Human Punk

by John King

  I wonder how many people know Sid’s real name was John, that he was a boy when he replaced Glen Matlock in the Sex Pistols. Look at his face in the photos, before he joined the band and learnt the cartoon snarl, and he’s soft, a child. Someone older should’ve helped him out. You look at McLaren and Westwood, swanning around twenty years later, and it doesn’t seem right. They were part of the Establishment while the band members were just ordinary kids, the whole fashion parade and avant-garde as much a part of the system as the House of Lords. They’re all the same, obsessed with empty statements, living in a fantasy world, chasing fame and fortune, acting out the system’s idea of rebellion, as if dressing up is hard. We used to call the bloke Stupid Sid, because everyone knew the score, that he was being conned, used by business interests, the sort of scum we hated. It wasn’t meant in a bad way though, just that we could see he was being stitched up.

  It’s a crying shame that a human being is remembered as a cartoon character on a poster, the good looks and Elvis sneer milked by faceless businessmen, promoted as a plastic cut-out who OD’d in New York City, their dumb idea of a rock ’n’ roll town, a glitzy arcade of smackheads and platinum records. I play the Clash single ‘City Of The Dead’ in my brain, see a Disneyland city full of dead musicians, Janis Joplin and Jimi Hendrix on the run from Sid, Kurt and Malcolm Owen, a battered Ford Cortina bumper-to-bumper with a chrome-plated Cadillac, Owen pressing the accelerator and banging into the back of the Cadillac, denting the fins, scratching pink enamel, Sid riding shotgun as Kurt leans out of the back window and levels a pistol at the longhairs, calls them a couple of goddam hippies, Marilyn grabbing James Dean’s bollocks as he pumps her in a penthouse filling station, watching the plebs down below, Johnny & The Self Abusers on hand with the johnnies, that Stewart Home song ‘Necrophilia’ pounding through a city broken into musical barrios, the ring of a police car chasing the Cortina. I pick up the phone and turn down the music, listen to Sarah’s voice, sit talking as the deck spins round, record finished, and I talk to her for a long time, don’t hang up till nearly an hour later, arrange to go round and see her next week.

  VERSION

  My head’s buzzing as I leave Sarah’s flat and stroll into a misty Saturday morning, a big smile on my face. Life is sweet, it really is, don’t care what anyone says, the only downer this Chapatti special bubbling away in my gut, an off-the-menu pharl, twice the spice of a vindaloo, meaner than a jalfrezi, worse than any stout-coke-vodka mix. I need something to ease the pressure, chilli simmering under my skin, oozing through the pores. My knob’s numb and there’s a trickle of spunk down the front of my jeans. Sarah wanted me to stay and meet her little boy, but I pushed myself to get out before her old dear brought him back.

  I cross the road to the paper shop, buy a carton of milk off a bloke who’s talking into a phone, says his old man’s gone on holiday to Great Yarmouth, and I drink the carton outside watching the fog swirl around the lights, traffic picking up, lights blinking stop-go-stop-go, dented cones on their side, tarmac cracked. The morning rush has started and I look out for Chris who’ll be rolling past with the family, his kids pumped up for a trip to paradise, off to the loaded racks of the super-stores. And I’m in the clear, on the move, milk mingling with the pharl, doing its best to turn it into a korma, least in my brain anyway, it’s all about psychological warfare, and I head off past the factory where I worked as a teenager, sweating my bollocks off in the foundry, trying to get the forklift up the ramp, fucking murder, metal filings itching my scalp, boils on my arms, the walls of the buildings vague outlines in the fog, ghosts that spring up out of nowhere pulling me back, and I can laugh it off now, doing well, moving on, slip back and wonder about the men and women, boys and girls working in the factory now, some kid fresh out of school scrubbing at grease, looking forward to the end of the week when he can have a pint with his mates, a couple of Es and lots of music, the throbbing beat of life going on and on, an endless creative circle.

