Generation Doomed Pt. 2

Talking about the doomed generation and the mysterious disappearance of one of our numbers triggered my memory...

I wrote this letter at the time a body had been discovered and I was certain that it would be what was left of my friend. Turned out that the identification revealed it to be the body of a local smackhead instead. The mystery was still there.

This is more than accurate description of events, however I have omitted the names for reasons that are obvious. Nobody who is one step away from grieving needs to know the truth about how the person for whom they feel arrived at wherever they have.

Well it looks almost certain that the mystery of what happened to ***** ********** is going to be unravelled fairly soon. As you may or may not know a body has been found in Nunthorpe woods, the body of what is only described as a “white adult male”. The body had been there for some time, buried under a pile of logs, not far from a footpath that although isn’t strictly for the public, is in common use anyway. ***** went missing at the back end of February; If I was *****’s family I would fear the worst…

And yet could this whole sorry state of affairs have been avoided? I mean, I spoke to mine and *****’s mutual friends and it all seems to be about money. I’d bet top dollar some of these “friends” even know more than they are letting on. What is for sure was ***** owed some very nasty characters money, and it came back to haunt him. The money was a mixture of Cocaine and gambling debts, certainly going into the thousands. And yet, even though I know the workings of the world and all things criminal, it seems incredible that a man nearly six months younger than I should have been murdered over what amounts to quite possibly the same amount of money I owe in student loans. Wasn’t there somebody he could turn to in order to secure this amount of money - He was not from a deprived background by any means. And if he knew the trouble he was in, why not come clean and tell your parents, friends, anybody, about the ugly situation you’re in? Anything to get that money, to pay off the debt that ultimately killed you…

I can’t quite get it clear in my head - But I can take a guess as to why. Perhaps what ***** never understood about this world, not coming from a deprived background, not mixing with these people on a regular basis, and certainly having no status in the “underworld” of Middlesbrough, is that these people can never be your friends. I envisage him having run up debts before, paid them off just before it got to bone breaking time, and then ended up laughing the matter off - “These people know me, they know I’m good for it. They’re good old boys. I’m exempt from the same treatment the others get”. But no, there are no friends in this business, as both you and I know.

I come to this conclusion because *****, although knowing he had the debts and obviously talking to people about the debts (not the right people as it turned out), went out and got drunk at the ********** in Middlesbrough, and it is from there he disappeared. These are not the actions of somebody with massive debts and problems, yet we know they existed despite his behaviour. He even left by himself, no back-up if there was trouble. This almost smacks of confidence. Can you picture how it went down? Did they follow him, or pull up in cars? Did they act friendly and lure him away with promises of more drugs or a party? Or did they plump for getting straight down to business and dole out the beating that killed him there and then… Coroner’s report says four “serious” wounds to the head. Naturally the flesh is in such a bad state of decomposition by now they would be unable to see the bruises that doubtlessly covered his body. The serious wounds, the ones that they can detect, broke bones. Perhaps ***** knew what was coming, and was past caring. Depressed and miserable, he went out for one last drink instead of hiding and panicking in his house…

When I last saw him it was Christmas time. Me, Rich and Phil had gone to a party in Middlesbrough to see a mutual female friend and ***** happened to be there. I say happened, I think it may have been his house. I was too drunk to care. I was pleased to see somebody from School, especially one I had gotten along with well, and hadn’t seen in about a year. But he didn’t come over to greet me, and instead sent over our host. She told me he couldn’t remember if I wanted to beat him up or not, if I hated him or not. These were clear and obvious signs of drug psychosis, that slow creeping paranoia that gets you eventually no matter which drug it is, just as long as you keep taking something. The mind was not built to exist in permanently altered states of reality, not after the formative child years of setting down what is real… But you can push it so far and still keep a hold of something that qualifies as reality. *****, even at this stage, had gone too far…

I explained that far from “hating” him, I was pleased to see him and would like to have a drink with him. She relayed the message and he came over to talk. He was gaunt, pale, poor complexion to how I remember him in school, and he looked a lot thinner. Increased metabolism with diminished appetite no doubt the cause, classic signs of the nocturnal drug taker. We talked about some good old days at school, football, mischief, you know the drill, and he told me about his new job (as an estate agent if I remember rightly) and what clubs he would frequent. But I could see that he was a derelict, a derelict with a child’s face. Which was the weird thing; he hadn’t aged since school, his thin build accentuating his young appearance.

