He’d invited his friend, Jamie, from his prep school to spend the night. We were still in our cottage, where the inside walls were made of fibre board and therefore not very soundproof.
I woke at about five the following morning to hear the two small boys talking animatedly. It soon became apparent that they were discussing their fathers. Damon seemed to me to be more articulate about his father, or at least appeared to know me rather better than Jamie did his own male parent. As though aware of this and to equal up the points taken or go one better, Jamie suddenly announced, “My dad owns a television station!”
This was perfectly true, he was the son of a powerful media family who owned both Australia’s leading women’s magazine and the country’s most successful commercial television network. I waited, anxious to hear Damon’s comeback. This was, after all, pretty heavy stuff. How does a seven-year-old, even one with Damon’s inventive mind, come back after a piece of one-upmanship of this quality?
There was a pause, which seemed to continue for quite a while, then Damon replied, perhaps even a trifle tartly, “My dad knows everything!”
This was said with absolute conviction, as though the ownership of a television station was a poor substitute for the ownership of positively limitless knowledge of the kind that caused the stars and the planets in the universe to spin and shine.
I silently applauded. Maybe, in a court of his peers, this reply would have lost out against the sheer impres-siveness of owning your own television station, but as a comeback it was both sagacious and had a lot of class. Damon had neatly changed direction, brought the argument around from the ownership of things to the personal qualities of the two people. Not bad, not bad at all!
I beamed silently from the other side of the wall, proud of the classy kid we’d reared; then Damon added as though an afterthought, “But he doesn’t know very much about everything!”
Although both Damon’s brothers seemed to like him, Adam seemed the closer of the two to his little brother. Brett was a pretty independent type and somewhat happy-go-lucky, content to cruise through life doing just enough to be left alone and to be seldom singled out for either responsibility or reprimand.
Adam was different, he was a trier and a perfectionist, constantly anxious about his progress, a born nail-biter. Adam soon learned to respect Damon’s mind and he’d bring his anxieties to him as often, if not more often, than he would either to his mother or myself. He seemed constantly confounded by life’s complexity and was increasingly subject to self-doubt and depression. This was particularly true during his puberty and it was at this time, in particular, that he took his anxieties to his little brother.
I discovered with all my sons that one morning they wake up and their world has changed. Instead of being happy kids, they become morose and silent. Instead of quite liking their parents they now see them as practically mentally retarded. Everything “sucks" and nothing can be done to please them. Their angst, confusion, malice, ill-temper, thoughtlessness, despair, superiority and disinterest comes out in the form of arms locked across their chests and brows so deeply furrowed as to be practically prehensile. Their voices drop an octave and they temporarily lose the ability to speak, this faculty being replaced with a Neanderthal grunt which covers every possible situation they may confront.
Angry-looking pimples, which they squeeze into even more angry-looking, raised red circles, appear on hitherto smoothly tanned faces. Though they don’t openly blame their parents for this unseemly pustulence or for everything else that’s suddenly gone rotten in their lives, it’s obvious that in the allocation of mothers and fathers they got a pretty raw deal, a couple of near idiots with absolutely no redeeming features whatsoever.
Morose anger is suddenly a constant in the home, not just their own, but the backlash of hurt and spite they instil in the other members of the family. No reconciliation is possible and, certainly, at times I seriously wondered where I’d gone wrong, and how, in each case, we could have been responsible for raising such an unmitigated little bastard.
Then, one morning three or so years later, the monster who has created such bitter enmity within a perfectly nice family comes up to you at breakfast. The troglodyte grunt followed by the rude stretch across the table for the milk and then the silent, aggressive spooning of Mr Kellogg’s crispy corn flakes into an open, munching, masticating mouth, suddenly kisses you for the first time in three years. Then he starts to chat and laugh as though nothing untoward has taken place in the preceding thirty-six months. The very idea of you as his mortal enemy, so permanent a part of his demeanour the previous day, week, month, year, forever, is now a preposterous thought, an invention of your own over-imaginative mind. He even manages to tell you, in a perfectly sincere voice, “I love you, Dad". And, of course, the little shit is instantly forgiven and his mother, who has been communicating with him via his brothers for the last umpteen months, hugs him, bursts into tears of gratitude and asks him joyously what he’d like for dinner.
Adam followed Brett into this state of pubescent insanity and, in due course, Damon followed Adam. While Brett was perfectly awful and Damon argumentative and irritable and over-precocious, Adam, as usual, managed to find a complication in his state of recalcitrant depression which made the adolescence of the other two seem like a couple of smallish wobbles in a more or less straight line of paternal harmony.
Shortly after going to see the film The Exorcist, Adam developed an almost manic depression. He became convinced that he was in conflict with the devil and that if he didn’t hang on to his thoughts very carefully the devil himself would take him over and rule his mind.
