American on Purpose (10 page)

G
iven that the threatened onslaught of a thunderous LSD-induced psychosis had introduced me to a whole new level of disquiet, it seemed only logical that I increase my alcohol intake to stay calm. Even at this stage, my drinking was not recreational, it was already medicinal. Alcohol evened me out, until I drank past it, blacked out, and did something crazy, annoying, disgusting, or all of the above. It helped in my next gig, too, because after being sacked from On a Clear Day I was hired as a drummer by a group that was its artistic and philosophical opposite, James King and the Lonewolves. These were the notorious tough-guy rockers I had introduced with my naked shaky knees in front of the heckling cockneys at the ICA gallery show in London. It was arduous being in this band, even though it was by far the most successful group I’d ever played with. The music was relentless and driving, melodic but anarchic, and people actually came to see us in droves. The music press wrote loving articles about us; we even had a deal at London Records, but it was no fun.

The guys in the band reminded me of the kids I had grown up with, harsh and angry and sectarian. This was nothing like the gentle drunken bohemia of the Dreamboys. It was more like run
ning the gauntlet. The lead singer, James King, wrote the songs and was undoubtedly some kind of rock-and-roll genius, but offstage he was so drunken, twisted, and profane he made me look like a fucking Mormon. It was embarrassing to be in his company, he’d spit and drool and mumble and cuss in front of the most attractive girls—he was way ahead of me on the alcoholic timeline. Jake, the lead guitarist, while extremely talented and prodigiously handsome in a James Dean kind of way, was always going to jail for
real
crimes, creating the need for stand-in musicians who would play along nervously for one or two gigs but never last longer than that. On numerous occasions I had to leap from the stage to break up fights that Colin, the bass player, had started with an audience member he didn’t like the look of. It was like high school all over again, and even though we were playing the cool gigs like the Clarenden Ballroom, and the Rock Garden in London, and the Hacienda in Manchester, I wanted out.

The last straw was night the pope visited Glasgow. Colin and I had been drinking all day and when we left the pub he told me that every policeman in the city had been drafted to protect the Holy Father and they were all out at Hampden Stadium, where he had been saying mass. Colin suggested that we take advantage of this by stealing something and I agreed readily, but what to steal?

Pointing out a parked car, he stated that, in all likelihood, there would be some kind of swag in the backseat for us to plunder. So we approached the car and were pulling on the door handles just as a patrol car came around the corner. We were arrested quickly, without a fuss, handcuffed, and taken to the notorious Stuart Street police station. In Scotland even the jails and roads are called Stuart. They processed us, confiscated our shoes and belts, and threw us into a filthy cell with another unfortunate soul who, the turnkey assured us, had mugged an old lady and was a right little shit.

“If this prick got his fuckin’ heid caved in during the night I don’t think there’d be any complaints,” the cop told us.

Thankfully neither Colin nor I was interested in dispensing jailhouse justice, and there was no way of knowing if the copper was telling the truth, anyway. We just sat, miserable in the windowless, urine-smelling chamber, until they let us go the following day.

I knew that if I continued hanging with these guys there’d be more jail in the future, and I was not enthusiastic at the prospect. Maybe next time I would be the prick the cop thought needed a beating and maybe my cellmates wouldn’t be as apathetic as Colin and I had been.

I was scared to tell them; getting out of the Lonewolves was like getting out of the Crips—no mean feat. I waited until Jake, the one most likely to actually kill me for leaving, got sentenced to jail for another six months, and I used the band’s enforced downtime as an excuse to get a job in a bar. I said I needed the money and was giving up the music business. I didn’t mean it at the time, but it turned out to be true.

The Chip Bar, my escape hatch from the Lonewolves, is something of an institution in Glasgow. It is situated above, and affiliated with, a gourmet restaurant called the Ubiquitous Chip, a hippy, dippy, and pretentious, but also fantastic, restaurant which for a long time was the only place in Glasgow where you could get a decent meal that wasn’t Italian, Chinese, or Indian. It still attracts an artsy, if sometimes pedantic, clientele from the local university and from the BBC station located nearby. The bar itself is known for its Furstenberg Lager on tap (thanks especially to the beer’s titanic alcohol content) and for its cool, young, and good-looking staff, which I suppose I fit into enough at the time to warrant employment.

I loved working there. No one swings harder than bombed intellectuals. People in the bar business were even more forgiving of drunken behavior than those in the music business. One night I was walking to work with Robbie, who was headed to his shift at
the Spaghetti Factory. We were discussing what would happen now that the lease was up on our flat. I was a bit put out because Robbie had just announced that he no longer wanted us to be roommates. Not that there was any cooling of his affection for me he explained, but because Colin, the tattooed love monster who had burst open Robbie’s closet door, was returning from the North Sea oil rigs and he and Robbie wanted to try living together. This was a considerable hassle for me, having relied heavily on Robbie’s maternal instincts (he’d even fixed me up with the job at the Chip), but now it sounded as if I would actually have to do something for myself.

