Depression

I know it has become a cliche and the word has been overused almost as much as the dreaded word “love”, but the time has come for me to address the fact of my own depression. I have been evading it for a long time, sidestepping the issue whenever possible, looking for distractions in any direction I could. I’m not just talking about a matter of weeks or months but many years.

Admittedly I’m writing from deep inside a hole, a place where objectivity is impossible and for the last five days I have been unable to do anything but sleep and distract myself with things that remind me of a time before the terrible pain began in my life. I have looked up the accepted ideas of what depression is and it fits me, almost perfectly.

Today is the first day I have ventured out of my flat for several days, since my 70 minute nocturnal walk from the hospital to home, and it wasn’t a good experience. Almost the first thing I saw were three men of a similar age to me standing on the street chatting casually. One might think that there was nothing odd or especially peculiar about that but I found it almost as disturbing as the diner scene from the beginning of Lynch’s ‘Mulholland Drive’, with its sense of the entire world feeling like it’s been wrenched out of sync, that everyone who looks at you sees a part of you that you yourself are only dimly aware of. Suddenly there were three average men looking at me who seemed to be sneering and judging me. I felt that they could see all my frailties and my weaknesses and they felt nothing but contempt for me.

As I walked around this feeling just grew. Every man who looked at me seemed to me to be preternaturally powerful and every woman cold and indifferent. If it were only that I think I could have coped but I could feel the energy I had stored up just fell out through the soles of my feet and that made the very act of walking an incredible effort, almost as if I were swimming against the tide. I couldn’t even keep up with the gentle pace of those with me; with every step I began to fall back and as the feeling grew the anxiety rose up in my chest.

Quite how I managed to get through the experience I don’t know, but I did and eventually I found my way back to the safety of familiar walls. Even there, the only safety is in solitude; being reminded of one’s own terrible and toxic failures is an awful thing and in these days I find it in every face: in my long-suffering wife, in my child, even in my colleagues.

For a while I want to write something about the feelings I have around being depressed. Exclusively that. Maybe it will help me or maybe it will just plunge me deeper. Who knows? I no longer have any answers and no energy to maintain the fiction of having them.

Denise. ‘Combat Driving’

The shop is quiet, much quieter than usual after the pre-holiday rush to stock up the fridges of the Home Counties with high quality organic fruit and veg. Denise looks up from the back room at Michael, his bald head angled downwards as he scrutinises the some document or other. His attention rarely wanders and so she quietly lifts the phone and listens to the tone, her fingers poised to dial the number. Her heart is pounding, terrified of its own sound in case it gives her away to a curious world. She replaces the phone on its cradle and waits for someone to come in, for some distraction which will make her voice less obvious. She checks her watch and sees time racing by as the window of opportunity closes. She begins to lose hope and starts to shift her weight from one foot to the other when the door opens and a woman with a child Jack’s age walks in. The guilt kicks her in the stomach as she watches the child, who stays close to his mother as she browses the fruit. Michael goes over to her and they start to talk quietly, the words not quite audible and so she realises that it is safe to call. She picks up the phone and dials the number, one of the very few she has memorised after years of using mobiles. She listens to the ring at the other end of the line until his soft voice answers:

“Hello?”

“I can come now. Where can we meet? The usual place?”

“If that’s fine for you. Shall we say in 30 minutes?”

“I’ll be there even earlier”

Her eagerness to meet him always embarrasses her and every time she swears that the next time it will be different and that she will make him uncertain. Now in the silence she can hear his smile and she doesn’t care if she has made a fool of herself, she just wants him to know how much she wants to be with him and how eager she is to be close to him.

“I’m quite sure of it. Don’t rush, if you’re late I’ll wait for you and nothing is going to change. Please Denise, be sensible in that car. Do it for me.”

As she listens to the sound of his voice in his ear her eyes close and she feels his hands on her body, holding her waist, gently squeezing it and … She has to stop, she forces her eyes open and looks around at the back room of her shop, focussing on all the mundane details of her daily life. She wonders what her face must look like, she can feel the smile creeping across her face replacing the advertisement for arousal that was there before.

