“The Secondhand Life of Harker Lee,”
by Harker Lee (Annotated by J. F. Segal)
Chapter One. Introductory Note
Those who have occasion to use these autobiographical notes should be made aware of certain peculiarities pertaining to the use of pronouns. Harker Lee is, of course, wholly conscious of the schizoid condition which he is attempting to document, and to some extent the entire pronoun structure may be regarded as a contrivance — almost an elaborate joke, although who the joke is aimed at is not quite clear — rather than as a representation of the way in which he actually perceives the state of reality. However, it is not possible to reach any final and justifiable conclusion about the extent of meaning which Lee intends to convey by this device, or how much meaning it has so far as he is concerned.
The following idiosyncrasies occur, and the reader should be aware of them in attempting to interpret any passage in these memoirs:
The pronoun “you” is almost always singular and usually is used by Lee to refer to his real (alienated) self. (The precise existential status of this “real” self is not our concern here — we are examining the way Lee writes and, presumably — thinks.)
The pronoun “I” and its derivatives (me, mine, etc.) relate only to Lee’s “compromise” self. It refers to a supposed communicative device, which he sometimes calls a mask, used as an arbiter between his real self and the outside world, but whose configuration is determined principally by the outside world. Statements in which “I” replaces “you” in the autobiography are sometimes intended to be false or insincere.
The pronoun “we” and its derivatives retain their usual meaning, but in addition there is a special use of the word which relates to everyone except Harker Lee. This deliberate exclusion is wholly artificial, a statement of his alienation, and this use of the pronoun does not occur often.
The pronouns “he,” “she,” and “it” are used normally throughout, and “they” almost always has its usual meaning. However, in connection with the use of “we” in the specialized way outlined above, “they” is occasionally constrained so that it can only relate to a specific group of others, and has no general meaning.
— j.f.s.
Chapter One
They told you that you were born in your grandfather’s back room, which you know from personal experience is one hell of a place for a growing boy to be born. A body might catch cold, with all that rising damp. Suppose the river had been in flood? They couldn’t have known it wouldn’t be. Normal people are born in hospitals.
I guess it must have been a genuine traumatic experience, which is probably why you don’t remember it too well. You can’t remember much at all that happened at around that time, though they tell you you were a real little bastard who never closed his yap and screamed through it all the time. I guess it was all pretty traumatic. Years of it. Young and healthy kids recover, you suppose. They seem to. Plenty of cold showers, toilet training, and the three Rs, I guess. No, of course you were healthy. Four pounds twelve ounces, they tell you. Like a little walnut, all crinkled and shapeless. If the midwife was nearsighted, she could have lost you in the bedclothes.
Maybe . . .
We don’t really think those kind of circumstances affect us in later life. We don’t see how they can. So in all probability all that was just so much passing time, and it wasn’t responsible for anything that was you, became you, was thrust upon you. Who gives you the option to believe? Your mother always said it sure as hell wasn’t her fault. What happened to you? Heredity or environment, mother — take your pick. It was your father, she says. Who gives you any option to believe? You can’t just think something, you know, you have to ask permission. Sometimes you can’t even do that. Society is secret: you can’t ask to join, you have to be invited. You can’t lodge a complaint, no matter how free your mason.
Like somebody or other said, he’s like a walnut, all crinkled and shapeless. Mother hadn’t seen you then. You were her first ever; she’d never seen one before. And there’s someone talking about walnuts. What sort of picture that brings to her rabbity little mind, hey? It wasn’t father who said it — father too busy fainting on the back stairs.
Pretty sick, you guess. You get born a walnut, what chance you ever have of turning into a paper frog when the old cosmic paperhanger says jump? Pretty damn slim. You’re a bad coin, like one of those turnings off a lathe that some comedian is always trying to bugger slot machines with. You buggered the biggest of them all — the giant super-whiz social slot machine. You never got your jaw-breaker, let alone your free plastic skeleton 1.075 inches high.
That’s the sort of secondary effect people don’t usually think about in connection with being born. Think about it.
You don’t remember being a child prodigy either. Perhaps you weren’t. It could be all lies, you know. They could fill you full of lies, and who’d know the difference? What chance have your microscopic, fugitive, fleeting memories of infancy got against their cold, hard, adult certainty? How sure are you of those cobwebs in your mind? Are they yours, or did some spider spin them there, with their fancy stories and their education? Anyway, you’re wise enough nowadays to know that even if you were a prodigy, you weren’t really. Quick, maybe, but nowhere near genius. You were fast, but that’s all. The long and the short of it. Whizz. An early reader, a voluble talker. It might have looked a lot to somebody standing close by, but it wasn’t so much. You were a real clever little bastard — clever enough to make people hate you, but not clever enough to fuck the bastards off and not care. You were superficial, even then. They taught you to say “I” and you said it, over and over, and just to fill up the cracks you learned to fill up the space between “Is.” They loved it. They hated it. What chance had you? Who ever offered you the opportunity to understand?
You never had a lot behind you to back up your front. That formed early, and by God it kept up. Look at you now. All face and no guts. That was you at five years old. Plus ça, etc.
