What if my Prose and Poetry was, in fact, my Life’s Story? Part Two:
I was eighteen when I left the island. Since being adopted, I had never been away from my parents for more than a couple of days. For the first time in ten years, I was going to disobey dad, leave him and mum at home to worry about me.
Part Two:
The Seventies, Flight, and Marriage
It was an impulse. That first night in Paris, I wanted to fly home through the night to tell my parents that I loved them. Words came to mind, words like betrayal. I was eighteen and convinced I knew what life intended for me. Dad was my hero and remained that person all his life.
At eighteen years old, dad served in the navy, as did his father, and he had a similar career for me in mind.
Grandfather built the cottage in which we lived; he was a crofter before joining the navy. Dad was proud of me, having taken flying lessons when I was fourteen, taught by David, a family friend, the owner of Glenforsa, where he kept his Cessna F-150. It was the first plane I ever flew. Unfortunately, this same plane was involved in one of the island’s greatest mysteries. Peter Gibbs, a WW 11 Spitfire pilot with the RAF, hired David’s Cessna in 1975. He flew out never to return. His disappearance and subsequent mystery when finding his body have never been answered. (A Wikipedia link to the story can be found at the end of this chapter.) *
Dad had ideas to send me into the RAF. I don’t remember when I had ever faced dad and told him outright, no!
Paris frightened the holy crap out of me. I had never seen anything like it. Hordes of people, lights, cars, gaiety, it was all so alien. I had packed two bags at home, convincing dad I was leaving. He gave me a hundred pounds and a new wallet. It was an astronomical sum back then. In today’s money, perhaps two thousand pounds sterling. Mum kissed me the way she did on the adoption day and hugged me even harder, crushing my ribs. Dad said, come home when your dreams are broken.
Three months after arriving in Paris, I was writing songs. No one ever heard them, but I was determined. I was a young musician looking for a place to stay and met a guy on the street. He told me his name was Leonard Laconte. His name is no stranger to those who have followed me here on Medium, but for the sake of continuity, and new followers, I will place his influence upon my life here.
We were poor by Parisian standards. The thing about Leonard is, well, he didn’t just call himself a poet. I mean, he was unquestionably a poet. He lived it; do you understand? We shared a bathroom, but each had our own study.
Every day I aimed at writing down five hundred rhythms in my notebook before dragging my guitar into every sidewalk café along the Champs Elysees, nestling up to beautiful women, those with elegance and poise, and asking… “Would it bore you too much to listen to samples of my work?” Some shrugged me away, most in fact.
Leonard and I made it work. Occasionally we needed to get out from the confinement of walls, seeking to feel inspired. We would spend the day admiring the women who walked up and down the Champs Elysees. I would play my music, and Leonard offered his poetry. We were so full of ourselves, I remember.
Leonard had something; he had spirit, art, joy, I’m not sure what else to call it. Women who met him were enamored. We were inseparable back then. I didn’t know what it was, be it Paris, the Seine, the women, the artists, or the richness of religion, but I loved it.
Sometimes we would meet up with his friends in the evenings, have drinks, and listen to each other talk about our lives. It’s hard not knowing how my story began, maybe after an accident happened in the universe, something unknown that radically upset the balance of one’s sense of self.
But this was not Leonard; he was a beautiful man. We weren’t lovers, though I would surely have loved him differently if I’d been born a woman.
Leonard would go off into various dimensions of his existence and looking back, I can now say, with great certainty, he suffered brilliant moments of madness.
Nothing very remarkable happened to us all those years ago, or everything that happened was indeed impressive. But, looking back on the nature of my friend, thinking about him serves to reflect his image in my mind.
We lived in a small second-floor apartment on Cerisoles St. It was a two-minute walk to the Champs Elysees. Leonard’s day began around 4:00 AM. Always the same way, he’d light his clay pipe and let the weightless veil of smoke hang over his head while he sat in his boxers on the edge of the bed for ten minutes.
He seemed able to get by on very few hours of sleep, and even those times were disturbed. There were forty years of age differences between us, yet he was like a brother, teaching me about life, especially women.
Once his pipe had been sucked on for a few minutes, he’d walk over to the balcony window and open it.
The Paris morning air pulled that weightless fog onto the street. Then, scratching his balls, he’d water the geraniums caring less to peer over the ornate iron railings to see who might be passing on the street.
His routine was changed only by the occasional voice yelling…maudite idiot!
He would re-enter the room, muttering the word ‘shithole’ in his broadest Flemish accent. Such a word from his mouth sounded beautiful.
The blond whore arrived at 6:00 AM every Tuesday. She had a youthful brilliance in her eyes and shining skin. He told me she was: one unbridled heap of organs that demanded his gentle care. Bending her onto knobby kneecaps, he pulled her to a state of undress and deepened his belly over her back.
