Ghost Milk: Calling Time on the Grand Project

by Sinclair, Iain

  Meeting the biographer John Baxter in Paris, Mike found himself mounting a strenuous defence of his old friend, against tides of malignant rumour. The confirmation of anecdotes, privately delivered, gave him no satisfaction. Better to relish being away from the unforgiving Texas summer, playing Cajun tunes with the legendary Paris book-dealer Martin Stone. A huge doorstep volume of Moorcock’s non-fiction – 717 pp., no indexes – had just been published by Savoy Books, a magnum opus in a small edition. The prolixity, the breadth of interest, the scatter of photographs running back to childhood, made this an invaluable source. Mike was curated in a way that was available to all: if you were lucky enough to hear about it.

  Then the bugs took over.

  ‘When I was writing here in Texas,’ Mike said, ‘I noticed an increase in the ant population on my desk. We won’t poison the surrounding ground, so we have to deal with insects on a daily basis.’ He tracked the scurrying soldiers back to a boxed set of The Newgate Calendar. Taking out one volume, he discovered an entire colony, eggs and all, sustaining themselves on eighteenth-century ink, the bloody records of extinct London lowlife. Literate cockroaches crept from fat Ackroyd biographies, sated on essence of Blake, Dickens and Eliot. ‘I’m on first-name terms with half a dozen of them and they no longer try to carry off the cat. Domestic life in Bastrop is like being on the Discovery Channel twenty-four hours a day.’

  The cave-like shops of Chinatown, with their masks and lanterns, cinnabar pillboxes, novelty crucifixions, retro-Mao posters, were as close as I was going to come to Beijing. We are on the wrong side of the Pacific Ocean. The last time I was in San Francisco, I brought home, as a present, one of those round red boxes. I loved to handle it, the cool surface responsive to touch. The diagram incised into the lid was the map of a city I had been chasing for years, a labyrinth within a series of protective walls. And inside the empty box, the colour of sea and sky: a deep turquoise.

  San Francisco was a walking city. We treated ourselves to a week at the Holiday Inn on the corner of Van Ness Avenue and California as a way of deprogramming the strangeness of Texas, where I had been a kind of exhibit, struggling to live up to my papers. I climbed the University Tower and was shown the spot where Charles Whitman, the rifleman who killed fourteen people and wounded thirty-two others, was himself gunned down by the police. The walkway on the twenty-ninth floor had been closed for years, then caged in, after students used it as a suicide platform. The clarity of the light, the tiny figures with their neat shadows, made trigger fingers itch, even among the liberal-minded humanists who took the excuse of my guided tour as a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to inspect the site. Knowing nothing, except how to get lost in an interesting way, I led my disparate group on a circumnavigation of the university-city; its population at 50,000 students was twice the size of the small town where I grew up. Out on the highway we passed a humped structure, bigger and whiter than the Millennium Dome on Bugsby’s Marshes. The membrane of the tent enclosed a pitch for football practice: funded, used, and fitting unobtrusively into the university parkland.

  Around Polk nothing much had changed. We started the day in Bob’s diner, with fresh orange juice and too much weak coffee. The independent cinema which, back in 1995, had been showing Abel Ferrara’s The Addiction, was now featuring the French gaol saga A Prophet. The same audience, ponytails and herb-saturated leather waistcoats, were occupying the same tired seats. Street folk, with their discretion and subtlety of movement, colonized doorways around our part of town, away from North Beach, where they had been so visible and assertive on my last visit. After the film version of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, a distressed shopping trolley had become the must-have accessory, heaped with salvaged microwaves, TV sets, duvets, outdated cans and cereal packets.