You couldn’t make it easy on yourself, could you? We all make mistakes, but did you have to make that one? Who done it? Did they push too hard? Or just chance. Or was it just built into you that if crawling was the way you had to get around you were just going to have to be the fastest damn crawler in the whole world? You always had to be six points up on the field, and not only because you wanted to win clear but because you wanted to turn around and yell hallelujah while you were doing it. But you were all flash and no fire. You always got the six most worthless points. You were satisfied. Hell, wasn’t it something you could count, let alone assess the value of what you were counting?
That’s education for you. Three Rs and a free arse. They give you the price of everything and the value of nothing. Sin-ic.
Remember education? That’s you, Harker Lee, from day one to the bitter end. You may not know what the hell you’re talking about, but you won’t shut up. You’ll push your opinions and you’ll prop them up with more and more talk, and the more they press you, the more you’ll lose your sense of distinction between what’s true and what’s not, what’s real and what’s not, what you know and what you don’t know.
Do they want to know where all these fancy fantasy existences come from? Offer them this. They come from having to be right all the time. They come from having to defend what you say for fear they’ll catch you in a mistake, in ignorance. You say something, you gotta be right — that’s education. Tell them to defend what they think to the bitter end against a host of jealous critics. See how fast they lose their sense of distinction between true and untrue, real and unreal, knowledge and idea. Fantasies come from having to be right. Fantasies come from the only way they give you to decide what you believe.
You were a real pain in the neck from five to twenty-five. Nobody ever took a liking to you, and who could blame them? They didn’t hate you, Harker, but they sure as hell couldn’t like you. In their gum-chewing, comic-reading, sports-fan, jacking-off kind of a world you were a nothing. You don’t rate plus or minus to the extent there’s any sort of record of you in the great big emotional cash register, which is where the world clicks in its head.
Is that all of it? You think so. A kid the other kids don’t cotton to. Didn’t get much chance, if all they got was a view of your arse up a six-point margin and a faint hallelujah. They couldn’t see you for the dust. Or was it the heat haze where you scorched up the dirt on your way? You wanted to hide in the cloud.
Things moved around you pretty fast when you were a kid, but you didn’t really notice at all. You watched, but you didn’t see. So who does notice the changes in their whereabouts when they’re young? The velocity of change, like everything else, is just taken for granted. You were around when they bulldozed away an old world and bulldozed in a new, and you didn’t even notice. Do you remember black-oil beaches? Dead rivers? Derelict land? Smog? People, people, people, and more and more people?
No.
Just that. No.
You didn’t see a thing. Were you blind, willfully or otherwise? No.
Were you a fool, deliberate or otherwise? No.
Sometimes, it just isn’t so easy to see. Give me a lever and a place to stand, and I won’t even try to move the world. I’ll be too busy looking at it for yet another first time.
You didn’t even have the wherewithal to analyze moving and changing schools and changing a whole spectrum of people called passers-by. How could you possibly figure moving worlds and moving lives? No chance. You couldn’t care enough. It wasn’t in you. Who does care enough? Nobody. Not you, Harker, even now. That’s for sure.
It made a big difference to the world, when you moved, though. You can see that now, though you had no chance at nine. It was a whole change of life. A step up the money ladder, a step up the slots in the social slot machine. You didn’t know it, couldn’t see it, because world two treated you in pretty much the same way as world one. A whole world of difference between environments, between places, between positions. But you didn’t see the world change at all. You couldn’t — you weren’t equipped. Let’s see now, with the aid of hindsight, just what you did see.
You saw a change in you. A change in your identity.
It wasn’t so easy to look red hot in those better days of childhood, because they were a smarter bunch of kids and a nastier bunch of teachers. They didn’t know any answers, but they sure as hell knew that you didn’t, and they slapped at you every time you got revved up. You were a ready-made real outsider, and they weren’t going to let you in, let alone let you out of the herd at the front end. You didn’t see a change in them, because they were just as hostile, just as arbitrary, just as ridiculous as the others. You thought it was you that was at odds — you thought you’d lost the touch. You thought your answers had turned sour.
You turned maverick. Did you have a choice? Anyhow, high and wide of the field, just the same as it’s always been. Up and away. Not so much losing contact with humanity. Just failing ever to make it.
You were a ready-made fall guy, of course. Aren’t you still? The bigger they are, the harder you fall. You couldn’t be just an average kind of a specimen. Not with the hand of cards that you were dealt. You had to be puny. Thin and short and mean looking. Myopic, too. A real freak. Just about everything you were set you aside. A misfit born, a misfit formed, and a misfit by vocation. Fall guy, you fell.
Was there ever a time, ever a single moment, when you could have said, to anyone, “It’s cold outside — I want to join the human race”? Was there ever anybody listening?
You don’t know. I know, but that’s not the same thing at all.
Did we ever ask you to come in and take a seat? You don’t remember. Maybe you were in the bath and couldn’t get out to answer the doorbell. Maybe you couldn’t be bothered. Maybe you were afraid of the thing standing on the doorstep. Maybe the doorbell didn’t work.
