Gotta Get Theroux This

by Louis Theroux

  The flat was barely furnished, with a TV and a bed. It was a little like visiting a B&B, the awkward feeling of doing business in someone’s home. Joe and I would joke that we worried Coarsey seemed lonely or that business had dried up, since we never saw much evidence of other customers. I’d try to start small talk about rap. ‘So, what do you think of the new Big Daddy Kane album?’ For some reason these conversational gambits did not lead to the fantasy of respect and comity that I’d dreamed of, and occasionally I wondered whether Coarsey might not be pining for a transracial friendship that could be a beacon of brotherhood for the world. One time Joe returned from a solo journey to Armoury Way to announce that Coarsey had asked, ‘Where’s Glasses?’ That was about as far as we got in the warmth stakes.

  Often we’d go to Zac’s place in his dad’s flat off Finchley Road in North London. Zac’s dad was a Napoleon obsessive, his sitting room a vast library of leather-bound books about the armies of the French Empire and Waterloo. Early in the evening he’d sometimes come and say hello and we’d make conversation. ‘They got so desperate they drank horse piss, didn’t they, Dad?’ Zac said. ‘All right, lads, have fun,’ Zac’s dad would say. Then, surrounded by the walls of dusty volumes, we’d get high and listen to whatever new hip-hop was out – BDP, Public Enemy, EPMD, Schoolly D – or tapes of Tim Westwood, the Capital hip-hop DJ, flattering ourselves that we were plugging in to important bulletins from dissident America. We’d put tracing paper on the record player and scratch records and improvise rhymes over break beats.

  I subscribed to Hip Hop Connection, a British rap magazine. It mainly covered American hip-hop but the editors tried to support the nascent UK scene. British rap was then spotty at best. There was Derek B, who was a pale photocopy of an American MC. MC Duke was more interesting – he styled himself like a country squire, with tweeds and jodhpurs and a shotgun, ready to hunt some grouse. The least embarrassing UK rapper was Silver Bullet, a verbal spitfire from Aylesbury who used alliteration in his lyrics in a manner reminiscent of the Beowulf poet.

  I bought a couple of British rap albums out of a sense of obligation, one by the Demon Boyz, another by Ruthless Rap Assassins. Neither was very good. Feeling burned, I wrote to Hip Hop Connection, complaining about their uncritical promotion of British artists. ‘Let’s face it, UK hip-hop sucks,’ I said, signing off, ‘King Lou-E, Oxford’. They ran the letter. A couple of months later there was a special letters page given over to replies, all of them negative. One began: ‘King Lou-E, dope name, pity about you being such a fucker.’ The editors wrote, ‘This is just a small sampling of the literally sackloads of mail we received.’

  Left to right: Zac Sandler, me, Joe Cornish, and Adam Buxton.

  In my third year, with finals on the horizon, my world became smaller still as I redoubled my academic efforts. When the time came to choose a specialization, I focused on philosophy and sociology, areas of inquiry that purported to provide world-encompassing solutions, frameworks for understanding the big questions in life. History came easily – the memorization and grinding through reading lists, the marshalling of arguments, ‘on the one hand this, on the other hand that’ – which prejudiced me against it. I romanticized subjects that struck me as more mysterious and difficult: the grand narratives of figures like Marx or Hegel or Auguste Comte, the pessimistic liberalism of Max Weber, the idea that lives in the West are becoming bureaucratized and regulated and imprisoning, that society isn’t progressing but getting worse, and the post-structuralism of Michel Foucault and his view that our bodies and lives are always being shaped and disciplined by dimly understood cultural forces, that even apparently benign concepts like freedom and justice are masks for deeper and more insidious forms of power. I spent a term studying the Scientific Revolution of the seventeenth century – Galileo, Kepler, Descartes, Boyle, Newton. I read philosophers of science like T. S. Kuhn, who maintained that scientific progress is much more erratic and less purely empirical than it appears, and Paul Feyerabend, who went further, holding that the supposed methodology of science was no better and no more truthful than mythology or magic.

