Autobiography (27 page)

‘Look,’
she says to no one in particular,
‘I haven’t got time for this, I’ve got to be writing some B-sides,’
and we all wonder what on earth she is talking about. The video crew visibly sink as Siouxsie outlines her suggestion for the video – a treatment which sees me walking through a park only for Siouxsie to emerge throwing stones at me, to which I evidently accept. The move is a crafty pecking-order trample that would emphasize Siouxsie’s natural superiority to the world, whereas I, quite clearly, would be seen as a spectacle of misfortune. The suggestion is met by a terrified silence, not least of all because it is delivered with a look of advanced misery from Eve white/Eve black. Aware that she is coming across as a slightly glitzy version of sheer misery, Siouxsie advances to leave – too soon, unresolved, yet getting the drift. On the doorstep she asks me whether right or left would be the best direction to find a taxi, and although her best bet would be left, I suggest she turns right. It is churlish of me, but it is she who has set the pace. I return to the room where everyone sits in a circle, their jaws agape and their eyes sore at the attack of the beast from fifty thousand fathoms. It is disheartening, but there it is.

I piece together the artwork for
Interlude
,
but the ongoing ownership tussle with Polydor means that the release date moves back, and is then shifted again when no agreement can be reached. In the event, EMI unsurprisingly become bored with the battle of the sea goats and
Interlude
finally escapes
amid cloud and heartache, and success is impossible. Reaching number 24 in the chart, it is supported by one solitary radio play – but nothing else, and not even a photograph of Siouxsie and I together exists to rouse a nation.

In the US
Interlude
receives excitable airplay, but Reprise decides against a domestic release for reasons known only to the silent gods. Sleeve notes for a new Timi Yuro compilation gratefully point out how
Interlude
had recently become a
UK
hit
‘as recorded by some miscreant
’
. I expect they meant me.

Some years later a Siouxsie biography hits the shelves of Waterstones, and alarmingly she gives a highly divergent account of our video meeting at 18 Regent’s Park Terrace, an account which naturally bombasts me with gobbledygook and ignites her own leniency. I am very surprised, and then saddened.

Gill Smith and I drive up to Cambridge to see Echobelly, whom I love. Gill’s banger dates back to the Apostles so the journey takes at least five days.
‘I don’t like Sonya’s voice,’
she says,
‘she sounds like a posh bird trying to sound tough.’

‘It would be nice if YOU could occasionally manage to sound like a posh bird instead of Rita Webb,’
I flick back.

The following week Gill writes in her weekly pop column how she
‘went out with Morrissey and no one recognized him – a crisp packet would have caused more attention’
,
and for this I scrub Gill’s name off my
In Sympathy At
the Loss of Your Pet Goat
list.

Laughed off by lawyers and accountants, pounder Joyce is now digging his heels in with his sudden claim for 25 per cent of Smiths earnings, swelling disfavor wherever he goes. I am legally advised to let him ramble on, skipping as he does from law firm to law firm – most of whom abandon his plea after a customary threatening introduction.
‘It is what we fear that happens to us,’
said Oscar Wilde, which is true, but gives me no heart in 1994. Well, why should it?

I had jumped from a squatty terrace at Chelsea’s Markham Street and had invested in something far better at Regent’s Park Terrace, with the noise of Camden bubbling over the way, and I am illuminated by an accidental introduction to Jake Owen Walters.

Seated at dinner in a badly lit restaurant in Notting Hill, Jake’s face is one amongst many, and as his food order arrives I stare intently at what appears to be a sloppy dish of dog food on his plate. Jake and I have scarcely spoken to one another, so he can’t possibly know that I have long-since passed the stage of attending any table where dead animals are served up as food. I therefore automatically stand up and walk out of the restaurant. I walk all the way back to Regent’s Park Terrace. Suddenly, you come to a certain situation and you are unable to live with it, and the only protest you can make on behalf of the butchered animal is to depart the scene. Whether this be considered irritating or rude by the gluttonous carnivore is of no interest to me. Nobody can possibly be so hungry that they need to take a life in order to feel satisfied – they don’t after all, take a human life, so why take the life of an animal? Both are conscious beings with the same determination to survive. It is habit, and laziness and nothing else. Once inside the house, the doorbell rings. It is Jake. He obviously understood my sudden exit, and he had been curious enough to follow me home. He steps inside and he stays for two years. Conversation is the bond of companionship (according to the Wildean scripture), and Jake and I neither sought nor needed company other than our own for the whirlwind stretch to come, and for the first time in my life the eternal ‘I’ becomes ‘we’, as, finally, I can get on with someone.

