Human Punk

by John King

  There’s ten or so Westerners on the train, all in this carriage, sectioned, same as Smiles after we took him to hospital in Tony’s car. I blank the memory of that trip, know it’s there and I’ll have to face it soon enough. The bunk is padded so it’s going to be easier to sleep than on the Chinese trains, where the boards are rock hard and there’s the non-stop gurgle of people digging into their throats and filling their mouths with spit, so by morning the floor’s covered in slime. At six o’clock the lights snap on and propaganda screams from the speakers lining the train, the shrill screech of ideology. It was the same when I was in Xiahe, but the lectures went right through the day there, loudspeakers on top of the poles lining the main road, little more than a dirt track. The communists preach to a Xiahe mix of ethnic Muslims, whose roots go back to the Old Silk Route, native Tibetans, and Han who’ve been brought in by the government to change the racial make-up of the area. Nobody seemed to listen, but the voice was always there, a sharp noise in the background. The Han live at one end of Xiahe, by the dirt-patch bus station, in concrete boxes, the Muslims in the middle by the market, in older brick houses with wooden verandahs, the Tibetans at the other end of town past the monastery, in adobe houses with carved doors. Out on the grasslands, further along the valley, there’s nomadic Tibetans who live in tents.

  Xiahe is half a day’s bus ride from Lanzhou, along rough roads and washed-out ravines, but it’s a great place. I ended up with a room in a building where monks lived before the Cultural Revolution. In the morning women came in off the grasslands and sold yak’s yoghurt for breakfast. When the men came into town they arrived on horseback, dressed in furs, once with this big bear-like dog. The local mutts mobbed up and had a go, but this nomad dog was a brawler and saw them off. Xiahe is a monastery town with a big temple, the remaining monks living in compounds that stretch from the river in the middle of the valley to the mountains. China’s temples were battered during the Cultural Revolution, many of the monks murdered, but now the party sees a way of earning dollars, the hard currency it needs to industrialise, and charges an entrance fee.

  I’ve run the arguments through my head, the way religion has been used to control people over the centuries, whether it’s the Christian behave-yourself-and-you’ll-go-to-heaven angle, or the Eastern everything-has-a-reason-so-don’t-complain view, and I agree that religion has been used to crush people, keep them in their place as the leaders get richer, but Xiahe made me think. The Tibetan kids were always asking for pictures of the Dalai Lama, and they were better people than the materialists from the Han part of town. In China I’ve found out that communism is nothing romantic or radical, just another materialistic option to capitalism. Everyone wants to be top of the tree, and there’s this lack of feeling, never seeing things through the other person’s eyes. China’s made me understand a lot of things.

  One day I went down to the dirt road running along the valley. After walking for an hour a vintage truck appeared, and I thumbed a lift to the edge of grasslands that stretch right to the horizon. The land was covered in flowers and there was an old man with some beehives next to the road. There was also a hut where the truck dropped me off, and I sat outside with a cup of tea, watching ripples spread across the grass, patterns created by clouds shifting in the sky. The beekeeper lived in the hut with his wife, let me sit outside with a cup of jasmine tea, a warm breeze tickling my face, thousands of miles from anyone I knew. I felt good. Really peaceful. There was nothing to do, nowhere to go, and I sat there for hours, drinking tea till the same truck came back past and gave me a ride home. It was something to remember.

  In the evenings I went to the centre of Xiahe, the nightlife two Muslim tea shops that also sold food, a forgotten corner of the world with loads of laughing characters, ancient Muslims with goatees, Tibetans, a few eccentric Han. It was mostly Tibetans, and they would sit staring at me, then someone would come over and pull the hairs on my arms. They don’t have body hair and were interested, resting their rifles against the table as they tugged away. A Swede came in one day, with a beard and extra hairy arms, and the Muslim boy who ran the tables spoke to the Tibetans, then said he’d told them the Swede was a werewolf. The nomads believed this, and the boy told them the werewolf only changed if he was angry, so they should treat him well. The biggest Tibetan bought the werewolf a cup of tea. They sat watching for a long time, quiet and thoughtful. A few days later the Tibetans invited the werewolf to go into the hills with them, after more tea and a lot of watching. He stayed with their families, travelling on horseback. I saw him again on my last day in Xiahe. He was shivering and had lost weight. Don’t know what was wrong with him, but he was sick. It was a hard life and even a werewolf struggles. He said they treated him well, but it was too hard for a European.

