Ramble Book

by Adam Buxton

  Terry Gilliam’s Brazil was a genuine mind-blower that colonised my thoughts for years and gave shape to a nebulous suspicion that the adult world was a meaningless nightmare of fear and conformity. We were particularly excited when Robert De Niro popped up as a heroic anti-establishment plumber whose parting words – ‘We’re all in it together’ – struck me as especially ace.

  We saw the sci-fi vampire/London zombie film Lifeforce in a busy Leicester Square cinema one Saturday night and had a hoot enjoying the badness of the dialogue, the over-the-top horror and the frequent full-frontal nudity. Fun though the evening was, I’m happy to say it didn’t turn me into an adherent of the ‘so-bad-it’s-good’ aesthetic.

  Sub Ramble

  Another of our favourite films in 1985 was Beverly Hills Cop. We already rated Eddie Murphy from Trading Places, but BHC, along with Harold Faltermeyer’s brilliant synth-pop theme, sealed the deal and thereafter our interactions were peppered with quotes, especially (in Eddie voice) ‘Get the fuck outta here!’ (as said frequently by Eddie) and ‘It’s not sexy, it’s animal’ (as said by Bronson Pinchot as the camp art dealer). Later we would watch Murphy’s concert film Delirious and a new set of words and noises entered our lexicon. Especially fun was pretending to be Eddie pretending to be James Brown, and ‘SERIOOOOU!’ became our rallying cry.

  I recently found Delirious on Netflix and started watching it again for the first time in 35 years. Oh shit. I’d forgotten how extreme those first 10 minutes are. We’re not dealing with a few jokes that would raise the eyebrows of the odd ‘woke’ teenager in 2020; it’s full-on, aggressive homophobia. I have a feeling we used to fast-forward a lot of that stuff to get to the more fun bits, but even that seems strange by today’s standards, when often it feels too difficult to enjoy some aspects of an artist’s work if other parts of that work are indefensible shit. Did we have more sophisticated critical faculties back in 1985? Or were we just more comfortable with indefensible shit?

  The film that left the biggest emotional crater on Planet Buckles that year was The Breakfast Club. It was released in the UK on my sixteenth birthday (7 June 1985), and like many teens at the time I felt the film spoke to me directly about the intolerable pressure being exerted by the adult world.

  Though I wasn’t directly affected by any of the issues that had been piled onto Claire, Allison, Brian, Andrew and Bender, the central message resonated loudly: us kids are important and sensitive and special, and adults like my dad don’t get it because ‘when you grow up, your heart dies’.

  I made at least four trips to see The Breakfast Club at the cinema that summer and every time John Bender punched the air and ‘Don’t You (Forget About Me)’ kicked in, my heart lifted off. I spotted a bad review of the film in Time Out (written by a fucking adult, of course) and I cut it out, stuck it in my diary and scrawled my review of their review over the top of it: ‘THIS REVIEW IS CRAP. NOT TRUE!’

  The other night, after my wife had gone to bed, I stayed up flicking through TV channels and there was The Breakfast Club. I watched it for the first time in about 30 years, and though a few moments still raised a tingle – ‘So, Ahab, can I have all my doobage?’, ‘The chicks cannot hold the smoke! That’s whut it eees!’ – I had to watch a lot of it through my fingers.

  Times have changed and The Breakfast Club’s jarring moments include some casual homophobia, sexual harassment and a makeover that ‘fixes’ Ally Sheedy’s alluringly odd character Allison by turning her into a pink-bloused girly girl (though I recall those moments feeling strange at the time). The thing I found most difficult about watching the film in middle age was remembering how much I once identified with those whiney, self-absorbed bellends. Then I wondered if I’m really all that different now.

  * * *

  Poster Boys

  Joe’s parents let him to draw a mural with felt pens on the walls of his bedroom at the top of their house in Stockwell. He tried to reproduce the cover of the Thompson Twins’ ‘We Are Detective’ and Keith Haring’s artwork from Malcom McLaren’s album Duck Rock before losing confidence and covering every inch of his bedroom walls with posters.

  These were not the Athena posters that hung in every other study at school – airbrushed sports cars and heavily made-up women with giant punky hairdos, pouting and ‘being sexy’ – Joe went for film posters.

