Free Broken Music: A Memoir by Sting Page B

mother, gets me
First Steps in Guitar Playing
by Jeffrey Sisley. This book will teach me how to tune the heirloom guitar and introduce me to the rudiments of strumming chords and reading music. I’m in heaven.
    I become utterly obsessed with the guitar, and spend every available moment hunched over it, gazing into the sound hole, playing the same sequence of chords over and over again.
    I’ve often thought that playing a musical instrument is an obsessive-compulsive disorder or a symptom of being socially inept, but I can’t decide whether playing an instrument makes you socially inept, or you’re a sociopath to begin with and you play an instrument as some sort of consolation. Needless to say, with the guitar, I becomeeven less communicative at home during this period and can readily escape into the hermetically sealed world of my own making.
    Because I’ve won the scholarship to the grammar school I have lost all interest in my junior school. I basically stop working or even pretending to. Mr. Law resents this greatly, as I’m one of only four boys to pass the eleven-plus examination in the whole class. “Arrogant,” he calls me in front of everyone.
    It won’t be the first time that I’m accused of being arrogant, but I’m not arrogant at all, just lazy. Anyway, this school is boring and I’ll be gone to another one soon.
        Since my mother’s love affair, sex seems to have sprouted up everywhere like an explosion of wild crocuses after a long winter. The headlines are screaming SCANDAL, PROFUMO, KEELER. Mr. Macmillan’s government seems about to fall. Cinema posters have overnight become lurid sexual tableaux, advertising “naughty romps” and “bawdy tales.” The newspaper shop in the High Street is awash with near-naked women leering invitingly from the covers of magazines and paperback books. At home we have an album of Julie London’s; on the cover she is wearing an extremely low-cut evening dress. Put the edge of your hand over the bottom of the cover and she looks completely naked. This provokes such a stirring in my loins that I have to run outside and climb the lamppost in the back lane, but that only makes it worse. I can stay up there for hours. My nocturnal adventures too are becoming obsessive (now that I know it’s not blood on the morning sheets) and my mother is too embarrassed or feeling too guilty to say anything about the less-than-discreet evidence of my activities. Besides, I’m still sure that this phenomenal discovery is mine alone, not having confided it to any of my friends, who I’m convinced simply wouldn’t know what I was talking about, even Tommy. Confession is now utterly out of the question and I amprivately exultant in my sin. I have a grossly inflated image of myself as one of God’s fallen angels.
    At school, besides Tommy (when he’s there), I have befriended the more delinquent elements in my academic group, largely for protection but also out of a genuine fondness for and fascination with the underworld of smoking, swearing, and shoplifting. While I don’t partake directly in any of these activities, my closest friends do, and I will often tag along like some sort of foreign correspondent, neutral and observant. Woolworth’s on the corner of Station Road and the High Street seems to be the mecca for light fingers and deep pockets. The back of the Ritz is where the dexterous art of rolling your own cigarettes is perfected, soon to be superseded by the Rizla rolling machine, accompanied by much cursing and expert spitting. The only activity I will take any active part in is fighting, albeit unwillingly. I have been at least a head and shoulders in height above everyone in my peer group since I began school, and while this doesn’t seem to bother the thugs in my own class, it really upsets the thugs in the older forms, especially the smaller ones. I am forced against my better judgment to fight these idiots after school behind the Ritz. As I have been