the back of. There was, among other things, a personal covenant with God asking for help to overcome an alcohol problem. It was touching in a simple way. There were other prayers that people had written in there too.

I kept that Bible with me for years, even after I got out. Someone had also written some prayer in there that said something like, “I know you are busy and by the time you get to my prayer I will be out at home with my missus and daughter again so can you look over us out there please?”

Like I said, touching in a simple sort of way. Vend-a-prayer. Take a number and wait. No, sir, I am sure the Apocalypse wont get here first. There’s plenty of time. Please get back in line, sir.

I located a goodly vein in my inner elbow. You may recall my earlier derision for wrist slashers. Gotta go higher, baby, find a good one.

I had a few logistical issues to over come, namely, the amount of blood.

You see, if I just slashed my arm and sat in the shower, (each cell is self contained with ablutions and the like) then there was a chance a random cell check would find and thus save me. Then, I would be put on obs and how would I get to hell to become Lucifer’s personal BBQ chef then? No, I had to get it right the first time.

I looked about my cell, and the answer was right in front of me. Simply slash my wrist, sorry, arm, lie face down on the bed and drape my arm into the plastic bin that I had moved beside the bed.
It would look as if I had just rolled over in my sleep and my arm had flopped over and scored a basket. The blood would flow straight into the bin and from the angle the screws would observe me from the door window, they would not see far enough into the bin to discover what was going on until I was good and bled out. How long to die? There were usually many hours between checks random or nay.

Seven pints eh? I think it would hold that. My arm would be nice and low too. The hole in my body would be low enough to drain all but the blood below my elbow into the bin. See how considerate I am? Other people spray and stain. I am tidy. Neat mutant.

My cell was the furthest from the main yard, down a corridor. You could get, “locked down,” early, if you wanted to sit in your cell and write letters, listen to music or kill yourself or you could wait and get locked down at ten or whenever it was. On my chosen night, I selected the earlier lockdown set aside for suicide preparation.

No one else got locked down at the same time. So there I sat. I cried for a while, for myself, for the mutant. For things I wasn’t going to do, for things I still wanted to do but didn’t have the ability to go on with. It was too much…what I had done…let happen to me and tried to do…being a freakazoid mutant and not having any other freakazoid mutants to freak along with. I couldn’t do it. There wasn’t any reason to go on.

To be honest, the simple loneliness was actually the single biggest factor. I would have to fill a thousand pages with, “I am in jail, I am in jail, I am in jail,” and you would have to sit somewhere and actually read it all, be forced to read every single word over and over again, to begin to get near the internal mental anguish I was in. Go on. Try it.

I came to a calm. I had hours to kill, (!) because they would check me closely at ten when they locked everyone else down. A calm, an acceptance. My only concern now was doing it painlessly. I stomped on one of the disposable razors that you are given and extracted a nice fresh blade.

That was the best I could do…just make sure I had a sharp blade. I began to fantasise about the sensation of cutting my flesh. I had seen my own blood many times before…just not…like this.

Calm. I forgave myself and truly reasoned that this was an acceptable path, the only path. Abandoned wretch freakazoid mutant. Sent here to suffer. Sent here to die. Die you will. It is your destiny. Look what you have done, look what you tried to do. Look at the waste that is your life and existence. Laying it on a bit thick? Fuck you.

Something occurred to me. I really was going to hell. Suicide may be painless, (if you do it right, or depending on your bent, if you do it wrong) but it’s a one way ticket to the land of sin and blasphemy regardless. This amused me. I taunted Jesus.

“You’ve lost, Jesus. You’ve lost a soul. When I die, you lose. Satan gets me. I do this deliberately, wilfully in spite of you. Where is your power? Where is your kingdom that so easily do you surrender me to the abyss? Save me Jesus, go ahead save me! You can’t and you won’t. I am doomed to die now and doomed to an eternity in a hell of my own forging…you cannot stop me…go on STOP ME!!!!!”

I ranted for a long, long time. Tears again. Silence again. No saviour. Only death.

Calm.

I heard the doors in the hall opening. It’s final lockdown. I look about. My little exit ritual is prepared. It’s time to go. Satan’s Railway now departing. All aboard.

There is a sound of running feet that stops at my door. It’s the preacher man. His face appears pressed up against the small glass window in my door. He calls my name thrice and says,

“Man, Jesus just came to me and he said to tell you that he loves you! Night man!”

He went to his own cell.

Lights out.

Stopped. Realising. Wondering.

Acknowledging.

I pushed the bin away from the bed and dumped the fresh blade into it.

The train leaves without me.

What happened next or what was happening at that moment, I do not know. How did he know? I did not rant and rave and carry on loudly. Even if there were other people in the cells down the hall, how would they have heard me and told him without me in turn hearing them? Cold hard jail walls echo well. There was an almost airtight door between the hall and the yard where he was. Not to mention my closed door.

There are intercoms in each cell. Could the screws have secretly activated the intercom, listened to my insane mutant mutterings and knowing my association with the preacher man, asked him to, “look into it,” and he approached that as he saw fit?

Were that true, it would lend weight to other conspiracy theories I hold. Who says that because you have power you have to use it to spy and act nefariously? Why not use said power to help pathetic mutants like me? If I was a less pathetic mutant, I would help more pathetic mutants if I could. Pipe dreams, shut up mutant and get back to the story. You remain pathetic.

Whatever the truth was, in my mind, at that moment, I had challenged the son of God, and been answered…and been answered! Now that is something that you don’t see every day. I prayed, honestly and properly, like the lost sinner that I am.

Something appeared to me in my cell. Remember? Mental Illness? Another special ability afforded the insane mutant – visions.

It wasn’t…ahem…Jesus wasn’t there to see with the naked eye. It was as if I had no skull and my raw brain was open to air and the same as you feel sunlight on your skin, I felt him on my raw brain and this manifested itself into something decipherable by my visual cortex so though he was not there, I still saw him.

Kind of like receiving a digital signal, decoding it and projecting it onto a screen so you can see the message.

Except I didn’t get the sound component. Maybe I am not loony enough yet. But looking at him, either there was no sound to go with the image or it was irrelevant.

He just stood there before me, smiling. I see him now as I type this, in my memory. He is smiling, not a big smile, but an extremely smug smile and he extremely slowly and only just barely nods his head at me for a while.

It’s kind of like a holy Rick in really, really slow motion as if he has just made an absolutely incontrovertible point. You know. The Young Ones. Had enough you suicidal nazi or do you want some more?

Except Jesus does not thrust his hips at me and most certainly does not give me the circular forks.

He fades away very slowly over about half an hour. For that time, I am completely safe, completely warm and I am loved, wanted. I know that even though I don’t know what it is, I am needed for something and I am protected. That was an extremely cool half an hour.

I have a purpose!

(Sometimes I see Elvis’ face in carpet patterns and tile patterns. He looks like he is mouthing something but again, I can never hear him. The best one was when I was smashed off my tits living in a flat in Hamilton. That carpet was alive, man. So much pot was smoked, and spilled there, that you could have vacuumed the floor, emptied the bag into a bowl and smoked it. Elvis lives).

I prayed for months after that. I tried to talk to various ministers about it but oddly enough they treated me like an insane mutant. I guess if you don’t see God in their way you don’t see God at all. Luckily not one of the ministers were a Middle Eastern nation, and neither was I. There are already enough people killing each other about who knows how to love God properly.

So many people fighting over him. God must feel so much love from us down here.
That sustained me for many months, and for many years I knew it was pointless to think about ending my life prematurely. That has lasted until about, oh now I would say. I now see no point for Him saving my life. I have waited and I have searched and I have tried and I have worked and I have prayed.

I still see no reason why the span of time between then and now should exist with me in it. Why not let me die?

The lithium settled in. I felt sustained on most fronts, except being free that is. I stopped looking for answers and started living the best I could. I actually made some rewarding friendships that lasted for a while.

Time passed at Sir David Longlands. I worked at the laundry. I started some courses. I spoke a lot to a psychiatrist there. I opened up everything to him and held nothing back, about before jail anyway.

Pointless. I ended up asking him how I could help him when I went for visits because he sure as hell wasn’t helping me. I didn’t realise that yet and still thought there was some hope.

As if being honest and truthful, upfront and genuinely having a desire to heal and become a better person would make a difference. Down mutant.

I make a mistake. A big one. The guy who I thought was his bodyguard turns up and starts working in the laundry. There is an older crim working there too. There is actually only about four or five guys working in there. If that.

The guy who has been in there longest is a murderer. His wife I think. (Killing’s mostly done for passionate reasons you see. Wrong again mutant. You do not love taxi drivers). He seems a little slow but predictable. I like him.

The older crim is like a slightly more intense and “real” version of Grizzly Zen. I learn about life and jail from him. I continue to build myself. Kindergarten-Boggo Road. Infants-Sir David Longlands.

Things are OK until his, “bodyguard” turns up.

I think the bodyguard knows what he did to me and every time he laughs while talking to someone I twitch and look over to see if they are laughing at me.

Hello paranoia my old friend. Paranoia was never a part of me until jail.

I think they are planning to do it to me again. I don’t think it will happen with any promises of boats this time. There is only one screw in the laundry and he is not always there. I don’t feel as if I have the, “right to defend myself”. I am here for punishment. I have chosen the manner of my punishment. More laughter. I am a mutant. I deserve it.

It gets too much. Older Zen and bodyguard are in the coffee room of the laundry when I confront them. I have a moment of bravery. I say something to them about being tricked once but I will not let it happen again. I might have clenched my fists.

They look at me blankly for about five seconds.

They realise what I am saying and burst into raucous laughter, braying like donkeys who have just heard The Universe’s Best Joke.

They did not have a clue before I challenged them. It was just paranoia. Not anymore though. NOW they are laughing at me. He was not his bodyguard. Nothing to do with him. I just happen to have seen them talking once or twice and they worked near each other back in Boggo Road.

Now I’m laughed at.

Every day now…

“Are you sure I can’t fuck you?”

“Yeah, go get your pills,” as I go to get my lithium from the medication cart when it comes to the laundry, “Wouldn’t want you getting pregnant.”

I am a mutant. I am here to be punished and so I am. I become the size of a marble and live in my small intestines. I react to nothing. My face becomes a mask. I sing songs quietly to myself. INXS loses it’s coolness. I am completely insane again. I have chosen the manner of my punishment. That’s fair I guess.

A magazine turns up with a letter I wrote in it. While on remand at Boggo Road, I wrote a letter to the local paper back in Maryborough. It was flippant and insane, but it was also an apology to the town for what I had done. The last line of the letter was something about being careful when I picked up the soap. (Probably wrote it about the time I thought I had jail all sorted and I felt safe…silly mutant).

“YOU SURE WEREN’T CAREFUL ENOUGH WHEN YOU PICKED UP THE SOAP WERE YOU!!” More donkeys. Bray, Bray, Bray. I think it’s about now I stop praying so much. It does not seem to have worked.

One of the guys, a younger guy, an armed robber, pulls me aside one day. He hasn’t tormented me. He looks around conspiratorially, lowers his voice and lowers his forehead as he looks me in the eyes and says very calmly, “Don’t worry about it. You will just kill him one day. That’s all.” I get the feeling he is offering to help. He locks me with his gaze, looking from one eye to the other, then releases me.