“Don’t worry my love, I’ll be good. I promise”

“Good girl. I’ll see you very, very soon. Bye”

“Bye … “

As usual she pauses, waiting for him to hang up on her. This little moment of separation is a small eternity for her and she cannot bear to break the connection between them. She has no idea if he has noticed what she does on the phone, yet another example of the way that she cannot hold anything back from him. The phone is still in her hand and the minutes are ticking away. She switches it off, puts it back in its cradle and grabs her coat and rushes out past Michael with the briefest of explanations:

“I’ll be back in a couple of hours. If it’s really urgent, call me.”

She waves her mobile vaguely in the air as a way of looking more serious. She knows that Michael will never call her, nothing urgent ever happens and his nature is so even that even the outbreak of war would be taken in his stride. It’s perfectly possible that he suspects her of all sorts of misbehaviour but he acts as if none of it is his business and that is the way she likes it. He doesn’t even reply to her comment and she doesn’t need to look round to see that he has just raised his eyes a little and then gone back to his work.

Outside the air is fresh and sweet, the perfect spring day, a faint cloud of pollen detectable and the sun just the right temperature. It doesn’t burn but caresses the skin, in the same way that he does. As she hurries towards her car she remembers the way he touches her, his hands sometimes hesitant and respectful and other times roaming all over her without hesitation. Her eyes close involuntarily for an instant and her face declaring for all to see how he makes her feel.

She gets into the car after removing her jacket, belts herself in and speeds away. She has to watch her speed, having picked up too many cautions for excessive speed and in these days of CCTV and the incessant interference by government busybodies she has had to modify her behaviour. Usually it’s easy because she has iron self-control, but not when heis concerned. She has images the hands of the clock on the dashboard whizzing past as she is in his arms and so she panics and drives too close to the car in front. At every sight of a brake light her blood pressure rises and the bile rises in her throat.

“What the fuck..? Fuck you… Cunt! You fucking bastard!”

Each of the curses is a response to deliberate blocking on the part of a whole series of fellow-drivers, each one of them a moralising busybody who feels it is their moral duty to keep her on the straight and narrow and away from the man who produces such feelings in her. The whole world vanishes and all she can see is the distance from him and everything that is keeping them apart. Suddenly she becomes a monster on the road, sitting behind each car as if she were a racing driver trying to outmanoeuvre some bitter rival. She can feel the waves of suburban disapproval but she doesn’t care; every single obstacle on the road has to be despatched until she reaches her goal.

She checks the clock and sees that she has timed it perfectly as she slows up and pulls the car into the road that runs alongside the park. For them it is the usual place, not far from his flat, a place he can walk to, and a place where she is not known. This is the only thing she lies to him about, he has no idea of how long it really takes to drive from her shop to here and each time they meet she breaks records trying to maintain the lie. It is a tiny lie but one she feels bad about since everything else is open. He is the only man she has never lied to about something serious and she cannot hold back from him.

She sees him standing, looking straight at her, the car instantly recognisable. Her heart starts to pound faster and her breathing becomes shallow. She can feel herself smiling, a smile unlike any other in her life, it rises up from some subterranean depth and the years lift away. There he is standing there, much less feminine than when she saw him again for the first time but still unique, unmistakeable; in a world where men compete and strut puff out their chests in competition at the slightest provocation Lawrence is stood there so unspeakably beautiful that her heart melts and she feels the tears welling up invisibly. A lifetime of masquerades and lies vanishes as he gets into the car beside her and smiles with every part of his body at her.

Anniversary. Ghosts from the Past

Today would have been my parents’ wedding anniversary if two things had been different; one that both of them had survived and the other that they hadn’t got divorced! That’s a lot of difference to make things conform to some kind of ‘what if’ scenario but what I’m reflecting on is the nature of their relationship.

There was ten years difference between them, my mother being the elder of the two and I think that’s fairly uncommon. The world is full of relationships where the man is significantly older than his female partner and that is regarded as normal. There is a great deal of conjecture as to why this might be but when to the other way round it’s hard to get beyond the idea that the younger man has some form of mother fixation. Whether that was the nature of my parents’ relationship I don’t know but I know that my mother never looked her age until very late in her life. Looking again at pictures of them as young people there doesn’t seem to be a great age difference between them except my father’s boyish air.

They met in Singapore in September 1955. He was 22 and she 32. I can be pretty sure that they might on Friday 16th at a military dance. He was a soldier serving in the Malayan Emergency and she a teacher working for the British Ministry of War (back in the days before we started referring to “defence” instead of war). According to her diaries she was living a rather sedate life, enjoying painting with a man named Tony on her days off but all of a sudden this rather dashing young man came into her life.