  The air is fresh, cool mist swirling around me, thicker away from the main road, and Sarah’s a diamond, a lovely woman full of soul. A bloke in a Muslim cap hurries past, on his way to some Saturday overtime, sandwich box tucked under his arm, and I wonder how many times I’ve done the same thing. We work hard for a few extra pounds, think we’re doing well if we can save a couple of hundred quid, and in the meantime the captains of industry are spending a year’s wages on a holiday. I cross the street and walk past the cemetery, houses broken apart by the mist, showing off a window here, a brick wall there. I feel the oxygen in my lungs, nicely chilled, mist rumbling along the pavement, look over the cemetery wall at a big concrete cross, fog hanging above the grass, and I shiver from the cold, my legs going rubbery and brain cracking open as I’m sucked into some sort of horror show. I stop walking and look into the graveyard. Stand and stare. I don’t believe in ghosts, must be tripping, my tea spiked, the sun trying to break in through the fog creating the sort of vision that belongs to mushrooms, acid, peyote, religion, mental illness.

  Smiles is standing thirty feet away from me next to his grave. He turns and a white cloud covers his body for a few seconds, drifts away, and now he’s kneeling next to the headstone. He leans forward and rubs at the inscription with a piece of cloth, cleaning his own memorial. I’m panicking inside, scared of the flashback, cross the road and sit on a bench dedicated to someone knocked down by a bus in 1985, the brass plaque worn down by the elements, a yellow stain covering the name, the wood soggy and lined with moss. I keep my eyes on the graveyard. Smiles is still rubbing the stone, digging dirt out of the letters, and I sort my thinking out, know that it has to be a trick of the light. The council must be funding a cleaning programme, paying this bloke time and a half for working early Saturday morning, fighting off his hangover. It’s just that he looks like an old mate of mine, one of those coincidences in life, if you believe in chance, and I don’t, so it must be in my head, looking at the factory and seeing myself on the forklift, shifting back in time. I don’t know.

  The ghost stands and turns, drifts towards the gate and gets lost in the fog, body melting into the clouds, vanishing, and it’s like I’ve seen a miracle, know that there’s a spirit world now, that ghosts really exist, get this feeling inside me, confidence maybe. I lean forward and shake my head, look up again and see Smiles come through the gate, under the little porch with its own bigger plaque, columns of names from the First and Second World Wars, and I wonder if they include the soldiers who died in Northern Ireland and the Falklands. There was a bloke we knew called Barry Fisher who died in the South Atlantic. He was in the papers and everything. And I watch the shape turn towards me and come down the road, stare into the face as it gets bigger, the hallucination sticking and the body rock solid. I’m waiting for voices to start inside my head, radio messages and a television set that only shows one single gold-plated skull.

  The mist lifts and the face is huge, glowing, there’s no mistake now, the body alive, breathing, moving. Smiles is marching towards me, crossing the road, ten feet away. I call his name, and it’s not Smiles, it’s Gary coming down the road, Gary Dodds, an early-eighties version, must be twenty-one or twenty-two years old. There’s no smile, and the face is bent out of shape. I call his name again, and he looks over not sure what to do, peers at me as if he’s forgotten, a puzzled look on his face, stops and tries to work things out, needs time to remember who I am, and he’s got lighter hair than I remember, and maybe I’m face to face with a test-tube baby, Frankenstein getting hold of Smiles’s DNA and building a monster. I’m tired. Emotional. Head clanging. Caving in. The world crashing down.

  –I look like my dad, do I? he says at last.

  I nod because there’s nothing else to do. I don’t understand, move over so he can sit on the bench. He leans forward with his elbows on his knees, same as me, funny bones digging into the thin fabric of tracksuit bottoms, Nike trainers resting on the pavement, worn-out soles flat on the paving stones, a hole in the toe of his
right foot. The fog is fading fast and I can see more clearly, my mind doing one of those trampoline tricks where a charged-up athlete flips right over and comes out on their feet. I forget about spirits rising from the dead, ignore the hypodermics and loaded test tubes, start acting reasonable. Look blank.

  –My name’s Luke, the boy says, his head turned towards me, short hair and a gold tooth in the front of his mouth.

