Not that I was a faggot, fairy, or pansy, of course. Or that I was not, for that matter. Where, with what, or to whom I was putting it was simply irrelevant. George, or Rick as he was then known, was just trying to distract attention from what I really was, which was the only person in Chicago who knew who he was.
It was 1951. Supposedly George had been dead for a year, so it wasn’t surprising he’d try to make me look like a freak. Not that these days we consider faggots to be freaks, or even faggots. But in those days faggotizing someone was a pretty good way to hurt their credibility.
There could have been another reason, of course. His last English wife later married a homosexual; maybe it wasn’t the first time she’d done that.
I mean, have you seen the pictures of her? – Sonia Brownell, I mean, aka Sonia Blair, aka Sonia Orwell. I have. If I’d been married to her I wouldn’t have been faking my death and heading off to America to live as Rick Blair for any reason as yet known to mankind.
I imagine that seemed like a masterstroke to George, Americanizing his real name as Rick Blair. I’m sure he thought that Americans were too illiterate to know who George Orwell was, let alone to know that his real name was Eric Blair. And his attempts to disguise himself were pretty half-hearted. His new accent was good, but pretty well all he'd done to alter his physical appearance was get rid of that fungus on his upper lip which stood in for a moustache and get a decent haircut in place of that British one he has in all his pictures, the one that looks like a johnny-mop.
Or maybe he was just brilliant. If he’d gone out of his way to disguise himself people might have been more suspicious. In those days wearing a beard, for example, was pretty well advertising that you were an egghead and a Red.
Which was what he was, of course. That hadn’t changed. And here he was in disguise, in America, masquerading as a loyal American. In those days people were finding Reds under every bed, so I wasn’t surprised to find one competing in my bowling league. Try telling that to the FBI, though.
”I wouldn’t put anything past a Red, of course,” one of their agents said, obviously trying to humor me, “and there is a sort of resemblance, but we’re talking about one of the best amateur bowlers in Chicago. How did he get so good in two years? George Orwell officially died in ’50, and Rick Blair won his first tournament in ’52. And his neighbours say he’s been living here since ’47.”
Well, someone named Rick Blair has been living here since ’47, anyway, probably someone who looked like George Orwell. Perhaps someone the Reds had got up to look like George Orwell. Or like someone who looked somewhat like George Orwell, after which they worked on Orwell to get him to look somewhat like what he’d looked like before. That wouldn’t have been hard for them to do, given that the Russian state controlled the medical profession, which meant they controlled the plastic surgeons.
They didn’t take me seriously at the papers, either. They claimed to have checked him out thoroughly, but given the number of Reds in the newspaper business they’d claim that whether they’d checked him out or not, wouldn’t they?
He wasn’t that great a bowler, either. He knocked me out of that tournament in ’52 with some of the cheesiest strikes I’ve ever seen. The ball only found the pocket about once in every six frames, but the pins kept falling down. Don’t tell me there’s nothing funny about that. Don’t tell me the Reds couldn’t have installed radio-controlled tipping devices in those pins to make them fall over even when he threw one in the gutter. Fortunately for them he at least could manage to keep the ball in the alley. But that was pretty well it. There was hardly any spin on his ball. It curved like a girl’s. If he’d been one of the best women’s bowlers in Chicago I wouldn’t have been suspicious, because that’s how well he bowled. That’s pretty fair bowling, sure, but you don’t win men’s tournaments with it.
Anyway, what little he knew about bowling he’d learned from me. Call me naive, if you want, and why shouldn’t you want to? I am naive, I admit it. I had this brilliant idea that I'd show him how if he just applied himself to becoming a good bowler he could perfect his game and achieve some success as an individual, and that would show him the hollowness of the communalist claptrap with which his commie head was infested. I gave him a lot of valuable tips, man – he never had a better coach than me. And when won his first tournament, did he thank me? No. When he won other tournaments, did he thank me? No. When he won the big tournament in ’54 and I ran over to congratulate him, did he finally thank me, then? No – he said “Get away from me, you fucking faggot.”
Which was when I stopped being naive. The scales fell from my eyes. I saw that once a commie, always a commie. Even his own individual accomplishments had failed to get him to see the emptiness of his worship of the great god Proletariat. I should have known. My brother-in-law was a Baptist, and nothing would make him see reason, either.
But as I said, the FBI was no use. They treated me as if I was some kind of nut. Richard Nixon tells them about spies passing secret messages along in pumpkins, him they believe. I identify a red hot obvious Communist mole underground in the second largest city in America, they act as if they’re being nice to some kind of raving crackpot.
Okay, I’m no more sane than the next guy. We all have our quirks. Maybe being able to spot the rotten apple in the barrel is a quirky ability. Maybe not everyone has it. But if most people don’t have it don’t you think they’d show some respect for someone who does?.
And so our lives diverged. The struggle to unmask this threat to our country had cut into my practice time, and by ’58 I was bowling in fucking industrial leagues. Orwell, of course, went on to set a record (since surpassed) for high triple in a state elimination series for the American Bowling Congress. A commie spy ends up being recognized by the American Bowling Congress! Well, it’s not like I didn’t warn them. I did my bit.
I did my bit and so did thousands if not millions of others, and what did we get for it? Well, back then we got called witch hunters and Red-baiters, and we got to watch as the witch protectors and Red-praisers set up a society in which people like Rick Blair are heroes and every marginalized person thinks he has a right to run the country. The hypocrisy makes me sick – calling me a faggot and then turning around a few years later and telling me I needed to be more understanding of homosexuals. I understand homosexuals. American homosexuals are Americans. That is, they’re just like us, and they’re not like Rick Blair, and they’re not like the people who tell us we have to be more like Rick Blair. Or whatever it was he was calling himself back then.
The characters in this fictional work are not modelled on or intended to
represent any actual person, living or dead. Any resemblance between these
characters and any actual person, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
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