by Adam Thorpe
OK? Get the picture?
I did think this was going to be a trifle more poetic, as Dr Foliole (Leavis) would say. He’d have hated my films, but let’s not go into that. The point is, the point to remember, is that the film was never as good as the stills, was it? I don’t mean to say that a bunch of lousy photographs gently curling in the Enfield Ritz was better than, say, Passport to Pimlico. But that feeling, that feeling. The horse did move along and you moved with it and there were the mountains and it was great, but –
Right – it wasn’t the same feeling, was it? Is there life out there? Are you all yelling NO! No? OK, let me tell you something: Signor Fellini never looked at his rushes at the end of the day. He drove technicians crazy. He preferred the rushes in his head. Once he made a whole film without rushes. Then he got them done and watched. They were good. I forget the film. There was some kind of strike on down at the labs. A friend of his, one of his unit, told me this at a party. The opening night of E La Nave Va. The launch, in Paris. Great days, great days. Think about it. About Signor Fellini never looking at his dailies because he liked to keep things pure.
That haunted me. No, it didn’t. I forgot about it because I was pissed at the time and then it popped up again in some interview on TV. I was in a motel in Arizona, years later. Serendipity. For the whole of the next day, up with the Hopis, watching them pop in and out of their buried temple for the Butterfly Dance I think it was – hey, I couldn’t muse on anything else. I stood on the lip of the mesa and stared out at the wowee desert and I thought: that’s what’s wrong with everything. That’s what’s wrong with my life. That’s what Zelda might have meant if she’d said it right but she didn’t, she just said something halfway between Sufi and Zen and it sounded like she was telling me I had a low grade in math. (Sorry – poor marks in maths. Mr Doorman’ll be pawing me at this rate.) He never watches his rushes. I repeated this so many times to myself it sounded like another language, it sounded like Latvian or something. He never watches his rushes. He never watches his rushes. He never washes his undies. That’s my mother. She’s always interjecting. I bear no resemblance to Anthony Perkins. They say I do remind them of Danny Kaye, however. My mother was a very nice and kind person, salt of the earth and a bit of a toff to boot. Which reminds me.
Sorry – that was Zoë on the phone again. Have I got a guest list? She needs a guest list. Why does she need a guest list? The hotel needs a guest list. Why does the hotel need a guest list, Zoë my ducks? The hotel needs a guest list for security reasons. Apparently the Queen of Sheba or somewhere is having a ball in the room below. At least she’s in the room below. At least if someone’s planted TNT under her throne the ceiling won’t fall on top of us. Semtex, these days, Richard. This is ridiculous, Zoë. None of my guests would want to kill the Queen of Sheba. None of my guests would want to kill anyone. Except possibly me after inviting them to my party on The Big Night and then getting them stopped at the door by the Queen of Sheba’s personal security service who’ve probably only just taken early retirement from Broadmoor, Zoë one of the lasses O. But you must have a guest list. I don’t. I don’t know how many people are going to turn up. But you gave me a number to cater for. I gave you a number, Zoë, which was the number of invites I sent out and then some more. Oh, Jeeesus! Zoë, I didn’t know you were a blasphemer. What’s wrong? You think we’re going to run out of Miss Tiddleywink’s carrot cake? Miss Tiggywinkle, actually. Oh, crumbs. Hey, Zoë, I thought you were slim, dark-haired, and cool as a cucumber. Put your horn-rims back on, Zoë. What am I going to tell them, Richard? Zoë, you tell them from Rick-No-Tricks Thornby here that my guests are going to glitter so brightly the doorman’ll have to wear shades or he’ll feel like Scott of the Antarctic who ate all his huskies up. All except my relatives. Sorry, Richard? And my relatives are nothing to worry about. Save my daddyo. And he’s not coming. He’s going to be wrapped around Nurse Luscious in Chestnut Grove Home for the Intolerable, Havant. He’s what? Zoë, you tell them that. You might also tell them that I’m paying for the privilege of abusing their Suite F. A., and they can go stuff their Queen of Sheba because we’re just as vital. I mean, someone might want to blow me up. Have they thought of that? Zoë?
