The View from the Cheap Seats (14 page)

I
never actually worked for the old regime. But I can't see them behaving like that; I mean, I've heard that nice Mister Coren on
Gardeners' Question Time,
or whatever that program is (“Ah, this is the story about the lady in Luton with the ferrets down her knickers,” “No, I'm afraid not.” “Then it's Sir Geoffrey Howe?” “Hoohoo, that's the one,”), and he always sounded very nice. Not a man who'd resort to cheap threats, at any rate.

Not like the current bunch.

One of them rings me up, says he wants a review. This week. Fair enough, I say, when this week? Tuesday, he says. That's tomorrow, I point out. He says yes, that's tomorrow. Tuesday.

What if I can't get it done in time? I ask, all innocent.

There's a pause at the other end of the line; you can hear him looking up at the Men in Black Suits in the
Punch
offices, and getting the nod.

Well, he says calmly, then we'd have a blank page. And we'd print your photograph on it. Possibly your address. And we'd tell the
Punch
readership exactly whose fault it was that they had a blank page this week.

I wouldn't be able to enter a dentist's waiting room ever again.

Right, I say. Tomorrow. Put down the phone and describe him out loud. One word. Rhymes with custard, almost.

Okay. Write a review.

Only trouble is, tidied the office last week. Know I had the book somewhere, been tripping over it for a month, called
Gumshoe,
by some American philosophy professor who gave it all up to become a private eye. Gold cover. Unique. Put it somewhere safe. Tidied it up. Very careful. Somewhere. Somewhere tidy and safe. Probably on a bookshelf. One of the bookshelves, anyway.

Only other trouble is, awful lot of books in here. No problem, just look for the gold cover. Up there on the top of top shelf, climb on the desk, reach up, nearly overbalance, pull it out:
Great Sex
.

Bugger.

Wonder briefly whether
Punch
would notice if review of
Great Sex
arrived tomorrow morning. Men in Black Suits in
Punch
offices. Suspicious bulges in jacket pockets. No sense of humor . . .

Forget
Great Sex
.

Review
Gumshoe
. Remember the title, anyway. Can't go too far wrong if you remember the title.

Don't have the book of course. Just
Great Sex
,
funny there being two books with gold covers, flip it open, hope it'll be
Gumshoe
when I look at the pages. It isn't. “She has a magnificent polished body, the globes of her buttocks round and smooth like summer fruit, her breasts high and proud.”

Wonder what
kind
of summer fruit. Raspberries? Gooseberries?

Go and check with encyclopedia.

Discover that the gooseberry may be white, yellow, green or red, and may have a prickly, hairy or smooth surface. Doesn't say a word about whether it's a summer fruit or not. Expect Alan Coren knows about that kind of thing, what with
Gardeners' Question Time
and everything . . .

Doesn't say a lot for her buttocks.

Give up.

Decide to write review from memory. Fake it convincingly. Right. No problem. This philosophy professor, wants to be a private eye, name of, name of, anyway, he's written all these books on Kierkegaard or possibly it was Wittgenstein, one of that mob, honest-to-goodness philosophy professor, earns good money, married with children, gives it all up, becomes a San Francisco private dick.

Was vaguely expecting something tacky, like this book I read once, forget the title,
My Life as a Private Eye Including Fifteen Surefire Ways to Cheat on Your Spouse Without Getting Caught,
something like that, or else maybe sub-Chandler stuff, “Dame walks into my office, figure that'd get Descartes to come up with a new Proposition, sent my pulse rate over the speed limit, buttocks like thrusting gooseberries,” and was pleasantly surprised it's neither.

Not tacky.

Philosophy professor finds true happiness as penniless Sam Spade. Reads
The Maltese Falcon
a lot between cases. Good writer. Finds thirty thousand dollars of drug money under the floorboards of an attic. Gets kidnapped child out of India. Tries to save fitted-up Chinese-American from electric chair. Or gas chamber. One of those. Forget my own head next. Decides detection is Real Life. Never happier. Photo on the cover of the book: crinkly eyes, good man in a tough spot, copy of
The Maltese Falcon
open on his lap.

Wish I could remember his name. Begins with L, or S. Or P, maybe.

Best sections are long, boring bits, sitting in cars waiting for people who never show, pissing into Styrofoam cups. Convinced me I didn't want to be a private dick. Glad someone else is doing it, though.

Good private eye could find anything. Even copy of
Gumshoe
with gold cover. Probably look in most obvious place. Probably just sit down at desk, casual glance to the left, look over to stack of books writer's promised to review at some time or other . . .

Shit.

Gold cover.

Author's name Josiah Thompson. Book called
Gumshoe,
though; remembered that much. Says on the cover “The best book ever written about the life of the private eye.”

I'd go along with that.

This is a true account of what happened when I was asked to review Josiah Thompson's
Gumshoe
, written for and first published in
Punch
, 1989.

C
ities are not people. But, like people, cities have their own personalities: in some cases one city has many different personalities—there are a dozen Londons, a crowd of different New Yorks.

