The Life of Lee

by Lee Evans

  As the two-hour journey went on and the bus got closer to the college, the early-bird passengers would all eventually get off, gradually to be replaced by the second crowd of morning travellers. They were the art students who eventually filled the bus and turned it into what could only be described as a freak show. They were the complete opposite of those who had been on the bus earlier. It would now became an entirely different journey, as the vehicle filled with punks with huge spiky hair, Mods and young girls dressed up as their idol, Adam Ant, a massive hit with students at the time. There were others sporting wedge cuts and wearing jodhpurs like the pop group Haircut One Hundred, and the couple who got on every morning all done up like Dave Sylvian from the band Japan. I wondered how this lot ever got out of the door in the morning, with the amount of garb and make-up they were all wearing. It must have been like getting ready for panto season, but every single day.

  The bus would arrive outside the college and offload its morning menagerie of oddballs and misfits. An exotically dressed crowd, it looked like the circus had hit town. We would all enter the college, walking down the long corridor to the art department. This would lead us past the various other departments. First up, our parade would trigger the usual morning barrage of catcalls from all the testosterone-fuelled lads in the engineering department. Dressed in oily, these-prove-I’m-not-a-poof dungarees, they stood around next to their huge manly lathes, sniggering at us. ‘Look at them!’ they would sneer at us as we went by. ‘Lazy bastards!’

  Then we would pass the catering department where a few of the students would inevitably stand on the other side of the glass in aprons and white trilbies, pointing and hurling taunts at us. ‘Benders! Bleeding weirdos!’

  I kept my head down and carried on walking. Sporting only a duffel coat, Hush Puppies and bushy hair, I was able to blend in and not draw too much attention to myself. The abuse was aimed at the ones who were wearing make-up and decidedly different clothing.

  I had a deep sense of admiration for the way they would stick passionately to their beliefs, always adhering to an unyielding and non-conformist dress sense. When they received the attention of the more macho students, these alternative types would shout back, thumbing their noses and barking back in return, like some mad gang who had just jumped out of a Mad Max movie. ‘Piss off, you boring, conventional tosspots.’ I saw it as a badge of honour to be associated with these defiantly individualistic art students. I liked the fact that they viewed it as their duty to stand out from the crowd.

  All the same, there were times at first when I may also have been guilty of thinking that perhaps art wasn’t a ‘proper job’. That idea stemmed from Dad, my brother and lots of the lads I hung around with at the time. It wasn’t their fault, of course – it was just born out of ignorance. They quite rightly considered art, drawing and painting an easier choice because it wasn’t traditional manual labour. It didn’t involve the honest sweat of a working man’s brow.

  Of course, now I know that you have to reject the sort of closed-thinking crap they want to force-feed you at school, the narrow idea that you should keep your head down, never speak up and get a proper job. Now I understand that art is a proper job; for example, some of the students who were at art school with me went on to St Martin’s and later into the fashion industry. Spencer, my friend from art school, is now a great artist. Mark, another friend of mine, works at Warner Brothers’ animation department. I’ve also met other former art students working on film sets. I ended up as a comic. OK, so I let the side down, but at least it’s creative.

  Yep! Now I was at art school, I was turning into a different person. I had changed my mind about the direction I wanted to take in life. I adopted the ideology that I would no longer be a slave to other people’s ignorance. I had reviewed everything and was now going to be a famous artist. It became obvious it was time for me to stop denying myself. Above all, I was convinced that I could no longer deprive the masses, who undoubtedly would have been enthralled if they hadn’t been totally unaware of my true artistic genius. I reflected upon the fact that I might even throw them the odd painting here and there, perhaps one I had whacked out on a napkin while sitting in the Wimpy, as a sort of titbit. I would while away the days delving into my more important, meaningful work. I wasn’t yet sure of what that work would be, of course. But I would ponder and, in good time, perhaps after a blue period or a lemon one, either way after a right good muse, dive into Little Lake Me at some later stage. But, for now, I shall conclude that all that’s –

  ‘Bollocks.’

