Dirty Work

by Bull, Rod;

  Riff Raff

  There were a lot of Irish in the building trade in London. It was fun working with them. They could always make a joke of situations. After work was the problem for me, trying to keep up with their drinking twenty to thirty pints of Guinness a night. I would get to about five pints and have to slow down. They thought I was trying to stay sober so that I could trick them into something. I could hardly walk, let alone think—I was basically just trying to stay alive.

  One morning my boss told me to start taking out the stairs. The stairs came out quite quickly, leaving just the landing. There was a toilet on the landing. We went outside for a smoke. Suddenly we heard shouting and screaming. Running inside, there was the plumber lying inside on the rubble. He had been shooting up in the landing toilet, fallen asleep, and waking up half asleep opened the door, to step into thin air, cursing us as he fell. But luckily he wasn’t hurt.

  The building trade was the home of a lot of misfits, artists, druggies, bums, and writers. This seemed to be where I belonged. It was the only way a lot of these blokes could make a halfway decent living, but also very difficult to leave. As my boss would say, the creeping malaise. I was always looking for a way out.

  Mike Lonergan was one of my first real teachers. He was also my boss. Mike’s business was construction. I was still struggling with Gurdjieff’s All and Everything. I just did not get a lot of it. Talking to Mike after work in the pub one day, he asked if I was interested in esoterica. Not knowing what he meant, I just shrugged and mumbled something about Gurdjieff.

  “Ah,” he said, “Now there’s a conscious man. His work is all about being present. At the end of the day, look back at what you have done. This will show you how present you have been.”

  This sounded a little depressing to me, as I spend a lot of time redoing what I have done. In fact, the present was drifting away fast as the pints kept flowing. Suddenly, Mike said, “Let’s go to the 007 Room at the Hilton.” Having little money and looking pretty shitty, I was against the idea.

  “It’s dark in there, and I’ll pay,” he said.

  Among Victoriana, the Hilton stuck out like a sore thumb on Hyde Park Corner; judging by the way the waiter treated us, we must have also. Mike immediately ordered champagne, saying something about the people being a bunch of stuck-up twits who go home to poached eggs and baked beans, and he could earn more in a day than they could in a month. At the same time he was having a gander at two birds sitting at the bar.

  “They’re whores,” he said. “Let’s see what they’ve got.” He waved for them to come over. They looked a little reluctant—quite rightly so. Have some champagne, Mike was saying. The girls sat down. Right away, Mike started talking to the better looking of the two, saying the other was mine. Great. “Let’s have a look, then,” Mike was saying, trying to open the girl’s dress. Suddenly she jumped up and slapped his face. “What’s the matter?” Mike said, “Have you ever bought anything you haven’t seen?” That did it. They were off, with Mike in hot pursuit.

  By this time, I was pretty pissed. Falling asleep, my head on the table, I must have had a bad dream. I woke up with a jolt, looking around: no Mike, no girls, nobody. I had an uneasy feeling something was wrong. I waited a while. Still no Mike. Leaving stuff on the table, I headed for the toilets, came out and started down the stairs. Suddenly there was a hand on my shoulder. “Excuse me, sir, but there is the matter of the bill.” “What bill?” I asked. “I didn’t order anything.” “You were with the gentleman who ordered the champagne.”

  Lying through my teeth, I said I’d never seen him before; he just asked me to have a drink with him. The bill was around $60.00. I had $8.

  “Here, have this,” I said, shoving the money into his hand. They wanted to call the police, but the manager was against this. Maybe it was the whores he was worried about.

  “If I were you, Sonny, I would not go drinking with strange men. Get out and don’t come back here again! Bugger off.”

  I asked Mike the next day, “What the fuck was that all about?”

  “Oh, I just wanted to see if you could get out of it,” he said. I told him he owed me $20, so I made a bit on the deal. Mike was saying you have to deal with every situation and learn something from it. He was always intimidated by fancy places, so he was trying to use these situations to see that part of himself. A side effect to this was that he developed a limp.

