by Bull, Rod;
I had some limited success doing articles for German magazines, paparazzi stuff—hiding in the bushes and behind cars, shooting half-naked ladies—wandering around with a hard-on and trying to look cool. One job I got was photographing a North Sea oil rig. Hanging from helicopters, climbing to the top of rig towers, swaying around, sliding around in the oil, and watching a lot of porno movies.
Back in London, I took the film to the designer saying I would bring the rest in a couple of days. He said that would be great as he needed to make an ad. Two days later, I took the rest of the film in. The designer told me he had found the shot for the ad. It was a shot of the wellhead. This was very worrying, as I had not shot it on the batch of film I had given him two days ago.
“Yes,” he said, “It’s a great close-up shot. I’ve sent it out to be printed.” This was very, very worrying. I said, “I must see the tranny, Derek.”
He hunted around, finding it in the pile. I feared the worst. This was not the wellhead! “What the hell is it, then?” said Derek.
“Blueberry pie,” I replied. “Blueberry pie!” he gasped.
“Yes, I shot the pies close up. The centers were cut out so that you knew what kind of pie it was.”
The close up of blueberry pie looked just like the wellhead. There was panic for a while, Derek calling the printers and the oil company, telling them not to run the ad. He caught them just in time. It was close.
Once while traveling in Scotland with Wendy, we stayed with Richard and Joan Fere of Drumnadrochit on the north shore of Loch Ness. They were a strange pair. You never knew if they would be friendly or just completely off. This evening they were on, in their nutty way. The drams were flowing. The conversation got around to Nessie, as locals called the Loch Ness monster. I was trying to do a photo essay on her, and looking for different angles.
Suddenly, Richard said, “Alistair Crowley. He meant to incarnate the monster using black magic.”
A few weeks earlier, candles, strange symbols, and incense had been found in a graveyard in front of Boleskine House, once owned by Crowley and now owned by one of his mistresses. She does afternoon teas, Richard was saying. This all sounded a bit dodgy, but I had no other angles except waiting for hours on end staring at the loch, imagining a wave or a ripple was the monster, or talking to the people who had seen the monster, which was always after many drams. All in all it added up to the square root of fuck all.
So one gray afternoon—actually most days are gray up there—we set out for Boleskine House in the hope of an afternoon tea. Feeling a little nervous about the whole thing, I parked away from the house. There did not seem to be anyone around. Knocking several times there was no answer, so I walked in.
Ahead of me was a long corridor with strange paintings and symbols on the walls. The smell of burning candles and incense drifted down the corridor. Following the smell, I called out, “Is there anyone here?”
Suddenly, out of one of the rooms appeared a very, very old woman. She was very bent and frail reminding me of the traditional witch but without the hat.
“Afternoon teas?” I stammered.
“No,” she said in a creaky voice. “We only do bed and breakfast now.” This put a shiver up my spine. “No thanks,” I blurted out, with visions of being eaten for breakfast.
A dog ran out of the room she had been in, nearly knocking the old woman over. As she was trying to stop herself from falling, she dropped something, and being the perfect English gent, I bent down to pick it up. Actually I wanted to know what it was she had dropped. It seemed like some kind of ritual instrument. All the time I could feel her staring at me. Looking up at her eyes, they were just like red marble, white with streaks of red. There was something about those eyes, dead, but hypnotic. Get out as fast as you can! flashed through my mind. By this time, the dog had gotten out into the yard, and the old lady was hobbling around trying to catch it.
“Catch the dog for that poor old lady,” Wendy was shouting.
Poor old lady, my ass! My gentleman’s manners were vanishing fast. “We’re out of here,” I said.
Jumping into the car, I drove off. The car seemed to drive itself, floating down the road.
What was happening? I felt light. The car was floating, gliding along. Was I high? What was going on? This feeling of floating went on for about fifteen minutes. Slowly I came down to earth, pulled over and lit a cigarette, trying to figure out what had happened. Was it getting away from the old hag that had set off those feelings? I had not smoked any dope or had a drink that day.
