BEHIND BLUE EYES

Sometimes, when I think back on being a kid and all that, I find myself trying to decipher it all like some kind of strange dream I once had. I mean, it happened, a life was definitely lived, but now it’s all gone and the memory of it all is somewhat distorted, you know? But part of me can’t help thinking back on certain events and wondering what it was all about, like, you know, what it all meant and all that. Sure, there’s always the reality that the memories I hold aren’t entirely true, but that doesn’t mean I shouldn’t think back on them all. I mean, I find that I can’t help myself anyway, especially when certain recollections jut out and prick at me like thorns in a pillow. 

 Now, in saying all that, I guess that what I’m alluding to is this specific pocket of time from when I was about ten years old. I used to know this kid called Jason, who fast became my best friend, and Jason, above anyone I knew, really opened up my eyes to a whole bunch of different shit. And when I say “shit”, I mean “things”, or “experiences”, you know? Like shit that gets you thinking, shit that probably wouldn’t have come about until years later, if ever, if we weren’t good friends while growing up.

I mean, none it was ever really put into words back then because we grew up as boys, boys who weren’t expected to share feelings out of the fear of being called a “fag”. But, now days I’m over all that, and the feelings I get now from thinking back on everything fill me this sense of semi-mystified, almost-dying “what-if” wonder. It’s almost like returning to that dream-like state I was talking about, you know? Something like that anyway, I think. See, I still don’t really know why I feel the way I do about it all, or what those feelings even are.

            But it’s not all to do with just Jason. It’s a lot to do with the contrast between the two different worlds with which we both grew up in. You see, to some it up simply, how I see it is that Jason pretty much grew up on the wrong side of the tracks in a city with no trains. Whereas I lived close to those metaphorical train tracks, but just managed to be on the opposite side to his. I mean, I could see him from where I lived, and I was even allowed to cross the tracks from time to time, but at the end of the day I got to go back to my side, the not-so-less-fortunate side, whereas he didn’t.

It was Canberra, Australia’s capital, a shitty, painfully cold and quiet place, and, pretty much, that “wrong side of the tracks” I mentioned was a place called Burglar Court.

Now, if you grew up in Canberra throughout the 80’s and 90’s, you should know the name. But for those of you who aren’t familiar with it, Burglar Court was a group of commission houses on the edge of one of Canberra’s forgotten suburbs, known as Lyons. We called it “the Ghetto” when we were kids because we all listened to Hip-Hop and thought that living in the ghetto was kind of cool.

Anyway, to paint a picture of Lyons back in the day, it was the kind of place where families let their dogs roam the streets, twenty-four seven, and teenagers spent their time loitering out the front of the local liquor store with the hopes of getting someone to buy them grog. The local newsagency got held up nearly every Friday night, even though this brittle old lady ran the place, and strange men with AIDS scabs and pubic-looking beards were always lurking around and trying to talk to us kids. Needless to say, doors were locked in Lyons. The neighbourhood wasn’t to be trusted, and as you grew up you quickly learned to keep your bike at your side, always, and to never walk around alone. And, as a kid, or as anyone, you definitely weren’t allowed anywhere near Burglar Court, which was situated right on the edge of Lyons, down the hill towards the lower end. Its exterior was this collection of exposed grey and brown brick, with all these dried up Australian bush plants dying everywhere. The paths were cracked and the windows to the place were always covered with these dusty pieces of tapestry and shit like that. But it was the type of people that dwelled within the complex that gave it its name. As everyone in Canberra knew, Burglar Court notoriously housed a large portion of the city’s convicted sex offenders, drug addicts, and Canberra’s own biker gang, the Canberra Glassheads, who had knocked down a few walls and created this big hideout type thing inside. Well, that’s what people said anyway. The whole biker thing probably wasn’t true.

Me, though, I had my doubts about the danger of the place. This was mainly due to the fact that Jason lived there with his Mum. Jason was this little feral kid with red hair and these hypnotic blue eyes, crystally-open-sky blue eyes, that could be really loving sometimes, but usually they were just looking for trouble. I mean, if you ask anyone about Jason back then, they’d probably mention how he was always playing practical jokes on everyone and coming up with new weird shit to say or do. He’d put on these voices all the time and run around acting like a spaz. One of his trademark things to do was to fall to the ground and fake a fit. He’d shake and shake like crazy until someone became concerned, which just made it all the more funny. But my favourite prank of his was his sporadic “mall-run”, which consisted of him randomly running through the local mall screaming “MEDIC! MEDIC!” just to confuse the fuck out of people and get a laugh out of it all. I think he got the idea from M*A*S*H or a movie or something.