That disturbs me and I have severely mixed reactions about this. Now, not only do I have everything as it stands to try to collate into some kind of comprehension, now I am burdened with an additional decision and, “responsibility.” If I don’t take care of my own business, who will?

Fate decides I need to choose my answer sooner rather than later.
One day I am lined up for a visit and I see him. He is here. About the time I went to court he left Boggo Road. I don’t know where he went. He is getting a visit too. He is pleased to see me and says with a smile that he is going to try to come and work with me in the laundry.

The marble that is me becomes a black hole and I collapse on myself. I feel the world warp around me as it rushes in to take the place that I used to occupy.

I tell one of the screws that I get along with OK the whole story. He wants details. He seems sympathetic but he wants details. What happened. How many times. Now the screws all know too. Everyone knows I am a mutant. I am, and have, nothing. No pride. No rights of any kind. I am simply nothing. I am destroyed. I am a collapsed imprisoned mutant, suffering as he deserves too.

Why can I not die? How is this justice? How can this be how it is meant to be?

Because I am a mutant.

I get some Dungeons and Dragons books. I pick up DMing from when I played a bit before going to jail. There is nothing quite like a fantasy world when the real one is...is… is not an option.

Inmates borrow my books to get tattoos of the monsters in them. I doubt I will see my books again each time one disappears into another yard. Each time a different guy from the one who asks to borrow it, gives it back with a, “Is this yours? Wow, cool, thanks, man,” I am surprised.

Later, on low security, I see a Mephit on someone’s arm. Straight from Monster Manual II or Fiend Folio. (Advanced Dungeons and Dragons. How are ya Vin? Did you use the alternate stat rolling methods in Unearthed Arcana?)

I don’t work in the laundry anymore. I work in the screws mess in my block. Safe mutant safe. I make them toast and clean their mess. They don’t make me wear an apron for which I am grateful. Maybe they are just happy to have someone handle their food who is unlikely to spit in it. Domestic mutant.

I vacuum their floor. I try to save a grass spider that is in the way of my vacuuming. It runs onto my hand and I try to convince it gently to go out the window. It bites me. I squash it. Vengeful mutant.

I gather a motley crew of prison role-players. They give me pot and I run Dungeons and Dragons games for them. Did you know most people in jail play knights and good guys? Hmmm. What would we be truly given a choice in life?

However the first guy to start playing D&D with me is somewhat…tormented. He is a big guy. He says he fell off a horse once and was lying for days with a head injury. He says he has black-outs and goes off. He does things like smashing trolleys full of plates against the wall and breaking broom handles and stabbing himself in the thigh with the jagged end. Loki told him to do it apparently.
He is an occultist. I learn that there are about fifty different names for Marduuk, depending on the level of power you require for the desired effect, or spell if you will.

He tries to convince me that it is possible to have an, “anal orgasm.” I do not have sex with him. He does however try to kiss and hug me when I give him a 20th level evil wizard to play, accessorised with a gloomy castle in the mountains and about 2,000 orcs between Cormyr and Sembia.

Somehow he manages to kill the two Paladins, played by two other guys, who I set up against him. I honestly did not think he would manage it.

The Paladins come back as Monadic Devas and kill the wizard. The wizard comes back as a black dragon. They battle in the air over Baldur’s Gate and the fight continues on down towards the Cloak Wood where the dragon has a lair.

I do many trips backwards and forwards between two cells. Evil dude in one cell and the two good guys in another. I keep detailed date files so I know where each party is and what they are doing. The tension between the cells is fantastic as no one knows when they are about to stumble on the enemy Player Character.

Each encounter becomes deadly serious as they don’t know if it’s just a bunch of bandits or the advance scout of a legendary evil wizard who WILL use everything he’s got.

The wizard watches the skies nervously as he expects the Paladins to call the sun down upon him.

The games are awesome. Driven so far from reality, I rule the fantasy world and my rulership brings escape to those who play in my game. When I had power I helped people, gave them dark spells and holy swords. Adventure and entertainment. Storytelling mutant.

In another game, they get me so bent one night that I end up giving them the Dungeon Master’s rulebook and telling them to, “take their pick” I simply couldn’t think anymore…so smashed was I.

They roll up intelligent swords with a list a special abilities as long as your arm. The gods tremble. It takes me many sessions of play to get them back. The gods say phew.

I had smoked only a puff or two before going to jail, but that changed at Sir David Longlands. Jokes abound about people coming to jail to visit inmates so they can score.

I get stoned and listen to Pink Floyd. It was the first time I had heard The Wall and the bit where the helicopter flies in and, “Stand still laddie!” is yelled out had me so convinced it was real, I was peering nervously out of a cell window looking for the chopper. I was very smashed. Bent Mutant.

I started working in the carpenters shop. While I was there, there was rumour of a riot. It was explained to me that if there is an actual riot you have to be seen to break at least one thing or you will get in trouble after it’s over. I smirked and considered my opportunities for another fire. For a day or two I walked around looking for soft spots to kindle one of my children. My first born.

Well, I mean, if I have to…

I was taught how to wrap a t-shirt around my head, ninja style, so that if there was a riot, the security cameras could not convict you. The riot didn’t happen. My children sleep.

There was a yard, quite close to the carpenters shop that the screws filled with seventeen year olds. That was the rumour anyway. They weren’t supposed to be here, but there was no room elsewhere, or they were the, “worst of the worst,” of the juvies or something. They were kept segregated from the mainstream. At first.

We heard a commotion from the yard one day. Seems the yard of juvies had turned on one of, “their own,” and gang raped him. There is about twenty or so, (maybe more, I can’t recall) cells to a yard. The gang rapists were not segregated any more. Rumour is, they were handed out one by one to other yards. Chose your fate. That’s fair.

“What now? Well let me tell you what now. I'm gonna call a couple pipe-hittin' niggers, who'll go to work on homes here with a pair of pliers and a blow torch. Hear me talkin' hillbilly boy?! I ain't through with you by a damn sight. I'm gonna git Medieval on your ass.”

- Marsellus Wallace. Pulp Fiction.

Not quite.

I met a guy there who got six months for assault, brutally slaughtered a kid fucker while inside, (mistakes happen you know, cells do get left open tut, tut) and then got life… as a hero as far as the jail mainstream is concerned. He walks around with a permanent grin. Now he is waiting for his next chance to do God’s work. He has nothing to lose now.

They say the child rapist was still gurgling softly in his own blood as the screws came running, (eventually, hmmm must have been a shift change) to see who was howling in abject fear, terror and agony. When we would ask him what he used to kill the evil bastard with, he would only grin even more broadly and say softly;

“Everything’s a weapon.”

None of the screws would tell us either. They would only shake their heads slowly. This is from the kind of guys who delighted in telling me once how far your neck stretches when you get good and high with a nice tightly tied sheet. In their defence, they had just had to take photos of someone who had just hung themselves and they probably just needed to vent.

Probably.

God has servants everywhere. In the light, in the grey, and in the dark. If you touch a child, or indeed any innocent in a manner that harms them in any way, you are going to meet one of them. Some of them will pray for you. Some of them will counsel you. Some of them will torment you until you confess your guilt. And some of them will grin like a maniac as they whistle a cheery jig and use whatever’s at hand to make blood come out of you until your body doesn’t work anymore. Sometime before that happens, God will show you some way of making amends. I suggest you take it.

If you don’t use the chance that God gives you, you better practice your gurgling. You don’t want to sound like an amateur as you leave this world and go to become Satan’s personal knob swallower. I apologise to those servants of God who would choose to pray for the sinner. I apologise for the manner of my words here. I wish I had your end of the job.

A year or so has passed and I am up for assessment. I am reduced to medium security and I go to Borrallon. Borrallon turned out to be very productive for me. I did a course by correspondence that brought me up to Yr 12 standard with a TE score of 850.

(Years later I go to University for one semester. It doesn’t work out.)

I also get my Marine Radio license…for some reason… Some drug smuggling yanks run the course. Or were they Canadian? They explain that when you land a Lear Jet, you have to fly the plane into the ground, you can’t glide it. Good advice, I shall remember that.

People have computers in their cells here. Actually, some guys did back at Sir David Longlands did too. I play some sword and sorcery game on one guy’s machine. He is in for murder, or manslaughter, I can’t remember. He claims he got the blood on his shoe because he was walking past the guy on the ground who was being kicked to death and the blood sprayed out onto him.

He had a violence in him, like a barely contained dam. Like you could see the cracks all the time, just about to burst open. It was really scary when he smiled because it didn’t suit him. It was better for him to scowl because it seemed to offer more of a warning. Like the smile covered up the true violence that was just about to burst forth at any moment.

I start going to the gym. I am 22, there is a guy in for drugs who goes to the gym with me who is 33. There is another guy, (drugs too I think) who comes as well. He is 44. This amuses us. I run around the large oval and exercise area regularly. I put on a little weight.

I accidentally piss someone off. He is one of a largish family in jail and he is the youngest I am told. They are apparently an, “honourable,” family, jailwise, and when he thinks I have insulted him, he attempts to attack me…. not wanting any dishonour to come upon his family in the form of imagined insults from a mutant. I did no such thing and did not even know he existed until he was in my face screaming at me.
Paranoia has lots of friends it seems.

I am defended by several people, both physically and socially. This is a revelation. Two guys place their bodies between me an my would be assailant. I am defended.

Hoe lee sheet. Mutant allies.

Later, a friendly murderer, (wife again, told you, it’s all about the lurv baby), goes and speaks to the guy who tried to attack me. He, (the attacker) comes and apologises to me for the misunderstanding. In a jail sense, it’s kind of like a young knight apologising to the hunchback peasant he nearly rode over. I assure him there is no harm done.

Some time later one of the guys who defended me tries to pick up and throw a tennis umpire’s chair at me. One of those eight or nine foot tall metal jobbies. He thinks I have insulted him…

What. The. Fuck. Why does this keep happening? I seriously must look like a real freak to have people want to destroy me all the time. Like I am a disease and they are the white blood cells.

In my defence, this guy was a self confessed Buddhist Satanist.

…

Don’t ask.

Later, I clean up his blood after he chops his little finger off with a pair of scissors. Well, I scored his cell and no one else was going to do it.

I am at Borrallon for six months I think. Maybe more, I do not recall. From Borrallon I enter the WORC Scheme. Back in ’90, there were some bad floods out west. Low security prisoners were sent to help clean up. After the floods, some of them stayed and the Western Out Reach Camps were established.

I scored big time. As I arrived, the crim who was working at the hospital was just leaving and I got his job. This was at Cunnamulla. We lived at the racecourse and there were no fences. We mingled quite freely with the townsfolk.

Well I did anyway, not everyone managed it. They got pissed off at people like me who got invited in to BBQs and to stay at people’s houses for State of Origin and stuff like that.

I don’t think they understood the concept of being nice to the locals. They just wanted. They saw what I and a couple of others had and just wanted it without being capable of having it. It’s just manners people. Be nice. Friendly mutant.

I get my first heterosexual sex for almost three years in Cunnamulla. The first time I see her she is putting a rifle away and killing the small pink joey of the roo she had just shot.
We screw on the grass beside her mother’s house one night when I sneak into town with one of the other crims, (who fucks her sister. He says we are there to improve the genetics of the west).

I am on top of the world. She moans my name in the most delightful way as I go down on her. Yay, I’m straight again. I really like her but she doesn’t want to speak to me anymore.

