Educating Peter

by Tom Cox

  ‘Come on, Tom,’ said Jenny. ‘It will be fun! Why not come and meet him, and we’ll take it from there?’

  Irresistible vanity washed over me: I was going to be in charge here. This would be my version of a musical education. I could do this in any way I chose.

  ‘Which day’s good for you two, then?’ I said.

  One factor I hadn’t really stopped to consider was Peter himself. What were fourteen-year-olds like these days? Moreover, what were teenagers like? It was only seven years since I’d been one, yet it struck me, somewhat frighteningly, that I seemed to have entirely forgotten what it was like. Now, when I thought of adolescents, I thought of the pavement outside the London Astoria in the build-up to a nu-metal gig: the pseudo-threatening band names . . . my inadvertent need to cross to the opposite side of the road . . . the accoutrements of a new kind of hollow-eyed corporate rebellion . . . the cries of ‘Nigel, where’s Jasmine? She’s got my System Of A Down t-shirt!’

  I’d found teenagers scary and slightly confusing when I was one myself; now I just found them perplexing and unsavoury. I did my best to live and shop in places where they didn’t, and generally avoided them in the street, half-convinced that they were either going to ask me to give them a counselling session or beat me up for looking at their ‘bird’. Earlier in the year, a national newspaper had commissioned me to write a feature which involved manufacturing my own boy band. My editor had instructed me to head out on to the streets of the capital to recruit ‘talent’ between the ages of fifteen and eighteen, but I’d spent the afternoon browsing in second-hand bookshops instead. In the end, my band, Boyzcout, had been constructed out of a group of friends in their mid-twenties, all of whom, after the influence of make-up, had the common trait of looking twenty-four instead of twenty-seven. We’d tried hard to pack plenty of *NSync harmonies and hip, modern references to text-messaging and the dot com world into our single, ‘Zcouting For Boyz’ – ‘I’ll zcout for you babe while we’re out zcouting for boys’ – but record company A&R men had rejected the demo for being too mature. ‘It’s a bit like Mojo magazine in musical form,’ said one.

  I knew I was turning into an old fart, perhaps prematurely, but I didn’t care. There was no shame in my love of The Eagles, Journey’s ‘Don’t Stop Believing’, fuzzy dressing gowns, Sainsbury’s Taste The Difference range, weak beer, golf and the VH1 Classic Rock channel; just lots of self-righteous enjoyment. I’d spent the previous seven years becoming increasingly scornful of my former self. I’d sold his records, taken the piss out of his hairstyle and mercilessly mocked his tactics with women. Occasionally I felt the odd bit of reluctant affection for him, of course, but ultimately I thought he was a wally – although I certainly believed his spiritual descendants to be a thousand times worse.

  I was fully aware that it was a cliché to feel like your generation had made better things of their youth than the generation that followed, but that didn’t stop me feeling the same thing with every fibre of my being. To put it bluntly, today’s teens repelled me. I didn’t like their grunting, complaining music, I didn’t like their shapeless clothes, I didn’t like the prongs of gel-plastered hair on their fringes, I didn’t like their baseball caps, I didn’t like the big speakers in their cars, I didn’t like their piercings and I didn’t like the way they hassled me for bus fares in the market square of my home town. And, from the little bits of evidence I could gather, they probably weren’t gagging to add me to their speed dial either. When I had tried to convey my honest sentiments about youth trends such as nu-metal, skateboarding and gangsta rap in a newspaper article, I’d inevitably received an angry letter in response from a frustrated sixteen-year-old with a name like Toad or Jemima, lambasting me for a) my lack of understanding of the isolation the modern adolescent feels, and b) my lack of comprehension about why Slutbone or Composition Of A Horse had to insert the word ‘plasma’ into every second verse of their lyrics. This, naturally, had the effect of making me feel even more righteous.