They didn’t treat you too bad for all of that. You hear a hell of a lot of crap about how cruel children are. It’s not true. Children don’t know what cruelty is, and if they did, they wouldn’t want to be associated with it. Adolescents, yes. Kids, no. But they can hurt, of course. Anything can hurt if it isn’t careful. And if there’s one thing children never are it’s careful. But you got away without mortal wounds. They didn’t hurt you too bad. It was tough lots of times, but it’s tough the whole world over, all the time, and you knew that, didn’t you? You knew, at least, that everybody, everywhere, is being hurt by something. You didn’t get more than your fair share of hurt, and it’s no good crying now that you did. You handed out quite as much as you got. It didn’t hurt the people that hurt you, so you were never satisfied, but there was hurt in and hurt out and there was equilibrium. You know that now.
So it wasn’t the pain, that’s what we’re trying to establish. Harker Lee wasn’t driven to where he ended up, not like that. He went of his own volition. You can drive a horse to water but a pencil must be lead. Just about sums it up. A fatuous joke. A play on worlds.
When did you ever notice you were missing your humanity? Not when you were at school, for dead sure. Years and years later. Adolescence (it was late, wasn’t it?) — spring — flowering season — apple blossom time. That’s when the torture came, if it ever was. Still a freak, still small, still thin, even more myopic. Nowhere near the human race. But you felt it then. The call of the wild. You’re as alienated as you feel, and that was the beginning. That was when the wall grew tall, or when you finally got around to wondering about its climbability. Solid.
You didn’t miss your humanity, of course. They made sure of that. They were the hell-raisers. You only had to burn.
You can’t blame them, of course. They were in a mess of their own. They were beginning their own beginnings and pursuing their own ends. They were down at the department store buying their beautiful new egos. Trading in their football shorts for codpieces. Trading in their savagery and barbarity for a caseful of dirty jokes and exam passes, without a qualm. Making memories of their toys and toys of their futures.
No, you can’t blame them for slaughtering you. You can’t blame them for laughing and sneering and needing to destroy and decoy you. They had to go their way. Every pecking order has a dead, dummy hen. The only way to grow up in a hurry is to stand on somebody else’s shoulders. Who else but the loners, the freaks, and the outsiders could they use to fill their persecution quota?
So you were a fall guy. So what?
No, you can’t blame them for that.
You’d have done the same if you could have found something alive and crawling to trample on. And didn’t you try? Didn’t you pull out every last resource you had to keep ahead in the arrogance stakes? Didn’t you still know it all and a bit more besides? Couldn’t you still outsneer them? Didn’t you still have the wordy weapons? Didn’t they walk in fear of you even while they walked all over you?
They lost their effect for a while, the words. The others went through a period of immunity as they moved from one world to another, where you needed a new set of magical incantations to hurt their feelings. It took a new kind of wizardry to masquerade as wisdom.
But you caught on. You were still fast. They didn’t call you lightning for nothing. Because you were yellow, flashy, and bent.
You kept jumping, hey? You rode out the storm. You’re jumping still, paper frog. What’s that hump on your back?
In fact, this is where you really made some tracks. This is where you set up your big lead. While we were all slowing down, you were still driving on. You still had somewhere to go, though God only knew where. And you got there too. Your lofty pinnacle of self-awareness, of ultimate rationality, of diabolical cleverness. Finally, you won your crazy race, by sixty points. They couldn’t see you for dust.
Hallelujah.
And what do you have from it all?
Answers?
Yes, you have answers. All the answers. We can’t beat you. We can’t shake you. You can outword us every time. Because you know. You’re there, where we never even tried to go. But where are you? I ask you, do you know? What are you? What do you want to be? Why did you want to go?
I’ll tell you what you are. You’re an alien being. A man from another star, from a hollow world inside the Earth. A hollow man. An alien. A driver with no steering column, no brake, no reverse gear, and the engine in the trunk because there’s nothing but dirty washing under the hood. All you have is lots and lots of gears. Forward gears. And wheels and axles and twin carbs and overdrive and a whole series of accelerators. You can really travel, Harker, but how do you get to where you need to go?
How do you get back?
You’re an emotional cripple, Harker. You have no positive side to your mind. That showed, you know, in your trial. Not to mention in your crime.
All you are is the progeny of fear. You’re a generation of bogeymen. And a big generation. That’s a fertile mind you have there. You could fill up the Earth with phantoms. You have little enough apart from your almighty fear. No pride. No joy. No love. You’re scared shitless even of such as they. You dare not feel, Harker, not really.
Whose fault, Harker?
Yours.
You always said: there’s enough happiness in this world for everyone, and if I ever find the bastard who has my share I’ll cut his heart out. Will you, Harker? Find him, that is.
Go to it, Harker, go to it. Write chapter two and three and four. Cut it all out. Heart and brain and everything. Schizophrenia. Split it, boy. Split it and spill it. All over the pages. Every idiot-syncrasy. Leech out all the bad blood, old friend.
Bleed yourself to death.