  Trying to change something without a real understanding of it just turns it into something else, he was saying. This all sounded brilliant, but a little beyond my awareness level at this point. I was still having trouble getting out of bed.

  Sex

  No Manhire in the phonebook, so I took a chance, taking the tube to Belsize Park. She used to live in the house next to the station. Looking at the names on the bells, there was Stella DeQuincy. Then I remembered she had changed her name. I felt awkward ringing the bell. What would I do if she was there, what would I say? It was about five years since I had seen her! Suddenly, the door opened, and there was Stella, as beautiful as ever.

  “You have not changed,” she said. “Come in.”

  We started up the long flight of stairs to her flat on the top floor. I remembered crawling up these stairs drunk many years ago! She made some tea, and we started talking, as if nothing had happened. “What have you been doing?” she asked.

  “Trying to make some sense of my life,” I replied. “I was hoping you could help me. You were always telling me I was looking for somebody. You gave me that sci-fi book to read. What were you trying to tell me? By the way, do you still have a copy? But first, why did you change your name? Were the fuzz after you?”

  “I had to make a clean break,” she said.

  “What about Chris? What’s he doing, where is he?”

  “He’s in India with another woman,” Stella said. “He’s studying with some guru bloke, Bagwan Sri Rajneesh, I think.” Hearing this, I felt a little better. After all my spying, wheeling and dealing, I had felt guilty about the whole plot to get Stella back by devious means.

  Another reason for changing her name, to my mind, was that she was very beautiful, and with a name like Manhire, she took a lot of hits. I was also relieved Chris had a new girlfriend and guru. Funny how things go ‘round, from gunrunning to guru!

  Maybe Stella and I could start again, but something was holding me back. I had a lot more searching to do, gurus, teachers to find. I didn’t want to drag Stella into this; it wasn’t her thing.

  I started looking around her room. There were the same pictures, photos, furniture; nothing had changed. Stella had gone for cigarettes and wine, the ultimate set up! Sex was in the air. It always amazed me how easy and natural sex was between us, no forcing or imagination was needed, just pure sex!

  Sure enough, after we finished the wine, passion took over, until we lay limp, molded together, motionless, until the cigarette that starts the questioning was lit. Slowly the probing began.

  “What did you mean by giving me that sci-fi book to read?”

  “Nothing really. Just that you seem to be in the same kind of mission search as the character in the story, looking for something, somebody. Now I remember how the book ends.”

  Stella went on to describe the ending. The hero is sitting on the bench trying to record the changing visions, when everything vanishes. At this point he catches sight of the being he is tracking! How could this being look like me? he was thinking, at the same time fiddling with his camera to see if any images from his past encounter had recorded. Nothing, just a faint image of the man he was chasing, or was it his own image? Things were getting more confusing. Who was he tracking? His other self, ultra ego, his double-who? There was something about it he did not like.

  What had actually happened, when he was a guinea pig for the power ring? Fragments of recording were still on his wrist video camera, going back several years. Images were flickering in and out; protons, electrons, pi mesons, and quarks were stacking up in certain ways. Depend
ing on which way they came together and lined up, matter was formed or not. This all happened in a random fashion, as if there was no difference if matter formed or not. The hero suddenly realized what this meant. It did not matter if we were here or not. But if we ARE here, then seeing how matter forms, universes could not be controlled and expanded the way this power elite wanted. He must have seen this for them; they must have been keeping him alive to get more information out of him. But the smugglers had gotten him first, thinking they could use him as a hostage after their getaway and ship malfunction. Then deciding he was of no use anymore and left him for dead.

  He felt fury burning in him, but what to do? Could he somehow stop these people? Maybe he could give this information to a more compassionate group, so that no one group would have ultimate power?

  Stella stopped there. “I think that’s what he ended up doing, and somehow, you are looking for a situation like that.” It certainly rang bells for me, having been in groups that felt they had the ultimate answer. What about all that other stuff that was going on, like seeing his double? It was all to do with him being in a state of primordial awareness, the ability to see other beings. Actually, these beings were projections of his own true nature. Most likely his sickness and near-death experience brought him into this awareness, along with becoming fragmented from the balls up! This must have made him see that he did not exist as a solid form. Only when certain conditions are present does form become apparent.

