Developing My Tools
We are at station 6: The World (Equator, Capricorn, Cancer, Ozone = Emotional Climate)
Title: Developing My Tools
Object: Money
12 associations
- Bank robbery
- Counterculture
- Belief
- Ghosts
- Self help
- Secret
- No one cares
- Justice
- Vulnerable
- Society
- Suffering with mental health issues
- Poverty
In 1975 I do a bank robbery. I don’t have a gun. I have a really quick mind. Ivan has gone back to Pauline again. I have no money. I have £30 in the bank. This is to pay my rent which is £10, and buy shit, some bills, shopping etc. I have to get him back. So, in the bank I work out, while in my queue, if I go straight to the next queue, and then the next queue, there will not be enough time for them to work out I am taking out the same money. Nothing is digital back then.
I hold my nerve. It is exhilarating. I am living in this fantasy world, on my own. The world that best suits me. I am Bonne and Clyde. Except I only have Bonnie. Me. I arrive at the bank teller. Take out £25, to not raise suspicion by emptying my bank account. Then I join the next queue. Then the next queue. I have £75. And my little mind, my little 16-year-old juvenile mind, says if I do up our room, it is my belief he will be happy. So, I go to the décor shop on the end of the next block, and I buy wallpaper, blue, I don’t know why I don’t just buy paint, and I buy white with purple paisley matching curtains and a bedspread. It takes me all weekend. I have never decorated before. I have to patch the top. I cut the wallpaper too short. It works. The room, our room, looks homely. The landlord and landlady came to pay their respects. They love it. Ivan is impressed. He loves the steak and the wine. And the cash to feed the bookies, I drip feed him. Like I am a millionaire.
2012 — 2015, I do a series of bank robberies. I have a new love. My writing. I want to spend time with my writing. And my tools. My tools. I just want to develop my tools. Every day. Every day I do a new mind-map. I don’t know what I am looking for. Then in 2012, I fall on it. I’ve tried 12 stations; cos I have 12-words. But it is too hard to draw and too hard to control. It comes out all by itself: there are 8 stations. The mind-map even tells me what each station is called and what each symbol represents. I continue transferring one credit card to another credit card. I am £25,000 in debt. Unable to sleep. But closer, closer, closer every week. To what I don’t know. I just know. What do I know?
I am brought up in the 1970s counterculture. I am educated by Badlands. Where your lover comes in and shoots your dad, the fuckers been asking for it. And you go on the run, deeply in love, and when the cops catch up with you it was all worth it. They are the heroes. Martin Sheen and Sissy Spacek are the fucking heroes in a world that doesn’t want them. No one cares. That leaves them vulnerable. That leaves them defenceless in a world of poverty. What option do they have but to rob banks? They are delivering justice.
I very much have this inclination, this belief in my heart, when I enter my first prison. To do a workshop. There but for the grace of God. I’m one of them. Not one of these who are feeding off them. You know me and who-uses-who to pay a mortgage. I think I only have this way in; these nice white women carrying baskets of bread are my only way in. Not into the prison. Who the fuck wants to go to prison? To the art world. I have to allow them to assign me the jobs they can’t do. Or so I think. But always the revolutionary, I can’t allow these girls, these women, these prisoners, not to see me as them. We laugh. We cry. We tell each other real stories. This is my superpower. We tell each other real stories. Cos, I tell my real story first. I’m no better than you. I’ve got an Ivan. Aren’t we always in prison for an unruly heart? We laugh. We cry. The nice white women want them to colour with crayons. No. We’re gonna write a play. And we’re gonna have actors from York Playhouse do our play. There are rules. I fucking love this moment. No swearing. You know, you instantly know what happens. The first words out of the real actor who we have directed is… is… is ‘FUCK YOU.’ It gets a round of applause from our 300 minimum-security prisoners. It gets a standing ovation round of applause. I remain sitting. So does the guvnor. Sat next to me in our matching thrones. If looks could kill. I look back square in her eye. Smiling ear — ear. The audience settles back down to the harrowing story, a vulnerable woman, like us, is living on stage. Maybe, the guvnor does too. But she has a mortgage. Goes a long way to stemming her pain. Or does it?
