Saxual Healing

By Billy Medicine

How does friendship become obsession? Why need any romantic love be forbidden? Does there exist a sound more seductive than the reedy bray of a saxophone solo? The seedy, hysterical and unforgettable diaries presented herein tell of a lonely young man whose typical teen angst snowballed from mischievous trickery into the saxophone-related murders of two innocent men, and Billy's disappearance. And yet, Billy's efforts ultimately culminated in the production of the world's most beautiful and unknowable artistic expression of homosexual love. The creation of this stranger-than-fiction narrative was as much editor Leo X. Robertson's personal journey to discover what it was about him that had so unbalanced a disturbed soul, how much of the fallout he was personally accountable for, and how it was that Billy's unwanted persecution led Leo straight into the arms of his soulmate. Now, for the first time ever, read Billy's side of the story.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lulu.com
• Release date: May 24, 2015
• ISBN: 9781326284916

Book preview

Saxual Healing

SAXUAL HEALING

Billy Medicine

Edited by Leo X. Robertson

Published by Cardboard Wall Empire

ISBN: 978-1-326-28491-6

Copyright © 2015 Leo X. Robertson

All rights reserved.

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Foreword

A very strange thing happened to me when I was fifteen. In fifth year, a new kid came to my secondary school- we’ll call him Billy Medicine from here on out. I think my mum, an English teacher whose school he attended the year previous, told me he was coming. She told me he was a weird kid and couldn’t make friends. I can’t remember when we started talking, me and him. There was some awkward small talk between us in registration class when they handed out school diaries. Classes, hobbies… I don’t remember the specifics.

In general, people didn’t talk to him. Our school was insular and super weird, as are now most of the adults who enjoyed their time there. Anyway, Billy stood outside of circles of established friends in the playground, laughing at their jokes but implicitly forbidden from participating. I cringed on his behalf but still never made the effort to talk to him. It was only when me and my friend, who I’ll call Lapin, were discussing him and she said -Go up and talk to him!- I pushed my way into the circle, invited him in and asked about his day. He got a few laughs from the rest of the guys then fell silent again, but it didn’t matter: he was in.

The next few times I saw him, he was back outside the circle. Such was the persistent tribalism of the school we went to and that entire catchment area community; such it is today.

I have no doubt some of the other girls were friendly to him too, but there was something about me that soon obsessed him. He sent me messages saying he didn’t feel he got enough of my attention. You’ll see the emails and my responses. I’m not terribly proud of what I said back, but I found his messages belittling, insidious, sneering, and tinged with excess familiarity. I was much more sensitive then than I am now. I’ve dealt with it as best I can but it still haunts me like so many other memories that make their way into my own writing (which the following account is not.) We soon stopped talking.

As a result of this, Billy searched for my saxophone teacher (call him Mr Vain)’s IM account, and contacted him, as me, and confessed his love for Andy (I get to call him Andy now), as me. I see from Billy’s account that he tried to tell me this. He seemed proud of it, but I never received his boasts, as I’d already blocked him. I found out, utterly bemused, from Andy. He called me out of music class to discuss it. I asked what the name of the account was that sent the messages, and he told me it was [e-mail], which was Billy’s email address! Can’t say I was all that shocked who it was, but that he would go to that extent, and why? Because he thought I’d shunned him? Even if I had (I honestly might have… fine, I’m sure I did), wasn’t that a bit extreme?

Andy told me to drop it: he didn’t want any kind of associated scandal. It made perfect sense to me then, and I didn’t want Billy thinking he could get any attention for behaving as he did. I received many more lessons from Andy for months. I think this may have led Billy to believe we hadn’t noticed, that he’d gotten away with it. If we were ever waiting outside the same classroom, he’d try and strike up conversation with me.

-Think it’s about time to stop ignoring me?- he’d say, as if I was petty and sullen.

He’d shoot me the look of a wounded little puppy when I’d say- I never want to talk to you again.

Me and Andy never spoke of the whole ordeal afterwards, and we went back to laughing and being stupid together, and when lessons were over, I went on my merry way, no bad blood between us.

