My Booky Wook 2 (19 page)
The next day we shot some dry interviews with folks who’d known JK, then rode a vintage Dodge to the cemetery where the clicking and bongos stopped to have a look at Kerouac’s grave. The grave was adorned with snacks left by well-wishers, who’d paid tribute to the dead author with Ritz crackers, Rice Krispie bars and peanut butter. It’s confusing enough when people leave flowers for the dead as a generic gift to their remains, or cigarettes for Jim Morrison in Père Lachaise, but at least there is tradition and pertinence to prop up these trinkets for the dead. But Rice Krispie bars for Jack Kerouac’s corpse? Why? Because of the Snap, Crackle and Pop? “Wipe away that tear, my love, and reflect that now our Jack, dear Jack, has gone to the place that perhaps he always sought. The road is over for him, his destination reached, so weep not at his grave but leave a Rice Krispie treat.” I scoffed down much of the food and stole the remainder, trotting out the already tired “It’s what Jack would’ve wanted” defence.
In spite of my never-ending tributes to Kerouac the documentary seemed a little flat. If as was claimed we were genuinely trying to capture the essence of the book, we ought to have dispensed with the crew, got drunk and high and filmed ourselves trying to traverse America but ending up incarcerated. Cassady and Kerouac when embarking on their trips were not enslaved by schedules and BBC guidelines; my disregard of which was soon to have monumental consequences, but for now Matt was performing one of his vital functions – stopping me going berserk.
I don’t think the BBC were being disingenuous, I think they truly did intend to make an On the Road documentary that would really capture the pioneering hippie spirit of Cassady and Kerouac. But Cassady and Kerouac didn’t have runners, directors, production assistants and electric room keys when they crossed America. At no point did Neal Cassady lean across the car, tap his watch and say, “Jack, you do realise we’re scheduled to smoke this joint at 3.30 – for pity’s sake pull over.”
The only people for me are the punctual ones, the ones who are mad to arrive on time, mad to conduct interviews, mad to be in a meticulous documentary on BBC2, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow Roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars and in the middle you see the blue centrelight pop and everybody goes, “That was a really well-made tribute film about Jack Kerouac.”
For me the rigmarole of making a TV show is antithetical to searching for satori, enlightenment, America.
Peculiarly, on this trip that was about two friends who loved each other deeply and the complexities of their relationship, me and Matt’s friendship began to eat itself like a naughty gerbil devouring its babies. The dynamic had begun to shift and falter. We were no longer two gadabout, punk chancers, stealing briefcases and filming hookers for kicks; I was at last becoming a movie actor and Matt was becoming troubled by the ch-ch-changes. In these situations it’s never wise to allocate blame for what went wrong so let’s do that right now. Matt can be a pain in the arse but I am mad. And demanding. Matt once said of me “Give him an inch and he’ll demand a moon base.” I have an enormous sense of impatience and entitlement. I’m writing this in a Transcendental Meditation centre in Iowa, where the snow flirts with Humbert gravity like Lolita and deer wander up to my window and nervously peer as I toil. Earlier two men massaged my entire body with warm oil in a Vedic ritual that helps you to be relaxed and enlightened. I’m from Grays in Essex; you’d think on some level this spectacle would impress-a-me-much. It don’t. I can see it’s beautiful, but I think, “This ought be happening.” Matt would be hobbling around nodding and wringing his cap in a contorted festival of gratitude.
I used to think we were like a band in which I was the lead singer and he was lead guitar; that the attention fell more upon me but we were in it together. But the reality is I am a performer and he is a writer and that is a less equal dynamic. So in a way the equality of our early friendship was compromised by our success, but I tried to bring him along every step of the way – every TV show, every gig, every film, every threesome, I brought Matt along because I felt we were brothers.
Matt had to do the driving whilst I navigated, and that formed the basis of a lot of conflict, the two of us sat in a car quarrelling over crumpled maps. It was an interesting friendship, but the disparity in our beliefs – my optimism versus his pessimism – became a tangible gulf on the American freeways as I began to actualise my cock-eyed musings, pipe dreams and witterings. It must be difficult to be close to a performer who has the kind of ego that I have, with my expectations. My modus operandi is that I’ll be content with anything, as long as I know that it’s the best that’s possible. I’ll sleep in a cardboard box, under piss-drenched newspapers, if that’s the finest accommodation available. But if I find out the person in the next alley has got a damp blanket, I’ll want it.
