a desert of dung . . . preserving insignificance
Skazz invocation: This document is a fried offering to the Noise-makers, the Maze-builders, to Jah’s thunderbolt zapping us into breath, to the philosophy of William Shakeshaft, to the Soothsayers who predicted year zero: the Synth Uprising, to Manchester-Sheffield-Detroit-Berlin, to Wilson’s white-heat 1963, to the Dogged & Howlingest, to the souls of Engineers, to Robert Moog, to the ROLAND Corporation, to the National Coal Board, to smoking a holy weed while thinking of the leviathan’s cosmos, to certain undergrounders: the Givers of deep Muck, to the Billie Whitelaw wing of the Delia Derbyshire Library, to its spiral staircase there in Coventry, to Kling-Klang-Studio, to ye Ark afire, to nine hour sleeps, to the maggot in the heart of the cauliflower, to the percussion family: believed to be the oldest of musical instruments, to those Monoliths in the Desert, to strobesmokemachinebluelaserbeam, to Tubby’s loops and Phuture’s squelch, to Adonis the Pioneer, to AFX and MBV, to the Justified Ancients of burnt metallic entrails, to Burial and subway maps, to Kirby and subway dreams, to Konrad’s bottomless pit, to Pinter’s three black dots, to the spirit of old DH Lawrence Hayward, to the ghostwriters association of ghostwriting association, to the cavepainters, to lovers of neonlights in cities everywhere, to the aesthetics of Cruyff the greatest thinker in the game, to the aesthetics of Kappa, to the 2222 World Cup Final, to swimming across the Lake of Black Ink, to the Human League, Soft Cell, New Order, Depeche Mode, to a hill, a river, a tree and a stone, to co-inventors of static noise: Bacon & Warhol, to playing your own strats of spool-of-fire, to being alone at Xmas: on the street, in a room like now, to VHS tapes showing faded scenes from 1989 and 1992, to McLuhan’s brain in a jar of formaldehyde, to the New Wolfsalem, to misunderstood creeps, to living fearless against zombie-dread, to welded with a dash words like uber-vital, to Monday morning waking up, face covered in a layer of mucus, groaning, fucking hell there must be a way out and stood between the bed and the couch it dawns in bold slanted caps.
Seems like I’ve not typed for weeks. It’s cos work’s been a bastard but now it’s Friday and that means, it means: I can sit and think about Kafka. Everybody reads Kafka. But out of all the poets on the playlist it’s to him that I’m kind of most romantically attached, and so much so I printed the Warhol portrait, taped it to my door. Which is clichéd. Sod it though. It’s my fave painting. That neon is alive. And looking at the neon I think: Kafka and Warhol are overlapping opposites and a cable connects the diaries to the factory but dunno how. And I think: Kafka is a console game. And I think: Kafka polishes a crow whose wings are purple and blue. And I think: Kafka Cybernetic stockprice this morgen fell by 13 points. And I think: Kafka visits Artemis bordello. And I think: Kafka has a monopoly on the letter K. And I think: Kafka in a seedy letter asked Felice what she’s wearing. And I think: Kafka Zoo. And I think: Kafka in the 2nd-person operates in the 1st-person. And I think: Kafka taught art to those who teach me about art but I’m a bad student. And I think: Kafka is a kind of detective and his stories are kind of criminals. And I think: Kafka produced music in spurts of delirium. And I think: Kafka is a brand-name for pharmaceuticals, a benzo. And I think: Kafka is a brand name for spy software. And I think: Kafka’s eyes emit a high-pitch electronic buzz whose intensity increases as I get closer to the suffering that penetrates to the roots of my teeth. And I think: Kafka and his mythic porn collection. And I think: Kafka plays tennis with an ADIDAS racquet. And I think: Kafka uses silicon earplugs. And I think: Kafka in a room. And I think: Kafka is the room. And I think: Kafka is a metaphor for my drug addiction. And I think: Kafka is the angel-misfit. And I think: Kafka pinball machine. And I think: Kafka did one long confession, a poem, a poem-documentary, about life in the 21st century.
. . .
. . .
Jah the bleak, I like to think. We make factual pain music. As kind of cavedwellers we built a primitive copy and paste laboratory in a brain in a room. The simple idea is that the bed is the glue department and the settee is the scissors department and you tap the buttons, twist the dials, splicing and looping, rewiring the loneliest and the most howling times we can find.
All of the noise to my ear has the distinct echo of being made on a Be Light keyboard: i.e. plotless, first person, the past a glitch.
This control room I rent as I type of another I. This is my room for now, meaning I live alone, a bonus for the ring of Radio Berlin but by the time this document is done I could be in another cage which is a worry of the future but at least this month and next the rent is paid and the rooms around like the man above and somebody nextdoor who every day bangs a hammer, as if tapping a nail into wood, they’re quiet now and I am in bed thinking about my snakeball notes of memory over memory for which the technique is to freewheel and squelch, matching a thousand of these faint almost ribs of pictures at the back of the eye, rear-view-mirror-shit, matching them to the letters and the colon and the comma while the bones in each is a passing photo tested and produced in my little DIY ghost lab: the bed doubles as the scissors department and the settee is the adhesive I like to think.
Engineered at Shoom-in-Me Studio, that Raleigh Banana hell. My mind. Spinning in the maggot of the universe.
 |
The Slimy Side of my Nature
People said Warhol was a freak. He admitted to being a freak, that’s the word in his diary. I’M JUST A FREAK it reads but lowercase: page 460. A freak like Kafka, too, was in his way. He asked Felice in one letter to record every conversation she had with her workmates, to describe every bit of clothing she wore. Then there’s Joyce, another holy freak, in his way. He told Frank Budgen how he's turned-on by women's knickers. In fact one of his self-portraits the character Heinz Consumes Everything is arrested for an unspecified sex crime in Phoenix Park with a hint it connects to a lust for lingerie. So Joyce and Kafka and Warhol you could say were freaks who celebrated it as cosmic sadness transformed into art. And while I’m in this electric feedback game, while I’m droning a drone with this text, I could easily type thousands of words about why I’m a freak, in my way: masked like the claw they sense in you, unspoken.
