3 (THREE) ANECDOTES.
First, 3 anecdotes. Anecdotal and elucidatory evidence. Billy Hard Hat, so called because his head, trepanned, turbaned and bare of hair, approximately resembled a hard hat. The ridge of bone encircling the crown stood weirdly proud from the scalp, the brow bone protruding further than it should have, prime trepanning material. He walked down the road, right arm swinging violently, both marking time and delineating personal space. The left arm, numb now for a few weeks, remained virtually motionless. His GP, well up near the top of the list of GPs suspected by the medical watchdog authorities of being incompetent and/or of active malpractice, had told him that it probably wasn’t anything important. But he knew better, or thought he did. His whole arm numb, for no apparent reason. Not quite right. He was a wiry little bastard though, and disease wasn’t on his fictional agenda. Hard Hat outlives them all. He has other fish to fry.
For now he was on his way to the dentist, to have a worrying lump examined, a frighteningly hard and painful lump that had suddenly appeared in his lower left jawbone. But he was also a hypochondriac, usually a compendium of imaginary symptoms. Given his hypochondria, it’s also true to say that Billy was a malingerer. This was not so much that he wasn’t prepared to work if he needed to. Just that he saw no reason, in this particular day and age, to extend himself. His life was a parcelling of time between casino, kitchen, brothel and pub. Workplaces were no part of his scheme. The dignity of labour was not a slogan that resonated with him. Labour was simply an outmoded concept. The work ethic is fucked, he reckoned. Desperately in need of a leg up, or it would perish altogether. Academics in the soft left press had speculated for some time indeed that it had better be fucked, or we all will be. Hunter-gatherers, they implied, are by nature lazy, spending only 6 hours per week hunting, whereas proto farmers (which we all apparently became 10,000 years ago) have to spend all their time producing more and more food, the emphasis on quantity, for more and more people. People who otherwise would perish in fact survived because of the intensive farming producing more and more food…. and so on, ad nauseam. These articles had amounted to a slacker’s manifesto, a serious scientific apologia for putting your feet up. More people. More food. But we’ve out-evolved the work ethic, it’s a redundant concept. We’re hunter-gatherers by nature, not farmers. This idea appealed to Hard Hat, who liked a scrap as much as the next man. Appealed as compared to the over-heated and morbid competitiveness engendered in institutional culture, plus he was a completely lazy bastard. He may have conceded the need for a pale imitation of work, but only because he needed to keep himself in soft drugs, betting money and porn videos. There was no higher purpose. No further end to which he worked. He was just a shiftless idiot when all was said and done. A malevolent and otiose manikin, whose one unique identifier as an individual was an unusual method of self propulsion. His tempered motor efficiency was achieved by means of an abnormally enlarged hippocampus, given breathing space via the trepanned cranium. And now, by way of prevarication, and affording himself respite from the ordeal to come, he approached the World’s End…
“…Football’s not about what you deserve. I don’t care whether we deserved to win that match or not. The fact is that that cunt of a referee should never have disallowed that goal. He bottled it because he didn’t want to be responsible for the home team losing an extremely tense match in the very last minute of extra time. That’s all there is to it!”
In the pub, a sozzled suit was loudly pontificating on the result of some match that had been showing on the big screen. Pub life as Billy knew all too well was now just football punditry, over-amplified and tedious beer-disputation, modelled on TV forebears who were themselves utterly bereft of dignity, charisma, soul, insight or animus. He walked past the fat buffoon with his right arm scything the air provocatively, deliberately spilling his Kronenburg in the process. Splash! as the liquid coursed over his shirt front.
“Watch it you little tosser”.
“Tosser?”
“Yeah, little tosser.”
“Little tosser?”
Emboldened by the dissolute aspect of the emaciated figure before him, the suit prepared himself for fun.
“Yeah, bald, ugly, deformed little tosser”.
And to drive home his point, he extended a palm and flicked Hard Hat’s turban from his head, exposing the trepanned skull and tumescent hippocampus.