‘Why did you mention Battersea in that song?’
is his opening gambit.

‘Because it rhymed with Fatty,’
I reply with magnanimous Philip Larkin
don’t-trouble-me-now-child
eminence. Jake pulls down his lower lip with two fingers and the word
BATTERSEA
is tattooed into the painfully fragile skin inside the mouth. Suddenly life becomes a world without hours. Jake is stubbornly macho and has lived a colorful twenty-nine years as no stranger to fearlessness. He has no interest in being nice, therefore his leap towards me is as new and uncharted as mine to him. An ex-schoolboy sadist with a flair for complicity, Jake is the perfect buffer, lacking only what I have in abundance – and vice versa. He lived where he had been born, in the only detached house on Battersea High Street, where his sculptor father remained. Non-surrendering, Jake is a profiteer with a certain confidence of wit.

‘What are your parents’ names?’
he asks on that first night.

‘Barbara and Candy,’
I lie.

‘Your father’s name is Barbara?’
he snips, foolishly attempting humor.

It’s horse-hockey claptrap, and every minute has the high drama of first love, only far more exhilarating, and at last I have someone to answer the telephone.

As I lie in the bath, Jake serves me tea.

Life’s sharpest corners are turned, and Jake finally allows someone to sap his vitality.
‘You’ve met your match for the first time,’
his close friend Josie tells him.

Masculinity is marked out by a million intolerably exhaustive guidelines – defined by a sea of should-nots, must-nots, do-nots – and male friendships are bogged down by a welter of touch-me-not rules. With this it is assumed that the world is saved. Yet Jake and I fell together in deep collusion whereby the thorough and personal could be the only possible way, and we ate up each minute of the day.
Socially, we harmonize with the intuitive intimacy that fully communicates across the crowd by a series of secretive blinks and winks and raised eyebrows; a concurrent widening of the eyes and Jake would suddenly be outside with the engine running whilst I delicately take leave. There will be no secrets of flesh or fantasy; he is me and I am he.

‘Well,’
said the woman in the British Airways lounge
, ‘you’re either very close brothers or lovers.’

‘Can’t brothers be lovers?’
I impudently reply – always ready with the pointlessly pert, whether sensible or not.

‘Well,’
she now talks very softly,
‘I always envied that confidential friendship thing because
...
’
and now her voice wobbles quietly,
‘I just never had it in my life.’

Indulgently Jake and I test how far each of us can go before ‘being dwelt in’ causes cries of intolerable struggle, but our closeness transcends such visitations. I had bought a black Saab from a Wapping showroom, and this serves for many adventures around England’s south-west when the intolerable becomes
absolutely
intolerable.

I am photographed for
Creem
magazine with my head resting on Jake’s exposed belly.

‘Do you know what you’re doing?’
asks new manager Arnold Stiefel.

‘No?’
I say in a small voice.

‘Well, that’s a very intimate shot.’

‘Oh?’
I say, baffled.

‘A man doesn’t rest his head on another man’s stomach,’
Arnold goes on.

‘No?’
I answer, all adrift on the cruel sea.

Jake and I are both lying in the afternoon Dublin sun. Exactly where the sun has come from and how it ends up in Dublin is an environmental mystery. Everyone is darting about, trying to stop the day from slipping away, yet we are still and composed and constantly on the edge of bursts of private laughter. I have just been to see eminent Irish psychiatrist Dr Anthony Clare in his drab consulting room.
‘Remember, he’s only a man,’
Sinead O’Connor had cautioned me before I had entered his sunless bastille. He is indeed only a man, and not a very interesting one at that. He disapproves of everything I say without a speck of tender perception.

‘I find it very difficult to accept almost anything in life,’
I tell him, and he huffs as if about to take somebody’s name in vain. Minutes later, with 1945 all around us, Jake and I are down by the sea.

‘I spoke to the doctor about human suffering,’
I squint.

‘I feel sorry for the doctor,’
says Jake.

‘I said I agreed that suffering wasn’t much of a price to pay if your life eventually sorts itself out, but he –
’

‘Oh shut UP,’
says Jake. So I shut up.

