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Oscar Horatio L.I will fulminate in exile no longer. It’s dull here, and the sheep infuriate me.
This family-reunion forum isn’t a bad idea, though doubtless I’ll alienate everyone in weeks, presuming anyone sees fit to speak to me.
So, where’s everyone wound up? Abandoned, artists, or both.
Trina is both, naturally, making art of twine and shelters in one of the old New York warehouses. I always liked her best out of Old L’s kids, the least snooty. Adulthood seems to have improved her, sad, lonely – but honest.
Amazing how lonely we’ve all ended up. Even dear, dreamy Rebecca, who only married in – but still, you’d think the name was useful for more than ill luck and scandal.
It’s brought Sebastian both of course, and like me, he’s a fulminator. The difference being, I really am on the outside.
Thomas, if you ask me, is just about the only thing to have crossed paths with this family and survived with a shred of dignity – but then, he’s not connected by blood, but would like to be by marriage.
The one success?
Erik L. presides over the last arm of the old L Twine Empire. Bully for him. Seems to have done the best of all Old L’s children. Is he in the States or Australia these days? The States, I think – but he doesn’t say, and I don’t recall.
And then me. Oscar Horatio L. O. H. L. Oh Hoh Horatio, butt of every Christmas party joke. An embarrassing orphaned cousin bearing the family name, raised with exceeding ill grace by Old L and his wife-du-jour at Evergard.
Sorry, not meant to mention the divorces, or the deaths, am I? Not meant to embarrass the motley lineage. I used to be better behaved, not that it stopped me being terrorised by half the clan throughout childhood.
Oscar the dwarf. A joke from ages five to fifteen, neglected at boarding school from eleven to eighteen, begrudgingly seen as bright at university, and then as downright useful by twenty-three.
Yes, only three people understood the financial arrangements of the L Twine empire. One is dead, one was last seen on an elevated railway platform in Chicago in 1983 and one cannot yet be released back into the community. I wasn’t one of them, true, but I came a damn close fourth.
How many of you still blame me for the collapse of the L Twine Trust (No. 2) and all the sorry companies it pulled down in its wake, down to financial oblivion? Poof! An easy third of the fortune gone at a stroke, leaving the rest to unravel or struggle.
Do you know what it’s been like to spend ten years evading ASIC investigators and the civil law suits of the clan? Living alone at 38, in a crofter’s cottage on the south island of New Zealand? But the statute of limitations has run, my dears, the investigations have been closed. I’m coming back. And I’ve not been idle.
I wonder if anyone would care to meet me at the airport.
Erik L.Many a childhood dream has been quashed by the expectations of a father. My father never took my aspirations for a career at NASA seriously. It was only when the prestigious Massachusetts Institute of Technology offered me a place in their Astro/Aero degree that he realised how serious I was. He however, had other plans for me. Other plans for my life. He forbade me to take-up the offer. He said he wouldn't finance my education unless I studied Business at an Ivy League college. There was no way I could afford the education I wanted without help from my parents, so I chose the to get the education my father wanted me to get.
It wasn't a complete loss. I met my wife, Veronica, at college. I loved her the moment I saw her, and when I got to know her I was certain that we'd be together forever. We married in secret during our final year and Veronica was 3 months pregnant at graduation.
It was at our graduation that we chose to tell our families of our marriage and pregnancy. To say our parents were unimpressed would be an understatement of vast proportions. The reason? Veronica was the daughter of a successful sticky tape tycoon, Roger K, and family L. and the family K. have been enemies for decades. My marriage to Veronica brought them together in a way both would have rather avoid. So you can appreciate the reason for the secrecy surrounding our relationship.
Veronica and I took up our roles within the family businesses, as our fathers had planned, but due to our relationship we're seen as enemies within. It makes for an uncomfortable work environment, but our relationship hasn't suffered. I can't say the same about my father’s plans for me and my role in the company, but that’s not my problem. I’m doing my bit, playing the role of “dutiful son”, and if my dad’s dreams have been affected by my marriage to a member of the K. family, so be it. It’s not like I’d do such a thing to spite him. It’s not like I’d go out of my way to destroy his dream just because he destroyed mine.
TrinaWell, it's not like I'm the first person to be disappointed by life, by the fancy wrapping that is pulled off to reveal a rather drab though practical gift. I was going to be a doctor. No, that's not quite right. My gift for science combined with a preternaturally compassionate nature seemed to indicate that it was the career for me. Everyone wanted to see me succeed at it.