This divergence in our outlook began to manifest itself in the documentary and how we reacted to the spiritual quest at the heart of Kerouac’s tome. I thirsted for revolution, and the spirit of the Beats still glinted in the eyes of his old companions. I thought the Beats could rise again. Matt thought it was all cobblers.
Matt had a girlfriend at the time, I did not, or if I did I certainly wasn’t honouring any half-hearted oath I may have spluttered out in an airport. I was gadding about across America, snogging girls in car parks and diddling women in discotheques and publishing houses (it was a documentary about a writer – take it where you find it is the womaniser’s creed) and watching Girls Gone Wild, which blessedly was at every hotel we visited, providing what Championship clubs would refer to as a “parachute” for the occasions where real women could not be found.
Accompanying the Adult Channel’s consistently available, morally reprehensible hit was the Movie Channel’s crème de menthe, the animated film Ratatouille – a hit Disney movie about a gourmet rat who makes it as a chef. Me and Matt never watched it but enjoyed riffing on the genesis of such a story. “How about a film in which a rat, of all things, makes it as a chef?” Why not? Who are we to say what species of animal we want to see making it as chefs? The very fact that rats are so commonly associated with poor hygiene and disease just makes the idea of him knocking up a lasagna all the more fun. “Could you also provide a film in which a girl makes it as a slut?” “Certainly Sir – she may need a T-shirt by way of remuneration …” “That shouldn’t be a problem …”
When you, or your mate, drive across the geometrically impossible expanse that is North America you become hypnotised, as the first pioneers must’ve been, by its endless possibilities. I met a cowboy near Dodge City who said, “There’s only so much horizon people can take,” meaning I suppose that some people find opportunity daunting, that limitless sky is frightening with all its scope for change and hope.
I bought my soon-to-be-beloved rootin’ tootin’ cowboy boots in Denver from a woman called Roxanne. She had two staff members there; one of them, Stephanie, had a lovely bottom. Roxanne attended to me like a famous person despite not knowing who I was. We flirted and played; Quentin Crisp called charisma “the ability to influence without logic”. I flirt with old men, children, anybody, but it’s not sexual, it’s mostly about real engagement, not the artificial prescriptive connections that we too often tolerate. Roxanne, the compassionate matriarchal stranger, sent the two shop girls off to have lunch with us, and much more in my case. God knows I would never have relented until I received my birthright orgasm.
It was in Denver that we actually shot something which had shades of Beat philosophy. We were about to leave town when outside what must’ve been some tragedy-strewn trawler net for busted meat-puppets, homeless people on crutches and in wheelchairs swayed in clumsy congregation outside a shelter. “I wanna talk to them lot,” I bawled. The term “Beat” don’t mean percussive rhythm, it means beat up, beat down by life, beat. These people were beat. Now I don’t wanna get all “Down and Out in Paris and London” but you can’t spend any significant time as a junky without developing an affinity for the have-nots. In a Pavlovian way I’m still drawn to the damned, as it were them that led me to smack, it was at their feet I learned to cope with my condition, and there on the corner, choking on the symptoms of American affluence, the off-cuts of economic might shone like bleak beacons and drew me once more to their rocks.
Tentatively we pulled over and I clambered out of the pickup like a Labrador, Matt just behind. We read On the Road with them, perched on their chairs, ignoring their dogs. One woman who wailed and preached teary Bible verse lingers with me. She was a rigid archetype found among the homeless, the zealous drunk. I reached into the charade and told her with good-humoured cheek that she ought put aside the game she was playing. She chuckled with acknowledgement, like she knew she was doing an impression of a vagrant. All along her soul had a home.
We were about to up and off, with at last something authentic in the can, when the most anti-social social worker I can ever recall encountering lurched his goateed bulk into our personal space. Alerted by my lottery winner-style direct altruism – I’d been dishing out dollars on the street like they were flyers advertising dead presidents – he marched over to give me a piece of his mind, which judging from his vocabulary he could ill afford.
“I run this shelter,” he growled. “This is my corner!”
“Well, you should be ashamed of yourself,” I retorted. “Everyone here is destitute.”