I changed schools in sixth year, and so did Billy. To the same school. I also heard he changed his desired career from Law to Medicine. I vaguely remembered telling him I wanted to study Medicine. I still believe the change of school and career to be a coincidence. Maybe I’m naive. It meant we were in all the same classes together in my final year. I was coerced by my parents to change school for just one year to avoid the previous school’s weirdness. I needed to be pushed to do this because I’d begrudgingly accepted the school I disliked: its entire dreary bubble was the extent I knew of life, and thought upon changing schools I’d only encounter the same crushing in-a-crowd loneliness. Not to say a new school did a one-eighty on this, but it helped some. But if avoiding weirdos was the game, Billy was the weirdest of the bunch. Here we were in all the same classes, and this time in a private school that cost about £ Fuckton. We saw each other at all the school parties. I knew full well he’d been badmouthing me to anyone from our last school that he stayed in contact with, and all his new friends at this new school. Still he’d push my shoulder to get my attention and say -Leo, Leo, Leo!

Maybe a year and a half later, Lapin found Andy’s Facebook and sent me the link. She told me that Andy had saxophone jam sessions in his flat with other former students who had stayed in Sadwhitepeopledrinking, where we grew up. This was mildly amusing at best. Whatever: I sent him a friend request. Back then, you could see when someone had rejected your request, which mine had been, because you could send someone a friend request again, which I did. I thought there was some mistake. No mistake: I wasn’t blocked (at least then: I was later) but twice rejected as a Facebook friend. Maybe I looked different in my picture or something. No; it couldn’t be about the Billy thing? I’d thought that was all cleared up! But what else would it be?

Lapin tested the waters when she ran into him in Sadwhitepeopledrinking by mentioning what I was up to. I think she told other students to do the same, and each time Andy would nod or meet the news with a blank face and change the subject.

It was strange, right? So strange in fact that every time I saw Lapin we talked about it! Me and Andy are back on speaking terms (more than that!) as you’ll see, but back then, when I saw him in the street he would walk past me without looking. Once me, Lapin and my then-husband were eating in a restaurant, and we saw Andy behind us. This was just stupid fun for us because Andy was acting ridiculous. But I remembered: years ago, when I still got lessons from him, he and his friends were having dinner there one time when I came in with my family, and we said hello and were cordial and it was just a barely-worth-remembering coincidence. Now that it happened again, maybe six years afterwards, I couldn’t help but think maybe he thought I went to that restaurant all the time; that I was waiting to see him again; that I might strike and say something weird. But what he did was weirder. While we thought he would exit without saying Hi, since I was there, he came up and said Hi to Lapin, and both of them caught up, while me and my then-husband sat there in silence! Andy said Bye to her, but scanned his eyes back and forth between her and me? And then he left? So this formed part of the story that me and Lapin would tell each other every time we met.

(Andy’s reading this over my shoulder from our bed, says he feels ashamed. He shouldn’t flatter himself! It was nothing but a curiosity for us at the time because it was so baselessly odd. As you can tell, I’ve forgiven him. But all these details are to come!)

At age twenty-five, I sat opposite Lapin and her husband in a bar, and we told him this story for the first time.

He said -Why didn’t your saxophone teacher follow that up properly? I would’ve done that immediately, because there’s no way I would want that coming back.

Only then, a decade after the false love confession, I realised how much guilt I had harboured over what happened, how much I blamed myself for it, when me and Andy became complicit in our badness in a way. I didn’t want the embarrassment of having to tell teachers I was gay, and have them, out of sheer perceived benevolence, perceived tolerance and perceived understanding, give me some gay teen hotline for troubled gay teens troubled by their gayness, when that had nothing to do with the issue at hand and would only frustrate me further with how incompetent I knew they were. Some of them out of painful ignorance would’ve thought me being gay and my saxophone teacher being [MAN] was case closed: I was guilty! It was me! You know? Or Billy was gay, I was gay, ergo Billy was definitely in love with me. Billy was the second confirmed homosexual not only in the entire school but in the school’s entire history. One other girl in the school said she had a gay uncle, and I only found that out because every time I passed her in the corridors she’d say -Haha gayboy- so I confronted her and asked why she didn’t like gay people. It was because she didn’t like her uncle obviously. If they had no Sexual Education RE: Why are a Gays?, they at least should’ve brushed up the statistics curriculum, as this was a case of statistics anxiety, not homophobia[1]. Homosexuals were to my secondary school as disabled people to North Korea: extrapolating from our local absence meant we didn’t exist at all. No skills existed to deal with us. Our absence, however suspicious it might seem to (again) the statistics-savvy, was simply accepted as a universal truth. You might say this is all pure speculation: I never got the chance to see how they would deal with it; that it’s pure extrapolation on my own part because I couldn’t possibly know the sexual orientation/confusion of every teenager in a secondary school. I’m quite sure of my hypothesis. That the case was not dealt with properly is sign enough to me. It was the prosperous Don’t ask, don’t tell philosophy in action: of course there were gay kids, but they weren’t admitting it in an environment where hypothetical homosexuality was so widely scorned, and still remains, to many, a way to question a man’s manliness. From my experience, it’s mostly heterosexual men who care about what it means to be a man and how manliness can be preserved. There exist heterosexual men who question other heterosexual men’s manliness by calling them homosexual, thus assigning them to a group who don’t care as often about what it means to be a man or have that questioned[2].

