The first book I read by Jack Kerouac was The Town and the City. It was his first novel in a long succession of works that followed and numerous books of poems. While reading this first published work by Kerouac I intimately related to his neighborhood, friends and school. Within a couple of days of dedicated reading I finished the book; my appetite was set on the hook of Kerouac writings.

Within a short period of time I had several Kerouac books on my desk waiting to be read. While researching his life on the internet, I came across a 1959 interview he consented to on The Steve Allen Show. Steve Allen, for those of you unfamiliar with that name, was the quintessential host; softly playing the piano while he interviewed his guest. I remember watching the show as a child, being impressed at the confidence Steve Allen gained from the interview.

I was nine years old in 1959. I didn’t see the interview until 2008, but the decorum, the sound of the piano and the unwinding of the guest were all familiar to me.

Steve Allen opened with a short explanation of his next guest, while touching out a jazzy tune; his fingers moved with precision over the keys as if he were wiping off water droplets. He casually looked down at the piano and then at the audience, reassuring both that all was in control. He mentioned that a social movement in the 1950’s called the ‘Beat Generation’ had a significant influence on young people.  Steve pads the wires of the piano a few more times and then introduces the author of On The Road, Jack Kerouac.

Stiffly onto the stage, from the chiaroscuro of images behind long flowing curtains walks Jack to a stool at the side of the piano.  He sits with a fighters smirk on his face; his Canadian inheritance of toughness. He wiggles into place as if he were reporting to the principle’s office. He is wearing a suit coat with a white shirt; the top buttons are undone. He appears to be recovering from a long whiskey night and chain smoking. His face is full. His hair brushed neatly back. Steve plays softly as Jack enters a sandbox where he is the only child. Steve asks him to read an excerpt from his book. Jack opens to the last page and begins. The music, the overhead lights, the audience, they all disappear … Jack Kerouac is, once again, On The Road.

Kerouac and his friends, Burroughs, Ginsburg and Cassidy, transcend the decades. Like water, the simplest of fluids, they are impervious to change. They are trains in motion. Tides before and after storms, consistent and strong, deep and light, open and in many ways closed.

One cannot avoid the obvious impact the 1959 interview possesses. It is a meal to be ingested, a theme for acceptance. For poets like myself, who write jazz poems, I draw myself to the table as words capture the pain of song, the loss of human time, the image of red dirt roads, children without shoes, horn players under magnolias, rambling night trains, city diners and neon lights pointing towards whispers.  I draw it from places I’ve been and the voices still there, walking in my head.

–––––

RIVER DEEP

He touched the music
with fingers of jazz.  Long notes
rise like summer sidewalk heat;
his forehead creases at the high sounds.

His head and shoulders lift heavily
like an approaching wave, crushing
onto a people shoreline, breaking boundaries
from his past.

Little children see the truth on his face.
His smile opens deep corners;
face colors drain into common streams,
merging to a neutral flesh.

The medicine of jazz removes the hurt
into river deep.

–––––

TRAVEL

Her fire burns me.
Doors open to the color of her
skin
onto a canvas of song
where iron and grease remains
unwashed
walking miles in paths
without food
not knowing the day
or year
while the stomach
cries louder than her voice
and the coat of misery
is a hat
and her arms
swim hard in fields
where boxcars
roll past everyone’s
midnight
to city’s with
whiskey and promise
where love has no
home
and people forget
dreams
when pockets
fail to hold
the preaching and blood
but the jazz
she shares
owns the steps I take;
I find my way
through.
her.

You can find more poetry by Roger Singer at The Outlaw Poetry Network

Berlin, Bromley –
Bertie Marshall

See all books by Bertie Marshall at

Amazon.co.uk | Amazon.com



THREE PIECE SUITE. A fading Polaroid of the twilight world, of a London suburb. It’s net curtains, privet hedges, Pebbledash, Fishmongers and draylon furniture.

A teenage boy invents a persona called ‘ BERLIN’ and created from a realm of ‘magic and glamour’ in his tiny bedroom in a Victorian Terrace house, in the South London suburb of Bromley, in 1975.

The text is Part auto fiction, memoir, historical / cultural document.

‘’Bromley High Street in the late 70’s was a hangover from the 50’s and 60’s, like an expanding village, with only two narrow streets. It had a Little Theatre; a Tudor fronted building. Marianne Faithfull had played there once in The Three Sisters. And Cliff Richard in Panto. He played ‘Buttons’ to Lulu’s Prince Charming and Clodah Rodgers, Good Queen.’’

Text as Jumble Sale, a jamboree of findings, ads for menthol cigarettes, swatches of Habitat wall paper, snap shots of sleeping pills, it will also feature photographs of ‘BERLIN ‘and BROMLEY and the THREE PIECE SUITE in 1975.

