"The Big Mistake"

Crowley once wrote in the Confessions that he'd thrashed a former roommate and that he deserved it, and that for him was simply that, and life moved on.

 

I met Jib at Wakefield College where I had enrolled on a performing arts course. I had taken three arts courses in high school before this time, and I was a member of extracurricular drama groups at both Drury Lane Library and at Portobello. 

Jib seemed to have a good sense of humour, a quick wit that carried a superficial charm; this seemed to wear thin the longer one knew him. He played cutesy very well when first introduced, and had a mask of nonthreatening behaviour, being sleight of weight, thin, and asthmatic added to this illusion and perception. 

 

Jib was from Featherstone, a small town situated between Wakefield and Pontefract in West Yorkshire, the son of a former minor who had become a turf layer after the closure of the pits. His father was a weight lifter and it was told that he annually cut the heads off Turkey's that he ate and sold for Christmas lunches.

 

Featherstone seemed to me to be a rough neighbourhood, the people seemed largely poor and uneducated, Jib and his brother could neither read nor write, his brother was homosexual and had been in and out of psychiatric hospitals for suicide attempts. I was told that in Featherstone an Indian restaurant had been set alight by the locals because "Paki's were not welcome here".

On the opening day of college we stood in a circle and introduced ourselves. Jib later told me that when he first saw me he thought I was a really ugly girl.

On an evening Jib would sit at Mick's flat where he could scrounge smoke without having to pay for it and I would sometimes meet him there and when I had smoke he would come back to Knottingley with me, but when the smoke was gone he too would go. His gravitational centre was marijuana.

At Mick's flat he would sit with Redman who worked in a clothes factory and Redman drank heavily every night, and he would use his cider bottle as an ashtray and drink from the bottle saying, "it made the cider taste better". He would buy the latest video games consoles, alternating between the Saturn and Playstation and Mick and the others would take it in turns playing console games. Lee talked about his STD, and about shagging girls. Mick would follow the American sitcom "Friends", and they were all into X-files, they seemed to take X-Files very seriously and Jib thought I was stupid for not been interested in this show and for not thinking, or at least talking, about UFO's and aliens. We were all interested in listening to the music of Pink Floyd. 

Everybody seemed to have bad teeth in Featherstone. They were young men in their mid twenties and they wore falsies. Other people that frequented the flat were Wrigley who was heavily tattooed with a long curly 80's rock hair style, he wore a biker jacket, and had a Boa Constrictor for a pet that he would walk through the town with coiled around his neck. Richard who was chubby with blonde hair and blue eyes would promote German Nazi idealism. He would say things like "if the Germans had won the war, they would have got rid of every other race and cleaned up society so that it functioned much better". I hated this thinking, and recoiled in horror, but this thinking started to become the bedrock of Jib's thinking and I would often hear him parroting verbatim the views and opinions that he had learned from socializing with Richard.

 

Richard's girlfriend Kelly was a cousin of Micks and she was pretty with red hair and freckles, she had been brought up in Africa and she talked about black Africans in overtly racist  tones, she often used the word "n****r", Jib would use the words "n****r" and "Paki". Jib had a crush on Kelly and often spoke of Richard holding her back, "they don't do anything, go anywhere, they just sit at Micks every night, and she should be going to festivals and enjoying herself, he's holding her back". What this seemed to mean to me was that Jib didn't have a girlfriend at the time and that he fantasized about Richard's girlfriend.

 

Jib had seemed to me to be rude and disrespectful to the girls I knew that he dated. He would be insulting and belittling about Natalie, Debbie, and then Kathryn in order of sequence. I won't repeat the discursive insults to prevent embarrassment. We had been to see Natalie per-form as Dorothy in the Wizard of Oz and our group had all been swept away by the power of her vocal range and the strength of her performance. Debbie and I had been to high school together and I always interpreted her fondly. I thought Jib had been lucky to date her, she was above his station.

 

At college one morning before the class had begun and whilst standing next to Jib he lunged forward and double-fisted Kriss in the face. This had been a carryover from a row they had been having along the distance from Featherstone into Wakefield and as I seem to recall the argument had been about the Leeds United football team and Jib's lack of knowledge of the players and their results, even as he wore the blue Leeds United baseball cap.

Kriss, Jib, and I, would often work together at college, we would create comedy routines and overall this year seemed to have been a real hoot. In memory, these were some of the best and happiest times of my life. I loved spontaneous improvisations and Deb would sometimes look at me and repeat the mantra I was most familiarly associated with, with a smile, "it has to be original".