A little worming confession then, I said. Let’s do it, let’s make them doubt, let’s return to my first maggoty performance.
For this slimy side of my nature appeared when I was fourteen. This kind of smutty trait, it displayed itself as a little kink, a little sniff I tasted inquisitively and then lost control. This slime lurked in me thru and beyond early adulthood. Fourteen, though, was the age I discovered ejaculation which feels late but it’s where this story begins and yet I tried tugging off at nine as well (nine-years-old) after watching uncle Thingy down bluebell wood tug himself. Seeing his sperm shoot fat over a dock leaf. The same way my uncle fiddled with himself I went home and fiddled with myself but of course the seed (as in my balls, as in I was too young) the seed was unseeded. Then I forgot about masturbation until a few months before my fourteenth birthday I found that if I now caressed vigorously it would soon feel damn good, to produce my own yolk, to spurt over my belly, to chuck it up the wallpaper, crusting like a snail my bedsheets. In fact I was cautious about where I threw it initially. I used loo-roll. That first week. I then found a rag in the cupboard and used that. But once I’d recovered from the initial body-horror and the fear of my parents knowing I was mucking about, I was AT IT three times a day. Betwaddling it. Erupting into the perfect splodge.
Sorry for the drips: this is the maths of despair.
But it was Easter off school when lo: pottering about the house I found in my dad’s bedside locker a pile of magazines, Mayfair, Razzle, Escort, your bog-standard porn. Naked ladies are nice, I thought once I’d sneaked a copy into my bedroom, getting a closer look and I’d never seen the inside of a vagina before and there was the inside of a vagina, I was amazed by the shape of the lips. There were so many photos of them. Of readers’ wives. (My mum was in a porn mag once, my brother was in prison and an inmate gave him a publication in which he saw our naked mum, the poor kid: imagine that.) The stories captivated me too, reading about a plumber ferreting his way into a housewife’s knickers which he rolled down her legs and then sniffed. He inhaled a secret musk, it said. And I was like: wow, men actually get pleasure out of female underwear? The heavily stylised descriptions, in-actual-fact, made it seem like gussets smelled beautiful: a mixture of winter blossom and frying saltfish perhaps. I don’t know. These crude texts sounded fascinating at my age of slime, anyway.
Michelle lived over the road. She had a kid Lee and when they moved into Hoo View his dad, her partner, a skinheaded runt called Charlie Hunter lived there too. My only picture of him is down the library carpark we found a stray dog, my brother and I and this dog a Labrador followed us all afternoon at one point started humping my kid brother in the village and Hunter walked by with three lads who saw the dog attempting to bone Max’s short body and just as I kicked its ribs Hunter grinned and said: Look! All of them laughed. Then time changed things. One Sunday morning, mid-1980s, I lay asleep while Michelle was in her house, they lived on the end of the terrace and Hunter had a big survival knife or rifle and he was in a berserk mood that led to Michelle phoning the police and about five of their vans parked in our street while Hunter held her hostage: it was reported in the Herald. Front page I think. Splashed. For a few hours he kept her prisoner while the coppers negotiated. Then I dunno what happened but Hunter was jailed. And again, time changed things. Michelle lived eventually with Sean and started coming round our house, she not Sean, to chat and smoke, to drink tea with my mum.
Still gives me neck-tingles, to remember. Michelle on our couch, sat with my parents, they gossiped about other neighbours as I lay on a sheepskin rug. Her right leg stretched out and I think she was unaware her toes started stroking up and down, then in circles, against the waist of my top: a sweater: whatev. Slightly brushing my lower back, anyway, it felt amazing. Her toenails rubbing against me while they chatted about prowlers and eventually my dad noticed or he kept looking towards the carpet I think jealous that Michelle was caressing me, not him. I knew he wanted to have sex with her. Yeah. Those tingles felt non-sexual, though, more like them you get with ASMR. Yeah. With her toe or toes gliding against my right flank, I wanted the moment to go on and on and. Is this before or after the slimy side of my nature’s rise? I can’t recall. Despite it feeling both weird and good, I rarely revisited the memory. Told no one.
After she and my mum got pally, Michelle asked me to babysit. She’d give us a fiver to sit and watch telly, looking after Lee who was about five-years-old while she went down Adderstone and the first time, I remember, the images in my brain are simple brown patches, Michelle opened the front door and led me into the living-room where by the hearth her boyfriend Sean stood, welcoming and reeking of that HAI KARATE aftershave, as he referred us to the VHS player and a pile of videotapes on top he said are porn.
Have a watch if you want youth, he said. It’s hardcore.
Alright I might, I said and felt Michelle’s gaze.
Sunlight came thru a gap in the front curtains. She and Sean went out and I watched Coronation Street and a bit of Brookside and like every house around Hoo View in which I’d been, this room had a unique smell and it was of briny sweat and beef gravy. Lee came down and showed me his barnyard, a plastic farmhouse and tiny cows and pigs and sheep and shirehorses and we sat on the carpet in front of the telly when he knelt before the VHS saying let’s watch this and he inserted a videotape and the screen crackled into a naked woman with her thick legs splayed and her clitoris throbbing really huge. I had never seen this meat-of-the-worm before. Instantly I hit stop and eject and yet Lee had seemed captivated, he said let’s watch more. I said no. (Funny tales I heard about him as he grew into a lad. Like he’d be with a few girls in a cornfield and he’d take his clothes off, I heard and laughed thinking there’s a freak like us.)