One of the other crims fucks her. The one who fucked her sister. Ah. One of the other crims tells me not to fall in love with every chick I screw. Oh. Gotya. I think I was actually taught that in primary school. Find. Finger. Fuck. Forget.

Hello Tanya. I definitely found you, I do not remember a finger, there was certainly no fucking but I have never forgotten you.

I think of you every time I hear Cat Steven’s, Old School Yard.

“You were my sweet love, my first sweet love
My lovey dove, my love lovey dove
No matter what place, whichever the place
I still see your face, your smiling face
In childish dreams, inside my dreams
Like king and queen, God save our dreams
N’though time may face, though time may fade
It ain’t never too late, to learn about love
Learn about love.”

Every time.

Thanks Yusaf.

(I got in trouble for flashing my pee-pee at her in Grade Four. “WHAT ARE YOU DOING TO THAT GIRL!!?” cried the teacher in horror as I, grinning like a Cheshire cat, whip out my little guy and point it at Tanya in the back corner of the classroom. Told ya I was bonkers right from the start…)

I was ideally positioned as groundsman at the hospital. The locals called me “Matches”. The handyman from the hospital invited me roo shooting. I asked one of the screws. He said no worries. I was surprised but I didn’t question it.

I went shooting many times. I reloaded the ammo for the handyman’s rifle, and for mine. I used a .243 and he used a big 8.9mm. We also had an SKK for yippee shoots. I was still a good shot. (Except for goats. Don’t ask).

There is only one cab driver in town and I am not even tempted. I’m cured.

It was funny to hear the handyman say, “Awwwwww, did you get him Matches!?” As I headshoot a roo from 200 yards. Real outback accent on him. A bit of a wildman in his day they say but he gave up the rum and the cigarettes and went straight.
He is a fantastic shot and I learn to rapidly change my focus from near to far and back again while scanning through the bush for targets. Go try it. Go try to scan completely through the sparse Australian bush. Your eyes will tend to stop and want to focus every five meters or so on the dispersed trees.

You have to train them not to because you need to sweep smoothly while looking for roos. They are actually not easy to spot, and if they see you, nine times out of ten they are gone before you can bring weapon to bear. You can’t spend your time, “jerking” your focus from tree to tree. That’s not always the case however. Sometimes they stay. Don’t ask.

So began my “reintroduction” to society. I got a week off every month or so that I spent with family and getting to know my brothers’ friends. It was a long trip from Cunnamulla to Brisbane in the back of a cramped troopy. Always worth it though.

I spend time at a few different camps. Storms in Winton are awesome. The ones that sweep by the flat ground and you see them from afar anyway. Twice the other crims fuck up the Cunnamulla camp. Talk about shitting in your own nest.

I am shanghaied from Winton. I am suspected of using Dungeons and Dragons to brainwash the other prisoners into following me in a mutiny. I am both severely pissed off and amused at the same time. I’m not even in the Navy. Sorry, dad. Does that matter to you that I chose Army instead of Navy? Are you in God’s Navy now?

The GHS Melbourne (God’s Heavenly Ship), a holy white aircraft carrier, gleaming in the sky as it goes cruising through the clouds, launching golden Celestial A-4 Skyhawks to shoot down the demons. Salute, dad, see ya again one day. My nana, my dad’s mum, says the evening star is dad looking down on me. Maybe it’s the reflection from the GHS Melbourne’s hull.

(My dad worked with church youth groups. Quite the Christian apparently. I recently listened to a tape, that he and some of his buddies made while away on a ship somewhere to send back to one of these groups. I think it was about 1966. He used to like to talk a lot too as it turns out…)

I do some mustering at Hythe. A couple of the other crims and I go out on a billabong with an outboard. I sit in the front. The guy in the back opens the throttle wide, points the tinny at the bank and laughing insanely, (YAY!) leaps from the boat. I dive into the back of the boat and heave the outboard to one side.

Apparently the motor wasn’t bolted on very tightly and I hurl it off the back of the boat. It says glub. My auto-jettisoned friend stops sounding jovial. He is a street kid but speaks with such perfect enunciation that it just doesn’t fit.

We retrieve the motor. We reattach it and pull the starter cord many times. It says glub, glub, glub. Eventually it says roar. He laughs insanely again. I steer the boat home. The boat thing must be in the genes eh?

I bury an irrigation system for an earth wall in Charleville. They said I could just lay the pipes above ground but I start burying them. I think it looks better. They shrug and give me more pipe and tools. The council guys come to see what I am doing and take me for a drive to their depot to see if there are any small trees in their nursery I would like.

I take lots and bury more pipes to water them.

The earth wall was an afterthought. People complained about the old peoples’ home being built beside the graveyard so they graded up an earth wall to compensate. They might have hid the graves but I gave them foliage to look at.

I work at the water tower at Charleville too. I basically spend all day in the shade, occasionally moving the sprinklers around. I consider the subterranean options here. They are too vast. I bring a walkman and an exercise pad. I listen to The Wall a lot. Not for the first time in jail do I try to write a story. Sword and Sorcery.

I always fall over myself. I start writing stuff that illustrates something I feel I have experienced or learnt in my life, but you can’t do that unless you actually write about your life straight up. In the back of my mind I would like to be honest about everything and try to tell people exactly why I am a mutant. I will let you know if I ever actually get around to that.

Instead, I try to put it in terms of hidden secrets and puzzles that heroes have to put together. I invent myself in a fractured form and create champions who care so much about me that they will fight demons and dragons to put me back together. They crawl through dungeons looking for the lost piece, but somehow my stories end up with thread after thread of possibilities and questions and no one, metaphoric or not, is saved.

A grey haired old German screw tells me anyone who was alive in Germany during Hitler’s day who tells you they weren’t a Nazi, is lying.

Eventually I am released on work release. I work at Bardon 7-11 for some friendly nazis of a different kind who are willing to give me a chance. It’s the far right wing belief that once suitably cowed by the system, you should be allowed to mop floors and clean up other people’s shit. It does in fact kind of work for me. Industrious mutant.

They aren’t German. They are South African. I am told that the blacks cannot operate Africa without white people and it’s not a matter of enjoying ruling them, it’s a matter of having to because they are in fact, simply not capable.

She is concerned. It’s about the time when the shit was really hitting the fan over there in South Africa. She thinks he wants to go back and help, “sort it out.”

Later, I work for some black South Africans who are simply happy to live in Australia now. It’s like they get here and literally spend years saying, “phew.” Stick that in your pipe and smoke it ATSIC.
My favourite junky who visits me there regularly, dies. I don’t know he is dead until two girls come in with tears in their eyes. Drugs=bad mmmkay?

I end up leaving partially because the guy who does the other graveyards, gets paid more and does less. Funny how the harder you work, the more other people get an easy ride. Oh, and fuck that.

Finally, in December ’93 I begin six years of parole.

I meet all new people. They all know I have come from jail of course but no one knows any details. At least I think they don’t. I have been wrong before of course about what people do and don’t know and it’s relevance to me.

They are all friends of my two brothers, sorry, three brothers and a sister. My mother remarried while I was in jail and now I have a spare brother and a spare sister.

I turn my back on jail and try to live. I keep taking lithium. I have various jobs, mostly graveyards at 7-11s. Funny how night work just isn’t scary after jail. 99.999% of the time I don’t lay my hands on people in the store who shit me for one reason or another. A couple of times however, guys do shit me to the point where I have to explain to them that I am just about to bash them.

They do not believe the 7-11 dude and laugh. Both times they get out of the door and away before I make it to them with a sudden sprint. Both times there are two of them. I still feel it’s fair to warn them adequately first. One of them turns and informs me that I am a maniac as he flees across the car park.

No one ever, ever, even looks, like holding me up. Have you seen Getting Square? That is some funny shit.

I am full of hope. I think things can only get better.

(I get stoned and see Elvis).

But I am still mad, it’s just on hold for a while as momentum carries me forwards. I always have people to be around but they aren’t really connecting with me. Most of them are up to five years younger and more and who the hell knows how they perceive their friend’s big brother from jail?

They know I am bonkers…what are they thinking as they talk to me?

Yes, my old buddy paranoia, how are ya mate?

Over the years I come to know a few a bit better. But the more I know and try to connect, the more it’s the same old story. All I find are the gulfs, the differences. I handle it better this time round though. Nothing turns to ash and I don’t pull any triggers on anyone.

I do say a lot of really stupid shit though. Terrible stuff and I don’t know where it comes from.
I think perhaps I feel the need to have a negative psychological impact. I reason that the people want to see a bad guy, it’s what they expect. Some handle it very wisely and I envy the position they are capable of taking. Some even genuinely help for a while.

It’s not all bad. I do have some good times. Role-playing, war gaming, camping, parties, people to talk to. It’s not all bad. I think some people genuinely invite me to be part of their lives. I spend quite some time in the real world. Too close to goodness though. Mutant stomp.

I have to see a shrink regularly as a part of parole conditions. I see many. All up I have probably spoken to two or three psychologists and up to five or six psychiatrists, more actually I think. They all, ALL have different ideas about me. All slightly different diagnosis. It’s all shit of course.

I try a few different medications over the years. Only lithium has a good effect. I go on, still thinking there are good things out there to move towards, that I can have. I try to grow human skin over my warts.

While I am working at a 7-11, one of the shrinks I saw walks in. He is in his 40’s (late probably) I guess. I only saw him once or twice. The shrink I was regularly seeing at that stage was away. I had been off lithium for a while but felt I needed to go back on it, I was starting to feel manic, but not in a good way. I never felt manic in a good way again. Not since the fires started.

Well that’s a lie, several times I have started to feel good again. The elation begins and my mind starts to press against the inside of the top of my head as it tries to reach up to God. But every time my feet start to leave the ground and feelings of bliss wash over me a giant hole is torn in the bottom of my soul as a huge black anchor with a spiky chain erupts from me, smashes downwards and lodges firmly in the ground, dragging me back down.

Demonic smiths forged that chain and anchor while I wasn’t watching. It took them years to gather the, “material,” they made it from. It’s not that they don’t want me to go manic and destroy things again, they just know, that if I could get away again, you know, go manic, I would be gone for good and suffer no more. They do not want that.

He said I wasn’t bi polar. The best way to get a shrink to give you a new disorder or diagnosis is to insist that you know what’s wrong with you because another doctor has seen you. It seems to bring out the competitive spirit in them. Or they simply think you are a lying mutant.

You tell them what someone else has said and they lower their foreheads at you, clasp their hands together and you can almost hear them think to themselves, “Did he?” as you explain the last doctor said you were bi polar, “Well,” their thoughts go on, “we’ll see about that shall we?”

You end up like a painting that’s never finished, or at least if you are, you don’t know it because each artist you go to for appraisal pulls out his own palette and, “touches you up,” to his liking. It’s never to fix you though, all the touching up does is highlight the existing problems. Then again, why would a mechanic want a car that never needs fixing? Ah, that’s an unfair statement. Fuck it. Too late. I made it.

I asked this shrink for a prescription for lithium. It’s not like I was asking for valium or mogodons or anything. Lithium isn’t like that. He spoke to me and said I had an anxiety disorder and I didn’t need lithium. I said that lithium had worked for me in the past and I did need it. He would not give me any. Shrink wins.

So he walks into the 7-11 that I am working at, dressed in a black heavy metal shirt and jeans. It could have been a Metallica shirt, or AC-DC, I don’t recall. He didn’t see me as he wandered over to the magazine rack. I actually didn’t know if I should say hello, or even wanted to say hello. I ignored him and he didn’t see me for a while.