A city is a collection of lives and buildings, and it has identity and personality. Cities exist in location, and in time.

There are good cities—the ones that welcome you, that seem to care about you, that seem pleased you're in them. There are indifferent cities—the ones that honestly don't care if you're there or not; cities with their own agendas, the ones that ignore people. There are cities gone bad, and there are places in otherwise healthy cities as rotten and maggoty as windfall apples. There are even cities that seem lost—some, lacking a center, feel like they would be happier being elsewhere, somewhere smaller, somewhere easier to understand.

Some cities spread, like cancers or B-movie slime monsters, devouring all in their way, absorbing towns and villages, swallowing boroughs and hamlets, transmuting into boundless conurbations. Other cities shrink—once prosperous areas empty and fail: buildings empty, windows are boarded up, people leave, and sometimes they cannot even tell you why.

Occasionally I idle time away by wondering what cities would be like, were they people. Manhattan is, in my head, fast-
talking, untrusting, well-dressed but unshaven. London is huge and confused. Paris is elegant and attractive, older than she looks. San Francisco is crazy, but harmless, and very friendly.

It's a foolish game: cities aren't people.

Cities exist in location, and they exist in time. Cities accumulate their personalities as time goes by. Manhattan remembers when it was unfashionable farmland. Athens remembers the days when there were those who considered themselves Athenians. There are cities that remember being villages. Other cities—currently bland, devoid of personality—are prepared to wait until they have history. Few cities are proud: they know that it's all too often a happy accident, a mere geographical fluke that they exist at all—a wide harbor, a mountain pass, the confluence of two rivers.

At present, cities stay where they are.

For now cities sleep.

But there are rumblings. Things change. And what if, tomorrow, cities woke, and went walking? If Tokyo engulfed your town? If Vienna came striding over the hill toward you? If the city you inhabit today just upped and left, and you woke tomorrow wrapped in a thin blanket on an empty plain, where Detroit once stood, or Sydney, or Moscow?

Don't ever take a city for granted.

After all, it is bigger than you are; it is older; and it has learned how to wait . . .

This was “Easter Egg” text that popped up if you went to a library and clicked on RUMINATE while playing
SimCity 2000
, 1995.

I had recently retired from journalism, but Maria Lexton at
Time Out
asked me if I would like to stay out all night on the streets of London and write about whatever happened. It sounded exciting . . .

O
h, don't do nightspots,” says My Editor, “someone's already done them. Can you do somewhere else?”

I crumple up a carefully planned evening that takes in every London nightspot I've ever been to and a few I haven't. Fine. I'll just play it as it comes, then. Maybe hang around the West End streets. I tell her this.

She seems vaguely concerned. “Be careful,” she warns. Warmed and heartened, pondering imaginary obituary notices, and adventures ahead, I stumble out into the late afternoon.

Six till six.

6:00
    I'm seeing my bank manager. We're standing out in the hall, discussing the use of the word fucking in contemporary magazine articles. I tell him I can use fucking in
Time Out
whenever I want, at which point someone with a suit glides out of an office and stares at us. The tinkling laughter of his singular secretary, Maggie, follows me as I flee.

I try to get a cab at Baker Street, but the yellow “TAXI” light, holy grail of London emergencies, proves usually elusive.
I tube to Tottenham Court Road, where a queue of taxis lurk, yellow lights blazing.

Head down to the basement of My Publishers, make some phone calls, stumble over the road to the Café München in the shadow of Centre Point, where I drink with Temporary
Crisis
Editor James Robinson, awaiting the arrival of My Publisher.

My Publisher is late but I bump into huge rock star Fish (late of Marillion); we haven't seen each other for years, and catch up on recent events, interrupted only by a shady-looking fellow who's setting up “the biggest charity in England” and wants Fish to lend support, and a prat who asks Fish to write out the lyrics to “Kayleigh” on a napkin so he can win a £50 bet. Fish says he can't remember them and sends the guy away with an autograph. Still, somebody made £50 off of it.

My Publisher turns up, and we head off to grab something to eat (La Reach in Old Compton Street, great couscous), promising to meet Fish later in the new, moved Marquee. He'll put our names on the door.

11:15
    We turn up at the Marquee to be met by “Sorry, mate—we closed at eleven o'clock.” When I was a teenager the Marquee (possibly the cheapest sauna in the metropolis) scarcely opened before eleven. Dreams of a peculiar rock-'n'-rolloid night vanish. I still don't know what I'm going to be doing this evening.

My Publisher is heading down to Wimbledon to try to fix an antique laserdisc player he sold to an old friend. I go with him.

1:00
    Laserdisc player still doesn't work, which means my publisher is unable to view
Miami Spice
(“Those Miami Spice girls sure have a nose for torrid trouble . . . a porno pool party . . . our passionate policewomen are ready for the big bust . . .” Fnur fnur).