  At the same time, I enjoyed these concepts more as a spectator than as a believer, in the spirit of George Orwell when he wrote, ‘There are some ideas so wrong that only a very intelligent person could believe in them.’ I found myself drawn to fundamentalist figures like Robespierre or the thinkers in George Woodcock’s book, Anarchism: Sergey Nechayev, the Russian revolutionary who slept on bare wood and advocated terrorism and murdered a former comrade. I was fascinated by people who acted at odds with norms of behaviour – people unmindful of conventional ethics or even of commonly acknowledged reality, expressing the darkest parts of the human heart often out of a misplaced idealism.

  If there were any ideas that stuck me with me from my entire three years at Oxford, they were to do with the contingency of beliefs, the ways in which we are all prisoners of our own place and time. Slaveholders and pederasts in Ancient Greece. Godbotherers in the Dark Ages. Torturers and witch-hunters in early modern England. And, as much as I enjoyed the ingenuity of the theories of philosophers and sociologists, where I found writing to admire and connect with tended to be in the surprise of tiny commonalities and little beacons of shared humanity across the centuries, in the humane and intimate essays of Michel Montaigne, in the gossipy little biographies of John Aubrey. Something in their combination of remoteness and familiarity was oddly reassuring.

  As time went on I saw friends making plans for their future, setting up appointments with careers advisers, going to jobs fairs, meeting emissaries of big companies. It was faintly worrying. I had no idea what I might do in the future. By now I had contributed the occasional article and film review to Oxford publications, and drawn some comics and written a humorous rap for a student comedy magazine – the Queen delivering gangsta verses in the style of NWA, boasting about her riches and sexual prowess. But the idea of being a writer didn’t seem especially realistic and as my graduation date approached I looked out at the inhospitable world feeling like a prison inmate after years of incarceration who doesn’t know what the Internet is or how to work a mobile phone.

  I wondered about pursuing a postgraduate degree, maybe becoming an academic, and I applied for and got a place at SOAS, the School of Oriental and African Studies. The embarrassing part of my brain began to hope I might do well enough in my finals to get the nod from All Souls, the semi-secret Oxford College for the crème de la crème of academics, a kind of brains trust where the fellows are released from having to do any research. They sit around at their formal dinners having big thoughts. It’s like something from a James Bond film except, instead of a shadowy group of supervillains bent on world domination, they are tweedy academics dribbling into their soup – that seemed like a job that wouldn’t be too demanding. Professional boffin insulated from the world.

  When the finals results came, I got a first. With the amount of work I did, it would have been pretty weird if I hadn’t. The notice came by post – there was also a message from one of the history dons. It said how many Magdalen history students had taken firsts that year, going on, ‘but yours was by some way the highest and must have been close to the top of the entire year.’ The phrasing, which I unintentionally memorized, warmed my spirits in low moments for several years afterwards.

  The summer after I graduated I postponed my place at SOAS and flew to Boston. I did it on a whim, wary of the London jobs market, which was then in the throes of a recession, thinking I could postpone any decisions about my future and work by taking a few months off in America. The first Gulf War had been fought earlier in the year. Margaret Thatcher had recently left office, and the mood in Britain was bleak. The hectic and high-paced era of the eighties – all shoulder pads and yuppies in braces and ‘when it hits eighteen buy it all’ – had given way to a hangover of gloom and joblessness and shoulders tragically reduced to their natural proportions.

  By now, Sarah had taken a job teaching Englis
h in a remote area of China for a year. We were spending some time apart, by mutual agreement sowing some wild oats, and for several weeks I mooched at my dad’s house at Cape Cod, visited family, hung out with Marcel, who had taken a job writing the news for a start-up cable station in Boston, the Monitor Channel. On a whim, I took the train to Los Angeles, riding over in an Amtrak sleeper car, spending much of the time in conversation with the train attendants, who were all black and – confusingly – fans of Phil Collins.