The whole thing did not make any sense until recently, while talking to a friend about the incident. He said, “Oh yes, Alistair Crowley would dance with women, biting their lips. They would return to their seats with their lips bleeding. When friends asked them what happened, they would not know. Apparently Crowley could hypnotize people with his eyes. Maybe somehow the old hag had learned this from him.” Could this have happened to me? Certainly the urge to get away from her was very strong. But, on the other hand, if I stayed around I may have seen the monster. I never did finish that story.
Moving in the so-called art world, I was meeting a lot of different people. A bunch of musicians called the Soft Machine wanted promo shots. We walked around Soho, finding a demolished building. I asked them to get into the pit, photo-graphing them as they climbed up the ladder. I wanted to develop the film at my friend’s place. He had a way of pushing the film speed to around 4000 ASA. He told me I could use his darkroom any time. I could not find the developer he was talking about. So I asked him about the brown litre bottles and he said he was going to turn on London, by putting it in the water system. I don’t think he ever actually did this, but it’s the thought that counts. The photos turned out very weird, bits and pieces of body, arms with no face, heads with no bodies. But they loved them. Oh well.
Another musician friend asked me to have sex with his girlfriend. He would even pay me. It turned out that he was gay. The whole thing was getting a bit too much for me. Again, I was feeling out to sea. Somehow I was just not getting it. The work thing was very erratic. One minute I thought I was getting somewhere, but no sooner than I thought this, the whole thing collapsed. What was I meant to learn from this? Obviously, things change very quickly. In my case, hardly enough time to say Jack Robinson! Sometimes I would see the changes coming. Was this some kind of order or suggestion: Get out before you’re thrown out! Fate. I was starting to learn how to ride these waves. Trying to adapt quickly to change, which entailed a certain amount of bullshitting. Actually, that was my name at school. I was certainly living up to it.
I met a number of Americans who found England less abrasive than the U.S. One of these blokes was a talented interior designer. He asked me to help him finish up a job in Chelsea. Arriving at around 9:00 in the morning, he started to empty his bag and in the bottom was a bottle of whiskey, from which he took large swigs. He offered me some and I took a small swig, thinking this day is going downhill already. We had to paint a sign on glass over the front door. Martin was shaking; he could not hold his hand still enough, so I had to hold his arm so he could paint. It took us all day to paint this small sign. Somehow we finished it. We went back to his place and drank more whiskey. At one point, the phone rang. Martin had trouble getting to the phone. He answered it, saying “No, no, they can’t possibly, no, no!” and then he said, “All right,” putting the phone down.
Turning he said, “You have to help me. I have to go see someone about work. You must help me get there.” We were totally pissed.
Covered in paint, we staggered outside to find a taxi. It was raining hard. By the time we got to the place in Knights-bridge, just behind Harrods, we were soaked. Martin rang the doorbell. A butler appeared at the door, slamming it shut the moment he saw us.
“Martin Newell is my name!” Martin shouted.
We were getting wetter and wetter. Eventually the door opened again. “Come in, come in,” the butler was saying. “How dare you keep me w
aiting! My name is Martin Newell!” We were led down a corridor. Suddenly a door opened. It was like staring at the sun, it was so bright. The room was all white. Everything in it was white. The carpet was thick and white. I could feel water squelching from my shoes. Looking around, our footprints were like muddy prints in the snow. I was trying to stop Martin from falling. The people in the room just stared at us. They were all dressed to the nines. I heard something about a princess. Where the fuck were we? They got us drinks. We were slumped on a white silk couch. Martin’s cigarette kept coming close to burning a hole in it. I kept moving the ashtray under it, his arm falling as he nodded off.
Suddenly the door burst open. Six or so very well-dressed Italian-looking men burst in. Between them was an elegant woman. She came over to Martin saying, “Martin darling, how are you? You look terrible!”
He said, “Auntie darling, how are you?”
She asked him when he was going to start work on her castle.
