Chapter 10 - The Shrunken Alien Pt 2

Having no idea what to expect, I arrived no better dressed than before on the Monday, on time, as instructed. The shop was quiet. I sat around most of the morning waiting to be told and shown what to do. I was told very little and shown nothing. Alan had two employees, they were both men who were about ten years older than me who were dressed in jeans and work shirts when they arrived. I made tea for them. They both drove, and together they fitted the carpets for Alan who had three vehicles, his own car and two vans. All three of them are married. With no customers in the shop they played out being Jack-the-lad figures. The first thing that I could not understand was why when married men met and liked each other they normalised the pretence that they were all single, and were all God's gift to women. I could imagine alcohol as a transformative ingredient there, but those three were sober, and supposedly working. I was finding out how much being, male, single, supposedly celibate, and sleeping in the store room in my parent's house had left me seriously underinformed about my own gender. The reason the two carpet fitters were there was to be briefed about their work for the week, where they had to work together to carry around the carpets that they fitted, amongst other heavy tasks.

In the afternoon the shop was quiet. It seemed like it was shut. After lunch Alan asked me to sit in the back room and wait for him. For all I knew he might have locked the door and put the 'shut' sign up. That Monday afternoon he seduced me. I was sitting down in the only chair in the room when he came in, wishing I had brought a book to read to pass the time more usefully. He stood in front of me and kept a sociable distance from me. When he started talking it was normal conversation, I tried to maintain my side of it and I thought I was doing okay. But as we talked he moved and stood closer, almost standing over me. I can see the rugby training that had gone into the shape of his thighs through the tightness of his trousers. Having got inside my personal space, and I had not moved the chair back he made an about turn in the conversation so quietly that it was an about turn did not register with me. In neutral tones he talked about Japanese manufacturing, then he said 'I wonder what country of manufacture my underpants are. Shall we find out?'. He gets very close to me, still sitting in the chair and gets me to open his flies and investigate, until I am confronted with his erection. It was quite small but very firm. I tried to suck it, because that was how I had been sexually programmed. It is what I liked doing when cottaging. He stopped me and insisted that I wank him off whilst he stood over me. We said nothing whilst I did this for him. When he reached the end he wiped up the mess with a tissue that he had in his pocket all along.

With variations, this is how most afternoons went in the shop for the next six months. Some time between three and five in the afternoon he came into the back of the shop where he made me wait for him until I was bored with my own passivity, and the distance he put me at from him. Sometimes he lied down to enjoy it more, but  the routine was the same; he had the blood supply to the part in question, I was the one who was good with my hands. No talking was allowed. It spoiled his concentration on what my hands were meant to be doing. I didn't keep count at the time, but I estimate now that I wanked him off over a hundred times in that back room within the period of my placement. My sexual services were the first reason for him accepting me as a trainee, the rest of me was scared and cack-handed beyond use.

One time he got a scared middle aged woman in the back of the shop for what I learnt much later would be called 'a zipless fuck', sex fully clothed apart from his open fly that went from start to finish so fast that only he got anything out of it. He passed her on to me for me to do the same but I didn't do it. I was physically unable to. Even if I were able to perform, I would still have been thoroughly put off by the grubbiness of the circumstances. Instead I said some kind words to her and gently bade her put her clothes back on, as if we had both been misused. Sometimes he thought that what turned me on was to experience a wall of human muscle because he thought I had fantasies of that sort of physical pressure against me. I did have those fantasies, but to me they were safe fantasies. In real life I was never going to meet men that shape, and if one appeared then the chances were none that he would make my fantasy real. The reality he clumsily presented mentally shut me down, rather than sexual aroused me as he hoped. We were both surprised at how I could not react how he expected me to. Part of my negative reaction was because with the sex we were always as near fully clothed as possible. The shop was too exposed a place for him to be comfortable with either of us being naked. He has a wife, she might ring and insist on calling by. Alan also disliked me taking any sexual initiative with him. If I made to discreetly touch him sexually he would gently seek to stop me, though he has no objection to taking my had and putting in on his crotch whilst he is driving.

The worst of this was less about how mechanical, opaque, and unexplainable Alan made sex seem, and how selfish he made himself with all that, bad as that was, nor was it that the bad sex made me nervous around Alan and made me not want to do the work I was there to do, but the worst was in how when he pushed me to sexual behaviour with him, emotionally it echoed Mother's relationship with dad. 

In the parental household Mother's relationship to dad was one of passivity. Dad's relationship to Mother is one of opaque control. He kept his private life private from her. He with-held whatever information he could about his money and himself. He with-held from Mother what happened when he drank, how much he spent on drink, who his drinking mates were, and much more. Though to be honest about this some of the with-holding was about how little notice he took of what he was doing at time, and some of it was natural amnesia caused by the drink itself. Dad kept divisions between his birth family, his work mates and the family he'd made, and these divisions affected the family worst, because as family we were all meant to put each other before non-family. Dad put weaker family links before supposedly stronger family links. We sometimes felt as if we were last in his life. Historically Mother endured so-called 'low self esteem' as she tried to make plain for family what dad made opaque. 

In my placement Alan was like dad, to me being like Mother. My place in the carpet fitting team was undermined before it was ever attempted. The two carpet fitters were getting no money to train me, the boss took the money, and around the two carpet fitters I felt spare and useless. I lifted and carried etc, but I was scared of knives. In the parental house Dad would sharpen the only carving knife in the house after which Mother would refuse to use it after because it was sharp and therefore dangerous. So their conflict continued. Fitting carpets against walls requires cutting them with a Stanley knife. I always shirked from using knives whilst out with the lads until the last day of the placement where I did use a knife once. By then it is too late. I had long failed the teamwork test. The non-existent supervision of the Y.O.P's scheme was meant to make youths fail themselves so adults could get on and undermine each other.

