Dirty Work Read online

  DIRTY WORK

  DIRTY WORK:

  A CHUMP’S SEARCH FOR MEANING

  ROD BULL

  Station Hill of Barrytown

  Copyright 2017 Rod Bull

  All rights reserved. Except for short passages for purposes of review, no part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

  Published by Station Hill Press, Inc., 120 Station Hill Road, Barrytown, NY 12507, as a project of the Institute for Publishing Arts, Inc., in Barrytown, New York, a not-for-profit, tax-exempt organization [501(c)(3)].

  Online catalogue: www.stationhill.org

  e-mail: [email protected]

  This publication is supported in part by grants from the New York State Council on the Arts, a state agency.

  Interior design by Terrence Arjoon.

  Cover illustration by Rod Bull.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Bull, Rod, author.

  Title: Dirty work : a chumps search for meaning / Rod Bull.

  Description: Barrytown, NY : Station Hill of Barrytown, [2015]

  Identifiers: LCCN 2015025582 | ISBN 9781581771527 (ebook)

  Subjects: LCSH: Bull, Rod. | Spiritual biography. | Fourth Way (Occultism) | Buddhism--Tibet Region.

  Classification: LCC BL73.B93 A3 2015 | DDC 204.092--dc23

  LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2015025582

  Contents

  1. Chapter

  2. Séance

  3. Astral Double

  4. Rocket Bits

  5. Blitz

  6. Busking in Paris

  7. In the Shit

  8. Two Karmapas

  9. Girls

  10. Astral Body

  11. Sugar Cane Cutting

  12. Crazy Cutters

  13. Jail Birds

  14. Snake in the Bed

  15. Notting Hill

  16. Sci-Fi Search

  17. Carl Atkinson

  18. Peg Leg

  19. Headhunters & Big Dick

  20. Body of Light

  21. Spying

  22. Cockney Nick

  23. What Is It?

  24. A Dose of Clap

  25. Esoteric Quarks

  26. Short-Order Cook

  27. Stuck in the Astral

  28. Road to Morocco

  29. Pushing in London

  30. Riff Raff

  31. Sex

  32. Esoteric Ideas

  33. Crowley’s House

  34. Smuggling

  35. Jim Brown

  36. Despond in Corfu

  37. Dharma

  38. The Dream

  39. Steiner

  40. More Shit

  41. Stucco King

  42. Ski Bum

  43. Dark Retreat

  44. Death

  45. Floundering in the Dark

  46. Jackdaws

  47. Lyme Light

  About Rod Bull

  Illustrations

  Bike Trip to Europe

  1st Eleven Cricket Team (Bull seated last on right)

  Captain of the 1st 15 Rugby (Bull seated center holding ball)

  Bull with Model Airplane

  Bull’s Father

  Wendy with Buzzard

  Bull with Head

  Oil Rig

  Stone Circle

  Bull and Windsurfer

  Bull with Wendy and Joel

  Bull on Skis

  Chapter

  What was happening? Everything I tried was going wrong. I needed to start again, get my life back. Would it be possible to change the events of my life, was there some basic flaw in me? “There was a veiled past which I could not see, there was a door to which I had no key.” How would it be possible?

  Magic!

  Apparently magicians can alter the outcome of events.

  Séance

  Sundays were always strange days for me and my friends, Roger and Downie. It was a day of limbo or hangover from the night before. If we were lucky, we would have had grog and girls, but usually it was a bottle of V.P. and a wank. A three-shilling bottle of V.P.—wine of the winos—was the perfect drink. Mostly we sat around spaced out, smoking endless fags, usually roll-ups like Old Holborn, Golden Virginia, and Black Beauty. Sometimes one of us had a real fag like Senior Service, Players, or Capstan full-strength. The smokier the room, the more philosophical we became. I tell a lie—it was Roger and Downie who seemed to know where it was at; Downie always came up trumps, quoting Camus, Sartre, Dostoyevsky. When one of the Karamazov brothers plans to kill their father, he reasons that if there is a God, it’s His will that he commit the crime—and if there is no God, it doesn’t matter!

  Existentialism was way over my head. Most of my reading consisted of comics and a bit of Mickey Spillane. So I was always very relieved whenever Roger started to play his jazz records, like Louis Armstrong’s Hot Five and Hot Seven, and I could nod off into a smoky oblivion. This is how most Sundays went. But one Sunday, Downie pulled out the local paper and pointed to the classifieds. “There’s a séance in Broadwater, just down the road from us,” he said. “That’s where we’re going.”

  “What the hell’s a séance?” I asked. “Getting in touch with dead people,” he replied. “That’s a lot of old bollocks,” I shouted. I did not like the sound of it at all.

  That kind of thing gave me the creeps. I did not want to go. There was still some V.P. from the night before, so I took a couple of slugs. It must have given me some Dutch courage, or perhaps it was being called a wanker and gutless twit that shamed me into going.

  The séance was being held in a small hall annexed to a church. The room was dark—only candlelight. Most of the people were older women, fragile and otherworldly, and everything was hushed. I wanted to leave right away.