Andy was the responsible adult whose job it was in such instances to follow them up through the proper channels, whether or not he felt capable. With nothing to hide, no backlash, right? So I wondered if maybe there was something going on with him. The false confession of love he got from Billy, as me, could have revealed many true accounts of his affairs with other students. With no evidence, this is total speculation (Andy, now giving me a back rub, assures me it is), but what was I meant to believe, and why was I led to believe what I did?

Recently, I looked up Billy on Facebook. I couldn’t find him. Once he’d had two Facebook profiles, and tried to add me a number of times years after we went to school. Now he’d vanished from the internet. I asked around my friends: no news. Some of them hadn’t seen him after secondary school; some had gone to university with him then lost touch; some had tried to make contact and failed. He was gone. I couldn’t find this guy. So obsessed he was with social media in its primordial form; now that it was inescapable, he’d disappeared.

It was Lapin, equally curious, who managed to trawl out his old Bebo profile from the depths of internet search engines. Remember Bebo? I doubt Billy knew it was still active. He had very few friends, and everything he blogged was set to private. It was a convenient journalling tool, not meant for other eyes. Once I’d gained access to his account, by answering his transparent hint questions, I read all the entries within. I was shocked and horrified. I felt betrayed, guilty, ashamed, and the feeling I haven’t shaken in all these years: that in spite of how things turned out, I didn’t do enough for him. Then again, this is exactly the manipulative guilt-tripping that brings us back to the toxic, isn’t it? We each have our own examples.

I filled in the gaps in his story with some emails he sent me; some emails he sent others; some scraps of notes he wrote to himself and some emails later in life from his university account. Billy’s aunt kindly provided me with this information after she inherited his family home some time after his disappearance. She was also none the wiser about his location.

The last trace of Billy is an unpublished manuscript for a gay romance novel called Hang Out, finished in autumn 2014. Albeit a little formulaic, Hang Out is a funny and sensitive story about a straight university student who falls for a gay entrepreneur. There are certainly parallels between the plot and parts of Billy’s own life, most notably Billy’s relationship with art student Jamewald Pandrew in 2006. Present also is the trademark callousness of Billy’s love affairs as a PhD student. The manuscript of this novel is soon to be published also, for true Billy Medicine aficionados, but also for anyone who is interested in how people who exhibit high degrees of socially pathological behaviour are still able to produce works of beauty and display moments of real human understanding.

Everything I told you is given more depth in Billy’s account, where I observed how he felt in every situation. I can understand, but I can’t quite justify it: the lenses of the internally tortured absorb the external poorly, blocked by the mirror of the self. This can surely invite nothing but pity.

In the following text, my name, Leo Robertson, is the only one that isn’t altered. People, schools and cities, while all real, have been given different names: the foulest are Billy’s, the blandest my own. The school names are also colourfully adapted! Some of it I remember happening, some of it sounds too nuts to be true. I wasn’t there the whole time. I can’t say for sure.

I’ve left Billy alone to tell his own story. If I was there, you may find some editorial comments here and there to clarify [LR: Marked like this.] Billy’s is a heavy voice: pretentious, grandiose, conflicted, dark. His is a voice that rages and despairs. It is often hypocritical, wont to cloud itself from the truths of certain interactions; when I saw this happening, I leapt in to aid the reader in assessing the situation objectively. I’ve tried to be as non-intrusive as possible.

