Autobiography (12 page)

The bus rattled down the Old Kent Road – away from the overdeveloped pink blob of the Elephant & Castle’s shopping center. Each inch of the road has spent itself in other eras, everyone once working but now lying in bed, returning to nothingness on ice-cold afternoons in 1977. The famous Thomas a Becket pub completes the cynical view of an area that can no longer look after itself; many doctors, many waiting rooms, and the new life hammers the old life. I make this journey many times throughout the late 70s to visit James Maker, who lives with his parents in a maisonette of ramps and grey slabs on the corner of St James’s Road and Catlin Street. I jump off the bus at the Civic Centre, where Tommy Trinder fell from the rafters every Friday night and told it his own way to those unlucky people. James is cluttered in a row of 1950s formulations that have bright living rooms and downstairs bedrooms, walled in by Rotherhithe Road and Raymouth Road. It is the safest side of the tracks that are unsafe on both sides; a mishmash area that wisely manages to keep Peckham at bay, with its distinctly enormous schoolgirls with fat-tire legs. James is a year my junior and digs down deep – Louis
XIV wit gallops ahead without a word or gesture lost. Dunhill cigarette smoke blasts the atmosphere, and James lives a life of impotent rage.
He is certain that words can be found to describe the entire mess, yet he is also convinced that life has been made difficult on purpose in order to squeeze out the greatness in those of us who flutter wildly at the bars. His look is James Dean mid-blizzard, with a tongue more free than welcome.

He will utilize anything at all that might serve the purposeful quest for recognition. We are united. James will tell you that his life had been nothing until the New York Dolls, and he is enslaved to the song
Frankenstein
– the Dolls’ slumland melodrama wherein the deeper associations of evangelical pop have a roughhouse scruff-up with the musical dreams of Mahler’s 7th Symphony:
‘When those plans they don’t fit your style, you get a feeling of your own, or two,’
is David Johansen’s phonetic poetry – words as collage, using shape as well as sense to convey
...
um
...
what?
‘Well, I’m asking you as a person
...
’
Verbal, verbal, verbal, the song is 5:58 of holler-holler, minus chorus, minus repetition.
Frankenstein
has all the magical properties of sheer nerve, ready to blow up any minute. Screw loose and fully-to-the-skull, the guitars of Johnny Thunders and Sylvain Sylvain wrap around spiffy-tuff drums of Tony Lo Bianco’s ducking and diving
French Connection
New York City. Steam rises from the streets to meet David Johansen’s tourette’s, which complements his teenage dementia. The musical seizure of
Frankenstein
is an everlasting hallucination for James Maker, from which there is no joy like hearing loss; mechanical noise, tinnitus, joy. The neutral basis equals medication, and the New York Dolls become the amphetamine that they themselves are always in search of. The Dolls have a ‘when readers write’ aura; no one is more like you than we are. It is everlastingly lamented by James and I that
Frankenstein
had not been the opening track on the most important album ever made, instead of the Dolls’ foolishly impaired
Personality crisis
,
and oh, the moldering debate goes on in a cramped back bedroom at 91 Redlaw Way in 1977, as intuition races ahead of understanding. Our walks through fog-bound south London were always funny and full of the child-rhymer, but we also knew it was the dark turn of righteous oblivion, full of willing stubbornness, feeling short-changed should a day be dull – as if it all, somehow, should be peak after peak.

Unfit for society, James answers the telephone for Mayco Travel
– ‘9.3.double ohhhh?’
–
and writes best when most low, and becomes so attached to his complications that it will take decades to shake them off.
‘Mayco Travel was actually a very good job,’
he remembers,
‘I had my own chair.’
James would like to become famous in order to make up for past defeats. Since birth his life had been a sterile hell. Mimicry was his only pastime. Above all, he suffered from penis envy – being quite certain that he was not a conscious being. Deserts of boredom dripped by, thinly disguised as years. To pass autumnal afternoons James invented rivals. His only friend was Cheryl Bygrave, who lived along the flats – an equally mutilated existence of futile pains and an exclusive dependency on Freddie Laker Getaways. James would open the door but would not let you in, your rain-soaked demeanor registering nothing. His attitude to everything is obstinately masculine, yet he sees females as rivals in a stillborn play. Indescribable disgust jolted James out of bed each day, and darkness could never become light. One day we go swimming at a typically pitiful public pool in Peckham – the stench of feet agonizing. Roughly brutal kids dive-bomb all around us, and suddenly I notice someone in the pool who is still wearing his socks, and I close my eyes.