  Peter was an anomaly in that he didn’t fit into either of the categories in which I’d come to place teens: he didn’t remind me distastefully of the old version of me, but he didn’t remind me distastefully of the people I used to have fights with at school either. From our initial, fleeting encounter, I’d worked out several things about him: that he was tall for his age, that he was considerably better educated than I had been at his age, that black was his favourite colour, that he was uncomfortable with his hair, and that he had watched the Oliver Stone biopic The Doors at some point in the previous twenty-four hours. He was the essence of sub-Jim Morrison hangdog adolescence, yet he was something alien to me, too – a kind of teenager that I’d never been in a position to have to understand. Jenny might have been friends with my parents from her student days, but while they still lived in a cosmopolitan enough area of North Nottinghamshire, she had long ago moved to a subregion of North London where it was possible to buy a jar of pimento-stuffed olives from any one of seven local outlets at three o’clock in the morning. She’d sent Peter to the local independent school, where, among the children of art gallery owners, daytime TV presenters and pop stars, he was groovily encouraged to learn in the direction that he wanted to learn. Having been to a comprehensive school whose twin areas of progressive excellence were football and beating the living crap out of the year below you, I didn’t quite comprehend what this style of education involved, but I was almost certain that it meant Peter knew a lot bigger words than I’d known at his age, and probably a few bigger ones than I knew now.

  Would we get on? Did Peter have any enthusiasm for the project, or did he just see it as something his mum had pushed him into? It was far too early to tell. By the end of Peter’s first encounter with me, his only gestures of communication had been ‘Mmmmawwwrighttt’ and ‘Yeah, s’even better than Back In Black.’ Jenny, ever helpful, had assured me that in normal English this translated, respectively, as ‘Hello! You must be Tom, the music writer who is going to help me further my development and learn about multifarious aspects of our musical heritage!’ and ‘I’m so glad we both like the work of AC/DC! I think this provides an indication that we’re going to get along just spiffingly!’, but I wasn’t so confident. It occurred to me that, as a premature fogey, I’d spent my whole adult life hanging around with people older than me, people who treated me as their equal but always with the unspoken agreement that I was their apprentice. It didn’t matter how many Hall And Oates albums I bought; providing my mates were older than me, I would always feel slightly wet behind the ears. Now the situation was reversed. I was about to spend six months feeling old for the first time in my life, and I wasn’t sure I liked the idea. My parents, who had both made a living as teachers while I was growing up, had warned me from an early age not to follow their career path, and I wondered if I was about to find out why. Sure, moulding Peter in my image would be a great way to get my own back on a generation that got on my nerves, but I could see, from five minutes in his company, that there would be minimal effort on his part. He wasn’t going to make me feel like he was the least bit interested in me, my life or my friends. And I would have to learn a whole new way of speaking and acting: patient, cool, encouraging, effervescent, selfless, yet somehow disciplined and slyly exemplary.

  In the week that preceded my first official journey with Peter, Jenny and I began to draw up an itinerary for the summer. Due to Peter’s school commitments, this would be no ordinary road trip: it would take place in carefully planned stages, featuring minimal late nights and plenty of wholesome food. Long journeys might be a problem, particularly on school nights, as would the distance between my house, in Norfolk, and Jenny’s, in Crouch End. I started to wonder just how much time I would be spending on the London Orbital and what I would do to relieve the boredom. So much, I thought, for my loose, free-livin’ road trip, where every day was a magical mystery tour.

  I began to make lists of people Peter could hook up with, but always in the sceptical knowl
edge that rock stars are an awkward bunch and getting them in the same place at the same time as a recalcitrant adolescent might be a task no less arduous than persuading your favourite fragmented musical casualties to reunite and perform at your birthday party. In my planning I leaned heavily towards mates of mates and the kind of real people who’d be generous with their wisdom, and tried to ignore the more famous, plastic ones who might, if we were lucky, grant us twenty-five minutes of platitudes in a hotel room with their press agent eavesdropping outside the door. I could guarantee that someone out there would want to talk to us. What I couldn’t guarantee was structure, or that Peter would become a more rounded person as a result. Jenny explained again that she simply wanted Peter ‘to get more ammunition to enable him to make the right decision about his future, and to fill his spare time with something that wasn’t computer games’. Was it just British music she wanted me to teach him about? ‘No. Not really. Anything.’ Did she want me to persuade him that he didn’t want a career as a musician? ‘No. I just want him to be sure of what he’s getting himself into.’ The problem was, I wasn’t sure that I knew what he would be getting himself into. I wasn’t even sure whether the people I was taking him to meet would know what they’d got themselves into. That was the point of rock and roll, surely: it wasn’t supposed to be a carefully planned career choice.