Thinking back now, and describing now, it probably sounds petty or irrelevant to comment on his attire but he really did look pathetic. An old man dressed like a head banging teenage boy. I clean something for a while and forget about him. He has been at the magazines for a while now. Going through the porn as it turns out.

I go back and stand behind the counter and finally he looks up and makes eye contact. Big deal, looking at porn, it’s legal. So why does he make a slightly frightened face as he recognises me? Ever so slight. His jaw doesn’t hit the ground and he doesn’t go bright red or anything quite so Careyesque though.

He quickly shuffles out. I am quite amused by this small event. You can consider the implications of his apparent guilt with relation to his profession as you choose. I considered them and it amused me.

I am working at that same 7-11 when someone from my past walks back into my life. I am elated. It is the ex whose friend (and who became my friend) wrote to me for so long in jail. It is about 1995 I think.

We wrote a bit in jail. Hang on, she visited me too? How the hell can I only be remembering that now? Ah, mental illness. So convenient to be able to pull that when needs be. She tells me about a blow out one time when she comes to visit me. She maintained control of the car. A Laser? I am impressed with her driving.

I remember writing a story about her and sending it to her in a letter. She is the most beautiful fish in the ocean and I am fisherman. He catches her and puts her in a tank but he doesn’t think it’s fair so he puts her back. Or something. I really can’t remember now. Maybe he doesn’t catch her but thinks that’s for the best?

Has to be some mermaid inspired fantasy situation. Maybe it’s a throw back in my mind to when we would go swimming and…well now, that’s none of your business is it?

Now I remember her when I first got out of jail too? At Hendra at my folks place? We are standing out by her car as she is about to go. I kiss her? I hug her? I have a raging hard on which embarrasses me for some reason, and so I hug her against my hip instead of straight on. For some reason I can’t tell her that every fibre of my being is screaming out to be with her and wants to love her. Oh yeah, that’s right. I am a mutant.

As you may have guessed, she figures prominently in my thoughts even if my memories are a tad wonky.

I had actually seen her walking down the street in Brisbane City a year or whatever earlier, she walked right in front of me, I almost reached out and said hello to her, but she looked so different to who she had been when I was seventeen and she was fifteen. What a shock eh? Stupid mutant. I remember the way her arse moved as she walked away from me. There has never, and will never be, an arse sexier than hers.

One time, after I first broke up with her waaaaaay back in Maryborough as a teenager, she was standing out the front of a friend’s house, bending over in fact, picking something up and a friend in the car with me looked at her bending over as we drove up and he slapped me, saying, “How could you break up with THAT!?” Indeed, my chauvinistic Russian friend, how could I…

Thinking back now to the first time I can remember talking to her at high school, the memory of her beauty cuts my heart like a golden knife.

When she heard, in 1990, that the Maryborough Arsonist had been caught, even though she hadn’t seen me for a long time at that stage, she knew it was me. Her mother said to her that someone had been arrested and before her mother spoke my name, she did.

We started going out again. Sort of. This was extremely messy. Extremely. I was still every bit the mutant I had been when I was burning things down and… ahem… holding up taxis.

We run naked into the rain one day. We don’t say anything. We are standing on my back porch at Indooroopilly and it starts raining. We look at each other and strip naked and go and sit in the back yard hugging each other. It is bloody cold and we shiver. I think we last about 30 seconds. We run back inside. I don’t know. Who cares. Don’t ask.

She had had her problems too, we all do. I thought she was still afflicted by them, but in fact, I think she was trying to point out some of mine. I told her I would wait for her while she caught up, she asked me what I would do if it was I who was the one who was behind?

We had some LSD. Not good for you. Not for me anyway. It was my first trip. It was also the first time I had ever seen VB throwdowns, the small stubbies. As I sat there tripping, wondering what to expect, someone thrust one of these small stubbies into my hand. I could not work out why my hand wrapped so far around the stubbie. I thought I had suddenly grown to gigantic proportions. I sat there quietly peaking.
After being at The Mass for a few hours, off our dials, she is sitting in an alcove near the front door. It looks like a phone might have once been there. She is sitting on the shelf where it might have been and I stand in front of her and cock my head to one side and ask seriously of her, “So, when does it kick in?”

She looks at me with utter disbelief. Later she says she thought I was for real at first. She realises I am joking and we piss ourselves laughing like trippers. Her eyes are so wide and weird yet so sexy as she stares at me for that second or two as she cannot believe what I am saying.

That’s LSD for you. I didn’t really enjoy it. My mutant mind rebels against anything else trying to make it loopier. Got plenty thanks, lots of loopy juice here already, sod off.

What to say of this time? We were on again off again for a couple of years. It ended in marijuana induced tragedy. Remember all those things I don’t say to people? Bingo. I was still the mutant. Still the mutant. I was meant to be with her. But mutants get nothing. Mutants deserve nothing.

Back when we were together as teenagers, my eye began to wander. I asked an adult who I thought was wise and knowledgeable what I should do. What I wanted to hear was something along the lines of;

“You two are good together, work at it, it will be worth it,”

What I was actually told was that I was crazy for tying myself to one person at such a young age and I should play the field. Mutant hear, mutant do.

I played.

I messed about with another girl at a party while I was still with her. In fact I barely got her bra off. This girl said what about my girlfriend? I thought that was an odd thing for her to ask as my fingers reached her nipples. Isn’t this how it’s meant to be? I am playing the field like I was told to.

I lie to her. “Oh I have done this lots of times,” I claimed, in an attempt to make her think this was in fact, the norm. (As I had been told it was). She puts a stop to proceedings and we rejoin the party.

I am pretty sure that someone told my girlfriend that things had gone a lot further. Years later she still did not believe it had only gone that far. I do not know who told her what. I was in fact, at that stage, still a virgin.

A week or so later I call it off with her. I think she wanted to forgive me but I had been told to play. I tell her I don’t love her anymore and leave her standing under a streetlight at the end of her street.

As I walk away she runs up to me, kisses me, and runs crying back to her house. Years later she told me she didn’t know if she was going to kiss me or slap me as she ran up to me.
Later, I get my first fuck. The pills clear up the symptoms in a week or two. Filthy bitch. Nice move but God, very…errr…Biblical of you. It actually wasn’t my fault. I broke three condoms in one night on her once. Don’t buy the ultra thin ones. I am told she is hooking in Sydney now. Heavenly name, Satanic results.

That, is my biggest regret. Listening to that one piece of advice is the single most wrong thing I have ever done. Ever. It all stems from that. Everything.

“Should I be responsible or irresponsible?”

“Go play.”

That was the second of two moments in my life when all possibilities flowed through a single point. “You don’t need a lawyer,” and, “Go play the field.”

She stayed with me to her detriment for quite some time. I see that now, looking back. I guess she stuck it out for as long as she could. I was unreasonable, ignorant, damaged, arrogant and most of all, a mutant.

She left. Just disappeared one day. That was seven years ago. Deep down I know she was justified. I was smoking too much pot and it was affecting me greatly, focusing the mutant in me into a finely tuned weapon of destruction that I turned on both her and myself.

I thought she was down in some sort of hell and I had to go down to her and bring her back up again. She wasn’t down there, well not where I looked anyway, but I dragged us both down none the less. That Robin Williams movie where he goes into hell to rescue his insane wife gave me the spooks. I seem to remember it turned out OK for him though.

So would my life if I was writing the story instead of just reporting it. Welcome to Annexia. Bug powder dust anyone? Rub some on your lips? Sure.

I have never seen her since and I have looked several times.. There is a barrier there that stops me. This might simply be her complete disinterest in my continued existence. I accept that.

I am told she is married with two kids now. She rang once, the day she left. I asked her for reassurance. Weak mutant. I wrote her a story and sent it to her a few months after I last saw her.

It was about a knight who gets imprisoned for chasing a dragon around a town at night and no one believes him. They blame the dragon fire on him. He meets this Vampire chick when he gets out or escapes or whatever happened to him. They fall in love. Mmmmm allegorical.

We kinda had this vampire thing going. Well maybe it was just her. I kept the ticket from, Interview With the Vampire that we saw together until only a couple a months ago. We read the Anne Rice books. Personally, I am not a vampire fan. It’s just how it worked out. She had had her Goth days I think.
(Faith is better than Buffy. I would… patrol with Faith. With Willow I would…errr…shake hands of course, Wesley… Joss, you better stay hidden for what you did to Tara…If I get my hands on your script writing typewriter, that is one babe I will be resurrecting… Yeah… it would so be the first time that happened in Buffy… not… What if I out pop-culture reference you? Would you bring her back? Would you give me that Chance?).

I was told via a third party that she said the story was crap. That’s the last I had even third party contact with her. Thinking back, it was a kind of whiny tale. No one wanted to go to Toschi Station, but it was bad enough.

I think she was way past me. She saw more of reality than I am capable of perceiving and she tried to help me see it. I see that now, though at the time I thought my experiences had made me wise and knowledgeable. I knew nothing then and I know nothing now. Empty headed mutant.

I loved her. Needy mutant.

I hurt her. Evil mutant.

(A need a moment to myself here please).

“James or Kerrin or whatever your fucked up name is - You are a fuckhead and if you burn slowly in hell for a thousand lifetimes, the fire will have gone out far too soon.”

-my (belated) conscience.

(Thank you for that moment of privacy).

It adds up like this; Love + Hurt = Zero

A month or so later, perhaps longer, a friend took me to hospital via Lifeline. (Thank you for being there Lifeline). I was admitted to the psych ward. I was an incoherent mess. Grass, losing her, general state of being a mutant…

Melleril, largactyl, lithium, who knows what else they fed me? I stayed there for about six weeks, screwed one of the other patients, (a female I will have you know and it’s crap sex, the pills see to that), and returned to live with three guys in Ascot. Mopey mutant.

From that moment until very recently, I have lived in continual expectation that at any moment she would reappear and say, “I’m back, you have suffered enough. You have finally learnt all you need to, to have me in your life again.”

It’s called Mental Illness and it fucks you up. You have unreasonable thoughts and expectations that you can neither explain nor dismiss. They are there. You are lead down paths of non existent hope to laughing demons that you recognise because they are you.

You walk down these paths in warpspace while other people walk paths in the real world. Every time you manage to drag yourself back into the real world all you can see is how far people have gone ahead of you because relatively speaking, all their travelling goes from the point where you last entered the warp. You come out at the same point in real space, but they have moved on.

You build yourself up and make excuses to keep going but you will only tear yourself down again, from the inside. I don’t need any help doing that anymore. I don’t need to be fed anymore external pain like other people do. It’s all in here now. Full thanks. Ding. Please pay at the cashier.

I stand for a long time on the Storey Bridge one night. I have walked there from Hamilton. (Where Elvis lives). I throw my watch in the water. It has my name engraved on it and, “INXS Rules!”

I engraved it myself when I was seventeen. I got it the first Christmas I was working as a jeweller. I had it on lay-by but my boss paid the last $30 off it and gave it to me as a present at a Christmas party at his place. That was cool.

I throw my ring in the river too. It is made from gold melted down from some of my father’s rings. It has a diamond in it that was one of three from an eternity ring my father bought my mother. It was extremely feminine. When my mother said she was going to do it I recommended against it. She didn’t listen. A girl I lived with for a while used to call it my, “not very masculine ring.” Ironic. Splash.

