Mortification: Writers’ Stories of Their Public Shame (19 page)

Tickets for the event sold well; so well, in fact, that it was moved from the upstairs gallery to the 250-seat theatre. On the night, the audience filled the lobby bar and cafe, their chatter rising in an anticipatory buzz. A smell of damp cardboard, roll-ups and spilt beer announced the presence of the music press. The talk was scheduled to start at 8 p.m. At 7.45 the Talks Co-ordinator remained calm and cheerful, despite the absence of Mark E. Smith. A veteran of many ICA events, where feuding semioticians had come to blows, for instance, or distinguished speakers on Middle Eastern affairs had arrived unable to speak a word of English, there was little, I thought, that could flap her self-possession. But by 7.55 she was looking slightly clammy.

The metallic clatter of a stage door announced Mark’s arrival. He was wearing a grey raincoat and looked sort of blurred around the edges. Unsmiling at our fools’ masks of sheer relief, his first request – aimed directly at the undisputedly well-bred Talks Co-ordinator – was for a bucket. To her undying credit, she treated this as the harmless whim of an eccentric genius. A bucket was found. After she had handed it to him, he put it on the floor in front of us and pissed into it, noisily.

By now, the murmur of the audience – there were maybe two women there, the rest were men – was becoming restless. Backstage, too, was getting tense. At ease in the shabby little dressing room, however, Mark lit a cigarette. His temper was hard to gauge: we were both in this together, it seemed, with parity, as comrades – but at the same time I felt that I was little more than a fledgling in his palm. I would have done well to remember the first quotation of his I had ever written down; ‘I like to keep The Fall at arm’s length …’ it began. Then there was Mark’s widely publicized relationship with intoxicants and stimulants. Was he on anything? Worse, was he coming down off something? If I’d been Nick Kent, I’d have known. As it was I fiddled with my watch while Mark drank lagers and offered to massage my shoulders. The best part of an hour passed, with increasingly urgent visits from the Talks Co-ordinator. Were we ready yet? ‘Right then,’ Mark announced, at a little after 9 p.m., and for the first and last time I followed Mark E. Smith out on to a stage.

Some generous applause, and no small amount of heckling greeted our arrival. We had kept the audience waiting – beer-less, unable to smoke – for the best part of an hour and a quarter. Then all was silence.

There is something about the sheer speed with which a public event can suddenly go wrong. There are a few seconds of cold, broiling panic in the pit of your stomach, as you realize that you have just walked – or bounced, even, with the suave smile of the self-assured – into a room that has no floor. I had experienced other dead drops into public humiliation – that occasion on live trans-Danubian radio, for instance, when the presenter had announced, in perky, Americanized English, ‘And tonight in the studio we’re honoured to welcome Brett Easton Ellis’ – but never before in front of an audience.

The hush had been anticipatory, as though a mob were waiting for the axe to fall. Yet still, incredibly, I maintained a belief that the interview could succeed. It was only when I began to speak – an introductory address I had prepared about Jim Morrison’s public interview at the ICA, back in the late sixties – that I suddenly realized how terminally fogeyish, how toxically Middle English, I seemed in that situation. The effect was as though A.N. Wilson had taken to the stage at the 100 Club. The audience began to snigger, first in isolated guffaws and then with abandon. I would see from the photograph in the following day’s
Independent
newspaper, that their hilarity was first prompted by the manner in which Mark was sitting beside me, swigging from a bottle of lager, but with his little finger crooked – a savage caricature of gentility: the class warrior unleashed on the twerpish agent of gentrification.

I remembered too late that these kinds of events – ‘In Conversations’, bookshop appearances and so forth – are wholly bourgeois in their conception: they presuppose a complicity between the audience, subject and interviewer, in which a kind of broadsheet notion of edification is the predominant tone. And I was face to face with the man who had written ‘Prole Art Threat’ in 1979 and thrown Courtney Love off a tour bus. A man who preferred to get arrested by the LAPD rather than put out his fag on a plane. Smith had lambasted all the institutions of middle-class popular culture, from open-air festivals to student vegans; and as his greatest hero was Wyndham Lewis, so he assumed his best-known public mask of being The Enemy. No matter that I’d seen The Fall maybe twenty times, and no matter that I listened to the records with unceasing enthusiasm, and written about them as vital works of contemporary art. I came across like Wilfrid Hyde-White trying to interview Eminem.

