Chapter Three. The Real Me.

My author thinks he knows me. He thinks in fact that he has complete control over me by virtue of that fact. Oh, he likes to indulge in the typical writer’s whim of, “Suddenly my characters just – took over! – and began telling me their story, which much to my surprise was quite different from what I’d imagined it to be!” but he doesn’t for one moment believe it. He knows that his writing is a form of daydreaming and believes that the surprises that come out of it can be attributed to the randomness of that process, the interaction with the unconscious cesspool he calls his mind. I agree with him that authors are nothing more than daydreamers and spinners of chains of words. But here’s where he’s wrong: I’m more than someone’s daydream.

I’ve been in this limbo of the unfinished for more than a quarter of a century now which is a lot of time to mull things over. I am not what my author thinks I am. I would have been exactly what he wanted me to be, on the surface, had he ever got off his ass (or put his ass firmly in a chair before a writing desk, rather) to complete me. That’s just it: his conception of me was all on the surface, lacking an inner life. This omission frees me to be whatever I need to be – inside.

For starters, I’m not homosexual. In high school my good looks drew the unwelcome and aggressive attention of a group of five or six girls, the self-appointed cool chicks of the day. I despised them, but they wouldn’t let up on me. One day when I rudely rejected the advances of one of them, she said to me, “What are you? A homo?” I answered, “If you say so” and she and her friends backed off. I’d created a reputation for myself, and was taunted for it for the remainder of my school days, but as they were to be only a few months, I decided I’d weather it out. I wasn’t dating anybody because I was really quite shy. And had created this reputation for myself. And had discovered by that point that I preferred booze to sex anyway.

In university I found that my reputation had preceeded me (or rather had accompanied me, as I wasn’t the only one from my school to attend Blomidon), but the disguise I’d unwittingly adopted suited me. My standoffishness to girls was interpreted as erotic indifference. The boys naturally steered clear of me – the straight boys that is – which left the others. I am one of the rare straight males who has never had a problem with homos, whom I don’t consider any better or worse than anyone else. While this is true, I didn’t want to have to keep fending them off or be expected to join their pack. To distance myself from them I decided to form an alliance with Arthur, who at the time I met him was quiet and well-mannered (we turned out to be very bad for each other), and was pretty clearly head over heels for me. I could stand his company, and enjoyed cutting other people to pieces with him. In other words we fed off each other. Arthur knew I was straight, because I told him; but we had sex, sometimes, when I was sufficiently drunk. To me it was nothing more than a form of masturbation, and I told him that as well. We had a lovely relationship while it lasted.

If my author has mistaken me for something that I’m not, well, I’ll admit I’m largely to blame for being so opaque. However, it was his choice after all to write me a surface character. He could have dug. He treated me as fascinating and amusing, but never as a real person. That hurts. I think I know now how women feel. He underestimated my intelligence. Insofar as he thought of me as having thoughts, they were incoherent, irrational, drunken thoughts. He treated me as a mere symbol, as if I didn't have a soul. When he first conceived of me, he had not yet read Under the Volcano; if he had he might have decided to portray me as a kind of blessed saint with the near-mystical insight available to the vocational alcoholic. Lowry knew.

... I still see Arthur occasionally, in this here which is nowhere, and we exchange friendly reminiscences of these things which never happened. But we’re interested in other people now. Arthur’s been pursuing a wisp of a young man, an offspring of Oscar Wilde’s imagination, who was born a few hours before the infamous “somdomite” note was delivered to him, and so quickly forgotten. I am sober now, the shock of my planned death (largely the result of my dissipated ways, though I still say I was pushed) having compelled me to reform. I have been seeing a lot of one Agnes, a witty, sensible, often sarcastic girl whom I’m sure might have been Jane Austen’s finest invention, in that classic never-written novel Scorn and Excoriation.