Quite where this came from I’m not sure, certainly not from any formal religious training. The devil played no part in his childhood, good and evil in the accepted catechism was not high on the list of his childhood instruction. I tried to cope with this devil fixation, pointing out that puberty was a pretty tough time, that it was quite okay to masturbate and have sexual fantasies for which he had no need to feel guilty. But I’d guessed wrong as usual. Nothing I said helped. This thing seemed to be over and above the expectations of puberty, an extra bombshell thrown in to confound his already perplexed and somewhat bewildered parents.
To suddenly find that the devil, in a very real sense of evil, was preoccupying Adam’s mind, almost to the exclusion of everything else, was reminiscent of my own upbringing. But this wasn’t darkest Africa, there was no witchcraft in Adam’s pubescent life and I had certainly not introduced the subject to them as children. Only Damon had been shown how to take himself down into his own private country and, anyway, this technique had never been presented as though it contained any supernatural or mysterious qualities, let alone any quasidemonic witchcraft.
At first Benita and I told ourselves it would go away, that this particular obsession was simply a different aspect of puberty, unlike that of his older brother, simply another manifestation, one which Brett, with his more happy-go-lucky pre-pubescent personality, had fortunately escaped. But there was little doubt that Adam’s fears were palpable. Damon, however, was not prepared to indulge Adam. He would argue with him, confound his doubts, build up his ego and get him back on track. Damon, more than any of us, seemed to be able to cope with Adam’s obsession; almost single-handedly he got Adam out of his depression with his logic, his caring, his compassion and even, once in a while, with his capacity for profound sympathy. He was able to calm Adam’s fear and help to alleviate his depression and even, on occasion, to sit at his bedside until he fell asleep. Adam continued to need both the company and counsel of Damon long after he’d come out of his fear-of-the-devil stage and the two remained very close to the end.
It was curious that Adam, who was a good athlete, a good scholar, tremendously popular with his peers and his teachers and seemed to have everything a child could possibly want, needed the constant counsel of his younger brother who, though himself severely handicapped, never asked for a reciprocal shoulder to lean on. Much a
s they both loved Damon, I doubt very much if it ever occurred to Adam or Brett to show anything but the most casual, brotherly compassion for Damon’s condition. This was not simply because they were preoccupied with their own lives. Both boys, if you exclude that horrid period during puberty, are and were considerate people and by no means egocentric. It was just that Damon was such a positive personality that he was simply not someone for whom you could possibly feel sorry.
Damon had another characteristic which made it difficult to see him in anything but a positive light. He overflowed with confidence. In his own mind, nothing in the non-physical sense seemed beyond him and he became convinced at a quite early age that he was destined to be both great and rich, though, of these two things, wealth was the more important. We are not a materialistic family, doing things has always been more important than having things and so it was difficult to understand this desire on Damon’s part for material wealth. He never really lacked for anything in the material sense and his preoccupation with money seemed strangely incongruous in someone who had such intelligence and, I think, real depth of personality.
It only became understandable if you thought about what Damon didn’t have and how he might compensate for this. His body was frail, already he walked with a pronounced limp, movement in his elbows, knees and ankles was restricted, his joints partly fused by arthritis by the time he was in his mid-teens. Only wealth of a fairly excessive kind could turn him into the kind of hero he secretly longed to be. We always cherish the gifts we don’t have and make light of those we’ve been given. Damon wanted to be somehow physically important and he must have decided that wealth could achieve this; that an aura of culture and wealth would compensate for his inadequate physicality in the same way that truly rich people seem larger in stature and physically more impressive than those of us who merely make ends meet.
While Damon went through the usual childhood stage of deciding to be a great doctor and scientist and to find a cure for haemophilia, as he grew into his teens the famous Nobel laureate scientist he intended to be was also seen to be filthy rich, wore Ray-Bans and drove a Ferrari Dino, having achieved all this before he reached the age of twenty-five and while only just out of Med. School. It is a curious thing that Damon always projected the coming together of all his ambitions at the age of twenty-five, that he never talked of himself beyond this age. In part, his mother is to be blamed for Damon’s rather overblown state of mind. Not only did she fill his head with books but also with images. She acquainted him with paintings and buildings, places and people. She told him what it was to be a Renaissance Man. She imbued in him what was good taste and what was thought not to be. Being a strong woman, she is fairly arbitrary in her likes and loyalties and, besides, she is outrageously Eurocentric in terms of fashion, architecture, painting, design, intellect, lifestyle and just plain chic, panache, élan, sophistication and tradition. She used a big spoon to ladle all this on to Damon’s dreaming plate and he, one of the great listeners, imbibed all this romantic and esoteric nonsense and came to the correct, though disastrous, conclusion that it added up to a lifestyle which required a great deal of money, brains, talent and style – but not a lot of physical ability.
He assured himself that he possessed all the required characteristics save the money and, with the addition of a red Ferrari Dino (which, I suppose, compensated in his mind for his inadequate body), he would cope effortlessly with the business of being rich, brilliant and a dilettante. He would think faster, be more charming and, his natural self-confidence assured him, as soon as he was old enough to qualify for his learner-driver plates, he would drive faster and better than anyone who ever sat behind the steering wheel of a high performance Italian sportscar.