Then there was how I failed the clothing test. I had no pairs of jeans and work shirts fit for going out carpet fitting in. Mother was still making me  wear out the school type trousers that she had bought cheap some time ago. Now I was seventeen, and they were much too tight for them to be either comfortable, or practical for work. One day before lunch I bent over to pick a roll of carpet up and the arse of my trousers split, top to bottom. From near the waist to the crotch came completely undone. It was a rare moment of inclusive laughter amid the haunted silences and open opportunities I seemed to not want. It was as if I were Charles Hawtrey in 'Carry On Carpet Fitting'. I was glad to go to the parental house to change. It was a clear sign to Mother that I needed better fitting trousers, she was still choosing my clothes for me. 

The worst long term effect of the placement was that for several years after I left the scheme I could not stop myself seeing Alan as a friend.  I knew he was mostly motivated by sex and that he was controlling during sex. I have no idea now how I came to see being controlled as being friendship. Partly it was that it was sex with clothes on in the business premises of the owner, so the sexual activity felt like some humourless parody of sex. I did not know what to call what we did. For the most part it felt like a repeated series of frozen moments whilst we were both fully clothed. It was repetitive and most unerotic. 

Many might say that sex in public toilets was unerotic and impersonal. But if randomness is all you are offered in life then you accept it. There, in the public toilets, the men arrived to randomly find each other, and left when they had had enough. They met there because their idea of sex could not find room in the properties they lived in. Whatever else they were, the men in the toilets were not stuck or frozen with each other the way I felt in the back room of the business premises of Wilson Carpets. In the toilets we could walk away, though to walk away and be able to tell the truth of where we'd been and why we were there would have taken both a lot more courage than we had and the abandonment of a huge amount of taboo, that the taboos would not fall at all easily was the problem.

At one point during the placement I was stuck in the parental house on a Saturday afternoon. Because of the daily wanking Alan off to order midweek I had become too depressed to go to the allotments with Mother and pretend to guard her whilst she worked. I was on the settee whilst dad had the sport on too loud for him to be asleep whilst it was on. I don't know where the urge or idea came from but I walked into the kitchen and put the blunt carving knife to my wrist and stood there and started trying to cry but I could not force the sense of grief and loss well enough to make it come to the surface. Dad heard the noise of me attempting to cry and walked into the kitchen with sound from the sport still on too loud to talk over. He took the knife handle from my grip and put the knife away in the drawer and walked back to his chair and went back to his armchair to the sound/sight of the sport. He said nothing throughout the whole scene. He said nothing afterwards either. I felt empty and dry. I felt unable to articulate how I felt even if there were somebody who said they would  listen; there was nobody to listen to me.

Dad did not betray it at the time, but my weak suicide attempt made some lasting impact on him. Some time in the first half of 1979 he bought me a 405 line black and white television set that I could watch in my room. Up to a point I could watch whatever I wanted on my own in that spare room. If I happened to be in the parental house when the Saturday sport was on I need no longer be quite so tortured by how repetitive dad's tastes in entertainment were. Though the wrestling/afternoon meal routine remained intact for years to come. I gave myself further choice by finally buying that music centre I had promised myself and it did make a difference to hear the separation between channels when I set the speakers apart. The electrics in my room were primitive, one wire from a mains socket from the floor below went into a socket at the back of my room. That was it. It took some sorting out to get everything connected safely but I had enough confidence to fix that. I was not going to ask dad for help.

Having my own television had it's down side. One evening when Mother was out dad called me down from my room to see something on the local news magazine programme on television. When I looked I saw an enormous black bodybuilder who was in the television studio in just a pair of pale trunks. He was literally dwarfing the two regular male presenters who are camping up their own relative weakness compared with him because either that was their authentic reaction to him and the show was live, or because they had been told to do that by their studio manager. They had revealed the bodybuilders presence in the studio early in the programme. It was clear that they were going to get as much mileage out of him being in the studio as they could get. Even as I was in the sight of my dad the sight of this figure went straight to my groin. I felt I compelled to immediately go upstairs, turn my television on and watch the big black man flexing on my own and give myself immediate sexual relief. Dad was mildly perplexed that I left him that fast and that I seemed to behave so strangely with him. But he had no idea what sexual buttons he was directly pressing by inviting me to watch that sort of television.

Neither of us asked the other what they thought about this big black bodybuilder filling the screen. If I had asked dad what he thought of the figure he would have given me a compartmentalised answer, based on the compartment he put me in. Since I had never been an adult with him his answer would not be an adult answer. My thoughts about the bodybuilder would have returned to experiencing a progressive loss of personal space and the sheer size of the man. The close ups of the body of the body builder filled the screen and set off those thoughts with me. The interlocking flexing of different muscle groups were potent similes for how everybody except me agreed with each other about how the personal space I had should be used for their advantage rather than mine. Each flex illustrated my lack of choice and how, nothing as I was, I should admire other people. Poverty of personal space reaped it's own punishment; rule by and from other people. That the sexual reaction was both taboo and my first reaction was sexual was simply the icing on the cake for people who wanted to keep me boxed in.

The most polite and agreeable thing I could have said to dad was the obvious; that the body builder had an extra-ordinary physical presence which was clear even through the limits of the television screen. What I could not say was that the body builder's presence through the screen seemed stronger to each of us than the sense of presence that we offered each other in person.

Please find Chapter 11 here.

Please find the introduction and chapter guide here.