Friendship is rare
One of the thousands of torn-off scraps of paper stuck to Mikey’s bedroom wall had a quote from Ovid scrawled on it.
Daring is not safe against daring men.
It was notable for a swarm of reasons, not the least of which was that it was on bright yellow paper and was one of the only quotes or thoughts separated from the rest by a little buffer of wall-space. What set it apart most though was that it wasn’t in the tall mangled handwriting which Mikey produced - the kind of letters that looked as though they were scratching each other in desperation to get off the page. Instead, it was in the perfectly spaced, square block script of his profoundly different father and as such read more like a command than a classicist’s words of advice. For a very long time then, I assumed their provenance was the reason they took such a place on Michael’s wall and by extension his mind. It’s yet to be fully explored just how much a person’s living space reflects his underlying personality, but the connection always seems visible to me. It seemed natural that Mikey would assign some value to a physical piece of his most despised and revered relative. What I never realized until far too late was just how much the words meant to him outside of his father. How much meaning he placed into them himself.
We all like to feel in control of our lives, it’s just a human kicker that ices an otherwise bland and stale cake. Even if we’re trapped by a marriage, a family, a job, a mortgage and a war on terror, we’ll still find ourselves a mistress to trap us some more and allow us to say “Look! I’m still free!” It means that we all have our little ways of reinforcing and ensuring control, through ambition or sexual dominance or academic excellence or any number of combinations. We need to own our circumstances. I think what Mikey took most from his Ovid quote was not that daring could fail, but that it was simply only ever likely to if somebody else had got there first. If your competitor had dared to go where, I can’t believe I’m saying this, no man had gone before. Winning, for Michael O’Hara, was simply a matter of getting to the top first with a barrel of hot oil in one hand to pour on the followers. Perhaps with a bottle of bourbon in the other.
One of us should have seen this in him before we all set out across our great nation-state in search of liberation from ourselves. If only I’d really thought about the things that make Michael great, the things that drive him, then I would have seen that great vagina domino set that was to come in it’s full and awesome whole. But we’re all far too late for “if only”. Johnny once said almost the exact same thing back to me – that he feels the same retrospective realization that as the members of the group who had known him the longest, Johnny even more so than me, we should have… known him. He led us so swiftly and easily onward into the breach that we felt like warriors rallying behind a mad king. Or at least I did, but whenever I said that later Flo looked knowingly at me and started talking again about how much me and Mikey transferred onto each other. I guess I’d forgotten at the time that warriors behind a mad king tend to get killed in battle.
Still, though Johnny and I were smothered in a paste-like mixture of doubts, dreams, fears and loyalties, one thing was clear: We were all running away together, so come what may. Bring on the future! We larking, lonely few were titans on this journey and the best warriors do not need to feel invincible to know that they can still win.
I was going to cut short this train of reminiscence there, but I remembered a post script to this grounding information which sits just as well here as anywhere else. Again, it was just after the 2004 U.S. presidential elections and our world was blowing up around us when I found the quote on the yellow paper tucked inside the wraparound of Michael’s hardcover edition of The Fountainhead. I’d taken it out to stare at in a pensive and serious manner as you do with such trophies of history when he saw me. I kind of smiled and waved the paper a few times as if to say, “look, remember this?” but by the time I’d hit the second and a half wiggle of it Mikey’d already exploded. I couldn’t even understand what he was saying for a lot of the time he was screaming so loud and so viciously. He threw around all the madness, all the never ending energy he possessed, which he mostly kept metered out or focused and let loose. He was pouring out curses, death threats, vows for revenge as well as apologies, promises and pleas, all at once, in a devastating unstoppable wave. He’d quickly snatched the paper from me and swung it, sometimes with both hands, wildly around him splashing his own tears and spit and fury upon it. I have no doubt that the quote itself did not cause such a reaction, what we’d been through, what he’d been through, he was on the edge anyway, but something in that fatherly remnant had triggered everything inside Michael to break free, all the best in him and all the very worst. It wasn’t the last time I’d see him angry, and certainly not the first, but it was by far the worst. It was the kind of anger mixed with depths of despair, an anger rising to hide and to hunt all else within him that might hurt him. He tore that paper into hundreds of tiny pieces, picking them up again and again to tear at them like pieces of his own flesh. Only when, after maybe twenty earth-shattering minutes he saw the expression on my face did he suddenly choke on his words and swallow loudly, before silently walking out. No one saw him after that for some months.
