You came from the council estate, and we respected one another. One summer, when we were kids, we played football and afterwards lay on the grass. I couldn’t take my eyes off your legs. You asked me if I was a faggot. I said no. You laughed, and rolled on top of me, and I remember that sticky body. You told me you’d give me what I wanted. You never did, and we grew apart. Years later, I met you in a bar, and we agreed to meet up for a drink, but you never turned up. Then I heard you were in prison after robbing a Post Office.
There is a boy in a wheelchair, and he’s dressed in a hospital gown and plays the guitar. There might be nothing underneath that flimsy gown, but he does wear black socks. I always associate black socks with black moods, and I recognise that I permanently wear black socks.
The surroundings are bleak. An abandoned room with plaster dropping from its walls, and there is a floor lamp, with a tassel shade, like the one our parents had in the living room.
This is going to be a serious music video, but I ignore it, as I do most social media posts. What somebody else likes, doesn’t mean that I will like it too.
But something had piqued my interest and I listened to the song on Spotify instead.
“Hi there Ren. It’s been a little while. Did you miss me? You thought you’d buried me, didn’t you? Risky… Because I always come back.” The voice is weird.
“Hi Ren. I’ve been taking some time to be distant. I’ve been taking some time to be still. I’ve been taking some time to be by myself. Since my therapist told me I’m ill.” This voice is that of boyish innocence.
Ren sings in two mind sets. A song between two people but always the same person. ‘Sick Ren’, the one that suffered illness, depression, and doubt, and ‘Now Ren’, who got better, writes, plays guitar, sings, raps, and makes videos. A lot of his work is about his nightmarish experience.
“When I was 17 years old, I shouted out into an empty room. Into a blank canvas, that I would defeat the forces of evil, and for the next 10 years of my life I suffered the consequences…”
Afterwards, I watch the video, in which Ren switches between alter egos, and there is that fine line between sickness and health, and a fear that never goes away. That one day it might come back.
Dig deeper and you find a teenager who got a record deal and lost it when he fell sick with a mystery illness that took away a dream. There is an old YouTube video where teenage Ren speaks from the prison of his bedroom, and the trepidation that he might have been about to give up.
The illness was diagnosed as Lyme disease and after a stem cell transplant, he returned to the ‘world of the living.’ But the damage was done, it played with his mind, and we see an insecure young man.
This is performance art, and grown-up Ren jumps from the screen and works his way into your conscience.
There is mental illness in all of us. I see it in myself, and I see it in other people.
I’ve since watched interviews with Ren, and I see misery and torment, and I see my friend Liam, who I first met when he threw his skateboard into a bush so that nobody would steal it while he slipped into a bar for a drink.
I soon recognised that alcohol was used to numb his troubled mind.
When he is sober, Liam talks good sense. When he is drunk, you struggle to understand his mind set. And he can never look you in the eye, because he might see you backing away.
All the time, you think that there might be a key to end this misery, but that key is lost behind another locked door.
But occasionally, there is a glimpse of what lay beneath.
“I should go to bed,” he says. “But I think I’ll have another drink before I go.”
“I think you should go now.”
“But I don’t have a bed I like.”
“Then you can share my bed.”
“Will there be lots of cuddles?”
“I always give lots of cuddles.”
“I like lots of cuddles.”
Liam never gets those cuddles because I won’t let him anywhere near me and then I feel guilty.
But one day, I would like to think that Liam, like Ren, will move into the light.
***
“I was walking down a pavement after jumping out my mum’s car in a crossroads in a moment of frustration and distress with my condition. I was trying to run from myself. What appeared to be a homeless man with a dark complexion approached me and asked me what was wrong. I explained that I had been sick most my life, and I wasn’t sure I had the strength to continue. He looked at me and smiled and told me ‘Everything is going to be okay in the end Ren.’ I had not told him my name. There was something so overpoweringly sincere about this simple message, which brought with it an overwhelming feeling of inner peace, and in a flash, he vanished.” – Ren
One Two Glitch – Part 1 of 3/Chris_iphone/Instagram
“Too much self-centred attitude, you see, brings, you see, isolation. Result: loneliness, fear, anger. The extreme self-centred attitude is the source of suffering.”
Somebody once said to me, “I bet you enjoy your privacy.” I didn’t reply.
Because there is a downside to being the person you are. It is only recently that I realised that people are in awe of me. They are afraid. They want to talk. But they daren’t.