  Suddenly a tall, grey-haired lady stood up in front of everybody. Hands on her temples, eyes closed, she started to call out people’s names, telling them their dead loved ones were asking for flowers to be put on their graves. “George wants lilies of the valley; Frank, roses.”

  We were about to leave when the medium started calling out to the three boys sitting in the back row, specifically to the one in the middle wearing a bright sport coat. That was me. Now what? Why were people always making snide remarks about my sport coat? The medium seemed to be in a trance, saying a friend of mine had had a serious skiing accident in Austria: he had fallen down a crevasse, broken his neck, and died. We looked at each other, shaking our heads. We did not know any skiers. “I told you this was a lot of old bollocks,” I said.

  Several weeks later, I was meeting a friend from boarding school. The first thing he asked was if I had heard about Randall, another classmate and friend. Apparently, he had been on a skiing holiday, fallen down a crevasse, broken his neck, and died. This sent shivers down my spine. How did the woman know? Randall lived far away, so there was nothing in the papers about it. The whole thing started me thinking that maybe there is something else to life.

  And back at school I was starting to wonder what all the hoo-ha was about. What was I being primed for, some lousy office job, working with a bunch of boring old farts; or something in the colonies, trying to prop up what was left of the British Empire? Let them go mad, as Somerset Maugham might have put it. It all seemed a lot of nonsense.

  But I was good at cricket, something my father had drilled into me. It paid off, as I became a very good fast bowler, and every now and again I played for my college. I was able to bowl unplayable balls, almost as if I were not doing it, not there. This was always puzzling: where does that come from? I was also able to throw the javelin long distances
with no training, setting a new college record. What was that?

  I was getting more and more dissatisfied with college and started messing about with explosives—nitro, mercury fulminate, fertilizer dustbin bombs—seeing who could make the ground shake the most. One day making one of these bombs, it went off. I was extremely lucky to escape with damage to only my left hand and foot. I kept thinking I was dreaming and would pinch myself. Being pumped full of morphine, going in and out of consciousness, a dream reality—it was all very strange. Around this time I had been talking to a bloke in my class about the Bohemians, and that, along with everything else that I had been experiencing, was all leading to the fall, or as the old blues song goes—

  Wake up in the morning,

  Turning from side to side,

  I was not sick,

  Just dissatisfied.

  Astral Double

  I started to read some of the Golden Dawn people—Crowley, and Butler—and some of the exercises seemed simple, like the game in Rudyard Kipling’s book Kim: one is shown a tray of assorted objects—the cloth removed, then covered again. The idea is to write down as many of the objects remembered as possible. Some objects will be forgotten, revealing weak areas of the mental process or a mental blocking of bad memories. By meditating on the forgotten object, one releases the repressed emotion connected to that object. Then the said object is in no way different in significance from any of the other objects on the tray. This helps open the mind to more possibilities. This was one of the easiest exercises, but one I found very hard. There were many others, some that used sound vibration, others flashing colors, by positive will producing the reality of the dream vision in the waking state. Most of these methods seemed way over my head. How long would magic take to learn? I might be dead by the time I could work any magic, I thought! What to do?

  I asked my friend Chris to help. He had been messing about with hypnosis, saying he had seen childhood memories, past lives, other universes. It all sounded a bit dodgy to me, but maybe hypnosis was a way to examine what was inside of me that was causing the fuck-ups. Feeling desperate, I decided to give it a go.

  Chris had left for Paris, so I attempted self-hypnosis. This was proving difficult; often I would just fall asleep. At other times I would get stuck, not being able to get out of the hypnotic state for what seemed like hours. On my first attempts nothing happened, but after about the fourth try, flashes of a dark house appeared to me, with light coming from one room. It seemed that I observed this for hours. For some reason, the same vision occurred each time I tried hypnosis. I didn’t recognize the house and wondered what I was doing there. Just the one room seemed occupied, and every so often strange shadows would flicker across the windows. Some of the shadows seemed human, others massive and beast-like. Something compelled me towards the lit window of the house. Somehow, I had to get into the house.

  Another try—and there I was standing in front of the house. The house appeared to have no doors; only the one window was lit, with a drainpipe close by. Pulling myself up, I was able to grab onto the window ledge so that I was just able to see into the room. There was nothing there. Strange, I thought, where were the shadows coming from? Maybe it was the wrong room. I was able to get a toehold on the brickwork, so as to rest my arms, still looking through the window.

  The room seemed empty of any objects: bare walls, no lights—where was the light coming from? Suddenly it dawned on me that there was no door. My arms were getting tired again, and just as I was about to reach back to the drain-pipe, I heard a scraping sound. In an instant, staring straight back at me was what looked like a malformed or incompletely formed being. For some reason, I believed this being was me or part of me.

  Its arms and legs were undeveloped and the face was infantile, but its eyes were very sharp, and mesmerizing. I tried not to look into its eyes, fearing I would be sucked in. I knew the creature wanted something from me, something for its developing self to feed upon. Its lips started to move. Thinking it was about to say something, I tried to get closer to the window. Its mouth opened, letting out a shrill scream, and I went cold. I lost my grip, and falling back, falling . . . falling . . . falling . . .