“I’ve been waiting so long. The marble is coming from Italy in August, could you be there then?”
“Certainly, Auntie darling.”
The men all had notebooks and were writing everything down. Then as suddenly as they had appeared, they all left. By this time we could hardly move. I was stunned. Was I dreaming? Certainly totally pissed. They more or less threw us out. Martin shouting all the time, “How dare you! Morons, the lot of you!”
“Who the fuck was that?” I asked.
“You don’t know?! Madame Dupont, the plastics billionaire.” “See you in August, darling,” she said as she left the room.
I asked Martin later about this. He told me he was the black sheep of the Dupont family, but his aunt loved him because of his talent. That was not true of the rest of the people at that house. We were given the bum’s rush, being told in no uncertain terms that we looked like child molesters. We certainly looked like shit, eyes like piss holes in the snow. Somehow we got back to his place, with Martin cursing all the way. “No respect! Don’t they know who I am?” He was especially annoyed as he was meant to be meeting a friend of Princess Margaret at that house.
Smuggling
I was concerned about Stella, as the people Chris dealt with would stop at nothing if anything went wrong. There was a lot of double-dealing and changing sides in this world and no loyalty. Could I get Stella out of this? On the other hand, maybe she liked the excitement. I had very little to offer her; maybe she would find her own way out.
Several things happened. Chris lost a suitcase full of drugs. He had two identical suitcases, one with drugs, the other just clothes. If Customs stopped him, he would use the wrong keys to open the suitcase with the drugs, telling the customs officer he must have the wrong case, then taking it back to baggage claim and changing it for the suitcase full of clothes, knowing he would lose the drugs.
The police, who were cracking down hard on drugs, had also harassed him. One case was very nasty. They had followed someone they suspected of using drugs to a suspected dealer, picking him up after the deal, forcing him to tell them who the dealer was, beating him. The man’s heart was bad, and he died at the police station! The police then tried to fake his death by pushing him out of the back of an unmarked car and running him over with a second unmarked car. In the autopsy report, it was found he had died several hours before being run over. Furthermore, there had been no police report.
In another case, they ripped apart a friend we called African Siddi’s flat, suspecting him of dealing. When he walked in on the raid he exclaimed, “I must be dreaming.” Nothing was found, but the whole scene was getting too hot!
Sooner or later the axe would fall. I was not sure how much Stella knew of Chris’ activities. Should I try to warn her? My chance came one night at the French Pub. She was alone, looking thin, pale, and worried. I asked her how things were going.
“Not too good. I’m worried about Chris. He is up to some weird stuff.” “What kind of stuff?” I asked.
“Drugs. And something else. He’s dealing with some very creepy people. I’m worried.” I started to tell her what I knew about the gunrunning, the IRA, the OAS, also the porn.
“I knew something weird was going on,” she said. “It all seemed very exciting at first, until some men I think were MI5 hustled me into a car, driving around for hours asking all kinds of questions! Eventually they let me go. It scared the shit out of me!”
“What kinds of questions?” I asked.
“Mainly about the men who come to the flat. Also, where did Chris get all his money? I told them he had a trust fund. They said, we know about that, what about the other money? There has been a lot of money flowing through his ac-count.”
Stella was definitely worried. She did not want to get Chris into trouble, but she also did not want to be thrown into a French jail! I was feeling like a rat, with a lot of respect for Chris but loving Stella. My first reaction was to tell her to get out, as I knew the people he was dealing with were killers. Also to tell her the police were being dirty, telling her the story of the man who was beaten, died of the beating, then was run over. “What else did you tell them?” I asked. “Basically, that Chris had a large inheritance, that he also received money from writing.”
“Most likely, they don’t have enough on him,” I said. “But they may try to plant drugs or guns. Why don’t you keep moving, split for a while?” Of course, this was wishful thinking on my part.
“Chris has been thinking about that. He has false identity papers. Some place cheap and easy to hide, maybe India, Kashmir.”