The first chapter of "Berlin, Bromley" is available for download:

Towel moldy. Called Devon. Collect. Sold the car. Sold the ounce of weed in the car. Sold the tapes concealing the ounce of weed in the car. Bought a pack of M & M’s, boarded a bus and left town under cover of poverty. Don’t worry about furniture or phone numbers. Don’t worry about numbers or me. Don’t worry about…

Worry…

Where do bad folks go when they die? Where do bad folks go when… Where do…you ever dream? About what’s behind door # 3. About not trying so hard? Imagine daddy’s holding you tight when Bambi’s mom dies? Do you cry? Pansy. Lost it yet?

…Losing it?…

Can’t lose what you never had.
Ain’t this empty strange?

Could’ve been…college lucid…corn-fed wholesome…A contender like Brando. I think you know where this is going, nowhere you ain’t been in my back pocket. Wanna cut my hair off.

Wanna cut my hair off?

Oh, why bother. You’ll probably be a millionaire if undercooked hot dogs don’t burst your heart first. I don’t blame you. I made you accept tortured illegible eyeliner scribblings on the bathroom wall. I’m still not giving up or sacrificing my extensive cocktail napkin phone number collection.

I never called anyone back.

I’m not scared of withering alone. I’m scared of what I never was haunting my peripheral vision. Baby powder splashed across my thighs, dusting for prints, cherubim scatter.

Somewhere outside Biloxi

The brittle papyrus tobacco stained man beside me asks what I do for a living.
I tell him the truth.
I’m alive.

Psychoboys is about shifting geographical boundaries and identities. The novel is an exploration of the nature of the individual and the belief in the power of fantasy as a means of survival. Following in the tradition of experimental writing, this text assembles such icons as Nico, Patti Smith, the Marquis de Sade, pulp novelist Jaqueline Susann and the film-maker Pasolini.

For more about Psychoboys, read Spike’s exclusive interview with Bertie Marshall

Bertie Marshall has subsequently written his punk memoir Berlin, Bromley

Warning: the following is not for the faint-hearted.

The Sugar Mummy

What’s a bird too big for its nest? Six letters.” Rez asks Ms Thing who looks utterly nonplussed, and answers “Emu”.

“No, that’s only three letters.” Rez counts on his fingers. “It could be Thrush,” he muses – Ms Thing looks down at her lap. She interjects with an inspired, “F-L-A-M-I-N-G-O.”

“No,” Rez grumbles. “Natasha digs a ditch, three letters then six?”

Rez is confused and irritable, doing the daily crossword in the Moscow Tribune, one of the many daily rituals he and Ms Thing do together. They had come to an arrangement since that first night three months ago. It was a simple one, sex and companionship in exchange for pocket money and a roof over his head – Ms Thing, the sugar mummy. Rez’s mad mother had been committed to a Psyberian insane asylum but it was only a rumour. The rumour blew in through an open window in a shallow whisper that froze his ears, the angelic trumpets of his imagination.

So they had set up a ‘relationship’ without my permission. They lived by that maxim that Madonna spoke of in one of her songs. ‘The pursuit of pleasure should not depend on the permission of another’. HUMPF! Surely it’s more a case of ‘You scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours.’

Rez and Ms Thing created their own realm. Ms Thing focused all her waking attention on him, so the place was pretty sordid. Funny smells like boot polish and rotting eggs emanated from under the bed. The bed where their strange and intimate couplings took place – I don’t know if I can bring myself to describe in detail their… sex life…

Although ‘it’ repulsed him the fuck would go something like this:

Ms Thing in the doggie position, her orange mane and face pushed into red velveteen pillows, her geriatric anus pointing to the ceiling, like a Pantomine Horse or Surrealist chair. Rez would close his beautiful violet eyes and enter the realm of his imagination, conjuring up all sorts of horrors and perversions to get a hard-on.

At nearly sixteen he was indeed a ‘Big Boy’, in truth his cock was approximately nine inches by six – extremely solid and powerful, it rose majestically – a Dinosaur waking. His eyes closed tight and his jeans wrapped around his ankles. He shuffled towards Ms Thing’s ancient arsehole whose lips, once puckered, now wilted like a dying flower (without wishing to be too cruel) it now looked something akin to the mouth of a headless pig, with all the accompanying odours.

It would be easy to pity Rez at this moment but, to be frank, this boy had a wayward side, he saw the act of fucking Ms Thing as investigative work, he used his magnificent tool – the tool of his trade – as an instrument of excavation. In entering Ms Thing, he was entering another world, dank, slushy, fathomless. He was in some way fucking death.

Ms Thing was nearer to death, she was on a slow suicide into death. The act of fucking her represented a dark destiny for Rez.

His cock penetrated Ms Thing’s cavern, filling it up, extinguishing all light, he never held her love handles, he let his tool find its own way in. It was a good job his tool was so large, if not it would have felt as though he was falling into teeming bilge.

Once inside, Ms Thing gave a gruff little whimper – then they were locked, her face eclipsed by the red velveteen pillows.

Her vision became microscopic, so that particles of dust took on the appearance of valleys of weird creatures. What I mean is, micro became macro and macro became micro… Her perception, due to Rez’s fucking, became god-like. He plugged her into hypereality, pushed her into a new space. Their coupling at once hideous and transgressive.

