One Three One: A Time-Shifting Gnostic Hooligan Road Novel (5 page)

Musing that only a psycho could have interpreted ‘Last Tango in Paris’ with such venom and twisted spite, I clocked a road sign that put us just fifteen or so kilometres north of Macomér, the very place we’d been kidnapped all those long years ago. Do I not let on to Anna and just keep my head down as we burn past on the 131? I’ll keep my head down! And so it was just as we began our slow descent from the heights of the Altopiano Campeda that my drug dependency and my career trajectory entered the discussion via Anna’s simple query.

What a can opener! What a pest dispenser! What do I say without spilling my life into this sweet lady’s lap? Dayglo Maradona had been my re-birth. All that came before was just a prelude to the Storm. As a six-foot-two seventeen-year-old Jim Morrison wannabe, I’d stalked the streets of Eastwood with compadré Gaz Marshmallow, inching along the blue D. H. Lawrence heritage walks at about nearly m.p.h. Tripping and desperate for Culture, we’d both regularly sneaked into Lawrence’s
Sons
& Lovers
cottage on Walker Street until Gaz one rainy night spied the blue heritage line continuing up Lawrence’s path and became convinced it was leading the cops our way. Eastwood was too small-town for me; Nottingham too, I discovered. I had to get out of that crisp packet before I turned into a chewy. So I auditioned as vocalist for Arthur Tadgell’s epic Post-Punk band the Low Countries, and the first single we did was a hit! I’m not a songwriter, just a singer, but it was massive for that time. Not being from Liverpool and being so young, however, the dynamic in the band sucked shit and I had to be careful not to tread on toes. The singer/guitarist and the female organist were a couple. Until I came along, he wrote the lyrics and she wrote the music. Then after two singles for Arthur Tadgell’s label, the great entrepreneur one day returned to their rehearsal room from a Midlands shopping trip replete with a gift – one Rock Section: here’s your new lead singer, chaps and chappesses. Lump it.

I was remembering all of these extraordinary details, moments, incisive Visions as though they were happening right
now
, and all in an instant. But I rose with great effort from out of my Cavernous Inner to address this sweet lady and her questioning.

Anna remained silent, but still smiling. Well, she
had
asked. Despite her easy and elegantly physical ways at the tiller of Jayne Mansfield’s Ruin, this lady was clearly a scholar and a thinker every inch. It was evident in her choice of books on the back seat, the kinds of friends she talked to on her mobile, her canny self-management that had kept her so long in Higher Education.

I laughed. My Rock Section Story is a good one, but a very confusing one. And with Anna herself struggling with the nuance of spoken English, I hummed and ha’d and prevaricated as to just how I should convey to her all of those infuriatingly Anglo bits that
make
the story. I’d become Rock Section quite accidentally just twenty-four hours before that successful audition for the Low Countries; indeed this peculiar event itself had precipitated my decision to go for that audition. Late cold November 1979. It had really just started as a typical Nottingham midweek night out with Gaz Marshmallow, drinking at the Saracen’s Head. Unbeknown to us, we were about to watch – or rather, attend – our umpteenth gig by Skin Patrol, a trio of local white funksters on a Postcard Records bender. Well, more beers got downed and I was gassing to my mates at the bar as ye Skinners breezed – no other word for it – through their clean-sounding, mostly Orange Juice-inspired set. Until the end, that is … then … what the Terminal Fuck? After only about a 30-second sprinkle of polite applause, singer Courtney returns to the stage far too quickly for a barely demanded encore, but nevertheless
lets loose a life-changing 10,000 Doom Decibels from right out of the abyss, unleashing a slow Detroit mechanical blues called ‘Rock Section’, replete with the Moron Savant chorus: ‘Dance to the beat of the drum.’ By the end of the song, Courtney’s down on the floor necking some sex-bomb woman me and Gaz Marshmallow have always been too frit even to speak to, and we were watching the Doors in Miami ’69. How could Skin Patrol’s ice-rinky dinkiness have descended out of nowhere into Full J. Morrison Stupor Consciousness in the space of one single encore tour de force? How?