  I stayed in Xiahe for two weeks, then took the bus back to Lanzhou, a rough ride with 4 a.m. kick-off, the sky packed full of stars, the most I’ve ever seen, bursts of meteors burning up as they hit the earth’s atmosphere. From Lanzhou I went to Xining, got sick, and when I was well again spent three days trying to buy a train ticket to Beijing. The woman in the ticket office didn’t like my face so gave me the ‘mayo’ treatment, which could’ve meant anything, that I was less than a dog, the train was full, whatever. She screamed at me, really bollocked me in front of everyone, her face turning red as if I’d pissed all over her bike. The angrier she got, the cooler I made myself. There was nothing I could do, and she was boiling right up. I realised there was another way to deal with these things, something I’d learnt in Hong Kong. I watched as she served other people. Most of the time she ignored me, but I was always there, lurking. She really enjoyed humiliating me, but I didn’t crack, managed to stay calm, doing my own experiment. I hated her but never showed it, and this upset her more than anything. What was the point of her having power if I didn’t respect it, and I realised that’s what it’s all about. I lay on my bed at night fighting my own anger, kept myself going imagining I had a gun and could walk up and blow her ugly face apart. I was the outsider, foreigner, subhuman. I went to the window five times before I found another ticket seller, and this woman sold me a ticket right off. If your face fits you’re okay in a communist regime, the same as anywhere else I suppose.

  My plan was to stay in Beijing for a few days, see the Great Wall and the Forbidden City, then catch the train to Shanghai and take the cruise ship to Hong Kong. I was nearly broke, and had to find some work. The boat was supposed to be good value, with a swimming pool and half-decent cabins, an easy trip back to my job behind the bar and Sammy’s room in Chungking Mansions. I would work six months and keep my head down, save hard and plan my next move. I didn’t know what I was going to do once I’d saved enough, not really. Maybe I would’ve headed home, or gone somewhere else, tried the United States, the flights cheap from Hong Kong. I could get a job in a restaurant, cook burgers and open bottles. Listen to some of the new rap bands, the nearest thing to punk I’ve heard, NWA and Public Enemy cassettes from the market. There’s plenty of punk bands in the US. That’s probably what I would’ve done, but then I checked the post office and found Tony’s letter. Smiles hanging himself made my decision for me.

  Blowing out of China, the last few months crowd in, a chance to put everything in its proper place. And one of my worst times was Xining, another town on the Tibetan Plateau, again with a monastery but nowhere near the flavour of Xiahe. I was aiming for Lhasa, a two-day bus journey from Lanzhou, but the police shut the road. At times Lhasa is considered too sensitive for foreigners. I took a bus to Xining instead, a grim town with muddy roads and a depressed feel. I found a place to stay, more abandoned monk quarters with low ceilings and peeling red paint, musty rooms and sagging balconies. It was a dead place and the man running it said the corridors were haunted by the ghosts of monks murdered during the Cultural Revolution. The floors creaked and the corners were dark, but I never believed in ghosts. I got sick on the first night from some dodgy food, and spent a week soaking the lining
of my sleeping bag in sweat, insides exploding early morning so I had to find a way through the maze of landings in the dark, to a toilet block outside the building, stuck on some waste ground. Built in the time of Confucius, order had broken down, but there was a light, a mystery when the main building didn’t even have electricity.

  This was sickness China-style, stuck in a stone block at three in the morning crouching over one of the twenty slats, a bare bulb hanging from the roof surrounded by thousands of insects, the mosquitoes biting my arse, arms, face, digging in through my clothes, sucking blood and moving on. There were some big fuckers hovering around the light, king-size moths and giant space insects I’d never seen before. Long antennae sticking out of their heads, flashing wings and stick legs. One little gang started dive-bombing me as I squatted down and the poison flooded out of me, waiting for the medicine to get in my gut and kill the amoebae. Worse than the flying squad were the dogs, a pack of five who came out of the night and lined up in front of me. There were no doors or walls in the block, just the slats, and these strays really took the piss, growling and barking their heads off, snarling and flashing their fangs. I didn’t fancy rabies, but there wasn’t much I could do as my insides spewed into the pit, head throbbing from dehydration, the mosquitoes biting and the dogs snarling, the biggest and meanest moving nearer so I could smell the meat on his breath. It was at times like this I wondered what the fuck I was doing on the other side of the world, why I wasn’t at home sitting in front of the telly, half serious and half laughing.