  It was too easy to romance this town, with its contours of poverty, the locked restrooms for which café owners would dole out a key attached to some great wooden ball, to prevent street people and addicts from taking possession of their generally filthy sties. My ideal San Francisco was in place long before I came across Hitchcock’s Vertigo. The absurdity of his necrophile voyeurism forgiven for those dreamlike drifts, Jimmy Stewart tracking Kim Novak’s green Jaguar Mark VIII around the steep hills of a revised topography. Auto-courtship. All of it within a short drive of the director’s favoured hotel, the Fairmont on Nob Hill. And his chosen restaurant, Ernie’s on Montgomery Street. The Gotti brothers, who owned this establishment, were awarded cameos, in the 1958 film, as maître d’ and bartender. The crew gorged themselves, during a morning’s shoot, on salad with Roquefort dressing, New York steaks and baked potatoes, banana fritters. Hitch sent down a truckload of wine from his vineyard in Scotts Valley. In the director’s vision of San Francisco, the bridges, parks and phallic towers are subservient to more significant architectural constructions: the behatted elongation of James Stewart, who walks like a man with a chronically bad back, and the baroque entablature of the Edith Head-tailored mass of Kim Novak. Who walks like an avalanche with the breaks on.

  The confusion I felt, in this new place, was not simply a question of orientation: where was the Pacific? And why, setting off to find the poet Michael McClure’s house, above Berkeley, on my first visit to California, did I drive into Oakland with Kathy Acker’s stories of being flung from a car, after turning down a threesome with Gregory Corso and his pick-up, putting an edge on my attempts to ask for directions? Now, years later, we were caught in the same loop. As a tribute to Vertigo, we took the lift up the bell tower at the university, before hiking a long hot way, down a featureless avenue, to the antiquarian bookshop of a dealer who used to trawl the stock in our Hackney bedroom. He was ill, terminally ill, and the shop, stacked and dusty, promised hours of serious investigation. While I made a desultory pass at this, Anna took a chair, the only one in the place, and chatted to the man who was helping out. She asked for directions to the ferry; we wanted to cross the bay, before returning that evening for a reading McClure was giving with David Meltzer. I liked the sound of Jack London Square. But after misreading the first road sign, we plodded for hours in the wrong direction, deep into the projects, over railways, under elevated roads. A sheriff’s car cruised alongside us for a block or two. We jumped a bus, reached the point of embarkation, another stalled marine makeover: to find white-shirted Asians, with polished black shoes, playing cricket under the palm trees.

  The managed schizophrenia of my approach to the Bay Area went back a long way, to a schoolboy, roomed in the unearned splendour of an Oxford college for a hockey festival, devouring Kerouac’s The Subterraneans. Nothing, superficially, could have been less subterranean than my surroundings, outfit or appearance. The slender Grove Press paperback, with its Golden Gate Bridge by Roy Kulman, supplied the outline of a city I had no intention of visiting. There was enough morbid ripeness, in those intense, free-flowing pages, to seduce a British adolescent operating within strictly proscribed limits. There was hot language, first and last, ahead of narrative. Kerouac’s prose was confessional, stalling or lifting away with unrepressed surges of memory, before plunging into melancholia and blockage. The tang of a forbidden thing, the sex act and all its sticky mysteries. Urgent conversations, ugly solitude. Bars, cheap hotels. The ocean.

  And then I discovered that San Francisco was a fraud, the true story of The Subterraneans took place in New York. Kerouac’s junkie angel, Mardou Fox (travestied in the film version as the very white Leslie Caron), was a black woman called Alene Lee. The shift, coast to coast, allowed Kerouac to distance himself from a one-night stand with Gore Vidal. Despite these tricks, San Francisco gains a double identity, in the exorcism of past shame and the anticipation of future Dharma Bums visits. Kerouac’s Pacific-rim town defines itself as somewhere sympathetic to poets. The Subterraneans is poet-truth, uncensored; street details are noted at speed, or on speed, with intoxicated excitement. The synopsis, sold to his editors, is the excuse for a frenzied monologue: the poem Kerouac was too modest or too shy to delive
r at the Six Gallery reading on Union and Fillmore; where, in 1955, Ginsberg launched Howl, in the company of Gary Snyder, Michael McClure, Philip Whalen and Philip Lamantia. Kerouac’s city of vagrants, giant sunflowers on docks by the railroad tracks, is animated by pill-fired New York psychodramas. Like Hitchcock, he takes what he needs. He makes a contribution. He invents a territory in which we are invited to lose ourselves.