  Stella said that different beings see things in different ways, just as in high-energy physics: things are altered by the way one looks at them.

  This was all fine and dandy, but how did it relate to me? Did Stella think I was some kind of space cadet, zooming all over looking for bad blokes? It all seemed a bit over the top! Certainly working with the Tibetan tulkus gave me glimpses of those other worlds. I would find out later how this applied to me.

  I would see Stella a few more times before taking off on my search again, not knowing if I was running away from her love or if we stifled ourselves with love. Or was I just a space cadet chasing my shadow?

  Esoteric Ideas

  If you want to find out anything in England, go to the pub. Actually, I rarely left, usually starting off around 11 a.m. and going in a circular motion. Arriving at a watering holes one day, I met this geezer, and we started to rabbit. He waxed a bit mystical, raving away about the Epic of Gilgamesh, the Tales of Mullah Nassrudin, and Mount. Analog. These were all brilliant esoteric teachings.

  Gurdjieff uses quotes from Nassrudin to show people where they are stuck. One of the stories goes something like this: One day Nassrudin loses his house key. His neighbor is passing by, and asks what he is doing. “Looking for my house key,” Nassrudin replies. Where did you lose it? “Over there,” he says. Then why are you looking for it here? “There’s better light here,” replies Nassrudin.

  We often look in the wrong places. My new friend started to tell me about a Gurdjieff group in Holland Park, where they did the Gurdjieff dances. “It’s on Addison Crescent—the house has a domed building at the back.” This got me going. Maybe I could get to the bottom of this Gurdjieff thing. By this time I had had way too much booze. Maybe just one more would bring enlightenment and a breakthrough to another dimension. Of course, the opposite happened, but somehow the Gurdjieff group thing stuck.

  Holland Park was a place where I would pass out if I had nowhere to stay. As it happens, that’s where I woke up the next morning, with a jolt. Some geese were passing by, squawking. I must have been in their flight path. Slowly, last night’s ravings came back. Addison Crescent was just down the road, so I thought I would do a bit of spying and find the place with the dome in the back. But thinking that anyone would be around at 6:00 a.m. was a bit daft. Time for a cuppa.

  I returned around nine, ringing the bell. Some bird came to the door and told me I would have to write a letter, listing reasons why I wanted to join this group. This seemed a bit off, but maybe I didn’t look too hot, somewhat like a tramp. This was not what I had expected, and it came as a bit of a shock. I wondered if this was a way of trying to get rid of people. Later I found out this was their way of sorting people out.

  I opted for a different approach, thinking I should try to find out a bit about some of the groups. Watkins Book Store in Cecil Court was a place where strange-looking people gathered. The store had a large array of esoteric books. When Mr. Watkins was in the shop alone, I plucked up courage and asked him if he knew of any groups. He was very direct for an old, frail man. “What is it you want? What are you looking for?” This took me back a bit, so I stammered out some of Gurdjieff’s ideas. “There are different groups—Gurdjieff, Ouspensky, Nicoll,” he said abruptly. This sent me into a tailspin. I had better find out a bit more about this, at least read some of the books. I bought Ouspensky’s In Search of the Miraculous, thanked Mr. Watkins, and left.

  Certainly, reading Nicoll and Ouspensky helped me understand Gurdjieff’s ideas a bit better. But why was Gurdjieff himself making it so hard to understand? To make you think! Dig deeper, ponder, reason, go crazy, push buttons—maybe all those things. But alarm bells rang over something Gurdjieff called Chief Feature, a particular aspect of one’s nature that rules your life, making you do the same things over and over. He would often say that other people could see this, but we could not. This was something I could definitely relate to, with my continuing string of dirty jobs. Was this what Shakespeare meant by “the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune” and “by opposing, end them?”

