Ramble Book

by Adam Buxton

  The following Monday morning I turned up at work clutching my new compilation on a fresh C-60 cassette. Soon I would know the thrill of the DJ, the sense of power and connection that comes with controlling the mood of a group of strangers with a selection of music designed to surprise, delight and energise.

  The restaurant opened and as the first few diners wandered in I pressed ‘Play’ on the tape deck and the room filled with Johnny Marr’s opening guitar lines from ‘(Nothing But) Flowers’, a favourite song on the new Talking Heads album, Nude. After the next few tracks it was clear my tape was a hit and servers nodded along approvingly to ‘Can’t Be Still’ by Booker T. & The MGs, ‘Love Me or Leave Me’ by Nina Simone, ‘I’m So Free’ by Lou Reed and other selections entirely out of step with the rigidly prescribed restaurant theme.

  Then came my curveball: a track from Joe Jackson’s album Night and Day. I thought it would be too obvious to go for ‘Steppin’ Out’, which had been a hit, so instead I chose an upbeat Salsa number called ‘Cancer’.

  Written as a sardonic response to the first flood of cancer scare articles in the late 1970s, the airily delivered lyrics are a litany of all the things that might give you the Big C (basically ‘everything’, according to Jackson). I thought it was funny, but I was 18 and no one close to me had died of cancer. As the chorus of the song played (‘There’s no cure! There’s no answer! / Everything gives you cancer’) I saw one of the servers over by the front-of-house desk scowling. ‘What the fuck is this song?’ she growled when I went over.

  ‘It’s funny,’ I said.

  ‘It’s not fucking funny,’ she replied and went to take an order.

  My boss Sally emerged from the office, looked up at the speakers, hurried over to the tape player and hit stop.

  It taught me a valuable lesson: it’s one thing to playfully subvert an environment with music, but it’s quite another to give it ‘Cancer’.

  ‘Follow the Leader – Yeah, Don’t’

  ‘Hey, man. Me and Ben are heading over to Lou’s. His rentals are away so we’re going to spoon,’ said Joe on the phone. He was not suggesting that we go over to Louis’s place and cuddle each other in bed, as nice as that would have been. We were in the habit of using the word ‘spoon’ to mean ‘hang out’ (origin: fool about – loon about – spoon about – spoon).

  In a few weeks Ben would be off to drama school, Louis to university and Joe to film school, and I wondered if this would be one of the last spooning sessions we’d be having for a while.

  Joe had just bought the 12-inch of ‘Follow the Leader’ by Eric B. & Rakim, and down in Louis’s basement den he put it on and cranked it up. I liked the super-low bass, the spacey samples that I thought were the Mellotron from ‘2000 Light Years from Home’ by the Stones (but are actually from ‘Nautilus’ by Bob James) and the mellifluous vocal and lyrics: ‘Let’s travel at magnificent speeds around the universe’.

  We declared it a triumph and smoked a joint.

  Either the joint was strong or we were weak, or both. Joe and Louis seemed to enjoy it, but Ben and I, who were more comfortable with lager, got the fear. Louis said he felt as though his head had been ‘plugged into the National Grid’. The phrase made me think of Tron and I imagined light cycles zipping around my cranium. At first this was fun (the light cycles were my favourite part of Tron), but when I realised I was unable to control the random images tumbling through my mind, I got anxious and my heart started to pound alarmingly. I looked at the others to see how they were doing. They looked fucked. Suddenly Ben leaned forward and said, ‘Oh my God, what if there’s something in it?’

  ‘There’s marijuana in it,’ said Joe.

  ‘No, something else, something really bad,’ said Ben. This was not what I wanted to hear.

  * * *

  RAMBLE

  ‘Oh my God, there’s something in it!’ became a bit of a catchphrase for our gang after that night, but it belied a real terror I developed about being spiked and losing my mind. One of the servers at the restaurant would sometimes hand out microdots of acid to make shifts more interesting, but one of the other busboys told me she’d been known to slip them into people’s drinks without telling them. Appropriately her name was Mickey (though I don’t think her surname was Finn). I was terrified Mickey might spike me and that if she did, I’d immediately go full Syd Barrett in front of all the hen parties and city boys. From then on I only drank from a bottle I carried around with me, but this didn’t prevent me from occasionally feeling a little faint during a busy shift and becoming convinced I was about to be dragged, hooting and howling, through the Doors of Perception and dumped in the Alley of Psychosis outside.