Seconds later, the pub was in uproar. The suit lay unconscious and bleeding, his nose now split down the middle. Hard Hat was buried under a mound of enraged pundits intent on offering their critiques, personally, without prejudice and with the aid of fists and boots. He had far more now to worry about than the dental pain which a few moments earlier had been his major pre-occupation. His turban unravelled, his forehead throbbing and yet he himself, without noticeable dignity, called on the gods of his forefathers to assist him in his hour of need. At a previous appointment, the dentist had informed him that the lump was no more than a cyst; the result of an infection itself probably occasioned by one of the many cavities that decorated his teeth. Root canal work would be required. At least it’s not cancer, he’d thought. As he lay there, open to the attentions of the football pundits, the thought that he didn’t have cancer was nevertheless still a comfort, although not now quite so warm a consolation that he could afford to bask in it. Action was called for, and action was what he now decided upon. His wiriness and agility had often allowed him to extricate himself from scrapes before and now, eel-like, even with his arm still benumbed, he wriggled free of his attackers and was off like a rabbit, his good arm swinging vigorously as before. The pub struggled to its feet, dusted itself down, shot its cuffs and the punditry resumed, empty and vapid as before…
“…As somebody wrote the other day, the one undeniable fact about this whole nauseating farce is that Eriksson and the FA well and truly deserve each other.”
“But again, is he really so despicable? What actually has he done? If we’re talking about his ‘duplicity’over ongoing meetings with future potential employers, it falls flat. There’s no loyalty on the other side either. Loyalty is now effectively a completely debased currency, used disingenuously by both sides merely to score cheap points. Consider the fate of all managers as soon as results go against them. Where’s the loyalty there? As a pro aware of his market value (ie: what people, including the FA, will pay for his services) surely he has every right to maximize his earnings. We flatter ourselves if we think he should be honoured just to breathe the same English air as us. It’s a skewed perspective. A category error.”
“Yes I see what you mean. I agree. The issue here is the FA and their laughable posturing, their ridiculous yapping about being “humiliated”. The story is really just about English prurience and panic in the face of anything vaguely connected to sex, dressed up as moral outrage when the real subject is actually just bad PR. And bad boardroom management. How in fact the FA were not able to manage their own news presentation. It’s pathetic. It’s all he said/she said/he said nonsense and the FA are revealed again as totally incompetent. They’re the real villains. Continually making the wrong decisions. And then when exposed they start bleating, as in this instance, about it “not being right” that they’re made to “look like fools”… well, if the cap fits!!”
Hard Hat scurried up Camden High St, past Somerfields, past Woolworths, past the record shops, past the scummy boot stores with their grotesque sculpture frontages, past the fast food outlets and past the trinket stalls on towards the tube. Up to the tri-pronged pyramid junction at the top (to your left the delights and primary grazing territory of Chalk Farm, Hampstead and Primrose Hill standing proud at the fat crown of Regent’s Park. Straight on, the gentrified yet still down at heal precincts of Kentish Town and Archway. Or to your right, the prow of Camden Road leading down into the inmates’ playgrounds of Holloway and on up to the tumourous lump of Finsbury Park) where all the White Cider (8% vol) merchants disported themselves outside the appropriately named World’s End pub. The eye is livid here. For Hard Hat, all directional vectors are hard wired into camp self-effacement. Fictionalisation is at a premium. And here the punditry tends more towards the subjective, the street drinkers offering razor sharp critiques of the citizenry that are intensely personalized. And about nothing so abstract as professional football. Rather, straightforward personal abuse, both of their fellow drinkers and of straight-ahead passers-by, is the order of the day at the World’s End. Sales pitches are offers of degraded goods and passers-by feel themselves tainted, shuddering, though physically unmolested. Fights, pathetic bouts of ineffectual fisticuffs, are wont to break out between these hardened street critics at the drop of a hint of a slight, at the slightest suspicion that liberties are being taken. Liberties are taken routinely. And imaginary slights are taken with a consistency that is difficult for the uninitiated to comprehend. Disputes are entered into with a frightening tenacity that doesn’t correspond to the reality of any known spiritual template…
As Billy passed this body of recalcitrant and uncongenial men and women, a particular recumbent body caught his eye. The grizzled tramp, greasy coat fastened with string, sockless feet in distressed sneakers, livid face cheery red despite or because of the chill in the air, was propped in the angle of door and pavement, singing the songs of the damned. White Lightning at hand, he was at sleep’s door, serenading himself with the songs of his youth. He’d aged rapidly, 20 years bent double, time warped beyond parody, beyond time. What caught Hard Hat’s gaze was a slip of paper that had just fallen from the fellow’s inebriated fingers. An unredeemed betting slip. Result! The greatest moment of his life so far. Snatching it up with his good hand, Hard Hat quickly moved on, making sure he caught the recumbent figure a glancing blow with his Nike, not that the dead to the world crooner noticed a thing. He was beyond pain. Beyond the static charges of electricity that were afflicting the residual pedestrian commuter traffic making its way to the tube station.
