PARASITE

I'd lost the plot. I'd become a parasite. And, spiritually speaking, I'd committed suicide…When you commit suicide you sever links with the old world and enter the new. What was good and treasured by you, along with whatever you thought of as bad or despised, are all left behind. Your soul drifts in time and space, alone in the ether, with the possibility it may one day enter a new body. My poor, dead soul hasn't got a chance in hell, or heaven, I thought, so I left for New York City…

My life back home was like being a part of some great, unwashed soap opera. Or a play that was intended for one night only, but kept on running, accelerating, straight through the evening performance and onto the midnight special, then on again, through till dawn, on and on, with naps taken during the matinee, before the cycle started over. And, all this with no one ever leaving the stage, not even to piss, shit, sleep, or fuck. All was exposed, and nothing was left sacred. Nothing, that is, except the mythology of its own existence.

Within it, a whole new language had developed, its punctuating phrase being, “mad one.” “We did the mad one…“We were caned; we went on a mad one…It was classic; a mad one….”

When someone ate too many mushrooms, broke into a Pakistani family's house and sat peacefully watching the TV (with remote control in hand) until the police arrived, that was a mad one. When someone ate too much acid and went charging through the streets naked until the ambulance arrived, that too was a mad one. Even when someone died from a mixture of alcohol and methadone, it was described as a mad one. Everything was a mad one! Everyone playing a role was a mad one. Eventually, making all things blur into one hysterically tragic mad one.

During the “golden era,” the day to day happenings of this mythological period would be discussed, joked about, and roared at, in various pubs and nightclubs, in living rooms, and on vintage-clothing market stalls. But all information, wherever it was divulged, somehow filtered its way back to the heads of the cast…Trixy Kissinger and Dana Lovell… All mad one's. All fumbled lines, and fondled asses. All sexual intercourses and infidelities, and they scenes they caused. All gossip, speculation, conspiracy theory, and general hearsay…everything found its way back to them.

King Trixy and Queen Dana --King Dana and Queen Trixy; either would fit. Through my hallucinating Piscean eyes, in my dream interpretation of them, that's what they were.

Half a decade later, it was Dana who introduced me, and the band, to Trixy, telling him that we needed somewhere to live and rehearse. He offered us a place on the spot, saying his only stipulation was that we were to invite him to all major house parties. Then, after letting his signature haw-haw laugh ring around the bar we were at, he continued mincing with his luvvies from the theatre next door. Deal done!

Moving into one of Trixy's houses led to the first time I defrauded the Department of Social Security. I don't say this in order to place blame solely on him, but simply as a matter of parasitic record.

The house was a newly renovated semi-detached in Handsworth, but as far as the dole office knew I was living at one of his properties on the other side of town, in Edgbaston. The Edgbaston address was where they sent my seventy-five quid dole cheque every two weeks, along with a similar-sized rent cheque for Trixy to pocket.

Trixy's scam was to have us live `in-name-only' at the same address that he was also housing `legitimate' non-dole tenants, who paid cash. Thereby, doubling the income on his properties. For my part I was more than happy to play dumb and live in a big, clean, centrally-heated house, instead of a freezing, damp hovel, like most of the properties available to people on the dole.

Even today, years after that meeting with Trixy, and many `mad ones' in his inimitable company, I don't know the truth about him…Was the upper-class accent really that of an Army Major dishonourably discharged? Were there really children and a wife somewhere? Had inheritances really been lost, or denied, because of unsavoury lifestyles unfit for polite society? And, what about the rumours concerning his South Africa years, during the apartheid regime? He certainly had all the elements of a Tom Sharpe character.

There had always been whispers, but who was to judge? His shady past was his own. Its mystery though, seemed only to add to his charisma. “The Great English Bounder,” Daley would call him, letting out an imitation haw-haw laugh in his mock honour. Trixy had become another specimen in Daley's long catalogue of anthropological case studies. Nutcases mostly.

What we did know for sure was told to us in mythic tales, by Dana, and the other classic