All this would make him extremely sexy, the young, good-looking Australian (with a slight but very sensual limp) who had come from the Antipodes to conquer the Old World.
The Ferrari was important; not a brand new one, which I suspect, using his mother’s social barometer, he sensed would be not altogether in good taste, but a Dino, a machine which epitomised Enzo Ferrari’s genius before he compromised his engineering soul and started building cars for rich, coke-sniffing hairdressers, advertising men and the new breed of Wall Street bratocracy.
As Damon grew into his later teens he lost the ambition to become a doctor. While, if he applied himself, he certainly had the brains for medical school, he may have known that his body would almost certainly let him down. The constant time missed from school because of his bleeds would be no different at university and medicine would certainly not easily allow for this.
If Damon was going to be rich, it was clear he wasn’t going to be a rich doctor and someone else was going to find the cure for haemophilia, which Damon now knew was not to be his claim to fame.
In fact, when he was about fifteen, we read an article which claimed that research at Oxford University had made it possible to diagnose haemophilia in the womb. What this seemed to mean was that there would be no more haemophiliacs, that a foetus found to be missing Factor VIII in the blood would be quietly aborted. Goodbye all future Damons. It was a sad but real thought. Beethoven’s father had venereal disease and his mother was placed in an insane asylum; by today’s standards the family gynaecologist would almost certainly have recommended that Mrs Beethoven’s pregnancy be terminated.
It’s an old argument and a tired one and, in a world where there are too many children, where forty-four thousand die every day of starvation, the anti-abortion stance is difficult to justify. How would we have reacted had we known of Damon’s condition while there was still time to abort? I feel almost certain that I would have agreed to this happening. After all, we had the gift of two healthy sons, two children is blessing enough for anyone.
Yet, as it turned out, the idea of not having Damon in our lives is almost unthinkable. He heightened our sense of life and taught us all the meaning of love. He showed us how important it was to live each day, to squeeze the essence from the hours we are given. He was no saint, yet he gave us all a sense of living beyond ourselves. He had no strong beliefs, but he made us more compassionate and understanding in those human virtues we have the arrogance to refer to as Judaeo-Christian.
It is too easy to eulogise someone you have loved and lost and Damon’s life of twenty-four years was insufficient to make him a remarkable human being. He was just a great kid, then a young man who had dreams that were bigger than his suffering and hopes bigger than his fears. He might also have had plans bigger than his frail body could accommodate, though I think not. Damon, the schemer, the dreamer, the optimist, was too used to overcoming obstacles, too big on fortitude not to have been a formidable competitor.
But when he was seventeen we learned that he was HIV positive. In the latter part of 1983 we didn’t know quite what that meant. The only thing we knew was that it wasn’t AIDS, the new disease which was beginning to kill homosexuals, quite a few in San Francisco and New York, though only the hint of a handful in Sydney. Not even Uncle Robert, a homosexual friend of the family, knew of anyone who had AIDS.
But looking back, I think we all knew that time was now a finite factor in Damon’s life. Less time was now on his side. Damon had to make his mark rather sooner than later. Perhaps that’s why he wanted to be rich while he was still young? Perhaps all this is nonsense? Certainly, I never discussed it with him, but at about this time, when it was announced he was HIV positive, Damon lost interest in long-term plans such as would be necessary if he were to follow a career in medicine.
I must also be truthful, Damon from the age of ten, when he began to deliver parcels for Bernie Carlisle, our local chemist, was always involved in a get-rich scheme. Because of his bleeds he couldn’t always ride his bicycle or get to the chemist shop after school, so he developed a network of local kids who could stand in for him. At first, this was simply a matter of expediency and of not letting Mr Carlisle down, but it soon became the basis of Damon’s working philosophy, as he was seen to take
a small commission from each of the kids for supplying them with job security.
I recall late one night, in fact it was early one morning, perhaps two or three a.m., when Damon was about ten years old and we’d not long started doing home transfusions, he had a bleed in his right arm so he couldn’t manage the needle himself. He’d woken me and I’d put the needle in and sat with him while the drip went through, when suddenly he asked, “Dad, what’s a commission agent?”
It was always as well to ask Damon where his questions were leading, his mind was so quick that he’d take leaps and you’d find yourself explaining at length something which was meant only to be a bridge to another subject queuing for attention in his mind.
“Why do you want to know?”
“Well, when Brett was writing that essay you were helping him with on modern communications, you said advertising was a commission agent for the media. What did you mean?”
I explained how advertising agents accepted work from manufacturers and, instead of charging them a fee for making the advertisement and placing it, they charged them a percentage of the money it cost to buy the air time or the space in the magazine or newspaper. Then I added that the media, that is, the television station or radio station, magazine or newspaper also sold the air time or space on the page to advertising agencies for ten per cent less than if the client wanted to buy it directly from them.
This meant that advertising agents got commissions both from the manufacturer and from the media and were therefore agents who received commissions. Putting the two things together, they were commission agents.
“You mean they get this money for doing nothing?” Damon was clearly interested.
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