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Authors: Matthew Chapman

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Trials of the Monkey (18 page)

BOOK: Trials of the Monkey
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He takes hold of the Bible on his desk, lays back the covers, and holds the outer margin of all the pages between finger and thumb. ‘I tried very hard to pick it up, but each time it would start to tear. I’d put it back down and try a different spot. I was trying to find a place—I was
desperately
trying to find a place—where it would hold together. But it wouldn’t.’
He lets the pages fall, leans back in his chair, and looks out of
the window for a while before going on. ‘My encounter with Jesus Christ had saved my life spiritually and physically, so I couldn’t reject him and I came to know about him through that Bible so the words of that Bible had to have a higher priority than the claims of science. So I rejected evolution.’
Nothing could be more tragic. He sank into a long depression. There was a part missing in his life. After a few weeks, however, and quite by chance, he heard about creationism. Here was a way out of his dilemma. At first he swallowed all the material uncritically, but soon realised that most of the creationists were mediocre scientists and most of their theories untenable. There followed a period of disillusionment out of which he emerged with the basis for his life’s work: he would start over, go back to the beginning,
rebuild
science from the ground up—and in the process exclude evolution.
‘You still include evolution,’ he amends, ‘you know, it’s just certain types of evolution that are excluded.’
He was accepted at the University of Chicago, where he studied astrophysics. He was trying to stay away from his first love, palaeontology, but after a year, he could resist it no longer and changed his major. He graduated with a Bachelor of Arts in Geophysical Sciences and applied to five different graduate programmes, one of which was Stephen Jay Gould’s at Harvard. No one mentioned on any of the applications that Kurt was a creationist. Gould accepted him without knowing and didn’t find out until it was too late. On the day—or rather night—when they met, Kurt had driven his sister down to her college in South Carolina and then driven another fifteen hours up to Harvard. By the time he arrived it was one-thirty in the morning and he was exhausted.
‘I didn’t know where to go, I didn’t even know where my dorm was. I stepped out of my car. Went twenty feet. Ran into Steve Gould. One-thirty in the morning!’ He laughs. ‘He’s going to his office!’
According to Wise, Gould wakes up at seven in the morning
and goes to work. After a normal workday, he returns home to spend the evening with his family, goes to sleep with his wife at a regular hour, then wakes up around one A.M., and returns to work. After a few hours, he then goes home again, hops into bed for an hour, and wakes up to have breakfast with the family.
‘I just ran right into him and he chewed me out right there. It’s like, “Oh, my word.” I mean I was completely out of it and I’m going, “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean it. It really wasn’t my intention. I didn’t know they hadn’t told you. I thought they would.” ’
The issue of creation didn’t come up for another two years. One day Gould stopped and asked him, ‘Do you still believe the same way?’ ‘Well, I’m still a creationist, if that’s what you mean.’ ‘Oh, okay,’ replied Gould. Another couple of years later, it came up again when Kurt was sitting in his office chatting. Again Kurt reaffirmed his position. Since then they have spoken of it calmly and seemingly without tension. Unfortunately, it was not this easy with everyone. One graduate student declared war on Kurt. ‘I’m going to do everything in my power,’ he told him, ‘to make your life hell while you’re at Harvard.’
‘And he tried.’ Kurt laughs, but you can see, beneath the laughter, memories of considerable pain.
Because he had to stop and work—as a landscape gardener—to be able to afford to stay at Harvard, Kurt was twenty-nine when he finally got his Ph.D. Since seventh grade, he had dreamed of teaching at one of the more prestigious secular universities, but when the moment came to look for work, he no longer wanted to and applied only to Christian colleges.
He had never heard of Bryan College until he applied for the job he now holds. It is, he states, the ideal situation. In a secular university he would never be able to conduct creationist research. His wife, whom he met in church and is not an academic, home-schools his children and runs a day-care centre in their home.
‘And so you’re happy here?’ I ask.
He nods.
‘It must be a big relief to be at a place like this after all these years.’
‘Yes,’ he says and nods again, ‘to be released of that pressure …’
‘Do you find, if I may be candid here,’ I say, lowering my voice, ‘do you find that you don’t encounter people here who are as intellectually stimulating as you might like?’
‘That’s been my universal observation, no matter where,’ he answers, and then yelps with laughter before catching himself. ‘Here at Bryan College,’ he says more judiciously, ‘there are students and fellow professors who are challenging for me and that’s good.’
Still bewildered by the idea of a nine-year-old contemplating suicide for ostensibly philosophical reasons, I ask him if he can remember anything else that could have made him so unhappy. He thinks for a long while, wondering, it seems to me, how best to express what follows.