And, I mean, I quickly discovered that this kind of character was really attractive to a more sheltered kid like me. It was exciting and different. If anything, he was my first proper taste of going against the grain of society’s expectations. It was always a lot of fun, but, yeah, shit, they’d probably medicate someone like him these days for the things he used to do.

But, in saying all that, even though we both had different personality traits and upbringings, we really weren’t that much different from one another. We both joked about the same shit, we both collected Pokémon Cards, and we both shared the same interests in music, that being mostly whatever was on the radio that week, which usually tended to be a mix of Limp Bizkit, Linkin Park, and S-Club 7, just to name a few.

Now, in case that brief catalogue of music didn’t give away the era from which this story is set, I’ll let you know that it was the dawn of the new Millennium - winter, 2000, to be precise - and somehow, and fuck knows how, my ten-year-old self had convinced my Mum to let me visit Burglar Court and stay at Jason’s for the night.

We arrived at Burglar Court a little after five-thirty, just as the sun was going down. In my hands, I carried a blue L-shaped pillow and my worn out lime-green toothbrush. We found the letterbox for 12a and then followed the cracked, tree-root-splintered footpath around the back to 12b. Mum rang the doorbell and then we waited. A clutter of noise came from behind the door, which included the yelp of what sounded like a tiny dog, and then the door swung open. I had never seen Jason’s Mum before, but I guessed it was her standing in the doorway before us. I mean, who else would’ve it been? She was a big woman; fat everywhere except for her face, which looked as though it belonged to someone else. It was gaunt, deprived and creased around the eyes, like a burnt-out smoker’s lung stretched over a tiny hardened skull. Dispersed across her clothes were the remnants of tiny pine-needle dog hairs, and the home behind her smelled of both cigarettes and that smell rooms gets when they haven’t been aired out in a long time, like a mix of bad B.O. and pets. Already, it was different to my home, but I didn’t really find any of it too off-putting or anything like that. I mean, if anything, she seemed comfortable in her own skin, humble and at ease with her home. She even greeted us with this big smile, one that broke through that ancient stoned look upon her face.

‘Hiiiii,’ she grinned at my Mum, exhaling the entirety of the word. ‘I’m Jason’s Mum, Tiff.’ They shook hands, and then, looking over me for the first time, she continued: ‘well, would you look at little Romeo here. Ha! Ha! No wonder Jason doesn’t have a girlfriend. You must be snagging all of them.’

She got my Mum laughing, which was a good start, and then they even joked about how Jason always seemed to be over at my place. It was all quite reassuring; to the point that even my Mum probably forgot where we were for a minute. But that all changed as soon as she realised it was time for to do the old goodbye thing. She hesitantly gave me the once over and then gave me this big motherly hug, clutching at the back of my head all desperately, like I was being taken away to an adoption agency or something. It was kind of embarrassing because part of me suspected that maybe Jason’s Mum never acted like this in front of other parents, or anyone at that, and to have this all go on right on her doorstep was almost insulting to her, I think. I don’t know really. Maybe it was just all that “Burglar Court is full of bad people” talk getting to me.

As we parted, Mum made sure to give me one last don’t-make-this-the-last-time-I-ever-see-you look before she disappeared back around the side of the duplex. But, come to think of it, I should’ve been more worried about her. She was a woman, on her own, walking around Burglar Court at night. Maybe the eyes and the hug were more her wanting to stay, rather than her warning me not to get killed or kidnapped.

Jason’s Mum and I then took my pillow and toothbrush inside. As we closed the front door behind us, Jason came running and thumping down the stairs, dressed in just his tracky-dacks and an ill-fitting skivvy, with this little dog nipping at his feet. It was a scruffy looking Jack-Russel-Chihuahua mongrel or something.

‘Hey, faggot,’ joked Jason, addressing me as he jumped down the last four stairs.

‘Jason!’ snapped his Mum, ‘what did I say about using that word with your friends?’

Choosing to ignore his Mum, Jason decided to fill me in on the dog’s story instead, which was now humping at my ankle.

‘This is Scotty the Gay Dog,’ he laughed, looking down at Scotty the Gay Dog. ‘He’s a little faggot.’

‘Jason!’ his Mum yelled. 