I threw them in because I didn’t want any identification on my body. I was about to go over next but the sacrifice of two things so dear to me seemed enough to please the demons who had whispered to me to test Jesus again so they released me.
Years later I hear that a guy I knew in Maryborough jumped from the same place. Bye, mate, see ya when I get there.

It was a good watch. A Pulsar. Stainless steel. Waterproof. I wonder how long it kept keeping time in the deep, dark mud of the Brisbane River before the second hand ticked it’s one, last, final, tick in the blackness? In ten thousand years, when they dig it up they will say, “Look! Here’s proof that this land was once a kingdom. See, someone named King INXS ruled!”

Damn, I should have engraved Elvis.

Or maybe I effectively, “slew,” the watch and it moved on too. There ya go Michael, it’s watch ya need. Keep it warm for me please. Great music, man. Bloody tops. And full marks for the whole Kylie thing too, what an absolute babe she is. She’s still doing well yeah. Yeah on a towel, real slow. Sorry man, gotta go, writing a story here. Say hi to Paula for me. No, I don’t think me going and saying hi to Tiges for you is a very good idea. Yeah, no worries, chat later mate, bye.

I moped for six months or more. Slept all day, sat up all night. Read Lord of the Rings again. I discovered porn on the internet. I went looking for X-files information and came across a, “Gillian Anderson nude,” link. Oh goody. That’s where THAT little adventure started. My God but she was sexy-cute in the first season or two.

Slowly, I stop taking the pills they started me on in the Psych ward. Except lithium.

One day I just gathered myself, stood up and declared of my own volition to fate/destiny/God/whatever that I had suffered for long enough and that I would now be provided with the woman I was destined to be with. (Still thinking that the answer was in someone else you see…deluded mutant).

I met someone. To be exact, I met someone then I met someone’s friend. We got together. We spent quite a few years as a couple. It seemed as though it was destiny.

It’s kind of like a dream now. For those years I was with her, it seemed a “normal” life was in reach. Kids, a house. Surprised mutant.

I learnt a lot while I was with her. Good and bad stuff. What it is to be with someone for years. What it is to know who you are coming home to everyday. The sex was great too. Well it was for me anyway. She had, (still has as far as I know) a fantastic body, tall and full. I made her a bit uncomfortable about her lack of experience though. That wasn’t nice.

I learnt the, “you did the wrong thing, you’ve done your time, it’s dealt with,” response. That worked for years. That was her family’s attitude towards me. It’s the only one that’s actually worked for any length of time. It truly did work very effectively for years.

All the males in her family are bigger than me. I am not short and neither is she, I begin to picture our kids with eager anticipation. They will be large and I will train them from birth to be good and just, but also to be able to fight, but responsibly and defensively. Vicarious?…errr so what? If you can’t teach your kids the lessons of your life who can you and what’s the point of having kids?

One guy I know from jail is encouraging his son to become a policeman.

The one or two actual moments that I ever spent learning a fighting style was based around a, “block then retaliate,” style. I never learnt an opening attack move. I think about starting my kids on such a style as soon as I can interest them.

“A Jedi uses his powers for defence, never attack.”

-Jedi philosophy. Star Wars.

I learnt what it feels like to have your girlfriend miscarry. How it affects her. A lot. Be sympathetic guys. They say it can be as bad as if the baby actually died in their arms and it’s common for the woman to feel like it’s her fault. Be nice okay?

I felt what it’s like to almost have a house and marriage. It was a really good feeling, like the future made sense and you knew how to chart your way through it.
Unfortunately, I, “plateaued.” Otherwise known as, “caving,” I believe. It is a common guy thing I am told. You reach a point where you are happy, content, and you don’t put anymore effort in. You stop moving forwards. You stagnate.

I learnt what it’s like to spend too much time playing computer games and looking at porn on the internet instead of making love to the woman you profess to want to be with for the rest of your life.

And finally of course, what it’s like to live with someone, but in separate rooms, and during that time talk to some other guy ringing for her who eventually fucks her.

Incredulous mutant. Belittled mutant.

“If you don’t play with your toys they get taken away.”

-a beautiful and wise advisor and healer to whom I can not speak anymore for fear of falling in love with. (The good ones are always taken). Real life.

Ended up in a psych ward again. My fault. Forgot the cardinal rule. Mutants get nothing and even when they do have something, they will destroy it themselves from the inside. Best I don’t breed anymore anyway. What if it is genetic? I already have my first born.

Whooshka.

Since then I have had several good jobs. Mutant destroyed them, don’t worry.

I have see quite a few chicks since then too, including a couple of really good ones. Mutant be mean and lie to them.

I spend a few months with a young chick. 22. Extremely intelligent and the sex is the second best in my life. (Sorry, but there was this one time… at band camp… ARGH! Shut up with the Allyson Hannigan musical fantasies already!!!! There was in fact, one time that this, “thing,” was done to me that almost made me pass out… talk about fly you to the moon and back… I can’t tell you about it. That was a serious sacred moment. I had a pillow over my head anyway so I do not know what she did to me…)

She writes me poetry! This is an extremely, rare event! A chick writing me stuff? Told you she was smart. It’s funny, flattering, poignant and sexy too! Topical even. We make candlelit love while John Mayer sings, “Your body is a wonderland.”

She is, or at least has been, bisexual. Possibilities abound. We discuss such… endeavours and what we would/wouldn’t be comfortable with happening. It is actually the most mature attitude I have ever had towards sex in my entire life but she is dubious, saying that she thinks too much of me to risk the possible ramifications of sexually adventuring with other people.

Rats.

She does however, do a really cool English accent. Mutant melt. She’s into a lot of, “young” movies and I rewind to a certain extent and I honestly feel I might have a chance to relive (YAY!) a few, “lost years” with her. You are as young as the woman you feel or something? It gets a little annoying seeing movies with themes rehashed from my late teens/early twenties but I guess they were probably rehashes when I first saw them too right?

I try to get her into movies and stuff that provokes my thought processes. It doesn’t go over too well but it’s not bad either. Who cares, she is bubbly, smart and the sex is good. She makes me want to put effort into the relationship.

We cover some heavy issues very early in the relationship…too heavy to inflict on a 22 year old who should not be being forced to make decisions about kids and stuff in such a new romance. She isn’t happy but she bravely steps up to the plate and we do talk about it.

She is tall, I mean in heels, she is taller than me and strong too! She can pick me up clean off the ground! I get her to do it all the time because it’s so cool. I find this an extremely big turn on. She is feminine but tough. In a way, she seems to be the female version of what I suspect myself to be, you know, mostly male but with a strong measure of… errr… “intuition?” yeah that will do for now, whereas she is, like I said, feminine but tough.

The kind of girl who you could be out with and if someone, “starts it,” won’t go and wait frightened in the corner to see if you get the shit kicked out of you, but circles around the other side, looking for a chance to get her own in. Funny thing is, I think, (and tell her) that she does look kind of like Eliza Dushku…

TIME OUT

Right. That is too many Buffy and Buffy related references now. Explanation. Last year I bought a DVD player mainly for one reason… to watch all the Buffy episodes.

I never really got into Buffy until one night, stoned as, I got into bed with that chick who I lived with for years, (yeah, yeah I was still smoking pot, fuck off thanks for pointing that out too) while she was watching some early, Angel. I hadn’t paid much attention. I remembered the hyenas episode of Buffy and a few other things but it just hadn’t grabbed me.

Personally, I think vampires are lazy. Not the creatures themselves, (errr HELLO!? sleep all day, stay up all night!?) well ok maybe they are a bit, but using them is lazy is what I mean. Once, when Xander thought he had found the monster/demon they were looking for, and someone said, “that’s a Dungeons and Dragons manual,” or something…that was funny on a couple of levels. (Diamond eating monster?)

Like, there are multiple books full of monsters and you make a series based on one!? Although the way the demons and the vampires kind of meld into one sort of species isn’t too badly done.

But it’s a well worn theme and it’s all too easy to draw on all the previous works and try and hang your work on the collected, “coolness,” of pre established concepts. So, with this in mind, I couldn’t watch Buffy or Angel.

However, as I lay there, bent, and watched this particular episode of Angel, I turned to my girlfriend, who watched it quite a bit, and asked, “Is it always this good?”

You know how it is, when you get stoned, things are… errr… well you get a different level of enjoyment from stuff. Me, I can not watch Star Wars drunk or bent for some reason, mind you, I take them very seriously so I do not enjoy alternate approaches to them.

“Yeah,” she casually nodded to me with an innocently and harmlessly inferred, “you idiot, of course it is, why do you think I watch it!?”

I start paying attention. It is witty and intelligent yet unassuming. It’s funny. It is hip but not tragically seeking contemporary bleeding edge coolness. It’s a good looking show and the combination of innocent charms and cute/hot looks contained in the fledging witch keep me coming back let me tell you that.

Star Wars and role-playing references abound. It is bold yet self deprecating and it develops. There is triumph and tragedy. Although, I have to be honest. What really got me in, what really, made me go back to Season One, Episode One and watch them in order, all the way through to the end of Season Six, just as Season Seven was drawing to a close, was Tara and Willow.

No you lusty lesbo lovers! It wasn’t about fantasising about two gorgeous witches, acted superbly by two extremely talented young women as they writhe in magical manner magnificently manifested manacled and… errr…. mouthed? Shit, that wasn’t too well thought out was it?

It was about suspension of disbelief and how little of it I had to do while watching them. It was so, utterly believable and genuine. It was tender and meaningful and… what’s the word I am looking for where you hold something up as an example of…para….paradigm? Yeah, that’s it.

Paradigmatic of a loving, caring, honest relationship between two souls, regardless of sex, sexual preference or anything else. The whole, “too much magic,” thing was… err… magic… Oh what a wordsmith I am…. It was such an excellent allegory, applicable to so many things that you can be doing wrong in a relationship and how it affects that relationship negatively.

That Tara, “waited,” while not really waiting was such a sign of love and care that it was just… errr… well I thought it was a great story within the Buffy series and I wanted to know how the series fleshed out around that.

I think I had seen Glory once, before watching the whole of season five.

What. A. Babe.

Anyway, that Tara was killed as a plot device to set Willow off after waiting all that time really shat me. That seemed like lazy writing to me. Any number of things could have set Willow off… anyway, not my series to write… (Again allow me to express myself with a, “Rats.”)

It didn’t have to end. Buffy (the character) was a bit burnt out sure but there are any number of ways to reinvigorate a hero. Unless they were all just sick of it. Seven years. Who knows?

GAME ON

I take her to a jazz club and I am briefly, “the best boyfriend ever,” which is cool but do not, ever, and I do mean, ever, compliment the mutant. That’s a sure sign it’s time to be cracking out the cards with the self destruct codes on them. If you are happy, just be happy. I will know. Or give me really good sex… oh, she did that.

Because she is so smart, I begin to think she is some kind of secret agent, (fuck off, fuck off, just fuck off) and I call it off. I sort of try to re establish it later but oddly enough she is very wary of me now, having seen the true mutant in me. It’s for the best, I would seriously hold her back. She is making a lot of money now apparently.