1:30
    Driving back into town through empty Wimbledon we get pulled over by a police car—they've noticed the antique laserdisc player in the boot, and have leapt to the not unreasonable conclusion that My Publisher is in fact a burglar. Nervously, he hides
Miami Spice
under the seat, gets out of the car, hands the cop his mobile phone and tells him to phone people to prove his identity; the cop stares at it wistfully. “They won't even give us one of those,” he sighs. He asks My Publisher about his (Barrow-in-Furness) accent and announces that he comes from Bridlington himself. Waves us on our way. My plans of an exciting night crusading against police brutality—or better yet, journalistically, spent in the cells—founder and crash.

1:45
    Victoria Station. Something must be happening at Victoria . . . nope. A sterile expanse, full of fluorescent ads for things you can't buy at this time of night. (Prawn Waldorf sandwiches?) My Publisher explains that London pigeons have lost their toes through decades of inbreeding and pollution. Tell him this sounds unlikely.

2:10
    Pass the Hard Rock Café. Nobody's queuing.

2:45
    Soho. We walk past a street of empty wine bars and bookshops, and My Publisher tells me it used to be brothels once, a long time ago; then,
Miami Spice
and a functioning laserdisc player ahead of him, he tears off into the night.

I decide that I'm just going to wander aimlessly, resolve not to disappear into any seedy drinking clubs, even if I can find any (like Little Magic Shops, they have a tendency to vanish the next time you want them, replaced by brick walls or closed doors).

Under the tacky neon glare of Brewer Street a young woman holds a polystyrene head with a red wig on it. The Vintage Magazine Shop has the
OZ
“schoolkids” issue in the window.

3:31
    At an all-night food place—Mr. Pumpernincks—on the corner of Piccadilly, I run into Ella. She's blond, with smudged pink lipstick and red pumps, Day-Glo acidhouse wristbands. Looks fifteen, assures me she's really nearly nineteen and tells me not to eat the popcorn because it “tastes like earwax.”

Turns out she's a nightclub hostess. I assume this is my first encounter tonight with the seamy side of London nightlife. She shakes her head. Her job, she explains, is to sell as much champagne as possible on commission, pour her glass on the floor when the customer “goes to the loo,” spill as much as she can. It's all a con, she sighs: £12 for a salmon sandwich, £12 for a packet of forty cigarettes, no one spends less than £100 a night, and last week she was offered £5,000 by five Swedish men to sleep with them.

She said no. She doesn't think she's hard enough for the business. Ella comes down to Mr. Pumpernincks to drink the rotten coffee and sober up every night. She came up from Bath to the big city a month or so back; her ambition in life is to steal a Porsche 911 Turbo, and possibly even to get a driving license.

4:30
    I'm in Brewer Street again. Six pigeons on the road in front of me; one of them doesn't have any toes. My Publisher was right.

In Wardour Street a small heap of Goths huddle together, walking warily. I can't figure out why: there's no one around to menace them, but maybe they don't know that.

It's sort of boring; there's simply no one about. I start fantasizing a mugging to break up the monotony of empty chill streets; I could probably claim it back on expenses.

Ella's gone the next time I pass Piccadilly.

In one of the back streets behind Shaftesbury Avenue, I walk past some accordion doors with something written on them. Walking toward them it reads
OPRIG
. Parallel it says
NO PARKING
.
Looking back over my shoulder it reads
N AKN
. I wonder briefly if somebody is trying to tell me something, then conclude I'm getting tired, or transcendently bored.

On the Charing Cross Road a little old Chinese lady teeter-totters on the pavement, gesturing at taxis that ignore her. She looks lost. Leicester Square is utterly deserted.

It's nearly five a.m. I stop a couple of cops I've seen across the roads all evening. Ask them about the West End—is there
anything
happening late at night? They say no, say the area's still cruising on a reputation it hasn't deserved for over a decade. They sigh, wistfully. “You may get the odd rent boy hanging round Piccadilly, but that's all they do: hang around.”

They'd seen three people in their last sweep through every dangerous dead-end alley and mysterious Soho street. They're almost as bored as I am; I'm probably the most interesting thing that's happened to them all night. If I had a mobile phone I'd let them play with it. Five thirty, they tell me, things hot up; the cleaners begin to come round.

5:20
    I pass a McDonald's. Already the McPeople who work there are in, McScrubbing the McCounters and unloading McMillions of McBuns from the McTruck.

5:40
    Ponder the touching concern in My Editor's voice when I told her I'd wander the streets, her obvious worry that terrible things were going to happen to me. I should have been so lucky.

6:02
    I'm in the taxi going home. I tell the driver about my abortive evening. “Fing is,” he explains, “everybody relates to Wardour Street, Brewer Street, Greek Street as where the action is. They fink people hang round the 'Dilly still, addicts waiting for their scrips. Fuck me man, you're going back twenty years. Notting Hill, that's where it's all at these days. The action's
always there. It just moves. And the West End's been cleaned up so hard it's dead.”

Conclusion (statistical breakdown):

Originally published in
Time Out
, 1988.