More Fool Me (18 page)

We decide to go upstairs to the snooker room. Oh, the hours and hours and hours and hours I spent there. I bought many of the accoutrements. A device for respotting a ball. Rests, spiders and extensions. Chalk. My own cue made from finest English ash. They rarely lasted more than a week before being broken or stolen. The room is only just big enough to fit a full-sized table. You almost have to open a window to play some shots. You certainly have to ask anyone sitting and kibitzing to lean to the left or right if you need to cue either side of the blue pocket. ‘Lining up on the white’ became a favourite, if obvious, joke. Coke, snooker, vodka, tobacco, chat.

There is a strange stumbling noise on the stairs. Up comes a round-faced, shaggy-eyebrowed young man.

‘You’re all fucking wankers,’ he says. ‘And you …’ he points at Alex. ‘Where’s that shithead All Bran?’

Alex smiles dozily.

‘Fuck you all. You can’t play for fucking toffee.’ This strange interloper grabs my cue. ‘And you,’ he says to me, ‘you are a poncey tosser.’

‘Right,’ I say. ‘OK. Poncey tosser. I shall make a note of that.’

‘Fuck off!’ he shouts, stabbing the cue up in the air. The round end of the butt bangs violently into the low ceiling. Dust descends.

He drops the cue and throws himself back down the stairs.

‘Well,’ I say. ‘Who on earth …?’

Keith is stepping on to a chair, magic marker in hand. ‘Fuck’s sake, Stephen. Don’t you know
anything
? Liam Gallagher.’

He draws a ring round the circular dent left in the plasterwork and writes: ‘The mark of a cunt.’

‘Oasis,’ Alex explains. ‘There’s this really dumb thing about which one of us bands is better.’

‘Oh,’ I say. ‘Ah. Yes. Quite. I see.’ Not seeing at all.

The afternoon folds itself into an evening. Other people, including many rather desperate known figures who never can or never will buy their own supply, drift in and look longingly at us as we now more unobtrusively flit from loo to table and back, sniffing up the residue from our nostrils as discreetly as we can. A coke addict’s discreet sniff is like the trumpeting of an elephant and deceives no one but him- or herself. It is of a piece with the whisky drinker’s mouth-freshening mint or the odorous farter’s suspicious darting glances at other people. Futile fabrication, fooling none.

The pretty-please puppy-dog eyes of the liggers is distressing me. As usual, Keith ignores them. Liam Carson arrives up the stairs to join me as a partner in doubles.

Only the day before I had had an opportunity to watch Liam in action. The daily management of a club like the Groucho presents all kinds of unique problems. How to deal with the notorious Soho bohemian Dan Farson drunkenly pulling rough trade up the stairs to the bedrooms? Vomit in unexpected places. Indiscreet snorters ruining it for the rest of us by tapping out lines on the dining table. Out-of-control revellers who think the place is open to all trying to pile in after pub hours (the club is licensed to serve drinks until two in the morning). Liam calmly deals with all these issues. There is a steely Irish resolve inside what appears to be a placid, rather doughy exterior. He was taught by the legendary Peter Langan, father of all London’s better restaurants. Peter begat Liam, Peter also begat Jeremy King and Chris Corbin of Le Caprice, the Ivy, J. Sheekey, the Wolseley, the Delaunay, Colbert’s, Brasserie Zédel, Scott’s, the Mark Hix group of restaurants, etc., etc. The better elements of London’s hospitality industry can all be traced in a direct line back to Langan.

As we were: the previous night I was sitting in the back corner of the Groucho brasserie, chatting to Liam and sipping a vodka and slimline
^*
tonic. He would have been on a glass of Chardonnay, this being the era before that grape and its wine were mocked into an unfashionable corner and a preposterous Essex girl Christian name to make way for Sauvignon Blanc. Liam was enough of an alcoholic to think that drinking wine by the bucketful didn’t really mean anything. Only the hard stuff counted. We are interrupted by a flushed girl from the front desk.

‘Liam, there’s an awful tramp in reception. He’s just standing there in a manky old coat with his hands into his pockets staring. What do we do?’

Liam slowly gets to his feet. ‘Don’t worry, darling. I’ll deal with it.’

‘Oh, do you mind if I come too?’ I had never seen Liam handling street interlopers. I knew he would never be mean or threatening. He is a kindly man. Besides, part of his job is to avoid scenes.