  * * *

  The idea there might be ‘something in it’ had made my heart start hammering so hard I assumed a coronary was inevitable. ‘Shouldn’t we call someone?’ I suggested. Who could we call, though? We were filthy, illegal drug users, faced with just two choices: prison or death. So, cowering in my self-inflicted madness, I waited for death.

  To kill time until Death arrived, I stuck on a VHS tape I’d brought with me that had the entire first series of The Young Ones on it. ‘Is it still funny?’ asked Louis.

  ‘Yeah, man! It’s amazing!’ I replied as I inserted the tape. I knew more or less every line off by heart and the comforting familiarity of the show helped bring me gradually back down to earth.

  * * *

  RAMBLE

  In the weeks after The Young Ones started airing in the winter of 1982, my friends and I weren’t going into school and writing think pieces considering how this new sitcom about four student caricatures sharing a revolting house constituted a seismic event in modern comedy. Nor did we describe The Young Ones as ‘anarchic’, the way the announcer on BBC Two would before each new episode. That word was enough to make my dad start muttering darkly from the back of the sitting room. After a couple of minutes of Rick shouting and Vyvyan loudly smashing things, Dad would sigh heavily and stalk out, repeating, ‘Anarchic … God save us.’

  Dad’s disapproval made me wary of fully embracing The Young Ones at first, but I wasn’t able to resist for long. It was fun to imitate the characters and there was something especially energising about talking like Rick. It felt great to curl your lip, widen your eyes, thrust your pelvis as if trying to have sex with every bit of air in the room and say, ‘Right on!’ (with a soft ‘r’) or to shout that someone was an ‘UTTER BASTARD’, before storming out wearing a look of gleefully furious indignation.

  * * *

  When Joe, Louis and Mark got back to London after the first term at their respective film schools and universities, they paid me a visit in the pizza restaurant a few days before Christmas. It felt like a long time since we’d been down in Lou’s basement plugged into the National Grid and it was weird seeing them in there. I couldn’t shake the suspicion that they felt sorry for me, clearing plates in a restaurant while they were in higher education, making new friends and preparing for the rest of their lives.

  My response was to make it abundantly clear that I was one of the greatest busboys London had ever seen. I carried my bus trays at double speed, stacked my pizza tins perilously high and bantered with the much older servers ostentatiously. It was important to demonstrate that I was a vital and popular part of a group of actual grown-up women and men from a wide variety of backgrounds who didn’t spend all their time pushing each other round in wheelbarrows dressed as babies, drinking lager and lime in the Nelson Mandela bar (which I assumed was what university was like). No, sir. We did real work in the real world.

  When Joe, Louis and Mark had left, one of the servers teased me about my ‘posh friends’. I complained that she was being snobbish and she laughed. ‘Are you serious? They seemed all right but “Cakes” are always shit tippers, that’s all I know,’ she replied.

  ‘Why do you call them “Cakes”?’ I asked.

  ‘Cos whenever we get a big party of posh mums with their kids and I take their drinks order it�
�s always, “Yah, can we have 10 Cakes and three Diet Cakes, please?”’

  BOWIE ANNUAL

  Joe and Louis agreed with me that the best bit of The Last Temptation of Christ had been when Bowie turns up as Pontius Pilot and says to Jesus, ‘Zo, you’re the one they call Jeezuz of Nazzzareth.’ The film was controversial. ‘Some things should remain sacred or it’s all meaningless,’ said Dad. I still said the occasional prayer in those days and had been prepared to disapprove of seeing Jesus getting it together with Mary Magdalene, but I thought the film was moving and was especially pleased that most of Bowie’s lines were generously drizzled with ‘wuzz’.

  For the next few days we said ‘I wash my handz of thiz’ a lot, and one evening Joe, Louis and I sat up late taping ourselves doing our respective Bowie impressions and running through favourite daft Bowie quotes.

