My next choice was how to use the no-fault exit path I had from my job, whist it remained a no fault exit. If I had remained in my job for later than the contracted date then my departure would have cost me financially. Whilst I had enjoyed doing the job over the summer, delivering post whatever the weather over winter was surely a different proposition. I was often slow to finish in fair weather as it was. When foul weather slowed me down a lot more, then the management would be less than happy with me. Working over Christmas and New Year and then being sacked for it was still fresh in my memory. One experience of that was enough for me.
The following explains how I left my post office job. As a postman I got all the gossip and conversation doing the rounds about who was leaving and what was happening among the postmen. I heard before the management were told that one particular long term employee was leaving. He told us first. I guessed that the management would want to replace him. I would have told the management what I had been told, to prompt them to think about this in advance of having to think about it. Except that the management were always too busy to listen to me because I was too low in the pecking order. My work contract was of the last in/first out type. I knew that much. I don't know what they recognised or inferred from the nature of such contracts. I did not know that my contract could have been extended, or how such an extension could be initiated. When the management were told I blamed myself for not being able to tell the management in advance that I knew the other man was leaving, that there would be a vacancy. I blamed myself for the management finding out when they did, because I blamed myself I also felt that I had to leave. By the time the management got around to asking me if I wanted to replace the departing employee I had formally accepted the expiring of my contract. I was in the position of saying 'I can't have that job. For me to stay longer would have required some discussion about it prior to the discussion I am having with you now where I would have told you, and you would have listened to know that person X was leaving.'.
And with that I returned to the relative safety of the dole queue. There I used the time I had to apply myself to thrift and better living on less money, a sort of non-work/life balance. In both the care home and the post office I had been no better off, financially, for working than if I were unemployed. The nearest there was to a personal sense of reward was a sense of being part of a team. With the exits from the jobs I learned the hard way the early lesson that mother had repeated until we both stopped listening; in any situation that I got into I had to make sure of my exits. My family could not teach me that particular lesson because, well what if I applied that lesson to them? What if I got the impression that family life had been bad teamwork or bad management, and I saw them as something to make my exit from? And what if my impression was objectively provable? That territory was too dangerous to even imagine. But it was a territory that I knew was there.
My family were not Christian. They saw no value in wanting to repent, or knowing that they needed to seek forgiveness from others to restore relationships to more innocent levels of openness. They would deny that family life was ever a dirty slate sorely needed to be cleaned, and defend to the last their actions in situations in the past. That I came from such a family and I was different from them, in three ways, in my faith in forgiveness, in my acceptance of my homosexuality, and in my (often hidden) stubbornness tripled how I felt like minority within my family. Those three distinctions also put me in a different minority within the church that I was part of. For them Christianity was for all the family and homosexuality was something to not forgive and brush under the carpet, leave as stumbling block for others. My sexual minority status was an unaccounted for mystery where there were facts around it, origins stories etc, but they did not cohere and were disliked.
And that is aside from employment matters. The pluses of paid work were meant to be that I took an active part in the economy and I had earned enough to pay deductions out of my wages, and that I had learned about work by doing it. But what I learnt was that a lot of the jobs I might apply for were temporary, low status, work which in addition to being poorly paid would have nearly no other material advantage attached to it, not even a rest room for breaks. If any single thing made these jobs doable for any length of time it was a genuinely sympathetic management. Every manager who presided over low paid could make a show of sounding sympathetic. They had to if they were to hide why they lost employees so easily and attract new employees to replace departing labour. But the difference between a show of concern by a management, and actually making the work conditions of tired long term employees so that the employee turnover reduced was vast. I now needed to be watchful of the jobs I had to apply for as part of my contract with the dole office to find work, to make sure that the economies the job involved did not eat into my personal reserves.
The highlight of my autumn, was seeing The Grateful Dead live. I had started liking them in Christmas 1980. Back then I was rather awkwardly living with my parents. We were all caught in the stalemate where every way there might have been for me to agreeably move out quickly proved to have too many downsides for it to seen to be a viable exit. To make Christmas more palatable to me Christian Youth Group leader, would-be mentor, and friend John Sargent had lent me the 1977 Warner Bros double vinyl compilation by The Grateful Dead 'What A Long Strange Trip It's Been'. John did not know what a foment of rebellion from family he was starting when he lent me that album.
In one way it was 'just music', albeit with imagery that led towards the uncanny. Plenty of the music I had heard up to then had embodied the idea of rebellion as lifestyle choice. But most of it was just image, one stage prop being leant against another in the hope that each prop held the other up well enough for the musicians to make the money they were in the business for making. I had none of the means to even begin to imitate what the bands I listened to did live. The nearest I got to the music in myself was putting holes in one my vests in imitation of Freddy Mercury's selectively torn T shirt in the glossy Queen video for 'Crazy Little Thing Called Love'. I wonder now how many deeply closeted young gay men who saw that video did what I did, and did not know how wide of the mark our attempted appropriation of that image was.
There was something anti-image, a certain charge, that got to me about the material on the double album I was lent to put on tape that Christmas. I had my NME book of rock to look the band up in. The entry for them in that was some help, but it left me few clues as to why they wrote, played, and recorded, in such a different way to all their contemporaries.
I don't remember now how I found out that the band were playing two dates at Wembley Arena in late October 1990. I don't know when or what the process was for me getting my one ticket to see the band. What I say for sure was that after a decade of connecting with them via a UK based fanzine called 'Spiral Light', and the live tapes that the band encouraged the audience to record and swap copies of by post, particularly with deadheads who were in American prisons, they were making their once a decade visit to Europe. It was time for me to connect directly. New material by the band, 'In The Dark', released in 1987, was their first studio album for seven years, and it raised their profile in the media much higher than before. It was time for me join up all the dots and complete what was started for me in Christmas 1980.
But long before I got to the gig I got a shock. Something happened that I could never have anticipated. We all have memories of where we were when we learned about events that changed many lives, though the event did not directly affect us. On Thursday 26th July the band's keyboard player, Brent Mydland, died, aged a youthful thirty seven. On the Saturday I delivered my post as normal, came home and changed, then set out for the town from Lady Bay. Before I got to the bus stop I bought 'The Independent' from the nearby newsagents. It seemed to be a lunchtime like any other. I started reading the newspaper whilst waiting in the queue for the bus. In the paper was the first report that Brent Mydland was dead and the band were in consultations about what they should do next. I was stunned by the news and then mystified about what that meant for their European tour and my ticket to see them. The band had always presented life the way they presented music, a mix of continuity and change. This death put a rather dark full stop at the centre of that presentation. Getting such bad news from so far away that I nonetheless felt quite a lot about at the bus stop near the school in Lady Bay both sharpened my awareness of my surroundings and made me feel separate from them.
To be redirected to Chapter Twenty Two please left click here.
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