This Is Memorial Device

by David Keenan

  Then Michael made his appearance. There’s someone new in the loft, my mum told me when I arrived back from one of our secret assignations (I immediately pictured it as the muse, inspiration itself, climbing the ladder of the brain stem and secreting itself in some forbidden lobe, some taped-off back room or abandoned dungeon, set on dynamiting the whole thing to hell).

  I couldn’t give a fuck about the IRA, Michael said, and he shrugged his shoulders and swept his long hair behind his ear (and stubbed a cigarette out in my mum’s flowerpot). He looked like a hunger striker, with a black beard, sunken cheeks, clay complexion, red eyes, yellow teeth, greasy hair, cigarettes (a Holger Meins, a Bobby Sands), a stretcher case, really, but here he was, propped up on a pillow like a painting (his pale skin like a cracked old master), and he was cursing the Pope, damning the Catholics, a pox on Southern Ireland, a plague on Italian superstitions. What are you fighting for? I asked him. Living room, he said. That’s Hitler you’re quoting, I told him. Picture a world run by Catholics, he said. Think about it (okay, I’m thinking about it) (it stinks). It’s sex as procreation, Michael said, which is like saying pleasure as function, which is like saying love as duty (which is like saying feeling as obligation), which is like saying heartbeat as slavery (which is like saying liberty as prison), which is like saying acceptance as apology (which is like saying today as tomorrow), which is like saying life as death. Fuck that, I said. Okay, he said (now we’re talking). But you’re just a wee boy, he said (that stung). What do you know? I’ve eaten women out, I said. I’ve strapped them to my face and drank from them like cups. Like cups? he said. Like cups that were overflowing, I said. Like goblets, like chalices. But the Protestants are worse, he said, shaking his head. Despite my intellectual sympathies, they’re worse. They’re mean. They have no warmth. They hate life and the world. They have as little belief in heaven as they do in next door. They despise all consolation. They exist to suffer beyond any display of suffering. Really, I might just as well have joined the mujahideen.

  What are you reading at the moment? he asked me. Vanity of Duluoz by Jack Kerouac, I said (I fluffed it). Bullshit, he said. Don’t tell me, he said. Charles Bukowski. William fucking Burroughs. Patti fucking Smith. Jim fucking Thompson. Hermann fucking Hesse (Bullshit von fucking Bullshit). Try this on for size, he said (and he pulled out a copy of Diary of a Madman by Gogol from his rucksack). Read the Russians, he said. And forget satire, he said. And forget metaphor, the Russians have no truck with metaphor. And forget time, they have no truck with time, either. When you read Gogol it’s neither yesterday, today or tomorrow. You ever heard John Coltrane? he asked me. I have Kind of Blue, I said (he’s on there). Bullshit, he said. You need to listen to Ascension. You need to listen to Meditations. You need to listen to Interstellar Space. You need to wake up to now, my friend. He stubbed out another cigarette. I need to get to sleep, he said. You have no idea the weight of my brain right now. I told Samantha. We have a visitor upstairs (I said).

  I got another job (another fucking miserable job forced on me by my goddamn parents). Gardening (they called it). But really it was more about painting creosote on fences, cutting down trees and toppling power lines, talking in circles with insane old people, drinking their fucking tea, lifting slabs, cutting up blocks, delivering coal (eating their fucking tablet). This is the Gulag Archipelago, I told Michael. I don’t need another Russian novel.