The medication just doesn’t work anymore. I have tried many kinds but it just does not work. Not to bring my perception to the point where I can operate closely enough to everyone else. Nothing makes the real world make sense for long enough to get anywhere.
Although, warpspace doesn’t seem to be much of an option anymore either. Can’t quite get there. Limbo mutant. Or more like stuck on the border of real space. Apparently I should have started doing stuff here 35 years ago. Oh, I see.

I can’t find my way back down into warpspace and I am soul anchored to the ground, preventing me from flying. It this where you people live all the time? I mean really…this is it?

You might think this is a good thing. I am finally trapped here on Earth with you. I am no longer deluded by things I have taken from my, or someone else’s imagination, regardless of the relative merits of the philosophies they embody and represent. Well that’s a lie too isn’t it... maybe? Read on.

I can not now, nor am I likely ever, to build a device capable of projecting a blade of light, a sabre of light if you will and use it to defend the precepts of justice that an old republic considers integral to it’s existence.

I can not now, nor am I likely ever, to grasp a shield in my left hand, enchanted by a good wizard, to repel the searing flames of the dragon long enough to close on the wicked beast and thrust my glowing holy sword into it’s foul gullet, rescue and marry the princess and use the dragon’s horde to establish a kingdom of legend.

I can not now, nor am I likely ever, to kneel before the Shrine of the Blue Primarch and pray that the wounds on his neck heal and he emerges from stasis to lead the chapter to a final and righteous victory for the Holy Imperium.

These things and more I finally realise I cannot do. I begin to think that true sanity and balance has come to me at last. Several things happen that lead me to believe that upon gaining the ability to separate fantasy from reality, and the passage of time in which I have neither destroyed nor killed, indeed attempted to become, “normal,” I am finally to be given a second chance.

I decide to get fit. There are several reasons for this. Stay tuned.

Although tall, I have never been particularly physically capable. I have always known the reason for this. I would not trust myself with any measure of actual ability. You do not give a child a machine gun and so my subconscious scuttled any serious attempt to improve myself in that regard. (Borrallon aside).

Point in question;

Sometime in the years immediately after I got out of jail I was riding a pushbike beside a friend as he jogged. It was probably shortly after midnight on a Friday or a Saturday night. We were travelling from my house at the time at Toombul to his at Chermside. We had just watched Braveheart and were possibly returning to his place for some role-playing, but definitely so I could do some washing.

The bag on my back was huge. I looked like a snail looks with it’s shell. We rode past a party of people that had spilled out onto Rode Road. As we jogged/rode past, one or two of the drunken guys, leaning against a car over the road from the house where the party was, called out derisively about my lack of a car and that I should get one.

Touchy subject. Though I had no license, and no car, this did not in fact worry me. I walked/jogged most places and could always find public transport in Brisbane if I needed to go further.

Didn’t worry me except when I had just watched Braveheart, (Scottish blood in me you see) was eager to courageously scream some single meaningful word as I died, resisting the evil empire, and when some drunken prick, “starts it,” whether he knows the circumstances that led to me not having a license or nay.

If you yell stuff at strangers, being a dickhead, you have to be prepared for the fact that one of them may turn out to be a psycho and may take enough offence to want to tear out your throat and slowly chew on it until the police are called.

Fuck off, I didn’t know what I was going to do. For some reason, or maybe just the ones I gave above, I stop and get off the bike. I make pointed eye contact with them, four or five of them, lower the bike slowly to the ground and slip the huge bag, source of their mirth, to the grass.

They say nothing as slowly I walk the twenty or so meters back to them, (it took me that far of travel past them to weigh up if they deserved what I was going back to do…whatever that was). Their eyes open and they shut up. They actually seem barely old enough to be drinking.

What do they see as I approach? What causes them to have pack courage enough to yell and laugh at me from a distance but then, faced with the inevitable truth that not everyone is just going to, “cop it,” they clam up and cringe like frightened puppies?

Alcohol.

I walk up to them. They are frightened. What do they see? I see their fear…do I smell it too?

My heart rate has not increased by a single beat per minute. For a moment, all the screaming that is done in my head at myself is done at them. All my self hate and disgust focuses outwards and locks like a Abrams turret on these drunken children who have needlessly drawn this down upon themselves.

How can I be this pissed off and enraged in my spirit and yet my body acts as if I am sitting watching a documentary on basket weaving?

I reach the closest boy. In my mind I am grabbing his head and smashing it backwards through the car window behind him. This is in my eyes as I walk into his personal space.
“H-how, ya going mate?” he stammers as he feebly offers his right hand to me and weakly crosses his left arm across his lower chest and stomach in some unclear attempt at defence.

I brush his hand away with my body and gently touch my left shoulder against him as I walk slowly down the line of them, fixing my eyes on each in turn, seeing only fear there. I walk off the end of them like an F-14 leaving the deck of a carrier and turn around to walk back the way I came.

“Huh… I thought so,” I snorted at them as I slowly walked away to retrieve the bike, my washing and to continue my journey. I felt like a General, who, after inspecting his troops, discovers that his shock troops are wearing girl guide uniforms. My job however, was done. I had let them know one of the possible consequences of being a drunken dickhead.

I sheath my hatred. Maybe I should have kept it out.

Someone must have gone running in to the party as I approached the boys. Now comes my lesson. In any group of drunken cowardly dickheads, there is a possibility that one of them, however drunk, can still fight and hurt you quite severely.

In this case, two of them who can still fight and hurt you quite severely.

Gotta watch out for the enemy player characters who will use all that they’ve got. They aren’t everywhere, but they are out there. Not everyone is a bot, (basically artificial intelligence) or an NPC. (Non player character).

Two guys come hurtling out of the party at me, yelling, “FIGHT!? WHO WANTS A FIGHT!?” More people have come out of the party to the street as well.

The shorter one grabs me low, around the thighs and holding them together lifts me clean up off the ground and hurls me down onto the bitumen, breaking my left arm at the elbow. (Poor left arm, it cops all the shit). I don’t know it’s broken until I get it x-rayed a few days later.

This is the first I realise that I was in trouble. They just clean caught me unawares. I had barely turned to see what bats out of hell were falling on me as I was tossed to the ground like a rag doll. I thought it was all over and in my own mind I was already riding away. The lesson continues.

The shorter one falls on top of me and begins wrestling, holding me down as his mate starts kicking me in the head. Did they actually want to kill me? It doesn’t actually occur to me that I had been in jail with someone who had, at the very least, witnessed, someone kicked to death.

I sort of hold my own for a while. I spread my legs wide and fight back against the short one on top, preventing him from flipping me over and getting me in any kind of lock. I am completely defenceless against the repeated bootings of my noggin. My head flashes time and time again as my brain rattles around my skull.
You know what I mean if this has happened to you. A bright yellow/white flash that fills your vision for a spilt second as your consciousness bounces out of reality for a moment and then back in. Each time it does, bounce back in I mean, I am surprised.

I am still actually not pissed off. I wonder why I am not unconscious. However, I keep thinking and considering the best move from this position. Luckily I seem damage resistant enough to have the time to weigh my options.

My friend pulls the kicking guy off me with a, “Keep it fair,” growl at him.

Apparently, (and I did not witness any of this) Mr Kicks tries to engage my friend, (with a broken bottle) but my friend just stands there and fixes him with a stare.

“What’s wrong!? Are you too cool to fight!?” asks Mr Kicks shaping up to him with a shredding tool.

“Yeah,” replies my friend levelly.

I am left with only one assailant now. Upon losing the striking component of his assault, the short one changed his attack from restraint, to actual blows, freeing in turn, my arms as well. We exchange a few short stabbing punches at point blank range. Mine do not seem to have any effect while I seem to remember feeling the impact of his.

Still not enough damage is done to me to cause actual morale damage. Although not angry, (don’t ask) I am still undeterred.

I cover up and his blows do no further damage. On the defensive now, I manage to shrug him off me and stand. We exchange a few more blows while standing. More people have gathered from the party by now and there is quite an audience.

I have quite long hair at this stage and it has come loose, so every time I attempt to strike him, I am blinded by my own vanity. I do not recall landing any further blows on him. He however, strikes me several times. I am taller than him with a longer reach but he darts in, hits me and gets away as I fumble.

No damage. The only damage is to my pride as I realise that though I am actually not hurt, (look in the mirror later and say that buddy) it is increasingly obvious that I am not up to the task I purported to be when I intimidated the drunken boys. Did I really say Abrams turret? Wanker.

I realise the utter pointlessness of this entire encounter and the utter foolishness of stopping and going back. Who cares what they said? Who cares what some drunken child yells out in his stupidity? I wonder how I am to extract myself from this situation.

All this time I fail to notice something. The short one is utterly fucked. Either too drunk, unfit or whatever, he is breathing very heavily and can’t stand properly.
Whereas I, although battered and broken limbed, am standing there philosophising about the merits of using violence as a means of getting your point across with nary an extra tick to be heard from my chest. No car. Jogging/walking everywhere you see. Wax on, wax off.

I have outlasted him. From tossing me in the air, to wrestling me on the ground and then dancing around boxing me, he was using energy either faster than I or from a smaller fuel tank. I bet his heart was beating. Although more skilled and focused, he just couldn’t do enough damage to me to stop me.

You must admit, he did have a good head start. I didn’t start fighting until my arm was broken and I was being held down and kicked in the head. I can’t be fairer than that.

(Jokingly, I have offered such a head start to others when physical violence is hinted at, even in jest. No one ever believes me).

I get him in a headlock and he just hangs there as if I was holding him up rather than struggling to maintain a lock on him. I consider all the things you can do to someone who has possibly just tried to kill you while you have them at your complete and utter mercy. An eye gouge? Simply do repeated short uppercuts into his face until you are rewarded with an impromptu red Rorschach test on the concrete?

“What do you see when you look at this?”

It looks like…death.

I feel an urge to drop backwards with a slight twist and lever his body weight against mine with his neck as the pivot and swivel point.

Everyone is quiet as I look up at them. Their champion lies limp in my grip. There’s no, “please let him go,” or anything. They just look as I stand there, barely breathing. They have seen me tossed to the ground, kicked repeatedly in the head and out belted in a quick box, yet I calmly stand with my assailant at my mercy. No one comes to help him.

I lean down to him as closely as I can to his ear and say very quietly, as much for myself as for him because I feel very cowardly at this moment;

“This can end now if you want, I can let you go, we can just walk away.”

He breathes heavily, struggling for air. He sucks enough down to reply haltingly and exhaustedly;

“…you… …fucking… …better… …or… …I’ll… …fucking… …kill… …you…”

Apparently I am not the only one with morale left.

Chose your fate. Chose your punishment. That’s fair. He has chosen. I offered mercy. The falling backwards thing pops up in my mind again. Do it, DO IT DO IT!

There is a low wall behind me. The fight had moved to the footpath. It is about two or three bricks high. I fall backwards over it as I release him and he shoves me away from himself. I snatch an ignoble exit from the jaws of victory.

I stand and walk away from him. I don’t look at him. My ears are pricked for the sound of running footsteps on the concrete path behind me. They don’t come.

I pick up the bike. I can’t remember if I walked or rode back to my friend’s place. Did I vomit at his place or on the way? I look in the mirror. There seems to be about four nice big welts. That would account for the yellow/white flashes.

At first, when I later get an x-ray, I attempt to convince myself that the impact fracture of my left arm was from me hitting him so hard that I broke my own bone.

It was a stupid thing to do. The bigger, better person does not react to taunts of any kind. The bigger, better person does not use intimidation to teach anything. If God decides that someone needs a lesson, it will be taught. It is not your responsibility.

