George Burrows
Beyond the playground
Last night I saw George Burrows. I was able to observe him without bringing immediate attention to myself, which isn’t surprising as he hasn’t seen me in forty years. I don’t know why I should feel so bitter about that long ago night as we were good friends, the best of friends, having known each other since our school days.
Perhaps because, older, he felt the disproportions of things — used the enormous weight of his reality against me. I say that in this sense: my life was filled with comparatively few beautiful things, but those things were worth any agony, worth living for, not suffering. George never had a beautiful thing in his life.
In a thousand ways George resented my creativity, never having shown himself as anything but a blaggard, likable enough, vulgar mostly, pissing his waste in every lane from Tobermory to Craignure.
It was a February night, the stars shone bright, sharp, and the wind howling. I had discovered so many new and interesting things: a fabulous cobweb of beautiful hidden places, palaces and castles, churches, and secreted streets full of romance and age and yet it was all so sad.
What a beautiful combination for an artist to discover — golden weather, when everything seemed touched with magic, people lining the banks of rivers, sitting in parks, walking in gardens, eating picnics under trees and listening to Grieg. The sadness of it all was overwhelmingly romantic.
I later joined George for a beer, it was 10.00 PM. He was drunk, verbose, having fun at everyone else’s expense. He got like that. He didn’t mean it. He was a twit after a drink. I told George about my discoveries.
In the telling, it was as if we had become fighters in the square ring of his reality, taunting each other from our corners, meeting in the middle, his face lurid with rage, muttering through his mouth guard, ‘take it back, take it all back, its rubbish, you creative whore, be a man’ and he struck blows at my creative life, blood ran from my nose, teeth punched through my lip, ‘you are the son of a fisherman, a titan, and yet you scream like a woman,’ and his next blow crushed my nose, my ear hanging, ‘you’ve always been a pasty faced little bastard, shaming your family name, you squeaking pussy,’ and my blood splattered out of the ring, into the faces of everyone I ever loved, and I fell, vomiting onto the canvas, ‘how pretty is your day now, prince of dreams? He yelled, standing over me, gloating his terror. I felt as if one eye was hanging from its socket, blinded, beaten, and then George fell by my side, collapsed.
He was insane, screaming in horror, ‘I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean it, I didn’t,’ and there was agony in his voice. Something had released him from anger.
Having watched him at the bar for a few minutes, I walked over.
‘Hello, George, it’s been a long time.’
‘Fuck me, the phantom ship has come home, he said. The man is timeless, living without desire, his spirit oblivious of the wider world. ‘Where have you been? Staying in golden palaces, no doubt, finding magic in all those secret streets, walking castle walls, why don’t you tell us all what you’ve been doing?’
I could have simply told him that I’d been off learning the craft of fighting, but I flew at him. ‘I’ve crossed castle courtyards, walked the silver-wet streets of New York, ridden bicycles in Amsterdam, falling, skinning my hands and knees, tearing my trousers,’ I said, leaving his cheeks pummeled, cut open and bloody. ‘I’ve ridden train cars in India, met priests, scattered a 100,000 words of sick wisdom on pages in Turin, their edges nibbled by rats,’ such words I punched into his burst eardrum. George was going down, bloodied, broken, his real life smashed. In all my life, I’ve never been dead and flat. I was born in February, between 9.00 PM and midnight. Thrown away, as if rubbish. I can take any beating, being the man I am, but not from the likes of you, George. Nor the life presented to me.
He lay flat, arms out-flung, beaten, his eyes shut. Before I left, I raised him up, kissed his head, and bought him a drink.