The old man’s horse had finally come in. Lighting strikes once only. Middle age went by…five minutes…By way of celebration, he’d made the mistake of letting everyone in on his good fortune. His audience had responded in the only way they knew how and had beaten him to a pulp, but somehow the betting slip had in the ruckus escaped detection. Now it appeared again just as Hard Hat chanced upon the scene. Such are the weird convergences of chance upon which fortunes are made and lost. Too late for him now, as Hard Hat relieved him of the slip. 500 notes. Hard Hat was a pig. A pig in shit. All his birthdays at once. High-class tarts coming out of his ears. Finest skunk. At least for the next week anyway.
“The natural order of things is that kids should loathe their parents, what their parents like and what their parents want them to like. And that parents shouldn’t defer to the tastes of their kids. Since the 60s there’s been a cataclysmic reversal in the cultural/generational polarities. Now kids are out-parenting the parents. Out earning cash, gaining economic kudos, largeing it, distancing themselves from childhood and the childish with indecent speed. And their parents cheer them on…keen to get the little fuckers out of the house so that they, the ever immaturing adultescent parents, can return as soon as decently possible to the Peter Pannish Eden from which they were ruthlessly expelled by parenthood. They embrace technology every bit as enthusiastically as the cuckoo young. Back catalogues are re-purchased in new formats. The terminal playground of middle youth is filling up with scrubbed clean check shirts from 20–50 years old. It’s all middle aged spread chat rooms on the internet – full of somethings. Record company back catalogues – catering to the 30/40somethings. Internet commerce – progressed by geek boys and girls so their generational forebears might more easily distribute the largesse of their oh so expendable middle incomes. Share the boom money. Share the good times. Parents puking and mewling, over-coked, dinner parties…or for the less salubrious…club nights. You thought AbFab was satire. Pure, sober realism. Pure documentary. The whole country’s gone meta-infantile. It’s a national disaster. The 60s never happened in this theology. Or they only happened in order to conceive the kaleidoscopic heterogeneity of the 70s. A time when no style/no taste really DID = GOOD!! English pop really did transcend for a few years the prevailing political cynicism. The dark middle age of youth is now upon The Culture.
There should be, but there isn’t, an ongoing antipathy and simmering unspoken resentment between the tastes, mores and outlooks of the two exclusive estates. Between the two there should be mistrust, bitterness, mutual suspicion and contempt for the others’ cultural frameworks. The estate of childhood and the estate of adulthood are mutually exclusive. So say all of us. A-fucking-men. The tendency of the various popular media to establish, with the collusion of the fashion lobby, adulthood as merely an extension of childhood is at the root of the modish assumption that there’s no qualitative difference between the two. They do this to open the wallets of child-adults. Nothing more nor less. Do we really want a society of on-message kids who’ll just ape their forebears? Evolutionary theory teaches that the succeeding generation must, if not literally, then figuratively, kill the preceding one. Without this friction, a friction which burns the next generation into shape, the human race will turn to mediocre, sub human sludge. How on earth are kids supposed to develop into autonomous adults when their models are groovy parents? The fate of Ned Flanders in The Simpsons is salutary. Done diddly done for, and all due to his beatnik folks……”
Yapp closed the magazine. He then closed his eyes. Opened them. He looked up from the glossy leaves, sticky and luminous. The hack who wrote this shit had earned his corn for the sweetly reasoned ersatz analysis, but still there was something missing, something absent. He sighed. Buffy, oh Buffy! Buffy Strangelove, the articulate amanuensis of his dreamworld, due to change his world. All worlds. Made up shit. Reality Corps leaflets left out in the rain. The world as he perceived it held its breath and nothing happened for a while. As soon as the betting slip had been redeemed, the world breathed again. Yapp sat in the public bar of the Elephant, Kronenburg in front of him, musing abstractedly. He already knew, the world at large already knew. There was a surfeit here of redundant information, glossy and superfluous. Tautologous information, confirming nothing. Billy Hard Hat appeared at the pub door, an excited smirk playing about his crooked mouth. He held in his nicotined fingers a wad of cash.