Am I even here?
James looks at himself far too closely to see anything, and every slice of hardboiled luck comes to him only as compensation for otherwise having nothing to do. No one had ever bothered with James, and even his own sister had considered herself to be an only child. His parents had urged him to never –
under any circumstances
– be himself. When his true self slipped out, he covered his face with his hands, as if scrubbing himself away. He sought a listener – preferably one who might accompany him on piano. Like an unappreciated wife, he became exclusively absorbed in his own reflection – not because he loved himself, but because he didn’t. The reflection was always the truth, the mirror had the last word, and James was too vigorous in his self-doubt to ever be doubted. In the Bermondsey of 1977, such behavior registered as abnormality of the hormones, a sadness in a man that develops in construction quite like that of a woman. No aggressive sexual activity is allowed, and so the boy wilts away, timing all wrong.
All wrong.
The mind is overactive yet the body does nothing, and depression can only be conquered if wallowed in. James had no understanding of himself as flesh, and because his life had been so lonely he directs himself towards masculine support – because this is the one thing he’s never had. All he really wants is male friendships. When my life saves itself, James’s life falls in on top of him. We had become just close enough to infect each other with our disappointments, although James was not without gaslight-flickers of fun – carelessly on Shadwell Dock Stairs, knee-deep in the not knowing, he would gumshoe early-hours Rotherhithe Tunnel in denim jacket and matching jeans offset by lyrically fetching court shoes as trademarked by David Johansen. James would annex anything that could be taken into his intellectually inexhaustible schemes, and he didn’t mind being beaten up because of it. In fact, a beating could be considered a good review. At one point he follows me out to Denver not knowing that I have already left, yet he nonetheless arrives and stays, chattering the midnight oil with my family who have no idea what it is that sits before them. James was one of the first people I had ever met who spoke in complete sentences, minus the ‘kind of, sort of, like, y’know, actually’ redundancies that prop up most people’s tautological cobblers. Londoners especially over-used the word ‘actually’, and usually placed it where it meant nothing. In their living room, James, his mother and his father had their own personal ashtrays, each a free-standing invention that needed to be pressed down like a coffee percolator in order to plunge the ash out of sight. Coming from a smoke-free background this struck me as quite funny. It had been, after all, just another consistently ho-hum evening at Kings Road in 1976 when the telephone rang louder than usual and I answered to hear James Maker’s voice:

‘IS that Steven Morrissey?’
– heavy on the IS. Well, it was. I had placed an ad in
Sounds
magazine requesting Dolls acetates in exchange for several large bags of pre-stressed concrete, and James had tracked my telephone number down via a variety of veiled maneuvers involving Stretford Town Hall and a careless local priest. Quite a convincing human being, James was only slightly damaged, but understood by no one, which usually left the body being lowered slowly into the ground. The tongue rattled carelessly on a staircase at midnight, and on his first arrival at Kings Road he spoke directly to my mother:

‘Hello. Are you Scottish?’

‘No,’
she replied, ‘
are YOU?’

‘No,’
he said, and an hour of silence followed.

In affection distress my life briefly matches that of Simon Topping, newly free of school, living with his parents and his sister Joy in Flixton.

‘Do you mean to say that your sister is actually called Joy Topping?’
I ask.

‘Yes,’
he laughs.

Soon the new motorbike rolls up at Kings Road with regularity, and I wonder what it is that he wants. I open the door and he stands before me holding up a copy of Nico’s
Chelsea Girl
LP.

‘Have you heard this?’
his Dana Andrews smile at full rev.

‘Translated into nine languages,’
I say,
‘
...
except English
...
’
I trail away – not in the least bit funny.

Nonetheless it’s Nico’s
Chelsea Girl
that fills our afternoons at Kings Road as rain batters the window, a cluttered tea-tray on the floor before us. Simon appears to be the first person who likes me for all the reasons that others usually dislike me. It had been a long hard war. It was enough just to sit there minus the usual nonsense of trying to make myself interesting. Simon takes me to his parents’ house in Flixton. I hitch up onto the back of his bike – a fastened position of proximity that throws an entirely new light on seething hurt. Once at his house, I find that my wet shoes (for this
is
Manchester) have dragged acres of grass into the living room, and Simon’s mother visibly ages as she looks down at her carpet.

‘Oh, I can’t stand her,’
says Mrs Topping as a Bette Davis film began on television,
‘she always acts the same in every film.’

I’m obliged to chip in with
‘Oh? I think she’s always completely different in each film,’
so
smarty-face says – having lived since the time of Socrates.

Mrs Topping looks disgusted at me and leaves the room. Some weeks later Simon and I are in his grandmother’s house just off Barton Road. She has recently died, and Simon has temporarily moved in. It is a typical old Stretford semi, with grandma still very much in evidence: postwar literature, baffling knickknacks, an occasional table, all lovingly in order with that northern aura of making-do. I am quietly lost in sad thoughts when Simon smashes in with:

‘My mother says you’re a bad influence on me.’
I smile weakly. A now familiar reel is about to be unwound.
‘She’s worried that
...
’
he begins, but I cut him off.