  I came to with a jolt, back in my room, a cold sweat sticking my shirt to my skin. It would be a long time before I tried any magic again.

  Rocket Bits

  They say the Buddha remembered five hundred past lifetimes. Tibetans also believe in past lives. Was I looking for something in my past, something in the future—a person or a past dastardly deed? Trying to remember my past lives would be a bit of a stretch, as my furthest-back memory was of me in my pram, wide-eyed, gazing up at endless U.S. troop columns going through our village en route to the coast and D-Day. My mother had left me accidentally-on-purpose in view, so the U.S. troops would leave chocolate in my pram! What was my mother up to? Was I some kind of chocolate trap? This experience was the beginning of my spying activities. As a spy, what would I learn, what tips would I pick up, how would I piece myself together, and what kind of person would I become? Meanwhile, my brother was also spying. He had started a museum of Nazi plane and rocket parts in his bedroom, all collected nearby. I was his apprentice since I was able to get into small places. Once while we were exploring, we found a crashed ME109. My brother climbed onto the wing and looked in the cockpit. Reeling backward, terrified and pale, he screamed that we had to go, but he would not tell me what he had seen.

  This made me curious. My brother was long gone, howling in the distance, but I remained behind. Somehow I had to find out what he had seen. Yet whatever I tried—swinging off branches, trying to move branches in order to climb up onto the wing—nothing worked; I was too small. What had he seen? His screams and look of terror still remain in my memory.

  I returned home that day to find the house surrounded by police and men in bowler hats, one of them talking to my brother in earnest. He had something in his hand that looked like any old piece of metal, and whatever it was, the bowler hats were very interested in it. Meanwhile, the police were taking other pieces away. Throughout their interrogation, I was hiding in some nearby bushes, hoping no one would see me. One of the bowler hats was holding books and papers in his hand, waving his arms and shouting in strong language, while my brother tried to explain he was learning German at college and that this was his homework. Amidst all the excitement, my father arrived home.

  “Could somebody tell me what’s going on?” he asked. “Is this your boy?” asked one of the bowler hats. “Yes, what’s the problem?”

  “He has parts of V1 and V2 rockets, plus many other parts of German planes. Do you know anything about this?” Looking pale, my father stammered that he had no idea, that it all looked like scrap metal of no worth.

  The bowler hats seemed suspicious and said they would have to take everything away for investigation.

  All this time, my father was trying to say something, and then my brother spoke up, saying it was his war museum, for which he actually charged sixpence admission!

  While the bowler hats continued to question my brother, the police were putting everything in a van. After what seemed hours, they left, saying they would return. We were warned not to go anywhere in the meantime.

  Still hiding in the bushes, this was all frightening to me; in the back of my mind was the image of horror on my brother’s face after he had looked into the crashed plane’s cockpit.

  We never went to any crash site again. The image of my brother’s face was burned into my brain. He became my hero, but what could I learn from him? He was extremely bright and cunning, two properties I did not appear to have.

  Did I start to construct my personality from these first impressions by choosing some aspects, while disregarding others?

  Blitz

  Being woken up at 4:00 in the morning to shovel shit left behind the horse-drawn milk cart was not my idea of fun, nor was any work for that matter. The whole thing put me right off. Especially for ten cents a week in pocket money. It was a
bad omen for my future work prospects. Collecting horseshit was my father’s idea; he wanted to make a foul-smelling fertilizer for his garden, which certainly made the plants grow tall—trying to get away from the smell, most likely.

  To make things worse, when I wasn’t shoveling shit, I would sometimes have to travel to London with my parents to some boring affair. My mother would get totally trashed, and it always ended with us being asked to leave. The most puzzling thing about traveling to the city was the people streaming in and out of the trains, like ants in and out of anthills. Where were they going? What were they doing? Was this life? It seemed crazy.

  With this early state of mind, I began setting myself up for a string of shitty jobs, and disillusionment. I’m not sure whether this was autosuggestion, or my karma working itself out. Maybe it’s the same thing. Whatever it was, it would lead me to a lot of bloody awful jobs. Dirty work, indeed.

  Maybe my bad luck with jobs had something to do with being a Blitz baby. My memories of that time are still vivid. Doodlebugs, V2s, constant bombing, being blown across the room, carried into air raid shelters, pushed under tables… staring spellbound at the flames, hypnotized by the tonk-tonk-tonk of the doodlebug pulse, waiting for the silence. Then the white flash, dark roar, breaking glass, blown-down shock wave! The roar of the V2 seconds later, the screaming howl as the sound caught up. Bright blue sky, glistening triangles; drowning, throbbing like a sore thumb. Messerschmitt, Heinkel, Dornier, Fokker, Wolf. White vapor trails against the deep blue, straight as arrows. Then from nowhere, like wasps suddenly circling, zigzagging, drawing pictures in the sky, the Spitfires darted, weaving in and out of the glistening triangles: black smoke, white vapor, primordial blue. Frozen in time.

  This memory is burned into my brain—a beautiful, deadly, red-orange glow on cobalt blue. The silence, blast, death—how quickly life changes.