…So Adam gave us his cousin’s money – more money than I’d ever seen – and Macca and Dano couldn’t get out fast enough. It was only me and Adam in the room.
Your mates are leaving, he said. Even then I think he knew. He got the tape out the stereo. It was a mix he’d made for the trip down to London, but he was giving it to me. If I liked what was on it, he said, then I could come over another time and listen to more. My hands were probably dripping with sweat when I took it.
On the way home, despite the deal going well, Macca and Dano were pissed off. They were like, I bet he’s keeping them dildos for himself. And they hated his music, too. Shitty computer noise, they said. It wasn’t real. But it felt real to me. I kept touching the tape in my pocket to make sure I hadn’t dreamed it.
I’ve still got that tape. I listened to it tonight before I came here. It hurts to listen to it, but it’s still the realest thing anyone’s ever given me.
After Adam gave it to me, I listened to it for like two solid days, then rang him from the phone box. I kept hanging up after pressing the last number, pacing up and down, calling myself chickenshit. I only managed to call him in the end by pretending I wasn’t myself, and letting that person – whoever he was – take over. Adam picked up after half a ring. He sounded happy to hear from me, asked if I’d dug the tape. I said it was the best music I’d ever heard and he chuckled down the phone like a cartoon bear. In that case, he said, would I like to come down to London with him and his housemate JJ that Friday, to deliver the dildos? There might also be a party happening which would be up my street. I said yes before he’d even finished speaking, would’ve went with him to an asbestos disposal centre if he’d asked.
He was like, Sound, meet us outside the blocks Friday morning. And bring some of your ill-gotten gains.
I hung up and danced in that pissy phone box. I was ecstatic, but not entirely sure why. What did I want out of him then? Just a desire to be near him, I think. Have you ever felt that? To just, like, bask in a person? Like a lizard on a rock? The rest, whatever it was, I thought, would follow.
Friday morning, I told Mam I was staying at Dano’s. There was a double bill of Hammer Horrors on the telly and we were going to make a night of it. Innocent fun. I think she smelled a rat, but let it slide. We were all looking for chances to get out of the flat in them days.
They were waiting for me in Adam’s old Austin Metro. Adam driving, JJ in the passenger seat. It was my first time meeting her. When I’d been round the first time she’d been at work, and I didn’t know if she’d take to me, but she got out and jumped on me like I’d just come back from the war. She was like, Hi handsome, and sunk her teeth into my earlobe.
So there we were, the three of us, caning it down the A1, talking and laughing and listening to music the whole way, and I’m dead serious when I say they were already my best friends. I know what people think of me these days, what they say I’m capable of. But it’s not true. Adam and JJ – that’s what I’m capable of.
I’d never been to London before. Never thought a place could be so big. It didn’t seem to end – mile after mile of pent-up oomph. Like, take a bus, a train, a tube – rattle through the spark flashing dark – come back up, and London’s still there. It was hard to wrap my head around after a lifetime on the blocks.
Adam’s cousin was this fat bloke called Randall who wore clothes like my dad’s. His sex shop was through a beaded curtain, down steps so steep you needed the walls for balance. He sold tapes with bored women on the fronts, and loads of weird, black plastic gear. Catsuits, crotch-less keks, gasmask-things with balls that went in your gob. I remember this massive rubber arm-thing. Das Fist, it was called. I mean…who would – could – be into that? These things were simply not part of my world or vocabulary. Greasy-as blokes drifted about, studying merchandise and not looking at each other.
Randall started sorting through the dildos right there at the counter, and his eyes lit up when he saw that double-shafted one. Then he slipped Adam something: a tiny plastic bag that went straight into Adam’s pocket. I saw, but they didn’t see me see. But JJ, she did. She caught my eye from across the shop, where she was cruising the aisles and unnerving the creeps, and did that train-whistle thing with her arm. You know: Woo Woo.
When we left, Adam rang a number on a flier he’d picked up a few streets over from Randall’s sex pit. That was how you kept ahead of the police in them days, you rang a number what gave you a recorded message telling you the place to meet to get told where to go. Only I didn’t know that then. Then we lined our stomachs – hard for me to eat, I remember – got in the car, and headed for the orbital.
