This week, I’m debuting audio recordings of episodes of Lamb—now you can listen instead of read, or listen AND read—woo! Just 5 episodes left to the conclusion.
In the coming weeks, I’ll be backfilling audio recordings of all episodes starting from the beginning, so if you prefer a good audio book in the car or kitchen, you can start from the beginning and catch up just in time for the finale.
In whatever way you choose to enjoy Lamb—THANK YOU for reading.
Start at the beginning:
We Regret to Inform You | Lamb ♣ 01
The Box
♣ ♣ ♣ 20 ♣ ♣ ♣
When I look back on our last two years at Wolcott now, Lamb was like the canary in the coalmine of old school toxic masculine bullshit. Despite his height and presence, he was especially susceptible to the viciousness of school boys and endured almost daily bullying.
Some got it into their heads that his slow motion galumphing, all knees and elbows, was a little swishy, so they would walk behind him in an exaggerated imitation to the general amusement of everyone.
And because he had what we call in the biz “gay twang”—that sort of nasally, lispy way of talking that marks gay guys for ridicule—they would call out to him mockishly across the quad or in the dining hall. At first, he didn’t realize these were pranks and thought he hadn’t heard properly, would go over and ask them to repeat themselves, and when they laughed and he got mad, they’d ask what was his problem anyway? I tried to stop him from engaging, but even though I told him to just ignore them and they’d eventually stop, I realized pretty quick that only worked if they didn’t get a rise out of him.
But they did. Lamb was a furious blusher, and even once he got wise to what was going on and stopped reacting, they could still plainly see he was bright red with embarrassment, and that seemed to delight them even more.
At the center of all this, of course, was Thomas. Ever since their initial run-in sophomore year, Thomas had made it his unofficial career at Wolcott to find ways to humiliate Lamb at every turn, especially after he caught Lamb that one time keeping guard outside Mr. Perez’s apartment.
Although he didn’t know I was there—stealing booze, cigarettes, and weed—I still wonder if he spoke to Mr. Perez because forever after that, anytime something went missing in the dorm, Thomas would immediately point the finger at Lamb. It became a general rumor that Lamb was a thief and couldn’t be trusted, and yeah, I felt a little responsible for the reputation he got, even though it was just the once.
Sophomore year, Thomas had got in good with a bunch of junior and senior guys on the varsity teams because he was such a great athlete, and really, he could do no wrong with any of the alpha-dogs and was promoted into that good old boy Gestapo immediately. Thomas’s star only seemed to rise higher as he found ways to torture the less developed or less fortunate, anyone who stood out for all the wrong reasons really, and no one stood out more—by standing a foot taller than everyone else—than Lamb.
There was one senior, a particularly sadistic fuck named Snyder, who adopted Thomas as his lieutenant in Overton House where he was senior prefect our junior year. Lamb and I were in Short House, and we got along pretty well with everyone; our senior prefect, Lanier, was usually pretty chill but we also tried to keep our illicit activities on the down low so as not to incur his wrath because he did have a temper on him.
So here’s what happened from what I could gather from the kid who came down to my room at 6:00 a.m. the next morning, and in subsequent conversations over the ensuing days. Lamb would never talk to me about it, and he didn’t write anything in his journals then or ever, as far as I can tell, though he did write a story that seems to have drawn from the incident that I may or may not share later—it’s a bit freaky, and so unlike the Lamb I knew, but it does give some insight into how he ended up in rehab after assaulting one of his Daddies.
This kid, I don’t even remember his name, comes down to Short House and says I better get up to the Overton common room and look in The Box. What the fuck are you talking about? I asked him, and he said that Lamb had gotten caught out of his dorm last night, and Snyder and Thomas had put him in the old fireplace woodbox in the common room.
“What are you saying?” I demanded.
“He’s still in there.”
So I raced to Overton just wearing the t-shirt and boxers I slept in, and there was the so-called Box in a corner with a peg through the clasp. It was pretty big—about half the length of a coffin, maybe, but wide and fairly tall, almost waist-high—but nothing you’d want to spend the night in, that’s for sure. Anyway, I went and opened it up, and Lamb was curled up inside, blinking, sheet-white, nearly catatonic. I had to smack his face a couple of times to get him to snap out of it, and then help him out. He was bent-over almost double with stiffness, and I walked him back to our dorm. Luckily, no one was around to see all this—breakfast started at 6:00 a.m., so if you weren’t up in the dining hall eating, you were still in bed before chores started at seven.
He wouldn’t speak or look at me, just crawled in bed and pulled the covers up over his head. What happened? I kept asking, but he wouldn’t respond, and I thought, well, he probably needs to just sleep it off and he’ll be better by the afternoon.
What I gathered later from Lanier himself was that he’d caught Lamb smoking on his balcony and threatened to turn him in for something like his fifth offense, which would have gotten him suspended for two weeks. He sent Lamb up to Overton around midnight on orders to bring back a copy of Penthouse from Snyder, which was just a bitch-ass way to punish Lamb without doing any of the dirty work himself.
Apparently, Overton common room was a free-for-all after lights out, with Snyder and Thomas conducting nightly rituals involving actual floggings with a paddle; time-outs in The Box sometimes two at a time if the boys would fit; and “thumpings”—basically a circle of guys standing around a victim, screaming and knocking him around like a mosh pit.