  And I probably wondered what I was doing rocking back and forward on the kerb when I should’ve been standing in line with the others, waiting to see the Damned and Ruts when this mush hit the side of my head, a couple of hundred punks cracking up as I was sprayed with pigeon shit, and because I didn’t know where to run I stayed where I was, looked up at this row of birds along a ledge of the town hall, saw their feathered arses hanging over the side China-style, a communal bog right above me, and I wasn’t quick enough, got squirted again, just for good luck. Typical. And at least Smiles was laughing with the rest of them, bent double like he’d been stabbed in the gut, tears in his eyes, and I had to wait half an hour till the bouncers decided to let us in, Dave taking the piss, wouldn’t let it go, and there’s me doing my best with a hanky, finally washing it out of my hair when we got inside, a big sink of water in the bogs, but maybe it served me right, posing like that, trying to impress the girls. And the Ruts were one of the best bands around, we saw them all over the place, for some reason the Nashville sticking in my brain with a handful of NF raising their right arms in the air, a punch-up right there in front of the stage, and the Damned were originals, took no prisoners live, and there was a sort of a happy ending when this girl started chatting me up during ‘New Rose’, pissed out of her skull, Rat Scabies banging the drum for love and romance, said she recognised me from outside, sorry, couldn’t help laughing when the pigeons shat on me, I probably smiled, glad she was happy, glad she fancied me, a local High Wycombe girl who lived a short walk away, up the hill. And she was with her mates who invited us back, real beauties done up in bondage straps and safety pins, we sat around playing records, drinking from a crate of lager, helping ourselves to the whizz on offer, but we were young and it was a mistake, kept us talking till morning when they kicked us out with hurt looks on their faces, said they had to get to work, and as we walked off it dawned on us they wanted sex, not chat, experienced girls two years older than us, and we shook our heads as the energy suddenly disappeared, knackered now, worn out, that’s the sort of kids we were, useless, too pissed off to laugh at ourselves. And I skip to another time, another place, see us running down a grim maze of tunnels following the sound, a dark night in a dark part of London, a great night out with the Clash, Members, Misty and Aswad, and I would’ve felt good inside, skin tingling, ears buzzing from the sound system, legging it through the arches of Finsbury Park, the thunder of the Underground, thousands of tonnes of city on top of us, knowing this train might be the last one of the night and we’d have to sleep in the station if we missed it, Dave reaching the tube just in time, holding the doors for me, Smiles, Chris, Clem and some other bloke I can’t remember, maybe two of them, letting the panels slip shut, rubber pressing together, lips kissing, and we were dying to give a mob of boneheads the finger same as in The Warriors but there was nobody there, just our imagination, and we laughed all the way back to King’s Cross, over to Paddington, home to Slough. And there was always a band playing in those days, something going on, and I can see us running down from Chalk Farm and on to the High Road, police vans and police dogs, punks, skins, herberts, soulboys, the politics of the country played out on its dance floors, outside the venues, in chip shop doorways, late-night train stations. And we enjoyed ourselves, made the most of our youth, went up to Soho on a regular basis, in with the plastic-mac pervs, conmen, out-of-town football firms searching for a cheap clip joint and a traditional cockney pint, fat old brasses and skinny junky tarts, lost tourists, drug dealers, spivs, plus kids from every tribe going. If there was a load of us we took the train, if not I drove, this was later when I was out of school and working, on the piss, racing home after eight or nine pints, me at the controls feeling the power in the steering wheel, pushing the engine as far as it would go, windows foggy from the chips and kebabs, chow mein and saveloys, up and down the Westway, year after year, turning right for the West End, left for Camden Town, racing along the Chiswick flyover if we were going to Hammersmith. And there was nothing to do locally apart from drink, have a row, the only clubs soul-patrol efforts that soon got smashed up and shut down, so the van got us out and about with a minimum of hassle, Camden, Hammersmith and Soho the main places, Camden always lively with the Music Machine, Electric Ballroom, Roundhouse, Dingwalls and Dublin Castle, plus loads of good pubs, specially the Hawley Arms. Camden was the best night out, while Soho had the Marquee and the 100 Club on Oxford Street, Hammersmith with the Odeon, Palais and Clarendon, the Greyhound just down the road. Those were the main places for us lot, plus the Sir George Robey, Nashville Room, the Hope & Anchor, Aklam Hall, Lyceum, Moonlight Club, and so on, names I don’t remember, never knew. And the van cost me seventy-five quid and did us proud, least till the night I wrote it off coming back into Slough, straight into a lamp-post in Langley