That brings me to today, and to the third item in my education, my university, you might say, and that’s the jazz clubs. Now, you can think what you like about the art of jazz – quite frankly, I don’t really care what you think, because jazz is a thing so wonderful that if anybody doesn’t rave about it, all you can feel for them is pity: not that I’m making out I really understand it all – I mean, certain LPs leave me speechless. But the great thing about the jazz world, and all the kids that enter into it, is that no one, not a soul, cares what your class is, or what your race is, or what your income, or if you’re boy, or girl, or bent, or versatile, or what you are – so long as you dig the scene and can behave yourself, and have left all that crap behind you, too, when you come in the jazz club door. The result of all this is that, in the jazz world, you meet all kinds of cats, on absolutely equal terms, who can clue you up in all kinds of directions – in social directions, in culture directions, in sexual directions, and in racial directions … in fact, almost anywhere, really, you want to go to learn. So that’s why, when the teenage thing began to seem to me to fall into the hands of exhibitionists and moneylenders, I cut out gradually from the kiddo waterholes, and made it for the bars, and clubs, and concerts where the older numbers of the jazz world gathered.
But this particular evening, I had to call at a teenage hut inside Soho, in order to contact two of my models, by names Dean Swift and the Misery Kid. Now, about Soho, there’s this, that although so much crap’s written about the area, of all London quarters, I think it’s still one of the most authentic. I mean, Mayfair is just top spivs stepping into the slippers of the former gentry, and Belgravia, like I’ve said, is all flats in houses built as palaces, and Chelsea – well! Just take a look yourself, next time you’re there. But in Soho, all the things they say happen, do: I mean, the vice of every kink, and speakeasies and spielers and friends who carve each other up, and, on the other hand, dear old Italians and sweet old Viennese who’ve run their honest, unbent little businesses there since the days of George six, and five, and backward far beyond. And what’s more, although the pavement’s thick with tearaways, provided you don’t meddle it’s really a much safer area than the respectable suburban fringe. It’s not in Soho a sex maniac leaps out of a hedge onto your back and violates you. It’s in the dormitory sections.
The coffee spot where I hoped I’d find my two duets was of the kind that’s now the chicest thing to date among the juniors – namely, the pigsty variety, and adolescent bum’s delight. I don’t exaggerate, as you’ll see. What you do is, rent premises that are just as dear as any other, rip up the linos and tear out the nice fittings if there happen to be any, put in thick wood floors and tables, and take special care not to wipe the cups properly, or sweep the butts and crusts and spittle off the floor. Candles are a help or, at a pinch, non-pearl 40-watt blue bulbs. And a jukebox just for decoration, as it’s considered rather naïve to use one in these places.
This example was called Chez Nobody, and sure enough, sitting far apart from each other at distant tables, were the Dean and the Misery Kid. Though both are friends of mine, and, in a way, even friends of each other, these two don’t mix in public, on account of the Dean being a sharp modern jazz creation, and the Kid just a skiffle survival, with horrible leanings to the trad. thing. That is to say, the Kid admires the groups that play what is supposed to be the authentic music of old New Orleans, i.e. combos of booking office clerks and quantity-surveyors’ assistants who’ve handed in their cards, and dedicated themselves to blowing what they believe to be the same note as the wonderful Creoles who invented the whole thing, when it all long ago began.
If you know the contemporary scene, you could tell them apart at once, just like you could a soldier or sailor, with their separate uniforms. Take first the Misery Kid and his trad. drag. Long, brush-less hair, white stiff-starched collar (rather grubby), striped shirt, tie of all one colour (red today, but it could have been royal-blue or navy), short jacket but an old one (somebody’s riding tweed, most likely), very, very, tight, tight, trousers with wide stripe, no sox, short boots. Now observe the Dean in the modernist number’s version. College-boy smooth crop hair with burnt-in parting, neat white Italian rounded-collared shirt, short Roman jacket very tailored (two little vents, three buttons), no-turn-up narrow trousers with 17-inch bottoms absolute maximum, pointed-toe shoes, and a white mac lying folded by his side, compared with Misery’s sausage-rolled umbrella.