That night, Gaz Marshmallow and I seven-league-booted back to Eastwood, plotting. We’d both watched the Transformation of Skin Patrol with our very own Nothingham eyes [sic] and the both of us now understood that we too could be Agents of Change. There had been a Jagged Time Lapse, most certainly. The next day would be our Rite of Passage in front of Mr Tadgell. We’d win a record contract and conquer the world. But when I woke up? Gutted. Gaz had lost the magic. He was decent enough to telephone – he did only live next door – but he told me we couldn’t expect what had happened to Skin Patrol to happen to us, that it was a one-off, and therefore he couldn’t do the audition today even after watching their Holy Transformation. But the whole shitty story made me just totally ten times more determined to play:
Skin Patrol just
demanded
transformation right there and then. Therefore shall I too Demand that Change in front of Arthur Tadgell!
So, guiltily, Gaz lent me the primitive Radio Shack drum box he’d put together himself, and I jammed in front of my bedroom mirror on bass guitar, nicking what bits I could remember of Skin Patrol’s new doom song, and the rest making up on the spot, plus of course adding far more Jim Morrisonisms than made sense.

So by the time it was my turn to get on Mr Tadgell’s stage – with G. Marshmallow safely back home/feet-up in front of
Midlands Today
– I walked out really confident, stared out into the audience and just said: Hey, this is Rock Section. I’m Rock Section. I switched on the mid-tempo, ping-pong drum-box and jammed Skin Patrol’s basic E-to-G chords for fifteen full minutes, intoning and hiccupping like my guitar teacher Paul the Cop had shown me Buddy Holly used to do. It went off like some great improvised pagan dance with machines, good through to the end, when I dared at last to look out finally … and shit a brick. There in front of me at waist height – totally in the centre of the stage – was Arthur Tadgell, staring up grinning with a full glass of wine, toasting me with that same smile he did on his TV show. I walked off stage and he charmed me to death. He shut down the auditions then and there, told everybody – a few future big names included – that he’d found what he needed. Lee Harris was there, The Stasi, Sandra Rough: she was loudly pissed off at not getting to sing. By the end of the evening, I was signing a contract in the dark car park lit by the lights of the great entrepreneur’s Jaguar Mark 10, and collecting free copies of all the latest stuff by the Low Countries and the Smoke Dopes, plus signed publicity photos of Mr Tadgell for Gaz Marshmallow and my auntie who both loved his Granada TV show …

As I rifled at great velocity through all of these ancient thoughts, Jayne Mansfield’s Ruin still high-tailed it southwards along the 131 with purpose and aplomb. But I had not really been concentrating on our continuously unfolding present, when it suddenly dawned upon me that I might well seize up with hostage fear upon glimpsing the dramatic and fast-approaching landscape around the Macomér neighbourhood. So when I ‘forewarned’ Anna of possible rough passages ahead,
our great convertible had already commenced its grand descent, skirting around that timeless former hilltop fortress along its 131 flight-path. Spectacular views all right but a near fatal error on my part. Uh-oh.

Then some
thing
Macomér’d me. An ancient deathly figure – its spectral hands outstretched – reached up and into me. And as I clutched at my suddenly aching belly, its cartoon replica imploded then fell away into some deep abyss under the roadway. Such was the Urgency in my brow, such was the Pounding in my brow, that the two feelings did boil within my head a heat of such terrific bulging Ugliness that I grew Horns Invisible that projected out Baphomet-like from my raging temples. Upwards, onwards and into the sky, they streamed out like great telegraph wires, like twin umbilical cords projecting up to that Blakean Sky that currently presided over Macomér. Then this great cascading 131 – now more switchback than expressway – racing runway-like through scree slopes, clattered downhill round Macomér, accepting only reluctantly those wild prehistoric landscapes of the Birori Valley directly ahead through which it now crashed, those lands that sixteen years previously had caused such catastrophe for myself and my compadrés. Kidnapped here, we’d been kidnapped here, fucking kidnapped of all things. Am I dying? Am I dying, I ask you? Stop the car. Stop the car. I cradled my distended belly as we swept ever faster downhill, and twisted around to grab the bottle of Sudafed that was nestling in my jacket pocket over on the back seat. The phone rang. I groaned – didn’t even attempt to answer. But now Mick was suddenly raging in my head, mimicking me in my current situation, and declaiming as ostentatiously as some Norse God gone Rave DJ:
Stoppe ye fucking car, I’m fucking dying, I do tellest thee, or what?