at three in the morning, fresh off the motorway. I had Smiles in the passenger seat, and Dave, Chris and Clem stuffed in the back with their sweet-and-sour cartons. The van was a write-off and we legged it into the houses and worked our way home. I was so pissed I could hardly walk, but still sharp enough to know I didn’t want to get done for drunk-driving, that the fine and ban would set me back. I stayed at Chris’s till the next afternoon, then went home. The Old Bill came knocking, but I said the car must’ve been nicked and I didn’t know anything because I was staying at a mate’s house. I got a load of stick off Mum, but she wasn’t exactly going to grass her own son up, and they couldn’t prove anything, had to let it go. I got money on the insurance, but not enough, and it meant I’d lost a car and had to start saving. I wasn’t earning enough to go out and buy another one so it was back to using the train, and we used to bunk it into Paddington, a quick ride then five tube stops to Oxford Circus, a quick pint at the end of Carnaby Street and into Soho for a drink in The Ship, or the pubs by the market, we saw some good bands at the Marquee on Wardour Street, the Vibrators, Chelsea, UK Subs always seemed to be playing there, backed up by groups you saw but never knew the name of, and every time Chelsea played ‘Right To Work’ at the end the stage was invaded, the number of people without jobs rising all the time, the flip side a song called ‘The Loner’, and Dave sat in The Ship one night and said I was turning into a loner myself. And he was right I suppose, but so what, and life went on, all lager and Space Invaders, the Marquee stank of this stuff I used to put down on the floor at work when I was sweeping the aisles of the warehouse, and everywhere you went you had to use plastic glasses, dipping your nose into t
he trough, and my training at work was slow, they made me do all the shit jobs, so I’d know the firm from top to bottom, and there was this bloke there who smoked dope as if he was a bong, so I wrapped this stuff up in tinfoil and sold it to him for a laugh. He was a poseur, as I thought, rolled it and puffed away behind the loading bay during a tea break, nodded his head wisely and agreed it was top-quality dope. And if we got up to Soho early enough we used to go round the sex shops, see what the women were spending their pennies on, there was always these stunners in little gangs checking the vibrators, didn’t give us a second look, mostly older permed birds trying to spice up their lives, one or two nymphos as well I suppose, and seeing one of these full-grown women inspecting a ten-inch dildo was enough to scare you off sex for life. Punk girls were the ones who dressed in PVC and rubber, and I never saw them hanging around the sex shops. The clip joints always had them sitting on the door in leather miniskirts and cartoon purple hair, eyeing up the businessmen and tourists who kept the sex clubs going. And we’d go see a peepshow, cheap screens with a woman stripping and showing stretch marks, or bundle in the cubicles where you paid 10p and all crammed in for a few minutes of some posh bird in riding gear getting her arse caned by Colonel Bogey, and all the time there’d be the poor dumb pikey farm-hand who was hung like a horse but wasn’t getting his oats, peering through the slats of the barn, his mistress bent forward over a bale of hay as the sick old magistrate with the whip dealt out the sort of punishment he wanted to inflict on the hooligans filling up his court. And there was a lot of banter stuck in those booths, four or five of us unable to move, the 10ps soon running out, and we’d be telling the gypsy boy to step forward and service the lady of the manor, you felt sorry for him, working in the orchards for a pittance, shovelling shit and digging ditches in the pouring rain, picking cherries and maggot-filled apples. But it never happened, and it must’ve been funny seeing us crowding in together. Those machines took us for a ride and after a pound we’d give up, walk out pissed off, knew we’d been conned, wishing the spudchurner had given the aristocracy a good tonking. We hated the magistrate in his tweed jacket, a dirty old man who got his fun tanning someone’s arse, and we’d go in the pub with the images in our heads, order four or five pints of snakebite, if the pub would serve them, otherwise cider or lager, eye up the girls. And I don’t suppose we were handsome in their eyes, most of the time they didn’t want to know, suppose we were a bunch of scruffy herberts when we were young. Me and Smiles for sure, we hated labels and designer clothes, lived in the same old gear, DMs and Harringtons, cap-sleeved T-shirts and jumpers. For years we never bought jeans. I had a Crombie I got in the market and I used to wear this in winter. It was a skinhead coat, but I wasn’t a skin, just a lot of the styles crossed over. And Dave was a bit smarter, went rude boy and later on casual, Chris everyday normal, and there was always something going on, something to look forward to, I was always peering into the future, even now lying flat out in the darkness, heading towards Siberia, wondering what’s up ahead, and I can’t help humming along with the Special AKA’s ‘You’re Wondering Now’, hear the saxophone in the night, last one out shut off the light.