  –My dad was called Gary Dodds. You must’ve known him because you called me Gary. I didn’t realise I looked so much like him. Mum never told me that.

  Yes, I knew Gary Dodds. He was my best mate, from the age of six or seven, something like that. It doesn’t make sense. He looks like Gary alright, but how could he have a son? I’m struggling for something to say, don’t know where to start, what questions to ask. I do my best.

  –My mum got pregnant when she was fifteen and went to live with her auntie. Mum’s in Brighton now and that’s where I’m going next. She told me where Dad’s grave is a couple of years ago, but I never came down till last night. I left my job yesterday, and was on the platform at Ealing Broadway, waiting to go to Paddington, when the announcer called out the Slough train, so I crossed over and came down here. I’d had a drink. It was nine o’clock and I slept on this bench till morning.

  I’ve only been to the grave once, after I came home from working in Hong Kong. Haven’t been since. It’s just a headstone, a stone oblong, and it did my head in to be honest, imagining the body under the earth, rotting away. I saw all sorts of things. Parched skin and a skeleton. No worms or maggots. Just slow decay. It’s better sticking a baby in the ovens. Try and cut it off once and for all. Do your best to look ahead. But each to their own, and if Luke had to clean the stone I don’t suppose it’s getting visited very much. I feel everything flooding back, can feel the spice in my gut, need a drink, a pint of Guinness and a triple whisky, a plate of food, something to concentrate on, a knife and fork in my hands, a glass to lift, anything but sitting on this bench with the smell of wet moss and wood, the smell of the past. The pubs aren’t open yet so I ask Luke if he wants to go for a cup of tea, sit in a cafe and have a proper chat.

  –I could murder some breakfast, he says. I haven’t eaten since yesterday morning.

  It’s a five-minute walk to the nearest cafe. We order and sit down. Luke pongs, needs a bath and some clean clothes, dumps his bag under a table, eyes moving side to side, clocking the men with their faces buried in newspapers, filling up on the latest scandal, more concerned with the back pages than the front. For the first time in my life I feel old. I’m not, haven’t reached my prime yet, but the breath is squeezed tight in my chest. It’s a shock being pulled back and forced to dig up memories. The cafe’s not that busy, the bloke who runs the place going around collecting empty plates, most of them wiped so clean they look like they don’t need a wash. And I’m doing my best to stay calm, choose the right words from the swirl crashing around inside my head.

  I don’t want to scare the boy off, try to handle all this mad-scientist footage that’s flashing up, concentration-camp experiments and mad-cow economics, genetically-modified human beings where all the emotion and individualism has been erased, clone culture, multinational-sponsored boffins stripping life bare as they fiddle with our chromosomes and DNA, corporations kitting out the dissection chambers, the synthetic beat of a computer-generated world. The Nazis had the same idea. They talked about it, while today it’s done in secret. But if I talk same as I’m thinking then the boy will be up and out the door, look at me the same way we used to look at Smiles when he was running off at the mouth, talking about communist and fascist dictators, the council’s housing policy. So I keep quiet and Smiles sits opposite me staring at the table, lifting his head as he sips his tea, face lit up by the light blaring in through the glass, the fog suddenly gone. Close up there’s differences, the shape of his head and the look of his skin, lots of things you never know you see, but are buried inside somewhere. He’s his dad’s boy alright, but I don’t see how. And then something clicks.

  –I’ve been working in Ealing for a year. Computers. It’s the sort of thing you can teach yourself. You have to get on a machine to start, find a manual, but once you’ve got the basics you’re off. It’s easy to bullshit your way in somewhere. People who’ve been to university get straight in the door, so you have to tell them you’ve been as well, then you’re in and it’s up to you. If you can do the work you’re away, and there’s money to be made. Computers are where the cash is. You’ve got to get in there and grab your share, take what’s yours. Doesn’t matter how good you are at something, it’s getting in the door that counts, squeezing past the interviews. Those cunts are so dozy they don’t check the references, and all you’ve got to do is have someone on the other end of a phone, or give an address where you can do a letterhead. You’ve got to use the system. I didn’t work this out till I was a teenager. It’s a shame, because I caused a lot of grief when I was a kid, mostly my own fault.