And you end up being on your own wishing that somebody, anybody, will be brave enough to sit down beside you and hold a conversation.
But they never do.
“It is cruel, you know, that music should be so beautiful. It has the beauty of loneliness of pain.”
I messaged bad boy Jamie and told him that I missed him. But he was probably asleep and never answered.
Close your eyes. Hear the silent snow. Listen to your soul speak/Adrienne Posey
It snowed in New York on New Year’s Eve. It started early morning and shrouded the city with relentless cruelty. It ruined everyone’s plans and forced them to stay home. By late evening, the city was silent.
Mitch Keller felt miserable. Truth be known, he’d been unhappy for weeks and he didn’t know why. This made him feel even worse.
He’d bailed on party invites and realised how his absence would be taken. They would think him arrogant for not going, their parties not important enough for somebody of his repute.
Instead, he’d stayed in his cavernous TriBeCa apartment, the Triangle Below Canal Street, and looked through steamed up windows at a strange world. And all the time he drank Jack Daniels because he thought it would make him feel better, but it didn’t.
Mitch had everything. A leading role in a TV series, a play on Broadway, and his agent said he was first choice for a forthcoming movie role. He was recognised when he walked the streets.
In the afternoon, Mitch watched a rerun of ER, the one where Carter paid a visit to his drug-addict cousin who answered the door looking like shit. “How are you feeling?” Carter asks him. “When you’re ill, you feel worse than you are.”
He turned the channel over and watched Homicide: Life on the Street, but it depressed him even more, and switched the TV off.
When night came, Mitch did something he rarely did. He dressed in a big coat from a charity store, found a woolly hat that wasn’t his, and the loneliest man in the world went outside. He walked the cold abandoned streets that nobody went to.
The snow was knee high in places and where it wasn’t, it crunched underfoot, because the temperature had dropped. He saw the white hats that had formed on chairs and tables outside a café he knew. Snow piled up against the door of its dark entrance. He thought about the people who worked there, having fun with family and friends inside a bright and cheery apartment in a part of the city where it was cheaper to live.
Mitch could only think of Zombies.
But he continued walking through unfamiliar streets where there was nobody, and cars were lost under thick blankets, and lights shone from upper apartments. There was a secret world above, one he wasn’t part of, and he wished that he could be in one of them, a tiny apartment, with somebody who cooked spaghetti and meatballs and talked to him like a normal person.
He remembered the summer when he was a teenage boy and walked down a similar street. Mrs Zsepy leaned out of an upstairs window and waved. Mitch shouted and asked her how she was, and she called back that she was fine. Afterwards, he heard her shout to a neighbour across the street. “Mitch is a good kid,” she called. “He’s a sensitive boy.” There was nobody leaning out of a window tonight.
Mitch thought about Patrick Swayze, whom he once met and liked, and the movie that he was hoping to star in with him. He thought about Sam in Ghost, a decent man, a decent ghost, but then he remembered the scene where his friend Carl is killed by a huge piece of falling glass and steps out of his body and is whisked away by black spirits, doomed for eternity.
The snow was falling harder, and the faster it fell, it caused the weight on his mind to get heavier. He was soaked, a thousand snowflakes clinging to his hat and coat, and he was cold. Each snowflake weighed heavy on him. And he’d wandered somewhere he didn’t know, where the streets would never be cleared of snow because nobody went there.
There were abandoned factories and meat packing plants where snow blew through broken windows and the missing tiles to form little mountains inside. There was a doorway, protected by planks of wood nailed together, but with space for somebody to climb through.
Mitch thought of dead rats, frozen in the snow, and wanted to see one.
He climbed through the gap and found himself in a dark hallway that might once have been the entrance to an office. It matched the strange silence. A city wrapped in cotton wool, muffled until nothing could be heard.
He sat in a corner, amidst broken glass and syringes, closed his eyes and thought about his nightmare. He needed somebody to talk to, but there was nobody. But the longer he remained there, in this dank, dark space, the more it provided odd comfort.
As he slipped between sleep and consciousness, he thought about people hitting the bottom. And he believed that when you hit rock bottom you bounced, but it was a matter of how hard you bounced. If you hit the bottom hard then you were likely to bounce right back to where you came from. But a slow fall didn’t provide enough bounce and you might settle on that bottom forever.
Mitch did bounce, and he bounced hard, and he considered that moment the worst it could get. But he picked himself up, went outside, and walked through the snow back to his apartment. He saw other people in the streets who were celebrating a new beginning.
