Strangers - Cassidy Rivers - 1

The Actors: Cassidy

Cassidy Rivers was once considered not ugly, almost attractive even, back in his days in secondary school. He didn’t take life seriously back then, and life didn’t take him seriously either. That was fine for the both of them. Like most disaffected youth his age, he rarely thought of the future, and when he did, it was that he never wanted to live past 40, and be a washed out sick old man. No, he wanted to have the physical ability to control his drugged up, useless life.

Back then he was a lithe character. His deep addiction to cigarettes did for him what it does for super-models, and raspy, wrinkly, skinny trailer trash alike. It killed his appetite most of the time. When he did have an appetite, there usually wasn’t enough food in the house anyway. But the body of a boy is strong, especially at that age. It is at that pristine time of puberty, when a boy is in between the stages of youth and man, that he is most resistant, most immortal. However he taxed his body, Cassidy would not feel the effects of it until much later in life. Ah youth, if only they never got old, they would never die.

As a result, he was skinny, but sturdy. His time away from the other world of friends, marijuana, and loitering consisted of work as a farm-hand, which kept his young muscles strong enough to make him worthy of the occasional hook-up by a girl whose self-esteem was lacking at the time. He was not the most powerful or most able boy in the school, but he possessed what it took to get the job done. Who cares, girls don’t like men with too many muscles anyway.

He was naturally tall, even for a boy of 16, and in spite of his otherwise lackadaisical lifestyle, he never slouched. It was not that he possessed any sort of self respecting form of pride that would make him loathe to diminish his presence in front of others. His motives for an up-right posture were purely for pleasure. He liked being able to see the tops of other people’s heads.

While not as difficult as other regions of the body, for most people it is fairly difficult to get a good picture of what one looks like from the top of their head. Most people aren’t even concerned enough to wonder what is occurring where hair follicles begin to swirl around the head unless they have lice or are lacking said follicles. It is quite possibly, one of the least paid attention to parts on the human body.

At his height, Cassidy had the ability, no, he had the power, to see everyday what you or I could care less about. He could know a part of you better than you ever will know, unless you spend hours alone with yourself and a few mirrors. He was able to identify types of people by the tops of their heads, but more importantly, he was able to take away their faces from his mind. Everyone was a stupid drone, shuffling to class, being hustled around a loop in gym class. If he squinted his eyes his fellow classmates would just blur together as one, huge mass, as unimportant to him as the tops of their heads were to them.

One of his favorite pastimes was to loiter in an abandoned stable nearby the school with a couple of friends, slowly smoking pot, and letting the drug seep into his blood like the light of the sun seeped through the cracks of the boarded up building. The boys didn’t care that this stable was once the home of Darcy, a fine young stallion that once had the honor to have drunk from the same water trough as Phar Lap, winner of the 1930 Melbourne Cup. They didn’t consider the excitement, even, that surrounded the building of the stable back in the late 1800s. As the boys puffed away the last class of the day those afternoons in the disheveled piles of hay and straw, the only time the existence of the stable would even enter their consciousnesses was during the rare occasion that some of the dry rotted wood would finally give way to age and gravity,

They would then make their way to the doors of the school, and he would wait for the bell to ring. Back straight up against the school wall, he would marvel as the throngs of students, scalps blending in to form a find quilt of hair, would rush to leave the school, leave the insignificant farm of young minds, and return to their own personal prisons.

Cassidy never told his friends the truth about why he wanted to return to school after cutting the last class. He told them it was to get the thrill of the risk of being caught. None of his friends could appreciate the beauty of the faceless, pathetic masses. Oh how he loathed pathetic people who lived as sheep.

Oh how he loved to watch with steaming contempt as they trudged along, rain or shine. How boring they were, how low and unenlightened. They were foolish and childish because they thought things mattered. They thought about the future, they thought about careers, they thought about the husbands and wives, family and children, that they might have one day. How stupid. They didn’t understand nothingness. They didn’t understand that the only thing that mattered was the nothingness what would consume everyone in the end. They didn’t understand that nothing mattered more than anything else.

At the age of 14 in his family’s outback Australian ranch he had witnessed the final beating his mother would ever accept from his step-father. He was never to hear the tapping of her heals on the hard wood floor again, nor her desperate, pleading, yet completely romantically infatuated voice.

Until that point, every slap to her face was mixed with both pain, and the joy at finally reestablishing physical contact with her otherwise distant husband. His abusive attention to her was attention nonetheless.

She walked out that day, a freer woman than there has ever been. She cut her ties and she never returned.

Cassidy never found out why she chose that day to leave. Why that day, and not the day before, or the day after. If something snapped, if the final straw was drawn, it was unclear to all but Flora Rivers. It was said she moved to America, to Philadelphia, where she found another husband, an upright, Victorian man of Middle American, an HR manager by the name of Dewey. She popped out a couple of kids for him and forgot all about her life in Australia.

He also didn’t remember much about what else happened that night. It had to be a completely ordinary night. Finished with the day’s farm work, he would come home to that creaky old house. His step-father would be drunk by then, and sunk deep into the chair next to the TV that was brand new and fashionable in the 1950s.