From the off he was a man who liked his drink and her diary refers to his coming to see her with a bottle of whisky and then a late night. Although my mother did a good impression of being a respectable lady, she loved to laugh and he was certainly a man who knew how to make people laugh. I can imagine him easily enough showing off and telling stories as she looked on captivated. It’s harder to see what he found so fascinating because his subsequent life shows him off to be an extremely selfish man whose only interest was in himself but I can’t help think that he saw in her an almost ideal woman: gentle, patient and loving.

What do we look for in a life partner? What is it that makes us fall in love? Is it a quasi-mystical experience that refuses to be analysed or do we look for someone who reflects our own experiences? I’m convinced that for most of us it’s a matter of compromise. Yes, we need to find someone to whom we are attracted but all too often you see couples where physical attractiveness cannot possibly be a factor but who may be absolutely in love. All kudos to them; they have found something that their more physically beguiling cousins lack with their devotion to exterior beauty. I’m convinced that there are as many reasons for ‘falling in love’ as there are couples. It may be because the other person has so many shared interests, or that they resemble their mother or father or that they confirm a person’s self-image (why do so many women whose fathers were abusive and bullying end up with men so similar?). Why do so many women fall for men whose only charm could be money or power and why do those men allow themselves to be flattered by the attention and to believe in some grotesque idea of their personal magnetism when it’s all about their bank account?

I want to focus on the idea of us fulfilling and continuing the narrative that was set up in our childhood. In some of my next posts I shall look at a few of the connected questions.

Back Again! More thoughts of ‘Transgender’

A combination of overwork, tiredness and stress has meant that I have been unable to post for a little while but now that my birthday has passed without too much fuss I can focus on what is important again: my writing.

I return again to one of the big themes of my life, that of gender identity, and am going to use it as a launching pad for a bit of a rant. Well, maybe nothing that extreme but at least I am making a serious complaint. If I have learnt one thing from life it is that one always has to have the courage of one’s convictions because there are plenty of people out there who are going to tell you that they know better than you and very often they may not be right. I grew up in a family in which my mother has too modest to tell the world (and her children) that she knew better and that the world had better listen to us. My father, by way of contrast, had a massive chip on his shoulder about his lack of education and always felt that he lacked something and so was always compensating. These two remarkable people (now that they are both gone I can say with absolute confidence that they both were) produced two sons whose intelligence is uncommon and yet both tend to listen too much to people who don’t really merit it. Both of us may sometimes come across as a little bit opinionated but that’s only because we both have strong opinions. I can’t really speak for my brother, but my own reticence has caused me endless problems, one of the most acute is in the area of my cross-dressing.

The world at large tells us that transvestites are abnormal and it’s commonly assumed that the urge to cross dress is connected with one’s sexual orientation. I’m not talking about the man in the street here either, but also men and women of science who have yet to see past certain assumptions. I know that there are many scientists who can see beyond the narrow perspective but very many refuse to countenance the idea that different possibilities are out there. The merest effort on my part takes me to Magnus Hirschfield and his pioneering work with “transvestites” and his clear observation is there to be found that there are straight, gay, bisexual and asexual transvestites. If I am able to find out this, why the hell aren’t the supposed “authorities” doing the same work?

There are two answers here. The first is that many experts simply are not that and are perfectly happy to overstep the limits of their knowledge and make claims that are simply not supported by the facts in front of them. The second is a little more subtle: that most of what we ‘know’ is simple hearsay and assumption. Until we test it against evidence in a careful and meticulous fashion we simply do not know that something is true. How many of us actually know that the earth is not flat? How many of us have gone through the evidence? Not very many, we just assume that we can trust the ‘experts’. It’s a very reasonable supposition and so there’s little or no danger in trusting in this case but when it comes to making judgements about of ther human beings it’s altogether more difficult.

I have had to deal with the world telling me that because I sometimes present myself in a more feminine way my sexuality must be less than entirely heterosexual all my life. In the end it put an idea into my head that simply wasn’t there at first. Now I have this bloody idea in my mind and the seeds of doubt have been sowed. As an early adolescent all my erotic fantasies were focussed exclusively on the female. The image of a male has never entered my erotic imagination and yet I find myself continually questioning my sexuality. If you were to ask a man with a similarly negative record of homoerotic thoughts if he were gay or straight he would answer without a second thought and his answer would be accepted. So, why then, do I doubt myself? Because the world demands that there be a connection between a man wearing female garments and homosexuality. Well, I’m sorry, but if there is one it is because the idea has been planted in my head after so many years of lazy assumptions.

