by Sam Taylor
When I told my parents about the telephone call, they were furious. My mother mentioned gift-horses. My father used the word ‘irresponsible’. Both demanded to know what it was I wanted to do with my life. I told them I was planning to work my way around the world: grape-picking, barwork, cruise ships, that kind of thing. I kept silent about my desire to write; I feared they would start using words like ‘unrealistic’ and ‘pipedream’. I didn’t have an itinerary, I explained, but that was because I didn’t want one; what I wanted was Adventure. Uncertainty. Freedom. What I wanted was a blank page.
But there were long weeks to pass before I could leave. To save money for the trip, I was working six days a week in a warehouse, and in the local pub most evenings. Both jobs were numbingly repetitive. In the warehouse, I was one of a thousand or so workers. I can’t remember exactly what I was doing there: I have an image in my mind of cardboard boxes and clothes wrapped in cellophane, and another image of long gloomy rooms filled with racks of coathangers. I remember looking at my watch more often than I should have done and being appalled by how slowly time was passing. I remember occasionally glancing up from my work at the walls and ceiling and getting the kind of recurrent claustrophobic panic that prisoners must get: the feeling that I would never get out of here. But what comes back to me most clearly is the soundtrack: Radio One was broadcast all day, from loudspeakers in the ceiling, and I soon realised that the station was playing the same eight or ten hit singles constantly, over and over again. And the DJs were even worse, like soma-drunk Deltas from Brave New World, all capacity for sorrow, fear and compassion permanently removed. It was like being brainwashed in the literal sense: being persuaded to think about absolutely nothing at all.
The bar job was marginally more varied, but if anything I hated it even more. At least in the warehouse I was anonymous, invisible. Behind the bar I felt exposed, constantly on display, and as a consequence I could never forget that my mind was located in the attic room of a clumsy, vulnerable tower of human flesh: the thing people called my body. Another reason I hated it was that everyone else in the pub appeared so happy and relaxed; I alone was there to work, while the landlord and his customers drank and talked and laughed. This strikes me now as a pretty good definition of hell: to be alone without the consolations of solitude; to be surrounded by other people without the consolations of company. It didn’t help that the wages were shit, of course. In both jobs it was forbidden to sit down, and the soles of my feet ached constantly. When I lay in bed at night they sang with pain.
After a few tearful rows, my parents backed off. They confined themselves to gentle remarks over dinner, about rates of pay on newspapers and so on. One article would be the equivalent of a week’s work at the warehouse and the pub, my mum pointed out. Even if you still want to go abroad, she said, it makes sense to try and earn a bit more cash before new year. I said I didn’t have any ideas for articles. My parents suggested some. I shot their ideas down. Then, almost against my will, I came up with some of my own.
I phoned the editor and apologised for the other day. He seemed almost to have forgotten who I was. I suggested one of my ideas to him. He rejected it. I suggested another, and he said yes, all right, do it. Eight hundred words, to be filed by next Tuesday. As we said goodbye he asked me if I was still planning to leave the country and abandon my nascent career. I said I hadn’t decided; I was thinking about it. Don’t think too long, he said, the train will soon be pulling out of the station.
That was all it took. Although I continued to tell myself and others that I was undecided, the image of the departing train haunted my dreams. I wrote the article and faxed it to the newspaper. The next day, at the warehouse, I was summoned to the supervisor’s office to take a telephone call. It was from a sub-editor at the newspaper, querying the spelling of a name. When the call was over, I thanked the supervisor and started to leave his office. He said, ‘Looks like you’re going up in the world, eh?’ I shrugged and said I hoped so. ‘I never would have guessed you had it in you,’ he said. ‘Remember us when you’re famous, won’t you?’
