by Tony O'Neill
I was employed for the first time in years, and it did not feel too great.
The hustle was this: Stoker produced a magazine that had various reprinted (without permission) articles from American country magazines and a few slim efforts penned by himself and some of his other wheezing, gray-haired friends in the London country scene. But the main body of the magazine was taken up with advertisements and reviews. It was my job to call people up and get them to advertise. I made a base salary, cash in hand, and a percentage of the advertising revenue.
Even for this kind of hustle it was despicably small-time. The only money the magazine made was in the reviews. Every day piles of CDs would arrive at the house for review in the magazine. The only people who bought the magazine were people who were reviewed in it. However, we would review anybody as long as they took out an advertisement in the magazine to peddle their wares. No advertisement, no review. The bigger the advertisement, the more enthusiastic the review. It was pathetic.
I spent most of my time in the bathroom shooting up. The lime-green tiles, the noise of Stoker’s music, and my blood flooding into the barrel. Then, full of drugs and good feelings, I would swagger into the office and start hitting up people for money on the phone.
After two weeks I was moved out of the office and into Stoker’s garage. He called it the “back office” but it was just a garage, a damp storage space piled high with unsold copies of the magazine in rotting brown cardboard boxes, a meager strip of carpeting, some electrical outlets, and a phone. I didn’t mind so much. It was good to be away from the music.
I was obviously better at selling than most of Stoker’s previous employees. I knew that I could make at least two sales a day—to keep him happy—and the rest of the time I could nod out in the back office, with the portable radio tuned to the BBC World Service. The voices of the reporters lulled me into very gentle space. Some of the people I called from Stoker’s decade-old list screamed abuse when they heard my voice. One in particular started yelling hysterically when I said I was from Traditional Country Music Monthly.
“Stop calling here!” he yelled. “Every two weeks some new idiot calls me from your magazine asking me to advertise. I advertised once three years ago and it did nothing! I do not want to advertise with you again! Remove my name from your list, idiot!”
This guy’s deal was accordions. He repaired them, sold them, reconditioned them. I didn’t like his tone so I made a point of calling him at least twice a week and acting as if it were the first time I had ever called him, and I had no idea that he didn’t want to be solicited anymore. Eventually a woman started answering the phone and I lost interest, as I couldn’t provoke her into yelling abuse at me.
11
THE BBC
The John Peel session with Liquid Sky turned out to be the first thing we did as a band. Leading up to the show, I put in a lot of work. The band had recorded demos with producers but had only a rudimentary grasp of how to play their instruments. It was up to me to re-create the drums and keyboards on all of the tracks. Louis XIV had never learned to play the bass, and Elektra confided in me that they had removed all of his bass lines from the demos without his knowledge and replaced them with the work of a session guy. But they liked him and didn’t want to hurt his feelings. We decided to program all of the bass lines in on the keyboards as well and to turn his bass low in the mix.
The first rehearsal took place at Elektra’s house in Hoxton. She lived with a guy called Tom, who was also in a band. They were married, although Elektra insisted it was only to get her into the country. She told me that Tom was really into fucking transvestites and doing coke, two things that didn’t really interest her. He worked a straight job in the city, doing phone sales, and then rehearsed with his band, the Ones, in the evening.
Tom disliked me immediately. Our first rehearsal I spent the whole day there with Elektra and Paris trying to make some sense out of the songs. It took us seven hours and a case of beer, but we finally got the rudiments of two tracks down. Paris plugged her fifty-quid replica Telecaster though Elektra’s stereo and played along. Her guitar seemed to be constantly going out of tune. I stopped asking her to put it back in tune though, because she didn’t seem entirely sure of how to do it and would take ten or twenty minutes to fiddle around with it. It would come back sounding exactly the same. The second time this happened, fearful of embarrassing her, I told her it sounded great and she smiled, relieved. Despite the fact that the guitars were out of tune and the bass player couldn’t really play his instrument, I thought that the band had something. A certain ramshackle power. So I persevered.
Then, around five, Tom came home. He walked into the room silently and looked at us programming the synthesizer with obvious disdain.
“All right?” he grunted.
“Tom—this is our new keyboard player.”
“Hi.”
He listened to us for a little while. He quite obviously hated the music. We took a break, Elektra ran out to get more beers, and I tried to make conversation with him.
“Elektra tells me that you’re in a band.”
“Yeah. The Ones. You wanna hear our demo?”
“Sure.”
He stuck a cassette in the stereo. Paris rolled her eyes at me and went to make a phone call. The music started. It sounded like fairly standard indie rock. And then the singing began. Before I said anything else, I asked Tom: “Are you the singer?”
“Yup.”
