This Is Memorial Device

by David Keenan

  There were times on the way home, and this is the only time it has happened to me in my life, I’m not gay, I’m not bisexual, I like women, as a rule, that I wanted to suck Richard’s cock, I can’t believe I’m saying this, and one night I came close to asking him – even though I wasn’t particularly attracted to him, he wasn’t my idea of handsome – outside of the flats on the main street, where I pictured pushing him up against the wall and going down on him in the light of the bin sheds. Do I regret not sucking his cock then and there? Ask me in another ten years.

  Or rather don’t because I doubt that I’ll be any closer to the truth of my feelings then. Looking back I feel as if I was never really there, that I was storing up all of these experiences, gathering material as opposed to living it, always the author and never the character in the book, which explains why I wanted to be a writer obviously. I remember Richard would make these tapes, solo recordings of really minimal droney keyboard work with primitive drum machines and we would take a drive in his car – his wife was a battleaxe who never allowed him to play his music at home – and we would drive aimlessly for hours, sometimes as far as Gourock, where we would pull up at secret viewpoints and he would play me his latest tapes, listen to this, he would say, it’s the sound of the ocean or it’s a tornado on the surface of Mars, and at the time I wouldn’t even pay that much attention, it sounded to me like a guy who had taped down a few keys on a keyboard and then walked away and done something else for forty-five minutes but now my memory of it is more like weather systems on distant planets or storms come crackling out of the past.

  Richard was a great reader and a book hoarder, even though Margot, his mean-spirited wife who looked like Siouxsie Sioux back in the day, had relegated the bulk of his collection to a series of cardboard boxes in the attic. Still, he lived with his favourite authors on a day-to-day basis. For instance he would talk about the critic Lester Bangs like he knew him personally, like Lester said this or I remember Lester didn’t like that. Lester had died in April of that year and we built a shrine for him in the trees behind Katherine Park that we would sometimes go and drink next to. Margot would never have allowed it in the house. We argued about Astral Weeks. Richard and Lester swore by it. At home you would go through his collection in the loft and see well-thumbed copies of The Dharma Bums and Moravagine but still he was living this mundane existence, jamming with his friends at the weekend, commuting during the week, and I would start to wonder if any of the books he read penetrated deep enough to have an actual effect on his life. My own life has been so seriously damaged by books – I’ve never been able to enjoy a paperback without wanting to commit myself to it forever – that his library seemed more like a collection of firearms that had failed to go off. But like I said, his ordinariness was attractive. I now wonder if that had more to do with my own inherited feelings of ordinariness. Like he was my way in, like there was some kind of sense of permission to his ordinariness, a bring-him-home-to-your-parents kind of mundanity that was acceptable to a deeply conservative part of myself. But soon enough I realised that neither of us were ordinary. Which in a way is the whole point of the story.

  6. Everyone Was Looking for That Mythical Ménage à Trois: Andrea Anderson visits Memorial Device at their rehearsal room which was actually in one of the archways near the train station in Airdrie and goes down a forest path in her imagination and nearly has to get some vacuous bitch down by the hair but thankfully not although she does manage to have an affair with Mary Hanna who set her hair on fire one night while watching a horror movie.