This brings me to my main point: I have spent too much time listening to the opinions of others about so much, to the extent that my own self has been distorted. Last week I sat in the office of a “therapist” who after listening to me talk about my life said: “So, you have tendency towards depression?” and I immediately answered corrected her. No! I don’t have any kind of “tendency”, and I’m not going to help someone put me in a little box that fits in with an inadequate world view. As you might imagine, I’m not going back to that person, nor any other at the moment. Maybe the state I have long complained about is actually a positive way of being for me! That could be an interesting experiment!

Remembering Benjamin

Denise’s eyes flicker open to see Simon in front of her smiling at her kindly holding a glass of water. All her resentment and rage has been sucked up by the drink in her system and now her hangover is peeping over the horizon of her consciousness.

“Fuck, I feel lousy. Why did you let me drink so much?”
“Since when have I been able to stop you from doing something you want to? Drink this: we need to start the battle against the morning after right now.”

Her vision is still a little unclear and so she spills water on herself but Simon makes sure not to leave the glass until she has it firmly in her grasp and then he takes it from her immediately and begins to refill it from a new bottle on the table. Her face is haggard now and she allows him to lead her despite the futility of his attempts to head off the hangover. Her resistance to the ill-effects of drink have diminished greatly over the years from the days when she would leap recklessly into open space without a thought to the consequences. Nowadays when she drinks more than one or two glasses she feels beaten up and  washed out and her ill-humour lasts for a couple of days.

She remains silent as Simon hands her glass after glass and she dutifully downs each one without protest despite the bloated feeling it gives her in her belly. After the fifth glass she lifts her hand and he sits next to her with the filled glass in his hand. She looks up at him and sees a boyish grin on his face. She is too weary to ask him anything so he just comes out with it:

“Benjamin Makinwa. You must remember him!”

Her voice is faint and pained now:

“Simon, look at the state of me, I can barely remember what we were talking about. Just tell me why he’s so important, but do it more quietly.”

One hand moves to the side of her head to brush away a long strand of stray hair as a frown appears between her eyes as if the effort of keeping her husband in focus was too much of a strain for her. She can’t do more than let him talk at her and hold her face in a fixed aspect of the attentive listener. Simon isn’t such a monster of ego that he doesn’t notice and his voice drops in volume and assumes the tone of the soothing doctor.

“Benjamin was in my class when we were in the Boys’ School. He has always seemed to be pretty average in terms of academic ability but all of a sudden it was as if he woke up from a deep sleep. He was brighter than nearly all of us and extremely volatile. He used to argue with nearly everybody, including the teachers and he was always getting into trouble because of it.”

He is wrapped up in his own narrative and doesn’t notice her slight grimace, perhaps writing it off as a product of too much whisky.

“You might not even remember him since he was a pretty anonymous boy back when we were all together. I remember seeing his father once and being struck by him. Benjamin was in trouble yet again, maybe for calling one of the teachers a racist or a . . . some bad word or other. Anyway, I saw this immense black man dressed in that really wild African get up; what do you call it, a dashiki?”

She doesn’t answer and he continues.

“I think that’s the name, but I had never seen anyone like it and it has stuck in my memory. My Dad has always been such a mild and gentle man, almost invisible and there was this huge figure with the most terrifying expression on his face. The thing that’s really incredible is that it didn’t seem to make a whole lot of difference to him, he just carried on the same way he had always done, maybe even worse.”

Denise’s eyes have closed and he gently caresses her brow, stopping at the deepening lines above her nose as he continues:

“He was a real Jekyll and Hyde personality, sometimes he was aggressive and really intimidating but he could also be sweet and gentle and I remembering talking to him about a lot of stuff, some of it pretty deep.”
“Such as?”

He is slightly surprised to find that she has spoken and looks down but sees her eyes still closed but he can see that he has her attention so he answers her.