 

Occasionally, Jib would be threatened and harangued by kids enrolled on other courses and I remember him on two occasions rushing through the main building desperate to locate me in the hope I would "sort out" his transgressors and would be assailants. Twice I declined saying "no", and thinking, fight your own battles as I continued to smoke my cigarette in the lateral bay area where the DANGER sign above the door had lost its D and instead read ANGER. I was never involved in a single fight whilst at college, but Jib, had it been known, would have been expelled from the course had the professor's known of his vicious assault on Kriss.

 

In the first year I had known Jib he would only walk the back streets and ginnels home once he'd stepped off the bus, because apparently, the kids on Featherstone Lane who were hard a-nd rough, wanted to beat him up. I thought this peculiar, what had he done? I would have to walk the long way around to his father's house with him. One evening after college he had summoned the courage to walk up the lane and was chased all the way up the hill onto his council estate and he ran into his house whereby his father had come out of the house and beaten up the youth, I learned of this event the following day at college.

Later Jib told me about why the kids in the town wanted to beat him up and he took me to the playing fields and showed me the mound of green where he had crouched down having hidden behind the mud and grass and he had taken aim with his rifle and shot a kid from his high school in the face. Jib had been arrested by the local police in Featherstone, the boy taken to hospital. Because of this event Jib shouldn't have even been allowed onto the course at Wakefield College.

 

I hadn't seen Jib for some months when he appeared before the escalators outside of the food courts on the lower tier of the Riding's centre. I walked over to him with my friend from Horbury and I told him that last night, which had been a Friday, I'd used ecstasy for the first time at Liberty Park nightclub in Pontefract. I had told him that I was dancing all night to rave music, a style that I had ordinarily eschewed and had even mocked with friends years earlier. I was amazed that under the euphoria of the MDMA experience there seemed to be a kind of telepathic bonding, like a communally shared experience. Jib's response, to my surprise and consternation seemed bitter and childish, "why do you have to get there first? I wanted to do it before you!" He said. I wasn't sure I understood, I was taken aback, I hadn't realised we we-re in a competition? Maybe he hadn't gotten over another girl called Debbie who we had called Pamela Anderson, choosing me over him saying, I looked like the singer from her favourite boy band which I think was called Let Loose. Maybe his response was because he'd been a virgin during our first year at college when I had been with M every night of the week? I wasn't sure. I had been elated for him when he finally got laid and he'd come into the class in the morning with a big smile across his face and gave us the news, "we should go out and celebrate". In the college play that we performed just before Christmas Jib had played my comedy duo sidekick. He appeared to assume the role of the inferior loser to my drifter and dreamer, a kind of superior loser. His character in the play was the son of a minor who was bullied by his school friends because his father had continued to work down the mines whilst the workers were on strike. My goofy character was destined to travel to the West Coast, only to return and tell his tall tales to his old comrades. We performed dance sequences to "Surfin' USA" by the Beach Boys. The play was called Northern Echoes and was performed to a full house consisting of our family members, friends, girlfriends and college students. I remember a feeling of intoxication and exuberance when the audience had laughed at jokes we had written.

 

For the second performance, I had played the role of the head teacher Mr Briggs in Willy Russell's play, Our Day Out. We put a lot of work into the performance and I had a lot of reading and memorising to do to get the lines and role right. Jib had maybe two or three lines in the overall play, he was disenchanted, he'd one starred as Oliver Twist in a high school production and he had made it down to the last four for the lead role in Disney's movie Black Beauty. 

 

For our third and final performance of the year and after several weeks of rehearsals and for reasons entirely unexplained and unknown to us, Jib decided not to show. We always had a 100% attendance record, never feigned a day's illness, even for Monday morning's which was "Movement" with mad Mavis and her flaming red hair, his absence immediately threw the performance into jeopardy. There were 30 guests waiting in the seating area outside the main theatre. We had worked on a strange, abstract piece of alternative theatre where the audience members would be led individually through a darkened green room where there were eerie sounds that played and words spoken by the performers. The individuals would be seated and they would touched, brushed and felt, before been ushered into the studio where the main part of the performance took place. We scrambled around to rework the script, but there was an entire section missing and we lost what could have been a great piece of original theatre. Afterwards, Jib failed the course, and seemed mean spirited and resentful toward those of us who passed.

 

After Juliet had experienced rape whilst overseas on a beach with an Irishman she had picked up in a nightclub on the last night of her vacation with a friend which ostensibly split our friendly and fair relationship, I told Jib, looking for some sagely wisdom and advice. I was shattered and pained, my trust was blown out of the water, and Jib said nothing at all, and I immediately regretted having told him. I longed for the old entourage of years earlier where I could have sat down with a pint in the Park Tavern and Stu and Kyle would have helped me to polish the lens and redirect the ship. Shortly afterwards, Jib passed around photographs in front of Juliet and I, making sure that Juliet could see that I had been holding hands with a girl we knew from Players. The girl I had been friendly with, but I hadn't even kissed her, let alone had a sexual bonding experience with her. 