I think some light relief, some image of beauty should be interposed here. Perhaps moonlight flooding through stained glass windows, casting kaleidoscopic colours across their fucking. Rez kneeling behind Ms Thing, his perfectly smooth white body defined by shadows, every muscle highlighted by the moonlight. His flat nipples like glowing mandalas, body arched back, a Brancusi curve… and that cock – eel in a cave – blond crop haloed by candlelight, eyes closed so tight, lips bitten and swollen on the periphery of pleasure?

About twenty or so brutal rammings inside of Ms Thing and Rez would get the pre-climax shudders, the feeling of piercing membrane, his helmet the mushroom cloud of a nuclear explosion. He puffs up as Ms Thing thrashes about braying like a donkey.

The inside of Ms Thing’s baggy butt impregnated by Rez’s blinding, celestial white light, his jissom, the milky way, giving birth to new planets. Rez has, as they say, put some life back in the old thing. Ms Thing, the cosmic sex vampire feeding on his youthful fluids and energies, lies prostrate on the bed like rotting fruit.

Rez looked down at his wilting cock as it once more curled and shrunk back to sleep until the next time…

Psycho Eyes

If we could see inside of Ms Thing’s bowels, they would look like this… glittering phospherescent dome, a cave where man first found fire. A gurgling, swirling mess of infinite illuminations… squelchy inundations.

Ms Thing cleared her throat and farted an unmentionable substance onto the bed. “There are several things that draw us together, most terribly our silence.” She was regurgitating, practically word for word, what the writer Anais Nin had said to French loony Antonin Artaud. Rez looked at the beached whale aloft the bed, then gazed down at his deflowered proboscis and mumbled…

“I want a pet, a dog, cat, bird, pig.”

Ms Thing, in a good but weird mood, replied,

“Anything your startling heart desires, my dear, what sort of pet do you want?”

“Something queer, something odd,” he said pouting.

“I think I know just the place,” she said.

They took a cab.

About The Author

Bertie Marshall was born in Greenwich, London 1960. At fifteen he changed his name to “Berlin” and became part of a group of people known as The Bromley Contingent – the first group of Sex Pistols fans.

He is the author of seven plays and three chapbooks; Schwul, The Palace Of Faux Pas and Master Bitch. His many jobs have included; rent boy, drag queen, shoplifter and psychic. Having completed a second novel Author, Fag, Gutter, he is currently working on a third.

In his short life (1960-1988), Jean-Michel Basquiat came to personify the art scene of the 80s, with its merging of youth culture, money, hype, excess, and self-destruction. And then there was the work, which the public image tended to overshadow: paintings and drawings that conjured up marginal urban black culture and black history, as well as the artist’s own conflicted sense of identity.

He was, all at once it seemed, the ultimate party animal, a wannabe streetkid and grafittist hiding his black Brooklyn middle class roots, an advocate and interpreter of the marginal and dispossessed at the court of the mainstream, an angry black aspirant to the all-white art canon, a precocious talent, a creature of cynical marketing and a fraud, a proto-muIticulturalist, an American original.

As I came across the abundant contradictions, the public perceptions, mythifications and self-inventions that went into the shaping of Basquiat’s life and work, the more I wanted to understand how these had all attached to the same person. I set out to create my own picture of Basquiat.

I began research on a book on Basquiat in late 1991, which included interviews with dozens of people who knew him and worked with him. What was initially meant to be a biography turned, in part out of frustration with the strictures of biographical writing, into a work of fiction.

The excerpt is from midway into the book, around early 1985, when Basquiat has become close to his idol Andy Warhol, and media interest in him as a symbol and symptom of a booming art market is at an all-time high.

Robert Knafo

It’s going to be a cover story,” the writer said, addressing Andy and then Jean. Jean, Andy and the writer on assignment for the New York Times magazine, a young woman named Maureen McBain, were settling into their seats at the restaurant table, Jean looking pleased and proud.

“So tell me what it was like to be Samo,” she asked him.

“It was great,” he said, looking deeply at the writer. Attractive, he mused. He had other reasons to want to charm her though. It would not only be a cover story about the art scene, she had explained to him over the phone, but about him, really, in a kind of profile within the piece.

It was a cover story about him, he had explained to Andy when he’d invited him along to lunch. Jean smiled a little shyly. “Of course I was, like, starving, and I’m making a lot of money now, but it was still cool then. There was something real in it.” Not like now, was the implication that hung over the moment of silence. The writer barely crooked an eyebrow. She wouldn’t pursue it, not right now. Andy looked on, rather wistfully.

The writer and Jean were thick in a volley of mutually appraising looks. Andy harrumphed, and looked ostentatously at the menu. The writer remembered that she was with Andy Warhol, gave the aging art star a moment of vague if respectful attention, then trained her sights back on the young phenom in off the street, the auction record-breaker, the black hope, the emblem and symptom, the natural hook.

“Well, tell me more about your work at the time.”