He sprayed yet more spittly rage. “Fuck off, you ponce,” I said. I hate them do-gooders, telling you not to give drug addicts money for drugs. As if that is the junction where the problem can be solved. “Maybe if they don’t have any money they’ll just eat wind-fallen fruits and busk.” No, if you are a drug addict you will find a way of getting drugs, you’ll give up your house, your dignity, suck dick, rob friends and strangle pets to get your paws on a bag, a bottle or a rock. You can’t just threaten to send junkies to bed with no pudding and hope they’ll buck up.
Me and Matt continued to bicker our way across the States, many of which were as indiscriminate and angular as they appear on a map, like Thelma and Louise the night before their synchronised blob dropped. We were heading to San Francisco to the City Lights bookstore – a Beat Mecca – to shoot a conclusion to our trip in front of an audience. Stephanie, the Denver boot girl, had flown out to save me from myself and was in the hotel waiting for me when I arrived watching Girls steadily growing Wild.
Naturally after the performance I was so jazzed up on pomp that I ricocheted out of the store and into bars and started womanising. Know this: I want love not just physical but spiritual, I craved these women like insulin. I met an Australian girl who seemed like the solution and, through the weave of need over my irises, she was beautiful. I smoked her out of the bar with my fumigating charm and the two of us led a merry dance through the trams and the damned, saluting street sweepers and making token gestures to hunched sentries slumped forgotten in doorways. It all seemed so right, like the moon was nodding on from the night.
“Come back to the room,” I bartered, but my work was done, she was mine.
I had however in all the cloying romance and zippedee doo-da joy of it all forgotten that there was already a girl in my hotel room who’d been waiting for some time. Curses! Foiled again by my own brilliance, I thought. I’d picked up from Stephanie and my Antipodean companion a little too much Christian resolve to gamble on the obvious solution of a three-some, so I had to do some tricky admin. The hotel I was in was, as Elvis Presley almost said, “All booked up”, so I had to find another inn like a randy midnight Jesus. American hotels for some pain in the arse reason won’t let you check in without a passport – which I had left in my room. So I had to explain to the Australian girl that I was off back to my room to get my ID and she should wait in the lobby, after which I had to slink into my room and explain to the saintly Stephanie that I’d only popped back to get my passport for some implausible reason, then off I went, swallowed back into the night, the city night, the only place dark enough for me to hide.
What kind of a man was I? Treating women in this way? If this is what I’m telling you, can you imagine what’s being left out? The hot-tub parties with one male guest, the coaches loaded up after gigs and taken back to my hotel, the backstage corridors of arenas with room after room filled with women. Appetite and opportunity clashed like a sequel to the Big Bang.
Often I’d try to mould these chance encounters into love, flying strangers around the world in an attempt to make the night last longer, but it never worked. I could never make sense of these women out of context. Like a jungle explorer enchanted by a glorious parrot, only to find that once home in the suburbs, away from the tropical glow, it just claws and shrieks and shits on your net curtains.
San Francisco was the end of the road. The end of the On the Road. Me and Matt left the exhausted crew and each other and headed home. Having journeyed so far together we had never been further apart.
†
Hey Pluto!
By virtue of its lure America began to baptise me. I was becoming, like the planet itself, American. If not ideologically, then practically, because that’s where movies are made. My second Hollywood movie Bedtime Stories was to be shot in LA, which meant we’d have to find a residence, so me, Nik, Sharon and Nicola searched the Hills like prospectors or some cross between the Manson family and the Partridge family looking for somewhere to live. We found a beautiful place off Sunset Boulevard. Can there be a more grandiose word for road than boulevard? Can you be sick on a boulevard? Can there be boulevard crime? Could alley cats saunter on boulevards with grubby disdain or would the location make ’em glam?
Up there in the Hills the four of us, my beloved barmy quibbling siblings – Sharon, who once rode a horse through the streets of south London when she was meant to be at school, Nicola, who kipped beside me with a baby in her belly, and Nik, who skied with a broken ankle – searched for a home. We found a phenomenal place. A glass-walled house where Bette Davis had once lived, where Motown mogul Berry Gordy had Rapunzelled Diana Ross when she was still supreme, and where Gabby, the cleaner and our new surrogate mother, told us that Arnold Schwarzenegger had once taken tea.