Autobiography (11 page)

At last I am face to face with Marc Bolan – as his flutterers flutter about him in the lobby of the Midland Hotel in Manchester. I am nothing and look nothing.

‘
Could I have your autograph?’
, I
ask softly.

‘Oooh, no,’
he says, and slowly walks away to nowhere – unavailable to the outside world. I nod with all the shyness of adolescent modesty, as if understanding the catastrophic trouble I had brought upon him by asking. His new album will enter the chart at number 50, and mental illness is artistic activity is mental illness is artistic activity. On this day of buried disappointments, the showbiz version of Marc Bolan probably relishes the socially trapped condition, yet there is no one here but I – a member of his audience to whom he once turned for confirmation of what he was, and I gave to him as he gave to me. Ah, but not today – shadow close, swift as a swallow
...

Back on Manchester’s inscrutable streets I find a tatty leaflet stuck on a Peter Street lamppost telling me that the Sex Pistols will play that very night at the Lesser Free Trade Hall. They are not the saviors of culture, but the destruction of it – which suits me quite perfectly, and I manage to see them two more times that year. By their third Manchester visit they have released a single,
Anarchy in the UK
, and everything has tensed up. The music papers are at their peak, and it’s almost as if this idea of music has only just started. Their riches are overwhelming, and they seem to be helping everyone to come up with something new. The Sex Pistols are the first British band whose social importance appears to be instantly recognized, and their immediate success is an exhilarating danger to behold. Their singer is a striking Dickensian original; a pop-eyed Wilfred Bramble, but aged 19, and I am fascinated to discover that the Sex Pistols loathe and despise everyone on earth
except
the New York Dolls. I see! Something must’ve happened over Manhattan. Solitary, I slope from gig to gig, and I find my freedom only in the liberating shouts of others as they sing themselves into view. Nothing is ever enough, and I want my turn. Manchester gigs throw up the same dramatis personae; Paul Morley and Ian Curtis are always in line, both ready to be Elvis, both ready to chronicle the age. Ian stays with his grandmother on Milner Street, which leads off Kings Road, and he telephones me a few times to test my palette of words. He is genuine and is attempting first poems. I continue to live with my mother and sister at 384 Kings Road, with its landing haunted by the previous occupant – an elderly woman who lived and died within these walls. Of course, elderly people were not
always
elderly, and are often new to such a surprising fate. I am suddenly full of sweeping ideas that even I can barely grasp, and, although penniless, I am choked by the belief that something must happen. It is not enough just to ‘be’. I am reliant upon the postage stamp, and tactlessly revealing letters are catapulted north and south – anywhere where a considerate soul might lurk. There is such a godsend as ‘penpals’ – friends known only via letters, and these are easier to construct than any living embodiment. The lineage from Dolls to Ramones seemed like a Himalayan missionary’s trek from which a thousand lessons could be applied. But I want no more. I want it to stop now. I cannot continue as a member of the audience. If only I could forget myself I might achieve. I am crumbling from the top downwards – in mad-eyed mode, finding daylight difficult. Unemployable, my life draws in tightly. At 17 I am worn out by my own emotions, and Manchester is a barbaric place where only headless savages can survive. There is no one to take me on, and no one to bother about me. Months go on for years. I explode from intensity. I cannot cope with anything other than my inability to cope. I want to sing. I am difficult and withdrawn – a head, really, but not a body – full of passion within, but none outwardly. There are no sexual guidelines and I see myself naked only by appointment. It is simply a funnel, and there is no one around who suggests otherwise, and my mental horizons are so narrow and no soul is interested in the me that is beneath the chastity belt.