“You know, it was like writing on the street; doing my tags, mostly on the D line, because that went from Brooklyn to the Village, and, well, just all over downtown. ” Jean brushed a dangling rasta apollo braid that had been falling into his line of sight away from his brow. He’s flirting, well that’s a good sign, she imagined.

“Like what? For example?” the writer said.

“Okay, huh: ‘SAMO, copyright, AS AN ALTERNATIVE TO JOE NORMAL AND THE BOURGOISIE FANTASY.’ Like that.” She wrote as he spoke.

“What else?” She asked. “One that you remember especially?”

Jean smiled. “JIMMY BEST ON HIS BACK TO THE SUCKER PUNCH OF CHILDHOOD FILES,” he said.

“And you lived on the street at that time?”

“Are you kidding? For years; on park benches, in Washington square; on steam grates, whatever.” The journalist scribbled into her notebook as Jean spoke. “I did whatever it took. I stole food from grocery stores. I hustled.”

“Really?” Andy asked.

“Yeah. Guys sucking me off for twenty bucks.”

“You’re getting the real dirt,” Andy said to the writer.

“I don’t think the Times is going to let me use that,” she said.

Jean shrugged as if to say, just telling it like it was.

“So why did you stop? Samo, I mean.”

“Because I had enough of being known as Samo. There were other things I was doing, that were just as interesting, if not more interesting.”

“I met Jean when he was doing T-shirts and postcards,” Andy contributed.

“That was like three years ago,” Jean said, in confirmation. “But I was painting then, too.” He looked at Andy as if to press home the point. “We’re doing a studio visit after lunch,” he said with a sly purse of the lips, to his infinitely more famous friend. The writer from the Times looked up from her notebook at Andy with the trace of an apologetic smile, then went back to writing in her jagged, diligent shorthand.

Jean and Maureen stood before a painting of a man in a wheelchair. She had asked him where his ideas came from, and he’d told her the story, spying the man on the street as he yelled at a boy to be put in the sun, his Cajun accent, giving him money, the old man’s crazy gratitude. She inspected the image before her and wrote in her notebook: chair like a throne/ old man almost a god/head primitive mask/frightening defiant. Now she said: “Help me to understand–how do you actually make a painting? The process.”

Music played in the background, a gong, a flute, a line of synthetic keening, pausing, proceeding, an enigmatic composition, which, if not attentively listened to, could easily fade in the background, receding to some subliminal aurality. “I paint to music,” he said to her, and raised his eyes into the air, as if to catch the passage that hung now betwen them, a loosely strung necklace of meditative, mysterious chords. “I catch…a rhythm and I let it go in there,” he gestured toward the picture of the old man. The writer took notes; leveled another look at an early work that he had brought out for her, a painting bearing several furiously scribbled skull-headed figures, with a background teeming with local tempests of brushstrokes and wordings. “Your work has changed so much,” she said, with a glance at him that looked for comment or affirmation.

“I think I’m more economical now,” he said, after his own gaze at the familiar skull heads. “Every line means something. And there are things I know now, things that have become important to me. I’m interested in painting the black person. He’s the protagonist in most of my paintings.”

“Tell me about that.”

“I realized I never saw any paintings with black people in them.”

Maureen noticed the book lying on the table, titled “Flash of the Spirit.”

“You’re reading that?” she said.

“Yeah,” Jean said. “How the African beliefs came to America, the Carribean. It’s a great book.”

“Your work shows a lot of African sources. The masks,” she said.

“Recently, yeah. Not early on,” Jean said. “Early on I was more interested in Picasso, Twombly, DuBuffet.”

“And what about your contemporaries, Schnabel, Haring, Salle, Clemente, Fischl,” she asked. “Who are the ones you admire or like most?”

“Oh please,” he said, with a derisive smirk. “I’ll take a little kid’s work over any of that any day.”

Over the debris of breakfast the phone rang. It was Andy, and he was furious at Jurgen. Jean had never heard Andy raise his voice so loud.

Jurgen’s show of Andy’s, Jean’s and Francesco’s collaborations had opened in Switzerland. “He said they were curiosities!” Andy yelled into the phone. “You remember? No one would be interested. An experiment for all concerned?”

“Yes, so what happened?”

“He’s selling those paintings for forty and sixty thousand dollars apiece!”

Jean’s jaw dropped. “He paid me thirty for everything!” Jean finally bawled out. “Aw, man, he’s gonna be giving some of that fuckin money back!”

“I should ask him for more.”

“Fuckin right you should! He’s got fifteen of our paintings!”

“He must be giving Francesco more than us. I can’t see Francesco doing it for so little.”

“He told me he said he was getting the same.”

“Yeah, but I mean, what else would he say? Those Europeans stick together.”

“Let’s talk to Tony about showing with him,” Jean said.

“Okay,” Andy said. They were referring to their duo collaborations, the ones without Francesco. “I mean, we can talk to him. Although you know what he did, right?”

“What?” Jean asked.

“Well, uh, he’s the guy who slashed Guernica in the early Seventies. As a kind of performance piece, I guess.”

“He’s an art dealer,” Jean said, impatiently confused.

