If there was I did not find it. My father and my elder brother were working; my two younger brothers at school; and my mother busy with all the domestic stuff, trying to make ends meet. I was company for her, kept my youngest brother from under her feet.
The money brought into the home by my elder brother was greatly appreciated. The cost of living was proving greater than anticipated. Our father’s wage did not go as far as all that. He was finding difficult the transition from self-employed tradesman to wage-slave employee. At home he had worked nine, ten or twelve-hour days, six days a week, and if he was five minutes late, so what? One way or another he got the work done. Now he had to cope with the timecard routine. A minute late and people took notes. He was not there in the guise of the gruff but loveable Scottish engineer who can build a spaceship from a dod of chewing gum, three nuts and a bolt. He had expected to be treated as a first-class craftsman, but the gallery used him like any other worker. His workmates were from Puerto Rico and Central America. He was also an immigrant; immigrants are cheap labour.
Most of the time I read or loafed about. L.A. was where the jobs lay but it costs money to look for a job. That had to come from the family budget. Busfares mount up. If you are out for several hours, a coffee and a sandwich enter the reckoning. I could not borrow if I could not pay back. It was donations or nothing and nobody wants charity, not even 17-year-olds, especially ones that have been independent for years. You become overly sensitive. I hated to be ‘caught reading’. But what else was there? I went out for walks but that area of Pasadena was fairly boring, besides which walkers were suspicious characters.
My mother made sandwiches for my father and elder brother. I took one when I travelled into the city, two or three times a week. Occasionally I walked to save money. It was 11 miles from Pasadena to downtown L.A. Coming home in the dark was worse, down across quite a wide stretch of railroad tracks and through Chinatown and then on, and on, and on.
I got to know the downtown area quite well. There was a single-window record store nearby a pawnshop whose entire window was devoted to Bob Dylan merchandise. This was a time for Elvis, the Everlys, Del Shannon, so it was an adventurous display. Back in Glasgow, Dylan had a cult following but only a hardy few; the rest of the population had succumbed months previously to The Beatles, myself included. I had the Please Please Me album and took it everywhere, until I lost it – I hope not at cards. Bob Dylan’s image did not last long in that record-store window.
Like most other exiled teenagers I was proud when The Beatles stormed the U.S.A. In Glasgow there was also a music scene. We had good bands of our own: Blues Council and the Pathfinders were just two; a third was George Gallagher’s The Poets. A couple of nights ago, as I write here in San José, January 2007, a local radio station featured two of their songs. It was a complete surprise, sitting staring out the window at 11 o’clock in the evening. I was expecting a wee lassie to jump out and shout, Ha ha Dad, April Fool!
The Poets split up in the 1960s. Individuals continued in other bands. In the 1980s some were doing gigs around bars in Glasgow and district, playing a role in local political campaigns. They reformed as The Blues Poets in the early 1990s and in 1993–4 they agreed to take the lead in my ‘musical’ One two – hey! The band took on acting roles as well as performing seven or eight songs. It was just a special thing altogether. Their performance night after night helped keep me sane during the media hullabaloo that followed publication of How Late It Was, How Late.
In 1964 The Beatles were everywhere. The first song to make it was ‘I Want to Hold Your Hand’. Young Americans walked about in a daze. Within two weeks or less The Beatles’ U.K. backlist was rushed onto the market and four more of their singles entered the U.S. top ten.
Not only was I proud, it made sense of my clothes. I had been walking about dressed in Glasgow-style; early mod and strictly working-class. Another couple of years passed before the art-school, cross-class culture appeared and dominated. On the east coast young males were still trying to look like Bobby Darin or Elvis Presley. Where I came from nobody of my generation wanted to look like Elvis – that was your auntie’s boyfriend. Teddy Boys and Rockers singing ‘I Don’t Have a Wooden Heart’, you kidding?