Next time Michelle asked me to babysit, Lee was in bed. It was just us two in the living-room while she waited for a taxi and I settled on the brown couch. Wearing a red silken dress, she leaned over an armchair and parted the net-curtain an inch to look for the cab and this gave me an opp to look at her hips and buttocks and the curves gliding inside of them I thought as my neck turned and she heard the click of my vertebrae. She knew I ogled. And this was a weekday. I say that because the slime emerged on a Saturday, summer, the sun setting when I babysat and Michelle went to Adderstone: a smallish town with loads of pubs, deep in the midland countryside. Each pancake day since the 12th Century all the shops on Long Street, they shutter their windows and board up doorways for the Ball Game when hundreds of mainly men collect on the road and the mayor alongside a local celebrity like Eddie the Eagle Edwards or Edwin Starr, two Eds who during the late-1980s-early-90s lived in the area, the mayor and a media person lean out of a high window in the town’s main thoroughfare each year since the age of the Green Man and they drop a massive leather like a medicine ball but lighter and bigger for the crowd below to catch and over the next few hours they tussle for it, mobs of men, fiery jacks, skuttles of them younger, hundreds try to touch as it flies from one muscular arm to another. They pile into tangles just to hold this Shrovetide Ball. The only rules are you’re forbidden to kill and whoever holds the ancient-fucking-orb at 5pm, when time’s up, they’re declared the winner.
She was out with pals in Adderstone, anyway, Michelle was, the night I went in her bathroom. Now I think of this upstairs room and I’m digressing again but you can skip to the next paragraph cos I want to say that when I recall this place my mind sees I’m six-years-old on Hoo View’s green, the patch of grass in the middle of the cul-de-sac with Marc Dixon and a dozen kids of an evening when Paul Mackumsky pointed to this bathroom window and he snorted, said there’s your granddad Marc look in the nud and everyone saw in Michelle’s future bathroom, Ron, Mark’s granddad, his body stood behind the rippled glass naked in the tub. All the kids went ha-ha-ha and Marc said nothing, I remember and surely he’s never forgot. Years went by and I was now myself inside the same bathroom where I peed, flushed the toilet. I zipped and mumbled something and washed my little claws and I never dry them on a towel I just wiped palms and fingers on each trouser leg while the cistern pipes were humming. I noticed a pile of worn clothes: a pink shirt, a pair of stonewash jeans, a baby sock, a bra and a pair of panties. When my eyes saw the latter, my heart pumped faster than normal.
The potency of the powers of the slime went wild. I changed into an eyeball and it was somehow attached to the ceiling, this eyeball, watching me hook a finger around the hem of these knickers. Red lace. After dangling them for a bit and noises going pop in my head I dropped them back on the pile, slyly tried to adjust them as found. From between two socks peeped another pair of white silk. Panties. I saw myself grub them. Saw myself stoop level with the window-sill and hold them up, pawing these ladies kecks as an urge boiled inside, I don’t know, a glow deep in my end while a voice from a fire told me that a woman has been living in this cotton gusset which you can see soiled in a waxy yellowy dried kind of goo. Suddenly the slime took hold, a shot thru my belly. Another I, another me, turned the lock in the bathroom door and put the toilet seat and lid down and then taking a sneaky glance at the window this other me unzipped my jeans, yanked them to my knees along with my boxers. So my dick was out and my arse was out. Then taking another sneaky glance at the rippled glass cos I heard a car engine, I sat on the loo. Perhaps my arsecheeks left a print on the lid, but anyway. Creep-of-creeps, I wrapped Michelle’s panties round my unholy penis. The material felt soft and smooth and languidly I jacked-off.
I was not myself. I was a new version of me when I unwrapped the pants from my end. Holding them up to my face I concentrated on the strip where the vagina had been, a double-layered kind of fluffy cotton, it was smeared in orange-brown pastels and for an instant a pang of shame flared in me saying this is wrong-wrong but then the voice controlling my penis told me to shut up and sniff. A kid in my class said the scent of a dirty gusset is called buckram. And that was a thought I had, I didn’t want it but it came to mind in the few seconds of my head fizzing as I smelled the cotton and it was as if the scent set off these wavy caresses to rise from the back of my legs into my fluttering balls. Then I came.
Dreamcore was about to have a renaissance. It was 1988. Early ravers were dancing that weekend while I was babysitting, saying hello to the slimy side of my nature. Lust is not a crime. Next morning, at home, I crept downstairs. Keeping well away from my mum and dad’s eyes, I hid behind the Sunday Mirror in the armchair for an hour going thru all of Saturday’s football, I read up on the games, transfer news, checking what teams stood at the top and bottom of all the divisions including the Scottish and while I turned the newspaper’s leaves, other parts of me were feeling very grim about what I’d done. My dad asked if I wanted a slice of toast with marmalade. Not hungry, I said. And even though I’d irritate him when I slurped them, he asked: How about a bowl of Coco Pops? When I was a bit snappy in the way I said no, he realised I was troubled. Around midday the top of Michelle’s head bobbed in our front window and I raised my head because I wanted to test if I could look her in the face without some message telling her: I invaded your most inner-privacy sorry, Michelle, I sniffed your panties. We had split-second eye contact and my mum and her spoke at the doorstep about swapping a glass coffee table, for what: I dunno.
The better to implicate oneself in highly dubious proceedings and bring the flow to life, I was a now a budding freak. Yet told nobody, until you, now.