  Some of them were for classics from the Sixties and Seventies that he’d bought from shops in Soho frequented by film geeks (in those days they would have been called ‘anoraks’ or ‘saddos’), others were for films that had only just been released.

  ‘Where do you get these?’ I asked him.

  ‘I’ll show you,’ he said, and one Saturday afternoon we got the Tube from Stockwell to Tottenham Court Road. Upon arrival, rather than ride the many escalators up and out into the West End as we would normally have done, we hung around on the Northern Line platform and started inspecting the film posters.

  Joe stopped at one for A Nightmare on Elm Street, a film we’d loved when we saw it at a preview screening at the Scala in King’s Cross earlier that year. One of the top corners had come unglued and Cornballs flashed me a grin as he started tugging at the corner with little teasing gestures. Sure enough, the poster began to peel away easily, and after a quick look round the empty platform, Joe whipped it away from the wall with a flourish, before rolling it hastily and tucking it under his arm. ‘There we go,’ he said. ‘It was coming off anyway.’

  It took me a while to get up the courage to have a go myself. I knew this was theft and vandalism, but I clung to the fact that, as Joe said, some of the posters were already hanging half off the station walls, either because they’d been put up badly or because the paste had been watered down too much, so actually we were sort of tidying up, which was public spirited of us. Also, we weren’t stealing from an individual, just some rich film company who would never know or care that one of the thousands of posters they’d put up had made its way to a teenager’s bedroom, where at least it could be seen by other cinema-goers, though admittedly in slightly smaller numbers.

  With these bullshit justifications sloshing round my head and my heart thumping, I found a poster for the new Bond film, A View to a Kill, the corner of which was already flapping in the warm wind whistling down the Northern Line tunnel. The following Monday it was Blu-Tacked to my study wall at school where I could admire the artwork featuring Grace Jones and Roger Moore’s ludicrously extended legs at my leisure.

  Over the next few weeks we became expert at finding the least busy station platforms and the most peely-looking walls, and before long my study was completely covered with posters for Terminator, Beverly Hills Cop, Brazil, 2010, Into the Night, Starman and Cocoon. Sometimes we’d find that several posters had been stuck on top of one another in a big wad, so we’d dislodge the whole stack, roll it as much as possible and, once home, soak the posters in a warm bath until they slid apart, revealing the partial history of a year’s worth of film releases.

  One sunny Saturday afternoon during the summer holidays in 1985, Joe and I were deep in the tunnels of Leicester Square Tube and enjoying a particularly bountiful haul. We’d been down there a couple of hours, waiting for the platforms to empty after each train departure, then hopping and skipping with criminal glee as we harvested posters, when out of nowhere a policewoman and her male colleague suddenly appeared. In that special patronising voice the police are so good at, the policewoman called out, ‘Hello! Do you two want to come over here?’

  Joe, who was taller than both the cops, didn’t seem worried by this development, but as we made our way over to the patronising police, I was struggling not to cry. ‘We’ve been watching you two upstairs on the telly,’ said the man cop, pointing up at the CCTV cameras that we’d never even registered before. ‘Dancing around like a pair of berks.’

  ‘That’s nice,’ said Joe. ‘I’m glad we’ve been entertaining you.’

  The man cop didn’t like that. ‘That’s criminal damage,’ he
said, gesturing to the rolls of posters we’d abandoned further down the platform. ‘You could go to prison for that. Is that what you want?’

  I decided the time had come for something a bit more conciliatory and with my voice wavering I replied, ‘No. We don’t want to go to prison. We are really, really sorry.’

  The woman cop smiled faintly. ‘I think your mummies and daddies would be very disappointed by this, wouldn’t they?’ she said, and before Joe could make his contemptuous pony sound, I looked imploringly at both cops and in my poshest, wettest voice said, ‘Yes, they really would be disappointed. We’re never going to do this again, I promise.’

  The cops exchanged a look and the man said, ‘Well, you’d better make sure you don’t then. Consider this a warning. Go on.’