In California white youths were more influenced by Archie comics and the Jerry Lewis look; crew cuts and trousers that flapped six inches above the ankles; white socks and thick rubber-soled shoes. They would have been laughed out of Glasgow, Liverpool, Manchester and Newcastle. Thanks to The Beatles I was vindicated, strolling about in my box-cut short jacket, nay vents and cloth-covered buttons; open French-seam trousers, Boston-collar shirt, black socks and chisel-toed shoes.
I still attracted attention, mainly from men around the bus station at 7th and Main. I was naïve but not innocent. Young people of both genders suffer harassment in factories. I coped with it, I think. The situation in Los Angeles was different. My vulnerability lay in the economic. A few years passed till I came upon the work of John Rechy. His City of Night was published back in 1963. If I had found a copy then I would have viewed differently the downtown area around Central Library and Pershing Square. Maybe one of these early stories would have been entitled ‘Not Raped in California’. The York printer and the Extra-mural class at Glasgow University would have enjoyed it. Hubert Selby’s Last Exit to Brooklyn was published in 1964 and I had no knowledge of it, nor of the obscenity charges brought against his work in the U.S.A. in 1961, then later in the U.K. in 1968.
The courageous integrity of artists like Selby and Rechy can have an inspirational effect on young writers. Just get on with it, do it honestly, do it properly, tell the fucking truth, just tell it, do it. Whereas, in mainstream English literature young writers are encouraged to find their place in the hierarchy. As an existential experience working-class life was a taboo area and prostitution, like industrial cancer, is a working-class experience, essentially.
While in San José I attended a reading given by a contemporary of mine here in the Bay area. He is a decent writer and a likeable man but his public persona, like many another English novelist, appears modelled on Prince Charles taking a stroll down the charity ward of a Cambridge hospital. During the question/answer session that followed he declared to an audience of maybe 500 people that in his opinion the greatest influence on English novelists of the past thirty years was Philip Larkin.
Honest to god.
But Anglo-American audiences dote on that socio-intellectual embrace. Especially when the individual appears able to cope with the beastlier forms of street life. He reminds them of that English actor who portrays bumbling upper-class characters who stay calmly ironic while dealing with brute reality, even such horrors as having to buy a young black woman to service one orally. They understand such angst and often experience it themselves when making contracts with street people. Even young WASP women share a smile. They empathise with the man buying the woman! The idea of being on your knees in a back alley, staring up at a rich white bastard’s penis, seems not to occur.
If only I was a fucking musician, man, why did I have to be a writer, I could just get on with the work as honestly as I could. Music had Eric Burdon, Them, the Stones. We writers had Kingsley Amis and the Angry Young Men.
In the name of fuck.
In those days the clearest statement of my own position came via Steve Marriott and the Small Faces:
Wouldin it be noice,
to get on wiv me nighbirs
and then shout like fuck and bang yer drums and whistle and stamp yer feet. Instead one is to learn firstly the rudimentaries that one might come to respect, not simply Standard English Grammatical Form, but its exigency, how to be a good literary chap, and know yer place.
Poverty types do exist but it is bad manners to air them publicly. The bourgeoisie expect beggars to apologise for their lack of invisibility. Regrettably some beggars do just that. Thus they seek a pitch nearby a public sewer. Sorry guv, I aint one of em reds, give me twenty pee and I’ll plop
dahn the plugole.
Young artists learn how not to deal with life on the street except at a distance, to subjugate the impulse to create original art, and look to the fiction-as-sociology mainstream. Stay with the objective third-party narrative, or that whining first-person present tense: assimilate that conventional grammar at all costs, that one might come to describe those curiously shabby, odorous creatures from the outside, without having to touch, taste or smell them. Do not attempt to gain entry into their psyches, you will find that a contradiction in terms; amorphous mobs and baying multitudes do not ‘have’ psyches.
Earlier writers tried something different. They knew the lives of ordinary people and attempted to work from within. It was not necessary to have experienced everything. But you have to be sufficiently touched as a human being to address these areas; you begin from solidarity – a mixture of sympathy and empathy, a tricky emotion for those in an economically advantaged and socially superior position. I was ignorant of American writers like Saroyan, Caldwell, Le Seuer, Ellison. I had no idea of the existence of stories such as ‘Blue Boy’, ‘The Daring Young Man on the Flying Trapeze’ or ‘King of the Bingo Game’?
