Thomas Awful’s Friday Defeats: The Other, Other Brother
Hey it’s Thomas Awful’s Friday Defeats. I’m Geoffrey, Duke of Brittany, son of Henry II, younger brother to Richard the Lionheart, older brother to King John, and a horse ran over me to death and didn’t even realize it.
I once tried out for a punk band. Tried out isn’t entirely correct. I wasn’t trying to make the Varsity baseball team, if such a thing even existed at my Performing Arts High School (it did exist, and the coach had one arm). I was just trying to attach myself to a scene that seemed cool, fun, not entirely depressing. The plan was to show up at the place and fake some proficiency at the bass. I was 15 years old, maybe a little bit 16. My dad drove me to the house in his truck. It was in Campbell, California, in a one-story house that I remember as nice looking, I mean, it wasn’t anything to remember too vividly fifteen years later, but it was fine. I brought my bass, which my parents had bought me for Christmas, because I was determined that I should be able to play an instrument — the easiest instrument to fake — because basically everyone else I knew was in a band, creating supremely good if basic noise where once there was nothing. I carried my tiny amp to the door, and knocked.
Years later, I would watch an episode of Freaks And Geeks in which Jason Segel tries out for a band and he just can’t hack it. I’ve watched nearly every episode of that show several times over since, but no, not that scene. It’s too stupidly familiar, too embarrassingly spot-on. It was like a hang-nail or a stubbed toe, a completely unforgivable thing to complain about, but something impossible not to carry with you every day and especially every night, in those desperate moments right before you fall asleep, when tragedy slips away and only the awkward and painful and totally asinine shit comes back to slap you. Anyway, I was a scrawny, bowl-cut version of Jason Segel in Freaks And Geeks. Except Segel actually had some chops. He just had no idea how to slow down and subsume himself into the collective, or how to take direction. I had no idea what I was doing and everyone saw that. They were very kind about it, which was awful. In the end I started playing “Bro-Hymn” by Pennywise: a song about the suicide of a former member, by one of our worst bands, and my friends joined in. Eventually they outpaced me. I got lost. I liked music, but I didn’t understand it. And then I left to smiles and helpful words.
Sometimes you want to tell your past self to pull your past head out of your past ass, but you can’t. At best (or worst) you can just sort of have nocturnal emissions of counter-factuals. Should, woulda, fucking coulda. Your fate isn’t written in the stars, but sometimes it feels that way. Sometimes the abject fury that is the manifestation of failing and failing to clear a hurdle is just that sound-and-fury shit that signifies, I’m not sure, not much at all? Sometimes you can spend years raging against the dying of the light before you finally realize that darkness is pretty chill indeed. The earth has been dug up again and again to deposit the bodies of men and women who never learned that quitters often win, and that winners often quit. I never tried playing the bass again and I don’t regret it. It wasn’t a surrender, or at least it doesn’t feel like one. I’m tone-deaf and my rhythm is a night-terror. That wasn’t my world and that’s fine and if you disagree, I have a bridge to sell you in my township of Fuck Off, Dude.
Still, I can easily imagine another path, one that I might have pursued had I been just a little bit angrier, a little bit more determined to prove people wrong. I learned early on how stupid and largely pointless it is trying to prove people wrong. In that, I’m very much unlike Geoffrey, Duke of Brittany, son of Henry II, younger brother to Richard the Lionheart, older brother to King John.
Today is August 19th. 830 years ago, on an August 19th much like this, Geoffrey died, crushed by a horse in a mysterious tourney mishap. There’s nothing especially interesting or even unique about this random noble from the 12th Century, and yet I’ve always felt an affinity to him, because neither of us had what it takes to make the band. The difference is mostly that I immediately gave in, which I convinced myself was a sort of honorable submission due to my obvious and glaring limitations. Geoffrey, my darkest timeline homeboy, stoutly refused to submit to anything. He was always ready to throw down. Because that sort of behavior is so alien to me, so completely fucking foreign to my cowardly Vichy French instincts, I remain transfixed by our imagined kinship. For his part, Geoffrey would have no interest or need for me. That, too, is fine and proper.
Everyone knows the basic schematics of Geoffrey, Duke of Brittany’s life. He was the very direct result of Henry II and Eleanor of Aquitaine stripping off their sweat-soiled medieval doublets and weird hats and humping just enough to get the job done. What comes next in Geoffrey’s life are snippets of derisive gossip from universally ill-disposed chroniclers that seemed personally offended by his audacity to fucking be alive. Gerald of Wales said of him:
“He has more aloes than honey in him; his tongue is smoother than oil; his sweet and persuasive eloquence has enabled him to dissolve the firmest alliances and by his powers of language able to corrupt two kingdoms; of tireless endeavor, a hypocrite in everything, a deceiver and a dissembler.”
You’ve probably guessed that I’ve heard similar things about myself over the years. I think mostly unjustly, but yeah, there’s probably some truth to that sort of calumny. Some truth ain’t shit though, in the grand scheme.
Geoffrey’s brief time on planet Earth was largely spent attaching himself to or fostering rebellions against an ever-shifting and developing cast of family members, which sounds shitty, until you remember who his family members were. Though certainly not the most chill recourse, Geoffrey again and again attempted to obliterate that specific sort of aloneness that afflicted the third of four sons. That Geoffrey attempted to destroy that public alienation through force, and that force was — until this publicly kinder, gentler, more woke epoch — the only medium history has ever respected, this is just another detail.