  Out in Leicester Square I savoured the sweet taste of liberty, but it was tainted by an uncomfortable feeling. Not for the criminal damage (the posters were coming off anyway), but for how quickly I’d tried to ingratiate myself to the cops and how being middle class and polite (and probably white) had got us off the hook. Or maybe they were just nice cops who correctly identified us as the kind of youths who would benefit from a patronising cop scare. Either way, from that day on we were much more careful when stealing film posters.

  Holiday Time

  Later that summer I went on two foreign holidays in the same month, something that must have pleased Dad as they were down to his wangling powers at the Sunday Telegraph and the privileges that came from sending me to Westminster.

  First, Patrick and I got invited to stay at a hotel in Crete that was partly owned by the Greek Cypriot parents of Stelios, one of Patrick’s housemates at Westminster. We spent two delirious weeks out there largely left to our own devices and discovering the joy of alcoholic cocktails, water-skiing and holiday discos.

  A few days after I’d returned from Greece, I travelled with my family to China, a trip that was bookended by a couple of nights staying at the Mandarin Oriental hotel in Hong Kong, where each of us had our own room with personalised writing paper on the desk. ‘Not too bad, eh?’ said Dad. ‘We’re getting the red-carpet treatment!’

  ‘Why though, Dad?’ we asked.

  ‘Why? Because I’m a very important journalist, that’s why.’

  * * *

  RAMBLE

  More exciting than the rooms, the writing paper and the red-carpet treatment at the Mandarin was the little menu on top of the TV detailing the six films available on the hotel’s movie channel: Thunderbolt and Lightfoot, Logan’s Run, Victor Victoria, Bustin’ Loose, Marathon Man and The Jerk. Over the next few nights I watched all of them but started with The Jerk, despite never having heard of Steve Martin or even knowing what a ‘jerk’ was.

  My favourite moment was a scene in which Steve Martin’s character, Navin R. Johnson, is working as a petrol-pump attendant. The new phone book is delivered and Navin explodes with excitement when he finds his name is listed in there. ‘This is the kind of spontaneous publicity, your name in print, that makes people!’ he cries. ‘Things are going to start happening to me now!’

  Cut to a deranged gunman (played by M. Emmet Walsh from Blade Runner) randomly selecting Navin’s name from the phonebook, then turning up at the gas station to shoot him. Something about the way Walsh says, ‘Die, gas pumper!’ made me laugh a lot, and for the rest of the summer it was my favourite thing to say, along with, ‘Things are going to start happening to me now!’ – a phrase that still pops into my head whenever a particularly underwhelming offer comes in from my agent.

  * * *

  On several occasions during our stay in Hong Kong, Mum and Dad went off with boring public relations people and I was allowed to wander alone through the humid maze of markets in the Kowloon district. I had been given my first allowance – a very generous £40 a month – and I used it to buy my first Walkman from a tiny strip-lit Kowloon electronics shop.

  Minutes later, as I drifted between the covered stalls wearing my new headphones and listening to Autobahn by Kraftwerk, I wondered how life could get any cooler.

  Girlfriend Is Better

  I came back down to earth when we got back to England to find my O-level results had arrived. Thought I feared the worst, I had done well enough in a handful of subjects to return to Westminster as a sixth-former in September, sporting a pair of brothel-creepers, trousers with legs taken in by Mum and a new spiky haircut that made me look like an affable lavatory brush. With exams out of the way and new looks on display, there was an atmosphere of excitement and possibility, intensified by the new intake of sixth-form girls.

  One of them, Lottie, looked to me like the John Everett Millais painting of Ophelia, except with a bob and not drowned in a river. She was tall and stylish, gliding through the gaggles of awkward boys in Yard like a swan. That’s how I remember it. Probably she just walked around normally.

  Like all the girls that got into the sixth form at Westminster, Lottie was also extremely intelligent, though evidently not so intelligent that she knew to resist the charms of the French Fancy-snaffling emotional maelstrom that was the 16-year-old Buckles. Maybe it was the Eddie Murphy impressions that got her or maybe it was the bog-brush hairdo, but after only five weeks in the sixth form I was ‘going out’ with Lottie and I was in love again.