Side 1
Match prep yeah
Clocked-off at 4:32pm and walked south in oblivion for a bit but eventually got a Stagecoach and stood in more oblivion on the crowded bus until I debarked outside NATWEST, the bank in Withington where a man to the right of two cashpoints sat with a layer of cardboard between his backside and the grey pavement. All of this in fact feels grey. The hoodie, the paraboots, the baggy jeans he wore: like his face and eyes and hair. Grey almost too were the tones of our voices as we asked: How’s it going?
Football’s on later, I said. Liverpool-AC innit?
Don’t know, he said.
Sat further up the street by SPAR was another, a man, cross-legged on a folded up sleeping bag and he spoke to somebody passing who shook their no-no-sorry head. Grafting they call it, grinding and surviving as in asking strangers for money and though I’m yet unaware of what that life entails I’d look at him and the first man, at others who’d sit in the same begging spots: they call them pitches. But I’d see them daily and think: Shall I?
My answer was nah: the match is on and. I turned down Copson into GATEWAY or was it SOMERFIELD or had it became a CO-OP by then? I know it’s irrelevant. Like revealing that I once took a photograph of the fruit shelves in this GATEWAY or SOMERFIELD or CO-OP and when I went back to my room I used my home computer to change the filters on the image so four bunches of bananas and a pyramid of oranges all became black as if decayed, as if apocalyptic I thought but anyway, after getting off the bus from work, I went in this supermarket. A bit jittery. From downing since 9am roundabout six espressos. I grabbed a shopping-basket and the veg was there so I snatched (or picked up) I simply picked up a carton of cherry tomatoes: okay for the heart-strings: and put it in the basket. I walked sharp down the first aisle, dodging two trolleys and from one of the refrigerators I got a box of six chicken drumsticks and from another I got a Brie: a triangle of. And I tried being quick. People so slow though, walking dumb cattle, cows on tranquillisers to the bread where I found a (by now stale) baguette. Last before checkout was the drinks and it took ages to find this okay red Chilean, wine-wine-wine-wine, I’d buy it loads, about three quid a pop so two bottles tonight. Something to glug down the hatch watching Liverpool.
Back in my holy bedsit I said hi love or hi mate to the kitchen wall.
One pinpoint was within ten of arriving I’d turned the oven on. It was gas, which is also irrelevance I enjoy to recall. When a tiny orange light on the stove’s panel went off to say it’d reached two-hundred I put all the drumsticks in a glass dish I’d oiled and preheated and it spat twice at my chest before I sprinkled the skin, like my skin, the white dots around my calves, covered it with loads of paprika and chilli powder, bit of salt, black pepper, a clove of garlic I’d chopped like toes. Something to line the belly, yeah man. From the cold tap I added a drip of water, with a spatula I mushed it all around. Red and tasty it looked. Then, a tea-towel protecting my fingertips, I slid the hot dish into the oven: top shelf. Yeah. All of this is boring and forgotten stuff. A Swiss Army knife I owned is now lost but I must’ve used its corkscrew to open a bottle so the wine could breathe in and out, a lung, whatever that does. Damn. Evenings after work are kind of strangling. You cook, eat and then all you can do is vegetate, as they say, in front of a screen. So boring. But the legs roasted while I checked emails and Martin Parr had replied saying yes he’ll do an interview, telephone him on this number and I was like good shit, ask about his aesthetic! Life can be okay sometimes: I poured a mug of wine. Quickly logged into YAHOO and typing the news I said he’s my fave photographer to Rosey who I pictured driving, radio on, humming to The Coral.
I like their song (don’t ask me to sing it) but the chorus goes on about the morning and there’s a little tinkle of xylophone, she once said: which is kind of relevant to this text.
Glued t’t television
Chicken skin, spiced, flamed to a crunch, tastes the best. Bababababa. Eating drumsticks, sipping thin redwine, I was parked in this wooden chair that rubbed my arsebones and I had this big twenty inch MAC monitor stood on the table to my left and a wheeled stand to my right bore the chunky TV. So two screens as I’m munching. So my froglet eyes kept involuntarily moving from my dinner to YAHOO Chat (waiting for Rosey’s reply) and back to the food on the plate and over to the Champions League Final preview now starting on telly from Istanbul. I forget who would've been a pundit in those days. ITV broadcast it though, free-to-air. You could just switch on your shitty old box and watch the first half, Milan scoring three, Kundera nil and my gaze was on the computer not the television as the teams walked off the pitch at half-time. Rosey typed: I’m sorry Chat Twat. She knew I was a bit gutted. Three-nil down. I poured another mug of which muddies the lips I saw in the bathroom mirror and then peed, thinking: That was typical English-clubs-in-Europe, we were totally out-cultured.
Wow though, in the second, when to our wonder it exploded. Gerrard connected with Riise's cross arching a header past Dida for an early goal, which was okay but then Šmicer beat Dida bounding a shot into the bottom left for another and it was soon after that (the what was by now machine on fire) Gerrard ran for Baros' layoff and was tripped by Gattuso in Milan’s box. It was a penalty, potentially making it three-all, making it historic, an epic in Istanbul. Yet for most of that wild second-half I was drunk, typing (bababababa dialogue) to Tracey on my clunky home computer. At least I know I’d have watched pinned to Alonso taking that initial pen. Which Dida I think saved. Alonso missed anyway but when on the rebound he scored I know for sure I sprang off that chair shouting words like fucking-yes-man-yes-god-jesus-wow. The street outside would’ve heard. The windows were open. Another detail I enjoy to remember.
Coming from three-nil down Liverpool made it three-all and after a goalless extra-time they won three-two on penalties.
