Ghost Milk: Calling Time on the Grand Project (56 page)

We would have to wait forty minutes for the Sausalito ferry, but we could embark, right away, for Larkspur. I had no information on this place, but it sounded bucolic and the ride took us across San Pablo Bay. It wasn’t until we were snaking around the headland that I knew we were in the wrong movie. Guard towers, grey walls. The only colour in the scene was a splash of orange from the exercise yard. Sunlight wilted into Depression-era monochrome. To the Lloyd Bacon film made for Warner Brothers in 1937, with Pat O’Brien and Humphrey Bogart:
San Quentin.
The soothing voyage I contrived, as a treat for Anna, was a hop, engines at full throttle, to one of America’s grimmest prisons. Forget Alcatraz. That was a tourist excursion from Fisherman’s Wharf. And forget Eastwood masquerading as the only man to crawl ashore on the mainland, after conquering fierce tides. The Alcatraz rock had, over the years, been occupied by hippies and Native American tribes. Swimming clubs used that stretch as a harmless weekend exercise. A nine-year-old boy had cruised the distance several times.

San Quentin was something else: Quentin, Q. The original cyanide gas chamber. I blazed away with my camera, using up my last roll of film. All my American fantasies congealed within the malign geometry of this massively secure penitentiary, an ugly barracks built to contain ugliness. As the ferry slid towards the dock I was haunted by memories of prison-yard dialogue, the snap and spit of warring factions: Latino, white supremacist, black. Quentin was the Holiday Inn for recidivists, unAmerican hardcases, beyond parole. Time was manacled, it didn’t move.

They were all here. Sirhan Sirhan, the Robert Kennedy assassin, passed through Quentin before transferring to Corcoran State Prison. Charles Manson, Dune Buggy Korps Commander, checked out in 1989. Barbara Graham, impersonated by Susan Hayward in
I Want to Live!
, died in the gas chamber in 1955. Merle Haggard, the country singer, sentenced to fifteen years for grand theft auto, served three within these walls. Caryl Chessman, convicted rapist, delayed the death sentence pronounced in 1948 until 1960. He became the first man in America to be executed for a sexual offence that did not result in murder. Neal Cassady, mythologized by Jack Kerouac and Tom Wolfe, endured a prison term in San Quentin, after being set up by an agent provocateur with a low-level dope deal. He saw his imprisonment in this fortress as a religious ordeal, during which he would correspond with female friends, by way of imitations of ‘Proust’s endless sentences’. Let loose in what he called ‘The Big Yard’, Cassady experienced a sense of ‘hazelike concentration’, objects and memories sharply sculpted out of fog.

A number of actors, who went on to perform as Hollywood criminals, graduated from Quentin. There was Eddie Bunker, one of Tarantino’s reservoir dogs. And the fearsome Leo Gordon: who played a major part in Don Siegel’s
Riot in Cell Block 11.
A San Quentin theatre workshop made contact with Samuel Beckett before staging a production of
Waiting for Godot
. Rick Clutchey, who appeared in a trilogy of Beckett plays, was invited to attend rehearsals supervised by the playwright in Berlin. A city in which, according to the biographer James Knowlson, ‘they made an oddly assorted couple in bars and restaurants: Beckett, tall, almost skeletally thin, with his spectacles pushed back onto his spiky hair, as he listened to Clutchey recounting tales of life in the notorious penitentiary’.

Built in 1852, San Quentin was the most authentic of my grand projects. And the most enduring. Baseball and other sports were offered, as a way of appeasing the insanity of an ever-expanding institution. Physical torture as an approved instrument for the interrogation of prisoners was officially suspended in 1944. This was a bad place. No sooner had we realized there was nothing to be seen except a vast car park, for commuters and prison visitors, than we re-embarked. I finished my film as we sailed alongside the red-roofed monolith with its guard towers and searchlights.

