Trials of the Monkey

by Matthew Chapman

  I worked for my father, welding refrigeration coils. I wrote poetry, though not much of it. I thought of becoming a hobo or joining the Merchant Marine. Most days I drank or smoked pot. Sometimes when I was high, I would imagine myself a writer. Perhaps because of my childhood eczema, I always found it hard to sleep. Now it became almost impossible.

  When I was committed to Marie’s care, I was suicidal. By the time I left I was a writer. Like bookends propping up the shabby literature of my education stand two magnificent women. Mrs. Marshall taught me the pleasure of creation, and taught it so well that the sadistic prep-school conformists who tried to beat it out of me, pissing on the flames and stomping on it with their stinking brogues, could not quite succeed, leaving alive an ember for Marie to blow back to life.

  Marie lived in a tall, narrow house in Little St. Mary’s Lane, an old street leading down to the River Cam. When I first went to see her, I was too young to drive a car. With the wages from my father, I bought a motorcyle, an AJS 350, and drove into town on that. The room where she saw patients was at the very top of the house, three flights up. At first, I lay on the couch to talk, but as lying on my back was at that time synonymous with masturbation, I would get an erection, which distracted me, and perhaps even her, from the analysis. I moved to a chair, turned at an angle away from her.

  I looked out of the window at the roof of St. Mary’s Church, the church where my mother came to worship when she was in college, where I was baptised, and where later Sarah and I were brought for our few years of churchgoing. A row of rounded crosses, like clover leaves, ran along the ridge. Sometimes I would imagine myself firing a rifle at them one by one.

  I got in the habit of remembering dreams, sometimes three or four a night. These I would bring to Marie like gifts the following evening. I went five times a week for about two years and slowly began to see that I was not a random scrap of disordered matter, but an odd mixture of my mother and my father. In spite of my lack of mathematical ability, I shared with him a rationalist’s view of the world. As time passed and I was able to forget school, I became curious again, as he always was, and soon after that, began to feel a capacity for hard work. Meanwhile, the strange beauty of my dreams convinced me that if I could find a way to reach inside my head while I was awake, I’d find a rich, poetic imagination such as I believed my mother had. I was, like her, melancholic and romantic. Perhaps, I began to hope, I might be able to combine all these inherited characteristics and create something from them called Matthew.

  Marie encouraged me to start writing short stories. They were rarely more than two or three pages long and tended to be observations of intense moments. One described the moment when a young man decides to ride his motorcycle down a long hill and across a busy road without stopping. Another was about an older man and his life of sad but delicious solitude. The only thing on earth he loves is a rare flower he has grown, which is now dying.

  Marie knew a woman in Cambridge who was a published short-story writer and sent me to see her. I can’t remember her name, but she took me seriously and said I had talent. This was a woman who produced work. What she said had value.

  I began to read enthusiastically. I read all the novels of Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Steinbeck, D. H. Lawrence, Thomas Hardy, Zola, and Raymond Chandler, along with plays, newspapers, history books, magazines, and poetry, any scrap of paper with words on it found anywhere at any time.

  When I turned seventeen Peter, Francis’s father, gave me a car, an old Morris Minor. Soon afterwards, I decided to leave home and go work in London. I had friends who were getting a flat. I left Marie and didn’t see her again until shortly before her death twenty years later. We went out and drank too much and she was sad and scurrilous.

  On the day I left home, it was still summer. I could hear thunder shifting in the sky above. I hugged and kissed my mother goodbye—I always loved her, no matter what she did, and always felt we understood each other—and started to drive. When I got to the motorway about twenty miles away, the storm broke and rain began to batter the car. I turned on the windscreen wipers but they did not work. I thought about turning back. Instead, I pushed my seat forward, and reaching through the side window, wiped the rain from the windscreen with my hand. I kept on doing this until, an hour later, I arrived in the city.

