The Strange and Terrible Story of George

I was on a bench across from my local bus stop, swigging a beer and contemplating just what my next move of the day was going to be. I heard some loud laughter across the road. Not normal laughter you understand... The kind that sends shivers down your spine. It sounded like the voice of some mischievous retard who could no longer differentiate between good and evil, more than likely as a result of his disease...

I was staring at the obese, yellow faced source of this laughter and it hit home that the reason that this sound was so haunting and resonant was because the source was familiar to me. Ye fucking gods... It was him. I regressed there and then with a mouth full of cold beer as the fiendish creature banged on the doors of a bus shouting at the driver to let him in because he knew him and didn't want to stand outside.

George ****** ****** *****-******, sometimes plain old George, had been at my school along with all the other doomed ones. I gave him short shrift, putting his stammer and nervous ways down to some kind of gimmick designed to attract attention to himself. It wasn't that I was a bully like some of the others. It was just I believed that he was able to communicate properly and elected not to because of all the other problems this brings. Fuck it - if he doesn't want to endure the woe of communicating with those around him and instead would rather enjoy the altogether different woe of being marginilised then that was his call. I could entirely take or leave old George. And that's how it was.

I saw him was when we graduated from college. People were in high spirits talking about what it was they were going to do with their lives, intently dissecting each others possible new chapters. George stated quite plainly he wanted to be an actor. Sure, he'd lost weight, his stammer was less obvious and he had started wearing sleeveless t-shirts. But an actor this guy was not.

He knocked things up a notch as the beer was flowing later on in the course of the day... As former students mingled with teachers for the first day of mutual acceptance and the red faced knowledge that it wasn't all that bad... George decided to cement his reputation as an actor by declaring he was gay. And that he was moving in with a guy who was going to help his acting career really take off.

What really knocked it up a notch was when he started stripping off naked in the middle of our local bar and started to writhe like some kind of obscene belly dancer. People tried to stop him, others sat there slack jawed, aghast at the foulness of what they were seeing. It was, naturally, only a matter of time before he got thrown out... Which he did and that was the end of that chapter, right?

Apparently not - He turned up within the year, his spirit broken, his asshole in tatters and his dreams of acting nothing more than a smoking pile of ashes. He ended up being committed, to the same institution that helped claim the life of the footballer mentioned on an earlier post, and was not even allowed the occasional day release. I'm told he would regail people with tales of the non-consensual sodomy he endured in the pursuit fo his dream... I'm also told he would alternate these tales of horror with tearful outbursts pining for his gay lover who never visited him once.

Some even went so far as to say the whole sorry episode existed all in his mind and his mind alone. Who knows, or wants to know? The doctors who allegedly put the stitches into his ass are the only ones who could give us defining evidence either way.

And here he was now as I snapped out of my beer fuelled flashback and I couldn't help but feel a little bit sorry of what had become of him. The weight was back on, the skin even more yellow than I remembered and the "treatment" he had received had elft him devoid of mental sharpness. He was now a loudmouthed bufoon, unaware that his enthusiastic, childish burblings were greatly offensive and terrifying to all those around him. The bus driver had that look of fearful disgust on his face and wouldn't let him on the bus despite his enthusiastic banging. He instead was left to converse with a bag lady with whom he was on first name terms.

- 'Ello Georgie she rasped

It all made me realise that my next move was to do anything but go near the bus and risk making eye contact with this deformed ghost from my past.

Whatever happened to students?

I've been away a good few weeks re-visiting my glory days by going back to my old university. Every day of my five years that I spent there would result in some form of drunken carnage that would live long in the memory. This was, after all, what university was about... For most it is the first time the umbilical cord is truly cut, the first time you can really experiment with whatever you want free from prying eyes and fears of disappointing loving family members.

This was not the case for me but, not wanting to miss out on anything, I pushed it just about as far as I could go, a continuation of the debauchery that blighted my young life. It was a great time - a stand alone point of my life where there were no real responsibilities, no-one to put ahead of my own selfish desire...

It should have been nice to revisit this. Instead what I saw was disgusting... A sea of banality and mediocrity. A university populated by middle class students so desperate to impress with faux home county voices and sensible haircuts. Even those that touched upon being different or individual did so in a way that appeared to me to be some kind of parody, like the characters in the young ones made real. It was awful.

Attempting to make the worst of a bad situation I tried to cajole and coax these greenhorns, to explain stories of a past when students actually did things. when mayhem did not equate to having your first pint at three in the afternoon. Their eyes glazed over, I don't think they understood.

I continued to try through my time there, managing to spark a few incidents but nothing like the days of old. Why such a spectacular fall from grace? Because of student loans. I, like so many others, had to return home from university in thousands of pounds of debt only to walk straight back into the same shitty job I had before I went away, now with the added indiginity of seeing the idiots who stuck around and didn't get an education zooming past me in beemers boasting about their 40k a year incomes. The young people I work with now tell me only a chump would go to university. Despite the good times, on reflection they may be right.

Working class people are taking this advice to heart, staying away from higher education. This in turn is leading to the student bodies of such institutions to become boring, bland and ultimately self-satisfied. My year was the first year that it was a loan. We didn't really look forward. We just took the loan,the overdraft and the credit card and didn't say anything. Since that experimental year people have learnt the hard way not to bother.

Not that you don't get personalities in the upper classes you understand. But put purely middle class people together and there is no reason for them to get up to anything, no-one to lead them down roads they have never previously explored.

The knock-on effect it has had on the student movement as a political force is evident as well. NUS is at an all time low, ridden with petty, self important, bickering imbeciles. It acheives nothing for its members, and dedicates way too much of its time to national issues it can't change because it echoes the debating teams they all used to be on back when they were at their private schools.