“He used to be a conceptual artist,” Andy said. “So that was his work, slashing Guernica with a knife.”

Andy was in the office, musing about getting together with Jean. This is it, the great new chapter in your career you and everybody else has been wondering about. The new reason to care about his art, the reason to feel as if he could escape the suspicion and fear of being played out. He was delighted with the work they did together, he couldn’t wait to pick up a brush, to make more. He called Jean at the Ritz-Carlton, in the early afternoon, when he could reasonably count on finding him emerging from bed. He suggested a painting session, which was fine with Jean but not today; today he was taking his mother out to lunch. It was her birthday, and Jean was having a lunch for her, at Mr. Chow. And shit, it was getting late, he was gonna be late. But if Andy wanted to come, he was welcome, and his mom would get a big kick out of meeting the famous man.

At the lunch Jean had slouched back into his chair, withdrawn to observer status, watching laconically the small tableau at the table, the scene of his quiet, sporadically distant mother in the tacit stewardship of her nurse-companion, and Jean’s two younger sisters, hovering quietly over sorbets. Jean said he was going outside, for a smoke.

“She seems to be enjoying herself,” Andy said to Jean in a low voice. He caught the regret in Jean’s eyes.

“She’s spent half of her life going in and out of mental hospitals,” Jean said to Andy, who’d followed him out.

“She looks like a nice, regular mom, though,” Andy said.

Jean humphed in disdain. “She wasn’t a regular mom. She was somebody that had to be taken care of.”

“What is wrong with her?”

“He drove her crazy,” Jean mumbled.

“Who drove her crazy?” Andy said.

“Nothin’,” Jean said. “Just, one day, she wasn’t home anymore.”

Andy looked at Jean. “Well,” he said. “I know that isn’t the way she would have wanted it.”

“Yeah…” He glanced down 57th street, looking for his father to appear.

“You know, mothers are just built a certain way.”

“Yeah…” He dragged bluntly on the last of his cigarette, then tossed it away.

Andy looked at him, silently. This kid…Just once I want to hear you say, you know Andy, that’s so true…

“Where the fuck is he,” Jean said aloud, to himself.

“We really should go back in. It’s not polite,” Andy said.

]]> http://www.spikemagazine.com/0397basq.php/feed 0 http://www.spikemagazine.com/1096x20.php http://www.spikemagazine.com/1096x20.php#comments Fri, 01 Nov 1996 17:14:28 +0000 Jason Weaver http://spikemagazine.com/wordpress/?p=520 SPIKE presents an exclusive extract from this hilarious cigarette obsessed debut novel

DAY 1

DR WILLIAM BARCLAY, born 7 March 1936, died 3 March 1994, age 57. Mysterium Magnum. The principle of all generation is separation, he used to say.

Distract your mind. Take up a new hobby. Occupy your hands.

He said that the Mosaic Virus could sweep through a field of sweet tobacco leaves or potatoes or tomatoes in a single day, causing devastation to entire agricultural eco-systems.

Try not to think about it. Spend time in public places. Keep very very busy all day long.

{365 x 20 x 10} + { 2 x 20} ( leap years). Equals exactly 73,040. Plus 17 irregulars. Not give or take, not approximately, but exactly seventy-three thousand and fifty-seven. All the same, it’s difficult to prove.

Walter once told me that the old steam-trains in the old days, all steamed up and stretching homewards, used to say Cigarettes tch tch, Cigarettes tch tch. The sound of a train then, an old train on an old track, steaming homewards, smoking.

I knew about this, the concentration. That concentration would be part of the problem. That a restless, dissatisfied mind would rip from one dissatisfaction to the next, like a child stuck in a hawthorn tree in a high wind, on a high hill, in winter. All night.

Lucy Hinton, big-bellied and surrounded by children. The back of her head turns into a chimney, the blackened smoke-stack of a steam train, steaming smoke-signals saying, at the very least, good-bye.

Steer clear of friends who smoke. Repress your desire.

Feeding the dog would distract the mind. Scientists experiment with animals to save people like me from unnecessary discomfort.

Julian Carr, Dr Julian Carr, went to work in his sister’s bra.

Breathe deeply. Indulge yourself in every other way.

Always boxes of Carmen No 6, and never soft-packs, although at one time soft-packs were very fashionable, especially in Paris, where I once was.

I hate and despise more things than I can name. My lungs ache. Avoid tense situations. Use public transport.

In the flat where we used to live above Lilly’s Pasty Shop, Theo would hop once and jump once and Lilly would bring up a Jumbo Pasty No Chips. He had a range of jigs for different orders, and I swear the cat could recognise the step which meant cod.

I wonder if Dr Julian Carr would have made my parents happy if he’d been their only child instead of me. The Hamburg episode notwithstanding.

Carmen No. 6 in endless white boxes, on the beds and tables and chairs, in all the pockets of my life. The logo of black castanets, in silhouette, looks like a split scallop shell. Nowadays, the sign of the double castanet is most often seen beside the air-intake of Formula 3 racing-cars, of discreetly positioned in posters for the English National Opera.