When he was at school all the girls used to want a piece of him, but ***** didn’t want the nice posh girls who would let him get his fingers, or maybe even suck him off. He would opt for, and fuck, the girls from the estates, the ones who would drop mewling brats out of their boot topped cunts in record times, creating an army of bastard children all uglier and denser than the parents that sired them… He got lucky that not one of his “conquests” became pregnant. Together me and him would down half bottles of Vodka round the back of the school disco, wanting to get wrecked and face the music of horrible adolescence. Some nights, on the rare occasions, he would even take ecstasy tablets, for a school fucking disco no less, one of the few people I knew who were genuine in their drug use at this age. Despite how abnormal this may sound, all of this behaviour made total sense to me at the time and he had my utmost respect.

Yet, despite his obvious qualities and ability to not get bogged down with teenage bullshit and go his own way, he always tried to ingratiate himself into the gang of “hard” fighting kids (in a lot of cases much older than we were) from Marton and Nunthorpe. Why? He had no real reason to, people pretty much left ***** to his own devices, and he was popular enough. Who knows why? But he did start to hang round these guys who were going on to graduate from a very different kind of school we were going to - Me and him and many others like us wanted to experiment with the things we weren’t supposed to have, to prove that not only could we handle them but we could take more than the older generation that had forbidden us to touch them… Such joy from a simple agenda when young. Those kids were going to graduate from a school so brutal it makes the ones our parents hawk to us (The so called “school of hard knocks”) seem like a holiday camp. Life in these places was savage, and these kids were the product of that savagery, knowing that to make any kind of name for themselves, to secure any kind of future, they would have to be more brutal, more savage than the generation before them. Why would anybody want to become a part of that if they didn’t absolutely have to? But violence and crime can seem glamorous to those who don’t know it’s true colours.

It would come as no surprise to learn that it was one of these “old friends” that helped put the boot into ***** as he looked up helpless, held by two men both infinitely stronger than him. He more than likely tried to beg, tried to reason, maybe even went so far as to mention the good old days, but this was what these people had to do. Even with someone as ultimately small time as *****, because if they didn’t, then maybe it would be them in his position, and somebody with all their fears in their position, sticking the boot into them, as they choked blood and spat teeth and hoped and prayed for just one more chance to see their family and friends, even from the bed of a hospital.

Hell, I’ve made a lot of assumptions and conclusions, but I’ve seen this before, I know how it went down. Even if this body, by some crazy stretch of the imagination, doesn’t turn out to be *****, it is a matter of time before we do find his battered corpse somewhere. He died owing money, with money in his bank account, money that makes it look like he is dead because it has been untouched since his disappearance. Money that might have bought him time. But no, he is gone, and the money will go on something less important than keeping him alive, more than likely on his own funeral arrangements. A part of me would like to go to the ceremony, pay my respects to a kid who was little boy lost, a good guy with a good heart. But I doubt I will, because the whole thing is so fucking tragic and sinister, and the people there in attendance are more than likely just as guilty as the people who beat him to death. This could have all been avoided, that much is fact, even if everything else I’ve assumed is wrong.

Generation Doomed

I bumped into an old friend a few days ago who told me that one of the "successful" sporting graduates from my school days had decided to hang himself in a nearby sanitarium. Just how had he got there? A few years ago he was playing up front for York City and was the subject of a possible one million pound transfer to Sheffield Wednesday...

Apparantly a spiralling heroin addicition saw him kicked out of club after club until he had a complete collapse. The Ultimate in collapses. He was sectioned in our local "mental health hospital" and had access to the means to end his life. His life had not been an easy one. He was a black guy with white foster parents. Turns out, kids can be cruel.

Still, he always had his sporting talent to fall back on and while I was slugging it away in a call centre he was earning a thousand pound a week and having all his accomidation and travel paid for. Based on this I cannot see why he ever felt the need to anaethetise his pain with heroin. He had other means with which to do it, and he must have known that heroin is not exactly conducive to a sporting career.