In Soho, where the fashionable, successful and prosperous dine, drink and thrive in such close proximity to a parallel world of destitution, prostitution and misery, a bitter hiccup of liberal shame, embarrassment and guilt (which are of no use to anyone) rises in the breast of people like me, a kind of social acid reflux, which is the price we pay for too much good living. And useless, as I say, to the poor, who would rather have our money than our pink-faced, hand-wringing apologies.

I follow Liam as he opens the doors that lead from the bar area to the reception. The frightened girl from the front desk is next to me, just as anxious as I am to see how Liam will deal with this ‘tramp’, a word from childhood but what other does one use? Bum? Hobo? Panhandler? All rather American.

The tramp in question has his back to us, but I can see a thick overcoat a size too big for him into which his hands are thrust. As he turns, Liam quickly extends a cordial hand. ‘Mr Pacino, welcome. How can we help you?’

The girl by my side quietly melts into a puddle on the floor. I can understand her mistake. The great actor has eyes, in the old phrase, like piss-holes in the snow. He is unshaven, and his ‘affect’ is ungiving. It is possible, probable even, that he is researching for some role. I think this was before his Richard III project, but maybe this was where his mind was at the time.

Back to this evening of evenings. Liam and I play Keith and Alex, our new best friend, at snooker. We are joined by Charles Fontaine, chef patron of the excellent Quality Chop House in the Farringdon Road, a ‘working men’s’ restaurant more or less unchanged since 1869. As ever, he is anxious for poker, so we decide to go upstairs to the Club Room to play. Alex excuses himself from this and slides in a happy, lazy shuffling way downstairs. Something rather Bazooka Joe about him.

Charles, a French ‘man of the mountains’, as he likes to call himself, is passionate about poker. His skill is not in proportion to his enthusiasm, but he seems not to mind. We play Seven Card Stud, Texas Hold ’Em, Five Card Stud, Five Card Draw, Omaha, High Low, dealer’s choice. A card-table to make modern purists shudder. We even allow the dealer to nominate wild cards. I have provided the packs and a neat wooden carousel of chips, plastic but serviceable enough.

‘Oh, Stephen,’ Charles says to me excitedly during a shuffle, ‘you know the Peter Blake? I buy it.’

‘I’m sorry?’

Charles has been in London for the best part of fifteen years, working in the kitchens of Le Caprice under Mark Hix, yet still his command of the English tongue is far from secure. I manage to grasp what he is trying to tell me. He has bought a découpage artwork representing me that the pop artist Peter Blake had been commissioned to make to accompany a profile for
Harpers & Queen
or
Vogue
or some such magazine the previous year. Somehow Charles had tracked the original down and hung it in the Chop House. As I look up from the computer this very minute I see it hanging on
my
wall now. Charles called me up a month or so back from Spain, where he has a restaurant these days. Spanish sovereign debt crisis, money tight, he wondered if I might be interested in buying the piece? A price was agreed, and now it is mine.

But back to that day in the early nineties.

Usually a poker game lasts from around midnight to four or five in the morning. Liam will be in charge of locking us in and letting us out. The greatest fear is his wife Gabby coming round and tearing a strip out of him. They have a daughter, Flossy, and how she would love him to settle down to something sensible and secure and unconnected to alcohol and druggy people like Fry and his fiendish friends.

Tonight, however, is a very special night. At round about midnight word reaches us that we should go downstairs. There is a palpable buzz at ground-floor level. The doors that lead from reception to the bar area are thrown open, and in charges Damien Hirst, accompanied by Jay Jopling, the gallery owner, followed by Sarah Lucas, Tracey Emin, Sam Taylor-Wood and Angus Fairhurst. These are the leading YBAs, Young British Artists, graduates of Goldsmiths College, London. Collected by Charles Saatchi, reviled by bourgeois tabloids, they are all making a serious noise in the art world.

Damien, leader of them all for shock value and fame, is waving a piece of paper over his head like Neville Chamberlain on his return from Munich. It is not peace in our time, however, but a cheque.

‘Here!’ shouts Damien, pushing his way to the bar and handing it across. ‘I’ve just gone and won the fucking Turner Prize. There’s twenty grand there. Lock us all in and let me know when it’s spent.’

A huge cheer. At round about six in the morning the barman wearily but cheerfully rings the cheque through the till. ‘That’s your twenty grand spent,’ he says.

‘Another twenty grand on me,’ says Damien to another great cheer.