But I just smile resignedly and sickly, my eyes widening and my head pressing further and further back into my seat. I’m learning just how low low low a cunted sloth bombed out on a diet of Sudafed and squidgy black can – when he really puts his mind to it – really really really sink into overly luxurious mid-1960s General Motors upholstery. Then a nod from the Gods, and a vote from the Remotes, and a station platform announcer-type declares:
Ladies and Gentlemen, welcome to judgement
. Just in time (?), Anna guides this massive Buick off the 131 right up the slip road of Macomér Industrial Estate and my Body, Psyche and entire Being collectively sense our precise geographical location. And thus my entire Macomér’d Being – now registering only ‘Kidnap, Kidnap, Kidnap’ – immediately abandons all of its senses in favour of an every-man-for-himself Blind Panic, this causing me to pass out …

When I woke up, Jayne Mansfield’s Ruin was 150 metres away, parked up, straddling its big arse across the farm slip road that leads to Macomér’s industrial estate. Below us, the 131 roared by and I was clinging for comfort to the Sudafed bottle. But now, while Anna was fiercely slapping my face awake, I felt from the very bowels of the valley the sudden roar of a Great Being surging through me. And I knew I was feeling the same Great Being that once during the kidnapping I’d had reason to confront. Houuuuuuuuugh! Holy fucking … help … We were marooned in my Hell. Even through the filter of my drugged-out state, that roar and the sight of Macomér above was far too much to bear, and I threw up right there on the dirt road whilst the electric energy in Birori Valley bolted through me and set up within my head a raging Mithraic Fire. I crashed down on to my knees, convulsing like a toddler, and I wailed for all the Death and Disaster this place had caused us, and I fizzed and
I flailed in an orgy of self-hate and under-achievement. I pictured the naked Brent newly fourteen years old picking his way to freedom up that Macomér hillside sixteen years previously. Blind me from all of this. Dean’s dead, man.

And the generator-like pulsations pushing out from the nearby Altar of Punishment obliged me to shamble away, hobble away, put any possible distance between it and myself. Here’s me walking away, down this farm road into this decent old farm, probably where Anna’s gone for help. My silo stomach, my bitten lips, my under-attended-to but over-plumbed sphincter, smashèd face: all hurt like a motherfucker and I’m sure that as I walked I looked – to that Great Being studying me periscope-like from beneath the Altar of Punishment – as somnambulant, slow and robot-like as an old old geezer. But although every step here was a struggle, I intuitively knew that this was not a re-enactment of that Life and Death struggle that had destroyed my kidnapped comrades the first time. In truth, the Great Being on this occasion had – from his binding at the Altar of Punishment 250 metres away – merely sniffed me. And even in my fragile condition I well knew from experience that he’d need more than one whiff to refresh that colossal mind of his as to what my presence here implied. So as I stumbled finally into the farm of Puttu Oes, although my breathing felt asthmatic and wheezing, both my Will to Live and my Will to Win Through was increasing considerably with every step I took. Here within the white-walled farmyard, even the torturing effects of the sunlight overhead were hugely diminished, and my burning scalp felt cooled and irrigated. Unfortunately within the precincts of Puttu Oes, the farm looked long abandoned. Nevertheless, although temporarily protected from the Great Being Without by these deep Mediterranean walls, I still
needed sustenance and gobbled down the last of the Sudafed. You’re becoming Sudafed. Yet still from the back of my raging mind, I remembered the greater purpose of this my final Sardinian mission – to seek restitution for my fallen, wrongèd comrades before I journeyed to my rightful place.