  In London, I went to another psychiatrist for a few months. There was something Germanic about her—she was, in fact, German—and though she was well-meaning, it was a rough transition from my beautiful black mama. The only appointment she could give me was at eight in the morning. As I was soon working in a nightclub, shining a spotlight on two cabaret shows a night, the first of which ended at midnight, the second at two, and simultaneously holding down a full-time job researching documentaries, I would simply fall onto the couch and go to sleep.

  The documentary company, taking advantage of my lack of education, didn’t pay me. I researched a couple of documentaries for them, both about diseases. Now they asked me to research one on the effects of disaster.

  I had gone almost nine months on three to four hours’ sleep a night, often less. On Sunday mornings, when I could have gone to bed by three A.M. and not woken up until deep into the afternoon, I waited up for my working friend and then drank heavily with her, so that what benefits might have accrued from a long night of sleep were dissipated by chronic hangovers. I was comprehensively exhausted.

  ‘What kind of disaster?’ I asked, an ominous feeling rising inside.

  ‘All disaster. How does it affect a village when the mine collapses and kills all the men? What happens to a man after he’s had his legs amputated? Marital disaster, death of children, fatal diseases, bankruptcies, murder, suicide, aeroplane crashes. Communities and individuals. Psychologically and socially, how do we survive disaster?’

  How am I going to survive this disaster? was the question in my mind. Long-term sleep deprivation makes you paranoid. Why had they chosen me to destroy with this gruesome work? I was getting stabbed and assaulted in my personal life. Now this? I was horrified. Days, weeks, months of grief and mutilation stretched ahead.

  I began work. I saw some terrible sights and learned two interesting things. Several of the men I interviewed became compulsively sexual after their disasters. It was as if, having felt the wings of death brush against them, they now had to compensate by plunging in among the arms and legs of life. The second thing I learned was that if a community has a disaster which receives little media attention, it unites and remains united for years, whereas a community which suffers both disaster and heavy press attention fractures into a hierarchy of grief and contention.

  It was all so painful and I was so exhausted that within a couple of weeks I began to develop a nervous tic. To be more precise, I began to develop a nervous sneer. I’d be interviewing some poor sap whose wife had left him two days after he got hit by a lorry and was paralysed for life, and I’d feel my upper lip curl up on one side.

  ‘So,’ I’d sneer at him, ‘did your wife come to the hospital to visit you, or did she just straightaway take the kids and move up to Manchester with your best friend?’

  As he replied, I would wipe at the lip with my fingers and it would straighten out. Moments later, however, up it would curl again, a ghastly involuntary tilde of contempt.

  There were complaints and I was fired.

  I retreated to the mill house, slept for a few weeks, and then got up and wrote a play. When I was fully recovered, I returned to London determined to be a playwright. I went to visit a friend of my parents, an unusual man, brilliant but unrealised, who was staging plays in a church hall in Holborn. He encouraged me and eventually staged a reading of my first play.

  He also let slip the secret of my mother’s affair and the real paternity of my brother Francis. When I next returned to the mill house for the weekend, I looked at my parents differently. My father seemed almost heroic for having stayed all these years to provide stability for his four children. I never consciously blamed my m
other for what she had done and never told her I knew her secret. Her suffering became more comprehensible in one way at least, because I now shared an element of it. It is said that keeping secrets drives men mad, and in later years when I interviewed old CIA men for a script I was writing, it was remarkable how many of them were semi-deranged alcoholics. It was hard to know this crucial fact about my brother and keep it to myself. How it must have been for my mother I can only imagine.

  I say I did not consciously blame her. This is true. However, it was around this time that I began a habit which financed my writing for several years. I’d take a menial job and after a month or so would call in and say my mother was dying of some painful disease. Few employers would fire you outright and while they continued to pay, I’d write frantically, creating imagined life while being sustained by her imagined death. Sometimes you could buy a full month this way. One employer eventually called up and said, ‘Listen, mate, how long’s it going to take for your fucking mother to die because this is getting expensive.’ Usually, a secretary called and, with tight-lipped regret, would inform me that my employment was terminated.