The following week the arts editor asked me to come down to London because he wanted to meet me in person. I wore my only suit and it rained. By the time I made it to the newspaper office, I was soaked. I spent ten minutes in the toilet, attempting to dry my clothes, skin and hair in the meagre jet of hot air exhaled by the automatic hand-dryer. Sam Caine, to my surprise, wore a pair of faded jeans and a jumper with holes in it. He was in his early forties, with greying hair and an assured but kindly manner. I was so nervous that my answers to his questions came out in stammering spurts, loud as a barking dog. We ate poached salmon in the staff cafeteria and I slowly relaxed. He asked me where I saw myself in five years’ time. I looked at him blankly. ‘Doing your job?’ I joked, unable to think of any other response. He didn’t laugh. He made a cathedral of his hands. ‘James, you may need to lower your expectations. Journalism is a tough profession. You’ll need a lot of patience and a thick skin if you want to succeed.’
I didn’t believe Caine when he told me that, but he was right. The beginning of 1995 was a grim, frustrating time. Because I could-n’t afford rent, I was still living with my parents; our house was in a suburban estate in the Midlands. Three or four times a week, I would drive to Leicester or Nottingham or Derby to stand on my own in dark crowded rooms, sip pints of bitter shandy and try to think of something to write about the four men playing music on the stage before me. This was an isolating experience: not only my absence of friends marked me out, but the notebook into which I scribbled. People stared at me appraisingly, amusedly, contemptuously. In the darkness it was bearable - I could lean against the wall and not be seen - but when the lights came on between bands I wished I could evaporate.
I had escaped hell, only to find myself in purgatory. What made it worse was that I wasn’t even being paid for these lonely evenings. Though the arts editor was still commissioning me to write for the newspaper, opportunities were few and irregular, and he had already told me that he would soon be leaving the paper to go freelance. For that reason, I was trying to get work on a weekly music paper. This involved writing an indefinite number of ‘dummy reviews’ in the hope that one of them would, eventually, be printed. The objective of this initiation was mostly to humiliate new recruits, I think, but at the time I convinced myself it was a matter of perfecting my voice. The paper had a kind of unwritten house style, which consisted of diction (coded and matey) and attitude (either snottily cynical or rabidly awe-filled, depending on whether the artist in question was ‘out’ or ‘in’), and I spent all my waking hours trying to learn and mimic this style.
I had lost touch with most of my friends by now, but I wasn’t completely alone. During the course of the year, I had two girlfriends. The first was a friend of a friend of a friend; the second I met through the ‘lonely hearts’ pages of the weekly music paper. I don’t remember much about either girl. Their faces, vaguely. Their names. Their voices. Moments in bed together. Awkward silences in restaurants or parks. Goodbyes at train stations, identical but for the place-names on the signs. The pleasantly tense beginnings and the unpleasantly tense endings. The feeling that we were merely going through the motions. In each case it felt like I was dating a ghost, though in truth, I suppose, it was me, rather than the girl, who was not really there.
My career path took the shape of a labyrinth. I soon became accustomed to its twists and forks and dead ends: the unreturned phone calls; the sudden and unexplained changes of mind; the constant air of bored panic on the other end of the line. Unconsciously I adopted my editors’ manners; I became cold and short-tempered, especially with my parents. The angrier I got, the more they worried about me; and the more they worried about me, the angrier I got. Sometimes my dad would blow his top in return, which wasn’t so bad, but my mum just kept asking, in a pleading voice, ‘Are you all right, James?’ I spent most of each day in my bedroom, sitting at the desk: writing, reading, making (and wa
iting for) telephone calls. My mother would come in three or four times a day, on tiptoe so as not to disturb me, carrying a tray of tea and biscuits, or a light lunch, or a glass of orange juice and sandwiches. I kept telling her to stop treating me like an invalid, but she took no notice. ‘James’s Work’ became the sole subject of conversation at the dinner table. It was like a baby which quickly grew into a kind of ogre. It ruled the whole house, my work, and I was no less its slave than my parents were.