Peterborough Prison is maximum-security. You have to give your passport in. Go through a vacuum door that closes behind you before the other one opens. I’ve been up all night— the breadbasket carrying white women in their crinolines are insanely refusing to believe who I am, and are expecting, yet again, the colouring books with the colouring pencils to keep these ferocious inmates tranquillised — I have been formulating a plan. I’m laughing. I always have a plan. They don’t get a word in edgeways. I have to become the boss immediately. ‘Get in a circle. I mean please form a circle.’ My pretence at politeness makes the inmates laugh. They get in a circle. ‘I want you to tell me something you can’t live without. It has to be an object. Mine are my tweezers.’ They do the ‘I can’t miss’. But I won’t move on till they tell me. When they tell me, I give each a piece of paper and a pen. I give one to each breadbasket carrying white woman, who also tell us their object. And the actors who have just staged Black Crows: my play about Ivan and Pauline and me and his mum. Ivan is played by a puppet. A marionette. Pauline cuts his strings to kill him. This is why the inmates trust me. Write down your object. Below it, write down something that makes you angry. The guards want to kill me. I am not supposed to mention anger, or their outside family. Turns out what makes them angry is not being able to talk about their family. I give the guards paper too. ‘You have to join in. They are vulnerable now. You have to make yourself vulnerable too. What is your object?’ You know the drill. What makes them angry is their title. They write 12 associations. They have 20 minutes to write about what makes them angry. They have to include the object they can’t live without, and their 12 associations, under their title.
There are 40 people. I make them into 8 theatre companies. Each has someone who knows what they are doing. Like me, the director, one of the 3 actors, one of the Clean Break white women who have now put down their breadbaskets. Each theatre company has to find a place in this huge gym to read their 12-word narrative to each other. Then democratically decide which they are going to dramatise. Sounds impossible, doesn't it? Sounds like, I couldn’t walk into a room where 60 mins max ago there are breadbasket totting white women in crinolines, who historically bully the 3 actors, cos they’re not white, who also bully the 30 inmates, cos their inmates, who also bully the 3 guards cos they’re Animal Farm dogs and no longer human. But here they are: frenetic, busy, absorbed; absolving each other of the sin of not listening, not caring; here all 40 are, caring for each other; and yeah, they do democratically decide whose story is gonna be dramatised; and who is playing who; and how to stage it; and who is writing what; and who can look around the room for props. And after the most disgusting mincemeat lunch I have ever eaten, we reconvene to do our sharing. The top dog who has seen her arse all morning cos she is not in charge has changed her tune and goes round the room gathering an introduction for each play. She is our MC. She’s making herself vulnerable too. Cos if she ain’t good she’s fucked. In our world, in our society, in the world of us who suffer with mental health issues cos of our extreme vulnerability ignited by the extreme poverty of care, respect is everything. Given, or withheld.
The daylong workshop is a fucking sensation. Every playlet is the best thing I have ever seen. I have to give extra points to the 2 Thai drug mules who don’t speak a word of English. They have made a courtroom from chairs. The judge’s chair is a single high column. Held in place by the jurors’ chairs who are not as high. But higher than the two chairs thrown on their side on the floor. We all know what it means. Like we all know what is going on though we don’t speak a word of Thai, as each Thai lady condemns or pleadss for the unfortunate chairs.
The final circle gathers itself. And is calm. The guard who was most against me is the one who walks towards me. She hugs me. We are all hugging now. I feel like Jesus. Like Clint Eastwood leaving the town painted red in High Plains Drifter as my horse saunters to Peterborough Train Station. I’m not stupid enough to think my tools dismantled their master’s house. But I’m certain, I know, collectively, we:
Leave the master's house for a few hours.
We are in a yellow field in a different dimension.
A field of corn that gives shade.
That gives sustenance.
A field in which we feel safe.
A field in which we bury some ghosts.
After they play— after our ghosts play together.
In our yellow field, listening to the women we are hugging now, is our self help.