Compare them, and take your pick! I would add that their chicks, if present, would match them up with: trad. boy’s girl – long hair, untidy with long fringes, maybe jeans and a big floppy sweater, maybe bright-coloured never-floralled, never-pretty dress … smudged-looking’s the objective. Modern jazz boy’s girl – short hemlines, seamless stockings, pointed-toed high-heeled stiletto shoes, crêpe nylon rattling petticoat, short blazer jacket, hair done up into the elfin style. Face pale – corpse colour with a dash of mauve, plenty of mascara.
I sat down just beside the Misery Kid, who was eating a gateau and had everything horrible about him, spotty, unpressed, unlaundered, but with the loveliest pair of eyes you ever saw, brown and funny and appealing, I can only say, not that the Kid ever asks you for anything, as he only speaks in sentences of four words at his most voluble.
‘Evening, Kid,’ I said. ‘There’s been a small disaster.’
He just gazed like a fish: brows up, but not really curious.
‘You recollect the snaps I took of you as the poet Chatterton with your bird as your Inspiration in some nylon net?’
‘So?’ said the Kid.
‘It’s all right, my client’s not bounced the order, but I’ve developed the stuff, and your chick came out too indistinct by far.’
‘She not meant so?’
‘She’s meant to be vague, Misery Kid, but she’s meant to be visible behind that nylon net. Well? I expect she must have moved.’
‘You pay us for a second take?’
‘Certainly, Mr Bolden. But I can’t pay for anything till I give the prints to Mr X-Y-Z.’
‘Who he?’
‘The client.’
The Misery Kid picked his nose and said, ‘This client no deposit?’
‘No. We’ve just got to do it all again, Mr Kid, to get our money. Can you raise your partner?’
‘I dunno I know,’ he said. ‘Bell me tonight, I tell you.’
He got up, not showing his feelings, which was really rather heroic, because here was this trad. child, alone among the teenagers, in the days of prosperity, still living like a bum and a bohemian, skint and possibly even hungry, but still not arguing about the loot. If he’d argued, he’d have got some out of me, but to argue when the dirt dropped down on your head was contrary to his whole trad. ideology. As the Misery Kid passed by the Dean on his way out, Dean Swift looked up and hissed at him, ‘Fascist!’ which the Kid ignored. These modern jazz boys certainly do feel strongly about the trad. reaction.
The Dean came over and sat down with me. I should explain I haven’t seen the Dean for several weeks, although he’s my favourite and most successful model. The Dean’s speciality’s an unusual one, which is posing always fully dressed, and yet, somehow, managing to look pornographic. Don’t ask me how! In the studio, exactly when he shouted out, ‘Now!’ I throw the switch, though he looks quite ordinary to me, and then, behold! when he’s developed, there he is – indecent. Snaps of the Dean sell like hot ice-cream among vintage women with too many bosoms and time on their hands, and even my Ma, when she saw some photos of him was impressed – he looks so damn available, the Dean does. She actually asked to meet him, but Dean Swift is not interested in this, the chief reason being that he’s a junkie.
If you have a friend who’s a junkie, like I have the Dean, you soon discover there’s no point whatever discussing his addiction. It’s as senseless as discussing love, or religion, or things you only feel if you feel them, because the Dean, and I suppose all his fellow junkies, is convinced that this
is ‘a mystic way of life’ (the Dean’s own words), and you and I, who don’t jab hot needles in our arms, are just going through life missing absolutely everything worthwhile in it. The Dean always says, life’s just kicks. Well, I agree with him, so it is, but personally, it seems to me the big kick you should try to get by how you live it sober. But tell that to the Dean!
Why I’d not recently seen him, is that he’d until then been away inside. This has fairly often happened to the Dean, owing to his breaking into chemists’ shops, and as he suffers a lot when he’s cut off from the world and all it gives in there, he doesn’t like you to refer to it when he emerges. At the same time, he does like you to say you’re glad to see him once again, so it’s all a trifle dicey.
‘Hail, squire,’ I said. ‘Long time no see. How is you are we? Won’t you say tell?’
The Dean smiled in his world-weary way. ‘Doesn’t this place stink?’ he said to me.
