The Author at Luncheon

Brighton Darken

Being the journal of doing without doing


It has been some time since I lived among you Beautiful People, breathed the same salt air of cocaine desuetude and beery regret masked in bonhomie. Ah! Sodom on Sea - how like Laocoon I wrestled with your charms, till serpent's scales and jealous coils did slip from wearied arms. So much effort, I found, expended in maintaining the mask. Out here, it seems, the upkeep of a public persona takes a fraction of the dedication it did within the hive of fashion.

Sidling off the corridor of the present, a door opens onto a wan crescent by Kemptown. I am wearing an evening suit, the tart spring damp nesting in pinpricks of wet light on the railings, the tear-streak'd doors. There is a sticker in the window, a circle of yellow with a 7 and an L. This, despite the singular character of the fellow inside, is the only key I have as to where to find the Original Punk Rocker. Ian Conway Richardson, I salute you.

I stand on the drain before his basement flat door and listen. Heavy silence in the room, air thick with reveries and Old Times. Despite the asphalt sky, the sighs of sea-fret settling in the streets, the door hangs open at my finger's touch. I go in.

Magazines, split boxes, a poster from the Adverts - with a scrawled dedication to my friend. The familiar dread of finding him dead flickers over my heart like a dark hand. The bed is empty.

I push past the old toys, a purple plastic VW goes caroming into the middle room from under my foot. I strike up again, the tune in my head soaring into a trill. "Saturday night at the Movies - who cares what pic-ture we see-eee". On with the Juju dance.

A joyous shout from the kitchen. It is PR - the Original Punk Rocker. His face lights up beneath a jagged smile, kin to the studded tongue, the rubious lips that cover his black t-shirt. This is a result. I touch my arm in the forgiving place that has so long been the object of these pilgrimages, and prepare to relax into the tense anticipation of a finely erudite hit.

And lo, he is cooking up. "Hello there old fruit!" He is chipmunk chipper, jiving at the boiling pot with a spoon in his hand. "Got the jukkas, muckers?"

I slip out the orange-capped syringes. Once again, I think of Jeremy Brett as Holmes, and his exquisite steel fixing kit. One fine day...
We remove to the bedroom, PR enthroned once more in bedclothes and pillows, a can in his hand. "Elegantly wasted" he tells me I am, as I sink into his armchair. The wide purple collar slides out over my lapel. I slip an inch further down as he unravels the problems of my past.
"Stop running. He's gone now. Not there, but here. Give it up".
Time passes. The room patched with images, Robert Johnson, Houdie Leadbetter, the Cuban Flag, a poem from Chile. I return and Ian tells me of the Bionic Dog.

A magazine, "Lapdog Monthly" or some such, actually bought this piece he made up, about bionic prostheses for one's injured mutt. I snorted, but, here, where is it? He rummages about. I watch him, half-present, the beam of my attention slipping between old slides of my childhood, rage and innocence and youthful revenge, oh bear with him the old fool it'll never turn up - this tremulous smile of forbearance slackens. The awkward feeling of humouring a man reduced is gone. I have it in my hands - the cheque, the publisher, the amount - a hundred pounds. And there is the letter - "In Re: "Bionic Dog... Dear Miss Winsome..."

"Miss Winsome..?" I splutter.

PR takes a wry moment, sips from his in-flight entertainment.

"I know. I know."

Such effortless style.

Anacoleuthon

Being a journal of a Village Idiot

Morning again, chucky-eggs and coffee and the Rolodex of memory flips idly over, an engine in neutral as so often one finds the mind.

Perhaps the chief benefit of quitting the city is the sense of having stepped off the carousel. There is a concept known as entrainment, the tendency of machines biological and otherwise to fall into harmony beside one another. First remarked by Christian Huygen in clocks, it might explain the curious consensus found in that most common of crowds, the knowers.

It is as if the conductor has disappeared from my life. Here, in the huddled stone streets beside the moor, I find fresh air instead of imperatives. It is bracing, this sense of being undirected. Bracing and uncertain, like the feeling one gets having climbed a mountain and suddenly disconnecting oneself from the rope, to look out from a giddy perspective on the indifferent splendour of the world. Free to cause my own consequences, if not to survive them.

It is, of course, the fear of freedom that seeks likeness, togetherness in this clockwork fashion. There is a kind of comfort in predictable mistakes. The rose tinted spectacles have frames of thorn. How well we learn to suffer the familiar, how easy to fit in when close to a rhythm. Yet it is a curse, to be swept through days in a school of guppies, all gasping for the pellets that arrive with an echoed 'plop'. All the beauty and wonder, the intricacy of the magical mundane, all the symbol-rich ritual you employ to gain a grip on the day - this is all automatic, as insubstantial and persistent as the mores you ingest from the glowering furniture that dominates the room. Who runs this show?

Cocteau remarked that life was like a speeding train - to smoke opium was to get off while the train was still racing. He omitted to mention that he was stepping onto a raging tiger. In choosing an exit, we must be careful to ask the show stopping question all analysts dread - "Into What?"

Nothing shocks like Nothing.