‘
O
oooh, I know
...
I know
...
I know,’
with an exaggerated sigh that could ruin crops and kill off migrating geese. I see before me Christopher Power, a school friend who lived on gasp-worthy Urmston Lane in Edwardian lushness (it may not be now, but it was then); the house a mass of travel and reference books, and a staircase that was neither narrow nor cramped, and how he sat at the foot of the stairs one hazy Saturday after hours of picking rhubarb, and said:
‘My mother thinks you’re a bad influence on me.’

By now, I evidently know more than I know. Having accidentally managed everything in life to my own disadvantage, here we are again – with Simon Topping, journeying through yet another closing door. My mind stalled. I decided to dodge the plop of being a wearisome echo of myself, and I said:

‘She’s quite right. I
AM
a bad influence.’

Minutes later I am walking home – a wet heap of diffident stoop. I take the stairs at Kings Road, where Nico is always waiting for me, and I drag the river of this day’s events as Nico sings in the background like a big bale of black coming towards me through moorland mist. If I had access to a high place, I’d jump from it. Having been killed and eaten by Mrs Topping, I ponder on how I could possibly be considered a bad influence, since I am neither bad nor remotely influential. It is not as if, at this age of 18, I designed dresses under the name Violet Temper. It is not as if I sought a career in exotic dancing, or read jokes aloud at funerals. I had never even once been drunk. My main concern in life was to find somewhere that could make spectacles in less than an hour. I bored my own self into unconsciousness every single day, so how I could exert bad influence mystified me.

Nico was an unclassifiable artist and largely disregarded as a gifted amateur who took far too much refuge in horror. Her youth’s beauty dissolved into a lifelong lusty love of heroin that turned her into a shapeless object that moved along the ground like shifting smog. I meet her twice in unlit corners of Manchester danceterias, her frozen eyes wide amongst masses of deep black garments.
The voice is a deadly frost that speaks only in mind-boggling twister-teasers, and you feel certain that
Nico is in there somewhere
,
amongst the creases. The body is eighty-five parts anti-freeze and fifteen parts first-
degree aitch. It is said that Nico introduced her teenage son to heroin, and, as he lay in a hospital bed having overdosed, she rigged up portable recording equipment in order to capture his last breath. Nico herself will be dead at 49, having fallen from her bicycle. Her singing voice is the sound of a body falling downstairs, and she speaks as if the hangman’s hands are at her throat. One drizzly night at a crib called Rafters, Nico hoists herself onstage in preparation. Her fortress harmonium stands center-stage like a battleship, ready to wheeze vaporized tones like the last harpooned humpback. Nico aims for her stool but misses and jigs herself sideways. She readjusts and begins the foot-pumping process of awakening her harmonium. There is no
‘hello’
, and no
‘goodbye’
. I treasure her four studio albums, none of which contain the faintest hint of hope.

Two feature films of nervous vitality lock in my brain and possibly poison it forever. The first is
The Strange One
(1957), where de Paris pathologically infects the entire population of the world with his talent for bully tactics and his persistent offensiveness. Only articulate disdain for humanity saves him, and his rein of terror at a military school in Florida is remarkable solely for lasting as long as it does – even though it seems morally inevitable that he will end up being tied to a tree. His looks and style are far more penetrating than the God-fearing toothsome goofs around him – all of whom he breaks and wounds because they pay him far too much attention (or even because they show him none). De Paris is star quality and is not short on wit, thus I cannot help thinking that the common evil of his childishly dangerous ploys should be accepted by reason of his magnificent oeuvre alone – which in itself is certainly worth having. I think so, anyway. Ben Gazzara plays de Paris perfectly, relishing the humiliation of others. De Paris is too cute to be caught, and his contribution to immortality (what?) is suggested by the number of camera shots where the victim cadets are either kneeling before de Paris and looking upwards, or somehow seen from between the breeched legs of de Paris. If it sounds sordid, it isn’t. There are no lines of cruelty on the de Paris face, but we assume that he is that rare thing: a confident sodomite, or a libidinous bully, or perhaps just a talker, or all three. Inexplicably a lone female enters the film in a later scene with de Paris, and she sweeps through the only scene in the film where de Paris looks bored stiff, and we immediately forget that she’s even there. It is a plotless situation thrown in to take us off the salacious scent. Phew, thank heavens for that. We’re all saved! Could Hollywood bear the eternal burden of a tough fruitcake? No! Anything but that! George Raft? In any case, de Paris must die soon because he is just as real as life, and since he is free of sexual loathing there is slim chance of the obligatory suicide. It takes dominantly handsome Mark Richman, with a civic duty to sexual custom, to turn the nature of suffering back on de Paris, who, yes, is tied to a tree and tortured. For this, we are all purified and we return to the ideal vision of manliness untroubled by that nasty game of thinking. But it is all too late because we already prefer the richer intellect of de Paris to the bullheaded correctness of Mark Richman. But de Paris must perish, because he is neither correct nor dull, and by the closing credits we are left to assume that he is as dead as a pansy from last spring.