Oh Jesus. It was terrible. It was one of the worst things I’ve ever heard. His voice had an almost uniquely tuneless and charmless sound to it. But I had to be polite. So I told him it was great.
“I know!” he said without missing a beat. “I can’t believe it’s you lot that got a Peel session first, to be honest. I mean, truth be told—Elektra’s a great girl—but we piss all over your band.”
I looked at him and he seemed completely serious.
“So,” I asked eventually, “how’s work?”
He then started telling me a long story about his job. He had to wear a suit, so he could sit on the phone and sell printing products all day. And whenever someone did a big sale, they had to go up and ring a gong that was in the center of the office, and everybody had to cheer. They kept a scoreboard up there, and at the end of the day the person with the lowest score had to take the wooden spoon.
“What’s the wooden spoon?” I asked.
Tom looked at me like I was crazy.
“It’s a spoon, man. It’s made of wood. You know, a wooden spoon!”
“O…kay. What do you do with the wooden spoon?”
“Nothing! You have to keep it on your desk for all of the next day. And it stays there until you move up a place on the scoreboard.”
“Oh. That’s weird.”
“Weird? It’s fucking humiliating! I got the wooden spoon last week. I had to spend extra money on fucking coke just so I was aggressive enough to sell my way back out of the bottom. They’re fucking assholes! A wooden spoon! Can you imagine?”
“Yeah. That’s crazy. Why don’t you quit?”
“Well, it’s easy money. I couldn’t afford to live in Hoxton if I didn’t have a decent paying job. What do you do?”
“Well…at the moment I do sales for a folk music magazine. I work in some guy’s garage. The magazine isn’t real. It’s just a hustle to get money coming in.”
“That sounds depressing.”
“It is, but I’m in that garage without any other people around me, and I can listen to the World Service. And they don’t have gongs or wooden spoons, or some fool telling me I have to wear a suit so I can call people on the phone. But on the other hand, I am basically being paid five pounds an hour to sit in some crazy old bastard’s garage in North London and harass people who repair accordions.”
“That’s absurd.”
“I know. Life is absurd.”
Bit by bit, over the next few weeks we got four songs ready for the Peel session. It was a weird time in Britis
h music. When I had left England, the whole Britpop thing had been falling apart. There was a very real sense that the party was somehow coming to a messy end. The new bands were all shit. The established bands like Oasis were well past their primes, and even the really great bands like Pulp had started going through midlife crises. In LA, nothing whatsoever was going on. As far as music goes, LA is something of a black hole. People there were talking about a glam metal revival. The handful of cool bands floated mostly below the radar. All of a sudden everybody sounded like either Matchbox Twenty or Limp Bizkit. By the time I found myself in London again, New York bands were all over the press. It started with the Strokes, and then the Strokes’ imitators. Everything that bands had been doing in the UK suddenly seemed old. There was no effective response to the center of cool for the music universe suddenly being located on the East Coast of America. It seemed like everybody was looking for the next big thing in British music, so I figured, Why not us?
Our Peel session took place in a basement room at the Maida Vale studio. The place was huge and almost deserted. It had an eerie, hospital feel to it. The guys engineering the session had beards and wore cable-knit sweaters. They looked like a folk duo. We set up our equipment nervously.
“Okay, shall we do a quick run-through of one of the songs, to get levels?” the show’s producer asked through the talk-back system.
I gave him the thumbs-up. I counted us in and we started to play.
Shit.
I had forgotten to tell them to turn the bass down. Everything sounded like a mess. It astounded me that we had a bass player in the band who did not know how to play bass, yet didn’t seem to hear how terrible he sounded. He was completely unaware of his own incompetence. The song rattled along, and throughout it Louis’s bass line bounced around, in the wrong key and the wrong time signature, like the noodlings of a mental incompetent engaged in some kind of music therapy, yet he stood there with a big stupid grin plastered on his face as if he were maybe Tina Weymouth or Bootsy Collins. We struggled on, and after the song ground to a halt I looked over to the window of the producer’s booth. The engineers looked back at us in a kind of quiet puzzlement. I could see them thinking: “Is it meant to sound like this? Is this some kind of avant-garde thing? Or are they just completely inept?”
I cleared my throat and looked over to Elektra.
“Erm…I think some of the levels are a little off. Let me go over and speak to them.”
I popped my head into the booth and called the producer over.
“Yes?”
“Erm…listen, is there any way you can kill the bass altogether? I mean, just take it out of the mix?”
“Well…sure. I can do that, but…”
“The bass lines are all programmed on the keyboards. We don’t turn him up when we play.”
“Oh.”
He peered back through the window to look at the band again. Louis was still standing there grinning back at them.
“It’s a kind of…care in the community thing,” I explained. “The girls just like having him around, like Bez from the Happy Mondays. Except he can’t dance.”