Very few of us get to choose our families, and certainly we don’t choose our place in the family tree’s chronology. This in and of itself isn’t any sort of excuse for trashy behavior, up to and including betraying your parents and siblings with armed uprising. But Geoffrey, like the most of us, didn’t exist as a case study of malfeasance or treachery. And strangely, to his credit, he was just another gross product of his gross world, that muddy, fetid, garbage no-man’s-land between the Dark Ages and the Renaissance. It was too cold or too hot, an endless miserable hell-scape of rotten meat and a cavalcade of cunning motherfuckers intent on seriously fucking over your body or your eternal soul. It was a bummer to be alive.
Geoffrey’s place in the pecking order is deceptive. He had basically nothing to look forward to. He only had his own wits, his own ambition. He was neither the eldest (Henry the Young King, the charismatic cipher who pre-deceased him), or a formidable warrior that doubled as his mother’s favorite son (Richard the Lionheart), or even the goofy mess that nonetheless remained his father’s favorite child (John, Magna Carta PhD). Forget for a moment Geoffrey’s stupefying good fortune as the son of the founder of the motherfucking Plantagenet Dynasty. Indeed, aside from his name and a supporting role in The Lion In Winter, the sum total of his achievements and legacy is festooned to half-forgotten failed uprisings and the footnote infamy of niche academics. Most of us didn’t have famous kings for dads and brothers (never mind his two sisters who became Queens), so we won’t really be remembered at all, not after everyone we personally interacted with die at least, but perhaps that is a kinder fate, a gentler inheritance. I’ll vanish in about a hundred years, no matter what. All those myriad clip-show moments of my own humiliations, my own daily defeats, my goofy and completely historically irrelevant capitulations…gone. When you tally up the abacus of my years on this Earth, I’ll basically come out ahead due to anonymity.
This may be why I’ve always been drawn to the non-rise and certain fall of Geoffrey of Brittany. I’ve always had an idiotic soft spot for middle children, for failures and reprobates, for those who waste away snarling on the margins and amount to like, well, not nothing exactly, but not much either. Geoffrey was a goddamn Prince of the Blood. He rebelled against his father for the first time when he was just a teenager. Was he a shitty fucking son, or was he merely caught up in an agonizing position of being a member of a medieval version of The Royal Tenenbaums without the precious and somewhat cloying camerawork of Wes Anderson to smooth his jagged edges and render him aloof and full of doomed charm? Neither of those things, obviously! He was a dude that lived, and then he died, accidentally, at the age of 27. Centuries later, others would join him in the 27 Club, including Basquiat, Jim Morrison, Jimi Hendrix, D. Boon, Kurt Cobain, Amy Winehouse, and most recently, Anton Yelchin. 27, rough year for the famous.
In the end, after all the maneuvers and shenanigans, Geoffrey was trampled to death by a horse in a tourney mishap. Maybe. Or perhaps he died of a stomachache and the King of France concocted a weird lie to keep Henry Plantagenet from sniffing out this newest rebellion, this final betrayal. Either way, it’s not a death imbued with any sort of respectable pathos. No noble last stand, no biting last word, no nothing, no how. It was an ordinary stupid and pointless death, the likes of which is coming for basically all of us, eventually.
A life lived juggling choleric wrath and futile schemes seems like no life at all, but maybe that’s just temporal chauvinism rearing its homely head. Geoffrey was under the impression that one can outwit inevitability, that the teleological bare-knuckle boxing match that is being alive can be bargained with, tricked, bent to the will of a role-player or a supporting member of a star-studded ensemble. Not everyone gets to be Richard the Fucking Lionheart, and that’s no reason to throw in the towel or to shrink from the big moment. It’s possible, perhaps even likely, that the big moment will crush you into dust, but avoiding it or attempting to renegotiate the terms isn’t any sort of salvation either. Geoffrey Plantagenet, favorite son to no one, little brother and big brother to kings and queens alike, never shrank from the big moments. He shot every buzzer-beater that life hurled at him. He just never was all that good of a shooter. His mechanics were fine, his shooting-form close to flawless. He just couldn’t hit a fucking shot.
His reputation suffered because at this particular juncture of time and place, history wasn’t written by the winners so much as written by the monks who could be bothered to give a shit. Those tonsured motherfuckers hated the hell out of Geoffrey, because he broke all the norms and taboos. He didn’t give a fuck about God, country, or even his immediate family. He wasn’t what you’d call a hero, or even a prestige television anti-hero. But there’s a place in the recesses of the imagination that goes beyond heroes and anti-heroes and charismatic villains. Give me the ill-fated gross idiots swinging battle-axes at fate any fucking day. I never really learned how to play bass, and Geoffrey never became King, despite all his machinations. One of us quit and became nothing. The other (that would be Geoffrey, Duke of Brittany!) never quit and more or less became nothing but a hyper-linked name one might find on Wikipedia if you were to fall down a drunken Angevin rabbit-hole. Like so many things, there are simultaneously too many and not enough things to say about this dude.
So Geoffrey, bro, bad news. You are dead and your death was not very rad. The maggots have long ago feasted on your dead skin and everyone who knew your good qualities is also dead. But those of us here at the Shocker will never forget you. We salute your curmudgeonly insistence, your willingness to disturb your universe. That’s really all any of us can do, at least when we can be bothered to get out of bed and put on pants.