We rounded a corner and bumped into a cute, ever so slightly chubby, blond girl with blue eyes and a terminally hip look. Of course she knew Robbie, they said hi, and then he introduced me as his roommate. “Not for long,” I told her, as he was leaving me for a man with larger muscles and more tattoos.

“And a bigger cock,” added Robbie with a grin.

The cute blond girl, whose name was Anne, said that this was a remarkable coincidence since she was looking for someone to replace one of her two flatmates who was leaving to get married. I could come and see the room if I wanted.

I did want, so we made arrangements for me to see the place the next day.

After Anne had walked away I told Robbie I thought she was sexy. He said she was crazy, and anyway she had a boyfriend, and if she was going to be my landlady I had better forget about any funny business.

I nodded. He was right, of course.

The flat was on the top floor of a four-level Victorian sandstone building—you could get in shape just staggering up the stairwell. It was ideal, a small bedroom off of a large hallway, living room, and kitchen that was shared with the two other occupants, Anne—
whose father actually owned the place—and John Corrigan, a delightful and earnest hippie who put me in mind of a bearded, diminutive version of my Gunka James.

Over dark tea and sweet oranges in the kitchen I told Anne I’d like to take the place, and she agreed. We fixed a price on the rent and then got to talking about other things. Anne was and is a great talker, she’s funny and interested in people. She told me about her work with a group of young Glasgow artists who called themselves “The Intolerants.” They had caused something of a stir when they built a shed out of trash from Dumpsters in the main lobby of the art school. Every day at three p.m., six Intolerants would sit in it and have a tea party in dinner jackets and ball gowns. For their next project they were planning to build a man made of rubble in the Kelvingrove Art Gallery. It all sounded very appealing and cool to me.

Anne asked what I really wanted to do with my life and for some reason I told her my guilty secret. That I had been to America as a kid and wanted to go back and live there and make movies or some such ridiculous nonsense. She didn’t laugh, didn’t think it was ridiculous at all. She seemed almost impressed that I had such lofty ambitions. She herself was a movie
nut
, even working part-time as an usher in the Glasgow Film Theatre in order to see the obscure pieces of European and American cinema screened there.

She told me that she was a Highlander, one of that strange ancient northern breed viewed with some suspicion by my scrappy, less noble, lowland type. She was from Campbeltown, on the Mull of Kyntyre, where her family still lived, and was a former student at the Glasgow School of Art but was now seeking work as a graphic designer at the BBC. She told me she would cut my hair if I wanted. She was pretty good at it, she told me. In fact, she had given the groovy floppy haircuts to the band Orange Juice that had become all the rage amongst the indie rocker set. She told me she had friends in Manhattan, loved the Gotham art scene, and
really wanted to go and live there, which, as you can imagine, really caught my attention.

I liked her but I remembered Robbie’s warning. We could be friends and nothing more.

I moved in on a Friday morning, we had a cup of tea together at lunchtime, and that night I bumped into her at Maestros. She was wearing a fifties-style yellow dress with little blue flowers on it. Her breasts looked huge. We were both pretty drunk when we got back to the apartment. In the hallway I held up my hand to wave her goodnight but she walked over to me, looked me in the eye, and then took my fingers and put them in her mouth.

“What about your boyfriend?” I said.

She kept kissing and licking my fingers like they had chocolate on them.

“I broke up with him,” she said.

“When?” I said.

“Right now,” she said

Six months later we were married and living in New York City.

I
was twenty-one when I married Anne. She was twenty-six and had been warned, by her family and mine, that I was too young and crazy to be anyone’s husband. I had also been warned, by my family and hers, that I was too young and crazy to think I could be anybody’s husband. Basically everyone said that it was a terrible idea and that I should not go through with it. So, as is my wont, I resolved to do just that.

We genuinely cared for each other, too, and I think we were both excited at the prospect of escape and adventure. Our families met, our friends met, and everyone accepted the inevitable. So we hired a preacher, and on October 20, 1983, we took our vows in a small suite of the cheesy downbeat Grosvenor House Hotel in Glasgow’s West End. The Fergusons of Cumbernauld were all grumpy and pissed off because they felt I was being impetuous; the Hogarths of Campbeltown, Anne’s family, were all gloomy and afraid because they believed she was embarking on a doomed marriage. Anne’s father, Archie, was a kind, thoughtful fellow who actually said to my dad at the wedding, “Craig and Anne won’t stay together, he’s got other places to go in his life.”