I suspect that he never knew exactly why he was doing what he was doing. Rather, there was some kind of in built self destructive trend that he could not resist and lead him down dark paths without him figuring out why he was treading them.

Much like the guy I used to live with who now sells the Big Issue on my local streets - another product of foster care. Or an old friend from school who has been missing for 2 years. Or the best guy I ever knew, who died in the Iraq war...

There are many others. Too many to mention, list and do justice to with a few anecdotes. It feels to me that there is some kind of in built programming that we cannot override. Maybe you can call it fate, but I look around at the faces that shine with defeat around me... We are resigned to this biological sub-routine kicking in and we know there is nothing we can do. We will be seduced by this calling. It is the old matter of time.

Piracy is Theft - FACT or FICTion

Have you ever been to the cinema and watched the whole FACT type warnings before the film starts? I’ve often laughed derisively at the warning that “anyone caught with recording equipment will be ejected from the premises and prosecuted” and the request “to be vigilant at all times, reporting those who bring such equipment into this movie theatre”. Images of some toothless video pirate sat at the back row hoping the whirring noise emanating from his Super-8 recorder doesn’t attract attention, desperate to be able to sell the latest movies months before they are commercially available in shops. It just never seemed a plausible scenario to me.

Not like the bootleg recorders you would bump into, as you would drunkenly stumble around a mosh pit at a gig. That makes a little more sense. With even lo grade equipment you will be able to capture a recording that is decent enough; you can also go so far to say that these recordings give people who have never had the opportunity to hear their band of choice in a live setting without the studio covering up their deficiencies… I remember the disgust that throttled my intestines when I heard Soundgarden live for the first time. Cornell’s voice way off, the guitars leads way too complicated and polished on the album to translate live, and long pauses peppered with twittering, drunken speeches between songs… It made me appreciate the albums a whole lot more.

A bootleg also means you get to hear those all too rare cover versions that are only for ticket carrying fans. Green Day belting out “Eye of the Tiger” for example, or Rage Against the Machine blasting out NWA’s “Fuck Da Police”. The whole notion of “cover-songs” is something that all musicians can relate to, whether it’s your first lick on a guitar from Led Zeppelin, a cover of a classic blues track played by a local pub band, or the rare glimpse of the influences of platinum selling artists.

With images it can never be so simple. If you point a camcorder at a screen in a cinema, it will capture all around it, dark murky picture, bright light reflecting, poor sound quality… So surely this has never happened. I was convinced. Then the other day I was reading about these teenagers that had remade “Raiders of the Lost Ark” shot for shot, line for line, with themselves in all the roles. All the stunts were replicated; a garage was accidentally burnt down when re-enacting the bar scene with the Sherpas. It took six long years to complete, and all they had for reference was this badly made home video from an old video recorder they had smuggled into their local backwater theatre. There is talk of this version being included as an extra on a new Criterion edition of the Raiders… DVD.

So, I had to concede, that it had least been done. But it was in America, and it was in some small redneck community. The audience will have been allowed to take alcohol and guns into the theatre with them, shoot big wholes in the screen at the Arabs digging for the ark of the covenant, while they whoop and holler at the nazis exploits… So, fuck it. “This isolated incident is the exception that proves the rule,” I thought. I then put this idle jibber-jabber to the back of mind.

I’m going into work one day and my local cabbie picks me up – A bug bear for me at the moment is if I’m on an early shift, public transport is so shabby here I have to use a taxi service – at the usual time. He’s a young Asian lad called Ricky. Moved up north from London because he had some family and friends up here (don’t they always?) and set himself up driving cabs. He’s a good guy, always on time, always talkative… On this morning we got talking movies. Not film or cinema, just movies. Our views on films, not surprisingly, differed greatly. He thought “Euro Trip” was “hilarious”. I let that one pass me by, the waft of puerile filth coupled with the stench of feeble Americanised European stereotyping kept me away from it. I asked if he liked any other movies. He said he was a big fan of gangster movies. I approached him for his opinions on “The Godfather”… He said he’d never sat through it all the way through on the grounds that it was “too slow and too long”. “Plus” he added “What the fuck is that geezer who can’t talk properly all about”. I can only presume he was referring to the late Marlon Brando. A fitting tribute to his legacy…

We got talking about what was going down well in the box office at this moment in time, and we found a mutual respect for “Spider Man 2” if for nothing more than it was pure popcorn. He leans over and pulls something from down the side of his seat while we wait at traffic lights:

“You’ll like that then” he says, and drops a CD into my lap in a flimsy, transparent casing.