For these reasons and more, I have not trusted my restraint with a more capable physical form. Say it’s not my imagination. Say I am actually highly damage resistant for whatever reason…

Someone held a match once and I held my arm over it. It hurt like fucking hell to be honest, as drunk as I was. But through my pain I still remember the humour as the match burnt down to his fingers and he let out a tiny, “ouch,” as he flicked his hand free of the millimetre or two of match not used to burn a rather decent third degree hole in my arm.

Genetics, pain tolerance, being in fact a loopy fucker? I am a tad over six foot. What if I lose it? I mean really lose it and I do actually have a bit of muscle? I would end up being one of the reasons cops stopped using .38’s.

Fuck off, it’s my thought processes trying to take responsibility for what it can, I don’t give a fuck how stupid that sounds to you. It’s the fucking truth in my mind.

Until very recently that is. I started running regularly. I did push ups and sit-ups and such things during my runs. I applied for the reserves again, testing to see if I can get away with it. I believe that I am given the impression that backs will be turned, just once, that I will be given just one opportunity to prove that I have genuinely learned my lesson.

Not that I am considered sane by any measure, but that I am given the chance to see if I can direct my insanity into a focused beam that I will offer control of to someone else. Or something else. I will train myself to obey. It seems to be what everyone else does. Everyone trains themselves, or is trained (with or without their knowledge or consent) to do something that someone else tells them to do...
I destroy things in my flat that I think are wicked, including my ability to use the internet and access porn. I build a war shrine. I exercise heavily. I stop taking lithium.

Oh you think that’s it don’t you? Aren’t you fucking clever?

“Oh, he stopped his medication, that’s why he has gone loopy again and is accosting us with this drivel!” You fucking naïve, simple fools. Just know that you are and accept it. Do not attempt to understand. Simply know that you know nothing.

There is no difference because of the lack of lithium. There is a difference from the lack of porn inspired self abuse and the sudden change in my body chemistry from starting to do actual exercise. The lithium can’t touch it, becomes irrelevant. I do however keep it nearby and take some occasionally. It is placebic for a while.

I feel strong and the high I get from exercise endorphins starts a new psychosis. I get psychotic from exercise… from a natural thing that should be good. I eat only what I need to survive and I eat relatively healthily. You do not need very much food to survive.

What the fuck am I expected to do? Now everything makes me insane. Everything. Having stuff makes me insane. Having nothing makes me insane. Medication makes me insane. Not taking medication makes me insane. Sitting around doing nothing makes me insane. Exercising makes me insane.

WHAT THE FUCK DO I DO?

I try to focus. People say things to me as I think them. They say things that they could not know about me. Sometimes children do it too. Alone in my flat I construct my war shrine. I put candles on it and pray to God to make me who I should be.

I smash furniture with a mattock handle, a big club. Not to break the furniture, but to get used to the weapon because I think that I have lost people and things in my life because I wasn’t prepared to defend them.

I pray to God to make me strong enough to defend that which matters so if I ever DO have anything again that I need, that I want, that I love, I will be better prepared, and worthy of it.

“Do the club thing,” a child says to me out of the blue for no reason. WHAT THE FUCK!?

The sergeant at the reserve recruiting night looks at me and says things like, “burst into flames,” a lot. He is talking about going outside for a smoke. Why do I think the old guy who sits beside me is a psychic and is reading my thoughts?

No one else who is there to sign up makes sense. None of them look like army material. It doesn’t seem right. I withdraw my application. They ring several times but I do not answer. I lie and say I have no criminal record.

I see aircraft with bright lights on them, flying away from me. They are not landing lights. I know aircraft lights, I know what they are and how they work. The lights are nothing that I have seen on any aircraft before. I think something is trying to reveal itself to me, let me know I am getting somewhere.

I see these aircraft with strange, extremely bright lights on them several times. It is not paranormal, it simply looks like 707s or something with huge spotties on the sides and rear of them for no good reason that I can see.

I feel something or someone wants to recruit me. I feel that I should throw myself in the water and drown myself, that they will rescue me, that I need to fake my own suicide to get to, “the next level.” That I have to be that dedicated to want it that I would risk my own life again. That I in fact, would be prepared to die to sign up.

HELLO!? FUCKING DER!

I hear noises in the bushes around me as I exercise. I laugh at the noises.

“If you were the small animals in the bush that you are pretending to be, I would hear scuttling come UP to where you are and then move away!”

The noise moves away now in the fashion that I have recommended to keep it’s cover. I was not convinced. I have seen and heard many creatures of all kind, wild or nay and I know the sounds they make in the bush. These were not what they purported to be.

I imagine that people with, “camera suits,” are stalking me. Not cameras that watch me, but cameras that conceal them. They are suits that are covered in tiny cameras or simple fibre optic cables that take the light from one side of them and passes it around them and displays it on the other side so its as if the light has in fact, passed straight through them.

I look for ripples in the air one night as I sit on a swing over the road from Toombul Shopping town as I listen to a band on the other side of the fence, in a house there in the park. The chain on the swing, “twangs,” like someone behind me has, “plucked,” it. I imagine I am Lestat, having just awoken, as he hears that band playing.

I am not afraid. I think it is a sign I am being watched and everything is going to plan. I smile and pluck the chain myself. It twangs again, touched, I assume, by unseen hands.

I suspect this suit incorporates noise suppression as well because it is extremely silent, (apart from the bushes, which was deliberate) you know, detects a noise wave and then creates one in the opposite direction to counter it and cancel it out. 1 + (-1)= 0 No noise.

I wonder if it really is 2004. Are you sure? Is it really two thousand years since the Son of God walked about saying be nice to each other and so they nailed him to a cross? (Borrowed from Mr Adams, thank you).

How do you know? I mean really, how do you know? The reason I ask is, because I think the camera suited people (person?) may have anti grav as well because as I playfully wave my hands behind me suddenly, trying to feel the invisible person there, they are not there.

Or maybe that’s because they are actually a hundred yards or more away and the weapon they have with them is an extended magnetic linear accelerator, reduced for personal use of course. The weapon projects a line of magnetic flux to quite some range and when the projectile is fired, it travels down this projected flux, making it extremely accurate.

I am not saying they are trying to assassinate me, I just think that instead of standing behind me, they could just activate the magnetic flux ray and, “wave,” it over the metal chain of the swing that I am sitting on and make it, “twang,” slightly as if someone were doing it by hand.

YES I KNOW HOW IT SOUNDS! FUCK OFF! WHAT DO YOU DO WHEN THIS SEEMS TO BE A REASONABLE EXPLANATION FOR THE INEXPLICABLE REPORTS OF YOUR SENSES!??

Come on smart arses. Even a clue would be nice. I am hallucinating all this?

I walk away into the darkness near the raised railway. I look up and expect them to appear up under the railway, in a place where only I can see, like a Predator decloaking. I suddenly realise I am near water and imagine they only want to play a joke on me and wait until I get near the water, then suddenly push me in.

Was the preacher man actually a camera suit man, hovering invisibly outside my cell window as I ranted on at Jesus that night? Did he in fact listen in out there and decide to give me what I wanted to save me and the vision was in fact an entire fabrication of my one fucking hundred percent SNAFUed brain? The question remains why? Why save the mutant? To TOY with it some more!?

I walk rapidly away, pissed off at being, “carroted,” at being led like a donkey with a stick and a carrot tied to it’s own head. Ironic. What I want to see is where ever I look.

I get stranded at a town called Jericho one night on my way to Darwin. It’s a small town with some railway tracks beside it. It is all quiet. I have to wait for the store to open next morning so I can get some fuel.

I hear a noise like someone tapping the railway track lightly with a small hammer. I go to investigate. The track makes the same sound under me as I step over it. I shit myself and almost run away. I think someone is laughing at me or testing me so I don’t.

Instead I wonder WHY would anyone want to do that? Why would someone make the tracks make that noise? I look at the tracks. Some of the sleepers look as if they have been recently dug around.

Still settling? The tracks are still settling? Cooling down? At ten or eleven at night are the tracks still cooling down and making the characteristic, “tink” sound of metal cooling?

Why then does the sound only happen on track within a couple of meters of me, often as I step over it again? I would hear it if it happened ten, twenty meters away because it is quiet and still beside a very small country town at night. Go look at it, it’s tiny.

I walk up and down the tracks. I think demons are real, oh no, not that demons are doing this, but that people who fight them, with the camera suits and linear accelerators, are trying to recruit me, to see if I scare easily, because that would be a weakness when fighting demons.

Kind of like how they tested Will Smith’s character in Men in Black. You know, look for the out of the ordinary and deal with that because there are enough people taking care of the mundane shit…is that why I am different!?

I suddenly see a small fire out along the tracks. I don’t know how long it has been there, or if I am only just noticing it now. I think it is part of the test.

Mission Update: Investigate strange fire on tracks just outside the light from the town.

I walk slowly down the tracks. Suddenly, bravely, I step between the tracks and continue on. An image of a ghostly train appears in my mind after only a few steps and from somewhere out of the houses to my left, and a couple of hundred yards away, comes a distinct, “toot, toot!” sound. It sounds either like a actual whistle that someone has blown or someone’s extremely effective rendition of a convincing train sound.

I shit myself and leap off the tracks as the combination of imagination and real world collide for a moment of genuine terror. Perhaps this is a joke the townsfolk play often on people on their way to Darwin, who don’t care where their motorbike runs out of fuel and has to stay the night in the park between town and the railway tracks?

I have to reserve it as a possibility. The sound, even though it did not seem to come from the tracks or the direction I imagined the ghost train was bearing down on me from, did still sound compellingly unearthly.

The ghost train was complete fabrication.

You see I accept that regardless of truly incorrect appraisals of reality, (whatever the fuck reality is) I do have an extremely vivid imagination and it is all too easy to take genuine incomprehension, feed it to my central processor and have it extrapolate with fantasy rather than facts.

But even then, I think facts for me differ from other people’s so it becomes difficult to convince people sometimes that although I do have a good imagination, I can usually tell when I have crossed the boundary from simple incomprehension of reality into compensatory fiction.

Or can I.

Regardless, I often have to pare fantasy off the answer my CPU gives me.

To continue the computer parallel, it is like the components of my mind that come up with possibilities and hypothesis are bleeding edge technology, latest stuff buddy, straight off the drawing board, out of the factory and installed in my psyche.

Whereas the components of my mind that are fed all these possibilities and hypothesis and desperately labour to sort this information, collate and process it into actionable and rational information still have valves.

Oh.

Ver.

Load.

Just because you can clearly see that the whole panel of warning lights is lit up like a Christmas tree does not mean you know where the best place to use a garden hose on a nuclear meltdown is.

Knowing the problem is halfway to solving it? Fuck off it is. It just means you know that you are on fire. Informative.

Speaking of which, I get to the fire. Actually, before I get to the fire, (barely the size of a small campfire) I check out the surrounds and look for ambush points.

I see a hollow not far away and I go wide and left to come up on it so that if anyone was hiding there, waiting for someone to come and check the fire, and getting in the perfect position to either open fire at very close range or rush out and melee the investigator, I would come at them unawares.

I was spot on.

The hollow would have been a perfect place for that but there is in fact, nobody there. The fire is left over from a grass fire and is in fact, is nothing.