And you know when people say it’s not the destination, but the journey? Well that, like pretty much everything else people said to me in them days, didn’t used to make much sense. I’d never been on a journey before, but that night I finally got it. The motorway was rammed – a chain of red lights circling the city – and there we were, right there, part of it. People had their windows down to have a bit craic between cars, passing spliffs and cans. I felt like a traveller. England was just some other place that didn’t matter, different rules applied. Cars stopped at service stations and blasted music right on the forecourt. I remember one time we’d been at a rave somewhere out of St. Albans, where the generators had blown early, so on the way back everyone pulled into this multi-storey in Brent Cross and went mental until the sun came up. Adam liked to quote this thing Thatcher said – there is no such thing as society – and he’d be like, Fine by me, who fucking needs it? We’re going deeper. And at the time, I thought he was onto something.
But I’m getting ahead of myself. All that was later. That first night, when we were in the car, I was so nervous and excited. JJ leaned round to me in the back. She had a scar here, through her right eyebrow, where the hair wouldn’t grow.
You’re going to love this, Jim, she said. Then she kissed me gently on the lips. She tasted of fake strawberries and, of course, I got a hard on. I don’t know if she realised or not. She just laughed.
A long time later we got to the meeting place and word got round we had to go to some airstrip out by Maidenhead, and it was nearly midnight before we pulled into a field and I saw it for the first time. We parked at the top of a long hill rolling down into the dark landscape, and at the bottom was this hanger fifty times bigger than the warehouse we’d robbed the dildos from. Strobes lit the windows along the sides and coloured fog seeped across the ground. There were even fairground rides blazing away, but it was the music that was calling me, man – I could feel the low end even from where we were standing, and there were thousands of people just like me being drawn to it.
Adam gave me my ticket. He was like, Are you ready for this? And I totally, totally was. Once we got into the hanger, I flipped my wig. Like, I’d only ever heard acid on walkmans and crappy stereos, so I wasn’t prepared for that sound system. It broke me. Seriously, nowt had ever been that loud. People everywhere just going for it, and I was like, this is it – the pure strain of what I hadn’t known even belonged to me. Adam put a pill in my hand. He swallowed one with a sip of water, JJ too. I didn’t understand, but necked it anyway. Forgot about it instantly.
Later on – I don’t know when, I didn’t care about time – I started feeling it. This lightness in my stomach, sort of wings brushing my insides. Everything ratcheting up inside me, around me. My vision going at the edges and a feeling of love expanding outwards. This love and beauty that was entirely new to me, that mixed with the music and became the music. All these people I didn’t know, but did know, you know? I wanted to tell them all I loved them, and that I knew they loved me too. And I thought, Where’s this come from? But the question didn’t matter either. All that mattered was I wanted to dance. I’d been shot into the eye of the universe. Gone. Poof. I’d lost Adam and JJ but I didn’t care. Problems melted away. Faces came and went, and I kept dancing. Then we found ea
ch other in a crowd of thousands, just like I knew we would, because the universe knew we were connected. We were young and free and part of this, and it was never going to end. Adam had more pills, and we did them.
At some point, the sun came up and mist rolled over the fields. This heaviness starting to slink up, and I could feel myself dipping into the reality of who’s and where’s. I couldn’t control my jaw and I needed to sit. JJ sat next to me, wrapped arms around me. I told her I loved her and she squeezed my neck. We stumbled to the car. Being out in the cool morning brought us all down and made talking difficult. The car was freezing. Adam drove hunched over the wheel, gurning and silent in the slow-crawl back to the road. Every cell of my body vibrated and, like, I felt something monumental had just happened, but it was too big – I was too close – for it to make sense.