  Gradually, reality was beginning to replace my Thunderbolt and Lightfoot fantasy. Originally, I’d thought only of the concept of me teaching a teenager the laws of rock and roll on the road, as if the whole thing was nothing more than a movie, a series of easy-to-swallow images spliced together by Steven Spielberg for popular consumption: Peter and me in the car, arguing over a late-Sixties folk album; Peter and me being taken to an archaeological site by Julian Cope; Peter and me getting lost in Runcorn.

  Well, okay. Maybe not Steven Spielberg.

  The point was, this was going to be nowhere near as easy as I’d thought. Looking at the coming months with a clear head, the chances seemed slim that I would be picking up random hitch-hikers and playing surreal practical jokes at traffic lights. What had seemed like a great opportunity to be even less responsible than normal was suddenly looking like the most responsible thing I’d ever had to do. I wasn’t going to be spending countless hours sitting next to a caricature of a teenager; I was going to be sitting next to the real thing, with all the messy eating habits, imbalanced taste and raging angst that that implied. I was devoting the best part of my summer to this, I realised, as I set off home from Jenny’s place. I’d gone past the stage where it was going to be possible to back out. What was more, in all my meditating I’d forgotten to circumnavigate the roadworks on the North Circular, and was bringing up the rear in the South East’s most monotonous traffic jam.

  Not every great road movie starts with a bang, does it? I thought back to the sleepy opening frames of Seventies films like Vanishing Point and Badlands: nothing events in no-horse towns with negligible hints of the mayhem to follow. Besides, who said I was at the start? The real beginning could come at any moment I wanted it to, in virtually any setting. I was director, writer, producer and cinematographer here. There was scope for freedom, anarchy and adventure in this project, after all – it was simply a matter of loosening up, using my imagination and letting it happen. Liberated by this thought, I clicked The Best Of The Steve Miller Band satisfyingly into the tape machine, pushed the gear-stick back into neutral for the ninth time in as many minutes, and turned my attention to the evening’s shopping list.

  CASH OR EXCHANGE?

  BEFORE I GOT to know Peter, I got to know his self-image. In the prelude to our first meeting, Jenny, rather slyly, had loaned me one of his most treasured possessions: a dog-eared sketchbook. ‘Just to give you an idea of the way his mind works.’

  The sketchbook’s cover displayed no name or tutor group, just a sticker featuring the logo for the veteran heavy metal band Metallica, as if that said all there was to say. That night, back at home after our initial meeting, I leafed through it, feeling somewhat guilt-ridden. The opening few pages largely consisted of crayon copies of band logos – AC/DC, Slipknot, The Deftones – but about halfway in I found a self-portrait of Peter, dressed in the longest jacket it’s possible to wear without tripping over, strumming on a Gibson SG Standard guitar. There were certain similarities between this picture and the Peter I’d seen earlier in the evening, but differences, too. Like Real Peter, Crayon Peter dressed all in black, played guitar and wore his love of the darker end of rock and roll on his t-shirt. But while Real Peter played bass guitar, Crayon Peter played rhythm. While Real Peter’s hair was brunette, awkwardly jaw-length and curly, Crayon’s was jet black, shoulder-length and straight. Crayon Peter looked genuinely deep and mysterious, while Real Peter merely looked moody and worried. Crayon’s clothes hung on him like the armour of a gothic warlord, while Real Peter’s threatened to swallow him up. All in all, you might have said it was a pretty good likeness, if you’d either a) recently had to cancel an operation to remove a cataract, or b) seen teenage self-portraits before.

  Still, since my first engagement with Peter had been so fleeting, it was the image of Crayon Peter – or Thardoz, Lord Of Goth, as I’d come to think of him – that I carried with me in my mind as I readied myself for our maiden voyage. The only person who wore black on a permanent basis for whom I’d ever had any respect was the South African golf legend Gary Player, but unaccountably I found myself wanting to impress Thardoz. How could I win his trust? What would he think of my collection of brightly coloured shirts, flares and Fleetwood Mac t-shirts? What would his feeling be towards ‘Lollipop Years: 1967–73’, the self-made, sunshine-themed compilation tape I currently had on permanent rotation in the car stereo? How would this Satan-worshipping Brandon Lee-lookalike react when the chirpy opening chords of ‘Goody Goody Gumdrops’ by the 1910 Fruitgum Company kicked in?