What I find most fascinating about Billy’s version of the story is how little it involves me: his obsessions and fixations sought out any object at all. I happened by. I don’t want to ruin all sequence of events, but I’m incredibly thankful he entered my life. Vindictive or not, he helped me and Andy realise our love for one another, so we can finally be together. However, even in writing this foreword, whether or not I was simply a convenient empathic object, I am for the first time dealing with how obsessed he became, and in the interest of full disclosure, I can’t say I hope he’ll ever come back. Even so, Billy’s legacy on this earth has been of enormous benefit to humanity. It was a great pleasure for me to trace the formulation of his divine creation through hints of daydreams and eureka moments in his journal, which is truly rich in Billy’s incipient genius. You are no doubt familiar with his work: it has to be the very reason this book is in your hands, or on your e-reader, laptop… maybe even right in your ears!

Dear reader, I hope you appreciate your time in Billy’s skin as much as I do. It is, at its core, the experience of a morphing melancholy love: one which is forbidden, unrequited, lost, but ultimately redeeming.

by

Reviews for Saxual Healing

[harrywhitewolf · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

If this book was featured on The Culture Show, no doubt we would have some heterosexual boffin talking about, and trying to relate to, “gay” “issues”, who would discuss Saxual Healing contextually with Oedipus, Oscar Wilde, Julian Clary and Russell T Davies. They’d argue it would be wrong to assign an LGBT genre tag to the book because it would be like listing an Anthony Burgess book as such. They’d say that whilst this story addresses many issues facing newly pubescent homosexual teenagers, it’s also irrelevant because the book deals with an array of subjects and purposes such as obsession, paranoia and self-reflection, despite them having started off with ‘the gay thing’.Luckily I don’t work for The Culture Show, so I won’t begin my review with any such nonsense. Damn.I mean, I wouldn’t begin a review with, “The protagonist is heterosexual. He thinks he always knew he was heterosexual, but it wasn’t until…”? But in all seriousness, why do I bring it up then? Well, because Saxual Healing really is a clever post-Cucumber sort of book and its homosexual themes mostly arise out of society’s and ‘straight’ characters’ insistence that ‘gay is a thing’. Like it or not, if you’re gay you have to deal with society’s reaction to that-whether it’s good or bad, it’s still a reaction being had in the first place.And as the author writes, “Gay people are just as culpable as anyone… especially the ones for whom "gay" means a set of behavioural patterns in addition to sexual preference.”Also: “- ‘When did you know you were gay?’ The more interesting question is ‘How’, but we start with ‘When’: the benchmark for knowing is non-existent and there’s no need to stick to one’s decision. ‘How’ was better: if they could find no similarities in the method to any of their own experiences, they could rest assured they were not gay. Is their logic.”The author’s annoyed with such things. Good.Anyway, my review would be much more like this:This darkly hilarious book is about vanity, validity and vileness; where obsession and perception collide in bloody and youthful orgasmic gloops.It sticks disgustingly witty descriptions up every orifice of thought and pushes every schoolboy’s jokes about sex into elaborate, almost Burroughsesue, scenes that will sometimes arouse you, usually entertain you and often disturb you.When I sit down to read a book that I know in advance I want to review (as I did with this), I can’t help but think of it in terms of star rating as I go. I don’t like this, but it would seem I’m stuck with it. All the way through, I was simultaneously loving it but at the same time feeling like there somehow needed to be more to it, and after reading the brilliant Rude Vile Pigs, I guess I felt slightly let down in parts; thinking- hm, it’s a 4 star (rather than 5) affair really. Then the march towards the finale came and it suddenly changed my opinion of every nag I’d had thus far. Wow! That’s some ending!Billy Medicine is a clever guy. This is a clever (almost Brett Easton Ellis type) book. If you like your humour to be darkly and intelligently funny, you should most certainly read Saxual Healing.Some more quotes I liked: “What the f*** kind of a name is Kenneth anyway? Starts off strong, kind of forgets its a word in the middle of itself and ends in a fucking lisp.”“It’s fun to waste young time. Youth isn’t wasted on the young; youth was made to be wasted.”