According to some others who’d been there, they thumped Lamb for a good while—a junior, thumped by freshmen and sophomores, and Thomas in his own year!—and then Thomas himself gave the order that Lamb should be put in The Box, and threatened anyone who let him out with the flogging of their life.
Anyway, that morning I told the dorm master that Lamb wasn’t feeling well and needed to stay in bed for the day. By the end of classes, I found him up and at least able to nod his head yes or no again.
Problem was we had a recital the next day in English that we had all been working on for awhile: we had to recite from memory no less than 500 words from Moby-Dick, extra credit if you did 1000; we’d been memorizing and reciting it back to each other for weeks to get it right. I wasn’t entirely sure Lamb was going to manage it, but he refused to practice that last night beforehand, and went to bed early.
In English class next day, we went in order down the line, and when Lamb’s turn came up, he stood and went to the front. Mr. Dunning didn’t tolerate much nonsense in his class, so there wasn’t much going on before Lamb started, but as he got going, all hell broke loose.
A sweet and unctuous duty! No wonder that in old times sperm was such a favourite cosmetic. Such a clearer! such a sweetener! such a softener! such a delicious mollifier! After having my hands in it for only a few minutes, my finger felt like eels, and began, as it were, to serpentine and spiralise…”
I’d told him not to pick that piece; I knew he was going to take shit for it. But that was before The Box, and he’d been feeling bold. He said it spoke to him; he imagined it was his chance to strike one for Fellowship (he actually said that—who says shit like that?) and besides, it was also funny—everyone would have a good laugh. Oh boy.
…as I bathed my hands among those soft, gentle globules of infiltrated tissues, wove almost within the hour; as they broke to my fingers, and discharged all their opulence, like fully ripe grapes their wine; as I snuffed up that uncontaminated aroma, - literally and truly, like the smell of spring violets; I declare to you, that for the time I lived as in a musky meadow; I forgot all about our horrible oath; in that inexpressible sperm, I washed my hands and my heart of it…
By this time, the groans and guffaws really started to build. As he looked around he clearly realized he’d made a mistake, that he’d picked the piece in a moment of foolish optimism. But he couldn’t stop now; our recitation counted half as much as the mid-term, and flubbing it could drop your final grade a point.
…Squeeze! squeeze! squeeze! all the morning long; I squeezed that sperm till I myself almost melted into it; I squeezed that sperm till a strange sort of insanity came over me, and I found myself unwittingly squeezing my co-labourers’ hands in it, mistaking their hands for the gentle globules. Such an abounding, affectionate, friendly, loving feeling did this avocation beget; that at last I was continually squeezing their hands, and looking up into their eyes sentimentally, as much as to say, - Oh! my dear fellow beings, why should we longer cherish any social acerbities, or know the slightest ill-humour or envy! Come; let us squeeze hands all round; nay let us all squeeze ourselves into each other; let us squeeze ourselves universally into the very milk and sperm of kindness.
By the end, Lamb barely squeaked out that last line, and even Mr. Dunning was openly laughing while Thomas and his posse were screaming with hilarity, shouting out offers for Lamb to get his hands on their sperm. It was a nightmare.
It took quite a while for the hysterics to die down. Finally, me next, I began my recitation, and I couldn’t take my eyes off Lamb, folded in his seat like a caterpillar frozen in its cocoon, unseeing.
…But we are all in the hands of the Gods; and Pip jumped again. It was under very similar circumstances to the first performance; but this time, he did not breast out the line; and hence, when the whale started to run, Pip was left behind on the sea, like a hurried traveller’s trunk. Alas!
I should have stopped him. I never should have let him pick that stupid passage; never should have got him smoking cigarettes in the first place for that matter.
…The intense concentration of self in the middle of such a heartless immensity, my God! Who can tell it? Mark, how when sailors in a dead calm bathe in the open sea—mark how closely they hug their ship and only coast along her sides…
I thought of him shut up in that chest, the shame of it. I glanced at him again and almost lost my train of thought, his face drained of all color like the morning before; lost.
…The sea had jeeringly kept his finite body up, but carried down alive to wondrous depths, where strange shapes of the unwarped primal world glided to and fro before his passive eyes; and the miser-merman, Wisdom, revealed his hoarded heaps; and among the joyous, heartless, ever-juvenile eternities, Pip saw the multitudinous, God-omnipresent, coral insects, that out of the firmament of the waters heaved the colossal orbs. He saw God’s foot upon the treadle of the loom, and spoke it; and therefore his shipmates called him mad. So man’s insanity is heaven’s sense; and wandering from all mortal reason, man comes at last to that celestial thought, which, to reason, is absurd and frantic; and weal or woe, feels then uncompromised, indifferent as to his God.
Fantastic as always. I cannot imagine the horror of being stuck in a box all night. Gave me chills reading it. Can't wait for the audio version to come out!
I'm so glad Lamb has returned! I had no memory of just how homoerotic the story of the great white whale was. This episode like everything you've told in this story is both funny and heartbreaking in equal measure. You strike such a perfect balance that's hard to achieve. Also, I love your narration. What took you so long to start!? One minor suggestion - you might used the "voiceover" option rather than the embed option when you upload your audio. It's handled better by the mobile app audio player when you do.