MY LIFE IN HORROR: WE WILL BURY YOU PART 2

2/5/2018

BY KIT POWER

My Life In Horror

Every month, I will write about a film, album, book or event that I consider horror, and that had a warping effect on my young mind. You will discover my definition of what constitutes horror is both eclectic and elastic. Don’t write in. Also, of necessity, much of this will be bullshit – as in, my best recollection of things that happened anywhere from 15 – 40 years ago.

This is not history. This is not journalism. This is not a review.

This is my life in horror.

“We Will Bury You” Part 2

Read part 1 of 'We Will Bury You" here

It wasn’t all bad.

God knows why I feel the need to say that, given how long ago it was and how banal an observation it is, but still. Aside from Loz and the manager, most of the rest of the staff were kind and decent people, working shit jobs with stoicism and humor. Though I stayed in touch with no-one after I left, principally because I was a mobile phone hold out and therefore didn’t have the easy ritual of swapping numbers on my way out, I do find my mind turning to them, sometimes. I hope they’re well, happy, and in better employment circumstances.

Anyhow.

One of the side effects of my relegation to the Public Bar (‘see what you can make of it’ said the landlord, as though he were a millionaire granting his wayward son a start-up business with which to prove his mettle, and I had to resist a quite powerful urge to reply ‘I think I’ll make soup’) was an exposure to the customers of the public bar. It was here I learned the obvious yet obscured truth about pubs - they make most of their money from alcoholics, functioning and otherwise.

It was only years later that I learned one of the core responsibilities of a barman is to cut people off if they’ve had enough. As in, it’s a legal requirement of holding a license. And yet, not once did this information make it to me via my training on the job, and not once did I see my boss, or any other staff member, exercise this responsibility. Not once, in a year. And before you start speculating about whether or not it was just an especially lucky year, with no customers reaching a level of intoxication necessary to be cut off, I’ll save you some time by confirming that on one occasion during my term of employment, a patron of The Sports Bar literally drank himself to death one night, keeling over and expiring just outside the premises. Thankfully I wasn’t working in that bar on that evening - though I did have to deal with some of the fallout, as some of the Sports Bar regulars decided to spend the rest of the evening in a bar that hadn’t just had a corpse outside, so they could finish their pints without unpleasant thoughts intruding overly.

But for the most part, the public bar attracted the hard core alcoholoics, partly because the sports bar had a nominal dress code, but mainly because - and I am not making this up - lager was 2p a pint cheaper in the public bar - perhaps in apology for the shabbier decor and faint smell of decay.

The clientele was exclusively over 30, with the mean age comfortably over 50 (even allowing for the aging effects of drink, which for most of the regulars was considerable), overwhelmingly white (there was one asian regular, and one bus driver of indian descent, and zero black people) and male. Only two women frequented the bar on anything like a regular basis - one was the wife of one of the regulars, who would always order her pint in two half glasses because it looked ‘more ladylike’, and Dot, was the wife of Paul, an irishman drinking his way through throat cancer. Paul drank in there every day until he passed, and Dot would always join him on Sundays. After Paul died, she came once more, on the day of his funeral, and then I never saw her again.

As I think of it, miss ‘two half-pint glasses’ also stopped coming, after her husband got barred for calling the landlord’s wife a sour faced cunt. So after that it was, except from behind the bar, pretty much a woman free zone.

Which meant that I got a crash course in a kind of masculinity that even a childhood going to school with the sons of farmers had left me woefully unprepared for.

I cannot now recall the context of the first time I heard a woman referred to as ‘it’. I recall the feelings vividly - a deep confusion, followed by a dawning understanding as the context made the meaning clear, a surge of rebellion at the very notion, and then a kind of awed horror. I remember waiting for someone to laugh, to acknowledge the transgression, render it a joke. But no. Women, especially in a sexual context, were ‘it’. I’d fuck it. I’d leave home for it. Look at the state of it.

I was raised mainly by my mother, and she’s a feminist, and I’m a long way from being a good feminist myself, but I was still genuinely shocked - and as improbable as it may sound, the shock didn’t really diminish with familiarity. I would wince inwardly any time the word was used, as it was, frequently, especially when Countdown came on the TV - Carol Vorderman being quite the object of desire for these aging alcoholic men, hitting their third or fourth pint at 4 o'clock in the afternoon.