I don’t actually think someone would be waiting to do that to me. The exercise was just to see if I recognised the hollow for the ambush location that it could be.

I come up with a different hypothesis as I wander back and then up and down the tracks again. I pull out my cross and wave it at the tracks. They tink. I try to think up really good exorcism lines. Surprisingly, at least surprising to myself, none come to me. Odd, I am usually pretty good at such improvisation.

I imagine that someone is using technological methods of making the tracks make noises near me and they are just showing me a tool. Why do I specify, “technological,” there? Well, are there other ways?

When role-playing, I have always said that I only want to know what my character knows. What if, in my desire to be a holy warrior of some form, (which is actually WILD attempted overcompensation for the evils I have done in real life), people who also believe in the same ideals, if not the spiritual component, set up a way for me to really play my character?

What if, someone in need of help, is in fact tormented deliberately by such sounds? It is easily achieved. Look how small cameras, microphones and speakers can be. It is so doable. People can’t always ask for the help they need, it has to come to them in a way they understand. So they are “haunted”.

Bam, along comes me, undeterred by creaks, groans and whatever, appearing bearing the word of God and do the exorcism. I would, in fact, have to do a psych degree or something to back it up with. Religion is the tool, but psychology is the reality of human existence.

They trust me and I pass them into the care of…a church (not one where children are raped, I mean a proper church where God really is love) or whatever group that people think is the best way to look after them.

Fuck it, I mean, how many times would you have liked an inexplicable, but blatantly heroic figure to come into your life and save you from something!? Ever had anything happen to you that you wish hadn’t? Ever wish someone had stepped in right at that moment and stopped it/slain your demon/stopped the man fucking you as a child?

That’s not a personal demon by the way. I know it has come up a few times now. It just seems I have met so many females subjected to this utterly evil experience that I would really like a chance to stop it. (Apart from cheerfully waiting to execute them in jail).

Most chicks seem to want to find a way to forgive. I would like to take one, gut him, hang him from a bridge with his own intestines and throw barbed darts at him until the police came and took me away. (…and THEN wait cheerfully in jail to execute anymore that come my way…)

Don’t you think that splashed all over the news would at least give that evil fucker who is creeping into some six year old girl’s room RIGHT FUCKING NOW a moment of extra thought before condemning another woman to a life of self doubt and mistrust of men?

“Oh, it’s so sad but no one can stop it.”

BULL FUCKING SHIT. If you do not believe in heroes THEN THEY WILL NOT EXIST.

Take a breath.

Take another.

It is wild over compensation isn’t it? I am seeking an evil to destroy, to right the wrongs of my own actions. To assuage the guilt and self hate that lingers, nay dwells openly in myself. Just fucking use me, God. Pick something that’s wrong and fucking use me on it. I’m tough, I might not break. You might get to use me again. Fine by me.

Just one thing, give them a chance to repent first. Give them a chance to redeem. If they do not take that chance them smash me the fuck all over the fuckers. And let everyone see what happens to sinners. Some of them will try to redeem and fail, like me but they will join me and then you will have two weapons, three… more until there is an army of your soldiers waiting to fall upon the sinners and the demons so they dare not exist and there will be room only for love and joy in the world.

Then, and only then will your army come to join you, once the Earth is safe.

For fucks sake, do you not CARE!?

Take. A. Breath.

Take. An. Other.

Do not let me discover there is no God and then allow me to slip unnoticed into the shadows. Can you say, “hanging on by your fingertips?” Fair warning.

Back to Jericho.

I remember a story I wrote in grade eight. They said chose an inanimate object and write a story about one of it’s experiences in the first person. I wrote about a railway crossing that used to be in a busy shunting yard in a city, but it had failed to operate properly one time and a major crash was caused, killing many people.

My first person point of view was one of reflection as the crossing, having been moved to the country as punishment, thought back over what it had done.

(The next day I try to ask townsfolk if there had been an accident here on the railway and if lots of people had died. Hello, mutant, they think).

Reflection. Fourteen years since I was arrested. Everything I have ever had in that time, is gone. Given away, sacrificed, or taken away. What does that mean? I can hold nothing. Why do I think it’s all going to go anyway and there is no point holding on to anything?

A shrink offered me a psych pension once. It was in the few years after I got out of jail. I declined saying, “No, I will give it a go.”

I gave it a go and I have failed. For one reason or another I can not do it. What of that? I am neither stupid nor lazy. I am not an unfriendly person. I want there to be something to do. Something meaningful. Something that actually matters. Yet I achieve nothing but emptiness.

Is the response of, “society,” reasonable? Are my experiences well earned rewards for being a mutant? It’s irrelevant, they remain the facts of my experiences. I would not chose them for anyone else except as punishment. But that is the point isn’t it? It was decided that I deserve punishment. Not just jail…it has been decided somewhere that my life is punishment. You can not dispute the facts. I am, in fact, punished.

Why then and not now? Why did I light fires and feel the need to kill then and not now? What has changed? Why did I need to learn not to light fires? Why did I need to learn not to try to kill people? Why is it in fact, a lie… that it is not better to have loved and lost than never loved at all? Why do most people simply not do these things? Why don’t other people need to learn these lessons?

Because I am a mutant.

Because I am a mutant.

Why then have I been saved repeatedly? I am in fact highly gullible and extremely easily lead. I want to believe. I try to do and be what other people are to understand where they are coming from, to see if it suits me. I could have easily been lead to my own destruction yet I am saved, and inexplicable things happen to make me think there is some wondrous aura about my life that helps and protects me. Helps me what?

Helps me live longer to suffer more?

Why have I been taught the lessons I have?

Why do I continue to believe, beyond all rational thought, that some magical, science fiction or fantastic force, is yet to reveal itself to me and show me my path?

What will be done with this mutant? What should be done with this mutant? I do not know and I have run out of options. I am increasingly less inclined to be restrained by, “good,” judgement and the lessons of my experience. I see no point taking part in a society that contains so many lies and contradictions.

This civilization is killing the only planet that can support it. This is idiotic. Unless you want to die out. Then it makes sense. Why is this obvious only to the insane? Or at least how is it that you are considered sane if you are able to blithely ignore this fact and just “get on with it”?

People die for lack of food in one country and die because they have too much in another. How is it sane to support such a system? It is in fact foolish to slave to uphold the single most insane era this planet has ever seen.

All you are doing is breaking your backs to maintain the system long enough to willingly sacrifice your own children to the slave pits of the next generation.

Oh but they can buy plasma screen TVs instead of black and white TVs! Oh so much more entertainment! They can buy a newer, slighter rounder car! Oh, so much…rounder! They can buy Coke, or Pepsi! So much refreshment!
You can buy…you can buy…you can buy…

They won’t get anywhere that you can’t. They will serve the same evil masters who have always been there. That your parents served, that you serve, that everyone serves.

I am not talking conspiracy theories. I am talking about the rich and powerful who flaunt themselves under your nose, in the news, in the media every day. They love conspiracy theories. It makes people think it’s not their fault.

It is selfish in the extreme to inflict this on innocents. What gives you the right to summon a being into existence and subject it to all this?

You are told it is normal to do this and you believe it so you do not question. Instead you pity me at best, punish me at worst, for being outside your cage of choice!?

Where’s the flood? Where’s the plagues? Where is Armageddon? Surely it’s time?

I have fully, unapologetically and unflinchingly displayed my insanity and inability to mesh with your reality to you. You can use this to feel justified in telling me I am wrong if your gut will allow you to.

If I am wrong, I will die and who cares, big deal, another madman ranting on with drivel.

If I am right then evil will continue to hold you, your children, their children and this whole planet, forever. Or at least until someone listens to the wisdom of those who you name insane.

“Let my people go.”

-Moses. The Bible.

“<Hysterical laughter> They don’t WANT to go!”

-Any politician who tells you what you want to hear or Corporate Boss who has convinced you that you need to buy their product or your life will go unfulfilled.

Maybe you truly do need to fight evil with a different kind of evil. Reporting for duty.

I have looked continually for a way to fit in. From my vantage point outside society and civilization I have observed the situation. It does not make sense. I am not claiming that I do but neither does the system that punished/punishes me for being a mutant and continues to profit from the death of the planet and your sweat.

What will the system do with me? It has the power. The guns. The police to enforce it’s insane will. What is it’s decision?

Why am I tormented by these questions, paralysed to the point where I simply cannot function in any real sense? I think the only real answer is that I simply am not meant to be here.

BUT, for now, I shall continue seeking ways to prove that is untrue. Do not expect me to make any sense as I try. I am, after all, a mutant.

Do not be surprised if it transpires that I am here to defend the Earth against her own attempted murderers. Sound dramatic? Do you want to take that chance?

Do you in fact want this chance right now to defend what you obviously hold so dear and remove any chance that I may actively, deliberately, covertly, callously perhaps and most definitely successfully, attack in a real and explosive sense, those whom I perceive are doing damage to something more sacred and holy than say, the ability to make toasters or over priced running shoes?

I reserve one of my multiple choice answers to, “Why am I here?” to be;

a) Mutant Defender of the Earth.

Once I am satisfied I have a decent list of options I will make my choice. So far I have only two options. The other is;

b) Beach Bum.

Is there any specific thing in this civilization that you would stand in front of and stop me from removing? Would you? Would you actually stand there? Would you like the chance to remove any possibility that you will need to?

Your time starts…

…now.

I am currently playing Grand Theft Auto: Vice City. A computer game in which, among other things, you run around with concealed weapons, pull taxi drivers from their cabs and drive off in their vehicle with no regard for public safety. If you run into things enough, the cab bursts into flames. It is considered entertainment to fantasise about doing such things apparently.

For some reason, no clocks that I can see, are melting.

I still haven’t seen The Wall, nor have I decided on a tattoo.

I may now go for a walk to the video shop to see if they’ve got a copy and on the way, enquire how much a full back Maltese cross would cost.

Or not.

Thank-you-very-much.
Ladies and Gentlemen,
Arthur Morris Utant has left the building.

(Oh, and just quietly, one of the blatant lies was about what the detective said to me concerning my requirement for legal representation. He did not in fact smile as he commented on my lack of need for any. Sorry about that. Forgive me?)

Epilogue

(The mutant reflects upon his work)

I am beating myself around in a padded cell. I repeatedly hurl myself bodily against the walls. I am more tired than the grave but I can’t sleep. My story-life haunts me and bashes the inside of my skull like a huge lead ball. My brain aches from channelling my life into a week’s work. I cannot sleep.

Again and again I crash into the padded walls of my mind and I scream out;

“WHY AM I STILL TRAPPED IN HUMAN FORM!? I HAVE TRIED TO WARN THEM!!? WHY AM I STILL HERE!!!???”

I stop screaming into my own head and begin sobbing against the padded wall. What more can I do? I have lived it, suffered it and now finally, told it.

Weeping, I slowly start to slide down the imprisoning cushioned walls of my mind but I am stopped as arms softly collect me and hold me up very gently. The padding of the walls is gone, replaced by strong, warm arms and there is open sky around me.

I am encircled, cradled tenderly in a protective hold.

“Shhhhhhh,” says God, “I’ve got ya.”

I open my eyes and reach out towards my container of Lithium.

Better the Devil you know.

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• A Mutant's Tale Mr. A. M. Utant. 10/7/04
• Re: please be civil » Mr. A. M. Utant. Dr. Bob 10/8/04
• Re: A Mutant's Tale sunny10 11/11/04
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