  First you have to recognize this Chief Feature. Gurdjieff used some pretty radical ways to show people. He also talked about traditional ways of waking up: conscious labours and intentional suffering, with the problem being that people start to enjoy their suffering. The realization of one’s own death was one of the few things left to wake people up, he said. This all sounded a bit gloomy, but I think it was the shock factor that he was getting at, getting people to really look at themselves without holding back. I certainly needed a big shock.

  Actually, I think the huge shock I had in my teens, nearly blowing myself up, had rearranged my brain a bit. Maybe it had something to do with trying to make some sense out of life.

  Maurice Nicoll’s commentaries on Gurdjieff and Ouspensky made a lot of sense to me. Somehow it was not so taxing on the brain—more emotional or something. So I opted for a Nicoll group meeting every Wednesday evening. I also spent many weekends in the country, for more reading and discussion. It was an interesting group: writers, artists, publishers, doctors, and businessmen. I felt a bit odd, not really having a job. Somehow I think they knew this and gave me a lot of jobs—digging in the dirt, uncovering old brick gardens, picking rocks from the vegetable garden. I swear to God, I think they put all the rocks back when I left. This went on for months. Sometimes I had to create a menu and cook for fifteen or twenty people. My first attempt was a disaster. It was meant to be a curry, but not being used to the Aga coal stove, I burned the meat and tried to disguise this with curry powder and cayenne pepper. It was inedible.

  Wednesday evenings were also a little taxing. We had to write a report of the meeting without taking notes. Having little memory, this was a bit of a bummer for me. One evening a member of the group who worked for Vickers flew in from South America, arrived late and sat in the back. The talk was about being awake, waking up. Suddenly loud snoring erupted from the back of the room. This man would fly in from all over the world for these meetings, then fall asleep. Brilliant!

  Mind you, I often had the same problem. Not from being a high flier, but from going to the pub before meetings and having one too many. Despite myself, I did learn a lot from these groups; for example, learning how to wash up properly, although it took many tries. My fingernails were sparkling clean, like never before. This prompted my mother to think I had a real job! No such luck. I mumbled something about an office job, not mentioning the cleaning. Apart from the clean nails, and being forced to confront my
laziness, one of the things that stuck was an expression they used a lot: “It’s not exactly what he said, but the horrible way he said it!” The feeling of “I” people put into things—my idea, my house, my car, my feelings, my hurt, my teacher, ad infinitum—leaves very little space for anything else to come in, which leads to big problems. Same with the Christian persona, Muslim persona, Buddhist persona, Hindu, etc. Gurdjieff, I believe, was trying to break down this “I,” so that one could have a more open and mirror-like awareness.

  When confronting your own children, you find that they are definitely direct reflections of your own shortcomings or successes. Something the mother of my children would say was, “Listen to your voice, see how it lies. Try to keep the question open.” My son has actually become my best teacher. He throws everything back at me, like a mirror, pressing my buttons. Anger is the most difficult. Awareness seems to be the answer, catching it before it explodes.

  Gurdjieff would get into rages, turn white, then just stop, laughing at something. It was said he used anger as a way to purify both himself and those around him. This seemed a long way off for me. Sometimes I can catch it a little before it starts, and defuse it. Other times, it just explodes. Often it seems connected with disturbing a routine, having to do something at a time you do not want to do it. What is it in one that holds back and does not want to be disturbed?

  Crowley’s House

  I always wanted to do something interesting, be creative, and I had the chance when a girlfriend of mine turned me on to photography. Wendy taught me how to use a camera, a light meter and composition. Slowly I got the hang of it. Hooking up with a writer friend, we started to put together stories with photographs. My first attempts were bloody awful. Some-how I just couldn’t compose using a 2 ¼ x 2 ¼” square camera. A photographer friend told me to try 35mm instead, and let me use one of his Nikons. It was like magic! Suddenly I started to see, compose! My photographs started to get better and our photo essays started to sell. Mainly stories about the wackiness of the English—only mad dogs and Englishmen go out in the midday sun—or in plain English, taking the piss!