‘There was a recurrent dream,’ he says after a while, ‘that I had just about every night. I would lie down in bed and whatever the attitude of the window—you know, you’re looking at it kind of weird, it’s kind of a weird shaped thing—when I closed my eyes the window’s still there, still that light … that shape of lightness, and the whole dream was just that window, getting smaller and smaller and smaller and smaller, very, very slowly, and I would wake up screaming. And this for years. I knew precisely what it meant, it was the greatest fear I had as a child: I realised as soon as I began to talk to people that they knew instantly—they labelled me instantly—as a brain, and they rejected me instantly in like manner. I tried to speak differently, unintelligently. I did everything I could to thwart my intelligence. I was afraid that my intelligence was distancing me from people, from relationships. It was a terrible, terrible fear, and I did a lot—and I think successfully—to reduce the intellectual potential I had at that time, trying desperately to hold on to relationships …’
We sit in silence for a moment. I’m exhausted, physically, intellectually,
and emotionally. I can think of nothing more to ask him.
‘It’s been very interesting talking to you,’ I tell him truthfully.
‘Well, it’s weird, I know,’ he says, and laughs his high, boyish laugh.
Out in the corridor, I photograph him leaning against a specimen case containing fossils which would to 99 per cent of all the scientists in the world provide incontrovertible proof that the world is thousands of millions of years old, and then we shake hands.
‘Lord be with you,’ he says and next thing I know, I hear myself saying:
‘And Lord be with you too.’
All my adult life I’ve despised religion, in particular its resistance to scientific progress. Galileo is a greater hero to me than any saint. Yet here is Professor Wise, one of the most influential creationists in the world—and a religious nut by all previous standards—and I like him and feel sympathy for him. I didn’t tell him I was a descendant of that hell-dweller, Darwin, but from my questions he must have known I was neither a believer in the young-age creation theory nor a fellow Christian, and yet he generously revealed himself to me. My intellectual views remain the same, but in some significant way, my
feelings
have changed. Faith in God or any of the fairy tales that surround Him may be absurd, but the
need
for faith is anything but. When you encounter someone like Kurt, you realise that faith is sometimes an absolute necessity.
How to Get Along Sensibly with Girls
St. Christopher’s was a school for the semi-delinquent children of the relatively rich. It was vegetarian, the idea being, I think, that avoiding meat would reduce the violent or sexual urges in these sorry offspring. After a year, I opened an account at a local grocery store and ordered in thirty cans of corned beef. I had eaten about four of them when I read in the paper that several people had died of food poisoning from just such cans as these—I think it was typhoid—and so I had to go back to subsisting on nut-meat rissoles and banana cakes. My violence subsided to some extent, not through lack of meat, but through the sudden, wonderfully civilising presence of the opposite sex.
At last I was among girls again! Oh, the bliss of their little bodies and their shy glances, the smell of them, the way they giggled, the movement of them, the tenderness and malice, the promise in their blushes, the taste of their soft lips, the flick and whip of their skirts, and the marvellous hot, different
swell
of them. So many characters, so many different shapes, so many romances to be had, peeks to be taken, and feels to be felt.
Resurrection! Praise the Lord!
I was coming in at an unusual time and so my arrival was closely noted by the girls. A fresh boy. A good-looking boy. By now, mercifully, eczema no longer came to my face, and only flared up periodically—usually between my fingers, more rarely now in my elbows, at the back of my knees and on my ankles. If I remained dressed and kept my fingers pressed together, I could pass as normal. I arrived with my flowing locks and three years of pent-up desire pumping in my athletic body—and the girls,
the girls
wanted
me! I did not select, I simply allowed myself to be carried off by the most insistent of them. I’d been in an all-boys school for over three years; anyone was welcome.
No sooner had I acquiesced to whichever girl it was, than the others turned against me. Spurned hormonal girls formed into a lethal pack and loving lips became blowpipes from which, instead of murmurs of encouragement and flattery, came barbs of sarcasm and spite. One girl dubbed me Mr. X, a reference to my eczema, which had been discovered. The boys, resenting my romantic success, also hated me. I had several fights, most of which I won. Finally, when I was dumped by the first girl, I was forgiven by the boys. William, one of those who’d beaten me in a fight, became my friend and remained so, even after I was expelled three years later.
The school was in a town called Letchworth in Hertfordshire, about twenty miles from my family’s home. Letchworth was a ‘garden city,’ an experiment in idealistic urban planning intended to do away with tenements and inner-city squalor. It had succeeded: it was an utterly boring suburb. The main part of the school, which was on the edge of town, was a large red-brick house with lots of additions—an assembly room, classrooms, extra dormitories scattered around it with little or no thought to aesthetics. On the other side of the playing fields were two more ‘houses’ which functioned as dormitories for the younger children.