I felt relieved, but also rattish, secretly wanting to get back together with Stella! Spying on him seemed a very sneaky way of getting her back, even if I knew she was in danger.
Things were getting hotter. I was cornered again in a bar by men looking like hippies, asking all kinds of questions about drugs, guns and explosives. They said they wanted to buy whatever they could. They started to describe Chris, asking if I knew him. There was something dodgy about these blokes, so I played dumb.
To ease my guilt, I thought I should tell Chris about these encounters. He had a feeling something was up, but thanked me anyway, saying he was going to India.
Where was all this spying getting me? I certainly was not getting much from it. It had kind of got me back together with Stella, but I did not feel too good about that. My personality building was on shaky ground. Who was I building myself into? It was time to take a look at myself, spy on myself. I started to do some basic forms of meditation at about this time.
One of the problems was that judgments came up all the time. “I like this, I don’t like that.” How to be objective? Something I had been struggling with for a long time was the whole concept of awareness—who was being aware of what, who was spying on whom? Could there be a situation where there was no observer, nothing to observe? This would imply we do not exist.
We are made up of atoms, with a genetic code that builds us into what were are, in our case humans. We build personalities from our experiences and situations, building a wall around ourselves.
We can choose to break down this wall, only to find there is nothing there. This would be suicide, unless there was something else—a state beyond time, a primordial awareness where things appear and disappear like images on a movie screen.
Thoughts come and go, rising and falling like ocean waves. But something in us wants to alter these thoughts and perceptions. Spying on ourselves and wanting to alter what we see stops us from seeing things as they really are.
Jim Brown
One day in London, Wendy received a phone call from a friend, Mary Margaret Revell, a long-distance swimmer and sports lady who kept otters in her bathtub.
“Jim’s in town, Jim’s in town,” Wendy was saying.
It sounded like she was about to have an orgasm. She wrote down a phone number and put the phone down. “Who the hell is this Jim? Another of your wimpy friends?” I said. Little did I know!
“Jim Brown, the All-Star
, All-American football player. I was at Manhasset High School with him. He is over here filming ‘The Dirty Dozen.’”
Jesus, I thought, not another fucking American trying to queer my pitch. So far I had lost girlfriends to Elvis Presley, James Dean, and Clint Eastwood. Apparently, they all had amazing sex appeal, and I had none. This, I suppose, was all in their imaginations.
Anyway, Wendy called the number, arranging to meet Mr. Brown the next evening. We decided to go to Nick’s Diner, a hip place in Chelsea, which had been started by an ex-truck driver. We arrived at Mr. Brown’s hotel the next evening in our Ford Anglia, an English compact car.
Suddenly a huge black man appeared with an amazing-looking Austrian woman who turned out to be some kind of film star, or rather porno star. So this was Jim Brown. He must have been thinking the same thing I was. How the hell was he going to fit in this tin can of a car? He was certainly no wimp. In fact, I was feeling more and more like one. He wanted to call a cab, but while he and Wendy were greeting each other, I was able to move the front seat back far enough for him to get into the car. He just managed to squeeze in. I started to drive off and the car pulled to the side. Thinking I must have a puncture, I stopped and got out. All of the tires looked okay. What could it be? Suddenly it hit me that Mr. Brown must weigh 300-plus pounds, much more than this car had ever encountered. I started off again, lurching our way to Nick’s Diner. I kept glancing at Jim, crunched up and looking very uncomfortable, his head bowed down, trying not to put it through the roof.
When we got to Nick’s, we quickly ordered two bottles of wine, which vanished fast. Two more appeared. Wendy and Jim were talking about the old days at Manhasset High. I was falling in love with the porno star. The more wine I had, the more beautiful she became. This woman oozed desire, or was it pure, unadulterated sex? I mentioned something about taking photographs. She immediately said that she did nude modeling and would be happy to do a photo shoot. My head was spinning, glancing around to see if Wendy and Jim had heard this. They were both glaring at me, especially Mr. Brown. He seemed to be growing bigger by the minute.