The Art of Breathing Underwater

Chapter 8

On the Road was the first book I read that profoundly altered my perspective on life. Jack Kerouac's breathless, frenetic, poetic prose opened my eyes to the exotic possibilities of this world. A plane of existence beyond achieving top grades, going to college, working in an office, getting married, having two kids, and the mortgaged future that my parents had mapped out for me.

On the Road spoke to me on many levels. The protagonist was a young man searching for some kind of meaning in his life. Like Kerouac, I, too, came from a strong Catholic background. The older I'd gotten, the harder it had become to reconcile this deeply instilled faith with my current life. In part three, when the narrator, Sal Paradise, is depressed and lonesome, I recognised echoes of my bleak moods. It was a revelation to read about somebody else going through a similar experience to me.

Kerouac became the launchpad that propelled me into the stratosphere of literature. My mind opened to Hemingway and Miller, writers eschewing traditional forms to provide the reader with valuable insights into this crazy experience we call life.

I closed the cover on The Sun Always Rises and set it aside on the nightstand. A marvellous read. One thing bothered me, though, an exchange where the n-word got used multiple times. You could argue Hemingway was staying true to the characters, but not once did they use words like fuck and shit, equally commonplace as racism. It angered me to imagine what Robbie must have felt reading those lines—I knew he had; it was his well-thumbed paperback I'd read.

Each generation applauds itself for the progress it's made. But had anything fundamentally changed? I've never watched Reservoir Dogs in Robbie's company because of the number of times white characters spew that same racial epithet. Art is allegedly for the enlightened and the civilized. If the educated deem this acceptable, what chance do the uneducated have?

I got off the bed and fed my fish. Fletcher; my six-inch convict cichlid. I named him after the prisoner in the show, Porridge. Haunched down before the thick glass, admiring his vivid vertical black stripes as he darted from below the driftwood to devour the floating flakes. Appetite sated, he swam through the slow current, before disappearing behind a clump of Java ferns, sealed in his micro-biosphere.

Restless, I took to pacing around the box room. A proper walk would do the trick, except I had a headache the size of Ireland after last night's exertions. Boredom corroding my cognitive faculties, I needed to engage my senses.

I returned to the plywood bookshelf, running my fingertips across the battered book spines, pausing at a title before moving on, unable to make a clear decision. Almost at the point of being driven to distraction, my finger stopped on Naked Lunch.

I had only recently become familiar with the term, homo-erotic. Reviews for Interview with the Vampire—a movie I had gone to see in the cinema with Robbie and loved, so much so I bought the novel a week later—contained some reference to the film's homo-erotic undertones. If Anne Rice's handsome, sexually ambiguous bloodsuckers afforded me an oblique glimpse of gay sexuality, William Burrough's Naked Lunch ripped down the curtains and shone a spotlight on the subject.

Although the non-linear, hallucinatory narrative left me somewhat perplexed, there was nothing cryptic about the numerous, often graphic depictions of gay encounters. The first time I came across one of those explicit passages, a red hot surge of embarrassment shot through me, setting my cheeks afire. I let the book slip from my grasp. What the hell would the lads think? Or, Nicky? Or my god-fearing parents?

Somehow, it didn't matter. I needed to read more.

Propped by pillows, I sat in my bed holding the book up with trembling hands. Eyes devouring every word on the page, nourishing the mysterious desire bubbling up inside, and that's when the blood in my body rushed southwards.