I read work by writers who touched on it from the outside; in my teens I enjoyed A.J. Cronin and had no knowledge of James Barke or Walter Greenwood. But who tackled poverty and its effects, whether malnutrition or degradation, as an existential experience? In U.K. prose fiction a masterwork such as Knut Hamsun’s Hunger was a logical absurdity. Fortunately we could learn from European writers in translation.
When I started writing I looked with longing to rock music. It was never to do with being a liberated young male, it was to do with being a liberated young working-class male. The Who’s ‘My Generation’ was exciting but it let the upper classes off the hook once again, it universalised rebellion. You and me brother, the whole world could hold hands and join in. Oh no, here we go, a penny for the black babies. Religion and spirituality and wholefoods and tolerance for one another. Even the richest man in the world will bleed if pricked. Leave the guy alone, he is a suffering soul. Let us read the Beats and rebel against Daddy and his corporate chums. If only they loved one another they could join with Bob Geldof and Bono and become multibillionaire charity heroes. Perhaps then they could dance and let their hair down, use words like ‘gig’ and ‘cool’ in context; sniff a line, smoke a joint, listen to Jimi Hendrix, read Ginsberg and not shave on weekends. Thus ‘we’ might come to halt this beastly systematic brutality being perpetrated by corporate capital on working-class and indigenous communities across the globe. Absafuckinglootely, as they say in Cambridge and Yale.
In 1964 Los Angeles I had no money and no way of getting money. There was no game in town, not that I knew about. Since boyhood me and my pals gambled for money for as long as we had any. Once or twice the cards landed correctly or the horses ran to form. Here in L.A. the local newspapers had racing-form pages. Maybe the locals could make sense of them, I could not. Nor could I find a betting shop. The only money I had was skimmed off the busfares, or given by my father or elder brother. I did not like being in that position. Who does? I was not used to dependency.
So who knows, had I been offered dough by one of the men that hung around the bus station, probably I would have taken it and dealt with the consequences later. I was never completely sure what went on between men anyway. Stories in An Old Pub Near the Angel are set in England where I lived from the spring of 1965. The same business option existed there. Two Scottish guys I knew in London had taken the money. One referred to an elderly man who paid him for minor masochistic pleasures. The other said, I would have kicked his arse for ten Woodbine – a cheap brand of no-filter cigarettes; you could buy them in fives. That stuff was incredible to me, and by then I was 21. At 17 I thought anal sex was a metaphor.
In L.A. I just wandered about, along to Grand Central Market; maybe one of the butchers was in need of a delivery boy and I would just happen to be passing and that would be me with a job. My elder brother met my father here on Friday evenings to stock up on food before catching the bus home to Pasadena. By then I was on the road home myself. A hamburger stall on 5th had become my second home. An older man operated the stall, open from 7 a.m. and finished by mid afternoon. He did not know of any jobs for 17-year-olds but offered coffee refills for as long as I stayed.
His hamburgers were magnificent. When he dished one up to me he used to ask, With everything?
He soon stopped asking. Of course with everything, what are ye kidding? Mustard and ketchup, fried onions, chopped jalapeños, pickled gherkins: it was all over my nose and down my neck. I rationed myself to one a fortnight.
I came to realise that he assumed I was Jewish. It was my name. There are more Jewish Kelmans in the U.S.A. than there are Protestant Kelmans in the entire north-east of Scotland, including Macduff. In the 1990s I did a reading in New York City at an Irish club near the Museum of Modern Art. It smelled of money. I read from How Late It Was, How Late. A few individuals in the audience hated it, they really hated it, and harrumphed, coughed and spluttered throughout. Afterwards I heard one of the harrumphing elderly men say to his female partner, Kelman is not even a Scottish name, it is Jewish.