One day, quite out of the blue, Juliet had expressed something that seemed entirely irrational, she seemed totally jealous when she expressed something I wasn't familiar with; Jib had paid for sex with a girl we knew by giving her a bag of heroin. I assumed something must be going on between Jib and Juliet and Jib confirmed this by gloating in front of me with a big wide grin nodding his head up and down vigorously. 

 

I had seen on the TV news that the Conservative Party government were reducing housing benefit payments for single claimants who lived in two bedroom properties. I had a spacious two bedroom flat above a Fiat garage on Bradford Road and I complained to Juliet that I may have to move if I don't have someone who can rent the spare room. Within a matter of days, Jib was in my room seeming sorrowful and pitiful, saying that he'd had a fight with his father, apparently, it was told, his father had wanted Jib to get rid of the gun that he kept in his bedroom and Jib refused. A fight had ensued, and now Jib was manipulating the angle by asking if he could rent the second room. I had grown over time to dislike Jib, I was totally disenchanted with him. The glory days of taking LSD in the nightclub and walking through joint synchronistic adventures home was something past. Even then, he had once thrown a rock through the window of a house and run off. Once, I was told he'd cried out for me as the only person who could keep him sane and balanced when he'd ingested the mysterious molecules with his older brother and his friend Lee. I thought his offer of moving into the empty bedroom may be the answer to my potential housing crisis and I acquiesced and answered the affirmative that he could move in. For two whole months Jib paid not a single penny in rent. I was constantly on at him, almost every day to go down the housing office and fill in a form, he was a JSA claimant, there was no chance he would ever get a job and pay for the room with his own money. I found myself having to play the reluctant role of the transactional father to a recalcitrant child. The housing office was conveniently situated about a mile away from the flat, on the same road as the pub Jib frequented.

In addition to not paying rent he wouldn't get a key cut. I would tell him where to go, "just off Wood Street, they were four pounds, and the owner of the store would simply pass you one from the back rack, they are precut". He wouldn't listen which meant that I had to inconveniently get up and trundle down the stairs to let him in several times a day and night. He would often be with other people I didn't know and of whom he rudely did not introduce me to. The boy had no manners. Once, one of the girls he was with who I thought was pretty, stood giggling at me.

I would often sit in my room drawing. I reduced my time going to Players on a weekend to just twice a month. The place was grotty, dank and dark, there seemed nothing appealing or special at all about the place. The owner, a fat man in his 50's snorted cocaine and fucked 13 year old girls, it wasn't the place to be. Juliet would go out every weekend, Friday and Saturday night was sacrosanct to most of them, and I would stay at the flat and sketch and paint. Due to primitive physiological mechanisms, my absence meant that upon sight of Juliet arriving in the downstairs pub lounge, the bonded Justin neuron trilled in the guy's cellular networks and discussion ensued. 

Through the week I would often argue with Juliet. The short of it, I wanted her away from me. She would go to concerts and music festivals without me. She would lie incessantly; I had -no trust at all for her. At my flat, she would want to watch childish soap operas every evening, I couldn't stand the TV, and she was in a mechanical loop about her past boyfriend beating her up that I would hear almost every night of the year. I recall her saying "thank you" to the tough alt rock singer from Players who thumped him and who then hit me in the following weeks, because he thought I was him. We both had long blonde hair and blue eyes. He had been in my form in high school. We were both United supporters. I had even been to his house once, and he to mine. 

 

I wanted the relationship over, and I raised my voice so that Jib could clearly overhear my language from where he sat in his free-boating room. I wanted out from the troublesome and bothersome bind of her. I had once tried to break off the relationship and she had gone into my bathroom and hacked at her wrists with my razor blade that I had used for shaving. I ha-d let myself into the bathroom around half an hour later to see how she was, and I saw her sitting on the rim of the bathtub, holding her arms out, she was shaking and scared. The white bath, sink, and toilet were stained deep red with blood, I rushed into the kitchen to grab towels and I tightly compressed them around her arms.

One day whilst I was out in the city centre Jib trashed the room knocking plants over the floor and making sure there was lots of soil everywhere so the carpet was good and stained. I had to clean up the mess. He had also started waking up around 5am which was highly unusual for him as for years he would regularly sleep in until 1 and 2pm. Now he was hitting the strings of the electric guitar that he had little conception of how to play with the volume on the amplifier turned up to the maximum setting. After we had been introduced to BB's son, Jib had started smoking heroin from the foil, and one day, to pay for his fix, he stole my expensive camera and exchanged it for cash so that he could buy more Brown to smoke off the foil.