My mother had given me the money to travel to New York in 1976, where I stayed on Staten Island with Mary, who had left Manchester in 1969. Mary was now married with two children (Matthew and Erin), and is welcoming as seven sun-blasted weeks pass. But I cannot muster any lift in spirits, and I spend every day apologizing or saying the wrong thing, and I am born sorry. Mary’s large wooden house is dramatically positioned in the midst of a tricky swampland area, where grasping reeds of great height line the sides of each narrow dirt road. The
final stretch of hidden laneway leading to the tall and shaky house is permanently covered by large, busy toads, and there is no way to reach the house without leaving a tire-trail of squashed slime as the toads gather in their thousands.
‘Look, there’s nothing we can do,’
says Mary, as my head drops into my hand.
Each journey to and from the house is heartbreaking, and the toads multiply daily in their hundreds and are fixed to the road. This is the only road available, and each night beclouds with sound of toad and cricket. When Mary had first bought the house she had found three pythons living in the basement. Possums lumbered through the trees like fat cats.

‘So, what kind of girls do you like?’
probes Mary, but too much rattles about my head. Thankfully Hurricane Belle distracts Mary, who is warned by local authorities (authorities in what, I have no idea) to leave the island or face the wrath of any approaching whirlwind. In the event, we remain behind, boarding up the house and boxing ourselves in, peering out at the lashing reeds as the eye of the storm circles above. The next day there are apparently dead bodies across the island, but the toads remain.

I wander into CBGBs, where I find Russell Mael, and I blush my way through a request for a photograph, and there I stand – 17, clumsy and shy, with Russell, smiling beneath the CBGBs canopy. The first five Sparks albums had been constant companions. I had first heard
This t
own ain’t big enough for both of us
as Radio One’s Record of the Week, which they played daily at around 5:15. I had no idea who Sparks were, but I thought the singer – whoever she was – had the most arresting voice I’d ever heard. In time, of course, Sparks exploded, the color of madness. Ron Mael sat at the keyboard like an abandoned ventriloquist’s doll, and brother Russell sang in French italics with the mad urgency of someone tied to a tree. It was magnificent, and the ferocious body of sound was a speedboat in overdrive. The life and death question was:
what is it
?
As children the Mael Brothers probably slept in bunk-coffins in an unused wing of the house, playing with surgical instruments whilst other kids of Los Angeles addressed the surf. The straitjacket sound of Sparks could never be fully explained, and even now their historic place is confusing since they belong apart. Lyrically, Ron Mael is as close to Chaucer as the pop world will ever get – elevated and poetic, nine parts demon, and I am very thankful:

You mentioned Kant and I was shocked
...
so shocked;
You know, where I come from, none of the girls have
such foul tongues.

The lyrics of Ron Mael and the vocal sound of Russell Mael are solid and original factors, so unique that by the very laws of existence I can hardly believe they exist. The sound registered is very tough, although the faces are fixed in imperishable marble. What
are
Sparks? A miracle, of sorts, and the dead child is momentarily revived.

You’ve been waiting for your first encounter – what a let-down.
I’m just finishing my first encounter – what a let-down.

By the continued grace of my mother, I manage three more trips to America before 1980 enters us all, but by now Mary has moved to the less-interesting Denver, and although my life remains all wrong, I continually dump myself on Mary for seven-week stretches where I am unable to do anything but just get by. The knee-high Arvada snow makes everything look bright and clean, and I rashly place a fruitless ad in the
Rocky Mountain News
in search of musicians as despair mounts upon despair. I apply for a job at the ghastly Pathmark, only to be turned down whilst headless mutants are taken on. I attend an interview at Target but once again I am unconvincing to the mom-and-pop co-op who will employ almost anyone as long as they have at least one fully working eye. It is all too much.
‘You have a better chance of being hit by lightning,’
laughs Mary.
I cannot burden Mary any longer with my heavy granite shoulders, and I cry myself back to intolerant Manchester.
Yanks is a messy record shop somewhere behind the old Gaumont Cinema on Oxford Road. It is a large, damp cellar stacked with cut-price US deletions, and it is here that I ring the till for a few months – wrapped in a heavy overcoat, as the cellar quite naturally has no heat. A customer hands me a credit card and I have no idea what it is – having never actually seen one. Another hands me a cheque and I drop it into the bin below. My heart and mind are elsewhere – or rather, nowhere. One November night, as work concludes, I climb the cellar steps only to be met by a gang of immovable bulk who punch me to the ground and kick me senseless, hurling me from full Nelson to scissor-hold. I see blackness, and I hope it is death. A ludicrous concept, I struggle towards Piccadilly Bus Station with a twisted mouth. Walking through busy 6:30 traffic – with blood on my face, and with no intervention from passers-by – my life in Manchester is defined. I then serve time in another basement as a filing clerk for whom, upstairs, is the Inland Revenue. It is the only way, I am sure, to get the money to return to America because sooner or later
something
must work in my favor.