It took yonks to get back to London. We pulled up next to this tower block that vaguely reminded me of some other place I knew. Adam had a key to Randall’s flat and we took the lift up, let ourselves in, nobody saying nowt. We took our clothes off in the spare room and all three of us got into bed, shivering in our keks. I lay there, breathing. My hard on was pressed against Adam’s leg but he didn’t move. Nobody moved and slowly, whatever passed for my mind drifted away…
We drove back up to Teesside the next day and when I saw Asquith House rising out of the grey, I felt like I was being driven to the noose. It was real now, the hatred I felt for the place, now I knew what else was out there. It wasn’t just a comedown I was experiencing, it was the reorganisation of my world.
I started spending more and more time round Adam and JJ’s. We’d get pissed and listen to music, but we didn’t drop that much. Back then, pills were well expensive, a tenner or more – a 1989 tenner – and we were all pretty skint. I was eking out my dildo money, using it for our London trips, clubs and raves. I started wearing baggy, florescent clothes. Mam used to knit these proper day-glow mind-bending jumpers that were perfect. I even got her to do Adam and JJ some. Stuff like that felt good to wear, like my uniform – the first time in my life I’d ever wanted to wear one, though it didn’t go down well in the blocks. Like, some scunner sees you in your Global Hypercolour or whatever, and that was all it took for them to start. You had to not take the bait, though, because once you did you were on their terms. Still, I got brayed a few times and I started thinking, How can this place even exist? These blocks, this estate – they were cancer. Soul rot, man. Why didn’t people see? Why weren’t they picking up sledgehammers and bringing it all down? What was wrong with the world?
Then Dad started reading about it in the papers. Acid Monsters. Evil drug pushers beastifying kids with their tablets and powders. Inhuman, repetitive music brutalising the senses. Mass orgies of teenage flesh in abandoned fertilizer factories. Fucking ecstasy wrappers littering hard concrete floors. Twitching youth left for dead with foam on their lips. Torn, bloody underwear. Sodomised. He’d slap the headlines with the back of his hairy hand: Crazed Acid Mob Attacks Police, and he’d be like, Where are the parents, eh? What’s wrong with the world?
Druggy scum. Aye, that’s what he’d say – druggy scum. Blah blah blah, druggy scum. Blah blah blah, no discipline. Blah blah blah, bring back conscription, send them over to Ireland, let the IRA sort them out. When he went off like that, I’d go to my room and chew the duvet.
Another thing was, it was getting harder and harder to think up excuses for my weekends away, why I shambled home Sunday nights like something out of a George A. Romero film. I told my parents I was pulling nightshifts at the post office depot over in Cannon Park, sorting out the week’s backlog. Told them it was easier to crash at a mate’s who lived nearby, rather than drag myself all the way home for a few hours kip between shifts. They seemed to buy it. Mam would even do me some bait on the Friday, which we’d eat on the drive down to London.
But Cor was too sharp. She collared me one night and said she knew what I was up to. I was like, So what? What’s your point? She didn’t like it, she said, any of it – the music, the people, the drugs. Alive had got into Acid in a big way, she said. Now whenever she went round all he did was mix acid records and bang on about the parties he’d been to, how battered he’d got. It was boring-as, she said. He’d dragged her to Peel House and everyone was battered. Big, black, possessed eyes. She hadn’t been able to breathe. Alive tried getting her to drop an E, but she was like, Fuck that. Said it made her puke to see him turn from the kind, sweet person she knew into a clammy zombie. He was on E all the time now. She was like, I just want you to be safe. But secretly, her worry pleased me. This was my thing. The first thing of mine she didn’t understand and hadn’t beaten me to.
Man, I’m definitely coming up now…
So anyway, one night me, Mam, and Dad were sitting watching the telly, when there was a knock at the door. It was Adam. He’d dyed his hair spaceman silver. He was like, Hey, I was just in the neighbourhood and thought I’d pop up to say hello.
Mam invited him in, and as soon as I saw his eyes I knew he was battered.
Dad eyed him suspiciously. He wanted to know who he was, and Adam was like, Oh I’m sorry, so rude of me. I’m Adam, I’m a friend of your son’s. We work together at the depot sorting through all that mail. He’s a great lad. You’ve done a smashing job raising that one.
Mam asked if he wanted a cup of tea, but I was already guiding him into my room.