My life has been handling the pressures of different degrees and stages of illness. I was born with hemi hypertrophy, and at this time I was in the first stage process of the disease. Something was wrong with me, I wasn't sure what, but as WC Fields once said, "there's a Ubangi in the fuel supply" and I had begun to notice this. Others were not so understanding, it seemed. The elders, like BB knew about the disease before me. BB knew what he was going to do before he even physically saw me. All was excuse rationalisation. I would cry a lot. I stopped answering my door to the others. I was unwell.

Jib would smoke the resin I had bought and when that ran out he wouldn't share his small supply breaking a cardinal social rule we'd forged between us years earlier. Once I went in his room and asked him for a smoke and he took the joint down to the last drag and threw the roach across the room toward me, it landed on the carpet. He had no respect. He would run up high electricity bills, radiators on full in winter months, and he would eat my meals, and provide nothing himself.

 

One night I was alone in bed and it was after midnight and I was tired, and I had wanted to sleep, but worried that if I did, Jib may come back and wake me up, and I would have to get out of bed and go downstairs and let him in because he still hadn't bothered to get a key cut. The digital clock moved from half 1 and half 2 and I was still forcing myself to stay awake. I last remember looking at the clock at half past 3 and then at 4 O'clock when I was sound asleep I was buzzed rudely wide awake by the dreadful racket that passed for a doorbell. I got up, dressed, went downstairs, let the scoundrel in. He said nothing, not even a "hi", and as he entered into the internal door that led into the living room I said, "don't you ever do that again to me Jib". He gave no language, no apology, shrugged his shoulders and went into his room, and I went back to mine to sleep.

 

The following night Jib was out in town and there was a complete recapitulation of the previous night's cycle. The clock changed from half 1 to half 2 and I wanted so badly to sleep, but I couldn't trust that he wouldn't come back again and inappropriately wake me up as he had done the previous night. I was still awake at half 3 and fast asleep when there was a loud bang which abruptly awoke me. The downstairs door must have been unlocked and he was standing on the outside of the internal door. Why didn't he get a key cut like anybody else who moved into a new living environment?! I was so annoyed with him. I could hear he was with Cooper and they sat on the top step outside talking. Intermittently there was loud and aggressive banging at the door, but I lay in bed and left them sitting there until after 5am when I was even more tired, and then once I'd taken all I could take, realising they were not getting the message and going elsewhere, I let them in. Jib said nothing, nothing at all, just insolently walked into the flat. He went into the kitchen to make a meal out of my food and I paced around my bedroom before then confronting him in the kitchen. "What time do you call this?" I said, and he just shrugged his shoulders, devil may care, and I punched him twice in the head and he went down on the floor and curled up in a ball and I kicked him, and Cooper said, "Okay Justin, I think he's had enough." Cooper was a friend, I had a fond interpretation of him at the time, and he stood in the way blocking me from Jib, and I tried to move him with my hands on his waist, but he was too strong and solid, like an oak tree trunk, but rather eccentrically, to my complete surprise, and as though to exaggerate my strength, he fell down lack a sack of potatoes, what are you doing? I thought. He was always a little bit weird.

 

Jib moved out the next day. The "big mistake", in Herr Bowie's language, as that term didn't come from me, was not putting all of Jib's belongings into garbage bags and leaving them on the side of the road months earlier, because after his two month stay, I couldn't cover his rent and his bills, and that's exactly what happened  to me.

David Bowie procured judgment and evaluation of a death sentence for this event that involved the punishment-threat that one should be stabbed in the eye. Bowie was brought in by BB where he had been working through Back to Basics in Leeds. The death sentence was laid down in the song "Something in the air" on the Hours album. I was 20 years of 

age at the time of the fight.

Juliet said, "you really shouldn't have hit Jib", meaning it wasn't about her, although she was a key player and instigator in the conspiracy. There wasn't a time when I was able to tell my version of events. It seemed like such a small affair and I was never asked about it. Laird did say the following week that he had wanted to punch Jib for eating his food when he stayed over in Leeds. 

 

Afterwards, when we no longer talked, I would see Jib marching through town in the Nazi German long coat he had talked about buying and wearing for the previous year. Sometimes he would scowl at the friends he saw me walking with.

 

Author's Note

The layout of the text became somewhat disfigured because I believe I typed from my tablet and not from the computer. Converting to word and then re-posting doesn't appear to solve the issue.

Reviews

[alanwgraham]

This is a very impressive piece of writing Jostein. You have condensed so much detail into this story it feels almost too much and might benefit from expanding. You have really brought the characters to life with great descriptions of the setting and period. I'm assuming that this is from personal experience as it is so detailed. Some typos to pick up e.g. Miner instead of minor and you spoke of 'smoke' which didn't seem right to me but may be colloquial.
Great work!
Alan