  That’s what Dad called it. ‘Are you all right in the head, son?’ he asked as I held aloft one of my paintings to show him what I had been working on. Dad got up and turned the sound down to ‘3 – 2 – 1 –Dusty Bin’. Mr Benjamin always said that our work should provoke a reaction and a discussion, and it certainly did in our house. My art had changed the whole mood in our lounge. I had meaningfully introduced this piece to everybody as ‘The Crying Tree’.

  ‘A bloody crying tree? How can you have a crying tree?’

  I’d hardly pulled the painting out of my folder when Dad’s sunny face changed to thunder, and I could hear Wayne chuckling from somewhere behind him. Wayne was revelling in my discomfort, as Dad ranted and raved: ‘Call that art? I could do better than that with my eyes closed!’

  Dad moved across the lounge to get another angle on it and to think up a new way of abusing my painting. As he did so, he revealed Wayne sitting in the armchair opposite, still wearing his work clothes. My brother Wayne had acquired a job steel-fixing on a building site. The heavy lifting and working outside had made him look solid and fit. His youthful, tanned face complementing his blue eyes, he was a good-looking young man earning good money. He smirked over at me as he scoffed another mouthful of food from a piled-high tray on his lap. He had what was considered in our house a ‘proper job’. He was also paying Mum housekeeping and so suddenly had a say in what went on around the place. I, on the other hand, was an art student and earning nothing and so had bugger-all say. It was never vocalized, but because Wayne had a ‘proper job’ I felt as though I was seen in the house as some sort of slacker.

  The views of others around me only helped to feed my sense of rebellion and so, influenced by college, I began wearing odd, if not rather radical, bits of clothing. Trying to break away from the person I had been and fit in with the other students, I started changing my appearance – at first only slightly, nothing too outrageous. I mean it wasn’t even Trinny or Tranny, or that other bloke – Cok Wank? By today’s out-there standards, it was boring pipe-and-slippers stuff.

  But to my family, I was becoming uncontrollably outrageous. I would wear mismatched socks or decide to cut one sleeve off my jacket. This made me look like a one-armed bandit, especially since my eyes rolled around all the time as I was constantly on the lookout for a good scene to draw. People stared at me as if the five bells were about to come up.

  One morning, I might try trimming one side of my hair with Dad’s old nail clippers, before realizing my fringe was at a certain angle across my forehead that made me look like someone who had just woken from major brain surgery. Whatever, it didn’t look right. So I would trim the other side, and then I looked like all Three Stooges.

  Because of my new-found dress sense, Dad became suspicious that I might be a little too happy or even gay. ‘Well,’ I would reply, ‘I was smiling.’

  I soon guessed he was concerned about my sexuality. After all, I’d taken to wearing odd clothing and had never brought a bird back home. This was in stark contrast to Wayne, who was always boasting about his sexual conquests at the weekends. The way Dad looked at me, I could sense his suspicion, and that suspicion rubbed – if I can say rubbed right now … anyway, rubbed – his working-class roots up the wrong way. It went against what he saw as the norm.

  He seemed consumed by the idea and would keep making oblique comments or slip something randomly into a
conversation. ‘It’s good to keep yourself fit,’ he would announce, rising up from his armchair and jogging on the spot to demonstrate in a very manly fashion. ‘But it’s not so good to hang around the gym, is it, Lee?’

  Later, he would be sitting there listening to his record player and suddenly declare, apropos of nothing: ‘I like all sorts of music, but I don’t like musicals at all. Right, Lee?’

  I’m sure he just wanted me to say it, simply to confirm his fears. He would even say jokingly: ‘What, are you gay or something?’ But instead of it being friendly banter, I got the feeling he was deadly serious, as there was always a pregnant pause afterwards before I answered: ‘Nooooo, Dad.’ Then the conversation moved on for another day.