  They had a rehearsal room in one of the archways near the train station. That’s the way I seem to remember it. The archways are demolished now so I can’t say for sure exactly where it was but every fifteen minutes a train would pass overhead, I remember that for sure. The whole room would shake with this industrial noise. You can hear it on the early recordings. They said it added to the ambience and I always remember they had this landscape painting on the wall that seemed incongruous. But when I would turn up at the rehearsal to hang out – there was always an impromptu audience, people skulking around and drinking and smoking while they played – I would sit and stare at it, this forest scene. I would imagine myself entering it. The music would make it seem as if it opened up, like it was alive, this is only me, probably, but I would go wandering in the trees and the bushes along this path. At least I would picture myself going along this path. It was always confused like it wasn’t really happening but I wasn’t imagining it either, it was like a portal, in a way. Does this sound crazy? Like a portal that the music would somehow open up. And I never asked them about it. I kept it secret because I felt I had discovered the real reason that they had hung it there: it wasn’t out of poor taste or ill advice, it was there to get inside. I can still see that path in my head right now. Patty would play this one chord on the guitar and he would keep repeating it. Richard would be playing this mechanical rhythm on the drums. Remy would be alternating between these two notes on the bass and Lucas would step up to sing – he was so handsome back then, big lips, big Bambi eyes, a long fringe – and he would start to sing and his lyrics would be about one thing at a time like thinking something and then doing something and then seeing something. One thing would happen after the next. In an automatic voice like it was playing out without any kind of personal volition. Of course they had that song ‘Adherence’, that song that seemed to go on forever, and sometimes I would listen to it and think, oh my god, everything is fixed, I’m here because I’m supposed to be, the path through the forest is real, mad stuff like that.

  I had affairs. Everyone did. One night I got drunk and asked Lucas for a kiss, just one, I said, right on the cheek. His girlfriend was there and she got mad. But he kissed me anyway. With those big lips he could have swallowed my face. I dated this guy called Patrick Remora for about six months in the autumn of 1983. That was our season. He was kind of a tragic poet. He would do readings at the space and sometimes Patty would accompany him on guitar. They thought they were Lenny Kaye and Patti Smith though not really, they would scorn that sort of stuff and talk about Artaud and Breton and Éluard instead. Of course threesomes were all the rage. Everyone was looking for that mythical ménage à trois. Patrick said he only dated bisexual women – that was me down to a T – because he wanted to be around as many women as possible so he encouraged me to have as many female partners as I liked, which was actually easier than you would think in Airdrie. For instance, I dated Mary Hanna for a few months. No one really knows that. When I say I dated her what I mean is that we slept together on and off every weekend or so. Mary was impossible to get to know. This was before she started playing bass with Memorial Device. I had started at Glasgow School of Art but was already feeling disillusioned, everyone banging on about the patriarchy and hegemony and stuff like that, the tutors loved it, that’s what they gave points for, but I couldn’t care less about social commentary. Social commentary is not art to me. It never will be. I was looking for something else, for me it was serious. I would be coming home depressed and of course even these kinds of issues were anathema to Mary, she was one of those people who would just create without a second thought. At this point I had a flat in town. A bedsit with a bed built up on legs and underneath it a workspace where I would paint and eat and I had a small black-and-white TV set up. Mary would never sleep. My best memories are of lying in bed after we had made love and of listening to her down below, painting or writing, she was always writing in her journal, and all the time she would have the TV on low, late-night monster movies like Creature from the Black Lagoon or It Came from Outer Space, and I could smell the smoke from her cigarettes rising up and soaking through the mattress combined with the smell of her hairspray. Once she even set her hair on fire. She was so engrossed in this painting she was working on that I woke up and smelled burning. When I put my head over the edge of the bed I could see that her hair had caught fire – it was probably because of the hairspray, that stuff was high
ly flammable – and it was smouldering away while she worked, leaning on one elbow with a cigarette between her fingers. Another time she nearly gassed us by leaving a ring on the stove going. It was Mary that encouraged me to start painting.

  At first I was working with film, doing these pastiche advertisements, stuff for the Milk Board and the Department of Tourism, fake nonsense, and Mary saw them and went crazy. She flipped. This is nonsense, she said. Who got inside your head? It was a good point: at that time I had no idea who occupied my head, all I knew was it wasn’t me. She taught me to mix paints. She set me up with some brushes. We began going to shows together. At first I think Patrick was cheesed off because for all his talk he was really looking to be the star attraction in the relationship and to have me as some kind of perpetually dazzled fan, but as Mary and I became closer it sort of frustrated his plans.