He collapsed on my bed, laughing, and there was no point getting pissed off because it wouldn’t have got through to him, and, in truth, I was ecstatic he wanted to see me. He said, I’m hurt – I’ve dropped you off so many times and you’ve never once invited me up. He lay on my bed with a spaced-out smile on his face, and I was embarrassed because I still had posters on my walls, stuff like the Middlesbrough team, and the Pixies, what Trace had ripped out of an NME for me after I’d pretended I liked them.
There was a stack of videos on the dresser next to my bed. Taped off TV mostly, but a few from Oxfam. Adam read the spines.
You like spooky films? he said.
I shrugged. I guess.
You don’t have to be like that with me, Jim. I like them too. What’s your favourite?
Frankenstein, probably.
Adam stuck his arms in the air and groaned, Urrrrrrr. Me and JJ just watched one on the telly the other night. Fuck, what was it called?
I’d watched it too. The Revenge of Frankenstein, I said. A Hammer Horror.
Yeah! The Revenge of Frankenstein. Fuck me, man.
I told him I wasn’t so keen on the Hammer Frankensteins because they focused too much on the creator, Victor. I liked the old Universal ones best, the early ones. They were about the monster – I told him I called the monster Frankenstein – this poor fucker who’s been created and rejected and hated and doesn’t know why. All he wants is a home, someone what loves him.
Adam’s eyes on mine. Frankenstein, he said. See, he’s proof.
Of what?
That we’re all part of the same consciousness. Victor made a vessel to receive it, and the universe obliged – poured it right in. The way I see it, Victor and Frankenstein were both part of the same life force, right? But Victor’s closed himself off from that knowledge and Frankenstein, see, Frankenstein the monster, he doesn’t know either, only for a different reason. He’s not in denial like Victor, he’s just been born and got nobody to show him how things really are. And that’s when the world starts fucking with his head.
He ran a fingernail gently down my tapes. Frankenstein should’ve given them all some pills, he said. Things would’ve have worked out a lot differently.
He patted my single bed for me to lie with him. I did, though not without difficulty. Up close his eyes were like well holes. He whispered, I just want to say that I’m so fucking glad we met. I love you, Jim Jams. But you knew that already, didn’t you?
I was flat on my back and Adam was on his sid
e, facing me. His hand moved down my chest and I can still feel that hand, still cold from the outside. It moved down my belly, both of us taking shallow silvery breaths. He brushed my dick through my jeans and I didn’t move, couldn’t move. I’d never wanted anybody so badly, even though I knew that once I had him, things would never be the same, and that that was maybe what I wanted most of all. He kissed me…his lips were as cold as his hands, but warming, and it’s always a shock to me how soft other people are. You forget. I inhaled him, tried to make him part of me as he undid my jeans. I didn’t know what to do. I went to touch him but he said, Don’t, this is for you. He slipped down to the bottom of the bed, pulling my jeans and boxers off in one fluid move. The bed springs were proper creaking and I was worried people could hear. I closed my eyes as I felt his lips on my ankle – quick pecks that made tiny smacking sounds as they moved up the inside of my leg. I was falling in all directions at once. Then he stopped. I looked down and he was staring up at me, my twitching dick an inch from his lips…and then I felt his tongue…
Sorry, I’ll stop there. I’ve got a habit of oversharing when I’m coming up. But do you know what that’s like? To be with someone like that? It’s been twenty-five year and I haven’t forgotten a second, not of anything that happened that year, though the further away I drift from the person Adam kissed on that bed, the harder it is to tell myself it really happened at all. But then, that’s normal, isn’t it? Isn’t that everyone?
After that night, I wanted more. More of him, more everything. I wasn’t thinking about jobs, or the blocks, or the estate. I didn’t care, I’d escaped. Word got round, though, and one day as I was heading over to Adam and JJ’s, I bumped into Macca and them. They were drinking cider round the rec. centre, sitting lined up against the wall like derelicts.
Trace was like, Why’d you ditch us, eh?
I said I hadn’t, but I suppose I had.
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