I kicked away Scotty the Gay Dog and then moved to take cover behind Jason, pulling him in front of me as Scotty the Gay Dog came looking for another hump.

‘C’mon,’ laughed Jason, his blue eyes joyfully crinkling at the sides, ‘I’ll show you my room.’

Jason took my pillow and then we ran upstairs. Scotty the Gay Dog followed.

Jason’s room had these off-white coloured walls and a poor-man’s light brown carpet, which looked like it was decades old, at least. A single light bulb hung from a cord in the centre of the cracked ceiling, and brown watery stains were over everything. His bed was without a frame, and the mattress sunk into the floor. The wardrobe was mostly empty, except for some clothes, a small tin full of silver coins and a few picked at skating stickers. His bedroom window looked out to another complex that was brown with bricks. Blue-tacked to the bedroom wall, he had a picture of Fred Durst from Limp Bizkit. Durst was giving the finger. The poster had the caption: “GIVE ME SOMETHIN’ TO BREAK.” It was fucking sick. I knew my Mum would never let me have something like that, and I guess that’s why I liked it so much.

‘You can either sleep on the floor,’ said Jason, ‘or be a little fag and go head-to-toe with me.’

‘The floor,’ I answered.

He threw my pillow on the floor right beside the bed and then sat down to pull on his shoes. I couldn’t help but notice that he wasn’t wearing any socks. I mean, I couldn’t imagine doing that. It was way too uncomfortable and sweaty. You needed socks, no matter what the situation.

As I watched him tear at his shoe’s Velcro straps and then re-secure them, I became aware of Scotty the Gay Dog at my ankle again, humping away like the little faggy jackhammer that he was. I immediately shook him off and then kicked him away.

‘Man,’ I whined, ‘what’s up with your dog?’

Jason cackled with laughter, like he always did when someone else was obviously distressed.

‘Scotty’s just lonely, that’s all.’

Then, with this huge cheeky grin drawn across his face, he grabbed Scotty the Gay Dog and rolled him on his back.

‘Check this out.’

Jason then took to rubbing Scotty the Gay Dog’s stomach. This excited Scotty the Gay Dog. And then, as Jason moved his hand closer to Scotty the Gay Dog’s little penis, a red tip grew out from the fur. It looked like red lipstick, but it was Scotty the Gay Dog’s little gay erection.

Jason let out another laugh as he snatched his hand away.

‘Scotty’s a little faggot,’ he snorted. ‘Aren’t you, Scotty?’

I laughed, too, because as far as I could tell it was true. Scotty the Gay Dog was a little faggot.

Jason rose from Scotty the Gay Dog and then yelled at him:

‘Get out, Scotty. Out!’

Then Scotty the Gay Dog ran from the room, sporting his little red erection as he disappeared down the stairs.

After Jason’s Mum went to bed, we took the living room TV upstairs. We placed it on the floor by my makeshift bed, and then plugged it into the wall. The old curved screen lit up and then fuzzed and buzzed away with a whole bunch of coloured sound and free-to-air entertainment. It was true comfort, almost like hanging out with a family that was always there for you, you know? What I mean is that when watching TV it didn’t matter where you were or who you were with, TV was always TV, and it was always there. And, unless you paid for Foxtel or something, you were always watching exactly what everyone else was watching, all across the country, so in a way you were all kind of connected, whether you knew it or not.

We hit the lights and then got into bed. Within the darkness of the room, things felt a lot more at home. The cracks and stains of Jason’s room disappeared, and all that empty space filled with shadows, which left more to the imagination than a grotty 1960’s carpet. We were alone with the glow of the TV, able to dream, gently, and somewhat untainted by our surroundings.

We gossiped and screwed around whilst watching a good deal of this “Australian Top of the Charts” music show, which featured a handful of boring Aussie bands like Eskimo Joe and Something For Kate. I thought both acts were crap, so it was easy to talk over and keep as background noise.

After a few hours, the conversing died off and the eyelids got all sleep-heavy as the mind drifted to weird thoughts that didn’t make much sense but always seemed to come on the brink of sleep.

And then, as I was almost out, Jason’s voice broke through the darkness:

‘Dad called from prison yesterday.’

‘Hm,’ I grumbled, letting him know I was still awake.

‘He told me some really weird shit, you know. Do you want to know what?’

‘Yeah, sure,’ I said, my voice creaking away from the sleep that nearly had me.