Everyone but me.
When I was supposed to be studying for my entrance exams, I was locked in my room, fiddling with one of the variety of twines that were to be found all around the house: natural fiber twine, with or without wax; nylon-based twine; kite twine; fancy twine for wrapping packages; sturdier twine for binding crates. You name it, it was stashed away somewhere. Good sturdy stuff, generally. Useful, but not particularly exciting, not the main event, merely something to hold things together while or until the main event took place. And now that other, more sophisticated technologies had been developed, it was no longer even very useful.
I knew how it felt. While my flashier siblings attracted the most attention from the family and the public, I was to be the one to "do some good." I was to avoid the spotlight and pursue a life of altruism.
My goal -- or the goal that others made for me -- was to sacrifice my own happiness in order to make other lives better. And I succeeded at this. Except for the making other lives better part.
I dropped out of school at just about the halfway mark, moved to New York, where one of the largest (though dormant) L. Twine warehouses is, and made a half-hearted attempted at a career in art. No training, mind you, just an affinity for working with twine. Twine was my medium, and I executed a number of admittedly derivative projects, none really worth mentioning right now.
Gradually, the drugs and drinks that came with the party scene associated with the art crowd became what kept me in New York rather than the actual production of art, per se. And for awhile I convinced myself that this was okay, that
making art was actually a rather crude extension of the more important
conception of art. I was not to be bound by the expectations of a capitalist culture of production.
It was around this point that the view of myself as an addled loser first began to take hold. I wish I had the luxury of blaming others, of some sort of trauma, of opportunities denied, of financial hardship. But the fact is that I've been given everything and done nothing. I've made a lackluster attempt at every task put in front of me. I'm 32, have no serious relationship of any kind, I attended AA meetings just for the company but still drink a bottle of wine alone every night. I can't stand the stasis that binds me, but I have no idea what to do to escape it. My therapist tells me not to be so hard on myself, but I don't know any other way to be. I wish that I could reach out to my family, but I feel so distant from them all, and the petty resentments of the past always seem to get in the way.
Sebastian LOf course I am spared nothing. Fifteen years it's been --- fifteen years!--- since I had anything to do with them.
And what do the reviews say? That nobody has looked at the gutter as I have? No, although that would have been the truth. Oscar Wilde, as usual, had it arse about: "We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars".
Bugger that --- look at me, look at my installation. From Gutter To Grave. Watch as the cameras go to work --- this one strapped to a council worker's broom, a mangled close-up of rat-gnawed remains --- that one mounted on a gravedigger's cloth cap, sweat and dirt flying. A kingdom of refuse, riches I've served up for you.
Not that I expect thanks, just the truth.
And what pearls from the critics? What do they say? "From riches to rags: Twine tycoon's estranged son snipes at society from the gutter". Fifteen years --- and everybody, my philistine family, those carping critics, even Judith, for Christ's sake, takes pleasure to see me still entangled with the letter L.
Rebecca LMy husband left me 25 years ago, on the night of our first anniversary. He came home from work with a bunch of roses, then said he’d forgotten champagne and drove off to the bottleshop. He drove off to the airport with his secretary, who was waiting around the corner. I was so incensed at being the victim of such a clichéd end to a marriage that it took me a number of weeks to really feel any genuine loss.
At about the same time that a sense of loss at my husband’s departure started to seep in, like damp up a wall, I noticed small things missing from the house and I realised that he’d been gradually taking his clothes most important possessions to work with him each day. The things were not necessarily valuable (although he took those too, such as the antique carriage clock that had been a wedding gift from my aunt) or practical things (his toolkit, his Fodor’s guide to Europe) but also a peculiar assortment of unlikely objects- a paperweight shaped like a curled up kitten, a can opener that had never worked properly, a tape dispenser. And as I looked at the outlines of all these missing shapes, including the one that described my husband’s form, I realised that this didn’t really add up to very much loss at all.
The seemingly random nature of his selections reminded me of bushfire survivor tales, where ashy victims shake their heads and tried to explain why, as their house blazed around them, they chose to salvage a ZZ Top Greatest Hits LP and not their wallet.