He didn’t speak in an angry tone, rather with a sadness that I
understand now that I am a parent. There are some mistakes you just have to let your kids make.

The great Scottish denial system, fueled by alcohol and the national attitude of stoic bitterness, won the day, and everyone, including in-laws, punk rockers, and gays, all had a fine time and wished us well. My brother Scott was best man and Robbie was a sort of maid of honor. He was the one who pressed play on the cassette player so that Erik Satie’s
Gymnopedie no. 3
could accompany Anne’s walk down the ten-foot aisle between the plastic chairs. Word got around there was an open bar and most of the hotel guests and staff found their way to our reception, too. It got kind of wild. I don’t remember much after the first hour or two.

We left the following day for a two-week honeymoon in Amsterdam. Anne really loved hashish and van Gogh, so she felt she would enjoy it there. The night we arrived she still had a terrible hangover from the wedding, so that night she smoked a giant reefer, putting me in a huff because I had stopped smoking hash after my acid scare and felt everyone else should, too. We fought, she went to bed, and I wandered around the red-light district, getting hammered with some sleazy German dude I met in the hotel bar. That was the first night of our honeymoon—Anne passed out, alone, in the hotel as I drunkenly ogled the hookers who display their wares in the brothel windows.

Things did pick up after that, though. We made up and spent the rest of our honeymoon getting wasted together around Amsterdam. A high point for me—in a very high two weeks—was the french onion soup served in the grand, ornate dining room of the American Hotel, in the city center. It remains one of the top-ten soups of my life.

Back in Scotland, we packed up the stuff we were taking with
us to the U.S. and put the rest in storage. Anne’s father decided to sell the flat, leaving us no place to come back to should the whole thing go pear-shaped. I made a brief court appearance concerning my alleged thievery during the papal visit. The judge declared me a drunk, not a crook, and threw the case out. I was lucky.

Anne and I breathed a sigh of relief and headed off to our new lives in America. We had saved a little money from our jobs and had been given some as wedding presents, so we could get by for a month or two. We had a plan; it wasn’t good, or even lawful, but it was a plan. It was pretty simple. Though we both had tourist visas, we would work illegally until we could afford an immigration lawyer, and, at least for a short time, my Uncle James and Aunt Susan had agreed to let us stay with them, so we wouldn’t have to pay rent right away. By then they had moved to the Westchester County town of Rye, less than an hour by train from Manhattan.

Susan and James didn’t have a lot of room in the new place, but they fixed us up with a makeshift bedroom in the garage and made us very comfortable. All their Scottish expat friends came to see the new arrivals from the old country. Whiskey was drunk and the usual tall tales were told. I rekindled my friendships with my American cousins, who adored Anne from the moment they met her. Karen and Leslie were much as I remembered them, only taller and better-looking. Stephen wasn’t there. He had butted heads with his father and left to join the army, but young Jamie had grown into a long, thin dude, making a brave attempt at a mustache. He drove a silver Camaro and considered himself very urbane.

I worked with my uncle for a little while, helping out with caretaking duties around the estate he now looked after, but I was keen to get into the city. Anne and I took a train in one day to meet Jamesy Black, a guy she had known in Glasgow. He was a fellow student of hers at the art school and had married an impossibly glamorous American fashion model named Lucy. They lived on
Avenue B between Ninth and Tenth streets, which, during the early and mid-1980s, was one of the more dangerous neighborhoods in New York City.

We met Jamesy at the Odessa, that wonderful café on Avenue A. I had never been to the East Village before. I thought I’d died and gone to punk-rock heaven. There were Goths and junkies and rockers everywhere, mixed in with the scary street-life people. The whole neighborhood seemed alive with a tangible, cinematic danger. Everywhere I looked was a movie set—there really was steam rising from the sidewalks, the Checker cabs really were driving frenetically down the avenues. The noise the car horns make is unlike anywhere else on earth, as is the smell that is absolutely unique to New York City—the delicious aroma of pizza mixing with the acrid stench of urine.

In 1983, the East Village was New Yawk Fuckin’ City at its fuckinest.

We sat in a booth and ordered cold borscht, which immediately rocketed into my soup top ten, right next to that french onion in Amsterdam.

Jamesy turned up late, and I liked him immediately. He was very handsome and fashionable, a real hipster. He wore a little porkpie hat and wore a lot of rings. He smoked Marlboro reds from a soft pack and somehow managed to be both funny and cool. We jawed a bit about the old country, drank some beers, and then he asked if I had any experience in construction, as he was earning money working as a carpenter. I told him that all I had ever done was deliver milk and play drums and he laughed and said that sounded about right. He said he could get me a job working on a construction site on 122nd Street. All I had to do was carry Sheetrock all day with a bunch of Jamaican guys—could I handle it? It was three hundred bucks a week, so I told him I’d be delighted.

