Give the Anarchist a Cigarette

by Mick Farren

  After some procrastination I had finally collected my blue-and-white Rexine record player. The delay had mainly been the result of its being in the custody of a woman I now wanted to avoid. Reclamation achieved, though, the room took on a whole new perspective. Buddy Holly and Gene Vincent, Elvis and Miles Davis, the crucial Bob Dylan, Nancy Wilson and Cannonball Adderley came in as the second wave of invasion, and after that the ominous presence didn’t have a prayer and was confined to the lathe and plaster of the walls.

  The rules in the House of the Chinese Landlord were no music and no women, but I played my records anyway. When I dropped the stylus onto the first disc, I half-expected threats of eviction, but, surprisingly, nothing happened. Now I’d broken the first of the rules, the obvious next mission was to start working on the second, although even with my modest improvements, the room was in no way the eligible bachelor pad as promoted in Playboy and Man about Town. I could hardly imagine many women relishing the ambience, except maybe those with very bad self-images. Try as I might, the place could still be mistaken for the lair of a serial murderer, more Ed Gein than Ted Bundy. A new variation on Groucho Marx’s paradox: where Groucho wouldn’t want to join any club that would have him as a member, I wouldn’t want to be with any woman who’d be willing to come back to this place. Callow as I was, I had yet to realise that it is a much better idea for the single male to let the woman invite him to her domestic quarters, with possible creature comforts like food, warmth, planned decor and even a television set. I’d yet to find the confidence that women might actually do the inviting.

  Rather than repeat the tired cliché that rules are made to be broken, I should explain my theory of exemption, as I applied it to the playing of records in the House of the Chinese Landlord. I figured that if I simply went ahead and put on ‘Rave On’ by Buddy Holly with enough confidence and panache, as if it were the most natural thing in the world, the landlord would also accept it was the most natural thing in the world and would say nothing about it. I didn’t so much break rules as simply decide they didn’t apply to me. Sound tenuous? Maybe, but over the years it has worked far more times than the law of averages would logically dictate. As in all things, success was not guaranteed, and I have found myself in serious trouble because some son-of-a-bitch didn’t recognise my exemption, or perhaps said son-of-a-bitch actually recognised it all too well. I nevertheless continue to be amazed at how many people will accept my bullshit.

  As far as I can figure it, self-exemption from the rules is a product of three factors: accent, attitude and a total willingness to appear less than sane. The accent part I learned at a very tender age. Up to the age of five, my mother had raised me to have a near-perfect Oxbridge accent and generally to behave like a little gentleman. It seemed to amuse the majority of her Martini-drinking women friends, and I was complimented and adored for it. Then, at five, on the playground of the local mixed infants school in which I’d been unenthusiastically enrolled, I discovered to my horror that good manners and enunciation didn’t cut it. I had to talk common and act like a surly lout within a fast twenty-four hours; if I didn’t assume the protective covering, I was going to have class war – in the form of a six-year-old accredited school bully, Tony Attfield – break out all over my sorry, Bertie Wooster, talking-through-my-nose, la-de-dah arse. Fortunately, I had enough native intelligence not to completely eighty-six the Oxbridge, but to keep it in my back pocket to be pulled out at times of threat or dire emergency.

  In my subsequent war with authority, which fundamentally commenced at West Tarring Mixed Infants, threat and dire emergency tended to dog my footsteps, but I quickly discovered (in dealings with low-echelon authority figures like policemen, stage-door security and gamekeepers in rural estates when one is committing criminal trespass) that whipping out the accent and giving them a shot of their master’s voice could work miracles. Of course, this technique only really works in England, or its comparatively recent former colonies, where a nuance of accent can pin your socio-economic status for the last three generations. In the United States, you can only pull it off with a particular class of East Coast snob, and some middle-aged women who are still in love with Mick Jagger. In America, the criterion is money, and given my cavalier attitude to money, that aspect of the USA has proved something of a challenge. The only people I see being given the same kinetic exemption are celebrities and beautiful women. Over and over again I have seen beautiful women circumvent regulations and surmount obstacles by a simple, impatient Elizabeth Taylor gesture: ‘No, it’s okay, I’m supposed to be here.’