Daring is not safe against daring men.
It was notable for a swarm of reasons, not the least of which was that it was on bright yellow paper and was one of the only quotes or thoughts separated from the rest by a little buffer of wall-space. What set it apart most though was that it wasn’t in the tall mangled handwriting which Mikey produced - the kind of letters that looked as though they were scratching each other in desperation to get off the page. Instead, it was in the perfectly spaced, square block script of his profoundly different father and as such read more like a command than a classicist’s words of advice. For a very long time then, I assumed their provenance was the reason they took such a place on Michael’s wall and by extension his mind. It’s yet to be fully explored just how much a person’s living space reflects his underlying personality, but the connection always seems visible to me. It seemed natural that Mikey would assign some value to a physical piece of his most despised and revered relative. What I never realized until far too late was just how much the words meant to him outside of his father. How much meaning he placed into them himself.
We all like to feel in control of our lives, it’s just a human kicker that ices an otherwise bland and stale cake. Even if we’re trapped by a marriage, a family, a job, a mortgage and a war on terror, we’ll still find ourselves a mistress to trap us some more and allow us to say “Look! I’m still free!” It means that we all have our little ways of reinforcing and ensuring control, through ambition or sexual dominance or academic excellence or any number of combinations. We need to own our circumstances. I think what Mikey took most from his Ovid quote was not that daring could fail, but that it was simply only ever likely to if somebody else had got there first. If your competitor had dared to go where, I can’t believe I’m saying this, no man had gone before. Winning, for Michael O’Hara, was simply a matter of getting to the top first with a barrel of hot oil in one hand to pour on the followers. Perhaps with a bottle of bourbon in the other.
One of us should have seen this in him before we all set out across our great nation-state in search of liberation from ourselves. If only I’d really thought about the things that make Michael great, the things that drive him, then I would have seen that great vagina domino set that was to come in it’s full and awesome whole. But we’re all far too late for “if only”. Johnny once said almost the exact same thing back to me – that he feels the same retrospective realization that as the members of the group who had known him the longest, Johnny even more so than me, we should have… known him. He led us so swiftly and easily onward into the breach that we felt like warriors rallying behind a mad king. Or at least I did, but whenever I said that later Flo looked knowingly at me and started talking again about how much me and Mikey transferred onto each other. I guess I’d forgotten at the time that warriors behind a mad king tend to get killed in battle.
Still, though Johnny and I were smothered in a paste-like mixture of doubts, dreams, fears and loyalties, one thing was clear: We were all running away together, so come what may. Bring on the future! We larking, lonely few were titans on this journey and the best warriors do not need to feel invincible to know that they can still win.
I was going to cut short this train of reminiscence there, but I remembered a post script to this grounding information which sits just as well here as anywhere else. Again, it was just after the 2004 U.S. presidential elections and our world was blowing up around us when I found the quote on the yellow paper tucked inside the wraparound of Michael’s hardcover edition of The Fountainhead. I’d taken it out to stare at in a pensive and serious manner as you do with such trophies of history when he saw me. I kind of smiled and waved the paper a few times as if to say, “look, remember this?” but by the time I’d hit the second and a half wiggle of it Mikey’d already exploded. I couldn’t even understand what he was saying for a lot of the time he was screaming so loud and so viciously. He threw around all the madness, all the never ending energy he possessed, which he mostly kept metered out or focused and let loose. He was pouring out curses, death threats, vows for revenge as well as apologies, promises and pleas, all at once, in a devastating unstoppable wave. He’d quickly snatched the paper from me and swung it, sometimes with both hands, wildly around him splashing his own tears and spit and fury upon it. I have no doubt that the quote itself did not cause such a reaction, what we’d been through, what he’d been through, he was on the edge anyway, but something in that fatherly remnant had triggered everything inside Michael to break free, all the best in him and all the very worst. It wasn’t the last time I’d see him angry, and certainly not the first, but it was by far the worst. It was the kind of anger mixed with depths of despair, an anger rising to hide and to hunt all else within him that might hurt him. He tore that paper into hundreds of tiny pieces, picking them up again and again to tear at them like pieces of his own flesh. Only when, after maybe twenty earth-shattering minutes he saw the expression on my face did he suddenly choke on his words and swallow loudly, before silently walking out. No one saw him after that for some months.
posted by Cal Samson at 8:56 PM
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