  After a while I stopped writing plays. I didn’t like the milieu; perfume and fur at one end, humourless Marxists, at the other. During this period, I had became an assistant film editor. After two years, when my apprenticeship was over and I knew how shots connected, I wrote a small movie based on a nightmare I had about a revolution in England and the effect it has on a soft, middle-class young man like myself. I gave it the title Violent Summer, and decided to direct it.

  I was in one of those phases where no courage is required to do something dangerous. A decade of largely menial work had stretched my patience to the limit. I could not stand another ten years being told by people I did not respect to do something I did not find interesting. I reached back into my not-so-distant nightclub past and acquired half the money I needed to make the film. The rest I got from a theatrical producer I met. I managed to pull a cast and crew together and then, having actually never seen a professional film camera before, started to direct. The lead in the film was Bruce Robinson, who became my lifelong friend. The film was sold to one of the independent TV stations in Britain. It was well reviewed.

  It had taken me ten years to get to this point—ten years of weird employment, much of it humiliating—but here I was at twenty-five, a screenwriter and director. Had I gone to college, would I have been able to pull this off so quickly? Perhaps. Would I have met so many interesting people along the way, worked in so many strange places, or felt so directly what it was to be one of the dispossessed? Doubtful. Driven by desperation, not caring if I was jailed, I had jumped many of the apparently logical steps and forced myself into a position I seemed not to deserve. But in fact higher education, seeking as it does to winnow out the fools, is the worst place for a writer to get an education and where I had got mine was the best. What would the works of Shakespeare or Dickens be, for example, without the idiots and reprobates?

  If, as someone said, the measure of an educated man is that you can drop him down the chimney of any house and he’ll be able to talk to whoever he finds in the living room, I was at twenty-five an educated man. I was also, unfortunately, a drinking man, and partly because of this, didn’t make another film for three years.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  Spelunking with the Christians

  Kurt Wise is in a frenzy of activity. Several white vans, replete with Christian youth, are parked outside the front entrance of Bryan College, waiting to depart on the creationist cave tour and Kurt is dashing from one to the other making sure every young believer has a flashlight. I don’t have a flashlight and I’m late—and there doesn’t seem to be a place for me in any of the vans. I go from one to another, past rows of uninviting faces. Finally, I find a van with an empty seat right at the very back. I clamber past a group of clean-cut types of both sexes and settle in for the ride.

  Apart from me there are eight people here and they all ignore me. The girls are in their late teens, early twenties. A handsome young blond man sits in the passenger seat at the front, navigating.

  As we leave Dayton and head out into the country, they start to discuss a talent show they had last night. In one of the skits a man was supposed to dress up as a woman, but some of his fellow students ruled against it because of a verse in Deuteronomy forbidding men to put on women’s clothing.

  They debate this earnestly. (I say ‘debate’ not to suggest there’s anything deep about it, but because during the entire day I never witness anything which even verged on ‘argument’; all are unfailingly polite to each other.) Some think it was right to cancel the skit because after all, it’s in the Bible—no cross-dressing, end of story—but the handsome boy up front and the driver, a dark-haired older kid, suggest the verse existed to stop men dressing as women to avoid going to war and so has no relevance in this context.

  A girl in front of me, with short dark hair, bright eyes, a beautiful complexion, but ineffably prissy and wholesome, starts to speak about music. Her dogmatic proclamations are made in a singsong tone so upwardly inflected they sound like questions. (I later notice that many of them speak like this.)

  ‘I’m like coming to terms with the fact I don’t want to listen to secular music? I mean, my parents don’t like it? And I’m supposed to do what they say? Plus, you know, it’s the Devil’s music?’

  They’ve all been listening to a song by Nine Inch Nails called ‘God Is Dead.’