  It would be a mistake to assume at this stage of the game that I was living in hermit-like isolation, pondering the intricate vulnerabilities of the class system, but my life had become a trifle strange. For a start, the major constituents of my diet were two foods of which I didn’t know the names. During times of low self-esteem life support can tend to err on the minimal side, and my routine hunting and gathering amounted to little more than a quick trip to the Jamaican general store. I had developed a liking for a sweet, circular West Indian bread and a kind of salami-like dried sausage. To this day I have no idea what either of them is called, but it hardly mattered because all I had to do was take them off the shelf, put them on the counter and pay for them. They exactly complemented my stranger-in-a-strange-land state of mind. These two unnamed items were my diet, supplemented by beer, Coca-Cola, milk, plain chocolate digestive biscuits and a cheese roll at the pub.

  Eating oddly, perhaps, but I certainly wasn’t a hermit. Alex Stowell, his girlfriend Hilary and her eccentric and academically distracted parents lived about two minutes’ walk away in Ledbury Road. At least, Hilary lived in Ledbury Road and Alex, although he didn’t officially live there, spent most of his time in Hilary’s basement, which had been converted into what amounted to a self-contained studio. I had known Alex when I was a student at St Martin’s, and we had spent long hours in the canteen discussing and defining the parameters of bullshit. Hilary was still attending the school. Alex did have a home somewhere in the East End, but it was also frequented by his two psychotic brothers, which I surmise was another reason (aside from the obvious one) why Alex – who was a dead-ringer for the drummer Ginger Baker – was always down in the basement, under the radar of the academically distracted.

  Alex Stowell was very good at nosing out parties. His other attributes included the ability to fashion art out of whatever was at hand, and a precognition regarding the psychedelic lightshow, but we’ll get to those a little later. These were the days when the post-teen party was the social salvation of those without money. A dimly lit flat would become filled with a crowd of one’s peers, smoke, talk, bluebeat, Chuck Berry, early Motown, cheap Australian wine and flat Watney’s Red Barrel in seven-pint canisters. These makeshift, create-your-own-nightclub bashes were leftovers from art school. I was out of the college loop, but Alex had kept his connections, dropping into the St Martin’s canteen for a cheap hot meal when he happened to be in the West End. Alex fancied himself as a West End dude. In the era of Dexter Gordon and the legendary all-nighters, he’d gophered at Ronnie Scott’s, the crucial British home of modern jazz, at the same time as the pre-Rolling Stones Andrew Loog Oldham. Unfortunately, Alex (unlike Oldham) never lucked into being the manager of a pre-eminent rock & roll band. His creative time was reserved for stranger schemes.

  These weekend parties happened in all parts of the city, and they often concluded with long, communal walks back from the other side of town. London was a highly parental town in those days, obsessive about tucking its inhabitants into bed well before the wee hours. With the tube stations closing between midnight and one, lacking the price of a cab and with night buses so rare an occurrence that they constituted an urban legend, a half-dozen or so of us would commence a leisurely trek of maybe a couple of hours in the general direction of Notting Hill. With a few bottles surplus to, or stolen from, the party, and enough cigarettes to see us to Queensway, we hoped to run into nothing more
threatening than the odd copper on the beat, or a team of zipping mods who yelled abuse from their Lambrettas.

  ‘Poxy fucking ravers! Get your fucking hair cut!’

  It was something of an insult to be called a raver. Ravers were a species of middle-class moron, vicarious quasi-bohemians who wore bowler hats and baggy black sweaters and danced to bad dixieland jazz with a peculiar skipping motion. If for no other reason than the fact they kept Mr Acker Bilk and his Paramount Jazz Band in business, they were totally beneath our contempt. We, on the other hand, were the real deal. We were the rebel intelligentsia, new Pre-Raphaelites for the second half of the twentieth century. To demonstrate this to ourselves and each other, we’d sing, we’d recite and we’d talk. Oh God, how we’d talk.