  I split my time between repairing rock gardens, fucking Samantha, sleeping in a great big double bed that used to be my grandfather’s (and that I think he died in) and locking myself in the annexe with Michael. Occasionally my father would come up, quiz him on Irish history. Michael was well versed (he had served in South Armagh). But there weren’t many hippies in the IRA. It was more like the mods (or the Mafia), you know, clean living under poor circumstances (all of that crap), whereas Michael’s whole deal was that you should offend and terrify and appal and undermine (and disgust) at all costs. My dad would bring up Perry Como. What about him, eh? Perry Como doesn’t exist, Michael would say. He never has. What the fuck are you talking about? my dad would say. I’ll play you a song right now, a good dose (a good dose of Como). Then you’ll know he’s real. You’re a cheeky bastard, my dad would say. And then he would struggle with the stereo, pull out Perry Como’s 40 Greatest Hits, drop the needle on ‘It’s Impossible’, ‘For the Good Times’, ‘When You Were Sweet Sixteen’, and secretly, somewhere inside my veins, in the tunnels (long rebel-held) (or so I thought), a little bubble would appear (a little gasp of air) that would fight its way to the surface of my brain and (for a moment) I was ready to fight for sentiment (to stand by cliché as profundity), maybe that was as close as I came to any kind of revelation (I think so now, maybe, a little), and I would go to speak but then Michael would reach for the tone arm (it only occurs to me now that he has the name of an archangel) and he would wrench the needle back like we were in a sitcom or a radio documentary (the sudden urrrk! of the vinyl like the splat of forged ectoplasm, the disembowelling of some kind of airborne hallucination) and I would look round and he would be smoking a cigarette (flagrantly) (one arm behind his head, the other in the air) with his shoes off, his bare feet mocking my father, every inhalation bringing Perry Como’s existence into more and more doubt.

  8. A Beautiful Form of Self-Scarification and Of Course Endlessly Attractive: John Bailey recollects Vanity and Glass Sarcophagus in turmoil and it’s true that everyone was in love with Vanity everyone in Airdrie and everyone in Coatbridge too and after Memorial Device Glass Sarcophagus were the best live band of the era I saw the shows and bought the tapes which all go for a fortune now predictably now that it’s all over.