It was time for a change, and he needed a new start as well.
Mitch resolved to put New York, and dreams of Hollywood, behind him, and move to Paris where he would be successful in Europe. And that’s what he did.
He never made that Swayze movie, but before he left New York, he starred in a film, the one that everybody remembered, and for one scene.
It was a long time ago now, but it still seemed like yesterday, and he thought back to when production had wrapped, and Danny had encouraged him to go to that small cinema at the Paramount lot to watch the preview cut. He hadn’t wanted to go, but Danny insisted.
Danny had been his childhood friend and he remembered the days when they used to shoot pool together, but when Mitch started acting, they drifted apart, and one day somebody told Mitch that Danny had died in a car accident. But he hadn’t, because one day Mitch saw him on the street outside his New York apartment and the two were reunited.
The two of them sat in the dark theatre and watched the movie, and Mitch thought he was quite good in it. He hadn’t been looking forward to the final scene, the one that earned him an Oscar nomination, but when it came, he thought it brilliant.
The scene is where Mitch is in a derelict factory, propped up in a corner where he has sheltered from the snow outside, and the camera pans across his unshaven face and sunken eyes, wet with snow, but showing no emotion. And then, somebody clambers through a gap in the boarded-up doorway and sits beside him.
The down-at-heel stranger talks to him, but Mitch is too cold to respond. It plays out for several minutes, and the stranger, who is just a kid, tells him that his life is wasted. They share a needle, and Mitch just sits there while something is pumped into the vein on his arm.
Mitch thinks the kid is good.
And then, the kid steals his hat and coat, and goes through the pockets where he finds a little money. Mitch sits motionless, watching this unfamiliar person, but grateful that there is somebody to talk to. And the look in his pained eyes, as the kid goes back into the snow wearing his hat and coat and leaving Mitch to die.
The lights came up and everybody clapped and cheered, and Mitch knew that the movie would be a critical success.
On the way out, Mitch saw River Phoenix, who’d watched the preview, and had made his way over to them. He told Mitch that it was an awesome performance and that last scene would always be be remembered. But Mitch realised that it couldn’t have been River Phoenix because he had died a few years earlier and he wondered who it might have been.
Danny put his arm around Mitch’s shoulder and guided him outside where there was a bright light, a mysterious light that looked incredibly beautiful.
I once visited a Mediterranean island. Every night I took a book onto the balcony and read for a few hours.
Across the street was a restaurant, always busy. A young Greek boy politely greeted every customer. In between, he would pace up and down, lost in his thoughts. I watched him all the time.
My book became my excuse.
One night, the boy stopped his routine and waved. It became a nightly ritual, and I would wave back. And then he started smiling and acknowledging me with a friendly nod. He would get back to his customers, stealing a glance whenever he could. And all the time I had the advantage of watching him from above.
And then he was gone, simply disappeared.
One night, he didn’t appear, nor did he the one after. I enquired about him at the restaurant and a waitress fetched the owner.
He asked if I knew the boy well, and I said I did, sort of.
And then he told me that the boy had been riding home from work on his scooter and collided with a taxi. He had died instantly.
Have you ever grieved for someone you never knew? It is probably worse than grieving for someone you did.
All these years later, I think of that young boy, and in my thoughts, he waves, and he smiles, and he nods and casts furtive glances. Then he turns his back and is gone.
They played Stayin’ Alive and the kids had orgasms. It erupted. More than it did when we knew it. But that twinge of teenagism stirred and I was thirteen again.
I see something written by somebody else, and like it. But I will forget the words, and they will be gone. I shall put them here. When I am old, and remember nothing, I will know that they didn’t get lost.
“I was startled to see a nimble young youth on bicycle come to rest before my gaze, silhouetted by the violent blaze of twilight. Straddling his bike like a desperado, he stood transfixed by the dazzling spectacle of blazing colours. I thought, ‘rather pensive for a toughie; the kid has the soul of a poet.’ So, I approached him and saw that his face had ‘bicycle thief’ written all over it. I asked him if he would acquiesce to having his picture taken – he agreed, this boy who stepped out of Genet’s mythology of the young hoodlum, whose coltish grace and coquetry were his adornment.”
Inky. Arty. Sexual. A magazine of the human skin. That tender moment became an exploration of naked flesh. It meant something to you. It meant nothing to me. But then your obsession became my obsession too.
Perfectly Hard and Glamorous 