  Moreover, what about the car itself? I’d never seen a Ford Fiesta in a road movie. Scratch that: I’d never seen a Ford Fiesta in a movie. It was a car synonymous with the quotidian, an automobile almost indelibly linked with the phrase ‘I’m just nipping down the road to Tesco – would you like me to get any celery?’ Recently, I’d been slowly coming to terms not only with its unsuitability to a road trip environment, but its unsuitability to the lifestyle of a vaguely upwardly mobile man of twenty-seven. Something had finally clicked when, during a job for a sports magazine, an Audi-driving affiliate of the England cricket team had sneeringly pointed out his amazement that I had trekked the entire width of England in my ‘little car’. Made in 1997, the vehicle couldn’t even be written off as stylishly retro. It was just plain boring.

  I was perfectly aware I needed a replacement. My problem was finding a balance between the cars of my juvenile dreams, the kind of car that Thardoz would be impressed with, and the kind of car that would demonstrate my responsible nature to Jenny. What I needed was a cross between an Aston Martin, the Batmobile and a station wagon. What I wanted was the 1968 Karman Ghia that had been sitting, unloved, outside my local used Volkswagen dealer for too long. What I bought was a slightly used Ford Focus estate. Sure, it was dreary and responsible, but it had one of those devices where the car stereo gets louder in tandem with the engine’s revs, dictating that I could listen to ‘Life In The Fast Lane’ by The Eagles without the fast lane joining in on percussion. Not only that, I liked the noise that the indicator made.

  ‘You don’t want one of those classic cars, son,’ Norman, the avuncular sales assistant at Busseys, Norwich’s premier Ford dealer, had advised me. ‘You listen to your Uncle Norman. I’ve been working with Fords for forty years, and this is the best car they’ve made. You don’t want to go messing around at those second-hand dealers. I mean, do you want to spend half your time on the hard shoulders of motorways, mending fan belts?’

  ‘What’s a fan belt?’ I’d asked Uncle Norman.

  Once again, when it came to the crunch, I had let down my younger self, who would al
most certainly have plumped for the Karman Ghia. I felt bad about this to an extent, but that extent decreased somewhat as I realised my Ford Focus had dual beverage holders and a button which opened the boot from the interior. Besides, why should I owe my teenage self anything? Okay, so he’d done me a favour by dropping out of university after three months, but he’d worn shapeless clothes, listened to music that sounded like it had been recorded in a coal bunker, frequently chosen his friends and girlfriends badly, and made embarrassing pronouncements on the state of the universe.

  That said, even if I didn’t want to revisit the mindset of an early Nineties teenager, it was important that I got at least a vague insight into the thinking of his modern day equivalent. I owed Peter that much. Thus, as the day of our first expedition drew nearer, I began to venture tentatively into the unknown and research the very age group I was most afraid of: Generation Why, the even more confused and disenfranchised descendants of Generation X. From my local bookshop, I purchased Adolescence: The Survival Guide For Parents And Teenagers by Elizabeth Fenwick and Dr Tony Smith, a self-help book which gave useful yet temperate suggestions on how to deal with troublesome adolescents who did things like listen to techno music at unsociable volumes and moon over pictures of Christina Aguilera. From my local video shop, I hired the first five seasons of Buffy The Vampire Slayer. This gave me the opportunity to relearn the rules of teenage sarcasm, along with totally new phrases like ‘You’re giving me the wiggins’, ‘No biggie’, ‘Cutie patootie’ and ‘Wipe that face off your head, bitch’. From a satellite entertainment channel, I at last found out who mysteriously ubiquitous teen icons like Freddie Prinze Jr, Heath Ledger, Kirsten Dunst and Katie Holmes were. Finally, from my local record shop, I purchased a copy of Wheatus’s massive-selling single ‘Teenage Dirtbag’. To my astonishment, I discovered I quite liked it – even the bit at the end where the girl who sounds like a constipated witch starts singing. These were all important initial measures, since I sensed this adventure wasn’t going to be entirely about Peter’s education, but mine as well.