“It’s you birthday mate. All your birthdays at once.”
He was viewed without interest.
“Get ‘em in then”.
Hard Hat, with a hard on, made for the bar. Kensington could wait. He needed to get rat arsed first. Later opera tarts. Evening dress? A minimum requirement. High-class tarts; full-on lovescenes; quickies not on the agenda. 5 star luxury, Laurent Perrier or Roederer Crystal on tap, silk dressing gowns, curly toed slippers, room service not required for Room Service. He’d won loads at gambling, although not for a while. Gambler and rambler. Trepanned skull still and always a directional and divinatory tool. Correct numbers guessed with ease. He walked himself into ecstasies. In the circles into which he’d blagged an entrée contacts stay contacted. His credit was good. A caricature weird and exotic presence at the top Knightsbridge casinos, he was the recondite familiar of a number of society babes, a walking (or shuffling) talisman, a fantastical decorative ornament, a shifty homunculus, a comedic sidekick, an oddment, a ladies travelling companion, prescient in calling the shots at craps or blackjack. Working his way up, making his rep as Kitchen Porter in the kitchens of various top London hotels, his progress into high society was already archetypal. He was a blue-blood, a storyteller, a narrative fetishist who claimed descent from Tibetan dugpas, a fictional bloodline that seemed to imply impossible and previously under-researched genetic variations and (frankly) unbelievable versions of the truth. He claimed to the dizzy harem and anyone else who’d listen that the extrinsic world was merely his present playground. He claimed to have dreams in which he took wing and literally stole the earth. He offered fictional versions of himself in which he was identified as the original baseball-hatted vampire. He babbled of angels and familiars. He’d conjured them in his lunchtime. His religiosity knew no bounds and was, he averred, an elephantine accretion of his thrice-consecrated self, courtesy of The Big Guy. Buffy Strangelove’s name was never openly referred to by him, was only whispered in exotically appointed apartments. These big twitted babes, into whose ears he habitually decanted these outré fables, and into whose society he’d originally been precipitated after he’d blagged a stint as croupier – cover due to staff sickness – at one of the top casinos, and whose predisposition to credulity was unsurpassed, fell for his cock-and-bull stories hook line and sinker. In this harem of Arab servicers, magic and the related arts were the only things that made sense. So in this super febrile milieu, Hard Hat also made perfect sense. In this rarefied world, a twilight world of tarot throwers and magic practitioners, clandestine cash transactions and betting runners, fabulating homunculi were commonplace and unexceptional. Betting was always odds-on the afterlife, any afterlife. Even prosaic entrées to the mythical realm. Passwords were enabled. Billy was a bagman for the casinos, court jester to The Big Guy…Strangelove appeared as and when, unexpected and unannounced, and soon enough Billy began pimping for the whores. Perks were like crumbs from the top table, and he had to pay for them, big money, access the point of it all. Access and re-entry the divine metaphor re-fleshed, lent reality tonnage by Strangelove. Strange love. The point of it all. Shit kicking no-marks, onanists, wouldn’t have the access, he reasoned. He was access all areas. At a price.