‘Well certainly, Dean Swift, it does, but do you mean its air, or just its atmosphere?’
‘The both. The only civilised thing about it,’ the Dean continued, ‘is that they let you sit here, when you’re skint.’
The Dean gazed round at the teenage products like a concentration camp exterminator. I should explain the Dean, though only just himself an ex-teenager, has sad valleys down his cheeks, and wears a pair of steel-rimmed glasses (which he takes off for our posing sessions), so that his Dean-look is habitually sour and solemn. (The Swift part of the thing comes from his rapid disappearance at the approach of any cowboys. You’re talking to him and then, tick-tock! he’s vanished.) I could see that now the Dean, as usual when skinned and vicious, was going to engage in his favourite theme, i.e. the horror of teenagers. ‘Look at the beardless microbes!’ he exclaimed, loud enough for everyone to hear. ‘Look at the pram products at their plotting and their planning!’
And, as a matter of fact, you could see what he meant, because to see the kids hunched over the tables it did look as if some conspiracy was afoot to slay the elder brethren and majorities. And when I’d paid, and we went out in the roads, even here in this Soho, the headquarters of the adult mafia, you could everywhere see the signs of the un-silent teenage revolution. The disc shops with those lovely sleeves set in their windows, the most original thing to come out in our lifetime, and the kids inside them purchasing guitars, or spending fortunes on the songs of the Top Twenty. The shirt-stores and bra-stores with ciné-star photos in the window, selling all the exclusive teenage drag I’ve been describing. The hairstyle saloons where they inflict the blow-wave torture on the kids for hours on end. The cosmetic shops – to make girls of seventeen, fifteen, even thirteen, look like pale rinsed-out sophisticates. Scooters and bubble-cars driven madly down the roads by kids who, a few years ago, were pushing toy ones on the pavement. And everywhere you go the narrow coffee bars and darkened cellars with the kids packed tight, just whispering, like bees inside the hive waiting for a glorious queen bee to appear.
‘See what I mean,’ the Dean said.
And the chicks, round the alleys, on that summer afternoon! Heavens, each year the teenage dream-girl has grown younger, and now, there they were, like children that’ve dressed up in their fashionable aunties’ sharpest clothes – and suddenly you realise that it’s not a game, and that these chicks mean business, and that it’s not so much you, one of the boys, they aim their persons at, as their sheer, sweet, energetic legs walk down the pavement three by three, but no, at quite adult numbers, quite mature things, at whose eyes they shoot confident, proud looks there’s no mistaking.
‘Little madams,’ said the Dean.
‘There you go!’ I answered.
Here Dean Swift stopped us in his tracks.
‘I tell you,’ he said, pulling his US-striped and rear-buckled cap down over his eyes, ‘I tell you something. These teenagers are ceasing to be rational, thinking, human beings, and turning into mindless butterflies. And they’re turning into butterflies all of the same size and colour, that have to flutter round exactly the same flowers, on exactly the same gardens. Yes!’ he exclaimed at a group of kiddos coming clicking, cracking, prattling by. ‘You’re nothing but a bunch of butterflies!’
But the kidettes took no notice of the Dean whatever, because just at that moment … there! in his hand-styled car with his initials in its number, there sped by the newest of the teenage singing raves, with beside him his brother, and his composer, and his chicklet, and his Personal Manager, so that all that was missing was his Mum. And the kids waved, and the young Pied Piper waved his free hand back, and everyone for a few seconds was latched on to the glory.
‘Singer!’ cried the Dean out after him. ‘Har, Har!’
He was standing out there in the road, gesticulating at the departing vehicle. Abruptly, though, he sheered off at an angle, and I had to catch him up across the way. He looked back over his neck, gripped my arm, and hurried on. ‘Cowboys,’ he explained.
I looked back too. ‘They didn’t seem to me like cowboys,’ I told the Dean.
But to tell him this, was like telling some expert in Hatton Garden that you don’t think that stone there is a diamond.
‘I tell you this,’ the Dean said fiercely. ‘I can smell a copper in the dark, a hundred feet away, blindfolded. And anyway,’ he continued pityingly, ‘didn’t you see those two were dressed in casual clothes, but with their shoes mended?’