From the smouldering ruins of my marriage I grabbed two things that actually turned out to be reasonable choices- the house, and the L. family name. I work three days a week in a bookshop around the corner as a pastime rather than out of need. My parents recognised at an early stage that a feyand vague child such as I would require a trust fund to fall back on. It was a wise decision on their part.
I am filled with longing sometimes, but I am not sure what it is for. Perhaps it is travel. What stops me packing up and leaving is self-knowledge- I fear becoming stranded in some foreign city, with no passport, no money. I have even gone as far as buying a round the world ticket, but found myself unable to get on the plane, watching it leave instead from the airport lounge, waving a spotted hankerchief. People around me assumed that I was watching the departure of a loved one. When asked, I answered, somewhat pathetically, “Yes, someone I used to want to be just left on that plane.”
ThomasI met a girl, once.
I was twelve and sneaking through the shrubs to the back door of my information technology elective, keeping an eye out for my footy mates. If they saw me staying after school for computers they'd hang it on me for years.
She looked nothing like a football player, and that's why I didn't see her until we collided and fell beneath a eucalyptus. I was still wondering what had happened by the time she was up, her head cocked to the left, hand on hip, watching me.
"I thought this kind of thing only happened in the movies," she said, turning on a gorgeous smile, turning on her heels to sashay over my footprints and out of sight, turning me into a portrait of a slack-jawed rube. I'd have called out to her if I wasn't busy falling in love.
There wasn't any football or computers on my mind for weeks after that, only questions. I tried the yearbook, but she wasn't there, she must have been Year Seven like me. I tried my sister, because I knew she would never gossip to the guys. She didn't know the girl.
Then I knew what to do. I went early to the elective room, climbed that eucalyptus and waited. The class finished-- piano, I think-- and there she was, leaving through the back. I followed her home, to Evergard Avenue and that mansion bigger than the school.
I knew who lived there, how could I not? Mum's always on about the L.'s not paying their taxes and the L.'s being responsible for Grandpa's heart and the L.'s buying up all the good land and how I mustn't grow up like those L.'s, oh no, I'd shatter her.
But-- that smile!-- I had to live it again. I slunk unseen from Evergard that day, but I remembered her every day after; and one day I made sure she'd remember me. We became friends, Cin and I. Mostly good friends, occasionally poor friends, and every now and then we were fantastic, closer-than-blood, let-this-moment-never-end friends.
It took her two days to introduce me to her sisters, a week to her brother, a month to her cousins; it was five years before I met her mother, and two years more before I met her father, by accident. He doesn't like me. Cin says he doesn't like anyone.
I know what he does like, what he wants. And to get what I want-- the most beautiful woman in the world to finally say yes to me-- I'll get it for him.
BackstoryNot so many generations ago our family- The L family, was the sort that everyone envied. Our houses were beautiful and well-appointed, our children and animals well groomed and perfectly behaved. Our teeth were straight and white, our skin clear, our minds well-educated and everyone wanted to marry us, do business with us, or be us.
The L. family name was once synonymous with the Twine Industry. Oh twine, with your multiple uses and knot-handling abilities, how well and how long you served us. How we wished it could have stayed like that forever. Inevitably, however, new technologies, such as Sticky Tape, Velcro and the Postpac, for example, have reduced the twine industry a fraction of its former size- and now our family business faces an inevitable and rapidly approaching death. But the biggest factor in our fall from the top has been the crumbling of within the ranks of the family itself.
What started the descent? Who was the first to marry beneath them, to end up on fraud charges, or to insist upon undertaking an utterly self-indulgent career as a rockstar or an installation artist? Who first broke our collective family hearts by running away to join the circus or the Seventh Day Adventists? Family members are now scattered across the world- some left for love, others ventured out in non-twine related careers of their own. Still others, it is suggested, amongst the more bitter family members, annually huddled around joyless Christmas tables, have left to deliberately separate themselves from the family and its hold.
Do not misunderstand me. We are not yet in total ruins. There are still loyalties, allegiances and fondnesses in place. This webblog is a testament to that, established purely for the purpose of keeping the members of the L. family in touch with each other, despite geography, despite history. There is another reason for this Weblog, however- there are those of us who have good reason to suspect that there are even darker days still ahead for the L. family. Old powerful families attract enemies and create rivalries. Some of us believe, or at least fervently hope, that keeping the lines of communication open is our way to survive what lies in store for us.