  For a fortnight or so Lottie and I were blissfully happy. We wrote soppy notes in class, grinned at each other as our friends made puking gestures, and took every available opportunity to just kiss and kiss and kiss. Kissing Lottie’s lovely Pre-Raphaelite face was so electrifyingly wonderful that for weeks I didn’t seriously consider anything more advanced until we went on a date to the Fulham ABC to see Prizzi’s Honor.

  Though my eyes were aimed at the screen, my brain was in my left hand, which was undertaking an agonisingly slow trek from base camp at the hem of Lottie’s skirt, up previously uncharted bare thigh to the cotton-covered summit, at which point Lottie made it clear the mission was over and I was embarrassed that I’d revealed myself as the dirty monkey boy I really was. Perhaps that was the moment the spell was broken, because despite a few more weekends of bedroom kissathons to the sound of Swoon and Steve McQueen by Prefab Sprout playing repeatedly on her new auto-reverse boombox, by Christmas it was becoming obvious that Lottie needed something more than non-stop snogging in her life, and my disastrous performance at a couple of parties that December sealed my fate.

  Party Number One was for Joe’s seventeenth birthday on 20 December and it took place at his parents’ house in Stockwell. Ben and I got there a few hours early and started to indulge in our favourite recent discovery – no, not mutual masturbation, but alcoholic spirits. By the time Lottie arrived, I had turned myself into a tottering cocktail of overexcitement, anxiety, lust, vodka and orange juice. She’d barely had much of a chance to say hello to anyone or, God forbid, have fun hanging out with people other than Buckles, when I led Lottie away from the ground-floor partygoers to a spare room upstairs. There, my best groping efforts were frustrated by a serious case of the spins and after a few close calls I reluctantly retired to the toilet to spend the rest of the evening poised for puking action while the muffled sounds of the Pet Shop Boys, Level 42 and Nik Kershaw drifted up through the floor. When I eventually emerged, ‘Boys Don’t Cry’ by The Cure was playing and Lottie, along with most of the other guests, had left.

  Party Number Two was at Lottie’s house on New Year’s Eve and this time, instead of getting hammered, I sulked most of the night because I thought Lottie was flirting with Joe and Louis. ‘Fucking tall people,’ I thought, fully insane with covetous insecurity, ‘of course they stick together!’ With 1986 minutes away, I was still moping about asking Lottie’s friends if they thought she still loved me. ‘Still?’ said her friend Julia, before telling me I should lighten up and have a good time – a piece of advice that for the chronic overthinker is up there with ‘Just be yourself’ for total redundancy. ‘Oh! Have a good time! Yes, of course. I was so busy being turned inside out wi
th jealousy I forgot about that option. Thanks so much for reminding me!’

  At home the next morning I lay in bed sighing, replaying the previous evening’s events. I was about to call Lottie when I heard the phone ring and Dad shouted from downstairs, ‘Adam! Lottie for you!’ We arranged to meet in Blushes Café on the King’s Road and I walked there with Strange Days by The Doors on my Walkman, rehearsing an apology for my recent run of low-quality behaviour. Lottie was grateful for the apology but dumped me anyway. Very nicely, though. She really was a lovely person – tall-boy flirting aside. She went to catch the 137 bus back to Clapham and I trudged home in the rain listening to ‘People Are Strange’, sobbing my 16-year-old tits off.

  BOWIE ANNUAL

  My mother is Chilean and when I was a toddler I spoke Spanish. Then someone told my mum she was confusing her young son by talking to him in two languages, and from then on she spoke to me only in English, thereby robbing me of a superpower, which I think may be a form of abuse. Nevertheless, I did O- and A-level Spanish because I hoped an innate familiarity with the language would be an advantage and I imagined I could get my mum to do my homework.

  It turned out Mum wasn’t all that keen on doing my homework, although she did translate the Hunky Dory track ‘Quicksand’ into Spanish so I could sing it at my O-level oral exam, which I thought might impress the examiner. On the day, I was too embarrassed to sing and just recited, ‘Estoy más cerca de la puerta de oro …’ barely making it to the end of the first verse. The examiner turned out to be a Bowie fan and thought it was funny, but said, ‘It’s a shame you didn’t sing it.’ I learnt a valuable lesson that day: if you’re going to get your mum to translate David Bowie songs into Spanish, you need to fully commit to the idea and sing them.