And, I mean, I’ve given this entirely too much thought, but of course it’s also an insight into just how rock bottom the self esteem of these men were, that they could only comprehend people they desired as objects, that dehumanisation was the only way they could relate to sex and sexualty. It’s desperately sad. It’s just also monstrous and despicable and skin crawlingly awful to be around - especially when it’s assumed that because you are also male, that this is therefore how you think, too.

And then there was the curiously specific anti-black racism. Which… you know what, let’s do this one via case study.

Let’s talk about Trev.

Trev was a white van driver and regular of the public bar. Trev was a gregarious, friendly type - always a smile for the other patrons, always chatty, quick with a joke. He had charm. He also had access to amazing food, which he stole from his employers at every available opportunity.

The way the theft would work was childishly simple - he’d drive to the the posh eateries and upscale supermarkets in central London - places that had the kind of clientele that would consider Waitrose to be slumming it - and phone in the delivery. Sometimes they’d open up the back and he’d unload the pallets. Other times, if they were especially busy, they’d ask him to post the order form through the letterbox or pigeonhole and leave the delivery by the loading door. On those occasions, the slip would go through the letterbox, and the produce would go down to the local market, where it would be transferred over to stallholders in exchange for good, hard cash - except for the odd giant pork pie, or rack of scotch eggs, which would make their way down to the public bar for a feast.

For a while when I first joined he was also robbing to order - a pint would get you a dozen frozen tubs of potted shrimp in butter, just nuke for 2 minutes and eat out of the tub - but that was curtailed after stock checking became more regular. He would often regale us with stories about how his boss (who in Trev’s telling of it had an outrageously plumbly RP English accent) would bemoan the loss of a delivery, Trev indignantly claiming that he’d warned ‘em about leaving it out there, and how his boss would always say ‘of course, Trev, I don’t blame you’.

And, you know, I laughed too.

Trev also raised money for a local charity that specialized in helping people with severe mental disabilities. He would explain that he couldn’t put into words how it made him feel, when the people he’d raised money for called him a good person - a phrase he knew was not an accurate description of him, but that he loved to hear, anyway.

Trev was also the most racist human being I’ve ever met, and was was engaged in a sexual relationship with his widowed neighbour that was at best one sided and manipulative, but was more likely, based on his telling of it, actually outright abusive.

I find I am unable to stomach extended retellings of anecdotes on either subject, so I will give you just one, and ask that you trust me when I say this is not cherry picked for outstanding awfulness, particularly - it’s merely the first one that comes to mind.

In this story he described simply how a friend of his had lived in South Africa during apartheid - and how this friend would, when drunk, load up a truck with a few like minded friends and some firearms, and drive through the townships taking random pot shots at the black population. He would always conclude this story - which he told many times - by turning to his interlocutor with a charming grin and saying ‘now THAT sounds like a perfect evening, to me’.

So, yeah. That was Trev.

Trev was also a serious alcoholic.

He drank too much as a matter of course. But every now and then, he’d go on big, two or three day benders. He’d drive up - yes, in his white van, so far over the legal limit he’d be close to internal organ failure - and come in and drink for hours, then leave and go home and drink more and come back again. I remember vividly one occasion where he asked me to sign his payment slip for him, as he’d paid by card. I refused - I had exactly that much sense of self, but no more - and he scrawled an x. Which I then processed, and gave him his beer and cashback, and watched him drive off at the end of the evening.

My moral failings - let me count the ways.

The excuses are true, but ring hollow - I was young, ignorant, scared, desperate for employment - most of all, basically clueless about practically everything. All true, all useless, as I think back on how I smiled at and laughed with this man, and I burn with shame. I never laughed at his racism, never joined in or offered the tacit (or often explicit) moral support many others did - but fucking hell, what kind of pathetic bullshit is that, in the light of day, 20 years removed? He was a vile man, an evil man, and I enabled his self destruction and risked the lives and welfare of others, and listened to stories of abuse and did nothing but pull him another fucking pint.

I wanted to say all this. It’s important. It’s important I own my own complicity, confess my own weaknesses. The shame I feel I deserve to feel.

It’s also important context because it was on one of those three day benders that Trev brought in front of me a man who, I believe, intended to hospitalize me, and who I also believe had the capacity to kill me outright.

Trev gave that man a lift and watched from his van as the man berated me, as I sat outside the locked up pub on a cold autumn night, and wondered if my cab was going to arrive before this guy beat the everloving shit out of me.

He just watched.

TO BE CONCLUDED

KP
22/3/18