Several war-torn months are spent kowtowing to the rigors of gabbling clerical ciphers in a fate worse than life. As I understand it, there is nothing else I can do. This is one small rung below prostitution and is fully against sane judgment (because I would actually
prefer
prostitution), but my zest for life is fifty fathoms below sea level and it’s all I can do to add this day to yesterday. Let it all seep as one. Each day I enter the building prepared for execution.

‘WHAT is that?’
shouts the senior clerk pointing to my Gabba Gabba Hey t-shirt, and I am thus summoned to the all-powerful 4th Floor Inspector, and I wonder what world I am in as he sits before me – bald and paunched, an off-white shirt of sweat-encrusted armpits.

Sadness can often
...
just be
...
fatigue.

At Stretford Jobcenter a fat-assed woman sits before me demanding to know why I left my golden position in the underground warrens of the Inland Revenue. She is a Dunlop bloater of such walrus proportions that I find it difficult to answer her.

‘Look at you,’
she says, ‘
can’t you tidy yourself up?’
and she shifts her full-figured pigginess, with lard-arms waving and jelly-legs struggling
...
and I to the appointed place.

‘Because you left a perfectly good job we cannot allow you any unemployment benefit. Here is a job I want you to take.’
The hippo hands me a card with job details, and I read with disbelief.

‘You are asking me to clean canal banks?’

‘Yes.’

‘Clean canal banks?’

‘Yes.’

‘As an occupation?’

‘Yes.’

I breathe one final prayer of mercy, and I recall Nancy’s words in
Oliver Twist
:
I shall put the mark on some of you that will bring me to the gallows before me time
...
and the morgue yawns my name.
I am cross-examined at Stretford Sorting Office as there are postman vacancies, and this is the most I consider possible. Yet it isn’t,
because I am turned down –
deemed physically and psychologically incapable of delivering letters. There is now no escape but death.

I take the train to London to attend an interview with
Sounds
magazine, who are looking for a new writer. Editor Alan Lewis gives me hope, but the inevitable refusal arrives by post nine days later, and my head once again drops permanently to the side.

Starting a few weeks’ employment at the Bupa hospital in Whalley Range I begin my first day’s walk to work in heavy snowfall. It takes me an hour to reach the hospital by foot, and I fall flat on my face four times, clinging hopelessly to hedges as I slap to the ground. God is sending me a special message. My work in the sluice room requires me to shake bits of human innards out of post-op doctors’ uniforms in readiness for laundry. I will only be here for a few weeks, but I am holding on, poorly adapting yet not quite numb to shame. I am surely a secretive part of some scientific experiment of endurance, or a prank played by God. I represent filth. I am forbidden to live – by religion.

Since
Coronation Street
is our only link to Bel Air, I write to Leslie Duxbury at Granada TV, helpfully explaining how the twice-weekly crawl through northern morals needed a new knight of the pen. I am invited to submit a script, and I whip off a word-slinger’s delight wherein young take on old as a jukebox is tested in the Rovers Return. Swords cross, heads bump and horns lock, and the episode fades with Violet Carson addressing the camera, one eyebrow arched, with
‘Do I really look like a fan of X-Ray Spex?’
– cue
Thanks-for-the-memory
-style theme tune. It’s silly – but, really,
what isn’t
?
Leslie Duxbury assures me that my talents lie elsewhere and, self-unmade, I turn once again and I look at myself, my entire body ready to be put on ice. On Cross Street, Damien and Jason are looking for a stylist. I am not one, but I apply and I am given a trial run until I fail to differentiate between oily hair and an actual wig. There are rumors of tunnels beneath Cross Street and I start to look for them. I am beginning to give insanity a bad name.