“He wanted to be a doctor, like me. I think we were the only boys with that idea so we talked about what kind of doctor we wanted to be and the kind of life we wanted.”
“I don’t suppose they were the same, or even similar.”
                                                       “You’re quite right. I didn’t envisage this kind of life, I have to admit. I wanted to be a heart specialist, something that felt really important. Heart transplants were big things then and so it was like being at the cutting edge of medical science. Don’t all young boys want to excel and be brilliant and outstanding? And girls too.”

The politically correct afterthought is more irritating than the initial assumption but Denise’s head is too fragile to make any kind of protest so she simply deepens the lines on her brow in protest.

“I suppose all those people who wanted to be captains of industry are now working in banks or IT somewhere, and I’m a suburban family doctor. However, it’s not all bad, I really like my job and I feel like I’m doing some good with my life. I know a lot of people who aren’t happy with their jobs. I suppose because they feel disappointed.”

Denise opens her eyes, endures the initial wave of nausea that hits her and fixes her gaze on Simon.

“Do you really believe that people like Nigel Weston ever had any serious ambitions? Come on, don’t be a fucking idiot; his unhappiness is nothing to do with disappointment. Let’s face it, some people just have shit lives.”

Speaking has been a big effort for her and so she exhales deeply and closes her eyes again. He looks at her and appears to consider answering her but thinks better of it.

“Benjamin had ambition, though. He was going to treat poor children in Africa long before it they became a fashionable cause. He was full of noble ideas one minute, but the next thing I knew I heard that he’d been arrested for some petty criminality or other. It’s hardly the way to become a doctor is it?”

There is silence between them, so deep that they are both aware of the silence on the leafy streets beyond the bay windows.

“So, my answer to you is: yes, I am curious about some of them. At least I’d like to know what happened to him. I’m just scared that it ended badly for him. I really hope not.”

He waits for an answer but none is forthcoming; Denise is too tired and drunk to finish what she had started. He looks down at her and sees that she isn’t asleep but no comment is forthcoming so he leaves it at that.

“Maybe we should start getting ready for bed; I know we don’t have to get up early but at least one of us  will need to be up to deal with the kids and I have this funny feeling that it isn’t going to be you.”

The attempt at levity elicits no reaction at all and his slight disappointment but he works through it as he gets up.

“I’ll tidy up and use the bathroom first then, shall I?”
“Yeah, good idea.”

Denise in the Bathroom (Part 4)

Other girls had had broad hips and fretted when the expected breasts didn’t appear but she suddenly started sprouting and all three types came running. It had all been horrible enough at school but it became nightmarish when she was out and she found strangers looking at her, even men much older than her. On that day with the humiliation of the make up in her hand she felt that every set of male eyes and many female sets were on her bust. She had developed an odd way of holding herself where she squeezed her shoulders forward as if to form a protective cordon around her torso and this had led to her father to admonish her. Often as she would leave the house she heard his soft voice calling to her: “Be proud of yourself, stand up straight!” Sometimes he would omit the last part and it resembled a kind of plea. On that day he was mercifully silent and she skulked out of the house without any sort of contact.
She hadn’t had to wait long for the bus and sat on the top deck as usual. The make up was still clutched in her left hand and she had no intention of loosening her grip on it. She slid the bus pass away in her inside pocket where her cheap fake Walkman was. She rarely went out without flooding her head with music and on this day she desperately wanted to block out the world, but putting it on would mean using two hands and the risk of the make up falling onto the floor was just too great and so she endured the sound of the outside world, the chugging of the bus’s engine and the distracted conversation of two women in their twenties about the unacceptable behaviour of one of their friends or colleagues. Without the anaesthetic of the music the journey passed very slowly but after a while she saw that the streets were empty and unfamiliar and there was a rubbish bin to hand, so she rang the bell and made her way downstairs, the make up still secure deep in her pocket. The movement of the bus made it difficult for her to keep her balance so she lurched awkwardly down the stairwell keeping her shoulder as close to the sides as possible. The sheer artificiality of the way she was moving made her feel even more self-conscious than usual; she could not hide her bust as she wished and her limbs felt unconnected. Nevertheless, by avoiding all eye contact with the other passengers she manages to stumble her way off the bus and stands for a moment on the pavement as the bus pulls away. For a moment she is alone and the urge to laugh proves almost irresistible. She has learned to be guarded and remembers that all manner of people might be watching from a distant window and she relaxes her grip on the cosmetics in her pocket. For a moment she worries that the lining of her coat might not be robust enough and have one of those sneaky holes that allow embarrassing trinkets to fall out onto the floor, but she soon remembers that it has recently been re-stitched by her own hand during one of those wretched evenings barricaded in her room. Her hand closes around the thin plastic bag again and feels the outline of the shapes against both fingers and palm and for a moment her attention is held captive by the way her hand is so able to perceive different shapes but then she pulls herself together and looks around her to see if there is anyone looking. There isn’t and so she walks slowly and casually to the rubbish bin and ever so nonchalantly drops the bag into the bin. She can’t help herself and looks around one last time for any eye-witnesses to her misdemeanor, but there are none. at least none that she can see.
Now, standing in front of the mirror years later in a pair of men’s pyjamas accentuating the exaggerated femininity of her form she feels that her act was witnessed and that voices have whispered it around for years, distorting and magnifying its gravity and that there is no-one she can trust.
“This is craziness, you ridiculous woman. Get a grip.”