His mother would have told him to wash up before dinner, hastily trying to prove that she could be a decent housewife, and prove that she had skill in the apparently complex science of cooking. More often than not potatoes were over-boiled, chicken was burnt black, and vegetables were soggy or far chewier than edible food was ever meant to be.

Within the half-hour Cassidy would have dedicated his body to a shower, his step-father would have migrated to the unkempt kitchen, and some type of argument would have occurred. For the most part, Mr. Rivers tried to keep the beatings of his wife an affair away from the children, but he wasn’t always successful. When he failed to hide his miserable out lashings, he simply covered this remorse with contempt for the brats that interrupted him.

That night was not the first night then Mrs. Rivers had left the house in tears. To Cassidy and his older half-sister, Jill, nothing indicated that it would be the last either. However, as days turned into weeks, three people who otherwise have little connection to each other came to the realization that the one person who held them together was gone.

Within months superficial ties disintegrated into nothingness. Jill moved to Melbourne with her boyfriend, a strapping young lad who was already beginning to show a penchant for abuse. She called on the obligatory Christmas and Easter, but otherwise left Cassidy’s life for good. And so Cassidy was left on his own with his step-father.

Both of them resigned themselves to an awkward co-existence of avoiding while being dependant on each other. Cassidy was unable to support himself at that age, even if he had been born a more responsible person. There was no escape from that dreary, musky house, and no refuge in either his mother or his sister. Even if there had been, at that age Cassidy lacked the will to change his circumstances. With his step-father or on his own, it didn’t really matter. After he was introduced to his new best friend, Marijuana, his life fit snuggly into that “whatever, fuck everything” mentality that so many young men and women around the world have come to enjoy. So long as he could remain high most of his life, who cared if the old drunk bat was flapping around, crashing into walls. It mattered just about as much as everything else did.

The esteemed Mr. Rivers, on the other hand, did more than lack any similar biology with the young man who inhabited his ranch. He also had a severely different personality. Perhaps even that day, as his sobbing wife click-clacked her way out of his life, and into the great beyond, he did not know it. Most likely even in the first few days that followed, he still did not know it. Maybe he was simply used to her presence. Maybe the ritual beatings had calmed some primordial fear of rejection. Perhaps they bolstered his confidence of his possession of the former Mrs. Rivers.

Regardless of what her presence meant in the past, her absence destroyed what was already in a man broken by alcohol, addiction, and life in general. He was consumed by loneliness that even the bottle couldn’t cure. As much as he loathed seeing the parasite Cassidy had become to him, he feared even more an empty house. When Cassidy did finally leave, not even 24 hours passed before Mr. Rivers relieved all of his miseries via a Smith and Wesson Model 36 revolver.

When he escaped Ranch Rivers, Cassidy was 23 and the world was changing in ways that wouldn’t hit rural Australia for years. The 1980s were in full swing and not since Marco Polo was the eastern hemisphere as commercially important to the world as it was becoming now. Japan and the Asian Tigers were leading the way in shifting the focus from the west, and Australia too was benefiting from increased trade and an easy supply of cheap goods. Increased mechanization of agriculture also meant that the young Mr. Rivers was not the only former farm boy leaving his life behind for the big city.

Cassidy moved into a new world when he rented that small, entirely over priced, shack of an apartment in Melbourne. Modern living may have meant he has hot water at his fingertips in a moment’s notice, but it also meant living like a sardine that managed to fit a toilet, bed and kitchen sink in one can. After finding work in construction in the rapidly growing business of building life-sized monopoly pieces, Cassidy took the lease with some self-goading.

“The world is my abode. My apartment is just my bedroom.” he once commented to a fellow countryside transplant turned laborer, with a grin. That coworker ultimately couldn’t put the spin on his life Cassidy did, and in longing for wide open pastures, and a house one can walk through in more than 5 steps, ultimately abandoned his new life.

Perhaps the years of maintaining a nearly consistent high off marijuana finally burned a hole in his head, (he still enjoyed a more than occasional toke) but Cassidy felt no discontent about his housing situation and his strenuous, grunt work. To ask him if he was a happy man (and have him respond in earnest) might have set him off balance, forcing him to reevaluate his life, his mother, his future, and all those mops of hair in-between. This was something he was completely uninterested in doing. Life is unpredictable, changes in a moment. What is the use in looking at the path that got you there? Far more important to take life as it comes.

As a side effect to the Asian Miracle, xenophobic Australia was subjected to a new threat for the first time since English prisoners made the continent their new home: foreigners who looked funny. They came mostly as businessmen, but familiar American and European tourist faces slowly but surely were being subsidized by the faces of the new Japanese rich. And with them came their strange language, and their strange food, and strange mannerisms.

Unlike many of his peers, particularly those in parliament, Cassidy rather liked these new comers. They mostly avoided eye contact with him, they didn’t wear those god-awful Hawaiian t-shirts, shorts and sandals, they didn’t find his “accent” cute and he didn’t find their “accent” obnoxious. Most importantly, they were short and had nice, uniform hair. It was mesmerizing to look at a tour group.