Postmatch analytics drone
A squish of the inflow was after the match in that bone-rubbing chair, I felt bombed from disbelief. Red wine glowed in my belly. And wasn’t long before the mobile flashed a call from Tracey who from something she said which I forget she expected me to be cheerier about Liverpool but we talked about the goalkeeper Dudek wobbling his legs like old Grobbelaar, a massive philosophical statement she said and I laughed. That’s the first time she’d heard me laugh, she observed. Then we spoke the usual bababababa but in a subpart of my mind I was resenting her remark about it being the first time she heard us cos I only laugh at stuff that makes me laugh, I thought as we talked about what? The Coral. Tea-towels. Princess Anne. The Coral write sea shanties and my tea-towels need washing or I’ll catch impetigo, which can give you weepy scabs on the chin and Princess Anne? I stood on the forecourt wall when she opened Jawbone fire-station. So close I could’ve karate-kicked her. Nerves in my lower back throbbed then felt numb from sitting in that wood chair so long and twice while on the phone a car went beeping on Burton Road going bee-bee-bee-bee-bee-beep, celebrating the result, Scousers trolling South Manchester.
And I don’t know how I got into this next situation. It was around 3am and peckish I sliced Brie and tomatoes and put them in the last of that French stick after I’d dripped water over the crust and warmed it in the oven, so it was like fresh again, nice fluffy bread and sat back in the bone chair, I wanted to dive into this snack and watch crap on telly. Thing was I couldn’t relax cos Tracey was still on the phoneline.
She said: Put your mobile down on the arm of the chair but don’t hang up and let me listen to you eating.
Nah, I said and.
It was the skinniest end of the night, about half an hour before the birds began chirping. She cut me off or I her. Whatever.
Dirty skazz realism
Up on the ceiling a louse watched me in my sleep until 7:45am: my eyes opened, I groaned and stank (of sweat, cigs and booze) even before farting loud. Forget the smell but my guess it was vile cos of the two bottles I’d drank. At least my head felt clearish as I brushed teeth, made coffee and sat in the bone listening to Alan Brazil who said the Liverpool team are due late afternoon for an open-top bus ride through the city. No hangover: that bread soaked up the wine, I considered. And left the house to became part of a summer morning, so to speak. And it’ll be a beaut day, I decided at the bus-stop from where a 42 single-decker with only ten or twenty passengers carried us up the petrol chamber of Wilmslow Road. Sunny and blue. A few clouds of wool floated up there but the temperature was whatever, warm, nice on the chicken skin. Outside of Detroit House I had the ritual cig and met Axel who said: Utterly astonishing.
Nobody had said that to me before so it stuck in my mind.
A thing about the TNS office, a very boring thing is until about 11am on clear days sunlight would gleam through the office windows. Maybe not in winter but when I arrived at 8:51am to an empty call-centre of cubicles and beige 1980s-era comps, all of it glowed with a blonded texture I see faintly now, too much so, too washed and static, but still bright as I shut my eyes and press the keys (k and e and y and s) and see Julie open (there was) a pine door the main door glowing into and out of the office and I half-smiled and my eyes for a second followed the rhythm of her rump swaying in tight black jeans as she walked simply to her top desk. We stood about ten meters apart, my brain dancing with skazz energy like a steel ballbearing going ping-ping any-which-way, when I said: Julie, is it okay to leave early so I can go to Liverpool?
For the parade you mean?
Yeah.
Well the radio’s saying it starts at six, so you’ll have plenty of time.
Ah cool, I said and my attitude then was if you’ve got legs you’ve gotta rise off your backside some time or other.
The shift ended 4:30pm. Straight outside I sparked up, saying see-yah bye-bye to TNS people and I mooched alone to Piccadilly.
Side 2
Matt busby
Platform 13, in the citrus spun-light it was rammed. Loads of people, lots of chatter. Many collars and blouses were commuting back from office jobs but many Liverpool tops stood in groups talking, laughing and a man started that L I V, E R P, double O L chant and another booed. Skylarking, I thought making a cig. Fuck getting a train ticket. I lit up and an old woman, hair shaped like a box-kite, she looked flustered at me and then at a no smoking sign and looked flustered at me again and refaced the sign. She ruined that cig. I flicked the butt to the railtracks. A bottle smashed. Sounded accidental. Men whooped like men like boisterous chimpanzees. Then this poxy little regional type of train pulled up, just four wagons and a panic was I’d be unable to climb on cos every window showed a carriage of heads and chests and luggage but I waited for a man in front, he took ages for a person before him to pile aboard but we all squeezed and yeah, every seat and aisle from the vestibule, all filled so I leaned near a toilet door and began to sweat, pure crammed. A group of men and a woman all probably about my age talked about the Liverpool team Kenny managed which was when millions of us started following the club, hunting glory and I recall a guy who referred to John Barnes. I remember his poor breath, the smell.
Maggoty, I thought with relish: cos I didn’t know the man and I was irritated and bored.
Each time he spoke, the woman coughed I noticed. And it ain’t me who stinks it’s him, said the toilet door I imagined for fun but by the time we’d paused at Warrington I was feeling sorry for the man cos he sounded okay while his friends were too gabby. Like when he went into the toilet cubicle, one of them bitched: Hope he’s brushing his teeth. And they all laughed evil. Beforehand, though, on stepping inside the loo, he’d squeezed next to me and said sorry so I got a direct whiff and I coughed: an involuntary reaction for which I slightly kind of cringed.