It occurred to me that I had missed the point of The Fall by a mile. Of course, I should have realized that shamanic class warriors don’t do cosy, ICA-style interviews; they operate on a different level, ceaselessly self-protective and necessarily resistant to the commodifying grasp – the pasteurizing process – of institutional cultural interpretation. I’d watched Jean Genet on the
South Bank Show,
refusing to comply with the probings of polite mediation. For Smith to become the amiable studio guest, offering insights into his creative method, would have undermined the purpose of his entire project. But that realization came later. ‘Can you remember the early concerts in the working men’s clubs?’ I asked, fingering my notes with sweating hands;’ ‘Course I can. Do you think I’m daft?’ came the sharp reply. ‘Were you always interested in music?’ ‘My uncle played the saw. Lovely instrument.’ And so on. The remaining fifty minutes became a dark vortex – somewhere in the diminishing perspectives of which I took temporary leave of my body.

Some years later, I asked the ICA for a copy of their tape of the event. Listening to it, I was overwhelmed by just how generous, eloquent, affectionate and informative Mark had actually been during the interview. But there had been some fundamental collision of expectations and attitudes, between audience, speaker and event, which had all but drowned out the talk itself: to have thought of the public interview with Mark in terms of blurring cultural boundaries, had proved pointless. As Ken Dodd once remarked, ‘Try telling Freud’s theory of humour to the second house at the Glasgow Empire on a Saturday night.’

In addition to which, the turbulence which the event had seemed to summon up – a volatility of ambience which Elvis Presley’s biographer, Albert Goldman, once described as ‘acoustic steam’ – was perhaps a version of the same intensity which Smith brings to his performances with The Fall – as though his personality becomes a poltergeist, once he hits the stage. At the end of the talk, questions from the audience had turned nasty. ‘Mark, are you still a drunk?’ some man asked from the side of the darkened auditorium.

This comes pretty near the end of the tape. ‘Gotta split,’ Mark replies; and the void left by his departure from the stage, as recorded, is a rising roar of static electricity.

‘Insults should be well avenged or well endured.’ Spanish proverb

More than ten years ago I went on a national reading tour to promote the paperback edition of the novel I’d published the year before. The tour had its strange, moody hosts, its moments of validation from audiences, the schedule of fast-moving evenings that give you a Friendliness Hangover when it’s all over and done with, because you’ve talked so much and wanted to be liked so much you’ve tried to become best friends with everyone you met. The tour also had its forlorn venues. In Atlanta, during a terrible storm, the manager of the suburban bookstore where I was to appear assured me that it was not my fault that I was not Madonna and could not attract a crowd in such weather. Thunder rattled the panes. The shop was near empty. By 8.15 there were three black people seated in the front row; the rest of the chairs were vacant. Two white customers, sussing that a boring, poorly attended reading was about to take place, dived down the aisle toward the shelf of tax manuals. One of the three black people said that they ran an experimental theatre in Atlanta and knew the experience of finding more people on stage than in the audience, so if I wanted to read then they were prepared to listen. I hoped that anecdote would entertain and move the people in the publicity department back at my publishers. I had an obscure fear of them.

A few days later, in misty Portland, Oregon, I met up with an English friend, a poet, who the day before had read to an audience of 3000 in a downtown Portland theatre. Surprising, wonderful, cultured, hippy Portland. As my friend and I entered the bookshop where I was to give a reading, I put the paperback copy of my book in my pocket. Then this weird thing happened: ‘Hey!’ I paid no attention. ‘Excuse me, I’m talking to you.’ I turned about and saw a clerk, his tag around his neck. ‘Could you step this way, please?’ That was a rather brusque way to invite me to sign books, I thought. But, no, the clerk wanted to know if I’d just slipped something into my pocket. Yes. But that was all I was going to say. The clerk wanted to see what I had just slipped into my pocket. I saw the sign above the cashiers’ station, a sign that warned shoplifters that they would be prosecuted. My friend barked, ‘He’s reading here tonight!’ He couldn’t believe it either. I was being stopped as a suspected shoplifter. I know a painter who refuses to have anything to do with a canvas once he’s decided it’s finished. He wants his gallery to take it away and sell it as quickly as possible. The painting must begin its own life, one independent of the artist, immediately. The clerk didn’t blink at the photograph of the black guy on the back cover of the copy of
High Cotton
in my unsteady hand. My friend was going ballistic. I fled. I went outside for a cigarette. Someone came and got me when it was time for me to go on. I didn’t see that clerk. My friend sat in the rear, fuming. Otherwise, my audience amounted to about thirty people, seven of them either high-school classmates or the siblings of classmates. But I had a great time after all and I wanted the publicity department back at my publishers to be glad to hear it. As he held the door for us, the bookstore manager made apologies to my friend again. He’d really scared them, which nicely covered up for what I like to pretend was my complicated lack of reaction to being asked to frisk myself in a bookstore.