That clinched the matter for the Dean.
‘You don’t like coppers, do you,’ I said to him.
The Dean paused on his tracks. ‘The only good thing about the bastards,’ he said gently, ‘is that they’ve all got themselves together into the same cowboy force. Just imagine what the world would be if monsters like them were out among the rest of us, without a label!’
The poor old Dean! He really hates the law although, unlike most that do, he doesn’t fear it, really doesn’t, though he’s been given the matchbox treatment on more than one night occasion. Of course, all the jobs he’s ever done have brought him into conflict with the cowboys – e.g. faith-healer, dance-hall instructor, club escort, property consultant and old-lady sitter.
We’d now reached a street down near ‘the Front’, as the girls on the game call the thoroughfare, and here the Dean whispered, ‘I must have a fix very shortly, and I need a new whosit for my whatsit.’ So we went into a chemist’s shop nearby.
Behind the counter was a female case who didn’t like the appearance of the Dean, and went into that routine that shopkeepers have perfected in the kingdom, that is, to get on the busy thing and bustle about with very necessary tasks, and when you cough or something, look up as if you’d broken into their private bedroom. And when they speak, they use a new kind of ‘politeness’ that’s very common in our city, i.e. to say kind and courteous words, with a bitchy edge of nastiness, so they disarm you as they beat you down. To open the thing, of course, she asked us, ‘Can I help you?’
Ah! but in the Dean she’d met her equal, because he has perfected, and almost patented, a style of being terribly polite in a way that doesn’t mean a thing, and is in fact a mockery of the person he’s polite to, though not easy for them to pin down, because the Dean acts so serious and earnest they couldn’t quite make up their minds if it was sarcasm.
‘Yes, Mad-ahm!’ he answered, ‘you certainly can help me, if you please, and if I’m not taking up too much of your time.’
And then they began their duel of politeness, their eyes blazing hatred at each other, and there you are, I thought, that’s what happens when people grow to think that politeness, which is so lovely, is a form of weakness. And when the Dean had succeeded in luring the old slut to get out all sorts of products he didn’t really need at all, he suddenly said, ‘Thank you, Mad-ahm, so much,’ and dipped his cap at her and went out in the sun saying, ‘One of the fellow sufferers at the Dubious will lend me what I need.’
The Dubious, I should explain, is of all the drinking clubs that fester in Soho, the one that’s
in fashion just at present with the sharper characters, and there, sure enough, when I came in with the Dean, I saw, among others, Mr Call-me-Cobber, and his friend the ex-Deb-of-Last-Year: he being a telly personality from the outer colonies, and she one who slipped effortlessly off the pages of the weekly social glossies on to those of the monthly fashion ones. As a matter of fact, the ex-Deb’s rather nice in a hunt ball way, but the same cannot be said of Call-me-Cobber, who really flogs that dinkum Aussie thing too hard, though on the telly screen it looks terrific, so sincere.
While the Dean went rambling off into dark corners, I snapped this drunken loving couple, propping my Rolleiflex upon the bar.
‘Oh, hullo, reptile,’ said the ex-Deb, ‘perhaps you can help my paramour with his new series.’
‘It’s called,’ the Cobber said, ‘Lorn Lovers, and we’re looking for persons deeply in love who fate has sundered.’
‘You’re too young for tears, I suppose,’ the ex-Deb said to me, ‘but maybe among your somewhat older companions …?’
I nominated the Hoplite as Lorn Lover of the year.
‘And who’s he in love with?’ Call-me-Cobber asked. ‘We want to confront the frantic pair in front of the cameras, without either knowing beforehand what’s going to hit them.’
‘He’s in love with an American,’ I said.
‘A good angle, though we’ll have to pay the fee in dollars … Yes, confront the pair of them, and get them in a clinch.’
‘It’ll be sensational,’ I said.
‘His trouble,’ said the ex-Deb, pointing a princess-size cigarette-holder at her lover, ‘is his success. Ever since that fabulous series on the Angries, when the thing first broke, they expect the highest from him.’
Absolute Beginners Page 7