He once said you can change the world and I said no you can’t.

There is also hypnosis, aversion therapy, psychoanalysis, acupuncture, electric shock treatment, and possible conversion to the Seventh Day Adventist Church, who maintain that cigarettes are an invention of hell itself.

My name is Gregory Simpson. I am thirty years old. I am trying to keep my hands occupied.

DAY 2

She introduced me to the Olympians of smoke. She taught me its mythology through black and white cinema, showed me its gods and rituals and villains. I marvelled at Greta Garbo and Sam Spade and the way the smoke of cigarettes made sophisticate the silver of the silver screen.

She took me to see the Gitanes series of pre-war film-noirs at the Arts Cinema, where a sign in the toilet said No Smoking Rauchen verboten Ne Pas Fumer Non Fumare while the screen filled with unrepentant images of the twentieth century’s most proficient smokers. Their lives and our lives were enhanced by tobacco, confirming beyond doubt that in times of stress like love and European war the only fully human action was always a smoke. Smoking was as decent a response to hysteria as it was to boredom. It was as reassuring in victory as it was in defeat. And most comforting of all, it was one hundred percent safe. I saw nobody die of lung cancer, not on screen. Nobody even coughed or had a sore throat, except perhaps Marlene Dietrich.

Lucy told me that all this could be mine. That smoking and not smoking was the difference between entry and no entry into a cinematic world where post-coital cigarettes were shared in large beds in all the premier hotels of the world. By people like us. She held out cigarettes to me like an apple. It was love and desire. It was knowledge and everything.

In a way, the films were right. If I smoked a cigarette and made love to Lucy then I wouldn’t drop down dead before the night was over. But dreamers find it hard to reduce the world to its todays and calendar tomorrows, and I was also worried about collapsing in the middle of an awards ceremony many years in the future.

For all I knew Lucy could be toying with me. She might be using me in an early experiment in her masterplan to seduce Julian. She may have slept with him already. She might still be sleeping with him. Perhaps when she went next door they never talked at all, just fell into each other’s arms and made mad passionate love and the noises which came through the wall only sounded like conversation. The time she spent with me could be a trick like her pregnancy. And if I committed myself to her by a simple act of breathing that wasn’t a breathing of air, then how could I be sure she wouldn’t turn on me and laugh, perhaps while the smoke was still settling in my lungs?

The time she’d acted pregnant: it was late and I was drunk but she’d fooled me. She’d made me feel gullible and inexperienced and stupid. I didn’t want the same thing to happen again but I didn’t want to smoke a cigarette either. I asked her if she knew what she was doing to her health.

‘ I know, I know. I’ll be dead at thirty and so will my babies. I kill passers-by in the street and total strangers in restaurants. I am personally responsible for the murder of children in public parks. It could hardly be worse, could it?’

DAY 10

On 1 March 1962, an Ash Wednesday, the Royal College of Physicians published their first ever report on smoking and health. The initial print-run of ten thousand copies sold out, as did the twenty thousand sent to America for re-distribution by the United States Cancer Society, The report received wide-spread publicity and in 1963 cigarette sales in the UK fell by 14.5%.

The college pointed out that in 1960 10,000 people died from lung cancer in comparison to 250 in 1920. In an extensive study of British ex-servicemen a 20-a-day smoker was found to have a 14 times greater risk of dying from lung cancer than a non-smoker. As many as 3 out of 10 smokers would die from a smoking-related illness.

Industry spokesmen were quick to respond. No casual connection had yet been demonstrated between smoking and cancer, so the results given in the report were merely inferences from statistics. They had no more authority than mathematical expectation at a roulette wheel. The increase in lung cancer could be explained by improvements in diagnostic method. And a study of ex-servicemen was inherently unreliable because it wasn’t random: ex-servicemen might have a higher rate of lung cancer for entirely different reasons. It was all a question of presentation: even according to the RCP, 70% of smokers remained in robust good health. To suggest otherwise was to deny British tax-payers their citizen’s right to enjoy a pleasant and perfectly legal pastime.

The RCP couldn’t explain why certain smokers were more susceptible to disease than others. It was entirely possible, even after the findings of the Royal College, that a smoker could go through three packs a day for fifty years without losing a single day of smoking-related ill health. Or he could die horribly of lung cancer before he was forty.

What a gamble that was.

DAY 15

Of course I could if I wanted to. But it was important not to be simplistic about such things. It wasn’t a straight-forward choice, and there were many and complicated issues involved. There were convincing arguments both for stopping (think of your health), and for carrying on (what to do with your hands).

Stop: I knew all the facts and figures. I knew the statistics and the death-count.

Smoke: I liked it. And besides, statistics never told the whole story.

Stop: My aching lungs and the way I sometimes had to hold my heart in my hand. Think of the worry.

Smoke: Think of the worry, and the crematorium gardens full of roses dedicated to non-smoking dead people. Keep in mind, at all times, the distinction between life and survival.