If I read my 1995 diary now, I am returned immediately to the present reality of that past: the feeling that I was walking through darkness, or thick fog, my eyes focused permanently on the next step; my head full of money earned and spent, ideas for articles, files of information on bands and record companies . . . the soulless minutiae of today and tomorrow. Day after day of work and hope and work and fear and work and disappointment and work. Yet this is not the version of that time which exists in my memory. Memory turns the truth into a story: chance and choice solidify into fate; endless nights become little black dots on a map. And there is a reason for this. I cannot write the truth because it would take me almost as long as it took me to live it. And because it would be unreadable, unbearable. So let’s forget the truth, for now. I will write the story instead.
On 14 September 1995, I came to a decision. I was eating a cheese-burger at the time, in an almost empty fast-food restaurant, watching rain dribble down the windows. I made the decision and became so excited that I had to write it down. I scrawled on the back of a tray-liner, ‘I’m going down to London to make my fortune!’ The note is sellotaped into my diary, with a soft-focus photograph of hash browns and bacon-and-egg McMuffins on the back.
Five days later I was living in a rented room in Wembley, near the old football stadium. The room was just a room, but it was cheap and close to the train station. It had a view of a car park and some trees, and at night I could hear traffic on the Harrow Road. The man who owned the flat was rarely around; he gave me a key and let me use his coffee machine.
The first few months were lean, and I reached a low point when I was fired by the music paper. I had known it was coming - I always felt like an outsider there: the gauche intruder who says the wrong thing; the frowning idiot who never understood the office jokes - but it still came as a shock. I remember, pitifully, arguing with my editor, pleading for another chance. In the end he hung up on me. For a week or so I was in a panic, but the letters I sent out to other publications soon brought results. I got work with a music monthly and a London daily newspaper, and my confidence grew.
Soon after that the amount of work I was doing began to snowball. I charted my financial progress on a graph, and its curve was gratifyingly steep. Although Sam Caine was no longer the arts editor, I was doing more work for the Sunday newspaper, and other editors began to call and ask me to write for them: a young woman from a glossy fashion monthly; the music editor of a ‘lad’ magazine; the reviews editor of a serious film periodical. By the spring of 1996 I had so much work that I could barely keep up with it. I remember charging around London from office to hotel room to cinema to gig venue, listening to music or taped interviews on headphones and taking notes. The speed of my life was such that I never had time to think about what it was I was rushing so hard to achieve. Perhaps the speed was an end in itself? Perhaps I wasn’t running towards anything at all but away from something that lay behind me?
In a matter of weeks I had, as in the cliché, become my job. Ruthlessly I eliminated every part of my daily and inner life which did not contribute towards the next, immediate goal. I developed tunnel vision. I kept my eyes on the prize. Everything else turned to a blank, a blur: friends, books, doubts, small pleasures and idle moments . . . all were ballast to be thrown from the basket of the hot-air balloon as I rose and rose. I was driven - that much is obvious - but what drove me? At the time I felt sure the rapid pulsing of my blood was born of exhilaration; only later did I realise it might have been another emotion altogether.
I remember a dream I had around this time. I was in an athletics stadium with my parents and some friends from school. It was a sunny day. It was a normal athletics stadium, with a running track and tiered seating around three sides. On the fourth side, however, was a sort of transparent slope. I don’t know whether it was made of glass or ice or plastic; perhaps it was some dream mixture of all three. Anyhow, I decided to climb this slope. The people around me expressed their fear on my behalf; they warned me not to do it. I laughed at their anxiety and said I would climb it easily. And, indeed, it was easy to begin with - I was running - but the higher I went, the steeper the slope became, until soon I could no longer run but had to crawl on all fours. Still I went on. I felt as if everyone in the stadium were watching me now, their breath held. As I climbed higher, I began to realise the awful situation I had put myself in: the slope was now almost vertical and I could barely hold on to it at all. Suddenly, the desire to keep climbing was gone; all that remained was the terror of falling. It was at this point that I woke up: paralysed by fear, my fingertips beginning to slip, regretting the rash decision I had made. I remember the dream vividly now, perhaps because it has the air of a premonition, but I didn’t give it much thought at the time; it was only a dream, after all, and I was busy.
