Recollections

Dear friends,

If you are reading this, I have been murdered.

Recently I’ve taken to thinking about my past and in particular my family life during my adolescence. I guess it’s the time of year. Christmas is usually a time spent with family and that sort of thing but with mine back in the comfortably safe distance of New Zealand, Christmas for me is usually spent being thankful that I still don’t live there.

I don’t recall much of my childhood, which later I would discover is due to living in a state of high anxiety. From an early age, say around the point where we can articulate thoughts and sentences cohesively I distinctly recall my first thoughts being around the kind of “what the fuck am I doing in this household?”

My family were (and still are to some extent) best described as a pack of freaks. By the age of eleven, my father, former military man, hardened drinker and then born again Christian fundamentalist, figured it was God’s will to run the household like some clandestine platoon.  A sort of Guantanamo meets Hillsong if you will.   Each Wednesday members from the “New Life” Church would congregate in our lounge room for “bible study,” a two to three hour sit in where they would examine a passage in the bible and then ruminate over what “Jesus really meant.” Anything was up for grabs, and “god hates fags,” was not an uncommon favourite given that homosexuality was still a crime at that time in New Zealand.

I would retreat to the relative sanctity of my bedroom where I’d spend hours listening to pop and rock records, a major consolation, given that the prevailing mindset was that rock was “the music of Satan,” according to my parents’ friends anyway.   However this had been a battle that had been previously fought and won by my sister who was sixteen at the time. She had now progressed to smoking pot, going to rock concerts and earning a reputation as the village bicycle.

My mother, a lapsed Catholic just seemed to go along with whatever my father decided was law, with “wait until your father gets home” being a common refrain whenever I had completely destroyed something, like taking the alarm clock apart (just to see how it works) and then being unable to piece it back together.

My parents would later tell me that I was a very quiet child, withdrawn even. At the time this never really occurred to me. Instead, I just kept a safe distance from my family after reaching the fairly logical conclusion that we had absolutely nothing in common.

By the time I was fifteen it was clear that my parents’ vision of their ideal family was crumbling before their very jesus-saved eyes.

It’s funny now, how the cracks in the Christian veneer of the perfect family appeared so dramatically, despite the best efforts of my father to retain some sort of artificial facade.

But it was the hypocrisy of presenting a model of the perfect family at Church on Sundays and then returning to a household of violence and abuse for the rest of the week that really irked me.

Fortunately, for me, my sister had been the trailblazer.  It was as if as children we had been pre-ordained to lead certain lives irrespective of my father’s wishes.  We each had our fateful roles; master of the house, religious freak, housewife, troublemaker, faggot, slut.

I can almost sense the moment my father gave up hope, when one day I overheard him yelling at my mother “when is that boy going to get himself a trade??!!” (In other words, an apprenticeship as a plumber or an electrician.)

This, while I’m dancing in my bedroom to Wham and Culture Club wearing a “Frankie says Relax” t-shirt with bleached blond hair.   The closest I’d come to thinking about an electrician or plumber was being seduced by one.

“What the hell do you want to do that for?” Was the response from my father when a few years later I announced that I wanted to go to University.

There was never really much encouragement in my household for wanting to better yourself.  Perhaps it’s something to do with coming from a working class background, or maybe it’s just the fact that if you have low aspirations then you’re unlikely to be disappointed if you don’t exceed them.

Anyhow, despite the odds, I’ve survived. And another year on the planet is certainly better than the alternative.