Stop: It would upset Julian, but Julian aside, Theo wasn’t a statistic and he was dying. Remember Uncle Gregory and Walter’s wife and John Wayne. Remember the preference for funeral number 2 in the middle of next century, and not funeral number 1, sometime soon. Think of all those liberated minutes to spend doing something else. And. But.

Smoke: Up at the unit, week after week, they declared me fiddle-fit, and causality was as yet to be scientifically demonstrated. It could be one particular brand which was responsible for the death-count, or a not unusual combination of cigarettes with something else. No-one knew. The cancerous cigarette might be an independent event, so that each smoke was like a separate bet, having nothing to do with the last. The dangerous smoke might be number three on the second Tuesday of each month, or the one you didn’t smoke because you were too drunk to pull it from the packet, or the one you saved especially for your best friend at the end of a long day. And anyway, I liked the money Buchanan’s paid me. And the Chinese might drop a bomb. And it had to be better than Roman discontent and twenty dormice a day.

Stop: Okay then. Forget everything else. It would really upset Julian if I gave up.

Smoke: Everything else. The importance of showing my solidarity with the Estates and with Theo. The taste of Lucy Hinton in every fresh cigarette, and like Paracelsus said, it’s the dosage which counts. The way could light a match and openly hold the danger in my hand in otherwise banal and wholly tamed places. The fear of fattening up. Bogart, and the little bit of Bogart that rubs off. The chemical satisfaction and the seven seconds. The less certain satisfaction of openly defying mortality. And beyond that, a deeper fear that without cigarettes I might be left with no desires at all.

Stop: Imagine Julian’s reaction, and how wrong one man could be.

I lit another cigarette. Surely there must be other ways I could fuck Julian up.

Q1. Describe the taste of the moon.

It tastes like Creation I wrote,
it has the flavour of starlight.

Q2. What colour is Love?

Love is the colour of the water a man
lost in the desert finds, I wrote.

Q3. Why do snowflakes melt?

I wrote, they melt because they fall
onto the warm tongue of God.

There were other questions.
They were as simple.

I described the grief of Adam when he was expelled from Eden.
I wrote down the exact weight of an elephant’s dream.

Yet today, many years later,
For my living I sweep the streets
or clean out the toilets of the fat hotels.

Why? Because I constantly failed my exams.
Why? Well, let me set a test.
Q1. How large is a child’s imagination?
Q2. How shallow is the soul of the Minister for Exams?

[Reproduced with permission]

[Reproduced with permission]

I saw the best minds of our generation silent before a
fluorescent light that screamed like the rainbow sky of the
drowned man’s last memory

who tried to fight it with pilgrimages at night to food and other
scarce suburban treasures speaking of things they bought and
things to buy and things to covet with only enough money for
another cup of coffee

who broke out of shells slowly, blinking in the light, murmuring
a reinvention of society that never sank into the minds of
the millions and millions and millions that never heard

who sat in classrooms scratching at the surface of the texts
until the minute hand moved and a hole in the stomach was
felt like a loss of wisdom which the two p.m. job confirmed

who one day stopped at McDonalds and ordered a bag of wisdom to
go and it kept them full at least for a few hours but left a
starchy taste that smacked of car exhaust and dirty
magazines and crowded video stores on a Saturday night

who jetted around in cars inherited or half-paid for but
thundered about nonetheless floating just a few feet from
the ground by faith

who played cds over and over particularly the ones that
sounded like their lives and all of a sudden it was their
story being told and that was comforting enough to go back
to sleep

who cried at movies and imagined them to be made by men sitting
around and intentionally plotting to make the women cry
openly and the men do it in secret and not feeling the least
bit guilty for monopolising emotion

who made food their religion and religion their bedtime snack
after the fairytales got old and rusty and not politically
correct

who sat in on profound midnight conversations and took out an
empty notebook later on at home to record it all and drew a
most horrible blank

who sat up afraid of nostalgia and the future all at once and
felt paralysis set in

who spent nights clicking artistic black-and-white photos titled
“The Human and The Squash” and came away feeling that is was
the greatest truth they’d encountered in twenty years

who admired Love and other words capitalised by Dickinson in
museums for free

who found the hippie hallucinations only after nights of insomnia
and decided it had been a very productive week

who watched hemlines fly up and down and out and around and grew
so tired they woke up and didn’t change or even brush their
teeth

who had the same dreams as every generation before them with
water and flight and drowning and nakedness and facelessness
and all the characters telling the truth

who spent mornings representing each dream symbol in every
established school of thought and came up with seventy-four
different meanings

who reached for the sun and felt it burn them hot and crisp so
that they glowed a strange shade of orange and found it
empowering to fly to the most crowded stretch of east coast
beach and yell “I am not a target market for sunscreen”

who set out burning and glowing into the night slapping heels on
the pavement and pumping their arms and running running
running until they reached the invisible psychological
boundaries of their own brains or collapsed among the
foliage of the concrete jungles lying quiet in their rags
as the world spun on.