Later that night I am by the window of our shared suite at the Shelbourne Hotel. I deliver a running commentary on the ungodly nighttime activities around the Green.

However, we managed to parrot on non-stop for two years in a jocular fourth-form stew of genius and silliness. The knowing grin was a bolt of lightning in ancient walks through pulpy woods, or amid the annoying white noise of Los Angeles, where one night we are confronted by an aggressor. Jake’s fists move too quickly for the eye to follow, and the mugger drops. Delresto Drive is a small and shaded hamlet above Sunset Boulevard, and I unwisely invest in a monstrosity where ten hours of fried-alive sun burns daily into each room. The road has just a few houses, one of which briefly belonged to Marc Bolan during his ill-fated attempt at Americanization in the 70s. It is this inescapable fire that makes me ill after just one week, and since I cannot breathe my doctor prescribes an inhaler. I walk around the inferno from kitchen to hallway, my breathing heavy and my eyes permanently crossed.

‘Well, here you are – you’re in LA in your first glamorous home
...
with the sun beating down
...
and
...
it’s very, very painful,’
says Jake.

‘Do you have Anthony Clare’s number?’
I heave.

Instead we spend as much time as decency allows at Arnold Stiefel’s home on Beaumont Drive, encircled by Arnold’s rescue dogs and by his attentive maid.

Arnold waves us off each night with beloved jars of exotic nuts, and cake-tins full of luxuriously moist creations. But the lonely season must return, for that is what it does. No matter how your new circumstances pad themselves out, the roots of your behavior patterns have already marked you out for slaughter. The realistic essence of the true you made its mold back in the Queen’s Square and Trafalgar Square of years lost. My days at Delresto, with Jake, with Arnold, free of the monastery – full of child-like forgetfulness – all come to a sudden end as night returns at last. Back, instead, to the slowness of days and London’s grey noons, where I pack up my
nw1
life and,
why bless my heart
alive
, how unusual to find myself alone and perishing once again.

Arnold had taken me for lunch at The Grill in Beverly Hills, where he had casually ordered a bowl of frog’s legs.

‘Er, no, Arnold, please don’t order frog’s legs in front of me
...
’

‘I will! I’m sick of you holistic vegetarian busy-bodies telling me what I can and cannot eat!’
shouts Arnold, suddenly a 9-year-old demanding three extra scoops.

‘You don’t need to eat the little legs of little frogs!! Surely you can find something else!’
I rise on the pulpit.

‘I want frog’s legs!!!’
stamps Arnold – with both feet, which, like the frogs themselves, he would probably like to hold on to.

‘How would you like it if someone ordered YOUR legs for lunch?’

‘I want frog’s legs!!!’
and with that, a bowl is placed on the table with some thirty dainty little legs decoratively hanging over the edge of the bowl. I do my now familiar vanishing act and my brief days under Arnold’s wing end – sadly, for me, but far worse for the frogs entwined around Arnold’s teeth.

His frog’s legs aside, the otherwise cheerful countenance of Arnold had given me great hope of continued American success. He was a man of strong imagination and unmatchable wit – affectionate but competitive, frivolous yet deadly – and an hour spent in his company would never be an hour lost. Forever testing how much he could get away with, his wit was the source of his art, and his generosity matched his astounding memory. With Arnold at the pump,
The more you ignore me, the closer I get
becomes my first (and last) hit single on the Billboard 100, having a fifteen-week run and rising to number 42. Miraculously, it is aided by a video in which I finally look healthy and almost attractive. As Arnold wields his personality with all the thoroughness of a cement mixer, the US label takes me aside to complain of his methods . In London,
EMI
also complain about Arnold’s demands, and suddenly I hear that he plans to sell me to
MCA
for $8 million.
Vauxhall and I
jumps onto the US chart at number 18, which is my biggest success so far, but Arnold hates the title. ‘
Why couldn’t you call it
The World Won’t Listen
, or something?’

Arnold badgering the labels was not a problem because he was surely doing the right thing, as
Vauxhall and I
entered the UK chart at number 1. He was more savior than sinner, and his power-maniac drive was easily misunderstood. In a gale of criss-crossed wires, the relationship murdered itself on that afternoon at The Grill.

Peace came at last with
Vauxhall and I
, streaming out in a lavish flow and leaving me stupid with smiles.