He paused to take a breath. Then, looking up to the shadowy ceiling, he continued:

‘He said that the guys in there make you suck their dicks. And if you don’t do it, they bash the shit out of you, like, really bad. But he’s told me that he’s bashed heaps of guys and made them suck his dick, just so they know who’s boss, you know?’

‘Whoa,’ I breathed, ‘that’s-’ I stopped short, not knowing what to say.

The room fell into silence. Then Jason continued with a stern sincerity in his voice:

‘Do you think my Dad’s a fag?” 

I didn’t know. I had to think over it for a moment.

‘I don’t know,’ I finally answered. ‘I’ve never really known anyone who’s actually gay before, you know? And I don’t think I’ve ever even known anyone who’s ever been to prison either.’

I finished, but something about it all felt incomplete. I mean, it seemed like Jason wanted an actual answer from me, something to help him out, you know? But I hadn’t given it to him. So, being the good friend I was, I persisted by asking:

‘Are your Mum and Dad still married?’

‘Yeah, I’m pretty sure they are.’

‘Well, then maybe he’s not a fag. Maybe it’s just a prison thing.’

‘Yeah,’ breathed Jason.

Then the room began to lose its shape. I closed my eyes and fell into sleep.

Part of me was in Jason’s room, I don’t know which part, but I knew I was dreaming.

I could see the cracks in the ceiling and they were silently creeping along like fissures in the earth. The air was still and unbreathing. The walls didn’t budge. Then Jason was above me with his arm twitching in and out of sight. His laughter crawled up the deadened walls and then sucked up through the cracks in the ceiling. I couldn’t move. Something was pinning me down. Jason took his hand and then stuck his fingers between my lips. He pushed past my teeth and then pulled out. Then he started laughing. Or was it crying? I couldn’t tell. I was frozen stiff, in a panic. Gasping for air, I looked up at Jason. The skin around his eyes was grey and lifeless, cracking beneath the ceiling. His face looked familiar, but part of me didn’t want to believe that I had seen it before. His features blended into his Mum’s and then he took the form of a man I didn’t know, someone I had invented, maybe. I watched on as everything pulsated and tightened. A transformation was taking place above me. Jason somehow became the rejected walls of Burglar Court, but in the shape of a person, or something like that. It was too hard to distinguish or put into words. I just knew it. I could feel it, and it was all caving down on me. Dust. A frosted-over windshield of a rundown car. Bushes full of used condoms and bloodied syringes. Dust, dust, dust. Asbestos insulation and years of cigarette ash blew in from my peripherals, engulfing me, suffocating me, putting me to sleep.

Reaching for his hand, I woke up, slowly returning to my bed upon the floor. I was lying on my back with my mouth open. To my side, I heard the springs from Jason’s mattress bounce and then become silent. I groaned, heavy with sleep. I looked to the TV. We had fallen asleep with it on, and now a kid’s show was playing. It was morning. I rolled onto my side to see Jason.

‘What time is it?’

He said nothing.

‘Hey,’ I nipped, ‘I know you’re awake.’

His trademark grin peeled across his face. He then opened his watery blue eyes and faked a yawn, acting as though he had just woken up and all that.

‘Ahhh,’ he sighed, ‘good morning.’

 I shook my head at him in annoyance.                  

‘What’s the time?’

He rose from his bed, naked besides his pyjama bottoms.

‘Dunno,’ he said. ‘I have to check downstairs. Do you want a drink or anything?’

‘Yeah,’ I muttered, feeling the dryness in my mouth, ‘can I get some water?’

‘Uh-huh.’

He bounced out of the room and then disappeared down the stairs.

I sat up from my bed. Then, rubbing the goopy sleep from my eyes, I began watching the kid’s show they were screening on the TV. It featured a young man as the host, who was supported by this skinny puppet that was held up by all these strings. The puppet had a huge pencil for a nose and it was using it to draw on this big sheet of paper propped up in front of him. But what he was drawing didn’t make any sense. It was just a huge collage of scribbles and other garbage. Nonetheless, the puppet kept drawing. Obviously, he was excited about something, like he knew what he was doing, and the fact that no one else knew didn’t bother him. Shit, it didn’t even seem to occur to him.

‘All done,’ squeaked the puppet, as he hopped up and down while gazing over his shitty picture. ‘Can you see it?’ 

‘See what?’ exclaimed the host. ‘I don’t see anything at all, Mr Squid.’ 

‘Neither,’ I unconsciously exhaled.

‘Hmmmmm,’ mumbled Mr Squid, the puppet, ‘why don’t you try turning it upside down? Yes, yes. Try doing that!’