My penis made me locally famous. I didn’t find out about it until I got to University. Before then my experience of women was nonexistent. I’d been at a boys’ school and anyway I was pretty spotty. I couldn’t believe when, all of a sudden, at the Fresher’s Ball, I was snogging. I was even more amazed when we were in her room. We were both wasted. I didn’t have a clue how to behave, I was terrified, but she knew what to do and in no time we were naked, in bed. She was kissing my mouth. My neck. My chest, my stomach, my….! She stopped.

My God! she said, incredulous. Your cock tastes just like CHOCOLATE!

Melanie (her name) wasn’t a shy girl. She must have told her friend Suzy. I realised this the next day when a very attractive girl, with hip clothes and trainers, approached me in the Union Bar and just started chatting. This had NEVER happened to me before. She asked me if I wanted to hear a new C.D. she’d bought and then we were in her room. Halfway through the second track we were naked. She’d hardly even kissed me before her face disappeared under the duvet.

It does! she exclaimed suddenly. It bloody well does!!

Two weeks into University I was still a virgin. I had, however, received twenty three blowjobs from twelve different girls and heard words such as ‘incredible’, ‘amazing’, ‘Bournville’, ‘Swiss’ and ‘Belgian’ exclaimed by mops of hair beneath my bedclothes. I had also been requested to immerse myself in a glass of milk and move vigorously to see if any of the flavour rubbed off. It didn’t.

I went to the Doctor. She didn’t believe me. Nor did she try it out, which I thought shockingly unscientific. But she did see the state I was in and give me a salve.

Okay, so I’ll admit it. For the first year it was great. I could have loads of women, any time I wanted. I got cunning and made them sleep with me first. I got fussy. All the guys on campus were jealous. People who didn’t know me looked wide eyed to see one or more stunning girls on the arm of a spotty, pale youth, with lank dark hair and glasses. What’s he got?, they seemed to ask themselves.

But when the second year came I got really tired of it. There was a whole new year of girls who wanted to try me out. I felt like an object. A specimen. And there was something missing from my life, a yearning. I tried to have conversations with girls, in the coffee bar say, but all the time their eyes would be flicking to my crotch. Their tongues would run over their lips, their eyes would glaze over. I would make a hasty excuse and leave. It was about this time I began to get really upset about it. Everyone had started calling me Hob Nob.

I say everyone, it’s not quite true. Some people called me Willy Wonka.

Hey, it is NOT funny! I was a person! I was more than a sexual organ that just happened to be flavoured like confectionery. Everyone stared at me. All the girls laughed when they saw me. I overheard them talking about me. About it! I think I had a bit of a breakdown, I couldn’t take it. All through my third year I stayed in. I saw no one. The only person I even said Hi to was Sally Hughes, a pretty girl with breasts so huge she seemed to look faintly embarrassed all the time. I had overheard a guy bragging to his friend one day, in the sports hall, about what he’d done to them the night before.

Did you shag her? the friend asked.

No, the guy said, but I didn’t care. They were the best breasts I ever came across. Sally Hughes used to smile at me softly whenever we passed each other in the square.

I had given up on my little University world. Everyone knew everything. Because I didn’t have anything to do I studied all the time. I got a First and went to New York, Columbia, for a Masters. I took a deep breath of fresh air. Fantastic! It was great! Nobody knew me! If I hadn’t been for the lousy beer it would have been perfect. I met Laurie a few months later and we started to go out. I’d seen her around in the cafeteria on campus, but it was only when I heard her give a paper on radical feminism that I really noticed her. She wrote about the politics of oral sex. She stood at the lectern in black jeans, white tee shirt, her hair tied back severely, her little fists clenching to emphasise a point.

Oral sex, she concluded, is degrading. The worshipping of the phallus only serves to enforce the enslavement of women. No woman should ever do it, and I certainly won’t do it ever again. Ever. Thankyou.

She stepped down from the platform to rapturous applause from a room mainly filled by women. I was enraptured, entranced. I had to get to know her.

Well, eventually we got it together. Having no chocolate penis to rely on, I had to be myself and for a long time she wasn’t interested. But then it all happened. Nights discussing politics, poetry, walks in the park, old Cocteau movies. Love, smooth and slow, calm as an angel. About a year after we met, she was lying in my bed, naked, her black hair blooming like an impossible rose against my sheets, her flawless skin almost as white as they were. I was so happy. I started to kiss her, to cover her with kisses. I wanted to adore her, to make her feel better than anything; sighs escaped her like wind from a wood across a wheat field…

No! she said.

She took me by the scruff of the neck. Not there!

I stopped.

Why not? I asked.
I knew it, she said firmly. I won’t do it to you. I won’t. Not…

I know, I assured her. I want to do it to you. I don’t want you to do it to me ever.

You will , she said, you will! I knew this would happen…

I didn’t listen to her. I knew. There was no way I’d let her even if she wanted to. Never. I covered the insides of her thighs with my face and rested my hands on the tops of her legs. I pushed them apart slightly. She resisted a little but then she opened her legs wider and I…

I stopped. I lifted my head up.

Guinness, I said, Guinness!!

Author’s Note:
The author would like to point out that any similarity between the character created in this story, and himself, is purely factual. His email address is listed.