  We may not have known it, but we were cultivating our subterranean education. On these drunken hikes I first learned about Hangar 18, the Men in Black and the rudiments of UFO paranoia. (‘They drive ten-year-old Cadillacs, but the interiors smell of brand new leather.’) I debated Jack Ruby’s connections with the mob and Lee Oswald’s ties to the CIA and the FBI. (‘Hoover had to know all about it. He had to.’) I learned how an immortality treatment had been developed, but had been buried deep under the Pentagon and only handed out to the Anonymous Men Who Really Run the Planet. Having read my Burroughs, both William S. and Edgar Rice, I gave as good as I got, lecturing the crew on the Insect Trust, the Global Police State and the Hollow Earth. Freemasonry, Nostradamus, the Great Pyramid and the Knights Templar were all grist to our youthful mill as we passed along the paranoid rumour and cosmic gossip.

  Significantly, the one thing that almost certainly preoccupied all of us – the future and what it might bring – was hardly discussed at all. Maybe the global future, but rarely our own personal futures. In this we resembled the punks of a dozen years later, more than these punks ever realised. No fucking future, Sidney, know what I mean? We were militantly living in the moment, part of the youth obsession that Pete Townshend would articulate in ‘My Generation’. ‘I hope I die before I get old.’ And maybe we would. The nuclear stockpile continued to grow, and, on a more personal level, a few of us were already demonstrating an affinity with booze, pills, reefer and cigarettes.

  I knew some were pressing on regardless, still clinging to the career concepts of working in the pay of glossy magazines, high-powered ad agencies or TV franchises, but most were as confused as I was, running from the rat race, but with little idea of an alternative, short of blindly manoeuvring ourselves into the spotlight of fame, like the Beatles or the Rolling Stones. Since the gods of fame appeared to operate in such a random manner, Beatlehood (or maybe Beatletude) couldn’t be planned for, and all that remained was a frustrated sense of lurking potential, an instinct that something was waiting to reveal itself, some place a flower waited to bloom, or a flag was ready to unfurl, but feeling wrenchingly unhappy at not knowing where.

  Another subject no one discussed was that of potential nuclear holocaust – in itself another future scenario. A few years earlier it had been all anyone talked about. After the Cuban Missile Crisis the kids I hung around with had fallen ominously silent. We knew an H-bomb air burst over Central London would vaporise everything as far south as Horsham and well north of Watford. We had looked into the face of the beast and did not want to look there again. My own CND badge had long been left in some drawer as, in the wake of Kubrick’s Dr Strangelove, I had learned to stop worrying and love the bomb.

  Before parting for our separate homes, a regular stopping-off point was the Automat on Westbourne Grove. The Automat was a bizarre piece of low-tech, near-Orwellian science fiction run by a family of Indian brothers, one of the few places that remained open all night and within our all but non-existent price range. In Newspeak, it would have been called Prole Food Dispenser No. 947. To obtain said food you walked up to a fake display wall that was covered in tiny glass and stainless-steel doors, only slightly larger than a letterbox. After depositing the required coins – exact change, please – the designated door would unlock and you could remove the food sitting behind the glass. In theory it was a good, if soulless, idea, but in practice it proved a continuing logistical disaster, London at its most third-world.

  At four in the morning the Indian brothers were unwilling to put too much food on display. Trade was slow, and a hot sausage roll or beefburger could quite easily turn, if not actually toxic, then at least highly unappetising, well before a potential buyer might happen by. Thus, when you dropped the coins into the slot – exact change, please – a brother would hurry behind the hidden side of the glass and pass you what you wanted, through the slot, with a spookily disembodied hand. Hot and cold also proved a problem. The little doors were sectioned into hot, frozen and room-temperature, but the thermodynamics of the system were so lamentably designed that the hot got cold, while the frozen melted and oozed. Only the room-temperature remained pretty much as it was.

  The shortcomings of the Automat were further compounded by the change machine. Designed to convert bank notes into coin of the realm, it was almost always out of order. This forced the purchase sequence to operate as follows. First you went to a small aperture in the wall behind which lurked the brother on duty. He would give you exact change, please, and then you’d move to the wall of little doors and make your selection. As you dropped the coins into the slot, the man who’d just handed them to you would rush around behind the wall and pass you the aforementioned hot sausage roll or beefburger. Eventually the brothers grasped the Monty Python absurdity in this routine and admitted defeat. With technology vanquished, you simply asked for what you wanted and they gave it to you. After a few months of sad disuse, the wall of little doors was torn out, although the place still called itself the Automat.