Yeah I had a Northern Feedback Experience, which is an idea to feeling that groove in Dig It when he says Matt Busby and then dig it, dig it, dig it. By this I mean as the train braked into Liverpool I had by now found a seat and texted Tracey and was looking through a sunny window with a Fall live tape I’d recorded on earphones and can’t recall but it was crackly, the percussion driving like classic kraut and a hundred or so meters before Lime Street you go into endless shadow for this black-bricked wall beyond fifty meters high like a castle an escarpment and the railtrack goes on and on and while the train slowly halts for the platform I remember, embedded inside this massive wall was an abandoned room, a doorway with no door, a window no glass and I pictured Lennon before he was famous, Echo and the Bunnymen fans in 1983, ravers returning to the grey from nights in 1992. They’d have seen that which is a cave now, soot covered.
Anyway, there was a kind of click-northerly-click in my brain as my body moved through this space. But it’s impossible to describe cos the clarity vanished soon enough. And I could be tapping bollocks too.
We’d reached Mercyside.
Bows of burning gold, arrows of
Mooching out of the trainstation onto Lime Street I became one of three hundred thousand in an epic shebang. Over the road stood St George's Hall. The plateau. I could see the stone columns but not the stairs for so much spewing of red and white clad bodies, innumerable flags bearing faces of Shankly-Paisley-Fagan, of five European Cups, five stars. Thousands chanted. Thousands of voices moved with the swirl of how sound floats in warmer weather. Myriad, I thought and is there another word for sun? There is: wheel-o-fire. Silverplated. Whose glow span down on us, as hot as Ibiza said a girl, beating on every pavement full of heads and feet and legs, countless in Liverpool jerseys like the old TOSHIBA and CANDY kits and the now CARLSBERG. I walked. Or I tried to. Pressed-together bodies rippled like seawater as I more or less shuffled along the pavement. A woman with iron-grey hair in a bun, she leaned into my orbit and opened her mouth wide to drink in the solar rays. A red and white chequered banner (or in my mind a Liverpool FC quilt cover) was draped over a statue of a knight on a lashed horse. I stood and then tried to walk for a bit within this constant circle of moving people until I found a spot where I could stand and look at my phone and Tracey had texted: You’re on TV. And I typed: Bababababa x. When I hit send, it said: You Have Zero Credit. Yeah. Some bald chap had a stall flogging LFC bootleg shit: Gerrard posters, bucket hats with the club crest, loads of new printed Istanbul 2005 t-shirts, sweatbands, badges, two teddybears, wimpels and wimpels. A cider-drinking guy pushed a supermarket trolley and inside the main basket lay another pissed-up-looking man, he was flaunting this placard of a loveheart between the words WE and SIR RAFA B xxx.
I remember. I remember. I remember. From a Paul’s Newsagents out of the fridge I grabbed two cans of RED STRIPE and asked a man who looked like a Paul cos he had the kind of pale face and brown helmet of hair I’d associate with a Paul, I asked him for a small pack of GOLDEN VIRGINIA. He asked where I was from.
You don’t sound like Manchester, he said.
It ain’t where you’re from, it’s where you’re at, is an old-school proverb I liked to think.
For about forty minutes I sat on a carpark’s brick wall. I took biggish swigs of the Jamaican lager, which is weakish and sweet and I soon cracked open the second and had two cigs while noticing the sky gradually go orange in the west and in the east almost emerald. A bit bored, I reread Tracey’s text and imagined a TV camera filming me, broadcasting a two second headshot of me exhaling a smoke live on SKY Sports and then cut to the ad break. Eventually I returned to Paul’s and bought four more cans, three of which I put in my rucksack. Then I looked for somewhere else to chill.
Loads are saying the bus is delayed, a passing voice said.
Mersey police are flippin clueless, I also heard.
Running two hours behind, said a woman.
Steel barriers had been erected so the road was clear. I had a meander and found an unoccupied bench on which I rolled a ciggy and opened more beer and then I returned to the crowd and stood seven rows from the kerb. People yelled and talked but I wasn’t listening. I wanted a seat again and drinking that third tin I badly needed a pee. So after my smoke I dodged around a throng’s edge to find an alleyway where the memory is of aiming into a small drainhole while my nose picked up a tasty smell of Chinese cooking. Hungry, no mood for eating though, I went back to wait on the street. Every cop I saw and I’m talking hundreds, all the men had bright pinkie faces in the daylight and really thick shining necks and a woman nearby was saying phwaor about one of them with fuck-me eyes she said to her companion who had a pair of breasts. I glanced: lizard to the fly. Then I remember the spark of a man’s cheeks as he wept, holding to an ear the same type of NOKIA I used to own. He said something like: Oh sod off yer mardy fat fuckin sack of bitter blue shite. He was crying and laughing, going: Yerra divvy, yer divvy, yer fat fuckin div. Then a totally different man, a pensioner in a tweed cap, he was outside a betting shop cos a display photo of a sprinting greyhound lay above in the window, he said: The bus is passing Anfield now, it’s been significantly delayed but shouldn’t be too long.
The roar increased, an exploding gas in the darkening air. One kid had climbed halfway up a lamppost. REEBOK on his dangling feet, he perched on a street sign. Deeper into the haze other young lads in trackies and trainers had climbed up other lampposts, standing, perching. Five or six mingled on a bus-shelter roof. Chanting flowed richer then, more absorbed, more coordinated with You’ll Never Walk Alone rising and falling from one end of the road into my ear via some PA speakers I think as as my head swirled from the beer, gut empty. Just below the crest of a hill in the gone 9pm gloaming the crowd’s pulse went a beat higher cos from a bend in the road about an acre away the blur of a double-decker appeared. If I squinted it became crisper. Otherwise it was fuzzy cos my eyesight was bad as it watched the bus escorted by outriders, by fluorescent pigs on horses ever so slowly drive between the mass of ecstatic bodies and the screams and yelps and horns, the blowing whistles, crying of yes god yes, this city’s waited twenty years to be back here.
