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By Root 334 0

less turbulent but less obvious. He held it all in, put a stern face on it, not brave exactly, just expressionless, hard, what he called ‘my stay-the-fuck-away-from-me face’. The one he would wear for almost all of the next twenty years. ‘It was very confusing for me, as a kid, to not know what’s going on,’ he would later say. Coming home from school some days to find his father’s things missing – retrieved by Virgil while the kids were out of the house so as to cause as little disruption as possible – didn’t soften the blow, only sharpened the pain and sense of betrayal. ‘It was kind of hidden. That’s a big character defect that I still carry – I think everyone’s hiding something from me.’

At school, before his father had left, James told me, he had been ‘a pretty average student. Pretty quiet, pretty reserved, just kind of get it done and then go home and, you know, have fun and play, do whatever.’ A lover of sports, the only things that held him back, he said, were the consequences of his parents’ strict adherence to the Christian Science belief system. A misnomer, in that Christian Science forbids its followers any sort of practical engagement with science, including, most distressingly, modern medicine, whether that be taking aspirin for a headache or receiving hospital treatment for fatal accidents or illnesses. One of those nouveau American religions that had sprung up in the nineteenth century, that no other people on Earth would have taken seriously, it still holds huge sway in certain sections of mainly working-class US society. James still sighs heavily when asked to talk about it. ‘It didn’t impact on the school,’ he told me. ‘It wasn’t like they had their own schooling or like going to a Catholic school. It certainly did affect me, though. It affected me more than my sister and my brothers, where I…I don’t know, I think I took it a little more personally.’ He paused, considered his words. ‘Our parents didn’t take us to the doctor. We were basically relying on the spiritual power of the religion to heal us or to shield us from being sick or injured. And so at school [because] that’s what my parents requested, I wasn’t allowed to sit through health class, to learn about the body, to learn about illnesses and things like that. And, say, you know, I’m trying out for the football team, you have to get a physical, to get a doctor’s note…I’d have to go and explain to the coach that, hey, our religion says this. So I felt really like an outcast…alienated. Kids would laugh about it and I took it personally and some of the more, I think, traumatic stuff for me was [when] health class would begin, I would be standing in the hallway, which was basically a form of punishment in other aspects. Hey, you’ve been bad, you’ve got to go to the Principal’s office or you stand out in front of the class. So everyone who walked by would look at me like I’d been some criminal of sorts, you know?’

It was tough but, he suggests, it also ‘helped mould who I was, you know?’ Not that James saw it that way at the time. ‘When you’re young you want to be like everyone else, you don’t want to be unique. But I see the uniqueness in it now and it’s helped me to, uh, you know, accept and embrace the uniqueness of me.’ It was those difficult early experiences of always being the odd man out at school, James now believes, that nurtured his ability to not run with the pack, to always stand just a little bit apart from the rest of the gang. ‘It helped me carve my own path, and even the spiritual part of it; when you’re a kid you can’t really grasp the concept of spirituality. It was a very adult type of concept and for me not going to the doctor was strange. All I saw was the people in the church that had broken bones and they were healing wrong – it didn’t make any sense to me. So when I was saying these things to the [sports] coaches or teachers I was just speaking for my parents, I wasn’t really speaking for myself, so it was a kind of a sell-out thing, which I really never wanted to do again. But also it helped me embrace the spiritual concept