  I was staying with my uncle Peter, an author and Arabic translator, at his apartment in Long Beach, a small city south of Los Angeles. For several days I made sorties to sites around LA: a pilgrimage to Compton, spawning ground for the rap group NWA; a road trip down to to the Mexican border city of Tijuana. But the trip was mainly memorable for an outing to Hollywood where, amid the array of flea-bitten attractions, shops selling plastic Oscars, fly-by-night guys with vans advertising ‘tours of stars’ homes’, I passed a tall old distinguished-looking building advertising the L. Ron Hubbard Life Exhibit, a museum dedicated to the life of the founder of the religion of Scientology.

  I had heard a little about Scientology – my uncle Peter, who like me had a certain fascination with the macabre and the taboo, had described it to me as a mysterious and secretive spiritual organization, created by a science-fiction writer, which numbered Hollywood stars among its devotees and used hard-sell tactics on its parishioners to make money out of its religious services. Going into the museum, I’d expected a half-hour ramble around an unintentionally humorous slice of roadside Americana. Instead I was dismayed to find I was chaperoned by a very slow-moving docent. The displays about Hubbard’s early life worked hard to create the required impression of a spiritual prodigy of world-changing stature. They made a great deal out of his having been an Eagle Scout at an unusually young age – my dad had also been an Eagle Scout; impressive as it was, I reflected that it didn’t necessarily qualify him to start his own religion. There were illustrations of LRH as a teenager trading gnostic insights into life’s big questions with Native American shamans in Montana and wrinkly Asian holy men in Lhasa or Ladakh.

  Finally, after forty-five minutes or so, I overcame my natural urge to be obliging, and said, ‘I’m so sorry, but I really have somewhere I need to be.’ The staff looked at me as if to say, What could possibly be more important than finding out you are actually a trillion-year-old space alien? Eventually I made my way out, having promised to return the following day, which needless to say I didn’t do.

  I’d been planning to head back to London at the end of the summer, but as September approached, figuring I had nothing pressing to do there, I decided to stay in America.

  For several months I lived in Boston with my brother, sleeping on his futon. I found a job in a glass-blowing studio next door to an Asian bookstore where Marcel had briefly worked as a sales assistant. The studio, which belonged to a sleepy young glass sculptor called Tony Devlin, mainly produced cherub goblets. These were ostentatious gold-coated objets d’art – the kind of goblets Uday and Qusay Hussein might have enjoyed using to drink the blood of their enemies. They sold in high-class stores for large sums and, supposedly, were made in accordance with an age-old Venetian glass-twisting technique. In fact our guilty secret was that only the cherubs themselves were sculpted. The base and bowl were cannibalized from mass-produced glassware. It was my job to remove the stems from the store-bought goblets, grind the ends down and fix the cherubs in the middle using a glue that was activated by UV light – I had to wear special goggles when I did it.

  My other job was to hold Tony’s punty rod until the blob of glass on the end heated up – this is not a weird sexual euphemism but technical glass jargon, as any fellow glassworkers among my readership will recognize. Later on, after I left, Tony told me he’d found a brick that did the same job of holding his punty in place just as well as I had done. He said he’d nicknamed the brick ‘the Louis’.

  Never having aspired to make cherub goblets, I was feeling directionless and unfulfilled. My parents had split up by now, and while it had been abundantly foreshadowed, it was still weirdly upsetting and at the same time a little bit exciting. I felt licensed to feel a level of anger and alienation that was already in me. I had the feeling that at the point of leaving home, home itself had disappeared – and not just disappeared but been exposed as hollow, based on lies and improvisations. A Potemkin village erected by its own inhabitants to convince themselves that they were normal and well cared for. Looking back, with my own children as my future judges, I see these characterizations as unfair, but it was how I felt. And in a positive way, emerging from the fog of my own indoctrination, I felt what was probably a salutary urge to make something of myself, to separate myself from my family, to prove something, though exactly what was as yet unclear.