Six hours later I’m sipping a Bloody Mary. Somehow the club has been tidied, shifts have been relieved. Only we hardcore imbeciles are left.

Tracey and Damien vie with each other, trying to shock the shoulder-padded power-dressed publishers who are starting to come in for lunch.

‘Oi,’ shouts Tracey, sitting on the bar, ‘are you calling my cunt a pussy?’

A knot of publishers scuttle away, baffled and alarmed.

‘You,’ says Damien to a couple as they enter, ‘how do you make a queer fuck a woman?’

‘Errrr …?’ They know who this terrifying man is and don’t for one minute want to look unsporting. ‘I don’t know …’

‘Shit in her cunt.’

Ah, les beaux jours …

Ach, die schöne Zeiten …

Those were the days …

I have almost certainly conflated several days into one. I expect Keith Allen will call me up to say that he can’t have been playing poker with me the night Damien won his Turner Prize because he was there at the Tate for the ceremony. Alex will let me know that I proposed Damon Albarn and him for Groucho membership in ’93 and Damon will say it was ’94. Everyone’s memory will be different, but none of them, I think, will dispute my representation of the spirit of the age as we lived it, foul as it may stink in your nostrils, self-indulgent as it certainly was: precious hours wantonly pissed away, good money spunked, valuable brain cells massacred, execrable shit talked. At the time I loved it. Lived for it and little else. But I was fortunate, very fortunate, for I had a little man. I know because that genius Francis Bacon told me so, as related above.

The truly monumental Soho drinkers, carousers, wastrels and rakehells preferred the Colony Room to the Groucho. In the era of its founder, the fabulous Muriel Belcher, Francis Bacon was one of the first habitués. Dan Farson, author of
Soho in the Fifties
and
Sacred Monsters
, drew a splendid portrait of the early years of this tiny after-hours first-floor bar. When Muriel Belcher died, she was succeeded by Ian Board, the barman. Generally known as Ida, he had the most enormous spongy drinker’s nose I’ve ever seen and was one of the few people I ever met who still used, well into the 1980s, in a cracked, camp sixties voice, the appellation ‘ducky’. If he liked you more it was ‘cunty’. Someone told me, I can’t remember who – perhaps Michael, his assistant behind the bar – that when Ida died in the club, in harness naturally, everyone in the room, as he slumped to the ground, saw his great nose shrink down like a deflated balloon. The stopped heart no longer pumped blood to his scattered network of broken capillaries.

Jeffrey Bernard (whose drinking gave rise to the magnificent comedy
Jeffrey Bernard is Unwell
, for many the last chance to see the greatness of Peter O’Toole on stage) started to frequent the Groucho rather than the Colony Room or the French House the other side of Old Compton Street, another haunt of the old guard. He grudgingly grunted good mornings to me when I came in. Perhaps because his niece Kate Bernard was a schoolfriend of my sister’s. I always felt that the pioneering generation regarded us as soft. Alcoholic dilettantes. And the coke they regarded as pretentious and pathetic. Which it is, of course. We were amateurs. Bernard was a warning to all, however. Stick-like, he was as withered and fragile as Tithonus, on whom Zeus finally took pity, turning him into a cicada. You felt you could snap him in half over your knee. In his later years he sat in a wheelchair in front of the bar, cigarette in mouth, vodka and soda in hand. First one leg was amputated, then the other. I saw him and Dan Farson at the bar together once. They each subsisted on almost identical diets of pure alcohol, yet one was as round, red and shiny as a balloon and the other dry and paper-thin.

Francis Bacon started to come into the Groucho too, overcoming whatever initial distrust of the place he may have had. Rather as email and then Twitter were to be met with howls of displeasure and sceptical derision when they arrived in the world, only to be embarrassedly embraced later, so it was amongst the founding fathers of SohoBoho degeneracy that the Groucho Club – sneered at and despised by right-thinking roués at first – came finally to be accepted and enjoyed in the evening of their years.

Heigh ho, twenty years have passed since those days. Jeffrey Bernard and Francis Bacon are dead. Charles Fontaine lives and works in the south of Spain. Alex James has moved from the Groucho Group to David Cameron’s Chipping Norton set and makes award-winning cheeses in Gloucestershire. Damien Hirst lives and works in the West Country too, as does Keith Allen. Tracey Emin is one of the few YBAs, it seems, to have kept the bohemian candle alight. Not that she ever sucked things up through her nose to my knowledge. But she can drink. Yes, she can do that.