Aliens Vs Predator was scrawled across it.

Yeah, for all my above talk trying to make out I’m some kind of high art cinema critic this is a film that had been wetting my appetite. A fan of both sets of films it was a crossover I knew was doomed to failure, but one I had to watch anyway. I had been praying that it would at least constitute a “so bad it’s good” viewing experience. Better that than mediocrity on all fronts.

We concluded the transaction and I did a day at work wondering just how good a copy I’d purchased and whether the film would be much cop if I could indeed sit through the copy… I thought of all my pirate video experiences… The first dingy viewing of Robocop at an incredibly young age trying to figure what was going on and what the fuss was about, but still revelling in the amount of times I could hear the word “fuck” buzzing out of the speaker… More recently a version of Troy so badly put together that all the fight scenes on sand were so bright and lacking contrast and definition you couldn’t see the participants at all.

I then got thinking about the poor jokes old stand up comics made about pirate videos during the 80s in an attempt to prove they were cutting edge:

“Got a pirate video of E.T. the other day… Wasn’t bad either… Mind you, the little alien looked fucking stupid with a wooden leg and eye patch on it….”

You get the picture. I shuddered and went about the rest of my business.

Get in, decide to whack it straight in to see it the goods are “kosher” and yeah, the picture quality is good. A little fuzzy but certainly watchable. The sound is decent enough and the dubbing is right on the money. So I settle into the chair I am sitting in now as I type this and start to watch. The film is trundling along, painfully bothering to flesh out characters that we know are fodder for the real stars of the show, then I see a flicker of movement in the corner of the screen. Something black and smooth… The first glimpse of a xenomorph? A new kind of predator cloaking technology?

If only. It was the round, smooth shadow of the back of someone’s head. I couldn’t believe my eyes. Then, to completely shatter everything I had ever believed, someone else gets up and walks across the screen, easily as large as the actors up there on celluloid. This pirate DVD, of a quality higher than your average one, was indeed created by the same toothless, Super-8 carrying pirate that I had scoffed at for so many years. I’m sure I’m not alone in this mockery, but I have finally seen evidence of this and will hold up my hands – I was wrong to scoff…

I shall never renounce piracy as a bad thing, never. Nor shall I buy into the urban myth-esque tales of pirate video funding terrorist organisations: In the 80s the dreaded IRA, now the even more dreaded and omni-present Al Qaeda. The same business template of distribution that pirates are condemned for is used at the top where the entrepreneurs live. Purchase the “rights” to the original, replicate en mass through technology and distribute at a cost that covers overheads to make a profit. It seems insane to demonise one set of people to the level we do, while we applaud the multi-millionaires in their ivory towers and thank them for giving us the gift of entertainment.

All I am saying is that maybe those FACT pigfuckers and all the other anti-piracy groups know something after all. Which is more than I’ve ever conceded before.

Dark tidings and babble from one of the devolving generation...

Everyone was setting these things up. Usually I don't follow trends. Not because I'm some kind of true individual, but rather because I'm one of those people who says things like "Well it's totally commercialised now" or "It has become something of a cliche". I can't remember a time when I uttered the phrase "Well, I was into them/it before everybody else, but I won't put it past me.

Anyway, I set this up out of frustration. My friend Gav, a rugby player with a raging ginger beard that makes him look like some kind of 18th century fisherman, told me a tale about some Muslim guy he met in a bar. He believed that Darwin was sort of right, he just had it the wrong way round. People didn't evolve from apes, rather apes devolved from people. Gav, who isn't tolerant of other peoples views at the best of times, spent hours arguing with him, however Aqhmed could not be swayed.