“I see.”
I crept out and locked myself in the cavernous bathroom. The bathrooms were clean and smelled faintly of Pine-Sol. That was nice, at least. Nothing worse than having to shoot up in a dirty bathroom. I fixed and felt all of my anxieties about the session melt out of my body, through the soles of my feet and down into the tiles of the toilet stall. It was time to go make history.
12
DECEMBER
On the Hammersmith and City line nodding—peaceful, all the way back to Kings Cross. It is Christmastime. I am waiting for RJ to show with the drugs—my breath hangs in the frosty air—and he appears from the blizzard like the monster in Shelley’s Frankenstein, when the doctor chases his creation through the windswept landscape of Antarctica, and then I cut through to the toilet of the Kings Mall, where I fix with ice-cold, numb, and shaking hands, all the while, Frank Sinatra singing something festive like “The Little Drummer Boy” or “Silver Bells” is being piped into the filthy toilet.
And as the dope hits I know it is good shit—maybe a Christmas gift from RJ to me—and I fucked up my arm a little, and the black blood drips onto my shoes but I sit there—stupefied by the heroin—as Frank’s voice takes on a different tonality—spacing out dramatically—like the record is slooooowwwwiiinnggg doooooowwwww-nnnnn, and the music sounds like it being piped through a swimming pool filled with jelly.
On the train I think that maybe right here, right now, I am the most beautiful man alive, because everyone is beautiful when they are high: I start to realize that the war on drugs is a war on beauty—a war on perfection, because everything is perfect on heroin—it is a war against the simple human aspiration of complete contentment, and the thought makes me sad—that we are waging such a pointless and spiteful war against the noblest part our own nature.
The train clatters into darkened tunnels, turning the carriage black for a moment, and the thoughts bubble and then fizzle—Pop!—like a thousand Christmas lights burning out in unison—they turn to stone and sink to the bottom of a
vast
inky
pool.
13
HELL IS OTHER PEOPLE
I soon found out that the move from Stoker’s house to the garage had happened because Stoker had brought on a new staff member. She was from Newcastle; a thin pale girl who was supposedly there to lay out the magazine editorials. I had little to do with her. She seemed sad and a little beaten up. She smelled too, of thick heavy perfume seemingly to cover up for a lack of bathing. I recognized something in her and instinctively knew that she was an addict too. One day, after taking my mid-morning shot in the bathroom, I went to walk into the main office, stoned and forgetting about the move. Through the door I heard Stoker’s hushed, wheezing voice:
“Do it…like that…keep going…”
She gurgled, her mouth obviously full of the old man’s cock, and I could hear a wet noise beating faster and faster.
“Right there…faster…”
I got the fuck away from there and listened to a report on the opium farmers of Afghanistan, passing out upright in my old office chair.
I owed the bank money. So every time Stoker cut me a check I had to bring it to a check-cashing place. I found one place on Fortress Road that would let me write checks to myself and cash them for 7 percent of the total. I had a book full of blank checks with a limit of a hundred pounds on them, so three, four times a week I would convert one into ninety-three pounds.
Temporarily at least our situation was fixed. I knew that the checks would run out one day soon and then I’d have to find another way to get by. But in the meantime there was money and long winter evenings and nothing but time. I caught up on reading. I ghosted around Soho at night when I was feeling rootless and energized. The neon lights bathed me and the dark strip clubs and doorways leading up to beaten old whores gave me a sense that I was among my own kind here. Occasionally I would score crack in the Soho alleyways from the black dealers ensconced in the shadows and hit the pipe in empty doorways, while the sound of the city carried on all around me.
I’d sit there, looking out over the city I had left four years ago, a city I had once been a productive member of, and I would think that life could not get any more perfect, unless perhaps I was to wake up tomorrow and all that was left would be the night stretching from one end of the land till the other, and the neon would be on 24/7, and the city noise would be nothing but yells and raucous laughter and music blasting from bars and clubs.
After two weeks or so of being late to work because of picking up my methadone in Hackney I switched my methadone pickup to the Boots chemist in Tufnell Park, around the corner from Stoker’s house. I did not like the new spot, despite its convenience for work. The old bitch that ran the joint would make me drink the methadone on-site. This was the rule for all new attendees. Despite the time I had under my belt
at my old pharmacy, I was treated like I had wandered in off the street for the first time. There is no reasoning with pharmacists when the issue at hand is narcotics. In their eyes they are talking to you from a morally superior standpoint, so no words can be persuasive enough to make them relent.
At work one day, while I was doodling idly in my notebook, the new employee knocked and came in.
“Hi,” she said.
“Hello.”
“You busy?”
I shrugged and put the notebook down.