Her breasts fell more splendidly than snow. For an hour, she sweats Leonard’s obedience. Finally, Leonard shut his eyes and slipped off her back. He sent her away before locking himself in the lavatory: There, he could think, be calm, and sniff the air.
Leonard saw things as only poets do, in an imaginative light. But, in truth, Leonard was never going to be ordinary; born with the heart of a Chansonnier, he perfected his craft on fifteen-year-old girls. Later he wrote his poetry on the sidewalks enticing the most beautiful of women to stop. That was it about Leonard; they always did. For days they returned to read of themselves.
Nothing now, and you must trust me on this, is remarkable. There’s no other way to explain his absence in my life.
The doctor read the diagnosis. The shadow of despair came in from its dark corner and sat close. I was upset and too dumb to acknowledge what was being said. I had lived for a year in his light and lovely air. My tears were a useless demonstration of anguish and different from those that might herald the child’s arrival into the world.
The force of faith and compassion, the idea that somehow, a miracle would happen, kept me from believing the brutal reality.
Lying on his bed, his breath faint, he ushered me close. We had lived hand-in-hand through life’s monotonies; felt the warmth of the unexpected.
‘I hear it all the time; how you’ll protect me. I don’t want or need protection. I want to die.’
It felt strangest of all to imagine other mortals working in the bank, doing endless laundry, making the occasional trip to a salon, or caring for delicate children.
An hour later, Leonard departed this earth. I wept so hard snot ran from my nose, mixing with tears before it seeped passed my lips into my mouth. My heart broke so that every day after, I knew it survived only within a spindly thicket.
I wanted to ride a wild wind somewhere, just to be alone with the emptiness of a life that would never again recover its beauty. I never want to go to that place where the whistling of death seems more comfortable than the music of life without Leonard. But the only words I could write were these:
Dying
Sighing
Lying
Crying
Trying
Flying **
I returned home, broken of dreams.
1975
Dad, when at home, was the human equivalent of Mary Celeste. Everything about his life was perfectly in its place, except in his mind. He often drifted aimlessly through the house without direction, occasionally finding himself in the kitchen, a strictly forbidden room for a man more at home on the sea, prompting mum to ask: Darling, are you lost? He would look around before responding: Aye, lass, I think I be, turnabout and leave.
Dad started commercial fishing when he left the navy and two years later purchased a trawler. In my heart, no way was I going to disappoint him again.
There are many stories I can tell, not just of dad’s exploits but of those men who worked with him and who ultimately became my members of my close family unit.
Being with dad was as close to being whole again as a young man could be.
But something had changed in me after Leonard. I tried never to complain about life on the island. Coming into my twenties, having spent time in Paris, I felt crushed, as if every day the island had shrunk. After six months back on the island, I was writing songs secretly. Sleep came in fits and starts; sometimes, I woke unsure if I was in a dream of life or simply on a journey into self. I peered into the dark, wondering where I was.
I would take myself to the bathroom and wash tears away, but even as I did, more happened. First light slit a path across the waters to the mainland. I picked up my toothbrush and wondered why a lonely man worried about breath’s purity on such a helpless morning?
I tried to speak to dad with effectiveness about my love for the world. He understood, even though he lived with quiet dignity. Out of sight, I stamped my frustration, raged, and thrashed words down in anger.
Three years later, I saw an expression of pride so deep. I was awarded my wings. I had done right by him.
Dad undid me, did me up, never gave up on me.
Marriage
I wasn’t a man looking right or left as I walked down Oxford Street, crossing Picadilly Circus on my way to Trafalgar Square. I was on two weeks’ leave from RAF Cottesmore.
London, like Paris, held a fascination for me. I hadn’t kissed a woman in several weeks, making me disagreeable, and entered on a quest to end that drought in the company of two other young officers.
My expectations as to what falling in love would feel like were high.
I didn’t meet her that day or many weeks following, but in a restaurant months later. She had lazy long blond hair, eyes the bluest I had ever seen.
I’m not going to dally my words around how beautiful she was, inside and out, because there is still pain in looking back so intimately. We courted while I served my last three years in the air force. We married in 1978 on the grounds of Duart Castle. A year later, Philip was born, and in 1981 Daniel*** came into the world.
There was nothing, nothing in the wide world or beyond, that I loved more than her. It was the highest privilege to fall asleep with her body touching mine. I was wholly absorbed into her life and love.
Links included:
*Peter Gibbs, The Missing Pilot
**Dying, Sighing, Lying, Crying, Trying, Flying (Turning Around)
- ** Daniel