So he told me the story and I laughed. We'd been drinking cheap lager all day, but I found the whole notion so patently ridiculous I think I would have laughed had I been sober. On the way home that night I encountered some horrible night creatures riding along on a slick of vomit and verbal abuse. Their incoherent anger was directed at the invisible phantoms that surrounded them as well as each other. They were totally incapable of violence yet seemed to crave it. It all made no sense, but it was typical of the scenes you see at closing time in Middlesbrough.

I woke up the next day, had my usual morning potter about (this may well be some kind of polite euphanism for wank) and tried to go about my day. Working as a call centre manager. At 25. Surrounded by people, in some cases my superiors, who were barely literate. I sat at my desk drinking the sump that passes for coffee from our vending machine - after a few uses the coffee, chocolate drinks and tea end up coming out as one brown sludge - and I started to think maybe Aqhmed was on to something. These people around me are devolving. Perhaps at a more alarming speed than people in other geographical regions...

Couldn't shake this thought for the rest of the day. Didn't want the staff in the canteen to touch my food in case I caught his devolution bug... Was it airborn? Just how contagious was it? Maybe it was too late even for me...

And just maybe it was and is. Seems my entire life has started to run backwards. After leaving university I ended up straight back in a call centre. After that I managed to get work, in another call centre - in fact the same fucking call centre I had worked in at 17. Not to worry, I had an "adult" life and some aspirations that would surely see the doom and gloom of call centre hell a far and distant memory. Turns out, that adult life had been eroding slowly without me even realising it. My behaviour was becoming increasingly juvenile, possibly a cause or result of - it's too far gone now to tell - my girlfriend leaving. The knock on effect was having to move out of my house as I could no longer afford the upkeep.

I had to shack up again with my parents, for me an utter defeat. Even more so when I realised that one of the reasons everyone else of my age who I knew had been doing it for years and that was why they appeared to be more affluent than me. They make no bones of it. It just seems people of my generation have to rely more on their parents than perhaps any other generation ever. Fitting for a devolving generation and, I suppose, amusing given that our parents lived in a time of full employement, only a subtle undercurrent of AIDS and crime that can be romanticised by historians, novelists and pub bores.

I spent the first few days alternating between refurnishing my old childhood bedroom, one I hadn't stayed in since I was 16, and reading rejection letters from the many newspapers I had applied to. Those applications are part of my "adult" life, those aspiration things... Despite my qualifications and experience (Fair enough - not that much, but I can write, edited the university magazine, got a vaguely linked qualification and actually want to do it) not one has come up with even an offer of interview. Does it not say something that I would be taking a 9k paycut? No, three lines on a sheet of cheap bargain basement laser printer paper tells you that you're not made of the right stuff.

Another reason to hate the previous generations - opportunity. You read about a icon. Turns out he just walked into the job, got it through luck, someone gave them a break. My generation will never be afforded that luxury. It is all about standardised forms and meeting percentages. Who wanted a meritocracy anyway? Don't give us a break - we're devolving. It would only be a waste when you walked into work to see we had smeared shit up the walls and were trying to mate with your desk.

Just how much had I done to get out of or prevent my situation? Less and less as I settled into a sweaty, sticky comfort zone. My efforts, had been perfunctory at best. It only adds fuel to the fire when I realise that I am part to blame for this horrible lack of evolution and development that is weighing down on me like wet sandbags.

So I have made some resolutions to myself about how I'm going to get out of this. The outlook is bleak. This is at least something that isn't typing up another covering letter, only to be told to fill in a form. It's all there on my CV and covering letter, why the form? We wouldn't want to judge candidates as individuals... Standardised forms are where it's at...It is something to do that doesn't involve me having to go out and face the horror that lurks around every corner. Maybe it might be a way of makig contact with other people that can feel this terrible prophecy being fulfilled for us all.

Or maybe I am taking another step towards becoming some horrible, shambling shut-in that will be reduced to being unable to communicate without a keyboard and monitor in front of them. You can tell who they are you know. Their fingers twitch seconds before they start to mumble.

Whatever the path in front of me, there will be articles posted up on here as well as stuff like this, that may very well get re-read and deleted when I've had some sleep and I realise it is awful gibberish.