Love, Sex, Fleas, God by Bruce Clark

Author:Bruce Clark
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Love Sex Fleas God
ISBN: 9781415204641
Publisher: Random House Struik
Published: 2012-05-27T04:00:00+00:00

Thirteen

As an eighteen-year-old hobo I slept wherever I could, but my favourite spot was under a tree on a high embankment near a busy highway. It was not easy to get to my bed; the only way up was by semi-climbing from the road. The grass was never cut, which made sleeping comfortable. It was safe and soft. I spent hours – days – with nothing to do but think. It was a perfect time and place for endless self-pity. I directed my thoughts to nobody and everybody: Look at me, I’m a sad and unhappy teenager. My life is over, I have no home, I have no money, I have no food, I have no hope. I sang songs in my head – Leonard Cohen, Bob Dylan, Joni Mitchell, Dory Previn – while I demanded empathy from the universe. Sad, angsty, middle-ofthe-night, suicide music. Perhaps when it was all over, someone would make a movie of my brief, miserable life. Someone good-looking and famous could play me and, at the appropriate time, say, ‘Some mornings it’s not worth biting through the leather straps.’

The lack of empathy I received from the universe annoyed me. Not only was the universe not feeling sorry for me; it was ignoring me completely. What I expected from the universe – and was not getting – was an apology or, at the very least, an explanation. I wanted to know why. I imagined the universe hearing my voice and asking me, ‘Why what, earthling?’

‘Why everything, universe. To start with, what is my fate, what do you have in store for me?’

‘Fate has fuck all to do with it. I have nothing in store for you. You decide on your future – not me.’

‘But I’m hungry.’

‘Well, eat.’

‘But I’m jobless.’

‘Well, get one.’

‘But I’m uneducated.’

‘Well, educate yourself.’

‘But my mother isn’t here. She left me.’

‘So what? Stop whining.’

I turned twenty, thirty, forty, and then forty-five. I may have been semi-educated, and no longer under a tree, but I was still annoyed – and still ignored. My trains of thought were hitching themselves up to more carriages – overladen, Calcuttan trains, chugging into longer and darker tunnels. I was dangerously broody. Nothing made sense to me; I was marking unhappy time until I died. The universe was still the voice I was tuned in to but it remained stubbornly quiet. Then, quite unexpectedly, it cleared its voice and spoke to me.

It announced itself in the voice of a friend, who said, ‘I think you should go and see X.’

‘Who is X?’ I asked.

‘She’s a numerologist,’ he replied.

‘No, thanks. “Gists” of any sort sound too much like “Scientologists” and I’ve had enough of them to fill the billion years I once promised to give them. In any event, my grandfather based his business decisions on numerology and after he died the police came looking for diamonds.’

‘Seriously, I think you should talk to her.’

‘I don’t think so. I’m not going to learn anything in the numerical equivalent of tea leaves.’

‘Go and see her! Here’s her number.

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