  If I’d been predisposed to become a jihadi or a white nationalist terrorist, it probably would have happened around this time. Instead I started trying to teach myself Russian. That lasted about two days. I thought about joining the marines. I read books full of angst and grandiosity: Ecce Homo by Friedrich Nietzsche and Hunger by Knut Hamsun and Notes from Underground by Dostoevsky. I jotted down philosophical aperçus and wrote 800 words of a memoir. Based on paper-thin knowledge of the then-fashionable theories of postmodernism, I said things like, ‘Art is like a chicken running around with its head cut off. It’s dead, it just doesn’t know it yet.’ Full of ambition but with no clear sense of direction, I had the strong sense it was time to start my life, and no idea how to do it.

  Chapter 4

  The Way to San Jose

  When I told my dad I was going to San Jose, his reaction was to say several times, ‘Do you know, I have never been to San Jose,’ as though this in itself was an interesting fact about the place. Given that he had travelled throughout the world, the idea of finding somewhere he hadn’t written about and left his mark on was, in fact, one of its main attractions.

  It was an internship – I would be working for next to nothing for three months in California at a weekly newspaper. One dark winter afternoon I had visited the august reading room of the Boston public library and found a book called the Directory of Internships and applied for work placement schemes at a far-flung selection of US newspapers and magazines – one in Colorado, another in New Orleans. A few weeks later, a call came from Metro, a weekly in San Jose, California, saying they’d like to take me on.

  I had thought San Jose might be on the sea, confusing it with San Diego. In fact, San Jose is landlocked, a farm town that, as they say of cancer cells, forgot to stop growing. It lies a hundred miles south of San Francisco and numbered, in those days, around a million souls. It has no claim to fame other than featuring in a Burt Bacharach song about someone unable to find it, and its connection to Silicon Valley, in which it notionally sits, though in fact most of the big tech companies are in smaller towns outside the San Jose city limits, like Santa Clara and Cupertino. It is a city in which the natural relation between centre and periphery is reversed. The life of its community takes place in vast malls, secondary towns, suburbs, freeways, and office parks, far away from its largely empty downtown. All these peculiarities – its soullessness, the indistinguishable strip malls, the gun stores and fast-food places, franchise outlets and the weird scattered non-belonging of people, many of them from elsewhere – had a perverse charm for me. After a lifetime of cloisters and Victorian suburbs, I saw exoticism and romance in San Jose’s anomie and unplanned sprawl. It seemed utterly different to anything I’d experienced, and its strangeness and lack of judgement combined to make me feel, for the first time, invisible and liberated.

  Metro was a free newspaper, given away in metal bins around the city. The editorial team was a ragtag band of ageing punks and ex-hippies – what might today be called hipsters. The deal on offer from management involved allowing those on staff the liberty of coming in late, wearing what they liked, and playing Tetris late into the night on office compu
ters, on the condition that they did their work and didn’t expect to be well paid. Several of the writers were graduates of the nearby University of California, Santa Cruz, a cradle of radical activity and progressive politics, and I don’t think it’s too grandiose to say that faintly in the background were the stirrings of new ideas and subcultures that would prove influential through the rest of the decade – whispers of the Internet, ‘modern primitives’, techno-shamanism, and Burning Man. Sadly, there was only a limited outlet for many of these ideas in a newspaper dedicated to the prosaic concerns of a very average American city, in which it was widely acknowledged the only feature anyone read was the horoscope.

  My news editor, Jon Vankin, was a polymath of US politics, with a righteously angry punk edge, a devotee of the British music acts The Pop Group and Gang of Four, liable to quote lyrics about the death of the campaigner Blair Peach during an anti-Nazi rally in London in the seventies and rant about oligarchic corruption in the US body politic. He and another Metro writer later compiled several books of American conspiracy theories propagating the idea that we are all brainwashed drones existing in a sinister confected reality in which nothing is really what it seems – the Kennedy assassination, Iran–Contra, the cancellation of the TV series The X-Files.