  These included: ‘MTV. Too much iz never enough’, ‘Adolf Hitler wuz one of the world’s first rock stars’ and ‘It wuz some pretty boy in class … that I took home and neatly fucked on my bed upstairs.’

  It was good to be reminded of the way I used to think of Bowie when The Man Who Fell to Earth was shown on Moviedrome, a new ‘slot’ on BBC Two in which Alex Cox, director of Repo Man and left-field movie champion, introduced some of his favourite cult films. I watched it nostalgically, remembering the weekend just before Christmas in 1981 when I’d seen The Man Who Fell to Earth listed in the Radio Times.

  It was billed as ‘a science-fiction film starring pop star David Bowie’, thereby ticking two of my favourite boxes and immediately conjuring images of Zavid driving around alien planets in a hover car and exchanging wisecracks with robots (i.e. the perfect film).

  Though it was showing late on a Sunday night, Mum had said I could stay up to watch it, and as it was starting she sat down with a glass of wine and said, ‘I think I’ll watch it, too. I like that “Space Odyssey” song of his.’ Initially delighted that Mum was sharing in my Bowie enthusiasm, it turned out to be a very awkward occasion indeed.

  Within five minutes it was clear we wouldn’t be seeing Bowie battling baddies with a lightsaber (a shame, as he could have done the sound effects – ‘Wuzzz, wuzzzz, wuzzzza wuzzz …’ etc.). Instead, the tale of an alien disguised as a gauche Englishman called Thomas Jerome Newton trying to raise enough money to fly back to his family and save their planet from drought was less concerned with being exciting than it was with being oblique, impressionistic and at times nonsensical. I was keenly aware it was the kind of thing my mum was likely to dismiss as ‘really weird’, especially as it was really weird.

  My discomfort turned to low-level torture during a long sequence in which a middle-aged college lecturer played by Rip Torn enjoys a boisterous shagging session with a young female student. This was intercut with Bowie eating noodles and watching some Kabuki theatre, all soundtracked with animalistic grunts, groans and increasingly noisy ethnic percussion. It’s the first of several determinedly unerotic sex scenes in the film, and by the time Bowie’s todger is on display while he and Candy Clark’s character Mary-Lou get drunk and naked and fire a gun loaded with blanks at each other, Mum and I hadn’t exchanged a word and I was looking forward to getting back to revising for my Common Entrance exams.

  Although I didn’t especially enjoy or understand The Man Who Fell to Earth that night with my mum, I had seen it twice more by the time I watched it again on Moviedrome, and with each successive viewing I had found more to like. As well as admiring Bowie’s legendarily spaced-out performance as the beautiful alien, I enjoyed learning that his experience making the film and tinkering with a soundtrack that was never used ended up influencing (and providing cover images for) two of my favourite Bowie albums: Station to Station, made immediately after The Man Who Fell to Earth was shot in 1975, and Low, recorded in 1976.

  In 2012 I presented a screening of The Man Who Fell to Earth as part of the BFI Southbank’s Screen Epiphanies series but came away feeling I’d misjudged the tone of my introduction, which as usual was a mixture of enthusiasm and piss-taking. The problem was that the audience, many of whom hadn’t seen the film before, seemed to find it hard to shift gear when it started. There was much inappropriate laughter throughout, especially in the brief flashback scenes featuring Bowie on his home planet with his alien family waving him goodbye as he gets on a kind of train that looks like a big dog kennel covered in hairy turds.

  While there is a fair bit of humorously mad stuff in it, The Man Who Fell to Earth still evokes for me all the wonder and weirdness of falling in love with Bowie when I was still a young man, cautiously beginning to open my mind to the possibility that there may be worthwhile things down the road less travelled, even though they may occasionally look like a big dog kennel covered in hairy turds.

  Argument with Wife Log 3

  SUBJECT OF ARGUMENT

  TAKING THE TOWEL OUT OF THE BATHROOM SO AFTER I’VE SHOWERED THERE’S NO TOWEL

  MAIN POINTS – WIFE

  ‘You do so many things that are much more selfish.’

  MAIN POINTS – BUCKLES

  ‘DON’T TAKE THE TOWEL OUT OF THE BATHROOM.’

  WINNER

  BUCKLES

  SUBJECT OF ARGUMENT

  WIFE GETS RID OF LAVATORY BRUSH

  MAIN POINTS – WIFE

  ‘They’re disgusting.’