‘He that riseth late must trot all day.’ Benjamin Franklin

I’m very fortunate in that I’m not that easily embarrassed, which is a good thing as my behaviour has often not been up to scratch, this particularly being the case in my youth. I think that, over the years, I’ve become inured to the type of embarrassment that really fucks some other people up. I’m not sure whether this is a good or bad thing. Like most of us, the bulk of my cringe-worthy moments have come about through intoxication on drink or drugs. Now I’ve got to the point that I get somewhat red-faced if I wake up to find out that I
haven’t
made a complete tit of myself. It always seems a waste of a night out.

Of course, although it certainly helps, I don’t need drink and drugs to make an absolute prick of myself. Even sober, I’m the master of the
faux pas
. I blame this on the incredible arrogance of being so wrapped up in myself that I can’t be bothered to pay attention to what’s going on around me. Once, when I had taken a new job in London, after the first week my boss took me out for a drink. It was a relaxed, cordial affair although the alcohol was slipping down a bit quickly. He asked me if I was enjoying the job. I told him that it was fine. He then asked if I was getting on with everybody at work. I explained that they were all very nice, but there was one woman manager who worked upstairs. I told him that everybody hated her, thought she was a ‘poisonous cunt’. At this point I perhaps should have noticed the slightly pained, if thoughtful, reaction on my boss’s face.

The next day, suitably vulnerable and hung-over, I was having a lunchtime game of pool with a girl who worked upstairs beside the woman in question. She asked me if I’d had a good time last night. I told her that I did, but I’d had more to drink than I thought I would. She asked me about the boss and how I got on with him. I told her that I thought that he seemed a really nice guy. (It was very unusual for me to feel that way about any boss I’ve had.) She agreed that he was okay, but then she said, ‘It must be strange for him to be working so closely with his wife …’ Of course, I knew straight away whom she meant by this, experiencing what myself and a good friend called ‘the crumbling dam effect’. This occurs when you feel your face suddenly collapse in response to, well, mortification.

This type of embarrassment is intense, but relatively routine. The big problem in trying to dredge up a really mortifying memory is that there are so many and you suspect that you’ve repressed the best (or worst) ones. Anyway, one that always sticks in my mind was when I was ticketless at the Scotland v. England game at Wembley in 1979. I sat with two friends and a huge carry-out in the car park outside the stadium. We had been in a state of alcoholic oblivion for a few days and we wouldn’t have thanked anybody for tickets at that point, we just wanted to finish our session.

I farted and followed through. Despite the quickening of the pulse and sweating of the brow in response to the warm feeling in my underpants, I nonchalantly headed up and off to the toilets in Wembley Way. I thought that I would defecate, get cleaned up best I could, probably flushing my keks away if the damage proved to be too bad.

The problem was I found that the toilets had been so badly vandalized that they looked like the footpath at Edinburgh’s Royal Commonwealth Pool. Only they had a couple of inches of pishy water all over the floor, which you had to paddle through to get to the toilet traps, urinals and sinks. My hole-ridden trainers wouldn’t stand a chance, so I took them off, then my socks. Rolling up my jeans, I paddled along to a smashed up toilet-bowl. I then shat and wiped myself with the clean portion of my underpants. (There was no toilet paper.) I jettisoned the pants and took off my jeans and paddled my way to a wash-hand basin. As, naked from the waist down, I tried to wash out my arse, a group of Weedgies stood at the entrance, just pishing into the toilet and laughing loudly at my predicament. I carried on with as much dignity as one can muster in such circumstances, climbing up onto these boxed-in pipes and washing my piss-soaked feet in the sink. Then I scrambled along the ledge to the door and jumped out emerging into the car-park, where to the laughter of loads of drunken football supporters, I pulled on my jeans, socks and trainers.