  When I met John Baxter, who was hard on the trail of Ballard’s junkyard, the stories behind the stories from which a mythology had been expertly manufactured, he put me right about Brigid Marlin’s unwelcome cameo in The Kindness of Women. I had misinterpreted that interview as thoroughly as I was now misinterpreting San Francisco. Scanning the 1991 novelfor a feisty female painter, I missed that characteristic Ballard sidestep, the episode with a prostitute called Brigid in a Canadian hotel room: a ‘strong-shouldered blonde, naked except for the silk stockings rolled down to the ankles’. And the revealing way that this cloned Ballard, in anticipation of his beloved Delvaux, finds himself ‘looking at Brigid’s reflection in the full-length mirror’.

  Baxter told me that Ballard, unlike this celebrator of the kindness of women, never flew solo. He did his basic training and dropped out, having taken what he required from the experience, as from the dissection of corpses in Cambridge: a stock of potent metaphors. The lost painting that Marlin had resurrected – and improved, as John confirmed – had not been destroyed in the war. It had been recovered in Belgium. Thereby altering, at a stroke, the mystique of the duplicate. And the complex equation of Ballard’s infinitely revised forms of subverted autobiography. Much of the writing, Baxter told me, in those early days when a morning’s work was kick-started with a tumbler of whisky, was dictated into a tape recorder. The Shepperton author was not the anchorite with the pencil, depicted by Marlin in her portrait, but a suburban William Burroughs, doing the voices, testing the rhythms, over and over, to achieve flow. Rinsing hard, Ballard spat out pure gristle: CUT THE WORD LINES. TALK TO MY MEDIUM.

  Prepared now for a return to Hackney, and eager to patch in Baxter’s information, I shut out a snippet of conversation overheard in the lobby of the Holiday Inn, as we waited for the minibus shuttle to the airport. ‘Flights cancelled.’ A German, collected from another hotel, confirmed the worst: a volcano in Iceland had erupted, throwing up a dust cloud and leaving the travel industry in a state of confusion and panic. They didn’t know how to spin this one and they reacted by doing nothing, closing down airports, falling back on the reflex stratagem of a clapped-out Nude Labour regime: no comment. The upbeat mode, responding to the latest disaster from the Olympic Park, was to rattle off statistics like a concrete poem. The statistics for Icelandic volcanoes were not encouraging. ‘Three months,’ said one of the check-in uniforms. ‘Three years,’ said another. ‘The last time this happened, volcanic activity went on for three years.’

  In a few days, a week at the most, financial imperatives would begin to bite and the fuel-guzzling, dirt-farting tubes would be back in the air, come dust cloud, firestorm, terrorist outrage. The final word is always profit. The airline on which we were booked for our return to Heathrow had nothing to offer: no news, no compensation, no beds. A weary shrug. A booking can be made for next week, but it won’t be honoured. Acting promptly, we get a smaller room, right next to the lift, back in the Holiday Inn: at a higher price. There are five rooms left. Take it or leave it. Next move, the street. Eyes peeled for a Cormac McCarthy trolley.

  The lobby was heaving and smelt strange, a sickly sweet blend of coconut oil, patchouli and burnt popcorn. My way to the hotel basement, where they kept the internet connection, was barred by a bearded woman with flawless skin. She was wearing a cut-off black T-shirt and her powerful arms and shoulders evidenced a strenuous iron-pumping regime. ‘I’m sorry, sir. No access without accreditation.’ She pointed to the board on which the day’s events were outlined: plenary session on cross-gender migration, demonstrations of knots useful in bondage, whips you can trust, one-on-one massage seminars, and a keynote costume orgy.

  There had been a shift in delegates since we took the morning bus. The Christian fundamentalists with the lapel badges and threatening smiles had moved out and a regiment of amiable hardcore lesbians had captured the castle. Making every trip in the lift, every weaving passage through the lobby, a theatrical performance. Anna expressed her admiration for a pair of the more flamboyant boots on display and the seven-foot jarhead responded with a flush of pride, a conspiratorial wink. Paramilitary kit, stripped from some whimpering Bruce Willis, was much in evidence. Leather cowgirls. Cyber slaves. Barbarellas in see-through plastic sheaths. The lobby, before the evening festivities blossomed into the surrounding streets, was a wedding scene from a Genet brothel: kidney-crushing corsets, eye-popping cleavages, stilt heels. Hell’s Angel studs in impossible places. Streams of travestied and actual aircrew intermingled. Grounded pilots and tight-skirted hostesses dragged wheeled luggage alongside gash-mouthed Idaho librarians in fleecy Ballardian flight jackets. As the days rolled on, the hormonal reek of peanut-butter bodies and their pleasure seminars cooked up a microclimate that oozed into the cafés and bars on Polk Street, dives where traders were grateful to accept the custom of well-behaved tourists. Every ascent to our room was an adventure: we made polite conversation with one of the course leaders, a ponytailed black academic in Midnight Cowboy gear, carrying a supersized ebony dildo with the delicacy of a connoisseur coming home from an auction house with a bargain Giacometti.