Once the girls turned against me, I was often lonely and miserable. My mother sent me carefully wrapped packages with food inside and letters about life at home, news of my brothers, Francis and Ludovic. My sister, Sarah, was at another boarding school, Bedales, where she excelled. The letters were written in a neat hand which often got less neat as the letter progressed. They were witty and descriptive and always filled with her obvious affection for me. The anticipation of these letters and packages, and then their arrival, bringing as they did the reassurance that somewhere out in the cold and unexplored world was at least one woman who loved me constantly, enabled me to survive the
gloom and anguish caused by girls my own age whose love was as jagged and uncertain as broken bottles.
My first housemaster was a small, bearded man in a tweed sports coat whose larger and more vibrant wife performed the role of housemother. Both drearily vegetarian, they were also ardent devotees of homeopathy and I remember arsenic being freely dispensed for certain ailments. The house was divided in two, one side being for the girls, the other for boys. My dormitory contained six boys in three two-tier bunk beds.
Masturbation was endemic but because the bunks were old and made of metal, they squeaked noisily. As a result, just as you were about to achieve orgasm, someone would always make a joke or complain they couldn’t sleep and you’d have to start all over again. As all the boys except one were dedicated wankers, I suggested we drop the furtive aspects of the sport and adopt a more communal approach: mass-masturbation, timed to commence as soon as the lights went out. The suggestion was accepted and so the next night we all set out together, each in our own bunks, squeaking and groaning, all our little hands feverishly at work, the beds shaking and rattling, until the last boy finally came and we all went to sleep. Only one boy remained uninterested in the activity. He had a great love of lederhosen and racing bikes, but absolutely no interest in sex. After a few nights, he began to be a problem.
‘I just don’t get it,’ he’d suddenly say at some crucial point in the endeavour.
‘Shut up!’
‘No, but what’s the big deal? I just don’t get it.’
‘Please! If you don’t like it, just be quiet, we’re begging you.’
When that didn’t work, when he continued to complain and interrupt, we tried to tempt and provoke him.
‘Just close your eyes, put your hand on your willy, and imagine … Imagine your hand inside Sally’s shirt … Or imagine Cora’s legs … her buttocks … imagine long thighs … big tits … Imagine you’re under the stairs and Jane goes by and you look up and you can see
right up her skirt!!!’
‘So what?’
It was shocking how sexless he was. We even tried to tailor fantasies for him which would integrate his own obsessions.
‘Okay, lie back and dream … Pink nipples, drop handlebars, soft thighs, ten speed gears, your hand in her knickers, racing wheels,
pudendahhhh!!!!’
‘Uuugh!’
It was hopeless. Perhaps we should have crammed Jane or Sally into lederhosen and beat them with bike chains, but we were young; our limited imaginations could think of nothing sufficiently exotic to arouse this doughty little cyclist. Eventually, the chummy community of spermy boys disbanded and each of us slunk back into the frustration of muffling the once-again solitary vice. Several of us experimented with a new erotic technique in the hopes of bringing about orgasm more quickly. You would lie on one of your hands until it went numb and then take hold of it, wrap its insensible fingers around your penis, and jerk it up and down with the other hand, the idea being that as the hand felt nothing, you could imagine it belonged to someone else.
In the morning, we’d be woken by the bearded housemaster, who would herd us into the boys’ bathroom. Here, in summer or winter, a cold bath awaited us before the morning walk. You had to get into the bath and then lie down in the icy water until it covered every inch of you, including your head. Then, and only then, could you surge out and dry yourself. The bearded one would sit on the edge of the bath, fully dressed, grinning his sanctimonious grin, to make sure you complied with the total immersion rule and if you did not, just as you rose into the relative warmth of the room, he’d push you back down. He was a harmless enough man, but I didn’t like him. There was no beating at the school, but there were other ways to make your life miserable. In retrospect, some rules verged on reasonable, like the prohibition against smoking, but some still seem manifestly goofy, like forcing you to cut your hair a certain length or this cold bath routine.
One day, after I’d been there about a year, I entered the bathroom and saw his nimble, tweedish figure perched on the edge of the bath. I had developed young and, at the age of twelve, was strong and quick. Suddenly—and it came out of nowhere, no plan, not a moment of decision—I felt inspired to give the little man a dose of his own medicine. I gave him no warning. He was completely unprepared as I lunged at him and with a single shove, sent him floundering backward into the bathtub. He flailed around, scrabbling to extricate his scrawny arse from the freezing water.
He didn’t like it.
He punished me in some irrelevant way, but no serious trouble came of it. I suspect he was so embarrassed at his loss of dignity he didn’t want to advertise it further. I was a hero for a week until my tendency to revel too cockily in my successes undercut my admirable achievement.