The host grabbed the thing and turned it upside down. Then the image became apparent. Mr Squid had drawn an island surrounded by water. There were gulls and palm trees with coconuts, a sun. Everything. There was even a boat in the distance with a bunch of tiny passengers looking out to the emptiness of the island. I felt dumb for not seeing it in the first place. The puppet had outwitted me.

I decided to change the channel. And as I flicked through the lack of stations, my thoughts turned to Jason’s Dad in prison. When I had first met Jason, he had told me that they’d locked up his Dad for stabbing someone on a bus when he was high on drugs. They said he was a schizophrenic, or something like that. Jason told me that his Mum said being a schizophrenic meant you were crazy, you know, like you had lost your mind and now they kept you in a straightjacket, locked up and away from everyone.

With the TV quietly buzzing away, I wondered what it was that made you crazy. Was it being really poor that made you crazy? Or was it weird stuff that they screened on the TV or something like that? Was it drugs? I didn’t know. It all made about as much sense as forcing someone to suck your dick, which just seemed wrong and kind of cruel, you know? But I figured that that was prison. I mean, all anyone ever told me was that only horrible people went to prison. It was a place for bad people who did shit like that, supposedly.

I could hear Jason running up the stairs, and then quite quickly he was back in the room.

‘Here you go, fag-bag,’ he announced, handing me a glass of water.

I took the glass, but couldn’t help looking it over before taking a sip. The thing was that the water looked cloudy, but I didn’t want to be rude or awkward or anything, so I drank it. It was definitely water, but something about it didn’t seem right, like it had been contaminated or produced by a cheaper water company. It even seemed somewhat slimy, but maybe that was just my imagination. To be honest, I couldn’t really tell. And the not telling really played tricks on my mind because, as far as I knew, everyone in Canberra got their water from the same place. It was the way a city was meant to work, wasn’t it? Wasn’t it the law or something that everyone had to have clean drinking water? I could’ve sworn I had heard that on the news or something. But it did make me wonder, which then got me onto thinking that maybe that was what made people crazy, just little things, you know, like the taste of water. And, over time, little things like that would grow and grow until they became unbearable. Then finally you would snap beneath the weight of it all and end up robbing the local newsagency. Or maybe you’d end up taking drugs and then stabbing someone on a bus. Maybe you’d just simply lose your mind.

It was an interesting thought, but one with which I couldn’t really conclude, and I think this was because the water at my house tasted fine. Really, I couldn’t put myself in someone else’s shoes like Jason’s, or his Dad’s or Mum’s or whoever’s, because I never had to worry about second-class water, ever. The water on my side of town, away from Burglar Court, was definitely cleaner and clearer. It even tasted better, which sounds like a dumb thing to say about water, which doesn’t really have any taste to begin with. But maybe it was just the knowing where it came from, like, you know, what taps and pipes it moved through before getting to your glass. This could’ve had some kind of negative placebo effect. And maybe that’s what made people crazy, knowing that your water runs through different pipes to your neighbour’s, and always will, no matter how poor or rich you are. But could something like the taste of water, or even just the thought of it, really determine whether or not you went crazy and ended up in prison? Was it that simple?

Shit. I really didn’t know. I was only ten.

I didn’t know then, and I still don’t really know now. But, what I do know is that when I think about it all, there’s this song by Limp Bizkit that comes into my head. You know, it was one of their last hits back in the early 2000’s, and it was called “Behind Blue Eyes”. In it, Fred Durst sings something like, “Nobody knows what it’s like to be the sad man, to be the poor man, behind blue eyes.” It was something like that. I can’t really remember. But, whenever I hear it, the song gets me thinking about Jason. And this makes me think that maybe Limp Bizkit were kind of touching on what I’m trying to piece together when talking about my time with Jason back then. But, then again, that song was a cover, originally by “The Who”, I think, so maybe Limp Bizkit didn’t really have any more of a clue than I do. Maybe they were just doing it all for more money, or to get girls to think they were sensitive or something. Probably.

Regardless, who am I to know, really? In the end, all I know is that the dream from that night still sticks with me. So does the images of Scotty the Gay Dog, and the taste of that water when it moved down my throat. It’s all still there, and I still think about it all. I think about those cracks in the ceiling and the emptiness of Jason’s room. I even think about his Mum, and everyone else that would’ve once inhabited Burglar Court.

But mostly I think about Jason, and I wonder if he ever got out of there.