Nowhere Man

My name is Harry Hogg. I’m an alcoholic. I was born an orphan. I am a novelist’s dream child.

Raised by good people, I was uninterested in learning at school. At seventeen, I left the island on which I became a teenager. I spent days, weeks, and months alone, preferring to remain distant. At the time of writing, I am 73.

I cannot write my life’s story and leave out the intolerable truth, its violence, savagery, beauty, and its immensity. It is a story as uniquely disturbing as it is beautiful, but it is a life that has fallen short of once ambitious goals. Since leaving the island, my life has been lived on land, on sea, and in the air.

Since 1994, I’ve been drinking constantly. To this day I rarely see anything wrong in my behavior. It is possible I was a full-blown alcoholic from the time I took my first drink. My father rarely drank, preferring the intoxication of music, and a devotion to his work. His influence in my life, however, is enormous. Drinking is not something I learned from him. Love is.

Paris

Between the age of 17 and 21 I lived in Paris. I met an older man, a poet. Everything I have written since, sounds like him, such was his influence. I never found a voice of my own. Leonard wasn’t a well-known poet. As a street poet, his followers were the elegant women walking on the Champs-Élysées Avenue. His dream to be published was just that, a dream.

Leonard and I made it work. Occasionally we needed to get out from the confinement of apartment and sought certain avenues to feel inspired. Leonard had something; he had spirit, art, and joy. Women who met him were enamored, so that everything he wrote, and spoke, was only for the woman listening.

We were inseparable back then. I don't know what it was, be it Paris, the Seine, the women, the artists, or the richness of religion all around. I felt at home in the city. Sometimes, we would meet up with friends during the evenings, have drinks, and listen to each others' poetry. I can recall exactly when my poetical existence finished. I was after an accident happened in the universe, something unknown that radically upset the balance of one’s sense of self. Leonard was a beautiful man. He would go off into various dimensions of his existence. Looking back, I can now say with great certainty, he suffered brilliant moments of madness. Because addiction is a disease, Leonard could not stop using drugs. I was 20, never introduced to drugs, but saw how it disrupted so many aspects of Leonard’s life.

Nothing wonderful happened to us all those years ago, or everything that happened was indeed wonderful. Looking back on the nature of my friend, few poets had less invention, fewer still had his imagination. He saw things as only poets do, in an imaginative light. In truth, Leonard was never going to be ordinary, born with the heart of a chansonnier he had perfected his craft on twenty-year-old girls. Later, he wrote his poetry on the sidewalks offering the most beautiful of women to stop. They always did, and for days returned to read of themselves on the paving.

Treatment was never simple. Leonard went in and out of rehabilitation. At 41 Leonard died of a drug overdose. Strangers filled the church and wept. His few friends, some famous, paid for Leonard’s funeral and sang his songs. A shadow of despair came in from its dark corner and sat close. I was too upset and too dumb to acknowledge his fate. I had lived for three years in Leonard’s light and lovely air. My tears were a useless demonstration of anguish, having lived through life’s monotonies; with him felt the warmth of the unexpected. Nothing after his death seemed remarkable. There is no other way to explain his absence in my life.

Pilot

A man can look out of place anywhere, but never in a flight suit. In my day, the 1970’s, flawed individuals weren’t eliminated as cockpit candidates. I recall a local judge glowering down at me from his bench, I was a 13-year-old lawbreaker, a miscreant. By the time I signed up to join the RAF, there were several such entries in a variety of courts across the UK and France, and one in Croatia, (Romania then) all to which I pleaded innocence; petty theft, indecency (I pissed in a bush while wearing my uniform), assault (he had it coming), and trespassing. Had any transgression involved insobriety my flying days would have ended before they began.

During 3 years flight training, the only message playing over and over in my head was the same one I heard on the day of my adoption, do something wrong and I’ll be sent back, disgraced. I stayed out of trouble for the first year. A minor scuffle during the second, and a near court martial in the third.

Case 7354. H. Hogg: Royal Air Force 28-Jul-73 R.A.F Cranwell. Assault Occasioning Actual Bodily Harm — Not Guilty.

As I said, put a man in a flight suit, place him in the cockpit of a jet fighter and he can look like an achiever. A fast mover in the unmoving blue. After three years, I earned my wings. I wanted to fly fighters, attend advanced flight school, become a front line pilot. Front line pilots are above everyone. It would take another 4 years of stiff and exacting training. Harrier VTOL pilots were considered the elite. The Harrier aircraft was used as a strategic low-level fighter, training in Welsh valleys, 400ft, at 450 knots (500 mph), was nothing less than sensual. Pilots in the sortie room looked a harmonious bunch. Not the kind of togetherness that instantly commits to secrets but relationships built, not on practicality, but exhausting passion, a courtship enacted out between men and machine. My call sign was COD. A call-sign given me, referring to the many stories I told about my father.

At 33 years old, I was dropped from the advanced flight program. There is so much heartbreak in failure. I had been trained to kill, it is a lonely seat. It’s hard for me to pinpoint why I failed at the last hurdle. 3 in 10 pilots become front line pilots. From the vantage point of dad’s shoulders, I never imagined I would fail to be higher than everyone else.

I quit the RAF.

Cockpit

In the seat of loneliness Dark rider The fearless one Without bullshit

I elected to keep flying with a new career with the HM Coastguard. While training at Shoreham, I found a new passion for flying helicopters.

During my early career days I felt the loss of Leonard greatly. His presence in my heart was replaced by exhilaration, the sensual spasms of flight. There is a runway sensuality, a voluptuousness, with everything in sight, pilot, plane, throbbing together, but with helicopters there is a huge breath of actually being.

Part 2