The Mysterious Loss of Innocence
I'm Bernard the Buffalo, and this is my home.
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Sometime around 1995, a few Dutch teenagers got it into their heads that they should form a band. They started out by choosing a band name, the somewhat offbeat title ‘Gompie’ proving to be the most popular among them. Now all set and ready with an attention grabbing band name, they saw that the next logical step would be a come up with an attention grabbing song, too.
After much struggle, it was ready: a song which they titled “Who the X is Alice?” Now the ‘X’, as almost everyone will know, or if they didn’t know then they surely must have guessed, was a meek and humble censorship substitute for an expletive. No, not just an expletive, the expletive. Astonishingly, the song was an obscene hit, and so Gompie partook and basked in their 15 minutes of fame which in actuality lasted a helluva lot longer than they deserved or even dreamt of. An album followed, of which — although I haven’t bothered to listen to it — it wouldn’t be rude to describe as a crock of poo. And then, Gompie was gone. Vanished from the face of the earth. No, not really. Most probably they’re now hiding behind a thick smoky screen of obscurity.
Little did they know that their filthy little hit single, Who the X is Alice?, would form the soundtrack of the lives of nearly every young kid coming to terms with his/her loss of innocence. Everyone who went to school, as a rule, had to know that song, regardless of what background he/she came from. Take me and my classmates, for instance. Long before we even knew what the meaning of the X word was, we still knew the song. Come to think of it, most of us had heard the song even before we knew of the existence of the infamous X word. We just assumed that the slurry-voiced singer was saying something marginally offensive, like ‘heck’ or ‘hell’, and as a result, that’s the way we sang it at picnics and camping trips and what not. The song was just one of those things that you don’t know how you know, like the face of a long lost uncle who suddenly shows up at your doorstep, smiling blithely. In our case, 10 years was the approximate age at which we got it into our heads what the word was (this was accomplished by playing the offensive portion of the song over and over again on our cassette players). From then on would begin the inevitable process of shedding whatever innocence that we might have possessed, making the metamorphoses from simple, snot-nosed irritating kid to full-fledged pervert. Then, the meaning of the word would somehow make itself known to us, usually through friends who happened to be a wee bit more perverted than you.
It didn’t end there, however. When one knew the word and its meaning, it had to be spread. This was accomplished by bawling out the song at the top of ones lungs, and thus bringing out embarrassed yet fascinated giggles, which would turn to embarrassed and even more fascinated questions. This bawling out obviously had to be carefully timed so as to prevent any adults from hearing it, so that they might continue to keep blissfully assuming that those little kids were still the sweet little ‘uns that they were when they were brought into this world. Poor ignorant adults, they never would have guessed that all that was lurking in the child’s mind was one utterly fascinating and more importantly forbidden word repeated over and over again: ‘X’. Until the day came when the X word had spent so much time lurking in the backstreets of the child’s mind that it soon, unconscious to the child, found its way out through the child’s voice-box. This would cause the question to be asked of the child, “Where did you hear that word?” Of course by then the word had been known for so long that one has long since forgotten how it was known; so the child finds himself being the receptor of a couple of slaps.
All this blame, I’m sure it goes without saying, rests firmly on that blasted song: Alice, Alice, who the X is Alice? But then everyone must grow up sometime, right, and so what if that one song just happened to be the catalyst in the process of acquiring this ‘adult’ knowledge? It no longer mattered, so what a kid would do then was to make the best of a sad situation. The first illustration of this fact that comes to my mind is an experience I had in my extremely dear school. Amidst many a muffled giggle, we were made knowledgeable of the human digestive system, with the help of a chart that illustrated the whole thing to us. There was nothing extra ordinary about this, of course, except for the very last fact about our digestive systems: the anus. Looking at the chart, the drawing of the anus, to our eyes, resembled something that didn’t even form a part of the digestive system, in fact, it was a part of the urinary system - an altogether different thing, I’m sure you’ll agree. But from the standpoint of a perverted 13 year old, it didn’t make the slightest difference. So, everyone went about secretly giggling at the word ‘anus’ and pointing hidden fingers at the chart and at themselves. It is at this opportune moment that the class clown saw that his services were needed to deflate the slightly embarrassing situation, to turn the secret giggling into public laughter. So this is what he did: during the interval, he stood up, and in a voice clear as crystal he sang: Anus, anus, who the X is anus?
Another significant Alice related incident also occurred at around the same time, but in the neighbouring school, the convent girls’ school. As in all convent schools, there was an absurd excess of Nuns lingering about. To provide something for these nuns to actually do instead of just lingering all day, they were given the task of organizing retreats, where a group of Catholic girls would accompany a few of these Nuns to a far off, supposedly ‘holy’ place, so that these girls could pray and meditate and discover their inner calling and do a whole lot of other similar stuff. It so happened that one year, it was time for yet another fresh batch of girls to go on one of these blessed retreats; so they went. What did happen at this retreat transcends all possible rational expectations that one might be allowed to have regarding these girls. You’d expect them to turn all holy and sacred and ‘blessed’ and stuff like that, right? Well, think again. These girls were given intervals between long prayer sessions so that they may have some time to pray to God and ask Him to give them more things to pray about during their next prayer session. The girls, on the contrary, spent these intervals on a nearby field, screaming out abuses at the Nun and the priest in charge. Seriously.
But that’s not the point of this story. The real point that I am trying to make is a Point that came out on the way back home from the retreat. Believe it or not, instead of passing the time singing hymns and shouting out the Lord’s praises, they sang Gompie’s hit single, Who the X is Alice? Luckily, all that praying gave them the good sense to replace the ‘X’ word with ‘heck’ and ‘hell’. After all, the Nun in charge was seated well within earshot of the girl’s voices. As their bad luck would have it, among them was one of those haplessly ignorant ones, who although had heard the song before, had not been told that the ‘X’ word was a very, very bad word of the highest possible magnitude. Poor thing, she noticed that there was some inexplicable and seemingly irrational word substitution going on, so in a bid to bring this to everyone’s notice, she said, “Why’s everyone saying ‘heck’? That’s not how the song goes! It goes like this: Alice, Alice, who the ffff?”
On hearing this, the Nun in charge turned around, red-eyed. She lectured the hell out of them, and threatened to have another retreat if they used the word again. The prospect of another retreat was way too much for them to take, and so, to this very day, the girls of the retreat have painstakingly managed to hold their peace.
That was the point of that particular incident. Gompie, in a moment of unremitting, relentless stupidity, came up with something that would define with pinpoint precision that exact moment a child’s life when he/she ceases to be a child. For that, you just gotta respect Gompie, for without Gompie, we’d be lost.
THE END. I hope you enjoyed that. If you'd like to read more, there's plenty available in the archives