His other sideline was supply. Information, rumour, Chinese whispers, documents…documents retrieved from celebrity trashcans, floated in word of mouth markets, information that was dynamite in the wrong hands. He nipped into and out of the sight lines of security cameras so fast that he registered only as a blur, only recorded as the faintest suggestion of trouble. He operated at 96 frames per second. Technology, the engine of accelerated culture, wasn’t fast enough to keep up with Hard Hat. He was away and gone before he could even register. And now he was armed with 500 notes. It was looking to be a good night. But the streets were fully cabbed-up, clogged with taxis, levitating magicians, double-parked dimwits, delivery cowboys, removal johnnies, bus lane outlaws and road ragers. Safer just to stay at home. And try getting a cab after 4 o’clock. To Knightsbridge? Are you kidding? In this traffic? Impossible. Cabbies, he discovered, are all in their stupid little green-hatted tea huts, swapping porno bluff stories, getting all testosterone over the tabloids and necking mugs of sweet tea. Bus drivers too have their exclusive little haunts, not that he ever caught the bus. Bus garages, in windy and desolate forgotten enclaves, in catatonic suburbs, play host to legions of sweaty, oafish malcontents. The dismal half-light swallows coronary cases whole, then spews them out in honking double-deckers, specifically to risk the lives of their passengers. Heart attack transportation for everyone concerned. I don’t take the bus, except up the hospital, because I still need that old time religion. But people don’t return my calls. My emails remain unanswered. I’ve got a hidden agenda. Actually it’s so hidden even I can’t remember what it is. I used to be a lecturer. Frank was on the lecture circuit, and would debate fiercely with other academics, look condescendingly over the top of his spectacles, take questions from the floor. His jokes were of the patronising variety, designed to discomfit his discoursing adversaries. High camp in academia.
My brother used to visit me, until I requested he stop. It’s not exactly pleasant being leered at by an idiot with a hidden agenda. My familiar angel hovers nearby, tutting and looking meaningfully at her watch. Then, in an overt show of impatience, whoosh and out the window she goes. The lights buzz, Buffy Strangelove invocations now seem, if anything, even less of a palliative. The doctors apparently can’t “do anything”. Looks like I’m a goner. Doomed. And no-one to carry on the family business. When we were cut open, cut apart, they expected at least one of us to die. Looks like the doctors will belatedly be proved correct. Why does it take 40 years to die? Where are my fucking legs? That bastard took them. Medical science. That old thing…
Brian Yapp (self interview/testimony to ward witness/therapist)…..I, uh, started exhibiting Frank about 10 years ago. I was offered good cash deals by shady east end boys in leather coats to show him off in church crypts, upstairs rooms of boozers, behind factory walls, on canal towpaths. Frank was by that time an embarrassment. He’d get threatening calls at his office from “fans” threatening to decapitate him. Otherworldly stalkers in theatrical capes threatening to give him a good seeing to. Messages left on his office answer-phone punctuated by maniacal bursts of laughter. But Frank Yapp is my amanuensis. He speaks in tongues. He’s all tongue. A limpid monkey boy, arse of a monkey, face of an academic. He’d attempted at one point to become a kind of pop svengali, inviting applicants on local radio to sing to him. 52 turned up but invading street tramps turned the thing into a farce. Word of mouth on the street had it that the hired hall in Shadwell was a kind of soup kitchen for wannabe “characters” with the added incentive of a sort of ur-career as local TV colour. TV crews, there to cover the event, filmed an admixture of filthy decrepits co-mingling on set with bouncy, cheeky faced wannabe pop stars, the whole orchestrated by a man (plus two beautiful assistants) in a wheelchair, without legs but with a huge livid arse. The cheek of the devil. He’s a visionary alright. The event, an organizational disaster, later turned up as a photo-montage piece, entered for the Turner by a young would be conceptual artist/bullshitter. Made the shortlist, but didn’t win the prize itself, which was won by the acclaimed conceptualist Damo Patchouli whose winning entry comprised an artfully arranged collection of betting slips and used lottery tickets. It was, as the art world had come to expect, a masterpiece of understated sarcasm, a grinning gauntlet of intent, thrown down before the skeptics and the sensible press.
The death threats came from disgruntled young wannabes who suspected that Frank had orchestrated the scummy invasion as a sort of sick stunt, a hyper-ironic comment on their own fecklessness and aimed primarily at their own discomfiture. Of course it had indeed been thus intended, as they suspected, as a satirical expose of their desperation for fame. Although the constabulary also cautioned at least two of the tramps, caught in the act of pissing through the letterbox of Frank’s Soho office. I had, of course, subsequently to take him on the road, a brashly erudite and gaudily percipient elephant man. This was before the TV offers came in. Copywriters are always a few years behind the pace, although they flatter themselves they’re ahead of it. Ad men are shingle, washed clean of ideas with each new tide. 3 anecdotes by way of illustration. Later…
Tags: Billy Hard Hat, Brian Yapp, buffy strangelove, david kettle, Elephant Gnosis, Frank Yapp