Around then I felt like weeping. Tingles in fact rose to the back of my neck and a few teardrops fell down my cheeks while people danced in all kinds of shapes to the team rolling by with that big-eared silver trophy. The European Champion Clubs' Cup.
If I was an encyclopedic bastard it’d be a matter of naming the entire squad, players and backroom staff celebrating on that open-top decker. I’m unencyclopedic though, born legitimately by four months. When Dudek, Finnan, Carragher, Hyypia, Traore, Hamann, Alonso, Baros, Garcia, the captain Gerrard and Rafa the picaro manager, when they’d rolled up the street the swell in the crowd seemed to follow the ripped current towards Saint George’s Hall. I mooched into a street with more space. Needing another pee. A sign among the void said Mersey Tunnel.
Melville saw this sky, I said to myself.
Cash was low but I wanted a hit of proper beer in a busy pub. And it was wandering through a back plaza, with the old port in mind, I found the Hunted Fox whose bar was jammed full of buzzing and happy people. I looked for toilets first. The gents are down there, said a man. And it was beautiful, the piss I had, long and satisfying, out of my bladder, down the urinal and then my eye was caught by graffiti. Penned black in that classic hip-hoppy style a white ceramic tile said: Misunderstood Vision 1983. The artist is twenty-two, I calculated and now wanting beer I saw: choices on tap: STELLA, CARLSBERG, FOSTERS, GUINNESS. After what felt like ten minutes, the barman being well busy, I asked for a pint of the stout. It'd line my stomach but took ages to pour of course, giving us time to check the seating in this gaff. There were booths, wooden like pine.
I saw a cosy spot free and asked a woman: Excuse me, is it okay to?
Yeah sit yourself down, she said with a nice twinkle about her.
Twinkle, I dunno. Moby Dick’s ghost swims in the Mersey was a thought I had when freshly parked in the seat. The GUINNESS tasted and smelled a bit soily, the turf of the bog. It was okay though and I listened to the lady talking about a Janet who’s out of hospital and her Lee had mended his car exhaust but he was now selling the vehicle. Four swigs and a puff of a cig later, I got a disease called talking, I said to her: You’re from here, sounds by your accent, did you ever watch Liverpool back in the day, in the Eighties or Seventies, I’m not saying you look old sorry?
I’m sixty-three and yes, my husband and I have had season tickets for years.
Did you ever see a match with Shankly?
No but he did, she said looking at three men all polo-shirted.
That’s amazing, I said to the one of them who looked at me like uh? and I asked her: What sort of years did you start going to see them
I started going to home games when Bob Paisley was manager.
So you’ve seen history.
Like today, she said.
Once I had this weird dream where Bob Paisley was smiling affectionately at my mum and she was smiling in the same way back at him.
The lady’s body language changed, like she was thinking: Yeah, what is this fella on about? So I went quiet and when an inch remained of my drink I stuffed a finger in that tiny coin pocket of my jeans. Checking my last fiver was there. In the bigger pocket below I felt a two pound coin and shrapnel and it was pointless using my debitcard. So I don’t remember saying bye to the lady, why would I? I went into the fog of destroyed memory.
Postmortem effects: ghosts for memory
Moments, as I squint far back, seem to flicker like the outline of a bearded visitant would flicker into and out of transparency for less than a second as I walked along an unknown path opposite a line of railway arches. It was getting chilly, windier. It must’ve gone 10:30pm. The sounds of traffic and voices echoed from the centre but nobody was around on this corner other than a whitehaired man on a chair next to three huge plywood boards of Liverpool football merch.
Red and white scarves, a price said: £5.
Is there any chance I can give you two-fifty for a scarf please?
They’re five quid, he said.
Come on man, as an end-of-day deal.
Five quid mate.
Why not?
No.
Oh man.
No.
The theme is about staying alive and by now I was mashed. Knackered. Skint. Drained so low in juice. Meant I likely wobbled a few of the eight hundred steps to Lime Street where I remember a macadam road in the terminus and I never thought about it before, this hundred metre stretch of tarmac, might be destroyed now, it lay at the side of a platform and I didn’t care it was spotted in pigeon guano, I sat on one of the curbstones wishing my train would come. To get home to bed. A woman nearby glanced my way and from an invisible change in her face I heard her thinking: Why’s he on the floor the tramp? When the train arrived I found a carriage, underpopulated, a double seat in which I slept during the stuffy warm few minutes it seemed to take to. One thing was after Warrington I woke to a fly like a mosquito settled on the end of my nose and I could see it four times, a quirk of vision with it being so close and there were dozens of blue-green nodules. Neon is sad, I thought. Then I blew it away and dreamed of it. The fly: my spoogle totem. I climbed out at Oxford Road. Carefully man, falling down that gap between the vestibule’s doorstep and the track below, getting my head crushed, I’d pictured a few times.
I was back in Manchester, stinking tired.
Parked in the stop outside of the Palace was a Fingland’s decker, a 42 I read and dashed just before the driver was about to go. He saw us wave and the doors unfolded so I stepped on saying thanks, Withington please mate and then dealt the small amount, I forget how much a single ticket cost. But a night-bus, nobody around as I sat near the front on bottom deck and slept too deeply. When I jerked awake in the slobber, I saw, through the bus windscreen a motorway bridge, Northenden, a ten minute ride south of Withington. The instant I walked to the front of the bus, too, to tell the driver next stop please, right then we were crossing the river and she who stretches from east of here and ends at Liverpool Bay.
The Mercy, a holy stretch of water, I thought today.