  MAIN POINTS – BUCKLES

  ‘How do you propose keeping the toilet bowl free from faecal smearing?’

  WINNER

  BUCKLES

  SUBJECT OF ARGUMENT

  DOES A STANDARD FAN LOWER THE TEMPERATURE OF A ROOM?

  MAIN POINTS – WIFE

  ‘It’s not air-conditioning. Fans just move the hot air around.’

  MAIN POINTS – BUCKLES

  ‘Fans make you COOLER. So the room must be COOLER.’

  WINNER

  WIFE

  SUBJECT OF ARGUMENT

  WHOSE FAMILY IS MORE DYSFUNCTIONAL

  MAIN POINTS – WIFE

  ‘Yours is.’

  MAIN POINTS – BUCKLES

  ‘Yours is.’

  WINNER

  BUCKLES

  SUBJECT OF ARGUMENT

  DISHWASHER DOOR LEFT OPEN

  MAIN POINTS – WIFE

  ‘I was still loading dishes.’

  MAIN POINTS – BUCKLES

  ‘If there’s a ten-minute gap between the loading of each dish, the door needs to be closed to prevent tripping.’

  WINNER

  WIFE (but only because I stated my case with excessive tetch)

  SUBJECT OF ARGUMENT

  DOG SLEEPING ON OUR BED

  MAIN POINTS – WIFE

  ‘She loves sleeping on our bed and she’s part of the family.’

  MAIN POINTS – BUCKLES

  ‘So is the plan for you and me to stop having sex completely?’

  WINNER

  BUCKLES

  SUBJECT OF ARGUMENT

  CONSTANT INTERRUPTIONS WHILE I’M WRITING THIS BOOK

  MAIN POINTS – WIFE

  ‘You’re literally just writing down arguments we’ve had. It doesn’t look that difficult.’

  MAIN POINTS – BUCKLES

  ‘You do it then. And don’t say you don’t want to because you’ve got a real job and you’re not a dick.’

  WINNER

  BUCKLES

  CHAPTER 20

  1989

  My extraordinary work in the field of table-clearing eventually led to me being invited to join the special forces of the restaurant world: the bartenders. Sure, the servers made more money, but the bar staff had their own separate domain that only they could access: an elevated section near the entrance where they stood protected behind their mahogany bulwark in smart shirts, bow ties and waistcoats, looking down over the restaurant floor.

  Not long after I completed my training, Lenny the bar manager took his six-person team to see the Tom Cruise film Cocktail (or, as Joe referred to it, ‘The Tale of a Cock’). Lenny was hoping Cocktai
l would inspire us to enliven Happy Hour at the pizza restaurant with the kind of bottle-flippin’, glass-spinnin’, high-fivin’ ‘flair’ demonstrated in the film by bartenders Coughlin and Flanagan. We tried to incorporate a few of their moves, but the results, like some of the cocktails, were mixed, and left us, like some of the other cocktails, shaken.

  Glass bottle shelves were smashed by flying tumblers, customers were lashed with arcs of cherry liqueur, and one busy Friday night an attempt to do a cool dance to ‘Hippy Hippy Shake’ while re-stocking glasses ended with me slipping and bringing down about 50 highballs. They shattered in a jagged heap and I landed palms down on the lot. I spent the rest of the evening getting stitches at St Thomas’s A&E before meeting my workmates for a beer and a delicate high five at the end of the night.

  The injury was one of several signs that it was finally time for me to leave the pizza restaurant and work elsewhere until it was my turn to be pushed around in a wheelbarrow while dressed as a baby, followed by pints of lager and lime in the Nelson Mandela bar at Warwick University. Despite the ‘Cancer’ and Cocktail incidents, my boss Sally gave me a good reference and I got a job behind the bar at another subterranean American-style hang-out, this time in Dover Street opposite The Ritz hotel.

  Wave of New Relations

  The Service Point was the section at the end of the bar where servers came to pick up drinks orders for their tables. Most of the bartenders preferred working on the main bar to working ‘Point’, because generally you got better tips from the customers than the servers. I liked the Service Point because it meant I got to see Miriam.