Pricks to the price of loyalty

"He was a man of small stature, with hair blanched rather by suffering and sorrow than by age." -- Alexandre Dumas, The Count of Monte Cristo, digital location 2116

A short message thread with John Murphy posed an interrogative "Have you heard of Tony Stiles?" The apparently attractive young man is looking for acolytes to join in Tony's campaign against human trafficking, a rather noble, if daunting sentiment. Mr. Murphy benefits from the price of loyalty, and indicated Mr. Stiles had the humane decency most of us profess to have, as altruism is deemed beneficial. Murphy followed me a short time, then ceased, my failure to hold his interest a metric of some sort, perhaps that I alternately flirt with libertarian ideas, then turn and critique them, or maybe I'm just a downer, and he is a more upbeat promoter for his employer, one who hasn't eviscerated him. 

Such evisceration, a knife to the heart carried as an entrapment, taken to its logical conclusion, often leads to the emotional implosion of Kenneth Halliwell, the prototype of homosexual rage against itself. Prick Up Your Ears was about abandonment against the growth of a dead playwright's horizon. Fusing that with an agenda to send a message to reform a paradigm leads to the same interior crawlspace. If the inability to let go, and the blunt force trauma of destitution moves in the direction of vengeance, the trigger for it eliminated, there is an emotional recoil against the punishment inflicted, and escaping Halliwell's fate becomes an odds game: accepting a bad act that removes you from your innocence, however inflicted with injustice, and then beating the law, which is achievable, but rarely successful.

The emotional investment of a good lieutenant is not the same as a homoerotic set of coordinates exposed and deemed unacceptable, although emotional fraying can conflate the two, but I was John Murphy 23 years ago, motivated by a leadership I wanted to promote, to elevate, to see it as a public conduit, and misjudged that of which it was capable. Not that the scar remains fresh, nor even palpable, as the 23 years have beaten against the brute strength, now swimming with oblivion, waiting to see if there is enough left for the veracity of vindication, or if I fade past midnight like so many quadriplegics looking at a sixtieth decade like a death warrant, or a veritable concentration camp.

Come spring I need to give my notice, another daunting endeavor, but a necessary therapeutic tool; I'll need to trust someone's transitory generosity on the heels of this event. We'll see, but I couldn't give Mr. Styles the personal loyalty which she once had at her disposal. The price of grief, and blow after blow after blow. Impotent even to support my immediate family.