Denise in the Bathroom (Part 3)

She is frozen for a moment and then leans closer in towards the mirror to examine the way the smeared eyeliner mingles with the eye shadow to produce a colour that is devoid of life. This habit of wearing make up is a recent one, for many years she never bothered and reacted angrily when others told her that she should. Claire was in so many ways her opposite; as 12 year old girls discovering the changes of adolescence Claire was always ahead of her. She’d had her first period long before she had and that gap was agonising; every day was awful but it just went on and on for long months until the pain was a part of her life. By the time that first period hit Claire had become a young woman with beautiful breasts and an effortless skill with make up. She never looked bad, everything she did was somehow tasteful. Her skin may be older now but the face in the mirror reminds her of that first time when she was closed in her bathroom trying desperately to emulate Claire. Time after time it went horribly wrong and she plunged her face in the basin of water and scrubbed it off, not caring about the soap that stung her eyes. Eventually she gave up iclain despair and carefully disposed of the wasted make up in public litter bins far from her house. There could be no risk that her parents would learn of her failure as a girl and in case they or the neighbours saw her throwing the little Boots the Chemist bag into the bin they went out of her way to find a bin in an area where nobody knew her. She had put on her jacket and gone out there and then, avoiding her father’s vague question. Her mother was slumped in her favourite chair staring blankly at the TV screen. As she hurried past the door she saw the top of her head, the hair slightly out of place as usual and felt the usual rush of loathing for the way she lived.

She looks up at her face in the mirror. The eyes seem bigger and deeper than usual and she can almost make out her younger self escaping from the house and making her way to the bus stop. One hand is buried in her coat pocket with the hated make up held tightly, making sure that it doesn’t fall to the floor and give her away. The terrible panic that gripped her was very real and she can still feel it now: a private fear of total failure that she has never shared with anyone. Claire never knew that she had tried to emulate her beauty, as far as she knew Denise was just averse to being pretty. Until her breasts had grown she barely qualified as a girl at all, and then things were turned on their head. All of a sudden all the boys talked about her boobs and wanted to get their hands on them and Claire’s delicate beauty was overlooked for an altogether more primitive pleasure.  She had been thrust into a position of desirability for which she was ill-equipped to deal with. As long as she was the flat-chested tomboy she was anonymous and that had suited here well enough. Anonymity has its advantages; you can blend in and watch the way people behave and Denise had spent a lot of time watching boys pay attention to her friend. None of them noticed as she watched the way their eyes moved across Claire’s form. She soon learned to read the male mind, which ones’ gaze lingered over her face, which were held by her small but shapely bosom and which were firmly gripped by her hips. There were even some she caught scrutinising between Claire’s legs, checking out the slight protuberance of her mound of Venus. In that time she had got to know Claire’s body almost as well as her own and she would spend hours in front of the mirror checking her own to see how it compared. It always compared badly and yet she had devoured the performances that played out before her eyes. She had worked out the kinds of males each of the boys who paid Claire attention; those like Simon who looked her in the eyes were either too sentimental or too scared to look elsewhere and were the kind of men you settle down with. Some like David Ashton had their attention on her lower regions and they were those who followed their animal instincts. She had always been convinced that such males were a short term pleasure: get what you can from them and then get the hell out. The majority were just no-hopers like McAnless, boys that couldn’t keep their eyes off a girl’s breasts, overgrown babies that just wanted a nipple in their mouths. She had watched as other girls had ended up with such guys and knew then that it was a character defect, a sign of being soft in the head.