Because the rent on my room was so low, and because I didn’t pay much attention to what I ate or wore, I soon accumulated a large amount of money. It slept in my bank account, lazy and pointless. It existed solely as a means of gauging my success. Every time I went to a cash machine I would press the button marked ‘CHECK BALANCE’ and stare proudly at the newly grown figure on the screen. I invested my soul in those numbers. That’s me, I would think; that is how much I’m worth. Every zero was like another closed door on the nondescript room in which this chapter began.
Yet, to my horror and incomprehension, I found myself in a kind of surrealist loop: each time I closed the door on that room, I entered another one that looked exactly identical.
One night a friend, whom I hadn’t spoken to for more than a year, telephoned me; she told me about her new boyfriend, her job, her friends, her parents, her hopes and worries, then she asked how my life was. I told her about the magazines I wrote for, the money I earned, and then, staring around me, unable to think of anything else to say, I invented a looming deadline and hung up. I began to see for the first time how truly empty my life was.
It seemed to me that there were two ways of filling this void: with people, or with things. The trouble with people was that you had to spend time on them, whereas all you had to spend on things was money; and I had more of the latter than the former. So I went to the closest electrics store I could find and bought a TV, satellite dish, video recorder, stereo and laptop computer. Then I took a train to central London and went clothes shopping in Covent Garden. It was a source of immense and astonishing gratification to me, how quickly and easily I could spend so much money - and on so little. A thousand pounds on a suit! Two hundred and fifty on a pair of shoes! Fifty for a tie that I would never wear! When I had more paper bags than I could carry on the tube, I hailed a cab and got driven back to my cheap, lonely room.
The next day I looked in the ‘property to rent’ section of the London daily. I found a small, modern, white-painted and very expensive studio flat on the fourth floor of an office block near Liverpool Street station. I imagined this would put me in the centre of the city; and geographically, it did. But the area where I lived was mostly non-residential: at weekends it was deserted; even on weekdays, the pubs all closed at 8 p.m., and the only sounds at night were of groups of tourists being led on ‘Jack the Ripper’ tours through the maze of narrow streets below my window.
I was now spending as much as I earned, and my bank balance was down to three figures, but still the feeling of emptiness remained. I decided what I needed next was a new girlfriend. Most of the PRs I dealt with were women and several had asked me out to lunch or dinner; before, I had always said I was too busy, but now I
began accepting. One night, one of these women, a pretty, ambitious, young blonde called Katie, said she had some cocaine in her flat; she invited me back to help her consume it. We took the coke and had sex, and at 3 a.m. I left her flat, still wide awake and with the feeling that I had just discovered a secret city, a dark and forbidden city, hidden inside the city of daylight and work which I knew so well. This was June 1996, the beginning of the summer of my first disintegration.
There was nothing unique or original about my fall. Indeed, its lineaments conform so neatly to the falls of other young men that you could almost call it generic. In short, the balance tilted. I began to spend more than I could earn; to consume more than I could produce. I sought relief from the pressures of work, and from the emptiness within me, in parties and drugs and sex with Katie and others, and in doing so damaged my ability to do the work that paid for all these things. In the daytimes I would feel wretched and regretful, but in the evenings I would start again on the alcohol and cocaine. In private clubs I would enter a room and dozens of knowing eyes would turn my way. I swore I could hear them whispering my name. At first I felt flattered, but at some point my confidence must have evaporated because bad things started to happen. Paranoia and rage would pour from my mouth, faces would sneer, glasses would break, doormen would throw me on to the pavement.
This can’t have happened more than three or four times, over a period of three months, but it was enough. By October the telephone had stopped ringing. My name was crossed off lists. Unable to afford the rent but too cowardly and stubborn to admit the fact, I began paying for everything with credit. Now when I looked at the numbers on my statements, their largeness spelled not my worth but my doom. At the age of twenty-three, my career was in pieces, and those pieces were caught in a vortex, being slowly sucked around and around, each revolution taking them closer to the dark hole below.