Many of us on this planet, throughout history, have suffered pain, loss, alienation, dread, I know I'm not the only one; and I don't mean to come on with the usual grizzle, "Oh poor me, boo hoo hoo, I'm so fucked over!" Still, I don't mind getting some sympathy, some support, maybe engender some assistance, it's terrifying to cry out in the wilderness and have nobody answer. And anyway, if you have a harrowing story to tell, you might as well get it off your chest, you might even pique someone's interest, give them a window into the human condition, way out on the edge. I live to tell stories.
Imagine existing in dread for much of your life. Of course there were happy times, ecstatic, educational, entertaining, high. But these were like pearls strung upon a razor-sharp wire of angst that cuts to the bone. As an infant I lived in dread of being punched out by my hair-trigger bad tempered father, who coming home from World War 2 suffered PTSD and hit out at the constant jangle of his nerves. I never knew when that punch would come, the tension in the shared house was suffocating, building to a hurricane of violence, exploding over my head, my mother getting an horrific beating, her black eyes were my black eyes, her blood on the linoleum was my blood.
I dreaded going out to play on the streets, the local kids enjoyed being bullies, a sissy boy like me was ripe for victimhood, lords of the 1950s inner-city blow-flies had someone easy to stand-over and torture in me. A gorgeous, blue-eyed child with a Tony Curtis cow-lick of black hair hanging over my forehead, like a puppy you want to hug to death it's so cute, beautiful innocence shining like a diamond among ugly brats, it had to be destroyed. School was just as bad, I often went with trepidation, what teacher would strap me next for disrupting the class, bored as I was by all the slow, plodding dummies around me, I was reading and writing by six years old, they had to move me ahead a year and still I was head of the class, even after being thrown out of most of them. Recess, lunchtime and after school was like a gladiator contest. As a queer boy I was made to fight or flee, until the day came I learned to hit back, hard, square on the nose, then the brutes mostly kept their distance.
I knew I was "homosexual" from a very young age, good looking boys made my guts drop, I was always trying to seduce them, and getting a bad reputation among the boys as I succeeded enough times to make them both wary and amused. I'd heard the rumors about "dirty poofters", creatures of the night, beasts to be hunted and murdered, imprisoned or hospitalised, twisted and electric shocked. It promised a dreadful future for me, all my fond dreams of adventurous life full of accomplishments shattered by the ignominy of being "different", less than zero, queer. I went to bed in dread of what tomorrow might bring, whispering a prayer, "Oh god, please don't let me grow up to be a poofter!"
But a queer I was, my teenage years spent in criminalised lust, running towards the hot guys who shunned me, running from poofter bashers and cops who were ever on the look-out for those nasty sexual outlaws, rejected by landlords, refused and dismissed by employers, frowned upon by all the upright, bigoted citizens lurking at every interstice of society. My few friends didn't worry when I came out at seventeen, they liked me for my humanity and intelligence but the rest of the world was a war zone and I went to bed every night in apprehension of what the morning would bring.
I became intensely disquieted when I got conned by a cult, The Family, to have psilocybin therapy to straighten me out, in reality it was an attempt to brainwash me into joining their cult. Under the heavy drug I was dismayed to have my central identification, "me", shaken, fractured, threatened with dissolution, to become putty in the hands of the madwoman Anne Hamilton-Byrne. A life of "gay" aberration, chased and brutalised by "straight" society had made me extremely strong mentally and physically, thus I was able to resist the madness and eventually escape to indeed lead the adventurous life vagabonding around the world that I wanted. Yet even on the international road I had to watch my arse from getting fucked by thieves, blackmailers, rapists and serial killers, many days not knowing where my next meal or roof was coming from.
Back in Australia in 1976, I was 26 and still on the run from a creepy, judgmental society, particularly the cops who ever chose homos to incriminate instead of catching murderers, gun-runners, heroin overlords and corrupt politicians. Over the ensuing years I got myself a bad reputation for civil disobedience acts concerning the anti-nuclear industry, prisoners' rights, women's rights, queer liberation and social housing (squats) as I'm an intersectional activist in my art and thinking. In 1993 corrupt pigs framed me for an armed robbery of my local cake shop. Even though I had every proof that I didn't do it, these two bastards from Kings Cross pig-sty had every imaginary piece of crap to prove that I did do it, telling me while I was chained to the wall, "We hate thieves, liars and poofters and you're all three!"