My longing for sexual contact of any kind increased with every day. Shortly after my dunking of the master, a boy whose claim to fame was that he could dangle a massive flashlight (including large square battery) from the tip of his erect penis, discovered that if you climbed along a thick branch of a nearby tree you could get an unimpeded view into one of the girl’s dormitories. As I was always lurking about at night in search of romance, I was the first to catch him crouched up in his masturbatorial roost and quickly joined him. The clarity and closeness of the view was exquisite beyond words. There they all were in their fluffy sweaters and skirts and jeans, moving around and chatting like in a silent movie, except this movie was in glorious colour. Before long, the sweaters started to come off and down dropped the lower garments and there they were in their snappy little brassieres and pretty knickers. Then
they
came off revealing all the beautiful pinks and whites and little fuzzy bits, and up went the arms and on went the nighties—and oh!
Well
worth my allergic reaction to the tree bark.
To the boy’s considerable irritation, I told William about the carnal pleasures of the bough and the next night the three of us
were up there, perched in a row, studying the mysteries of female development. Here was the girl from India with hair so long it reached her slender buttocks, a princess it was rumoured, who on the first day of school crashed to the floor after grace because no servant had pushed her chair in for her. How svelte and elegant she was with her tiny breasts and her beautiful light brown skin. Here was the one from Egypt with breasts so large they swayed from side to side as she moved. Standing awkwardly to one side was Sally, a sweet, chubby girl fumbling to release her Playtex pantygirdle. Here was pretty Lucy with her firm, protuberant breasts and long, athletic legs. On a bed sat Gaby, rolling down her stockings, a pretty, soft-fleshed girl, up whose skirt my hand would be a year later when the news of JFK’s assassination came on TV (God forgive me, but I still remember my annoyance at the interruption). And finally, here was lissom Jane, a slightly older girl who could (and would, if asked nicely) make farting noises by sucking air in and out of her vagina.
This voyeuristic gold mine was more than any boy could ask for. It was heaven. It was too good to keep secret. Soon there were four of us up there, then five, then six. When an army marches across a bridge they break step because if they march in unison the bridge cannot endure the stress. We did not know this and one night our little fists must have fallen into synch, because suddenly there was a loud
crack!
and the sturdy branch—which had not so much as groaned before—snapped and crashed to the ground. Six scratched boys, clutching six shrivelling penises, limped and scurried off into the darkness, pulling up zips and cursing.
Those girls … Having seen them, how I missed them. How I longed for those bodies. Just to
glimpse
them even for a second, the indescribable perfection of them … It was beyond lust, it was love. I
loved
the sight of them. Had I been old enough I would have married any one of them on a simple promise they’d stand naked on a plinth and let me walk around them. I was in awe. It was a welling up of the deepest feeling, an abdominal surge of transcendent adoration and insatiable curiosity.
Study? How could I? How could anyone with all this magnificence prowling around or sitting at the next desk, plump bottoms flared on chairs, breasts resting on desks, and the whole thing veiled by a mere
wisp
of cloth?
What would they look like naked? How would they feel? How would they behave if we were alone? How would they smell? How would they taste? If I listed all the memories I have, memories that are as clear today as they were thirty-five years ago, of all the kisses and caresses, the furtive glances, the tastes and smells, of matches struck in dark places to illuminate an unleashed breast, of tight hugs and creeping fingers, of ears and necks, of cheeks and slippery tongues, this book would be a thousand pages long. If I listed all the
fantasies
I had of all of the above, it would be a million. Knowledge? Facts?! What
for?
Who needed them? I was an explorer waiting for a journey to begin. I wanted love and flesh and sensual and romantic oblivion. I wanted intercourse. I was
twelve
for Christ’s sake! I was in my prime.
And no one would accommodate me.
It was agony, double agony. If I could have separated lust from love, it would have been far easier, but at that time if anyone let me touch them anywhere in any way, my gratitude was so profound it
became
love.
Eventually, I could resist temptation no longer and scaled the fire escape outside the girl’s dorm. As soon as my eager face appeared in the window, a girl saw me and called the others over. To my astonishment, I was invited in. For one marvellous minute the sheer novelty of having a boy in their room so confused them that no one ran for help. I sank into the saturating, voluptuous scent of the place, my eyes feasted orgiastically on the teddy bears on the pillows, a bra hanging from a hook, photographs of mums and dads, the slippers and the slips, the pad of naked feet, calves and knees, thighs disappearing at the swaying hem, the swell of hips and buttocks, the narrow waists, the round bounce of satin-covered breasts, the giggles of the bolder ones, the brush of long hair against my face, the smiles and the blushes … And
then a little Puritan snuck out, a vegetarian was tipped off, and here came outraged wholesomeness personified.
BOOK: Trials of the Monkey
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