Some clubs I have known
From Griffith REVIEW Edition 8: People like Us
© Copyright Griffith University & the author.
Written by Jay Verney
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The pleasure of the club is a guilty pleasure, a pleasure of satisfaction sitting at the edge of arrogance, the accomplishment of acceptance, the brio of belonging. How can I reject it? Could I possibly join a club that would have me as a member? Only if I'm wooed.
ACCIDENT, ANCESTORS: AT THE END OF WOODY ALLEN'S FILM, Deconstructing Harry, all of Harry Block's fictional characters gather in his living room to encourage and thank him for creating them and this inspires him to create a new character who muses: "All people know the same truth; our lives consist of how we choose to distort it." Or how about: our lives consist of the clubs we belong to and how we and they distort the truth. The first distortion is the accident of birth and our instant and accidental belonging to a club called a family.
My family is a very large distortion of individuals who couldn't wait to run away from each other. They didn't seem to care what they did or where they went. Some of them joined the army – during wartime – to escape. Some of them moved to Melbourne. Others – there were a lot of desperate girls in my extended family – married entirely unsuitable people – deserters, drunks, gamblers, philanderers, smokers – in the hope of belonging to some other, better family.
But you can't escape the irrevocable distortion of birth. Those who knew this had two bob each way and stayed in the same places for most of their lives: the home town, or towns within double-digit miles of the home town – still desperate, mind you, girls and boys, always desperate – you can tell by the slight sheen of perspiration (not sweat) ever-present above the upper lip and desperation, as you know, prefers no particular gender or age or geography. They stayed in these same places – stony ground for the most part, sulphurous fumes in the home town's air; it was a mining town, after all, Mount Morgan – wearing their very own ley lines into the ethers, back and forth around their streets: home to work, home to the pub, home to the SP bookie, home to the grocer, home to the cemetery where the ancestors dwelt, caressing their memories, preparing the soil, worshipping the particular distortions of the foregone, the dust-and-ash versions of themselves. It's an extreme sport, ancestor worship, but the thing is, in the end, it's safe. It's a kind of pleasure itself, safety, if it doesn't bore you to death. No one, not a soul, can throw you out of the ancestor club.
To betray, you must first belong. I never belonged.
– Kim Philby, 1967
BELIEF, BELONGING, BINARY OPPOSITION: YOU DON'T ALWAYS REALISE you were part of a group, a club, until you're excluded from it. Children find out about this very early on. There's nowhere to go but out if you're not in. Do you reckon the eventual spiny pleasure is in continuing to identify with the place from which you were thrown, or in beginning to identify with the spot where you landed?
If you exclude yourself from a group, a crowd, a crew, a mob, do you automatically become part of another bunch, and does that other bunch exist in opposition to the original?
I've never been thrown out of any formal club for disobedience of the rules – how dull – but I had occasion not long ago to officially resign from one of those no-choice, member-from-birth clubs, one I have more than a key-ring badge for to designate membership – the Catholic Club. I had all of the requisite qualifications – I still have them, in one of those archival places in the mind – though I no longer need them, except as the firm but comforting push of opposition. I'm enjoying that spiny pleasure of the spot where I landed.
I was baptised, confessed, communioned and confirmed. I had a scapular, I was a Child of Mary with a large collection of holy pictures (the more violent the better – have you ever seen one of St Stephen being stoned to death? – there's something wrong with a kid who likes their holy pictures graphic, don't you think? – apart from Steve, the best ones depicted the scared-not-sacred heart of Jesus, poor bastard, that pumping red muscle dripping with blood – no wonder nine out of 10 ex-Micks prefer Buffy to Compass). Mass, benediction, vigil, advent, epiphany, Lent, requiem. Tall hats, flat hats, embroidery, velvet, vino.
I once owned a bottle of holy water from Lourdes, so the bottle said, but my mother, Maisie, wouldn't let me sprinkle it on my pillow for luck, or whatever the religious word for luck might be. She was a germophobe and suspicious of the water's freshness, not to mention its provenance. I kept it until it turned greenish. In a similar vein, neither my brother nor I were allowed to drink from the communal chalice when skolling the consecrated wine was all the rage at Mass for a time – perhaps it still is somewhere. I always had the impression that those who slurped from the golden grail, risking any number of communicable and potentially fatal diseases, were more included, more holy if you will, more worthily chosen ones, more privileged members' stand racegoers, than the rest of us poor pishers down on the rails whose mothers held sway. Anyway, Maisie said, why bother with cheap altar wine when you have a pub full of it on tap. I don't think she ever got the notion of the ritual, of preferential games, the pleasure of the mortal indulgence of such a pious club.
The nun who taught me in grade three sent laundry home once for Maisie to do. Apparently, all the "good" mothers did laundry for the convent. Maisie sent it back with the message that the nuns could do their own laundry in their prayer down time, or words to that effect, only more forceful.
I went to Catholic schools exclusively; fortunately for me, I was never molested by a priest, brother or nun. I played netball with the kids from the local orphanage who, it turned out decades later, had been sexually assaulted by their priest. He went to the metal motel for a couple of years and was released, on compassionate grounds I believe, once he allegedly developed symptoms of dementia.
It's a far greater pleasure to leave a club for which you have all of the accoutrements, decades of holy-picture-carrying membership, memories – photographic and personal – of the sweep of history in the florid, obsessive rituals, the men in tall hats and frocks swinging their infernal censers, terrifying small children with a spiky monstrance and a line or two of alarming devilry. It's the pleasure of the T-shirt that proclaims, "Apostate and proud of it". Unlike Philby, I used to belong.
I rose politely in the club
And said, "I feel a little bored;
Will someone take me to a pub?"
– GK Chesterton, A Ballade of an Anti-Puritan