  One of its main attractions was the hot chocolate. This was a boot-polish-coloured, machine brew made of ersatz cocoa, cheap non-dairy creamer and sand. To those of us who had just been walking for an hour or more, and were coming down from too much Watney’s Red Barrel and cheap Australian wine, it had a perverse appeal. It also came in semi-transparent plastic cups and these gave Alex Stowell one of his more spectacular creative ideas. He was going to build a Buckminster Fuller-type sphere out of the plastic Automat cups. In its finished form it would have flashing lights inside it and resemble the set for an episode of Dr Who. The first move was to start collecting the cups, and we were all enlisted in the effort. We gladly handed over our own cups, but when Alex started rooting through the garbage, we balked. The Indian brother on duty went one better. He came irately out from behind his aperture. ‘Excuse me, you there, what do you think you’re bloody doing?’

  Alex looked at him calmly. ‘I’m collecting cups.’

  ‘You can’t just come round here collecting bloody cups.’

  ‘I’m creating a sphere.’

  ‘What do you mean, a bloody sphere?’

  ‘A kinetic art structure.’

  The brother had no answer for this. Alex pushed home his point. ‘You didn’t have any use for them, did you?’

  The brother realised that Alex Stowell was not like other men and was obviously demented. ‘Just hurry up then, and don’t make a bloody mess.’

  Alex also subscribed to the theory of exemption, although he played the don’t-bother-me-I’m-stone-mad card more frequently and aggressively than I did. A typical example occurred one night when, motoring in South London, he urgently needed to relieve his bladder. We turned into a side-street and pulled up in front of a row of small terraced houses. Alex ducked into one of the minuscule front gardens, but no sooner had he commenced urinating than the front door opened and a male figure in a dressing gown started violently berating him. Alex held his ground even in the face of this primal and territorial wrath. ‘Fuck . . . I’m sorry, mate, I wouldn’t have pissed here if I’d known it was your front garden.’ This twisted logic deflated the irate householder’s fury. Only half-awake, he entered the surreality and came back with a gem of his own. ‘Well, I
suppose it’s all right if it’s an emergency, but don’t make a habit of it.’

  He waited until the Stowell fly was buttoned – Stowell was very particular about his button-fly Levis – and then went back inside, slamming the door.

  Where exemption was concerned, Alex was always on the money, but some of his other theories were a lot less sound. The sphere of plastic cups definitely lacked a fundamental grounding in basic mathematics. He was working on the simple assumption that, since the cups were narrower at the base than at the lip, imaginary extensions of their sides would connect at a single central point, like the radii of a circle. He had concluded that if he merely stapled the cups together, side by side, like facets in an insect’s compound eye, they would come together as a perfect sphere. He now made frequent trips to the Automat, each time hauling back a plastic bag of used cups to Hilary’s basement, washing them out and then painstakingly adding them to the growing structure. The Indian brothers had now totally accepted the project, and treated Alex like the Holy Fool, secretly pleased to have become patrons of the local arts.

  It didn’t take long to discover that major flaws existed in the plan. We had all imagined the sphere might be some five feet across, and even that was going to be impossible to get through the door of Hilary’s room. As it grew, though, the original estimates had to be revised. The finished thing was going to be double that size. Alex was unperturbed. Absorbed in the construction, he seemingly paid no attention to his creation’s subsequent exhibition, lodging or welfare. After some questioning by Hilary, he conceded that he could put it together in three sections and then take it outside for the final assembly. What he’d do then wasn’t specified, but he would take it out and that, for Hilary, was progress. Unfortunately, even before the first segment was complete, another and potentially fatal problem became depressingly evident. The sphere was torquing out of shape. As far as Alex could figure it, the rims of the cups were the problem. The thicker curved lip was throwing everything out of whack, and the sphere was evolving a shape like a deformed strawberry. Alex considered disassembling the entire thing, cutting the rims off the cups and starting again. Hilary and I shook our heads. Even if he went to all the time and effort of cutting off the rims, some new obstacle could easily arise. The project was going to have to be abandoned. Alex was depressed for a few days, but then his spirits started to snap back. They might not have revived so swiftly if he’d known that the failure of his sphere, and even the reasons for that failure, would serve as an analogue for many of the adventures that were to take place over the next four or five years.