I was under house-arrest for near-on three years, having to beg the courts for reprieve if I wanted to leave the city, which I did once, to my great humiliation. The pigs assured me that I'd go to Longbay gaol for seven years for this and I better learn to keep my mouth shut. For three long years, as my trial approached, I went to bed in dread. I had to have psychiatric intervention for depression and suicidal tendencies. That anxiety of dread towards the following day was something I had experienced all my life, I should've been inured, resolute and fatalistic about it, for dread was my default condition. But I was so tired of this existential intimidation, would it never end? I was lucky enough to get a genius queen's counsel who pro bono eventually got me acquitted, but the stress on my mind and heart wore me thin, it has neve left me, I still have repetitive nightmares of cops chasing me and wake up in a sweat with my heart beating fast.
So here I am in 2021, 71 years old with mild heart disease, hoping against hope life will go smoothly for me from now on as my nerves can't take any more harassment. Only yet again I'm going to bed with dread as to what the morrow may bring, for the demanding world just can't help trying to takes strips from my back. I got a notice from my bank, witch bank, the Commonwealth bank, telling me they are going to close my account on May 13th, not telling me the reason why or how I can appeal this mendacious decision. Like everybody today, my bank account is my lifeline. I receive my old age pension paid into it, I get my rent paid out of it, I pay all my bills with it, I purchase goods and services online with it, and I have any earnings from my art bought by individuals and companies paid into it, (I have a business name, "Hard Art", and an ABN for this.) I'm told to go open another account with another bank, I'm so fatigued, I don't have the strength to negotiate all the corridors of bureaucracy to get my life back on the rails with a new bank account.
This is incredibly callous treatment by the Commonwealth Bank towards a customer who has loyally been with them since I was 7 years old in 1956. The account they're threatening to close is 30 years old, created in 1991, with never a problem over those long years, small money flowing in and out, not enough to participate in crime, gun-running, drug dealing, money-laundering, nothing except selling art and purchasing goods online. In my paranoid terror I wonder if some LNP troll who works in the CBA bureaucracy has noticed my anti-LNP art and diatribes that I relentlessly post online, and Morriscum or his troll factory, (Young Libs), being vicious, ruthless bastards who brooks no resistance to their fascism and cruel policies, would perhaps have sicked one of their banking cronies onto me.
Or the same could be said of Hillsong cultists who have infiltrated every niche of society, banks, bureaucracies, businesses, the arts, everywhere and anywhere, and they brook no exposure, criticisms or subversive satire. One of those sneaky rats with their cheesy bigoted milk-toast nasty niceness could be ploughing away deep in the guts of the CBA like tapeworms pressing buttons that cut off any possible enemies' lifelines.
My last paranoia concerns a gay, drunk nobody who also pretends to be an artist and who I've had scabrous fights with in online commentaries about nothing important. He is talentless, dumb and a real vindictive piece of work, obviously extremely jealous, and I've heard he is the boyfriend of some arsehole who works high up in the CBA. The two of them are malicious enough to pull this dirty trick of cancelling my account and killing me off. It's not just straights who have given me a hard time in my life, some of the most horrible rats who have fucked me over have been my fellow gays, slamming doors in my face, making sure I got excluded, ripping me off, bashing me up and, when I was young, raping me.
Of course all of this paranoia could be my delusions, after a lifetime of being a zero-class citizen I have a bitter view of this neo-liberal, high capitalist rats' maze of a world. I find it almost incredible that I'm still going to bed in dread of tomorrow, and I stay in bed late into the day with a blanket pulled over my head, too weary to face my ongoing problems. Yet I didn't survive to 71 and achieve the art, the films, the writings, the adventures, by being a wimp. "When the going gets tough, the tough get going" is my cliche for today, otherwise the race is over but, like most vivacious humans, I cry, "Not yet, not yet! There's got to be something more good coming my way, just around the corner!"
