Will The Real Raymond Fields Please Stand Up? The Truth Behind The Legs … That He Had But Didn’t Work. (A Parapalegic’s Tale)

Act III: Biographies: Meet the Rest of Planet Earth

Tilehurst, England is a suburb of the town Reading in the Queen’s England. The name comes from the word tile, which means tile and hurst which means wooded hill which means probably that Tilehurst in ye olde timey England was just a bunch of tiled hills. Blimey.

I’ve seen a picture of their water tower and it’s quite fancy.

The citizens of Tilehurst are mostly nice people but sometimes bad things happen to them. Raymond Fields was an unassuming man, assuming he didn’t do anything terrible that no one knew about, like have a stash of child pornography or write erotic fiction about animals.

In 2004 he was a man who could walk. In 2005, he had a spinal hemorrhage and everything changed and he never walked again.

He coped with it fine because by then he was 72 years young and you just sort of feel glad to be alive at that age. Or maybe you pray for death. Or maybe your mental faculties are so reduced that you don’t even know what you want.

We’ll never know what Ray, if we can call him Ray, wanted because seven years later, he died in a home for old people. Staff were alerted to his death because he didn’t answer their daily intercom call. Which says a lot about the state of home care in the United Kingdom.  Whatever happened to predictability? The milkman, the paper boy, evening TV?

There was no sign of head injury or trauma, so the final cause of death was determined to be a brain hemorrhage.

First hemorrhage took his legs, then it came for his life. What did Ray ever do to hemorrhage to warrant this legless, brainless fate? Hopefully, it wasn’t that Raymond fondled hemorrhage’s daughter or dog because that makes his a tale less kind.

Fade to Black.

The Play’s The Thing … That Made Him Commit Crimes: Matthew Newton, An Actor’s Losing Battle with the Stage and Rage.

The second volume of Amil Niazi’s Biography series on Ordinary People: Shining a Spotlight on the Everyman.

Bert and Patti Newton, of Melbourne, Australia loved acting on television. They also loved each other and expressed that love in an adult way by having unprotected intercourse, which they can have because they’re married and no longer concerned about sexually transmitted diseases even though you never know, right?

Nine-ish months later, Patti went to a hospital or her backyard, it was Australia in the 70s!, and gave birth to a child she called Matthew. Not a very creative name, but Patti and Bert thought it sounded nice. I assume.

35 years later, Matt – as he likes to sometimes be called – also became an actor. But in Australia they call them “performers.” No just kidding they are also called actors there too, cultural fact.

People in Australia watched Matthew on TV and listened to him on radio too. Then he was charged with beating up his girlfriend.

Later, he got kicked out of a bar in the U.S. called “Mr. Moe’s” and was arrested for trespassing.

Turns out Matt is kind of a bad guy but Mel Gibson is Australian too so put another shrimp on the Barbie, eh mate?

End Scene.

Thrown Back To Sea: The True Story of Mr. Louis Auguste Dornier (Assistant Fish Cook on the Titanic)

Welcome to my new biography series: Real Life Stories of Ordinary People

Biography One - Thrown Back To Sea: The True Story of Mr. Louis Auguste Dornier

It was an unremarkably dreary October day in France. The year, 1891. Somewhere in the country, a baguette was bought and sold. Elsewhere, a person smoked a cigarette. And then later that day the same person smoked several more cigarettes. And in another place, a woman screamed as she gave birth to a baby. A boy baby.

Her and her husband (one assumes he was her husband), named the baby Louis. Louis had a relatively decent childhood in France where he obviously didn’t die of plague or whatever, and as a teen he likely smoked cigarettes and kissed girls. He could have been secretly gay, that happened a lot before it was okay to be openly gay. But we can’t be sure. At times in his life he experienced ennui and boredom, I think.

At some point, he took a liking to helping people make seafood and became an assistant fish cook.

He read or heard from someone, who knows how hiring got done back then, about a job on a cool and fancy new boat called the Titanic. He applied or told someone he wanted to work on the boat or the guy he assisted in fish-cooking was like, “hey I am going to work on this boat, can you assist me in my cooking of fish?” It was a wild and decadent time obviously since not only did this boat have a guy who only cooked fish but the fish man had an assistant too. Wow. Must be nice.

Anyway, one time while sailing the Titanic hit an iceberg and a lot of people died on it. Including, Louis August Dornier. He was probably eaten by the very same kinds of fish he cooked. Isn’t it ironic?

He was 20 years old.

The End.