She put the phone down on me. I guess – sorry, I suppose – I overran some, somewhat. Thornby In The Flesh. Dick the Prick. Rick Thornby: Houston’s answa to the ansaphone. I’ve seen all these scrawled up in the student’s lavatory when I’ve been caught short. Heck. Aren’t they original? The first was doing the rounds when a gas mask turned out to be Winston Churchill, for God’s sake. My late-lamented students wrote with their tongues stuck out. Or they would lean back and rest their feet on the desks and nod and I thought for years I’d hooked them with my exposition of doubles in Strangers on a Train or whatever but the nod’d get frantic and continue even when I was saying how the blobs from Sirius had just landed on the HCDVA lawn at my command at last and I realised they were tagged into a personal stereo so discreet it barely existed. And hey, I’d thought it was the air-conditioning system all those years. I went on yakking because I reckoned it was their bloody funeral. I never once used videos, incidentally. I used stills. That thing about stills in the Enfield Ritz was my little introductory piece for stale freshpeople. It helped clear out the chaff. About half of them didn’t come back to my module and it meant I could get between the desks to strap knuckles. Seriously – I NEVER USED MOVING IMAGES. Their eyes’d be less glazed, they’d maybe start to listen, maybe now and again I’d start to see something other than the drawing-pins and gum blatches on the soles of their giant trainers because they liked to rest their legs after sex or advanced trampoline or whatever. My colleagues thought I was crazy. They have big video screens in the College – the kind that disappear if you look at them from the side, they’re so Japanese. The HCDVA has a lot of dough, a lot of the readies, guv. But the pay was lousy. I got paid basic and I got paid boost. Boost was dependent on the number of students attending my module. Basic was so basic the bank’d charge you for wasting their time. It was embarrassing unrolling your handkerchief on the counter each month and counting out the cents. It’d get the queue of furred old ladies and the guys in Mickey Mouse masks really impatient. I’d shrug my shoulders and say, hey, schmuck, where d’you want this? Under my Bultex? Remember the Princess and the Pea! Besides, I’m British. I’m mean, peevish, and little. Give me a break! Boost was hopeless, by the way. I had an attendance number which would’ve made a great golf handicap. There were others whose boost was so big they had to carry it out in a sack. This was because their lectures had titles like The Valorization of the Vagina in Twentieth-Century Cinema or Copulation and Closure: A Critique of the Hard Core (I read between the lines, I read between the lines) with plenty of illustrative material and all that and there were fights at the door, it was like the Japs trying to get on a subway, it was deeply depressing to watch – especially from the other end of the corridor with a lecture in your hands that’d get Susan Sontag to shut up and listen and there’s this one student approaching, the mature student, the one with the whining hearing-aid and the dayglo satchel who’s got a crush on you because you bear oh boy just such a weird resemblance to her dead brother before they cremated him back in ’48.
OK, OK, I dramatise. It’s the coffee. I’m getting nervous. I’m getting wound up, for Christ’s sake. Wound up. When I say wound up out loud it smacks its vowels against my adenoids, against the quiff-greased walls and choking chimney-pots of Jubilee Road, against the grey drizzle of a Saturday morning when the Ritz is closed for refurbishment. It was. When it reopened, refurbished, the lipstick lady had gone and there was a new name. Bingo. I liked it. It reminded me of Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers and some husky or other in a Disney. There were no stills. There were two doormen in green pullovers. I held up my sixpence and they laughed. They wouldn’t let me in. Gambling, they said, not for toddlers. I asked my mother to phone up and check. Gambling must be full of murders and tongues, I thought. She said it
’s a Bingo Hall, dear, I’ve told you before. I know you’ve told me before, Mum, but I was pretending to play with Meccano and I wasn’t listening. Don’t go on about Donald’s Meccano again, dear. You know we can’t stretch to it, not with the heating bills and the protection money and the price of Wall’s this and that and your father’s cigarettes and your father’s drop of an evening. He does like his drop of an evening. Listen – there goes the gas again. Pop another guinea in, would you, love? We need it for luncheon. I can’t see a thing, otherwise.
Great days, great days.
Happy days.