Perhaps I waited for another bus or walked north up Palatine with the sky a black glaze and vacants of space at my dragging feet. No memory, though, apart from my body was drained. I would’ve not prayed for bed, but.
Bet you’re tired, said Axel after seven hours had passed and we were in the office.
A bit, I said.
I’d be exhausted if I was you.
Surprisingly I feel alright.
I did.
At about twenty to five on that Friday afternoon I stood among pedestrians waiting to cross near Portland Street MCDONALD’S. Passing cars-cars, a couple of buses and a white limo pumped fumes into the muggy heat and I was shattered. And yeah it was warm but overcast and the power of the sun had bleached the sky silver. Stood to my right was a man whose side and the back of his head were shaved, a tuft on the top combed into a quiff. Three earrings dangled from his left lobule. It was John Robb. The music journalist off the telly, shows like I Love 1988. Nothing to do with him but a gloom started to rise shortly after our eyes met and once the traffic cleared and I strolled south, a route done countlessly until my feet ached and I’d get a bus home, a feeling of pissed-offness began building. I remember two or three very fuzzy images. Back in my room I logged on and messaged Tracey: Too tired to speak tonight, bababababa. That evening I lay atop of the bed. In fact there was no bed in that room, simply a mattress upon which I read not many pages of a novel as it got dark, melancholy from every pore.
Next day, I scored a couple of bags of.
I like it when ghosts connect. And ghosts began to connect when I returned from lunch next day at Govnet having bought Joe Meek (part of the Skazz canon) on a CD whose case I opened at my desk and read the sleeve notes until a colleague on another desk Steve asked what I got up to last night and I didn’t say I got a letter from my dad asking me if I was gay. I said: Played Vice City. Hoping by being monosyllabic that Steve would leave me alone but no, he wanted to crawl further up my arse by asking what CD and I held up the cover for him to look and he said oh Joe Meek, he had heard of him but there’s a new band now called Kasabian. Similar to the Roses, he said. I like the Roses, I said. And from then on, we’d then talk about music and football cos he supported Liverpool and the day John Peel died we went for a postwork drink in the Zumbar opposite BBC Oxford Road and we were supping away while in the building across the street Mark E Smith talked about Peel to Gavin Esler and we were supping away when Steve said he’d worked for a Liverpudlian company selling magazine space and a man on his team was Michael Abram who’d take loads of speed and he broke into George Harrison’s house, attacked him, Harrison who I saw today in the Granada News clip from 1976 when he’s watching a TV and he laughs cos on the screen is The Beatles playing That Boy’s dripping harmonies and as he watches a previous version of himself you can see above his right shoulder Tony Wilson who everybody in Manchester has met: therefore all of those people have met a man who met George Harrison. And this in my mind is ghosts connecting. Like my dad once said: You know Bomber, he saw Jeff Lynne and George Harrison coming out of an Indian restaurant in Atherstone and they walked down Long Street singing.
Everyone has internal life. 1 person I heard call it your inner theatre. And art, I feel and mentioned it 87 times before and I'll mention it 87 times again, art kind of helps fill the spaces in my interior stage on which there is no spotlight and I'm the sole actor. There's no audience cos I have nothing to say. However, about 40 minutes ago while chopping a tomato I thought a line that now on my laptop I type: The bark rejoiced and you're getting older, rottener. So I go on, on, keying forward, how the heart-twinge today felt unlike the usual pain, as if something ripped and said: You gonna die alone in the night, on a frosty street. The year will be 303 Drum Machine. So I'll be 52, same age as when Shakespeare pegged it. And when I think of my end I think of his initials WS and I think of the initials SB. I know what I mean. It's just brain-chatter, my body's pollution, the drainpipe from the firmament where I'll think of the word maggot and then think of my birth and hear the words doom and mom and stirrups. I see the chrome pincers glimmer when I consider my beginning. I was breach is why, a fortnight late my mom said. George Eliot Hospital. Yeah. Feels weird to type that. George Eliot Hospital. Feels like bad art. And I remember: A decade to the day later, I had a kidney infection and was in the children's ward of the same hospital. My mom said I was born at 2am and on my 10th birthday in bed at 2am I looked thru a window at the maternity building whose lights glowed boringly like any office block whose lights glow boringly when the sky's dark. During that illness I overheard a nurse explain to an asthmatic kid that George Eliot was not a man but a woman who wrote stories and all the wards are named after characters in her books and I thought: Sounds fun to be a writer. And I felt the same for 25 years. Sounds fun to be, but art changes and I became a typist of self-documentaries like many people in 2018 who if they breathe in they type I breathed in and if I breathe out they type I breathed out. And tacked to the wall adjacent to my gaze are 2 postcards, a photo of SB and of SB and both are black and white and I look at the grey faces and think: They're craftsmen. Both fit perfectly into my howl philosophy. Or do they? I'm still trying to work it out. Both SBs wrote about lonely maggots and I'm a lonely maggot and 1 of the SB's created shittalkers, specifically Watt or Worm, who howl and have to a tee the shittalk mastery and the style is up there with the howlingest in the language, was a thought tonight and a thought from most nights as I look at SB's eagle portrait. The Avedon photo. But then I think: The other SB, Canadian born, said how when he wanted to write a new kind of sentence he looked to Finnegans Wake cos its prose is made with a new type of sentence and that is another recurring thought as I sit pressing keys, thinking: Words that blaze and fade and disappear and yet mine just disappear. FW never saw sunlight. Me too. Wish it was winter 2016 and 17 when I reread Chapter 3 of Book 1 and it was as if experiencing a cubist version of current affairs with the letters spelling unfact and untruth and fake carnage and fake screws and hotel and creamery and establishment,. And I remember. So I type..............