And we were in. That simple.

I borrowed a thousand dollars from my ever-patient Uncle James for the deposit and first month’s rent on a tiny apartment Anne had found. (I will never forget the look of genuine surprise on his face when I actually paid him back a few months later.)

Apartment #11, 334 East Eleventh Street, had a small living room with the freakiest green shag carpet that ever survived the seventies, a dirty little bathtub in the petite kitchen, and a small toilet off the bedroom. It must have been about 500 square feet total and cost 625 bucks a month, but it was worth it because we were on the top floor and could sit on the fire escape and look at the Empire State Building while inhaling the wondrous smells wafting up from Veniero’s Italian bakery at the end of the block. Anne found a job pouring coffee in a Gramercy Park diner, and we settled into our new American lives. The first few months were magical. We worked hard—I had to leave the house at five-thirty to get to Harlem in time for work, and Anne pulled ten-hour shifts, but we were happy enough. I was too physically exhausted at the end of a workday to throw myself too much into drinking, and after a couple of beers I was out. Unloading and carrying Sheetrock all day was my first rehab.

The site in Harlem was a big renovation job on a burned-out building near Grant’s Tomb. It was being run by a couple of bigtimey contractors out of Jersey, Lee and Bob, and both seemed to take a liking to me. They thought the world of Jamesy, who was a competent and diligent carpenter, and so his recommendation rated highly, plus there is something about a struggling immigrant that seems to appeal to blue-collar Americans, many of whom are of course the children or grandchildren of immigrants themselves. Lee and Bob told me that if I bought a screw gun and a saw and a few other tools they could promote me to laying floors and installing the stud-and-track support beams for the Sheetrock.

I invested in the equipment and soon was earning the unbelievable sum of four hundred dollars a week, tax-free because I was illegal. Every time a city inspector in a suit turned up at the site I was convinced it was the INS and broke into a flop sweat. The last thing I wanted was to be deported. I remained convinced that my future life and happiness lay in America, and getting kicked out would make it almost impossible ever to return.

For a brief spell it seemed as if the madness of the drinking and drugging in Glasgow had finally abated. Anne and I explored and delighted in our new neighborhood. We saved some money and bought some essentials for our apartment. Jamesy introduced us to guy named Rick, who owned a vintage furniture store on Avenue A, across from the junkified no-go zone of Tompkins Square Park. Rick was a tubby English gentleman who loved fifties-style plastic chairs and would set them up outside of his store. I don’t know that he ever sold anything, but people loved to congregate there and chat.

There, on the plastic chairs, I met Jamesy’s strangely aloof wife, Lucy, who was a very beautiful girl but seemed always to be in a far-off place. Later, after they broke up, Jamesy explained that she used heroin to keep her weight down. I met and became great pals with a small dark-haired Jewish actor from Long Island called Roswell. Ros was fantastically funny, but deadly serious about the craft of acting. He worked with Jamesy and me during the day on the construction site, but at night he took class after class to improve his sense-memory techniques and other such actorly bullshit. I adored him.

When Dimitri Solzhenitsyn, stepson of Aleksandr, opened the trendy nightclub Save the Robots, on Avenue C, Roswell and I were hired as the doormen. I don’t know why—we were hardly the scariest duo ever to hit the East Village—but it may have been because together we looked a bit like Jon Voigt and Dustin Hoffman in
Mid
night Cowboy
. We were fired pretty quickly, first or second night, I can’t remember, but we kept hanging out at the club anyway.

At Save the Robots, or on the chairs in front of Rick’s store, I ran into just about everyone who was anyone in the East Village in the early eighties. People like Spacely, the legendary one-eyed smack dealer who didn’t seem to comprehend that self-promotion and his chosen profession were at odds with one another, and the rapper Grandmaster Flash, who was a neighborhood icon and on the verge of becoming an international star in his role as one of the founding fathers of the emerging world of rap. I was deeply impressed with his ankle-length gold-lamé coat.

I met Jean-Michel Basquiat, another neighborhood luminary then being fêted by Warhol and the New York art world as the bold new face of neo-expressionist American painting. He seemed like another vague junkie to me, but his paintings were and are transcendental in their beauty.

Being around the heroin vibe of the neighborhood got me interested in the drug again. When I mentioned this to Jamesy he told me that heroin was bad shit, and anyway there was a much better drug that was cheaper and more fun—and best of all, it wasn’t addictive.

Cocaine.