I saw Peggy in it of course. Happy Days. Sam Beckett. Remember him? Before your time, perhaps, before your time. Hog bristles. Male castrated pig. Peggy was – Peggy Ashcroft, this is – she was a dream. She was wild. I did a whole season with her. The Rose Theatre. Remember the Rose? Course you don’t. She was in a wheelchair in the mud, I held the mike and she made us all cry, the builders climbed up into their saddles and yelled good luck and rumbled away, they were on our side, she’d moved the earth-movers, she’d made history, I should have stayed with just holding the mike in a non-speaking role but I fucked it up, I got all overwhelmed and kissed her on the forehead and leapt down and embraced this broken white column and said into the mike you’ve saved our Acropolis, Peggy in my patent Larry-as-King-Harry and then some fucking archaeologist said that’s the concrete footing of the old office block actually and please get your big feet off the original nutshells and good old Peggy giggled along with the crowd’s roar of derision or whatever it was, maybe it was just general cheering, maybe no one had heard in the general mêlée. Still, it was great to be in England for about ten minutes. HCDVA gave me a sabbatical, hoped I wouldn’t come back. A sabbatical on basic, just so lucky. Hey, how am I gonna eat? I pleaded with them. Give it to someone else! Nothing doing. Their stony hearts didn’t chip. I took a bucket-shop to London. I have three more friends in London than New York and two more friends in New York than St Lucia where I have none but where I’d really liked to have gone and been a beach vendor but you have to be beautiful, young, and black. It was raining in London. I’d got worried for a moment because sun had been pouring into the Terminal, Mike would’ve loved it. I put flowers on my mother’s grave and ticked off a dog-handler for letting his dog crap on her and he beat me up. After a few days trying to sort out my social security situation on the end of a drip I gave up and released myself and went to see Jerry. It was either seeing Jerry or doing my Marcel Marceau act on the subway. Sorry, Tube. Jerry Freeman, Viper’s Bugloss Productions, hotline to the happy hunting ground of Channel 4 because he’s married to one of them and plays Oxbridge Snap in the Groucho or something with the rest. He gave me a job. Well, OK, it was my thrust and his vacuum – I crawled into his office about the size of a hogshead in some refurbished fish warehouse in Shadwell not too far from where you’re swilling your snouts on my tick right at this present moment. In Shadwell, son? Hoi, that’s where the Thornbys rose. That’s where we plied our trade in the grease of our mits, my lad. Joshua Thornby, Jericho Thornby, Jonas Thornby. Father, son, and holy post. Slept on the barrer, slept on it. Never abandon your post. Slippery, slippery. Apple pulp, fish guts, beer swill. It’s where we all rose from, my son. Out the sea, out the Shad, out the Ratcliff Highway. Fog, fog, fog in the cranes and up the costermonger’s nose, fog in the bunting and the beer shop. Fog. Great fog, in those days. Proper fog. Not your modern sort. Not your modern filth. Mist, that’s all it is. Mist.
Hi, Jerry!
Jeremy’s welded to his portable. He waves a little finger at me. A little finger’s something. He’s got Nikes with dayglo tabs. He’s training for the Marathon. He’s jumping up and down and talking into his portable. I approach and the aerial gets up my nose. I dangle for a bit. He finishes. He vanishes into his press-ups. This is not the Jerry gentle-ski-run-shoulders, five-joints-a-morning Freeman I remember. Jerry, talk to me. I’m skint. I need a job. Tied me through. They made me take a sabbatical on basic. You owe me since that advert for Cyril Lord carpets. What advert for Cyril Lord carpets, Dicky? I’m not Dicky any more, Jeremy. I’m Richard. Or Ricky. Or Rick. Or even Rico, me old cock. Take your pick. That advert for Cyril Lord carpets. You made the coffee. I slipped you in. I wasn’t born when the adverts for Cyril Lord carpets were being screened, Richard. Weren’t you? Cor. Anyway, I’m certain you owe me. I’ll get you a visiting lecturer’s stint at HCDVA. Houston’s a great place. They love people like you. People with drive, ambition, an independent spirit of mind, fifty-five push-ups an hour, all that. Houston, eh? Fifty, fifty-one. Yes, Jeremy, Houston. Lots of space. Big Texan girls with desirable T-shirts and no engineering problems. No refurbished dock-pulleys to bang your nut on. Nothing old to refurbish and bang your nut on at all. It’s swell, Jerry. Fifty-four, fifty-five! Hey, Jerry, that’s great. I didn’t know you had it in you. I can just manage three with my knees down. Richard, said Jeremy, sinking into his tobacco bale and staring out over the landing-stage at the teeming emptiness below – Richard, I do have a little proj which might just interest you. Yes? Yes. Pause. He leans on his fish-gutter’s slab and catches a little drop of sweat before it spoils the lacquer. What do you know about Nimbies, Richard? Nimbies, Jeremy? Nimbies, Richard.