  I ask them why they’ve been listening to this and they tell me about the course they’re taking. Run by the Summit Ministry, it’s a two-week summer camp where they study ‘World Views.’ They compare Christian music to secular music, creationism to evolution. Tonight they’re going to watch a movie, Contact, in which a preacher is portrayed unflatteringly. (I thought everyone was portrayed unflatteringly—to put it kindly—but the preacher certainly had the worst haircut.) It’s a course in defensive strategy designed to help young Christians, particularly those going on to a secular university, to withstand attacks on their faith.

  ‘I hear like intellectuals, a lot of them commit suicide?’ squeaks a zit-encrusted teenage boy, apropos of nothing. ‘’Cause they believe what they’re taught, evolution an’ all, so they got nothing to live for?’ And now he fixes me with a mordant look, like maybe I’m one of them.

  ‘That’s true, statistically true,’ says another young man. ‘They don’t have God in their lives, they don’t have Jesus as their personal saviour.’

  ‘Amen,’ says one of the girls.

  It’s almost as if I’m the centre of a joke and don’t know it. Can they really be talking like this? Do they know who I am? Have they been instructed to behave this way? ‘Give him a good strong rush of the Word, kids, but make it look natural, like you’re just chatting among yourselves.’

  But I don’t think so. This is how it is, a constant reiteration of their agreement with each other. Younger, less adept in the art of atheist-detection, they haven’t yet caught on to my awful condition. They don’t know who I am, they just don’t like the look of me, an oddly dressed, unwelcome old fart hunched at the back of the van, scribbling in a notebook. The girls are wary, with the confused intuition of virgins, the boys are politely indifferent. We’ve been driving half an hour before they ask me why I’m here and when they do I keep it simple: a book on the Scopes Trial.

  To some degree this puts them at ease and interests them, so when sandwiches are produced and they see I have none, they kindly offer spares. I decline. It’s too hot to eat, the air-conditioning fails just short of me. If I extend my foot, I can feel the last wisps of cool air evaporate around my ankle.

  Most of the people in the van are from rural states, South and North Carolina, West Virginia, Pennsylvania, Utah, and Minnesota. Many have been home schooled, most are pleasant but uninteresting, the weird similarity of their views making it hard to distinguish one from another. The boy who looked at me when talking about the suici
de of intellectuals has a resentful, suspicious quality. The handsome young man is handsome—and aware of it. Chrissie is prissy. And then there’s Erica.

  Erica is an obstreperous, bright, energetic, outspoken, fresh-faced, no-nonsense type—what you see is what you get—except that beneath the surface lies something both provocative and vaguely sullen. You have the feeling that were she not a Christian she’d be commenting on guys’ asses and using the word ‘studly.’ As a Christian, however, she is forbidden from expressing herself this way and so this bold, rambunctious quality finds outlet in outrageous statements of another kind.

  ‘I have no friends, nobody likes me, but I don’t care,’ she cheerfully declares at one point. ‘I have no soul mates, so what?’

  Older than the others, perhaps slightly embarrassed at being here, she seems more worldly. She’s popular, but only as ‘a character.’ She’s too careless and self-absorbed for intimacy, too unpredictable and uncensored to be trusted, and anyway she’d rather be the centre of attention than deal with the complexities of friendship. Blonde, with long fine features and a well-stoned body, she’s brought along a bike helmet. ‘I’m just bound to smash my head against something,’ she states matter-of-factly, ‘that’s the way I am.’

  After about an hour, we arrive at Grassy Cove, a pastoral valley between faint blue mountains, and turn off the main road onto a dirt track. As we bump along, we pass three rugged country boys walking in the same direction. One has a bandana around his head, but to me they appear utterly harmless. The people in the van, however, particularly the females, sit up alert, and with slowly rotating heads study them with suspicion and hope out loud that they don’t come into the cave with them. They want to avoid infidel intrusion and the possibility of mockery.