  That was when I first started painting landscapes. I got the idea from the painting in the Memorial Device rehearsal room. I couldn’t get over it. What is it that moves you? Mary asked me. Landscapes, I said, personal landscapes. Then paint those. So silly that I needed permission but I did all the same. First I just painted straightforward landscapes, overgrown environments with thick bushes and dense trees and flowers blooming like crazy, then I began to paint rooms with landscape paintings hanging on the walls. I had the idea of an exhibition that would combine landscape paintings with paintings of exhibitions of landscape paintings. I tried to capture that same feeling of a portal. The feeling of stepping into a painting and seeing a painting.

  I got the nerve up to give one to Lucas. I went down to their rehearsal room on a Saturday morning, they tended to play all day on a Saturday, and this awful woman was hanging out, this really severe girlfriend that Lucas had, no one liked her though admittedly she was gorgeous. I probably felt a bit in awe of her. So there was a lot of resentment mixed in. She didn’t have a clue about music – she’s probably married to some miserable alcoholic in the sticks by now – but anyway it was awkward, as you might imagine. I had wrapped the painting in an old issue of International Times. It was the April 1971 edition with the topless woman with the machine gun on the cover and the girlfriend made some too-cool-for-school comment about it. I handed it to Lucas, who for some reason I now remember was wearing a black-and-yellow-striped T-shirt. He tore the newspaper off and held the painting at arm’s length for a moment before saying anything. He nodded a few times – it was as if he recognised the scenario or the impulse that had led me to create it – then he handed it back to me. Life is a series of internal disturbances, he said. That was all. At first I was taken aback. Then I regained my confidence. It’s for you, I said, I painted it for you, I was inspired by the rehearsals, I told him, it’s a landscape inside a landscape but really it’s me looking in from the outside. I began to create all these justifications in my own head, I began to come up with all these reasons that had never been there in the first place. His bitchy girlfriend called me a geek, fuck off you geek, she said. I was cowed but I kept at it. I’m not a geek, I’ll have you know, I said, I’m an artist, I’m responding to that painting on the wall, unlike you, I said to her, this shit actually means something to me. I don’t know if I really swore but in my mind I did. What do you mean unlike me? she said. You’re a vacuous bitch, I said. I couldn’t contain myself any longer. By this point Lucas was smiling under his breath, he was clearly enjoying the situation. I thought to myself, I’m going to have to get this vacuous bitch down by the hair. It was awful. I think her name was Paprika, Paprika Jones, something ludicrous like that. But nothing happened. In the end I was left standing there with this painting in my hand as the two of them walked off. I threw it in a skip on the way home and then I started all over again.

  7. Wisps of Blonde Sawdust (Blonde Stardust): Johnny McLaughlin is growing up in Airdrie or is it Belfast.

  (This is my favourite joke.) Paddy from Ireland goes on Mastermind. His specialist subject is the history of the Irish Republican Army (his questions start now). When was the Provisional IRA formed? (Pass, he says.) In what year did the Easter Uprising take place? (Pass.) How many people were murdered by the British Army in the Bloody Sunday massacre? (Pass.) Who pulled the trigger on Michael Collins? (Pass.) What was Martin McGuinness convicted and sent to prison for in 1973? (Pass.) (At which point someone stands up in the audience.) That’s right, Paddy (he shouts), tell them fucking nothing!

  (This is my favourite fact.) There are three thousand different types of snake in this world. (Another favourite fact.) There are more living things under the sea than on dry land.

  My family relocated from Belfast to the west of Scotland (in the 1970s) and we might as well have been snakes living under water. Our entire existence was based around secrecy and being hidden (and saying nothing). In our loft we had a secret room (an annexe, hidden behind a series of tall bookcases in a walk-in cupboard). Every so often we would be called on to shelter a brother or a cousin-in-law or a complete stranger (a commandant with instructions to lay low or a foot soldier out to escape the heat). Some nights my father would allow us to be locked in with them (for a few hours at a time) where they would teach us to smoke cigarettes and to play card games (and how to take a punch). Other times they would play music and sing for us (they were all crooners, they all sang in the old style and idolised Perry Como).