  ‘You can’t write about this,’ Anna threatened. ‘They’ll never believe it. I’m not sure that I do. It’s not happening.’

  I gave up my morning swims in the rooftop pool when the towels disappeared and the surface of the water was covered with an oily film in which you could make out the footprints of the previous night’s party. Rags of costumes, the shed skins of moonlighting superheroes, were draped over white plastic loungers. I scanned rooftops for the sniper from Dirty Harry. The washing machines in the laundry room had a horrible death rattle. Once started, you couldn’t turn them off. The only solution was to keep walking. Every day a different direction. Every night the hotel shuddered.

  America, I decided before coming, would be about staying out of cars. We could hike or use public transport. After Texas, where a black limo, chauffeur in dark suit and dark glasses, met us at the airport with ‘When I’m done with you folks, I’m gonna come back for Elton John’, we stuck with the programme. There was a cab home, on our first night, when Anna, worn out by grandiose avenues, weird lighting schemes, unfamiliarity, felt ready to collapse. Our boutique Mansion Hotel, the driver revealed, used to be a drying-out clinic for junkies. He had done time there himself and recommended it. ‘They’re cool.’

  I lined up with a row of dealers and conspiracy freaks nodding over their laptops in an internet café on Polk. Heathrow was shut down. Those who had taken, in panic, any flight out of the West Coast, found themselves camped on a terminal floor in Chicago or Boston. There was an invitation for me from the Guardian. Would I like to do a Hackney piece on how calm and quiet London was, basking in sunshine, without aircraft overhead? The city as it ought to be.

  I remember Moorcock, in his Letters from Hollywood, telling Ballard how uneasy he was in San Francisco, where everybody he met thrust drugs at him, in the belief that he was the manifestation of his fictional mask: Jerry Cornelius, the dandy assassin. The city was so pleased with itself, he said, that it seemed to consist of nothing but societies for the preservation of defunct societies. He’s not wrong about that: the spray-painted surfaces of Haight Ashbury, the Xerox bohemia of North Beach, where tragic writers have become street names. In the Beat Museum (relic supermarket), they have a large sign: FREE TO BROWSE. They don’t object if you take a photo of the Neal Cassady automobile that is now definitively off-road and in the shop window.

  The aspect that meant nothing to Mike, but which sustained me, was the sense of a town sympathetic to poets. They could
perch for a time and make a contribution. Polk was where that astringent Objectivist George Oppen lived, a man who knew when to step back, to vanish into Mexico. He published nothing between 1934 and 1962. John Wieners wrote his first book, The Hotel Wentley Poems, in an area he described as ‘Polk Gulch’. He had a room above Foster’s Cafeteria. Poets picked up on traces and they were the traces, spoors of the real. The figures camped on rugs in doorways understood it perfectly. ‘The story is not done,’ Wieners protested. ‘There is one wall left to walk.’

  Moorcock, in a conference hotel on Sutter Street, just up from Union Square, felt trapped by too much recycling, he couldn’t wait to get out. ‘An old friend of Linda’s has promised to show us who actually wears the peacock-feather suede cowboy hats sold in Carmel.’ He had only to drop around to check out the delegates at the Holiday Inn. ‘San Francisco makes me homesick,’ he said.

  Back at the airport, after a week walking the territory, through Golden Gate Park to the Pacific, where Anna rushed forward to paddle, and round the headland through Lincoln Park to Golden Gate Bridge, where Kim Novak posed for the suicide jump she never made, nothing had changed: beyond the length and aggression of the queues. Information was a commodity. Nobody was flying anywhere. A state of limbo was confirmed.