Old Man Peter

It's just him with some of the usual failings, I know. Nothing against me. Nothing against Shirley. Nothing against anyone. My annoyance has nothing to do with what he did or did not do for his crazy wife and crazy children, but more to do with what he did not do or say for me and my crazy life. Because, of course, like him, like anyone else, I am just interested in myself and nothing else matters as much as my momentous fuckover life. And that's his fault by me. But of course, how could he, by God, with his troubles and life's emergencies, capped by a hospitalization a few months back from which he might have not emerged alive, and Shirley forever fucking the world with his money, the children he was otherwise too old to look after and do laundry and ironing for, his work in Wollongong and the human rights journals he sometimes had trouble writing for, his unwritten books and the interview transcripts which he wants to finish by himself, his friends in the movement asking for more and more of him when all he could scarcely afford really is less and less.

And so when he thought of you at all, of course, it is more as one of the many things he comes by as he tries to search hell for a way to deal with his life's toughest trial: Shirley. In what way can you help him, in what terms could you come useful, say – say to see to his affairs while he is away; to make sure that Shirley could not hurt him some more in the only way she can: financially, that is, even if he has no finances to speak of, or precisely because he has no more for Shirley to want and profit from some more. That you yourself would need anything from him, professional, political – that one never occurred to him. Once he appeared in your trial where you stood him, thanks to a nice advice from your lawyer-employer friend who didn't even know that the law to which she should be appealing your case did not apply and therefore could not help you fuck be her.

How sad that about everyone is so encumbered with the most important problem to deal with: the self; one's small life. The small self as the big burden, says Kate Millett, who was betrayed, turned in by the very friends and comrades who God knows probably were just jealous of her years her money her property and just wanted to stomp their feet, a way of reasserting parity, she had no right to think of herself an artist and shoot up by them and so they turned her in to the psychatric ward where they themselves were more than fit to be in, to be sedated and straitjacketed for life, if they knew what they deserved. That is the very function of friends, Peter said one night in the kitchen that he was making coffee as I made out to wash the dishes, Gwen smoking her life away in the veranda. To betray you. You should expect that of friends. How consoling it all sounded then. And now that is probably how he feels towards me, that I betrayed him. For allying with Shirley's fucked-upness, or at least for refusing to take his side, for refusing not to defend Shirley's Goddamnalmighty life. For refusing to make a hero of him or at least paint the good man that he undoubtedly is.

So I have this resentment against him, too, for being not thoroughly enlightened, not thoroughly socialist or feminist enough? For being a man who for all the good that was in him, did not know how to listen, is not ever capable of listening, to what is said by those who did not make history, who did not make books, who did not make or were said to be did not make revolutions?

But who is ever thoroughly anything?

Whoever is ever.