"My brother Phil used to really like you."
"Yeah? Really. Well that's it. I have to go now."
"Come on", said Andy, "it's only been a few minutes".
"Well you got more time than I gave Robert Mapplethorpe", she said, and left.
Andy meets a lot of well-known people in his line of work. He said Roman Polanski was a wanker. Or was he talking about someone else? But you have to admire Polanski as a director: Le Locataire scared the hell out of me.
In one scene the protagonist sees the sillouette of a man looking out at him from a toilet across the courtyard, and so he runs around the block through the corridors to find out who it is who it is.
He finds the toilet. It is painted in yellow, and covered in Hieroglyphs, but there is no one there. He looks out back at his own apartment and sees the same sillouette of a man framed in his bedroom window.
I was a teenager, babysitting and doing up my parents friends' gardens. I went to the Kaplinskis. Raphie and Cathy Kaplinski once roasted a whole sheep at a party they organised for friends There was a disused railway station near their home and they had a large overgrown garden. To my 17 year old teenage self Cathy was beautiful and Raphie was loud and charismatic.But their daughter, Natasha seemed was very quiet. I have an image of her sitting on the back of their sofa in the lounge. She must have been about 14.
Then I worked for the Lambs and the Barnets and the Raikes and Bretts, and while I was doing this I was going nuts and Patti Smith's album Horses helped tip me over into a depression.
I got on well with Toby and Ben Raikes. When I looked after them I treated them as equals and we had long honest conversations together. I was 17, Toby was 12 and Ben was 10. Toby still remembers how I looked after them, and speaks of me with fondness. I'd like to see Toby again.
When people are falling apart they are radioactive. I remember my former girlfriend didn't want to be with me and put me together with another friend of hers in a strange chemical experiment. What would happen? Perhaps she thought that as were both without balance, we would stabilise each other.
He was a young man whose brain was gently cooking in strange particles and I could feel them coming from his chest and stomach in a haze. I had learned about chi and his chi was sticky and disgusting.
I read a book by Kurt Vonnegut's son around that time. There is a scene where someone comes to Vonnegut Jr.and says,
"Please give me some of that strange energy you have."
And Vonnegut Jr. says "Alright." and he zaps the petitioner, who then needs hospitalisation.Vonnegut was suffering from Schizophrenia.
Habie Schwarz told me of a dream she had had:
"I dreamed of you and when you opened your mouth I saw blackness; pure blackness poured out."
I didn't recognise what I was experienceing all those years ago as depression. But when a teenager dresses up in a black coat lined with red satin and runs through the streets all night. When he drives drunk across intersections and punches people and listens to Patti Smith's Horses, these are bad signs.
Perhaps the nadir was when, one afternoon, I accidentally stabbed myself in the leg with a sharpened pencil The lead snapped off and the wound festered and my knee grew so hot that I went to a hospital.
It was a tower block near the sea front. The woman at reception told me to go away, but after the X-Ray they rushed me into surgery. I wonder how many people are harmed by clueless reception staff in big hospitals.
I woke up with a fleshy hole in my leg that I could fit my finger into up to the first knuckle. Across the ward was an old man whose drip had come out of his arm. He was calling for a nurse who wouldn't come. His pyjamas were wet at the crotch. It was midnight and the room was big and cold and the lights were bright. The wind soughed against the corners of the tall building. To the right of the old man the window was a black rectangle of darkness.
There were crates and crates of home made beer on the balcony of 16A Inwood Crescent. I used to drink that sweet, partially fermented beer. I can still taste it right in my mouth. The house was like a box drum and my mother and father sleept below. They had to get up to work at 6am every morning and as I thumped round upstairs my mother would weep, because she couldn't get to sleep. I had a fist fight with my brothers, I smashed a radio into the floor, and kicked a hole into the door.
I started going out with Rudi Benjamin. We went to her house in Bosham. Her mom was Pixie Benjamin, a former member of the Congress of Democrats who was jailed after mom. Pixe was in the early stages of cancer.
Rudi was a very experienced 19 year old who took me on and rode me hard. Like a wild pony, she broke me in. I was upset about that at the time, I was a romantic, I loved someone else, someone far away. I let it happen. But I suppose it did gentle me down a bit and I learned a lot. Rudi was a wonderful person. There was a picture next to her bed of a naked supine girl with an ankle bracelet.
"Yes, she admitted, that was me when I was 15."
Still, before Rudi got started on me, we had an amber moment: one of those moments covered in sweet resinous illumination that harden and last.
We were in Bosham and the sun was setting over the harbour. I drank a glass of wine and relaxed with them around their wooden table and for the first time in two years I was myself again. The room was suddenly full of light.
I saw Patti Smith at the roundhouse in 1977. It was probably the best concert I ever went to. Patti Smith and her guitarist, Fred "Sonic" Smith were lost in their music and took all us along with them.
Andy blew up the picture of Smith and gave it to me for my Birthday. You can see it on Andy's blog. I was waiting until we got a new house and I got my study before I hung the great dame up, on a wall, but then yesterday Carmen said.
"Do you know Patti Smith dad?" and I said
"Of course."
"Well I like Easter, I've been listening to it."
I presented Carmen with Andy's wonderful picture of Patti Smith which she can put up in her room. She was excited about it, but I told her to be very careful when she listens to the songs on "Horses". because they are strong and rather dangerous.
Patti Smith: Land
Patti Smith: Redondo Beach
Patti Smith: Birdland
Comments
Post a Comment