The hamburger-stall owner was not put off when I told him I was a Protestant Atheist, as they say in parts of Scotland and Ireland, just embarrassed and apologetic that the subject had arisen. His son was my age and a soccer freak; he tuned in to foreign stations to get results from Europe. For some reason he had latched onto Partick Thistle. I explained to him that there was only one team in Scotland worth bothering about and they played at Pittodrie Park. He never had heard of Graham Leggatt, George Kinnell or Ian Burns, not even Paddy Buckley let alone the legendary ‘Gentleman’ George Hamilton, my father’s hero. When the Dons thrashed Rangers 6–0 in a cup semi-final at Ibrox Park back in the early 1950s, ‘Gentleman’ George ran amok. As I recall he missed the cup final and Celtic beat us 2–1 before a record 134,000 spectators.
In L.A., football was one of the primary absences in our family’s life. My mother was used to us ranting and raving about it but she missed it too. But she was missing everything. With five sons she was accustomed to the absence of female company, but not inured to it. Here she had none at all, and saw nobody. In Glasgow we lived in tenement blocks; six, eight or even twelve families lived up a close, and the next close was a five- to ten-second walk away. It was a community, even if ye hated the neighbours. Here in Pasadena the tied cottage was down at the end of a private lane, nobody except us. A family of animals with striped tails appeared in the evening to stare in the window, watching us watch television.
My father’s job at the private gallery in Pasadena deteriorated to the extent that he handed in notice to quit. The owner was looking for cheap labour only, and practised in the arts of obedience. Now she wanted us off the premises immediately. If we stayed even one minute beyond the period of employment, she would have us charged with all sorts of criminal misdemeanours, and each of these minutes would cost us rent.
Our tied cottage was located on the grounds of a large home on Arlington Drive. The owner had a Japanese gardener ages with herself, and an established Japanese garden with plenty shrubbery; bushes and trees and a burn flowing through the middle. There was a wee temple with a shrine where the gardener spent much of his time. My younger brothers, Alan and Philip, ran wild in the garden playing chases, splashing through the burn and sneaking into the temple and making the gardener’s life a misery. I climbed up on the roof to keep out the road, reading and sunbathing. My mother spent most of her time in the tied cottage, doing the domestic work and dreaming of Scotland. The mindset we entered into reminds me of that opening in the Cassavetes movie Gloria. The accountant father has cooked the books of his employers, a team of mafioso. It is useless to run. His wife has bouts of rage, then lapses into lethargy, like her mother and daughter, just staring at him occasionally, as they wait for the executioner. It is a brilliant scene.
&nbs
p; One of my father’s ex co-workers was our saviour, a young Puerto Rican picture-framer by the name of Mario. My father had been free with his skills to the other workers. Now Mario was quick to offer his support. They hatched a plot a week or so later. In Glasgow we call it ‘doing a moonlight’. Mario had a rusty old banger, wings falling to bits, exhaust system knackered. They stuffed everybody in, bags and suitcases, the lot, and we hightailed it out of town, straight onto Pasadena Freeway, Mario’s car rattling and shaking the whole way south to an apartment in Hawthorne, south L.A. This was more like it.
Hawthorne is next door to Watts where much racist violence hit the street in 1965. Around 15,000 National Guard troops were sent in to show the black American community who was boss. On any bus into town I sat at the back because I was a smoker. Only blacks sat there, whites went to the front. Sometimes the back of the bus was crowded and only a few seats being used in the white section. None of the whites gave me a row, they just kind of looked, as did the blacks, but nothing more than that. Not even a vague frown, that I recall. Perhaps the clothes I wore advertised my foreign origins. What happened to other colours or ethnicities, I do not know, I do not know.
Walking about in L.A. was no different from walking through the foreign neighbourhoods of Drumchapel: not for youths. This pressure is known to almost every full-sighted urban male that breathes, every day of our lives. Who will step out the way first? After an entire day tramping the streets, one wearies of the constant decision-making, and the longer it goes on the more complex the judgment. I start making a priori decisions: it does not matter the male, for every second one I shall step out of the road. For every third male over the age of 70 I shall keep my ground and stick out my elbows.
An Old Pub Near the Angel Page 14