  Luke doesn’t smile the same as Gary, but he’s positive, upbeat, even if there’s sadness in his eyes, the black bags of someone knackered after a night dossing on a bench, the visit to the graveyard knocking him out. If he’s working he shouldn’t be sleeping rough, freezing his bollocks off when he could be in the warm. He might catch pneumonia. Should’ve paid for a bed and breakfast.

  –It was spur of the moment, like I said. Don’t know why I decided to come down here. It’s only a fifteen-minute ride from Ealing Broadway, and I’ve thought about it enough times, but always put it off, said it wasn’t going to change anything. I’m glad now. It’s sad, a real choker, but there you go.

  It’s true what he says about working the system, and it took a lot longer for me to figure that one out, but you can only go so far. People used to bang their heads against walls and pile in full-frontal, say exactly what they thought, and that’s the way things were, and it was more honest, you knew what people stood for, but sometimes you have to use a bit of nous, if you really want to win. Problem is, some people are so fucking cunning they’ve given up thinking altogether, while the rest of them, the scum really milking the system for every penny, never had any guts in the first place, the original yes-men.

  I wonder about his mum. She’ll be worried if he was supposed to be in Brighton last night. I try and think of her name, but can’t remember. Feel guilty and think of Sarah, how I never remembered her name either.

  –I phoned Mum last night from the station. Didn’t say I was here, just that I had a few things to sort out. I’m going to live in the hotel where she works. There’s a spare room in the attic that never gets used. It’s on the sixth floor and I’m going to paint the walls and do it up.

  David Bowie’s ‘Sound And Vision’ plays in my head, an electric blue room where Luke can live. Fucking hell. Wonder where that came from.

  –The bloke who runs the place is sweet, Luke continues. He says I can stay there for nothing if I teach him how to use a computer. He’s doing it as a favour for Mum really. She’s a good worker. There’s a window that looks out over the sea, and you can climb on to a flat bit of roof and see all the way over to France. You don’t hear the cars down below either. It’s like I’m up in the clouds, on a mountain or something, and no one can touch me. I’m going to bury myself away and make my own music. I’ll have to get a proper computer, and the money won’t last long, but I can get a job in the bar, or in a pub, to keep me ticking over.

  I ask him what he listens to.

  –Everything from Kraftwerk and Brian Eno to Headrillaz and Goldie.

  Maybe he knows the Low album, that song ‘Sound And Vision’.

  –Blue, blue, electric blue.

  He’s laughing now. We’re both laughing.

  –The bloke who runs the hotel, Ron’s his name, he’s always been good to me. Him and Mum are just friends. Suppose he’s the nearest I ever had to a dad. It’s a shame my old man didn’t live, that they didn’t stay together. It would’ve be
en good to have had a proper family. Mum put me in care when I was small. Anyway …

  Our food arrives and there’s a bucketful of tears behind his eyes, so I look at my plate, pretend I don’t notice, get stuck in. I give him a minute, swearing at the salt shaker, moaning about how it always gets clogged up, the mark of a good cafe the condition of the salt shaker, the attention to detail that keeps the salt flowing, time ticking. I stick my fork in the holes, dig the knife in deep, chipping plastic, this rotten feeling in me as I think of this kid, any kid, stuck in a home, my brother stillborn, Mum and Dad never gave him a name, they should’ve given him a name, imagine Sarah’s boy asking her where his dad is and she has to say she doesn’t know, he could be anywhere, and I think of the teenagers standing outside a Chinese railway station, plaques around their necks, condemned to hard labour, maybe death. And what I really want to do is drill my fist into someone’s face and break their nose, splinter the bone into their brain, pay someone back for the unfairness and bad things people do to each other. Life doesn’t have to be like this. If people worked together instead of pulling in different directions we could have it all. Someone has to pay the price, but nobody wants to take the blame. It shifts around, moved on to the next institution. The anger rises, but I control it, let it go, clear the holes and give my food a nice healthy layer.