  It didn’t turn out to be that much of a rib-tickler in the end, but I tried something just for a joke one Christmas. I was sixteen, and this particular Yuletide was a little more important than others as Dad, who was hardly ever with us over the festive period because it was one of the busiest times of the year for him, was actually at home. Having him at the table for Christmas dinner was rare and very exciting for all of us, so maybe I didn’t think it through properly, but I decided to wait until the main course to make ‘An important announcement’.

  Timing is everything in comedy, of course, so once I’d hushed everyone round the festive table, I thought I’d selected the right moment to declare, with great pomp and circumstance: ‘Mum, Dad, I’m gay.’ I really wish I hadn’t because all hell broke loose.

  ‘Get out of this house!’ Dad shouted.

  ‘But I was only mucking about,’ I whimpered.

  Mum got up and left the room, sobbing. ‘You don’t muck about with that sort of thing in this house, young man.’

  Ooops.

  20. Power to the People

  There are not many moments in your life – perhaps one or two maybe – when you feel the inclination to jump out of bed in the morning with a keen sense of purpose, excitement and enthusiasm and a desire to burst forth out of the front door as quickly as possible in order to go and do something you really love. But I felt that way about art college.

  When I arrived there in the mornings, I even liked the smell of the art department, its heady scents of resins, paint thinners, clay or the thick white dust of plaster of Paris that hung in the air. If I was lucky, I would get Mr Benjamin, head of the department, for a lesson, and usually when that happened, any chance of doing any art was quickly forgotten. As soon as I got him talking about my favourite subject, John Lennon, I would sit for ages, completely engrossed, listening to him recollect his days in the 1960s attending Liverpool art school with the great musician. Lennon was my hero. He was then and has been ever since. Always will be.

  Why? I think most probably because I could at that time relate to him as a working-class hero. I also loved the way he always seemed to stick two fingers up at the Establishment. For someone like me, so introverted, and always at odds with people in authority, Lennon’s example in a strange way gave me hope and inspiration. Having idolized him all through art school, I felt he’d become part of my life. So a number of years later, when I heard that he’d been shot, it was as if the killer had taken a piece of my life away. Kids like me need someone like John Lennon, heroes who are from where you’re from. His murderer deprived people like me of a role model, a benchmark, a standard to go by.

  Yep, I loved every minute of art college. I kept myself to myself as I was still agonizingly shy. But, for the first time in my life, I felt I fitted in some place. No longer would I be pulled up for being a bufflehead; in fact, whatever I did or said was – quite amazingly – considered an idea of some sort. This, I felt, was the place for me. I had, as they say, found my promised land at last. My thoughts and feelings – which out in the real world had been seen as ridiculous – were allowed to run amok at art school. What the tutors were teaching us never for one moment felt staid or boring, but seemed open-ended and interesting. They were keen for you to contribute, and even though every other student was in their own strange artistic bubble, it felt as though they were of the same mind as me.

  At least, that’s how it was at first. It slowly emerged that we were as different as the myriad pebbles on a beach. As the year rolled on I started noticing how the students’ different characters came through. I discovered that one in particular was very different from me.

  I was sitting quietly sketching in a corner when suddenly, out of nowhere, a girl appeared next to me. Another student from another part of the art department. I recognized her from the canteen at lunchtime. She always sat up one end of the hall at some tables that had been pulled together, surrounded by a whole bunch of students from other departments. From where I was sitting, it looked like they were having some heated discussions; this girl in particular would get very irate about things, and begin slamming her hand down hard on the table to make a point while shouting something or other. I couldn’t tell what it was, as I was too far across the canteen to hear, but her vehemence made all the others do the same in agreement.

  As she spoke to me, she was breathing heavily as if she was in a hurry about something. She had unconventional looks, but was nonetheless mesmerizing. I was instantly smitten and particularly struck by the way she dressed. She was a bit punky-looking, with spiky white and blue hair and frightening eyes so heavily made up she must have spent the whole morning unblocking her eyeliner-pencil sharpener with a compass. She looked like Johnny Rotten dressed up as Zorro returning from a happy-hour booze-up down at Pepe’s Bar and Tapas in Santa Ursula, Tenerife. It was not a look that you could ignore. But back then I was lured by bright objects, and she was definitely bright; it was like having a conversation with the sun’s inner atmosphere.

