{"id":70471,"date":"2021-08-08T18:02:39","date_gmt":"2021-08-08T22:02:39","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.thebookbeat.com\/backroom\/?p=70471"},"modified":"2022-02-02T11:05:06","modified_gmt":"2022-02-02T16:05:06","slug":"i-arrogantly-recommend-by-tom-bowden-19","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.thebookbeat.com\/backroom\/2021\/08\/08\/i-arrogantly-recommend-by-tom-bowden-19\/","title":{"rendered":"i arrogantly recommend… by Tom Bowden"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>Chartwell Manor: A Memoir<\/a>
\nGlenn Head
\nFantagraphics<\/p>\n

The summer before my sophomore year in high school, I guess this would\u2019ve been 1975, the father of a friend of mine told that he was sending his son\u2014my friend\u2014to a military academy on the east coast. My friend was sitting with me in the car as his father made this announcement, along with his older brother, who, the father said, was \u201ctoo late to do anything about.\u201d Scott, my friend being sent to military school, said nothing. We piled out of the car and went in the movie theater, where Scott\u2019s dad dropped us off.<\/p>\n

Until a year or so before, we had been best friends, getting together for a couple of hours after school about three times a week. I had a piano and some plastic-lidded 5-lb Maxwell House cans that doubled as drums, played with by wooden sticks taken from a circus set I\u2019d had since age six. Scott had a kazoo. Together, we would write and tape record songs. We named ourselves \u201cVomit,\u201d and we recorded for \u201cToilet Records.\u201d Thematically, our songs were about bodily eruptions (such as vomiting), zits, and death. Typical 8th-grader boy stuff. The closest we ever came to writing a love song was a ditty titled \u201cI Need You (You Kneed Me).\u201d Although we never expanded lyrically, we added more instruments to our arsenal: an Emenee toy organ, an occasional borrow of child-size violin from Scott\u2019s younger sister, a Jew\u2019s harp, and nylon-stringed, $100 classical guitar.<\/p>\n

Apart from the bursting pustules in our lyrics, we were squeaky-clean nerds. We came from different neighborhoods, however, and Scott\u2019s there was tremendous pressure to take drugs, including pressure from his older brother. Scott succumbed, his A-average plummeted, and his parents decided military school was the answer to their troubled son\u2019s problems.<\/p>\n

All I know of him afterward was via retrospective hearsay, none of which I had any reason to doubt but nor could I confirm it: The summer after his junior year in high school, his parents decided to send him back for his senior year. Scott protested to extent of going on a hunger strike for two weeks, at which time his parents relented and allowed him to decide where he would spend his senior year: at the military academy or at the local high school.<\/p>\n

To their surprise, Scott asked to return to the military academy. Apparently, he tried to contact me during the senior year Christmas break. I was away on vacation with my parents, so I only later found out from other friends he had met with that he was trying to find me.<\/p>\n

Anyhow, shortly after returning to the military school after the new year, he ran away, only to be found in Florida two weeks later by a hired detective. Rather than have Scott brought back home to talk things over, his parents returned him straight to the academy. Once back, he filched some cyanide from the science lab and took it. Rumor says that he was part of a suicide pact made with three other students, and that Scott was the only one to go through with it.<\/p>\n

His was the first funeral I attended, and it was the first for which I served as pallbearer. Because he had attended a military school, his parents had his coffin draped with a U.S. flag.<\/p>\n

When Glenn Head was 13, his parents decided to send him to a small, private school to repeat the 7th grade. Over the years, Head had become increasingly distracted from school tasks and he was just eking by scholastically. Discipline was needed, and his parents chose to send Glenn to a boarding school for \u201ctroubled boys\u201d (mostly), ages 5 to 15\u2014usually boys from wealthy families, since tuition was $10K\u2014a hefty sum in the early 1970s.<\/p>\n

Every boy\u2019s nightmare comes true in this book: The headmaster (who demands to be addressed as \u201cSir\u201d) spanks, paddles, canes, beats, molests, and fellates the boys. (Who gets what is, as is usually the case in these situations, purely arbitrary.) The boys are trapped in a molester\u2019s dream scenario: youth\u2014troubled, confused, rejected at home\u2014given unstinting attention and emotional manipulation that combines the shock of violence with the comfort of hugs and loving coos. This, at age 13.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s the first part of the book. The second part deals with the after-effects of those years. The after-effects, until age 30, include seemingly non-stop drinking binges, porn\/sexshop\/strip club binges, and\u2014surprise!\u2014difficulty maintaining relationships. Bonus points: Semi-estrangement from his parents, who turn a deaf ear to their responsibility for submitting their son to the abuses of the school. (The parents already seem to know or intuit that \u201cSir,\u201d a tawny ex-Brit in his 40s, is abusive, and it\u2019s nothing they care to give much thought to.) Head and I are, I would guess, within a year of each other\u2019s age. Our parents are of a generation that says, \u201cDeal with it. It happened; you can\u2019t change anything. Move on,\u201d while remaining blinkered to what that mindset has done to themselves, let alone to their children and grandchildren, while the effects of their decisions ripple on throughout the generations.<\/p>\n

The indifference and willful obliviousness to molestation and other forms of abuse of one\u2019s own child and of one\u2019s own friend only worsen the emotional realm of the abused: To hear laughter as response to physical violation is a second violation of a child\u2019s fundamental trust in the world. Head, in later years, meets up with some of his old school pals from Chatwell Manor, after Lynch, the headmaster, has been thrown in jail for pedophilia. Head gives up drinking at age 30, joining AA, but certain unhealthy sexual obsessions remain. Knowing how fucked-up he is as a direct result of that one year, he\u2019s curious to see what\u2019s happened to them.<\/p>\n

None of the other three seemed to have made much of their lives: drunk, in jail, unemployed, etc. One is an especial car-wreck: drunk, missing a front tooth, part-time carpenter. That\u2019s the first part. Part two: admits to enjoying Sir\u2019s spankings and blow jobs. Part three: Hints that he\u2019s seriously looked into the cost of having Sir killed by professionals. This is the notion of \u201cresilience\u201d of our parents\u2019 generation.<\/p>\n

Throughout Head\u2019s memoir, at different years in his adult life, we see an image of Lynch on his drawing board, representing Head\u2019s different attempts over the decades to confront his fears and their source. Each time results in emotional tailspin, almost always self-destructive. In Chartwell Manor, Head seems to have finally purged himself of the evil spirit that plagued him for 50 years.<\/p>\n

I don\u2019t know if my friend Scott endured sexual abuse at the so-called academy he attended. I do know that he felt isolated from anybody who cared and was willing to do anything positive to help him. He\u2019s dead, and I\u2019m his parents\u2019 collateral damage.<\/p>\n

Highly recommended.
\n