  It was the summer holidays (it was the summer of 1979). I was seventeen years old (and I was in love with a girl from Salsburgh who played the violin). Her mother was a spinster (prematurely aged) with a perm so tight it looked like it had been set on fire and was still smouldering, the way it must have once, between her legs, when she was seventeen years old herself and gave birth to Samantha. She worked part-time in a cafe with a name like Joey’s or Machiavelli’s (something sneaky) and although Samantha was banned from seeing any boys (the fire between her daughter’s legs a reminder of the price of her own freedom) we were able to coordinate home visits according to her work schedule, where I’d wait at the bus stop (in sight of the front door) and watch as her mother got into the car and drove off, and once inside (in the labyrinth of their home, with dark corridors leading to rooms with dazed relatives sealed inside) she would lead me to a messy bedroom at the back of the house (with the curtains closed) and we would make love (in the bed she shared with her mother) to the occasional accompaniment of coughs and shuffles and doors opening and closing in the corridor outside, which by this point was like my brain (my own family policing my libido at a distance) reminding me that the blood that now rushed towards my penis and danced around its head (caught tight between her red, perfectly made-up lips) was once theirs and that somehow they had afforded me this pleasure (and so owned it forever) and the sound of people going by in the street outside in that time (and the smell of warm towels drying on the radiators) in that one perfect time where we made love on the fly and against the wishes of everyone, it made me feel like I was in hock to the beginnings of time (like sex with Samantha in the back bedroom could somehow be tracked back to the first orgasm of creation) and here we were, the aftershock (the endless re-enactment), the children of children of children of children of children (and as guilty as any one of them).

  I was a stockings man back then (and I will be until the day I die, so help me god). I was precocious enough at seventeen that I already had a fantasy in place. I had a way of moving her limbs (of lifting her leg to the side), of guiding my penis inside her with my hand, into her newly shaved pussy (shaved on my request), her turquoise panties pulled to one side, though back then there were only a few hairs, really, her vulva like an egg (domed, smooth, freshly blown), the prickly hairs like wisps of blonde sawdust (blonde stardust, I nearly said) in the drawers of a collector, which back then was how I saw myself (to be sure), as a collector, a connoisseur, a gourmet, a pussyeater (a body-gorger) (a piss-drinker, a shit-lapper), a woman-lover, a tit-biter, an auto-asphyxiator (an ass-lover, a panty-smotherer), a heel-worshipper (a hose-hugger). I would do to their bodies
what they would never dare (taste them in ways that they had never tasted themselves) so that their smell was my own as I gave it back to them. Samantha would cut her fishnet tights down to stockings and borrow her mother’s suspender belt (back then who had a lingerie budget?), black silk except for a little turquoise flower in the centre, which I would tongue and taste her mother’s perfume and talcum powder and warm laundry and I would think of her mother (dressed for sex and masturbating in their windowless bathroom) as her daughter lay dressed for sex beneath me, tearing at her frayed stockings, biting my shoulder, scraping my arms (the delicate buckle on her patent heels running up and down my back and leaving lines beaded with blood that looked like a child’s first attempt at writing, gasps of silence, secret signatures), and so I went through all of these mute girls in my youth, these silent types, and had them write on my back or bite their name into my forearm. I’m John the goddamn Revelator (I said to myself).

  The rest of my time I spent alone (an intuitive heartbreaker right from the start). I was a precocious reader (a dedicated listener). From late-night radio I picked up on what was happening in New York and San Francisco and London (and LA and Manchester). But when I walked out on the streets I felt nothing. I read Céline and Cendrars (and Ginsberg and Borges) and looked out of my window towards Glasgow and I saw nothing but fucking street lights (snaking off).