  ‘Hi, I’m Sarah. Are you going to the demo over the weekend?’ she asked in a forceful, excitable, upper-class accent.

  I was confused. I was desperate to fit in with all these arty types. Also, I was seventeen, I was keen to find myself a girlfriend and I thought that maybe she might be asking me out. I reckoned I could easily get used to all the make-up. After all, I thought, girls never talk to me and here’s one actually chatting to me unprompted. There again, I was so desperate, she could have asked me to eat my duffel coat and I would have started munching away at the hood right there and then.

  I answered like I knew what she was talking about. Eager to match hers, I also put on a very bad posh accent. ‘The demo? Yah. Are you gooowing?’ I said, crossing my legs and swaying back and forth in my chair to look more intellectual.

  ‘Oh, yah,’ Sarah replied. ‘We really have to wipe out nuclear weapons, right? If the bloody Yanks think they can just pitch their pipes of evil death over here, then, like, they’ve got another thing coming, right?’

  She shouted the word ‘right’, which made me jump. It also simultaneously startled a few of the very sensitive neurons in my brain, making them vault around a bit, which for some unknown reason forced my lips uncontrollably to shout back in her face very loudly indeed: ‘Too fucking right, Johnny Rotten, my son!’

  Sarah then turned to leave. I couldn’t really tell because her Coco the Clown make-up rendered her featureless, but I think she had a confused expression on her face thanks to what my mouth had involuntarily blurted out. ‘Outside the college gates, Saturday morning,’ she barked. ‘Coach leaves at nine o’clock.’ And, with that, she was gone.

  ‘Blimey,’ I thought, ‘I’m going on a demo. Wait a minute – who cares? I’m going on a date!’

  If it was a date, then it was a funny one. I imagined it to be something different, perhaps a bit of fun, a meal and a chat. I knew we were going up to London on a demo, but at least a couple of moments alone wouldn’t go amiss. To be fair, I’m not one for conversations, especially with a girl. I get too nervous – which was handy on this occasion because I hardly spoke to her.

  Having built up the date with Sarah throughout the week, adding bit by bit another vignette to the al
ready epic scenario, I was under the false illusion that Saturday would be spent shagging. I had deluded myself that somehow, as she was such a confident person, she would just make me have it away with her instead of going on the demo.

  So you can imagine my complete and utter disappointment when I hardly saw Sarah at all that day. As soon as we got off the coach at Trafalgar Square, she was gone – instantly disappearing into the heaving crowd. Left there like a lemon, I just stood and waited for her to come back. I gave her the benefit of the doubt, thinking maybe she would make her way back to me at some point. As I twiddled my thumbs, I watched the massive crowd start chanting about a bomb.

  I wondered, as I waited in vain for my posh ‘date’ to return, looking up at one of the four lions that guarded Nelson’s Column, what we were all doing there. Then I found out. There was some bloke at the front of the crowd who looked like he was geeing them all up. He was holding one of those loudhailers and shouting into it. At first, it seemed as though he – like me – had no idea why he was there, because all he kept shouting was: ‘What do we want?’

  And then everybody appeared to remind him by shouting back at him: ‘No more nukes!’

  But again he had to be reminded, because he then shouted: ‘When don’t we want them?’

  And everybody once more jogged his memory: ‘Right now!’

  I thought to myself, ‘You would have imagined they’d have put someone up the front who knows what we’re doing here. Either that or the poor fella has the memory of a goldfish.’ Because at that moment, he started asking everyone again: ‘What do we want?’

  As the ever-expanding crowd squeezed, heaved and pushed further into Trafalgar Square, I managed to lift myself above the masses and peer across the sea of heads towards the front – appropriately enough, just beneath the National Portrait Gallery, another place filled with a bunch of odd-looking heads, funny how it works isn’t it? – to see if I could spot my date.