Coming ashore at the ferry terminal, we bought tickets for Sausalito, and sailed straight back out again. English spring flowers dressed the gardens of freshly painted houses in unEnglish profusion. Vertiginous steps took us to a position above the town, on the edge of the woods, where a man hosing his lawn expressed amazement at finding people wandering about with no fixed purpose. By the time we sat down in a waterfront restaurant, I accepted the fact that there was no going back. I had left my camera, the battered old instrument with which I had catalogued so many expeditions, on the Larkspur ferry. Without evidence, no story. Ghost milk. American smoke.

The food was Italian and very good. Crisp white linen, red wine. The only other diner looked like a man with a yacht, someone who comes in every day, until he is ready to voyage again. He was weatherbeaten and expensively downbeat, in the style of that hard-charging actor, namer of names, occasional author, Sterling Hayden. He was reading a thick book without moving his lips. Or taking more than a single glance per page. He had the wounded air of a weekend sailor trying to forget thelady from Shanghai. He nodded, acknowledging our right to share his space. Before he went out, he strolled over to our table.

‘Good to meet another person who’s been to the atoll,’ he said. ‘Or even the Cook Islands.’

But this was unearned glory, as I had to admit: no boat, no exit strategy. The branded T-shirt was a gift from my son, who had been marooned in the Pacific with a crew shooting some get-me-out-of-here television series. True decadence is achieved, I realized, when you pay somebody to take your holidays for you. Tomorrow we would head south for that Mexico of the mind. I wanted to know just what happened when you walked thirty-five kilometres out of Guadalajara. And then one more.

My thanks to Will Alsop, Tom Baker, Fay Ballard, John Davies, Yang Lian, Robin Maddock, Brigid Marlin: for finding time to give the interviews I have included, in edited versions, in this book. And to Chris Petit, who, beyond deep-memory interrogation, provided transport and conversation, radio off, on lost English roads. Steve Dilworth’s generosity in offering the journal of a trip to China is much appreciated.

For information, hospitality, humour, wisdom, commissions, and a proper measure of cynicism when required, I am indebted to: Tim Abrahams, Angelina Ayers, Bea Ballard, Fay Ballard, John Baxter, Frank Berberich, Renchi Bicknell, Matías Serra Bradford, Michael Butterworth, Brian Catling, Judith Earnshaw, Laurie Elks, Charlotte Ellis, Gareth Evans, The Film Shop (Broadway Market), Anthony Frewin, Jürgen Ghebrezgiabiher, Gianni Giannuzzi, Stephen Gill, Benedetto Lo Giudice, Oona Grimes, Joanna Kavenna, Patrick Keiller, Fergus Kelly, Anja Kirschner, Andrew Kötting, Rachel Lichtenstein, Richard Mabey, Chris McCabe, Robert Macfarlane, Rob Mackinlay, Jean McNichol, Keith Magnum, Linda Moorcock, Michael Moorcock, Alan Moore, Leigh Niland, John Richard Parker, Bill Parry-Davies, Olivier Pascal-Moussellard, Hilary Powell, J. H. Prynne, Dave Raval, Emily Richardson, Kevin Ring, Les Roberts, John Schad, Robert Sheppard, Danielle Sigler, Paul Smith, Tom Staley, Susan Stenger, Ian Teh, Vitali Vitaliev, Claire Walsh, Stephen Watts, Patrick Wright.

Quotations from the works of J. G. Ballard are used with the permission of the Ballard Estate and the Wylie Agency. My thanks to them.

Sections of
Ghost Milk
, in earlier, unrevised versions, have appeared in:
The Architects’ Journal
,
Beat Scene Press
,
Blueprint
,
Corridor
(Manchester),
Dodgem Logic
, the
Guardian
,
London Review of Books
,
Matter 10
,
Our Kids Are Going To Hell
,
Towards Re-Enchantment.
The photo of Iain and Anna Sinclair is by Grace Lau.

This book is dedicated to Mayor Jules Pipe, a constant inspiration, as he remakes the borough of Hackney as a model surrealist wonderland.