  Of course everyone says it was the tits that first attracted me, that all I saw was the tits and it was all over after that, but it was something in the eyes and I don’t mean it like some kind of repressed adolescent romanticising of tragedy and poetry and bullshit or some attempt to be chivalrous, I’m really not that deep, I loved the tits as much as the next man but they went together with the eyes, dark eyes, sparkling eyes, eyes that were alive, not dead eyes looking out, no, not fake eyes, eyes like a tightrope walker over a deep dark lake, and those tits, yes, my god, fake tits, and of course all the girls were mocking her, calling her desperate, a man-pleaser, a phoney, but really she was the most genuine person I had ever met, at least back then, and it’s what got me into body modification, at least not personally but as a fan, as something to be appreciated in others, something to marvel at, because it really wasn’t my style, I wasn’t adventurous enough, I’m sorry to say, because to me that’s what those tits said, bring on adventure, a thumb in the eye of fate or God or whoever dealt the cards in the first place, I wish I could have done something as daring as growing a new pair of tits when I was nineteen, like sawing off a leg or getting a tattoo on my neck that read I-N-D-I-V-I-D-U-A-L so that I could never work in a bank, but fake tits are the best, a beautiful form of self-scarification and of course endlessly attractive though when I think of them now, I think of those dark eyes behind them, I think of the eyes looking up at me, perhaps they’re squinting a little, glittering, the dark make-up around the rims, both hands holding these beautiful tits out towards me while I masturbated over them, though really they needed no support, it was all part of the show and she loved to display herself, loved me to come on her tits, some people think it’s humiliating, but with her it was like a kind of anointing, there was a spiritual aspect to it and it was beautiful and it was more than tit-worship or eye-worship or greedy sex, although of course it was all of those too, but when I think about it now, the pupils floating on the surface of her eyes like dark lily pads with roots in who knows what beginning of the world and the huge tits in her hands, these creations made to drive me wild, I get a sense of vertigo and I feel myself falling forward and a sense of anxiety comes over me and I lose control of my thoughts, though really it’s more like falling backwards, into the past, a past that isn’t even there any more
, because it was a true romance, I’ve had plenty of relationships since then, good and bad, with their share of ups and downs, but I can’t hand on heart call any of them a romance in the same way, you know that song ‘Private Dancer’ by Tina Turner, it had just come out at the time and it sort of became our song, I know it’s a bunch of crap really but we would listen to it together all the time, we’d play it while we were having sex or sometimes when we were watching one of her videos with the sound turned down, it would be the soundtrack, when you’re in a romance that’s the kind of cheap music that works for you, that’s what the song is about in a way, you know, any old music will do, it’s saying that you’re no longer thinking with your head, you’re caught up, you’re swept away, it’s the oldest trick in the book and every time I hear it I feel the same way, transported, back to the way we were because there are no photographs of us together, no home movies, no washed-out Polaroids of the two of us at Glasgow Green or on the ferry to Dunoon in December, so the only thing I have to remember her with are VHS copies of her movies, low-budget porn movies, none of which I starred in, obviously, so the only time I see how she was back then, outside of my memories, is with other men, I mean it doesn’t necessarily make me jealous, just sad sometimes, when I catch my own reflection in the television, watching her being penetrated by two men on a couch in a council house made up to look like a classy hotel room and for a second it’s like she was just a thought bubble inside my head or vice versa but I never saw anyone come over her tits in the movies, you have to hold something back, she always said, you have to keep something special, plus she loved music, she was a big fan of punk and Krautrock and industrial and of course she wanted to get involved, she was an artist, that’s how she saw herself, an artist that used sex and her body and gender and stuff like that – though she never talked about it in those kinds of terms, that wasn’t her style – and so early on we began doing music together where we would record ourselves having sex, she would get into the zone, there would come a point where she was so turned on, you can hear the moment it clicks on the tape when the voice would come out, this new voice, this automatic kind of voice, not always using words but sometimes, words that you wouldn’t expect, words like exhibition and tournament and procession, words that always seemed too long to suit a gasp of passion or an orgasm, words like calculation and expression and verification, sexy words, it seems to me even now and back then, my god, it was all I could do not to blow my load as soon as she began talking these words, these magic words that were like passwords to a whole other kingdom of passion, on her knees in front of me, sometimes with a single thin silver belt tied around her waist and a pair of heels, those eyelashes curling up, nothing else, and next to my penis a microphone so you never knew which one she was going to suck and which one she was going to talk into and we would press up tapes in editions of fifty copies or less and distribute them ourselves, we had a newsletter, nothing earth-shattering but we would write up small descriptions of each release, most of which had a xeroxed picture of Vanity on the front or a blurry scene from one of her movies, deliberately obscured, we were into Throbbing Gristle, Peter Christopherson’s use of suspect tapes, Whitehouse, stuff like that, and we’d publish correspondence that we got from people who bought the tapes, reviews, there were a few, and soon other people asked us to start stocking their own releases and we did, if we liked them, or rather I did because music was still a sideline for Vanity, it was still the pornographic work that was her focus, she wanted to be the first intelligent porn star even though I told her there had been porn stars with brains before, but not like me, she would say, and early on we got a letter from Robert Mulligan, the guy that did Sufferage Tapes out of Greengairs, I was the first person in the world, actually, to hear the Steel Teeth cassettes, he had never sent them to anyone, he was just making this racket out there on his own, with no context at all, no idea that anyone was doing anything remotely like it, just completely isolated, but he heard a tape that Vanity and I had made, god knows how, except that we were becoming minor celebrities on the local underground scene, though he never bought it from us and I never asked him how he heard of us in the first place but it was the third tape that we did, Festival, a particularly noisy one, that inspired him to write and to send us a cassette and the rest, well, it’s history, we started putting out releases by him and he became this legendary figure who worked in a sausage factory in Mount Vernon six days a week and built all of these incredible electronics that he made this ultra-minimal, ultra-lonely music with, so that was one of our early hook-ups and of course when we met him he couldn’t look Vanity in the eye but she liked him, she said he was handsome, special, which is hard to believe as even back then he was small and fat and wore big black woolly jumpers and skintight black jeans and a tight woolly hat even when the sun was shining but judging by the quality of her partners in the films, the ones she liked working with, the inner circle she called them, there was no way of second-guessing who she would go for and we would go to concerts together, she always dressed extravagantly, even for the underground, with stiletto heels, leotards, tiny leather jackets that she wore like batwings, so you can imagine the kind of stick we got walking along Carlisle Road, heads would turn, people would shout things from passing cars, it was amazing and I started upping my own game, I grew my hair like Dylan ’65, dug out my dad’s old jackets, some of which were torn and eaten by moths, and I’d wear skintight jeans and winkle-pickers so sharp you could have kicked the eye out of a worm and sometimes she would take her heels off and climb up on stage barefoot and talk to the band before they even played their first number, no one would stop her, the bouncers would make way, the band would welcome her, she would hold her heels in her hand and everyone in the audience would be looking at her, of course most of the girls hated her and some of the guys said they did, but all eyes were on her and she had the stage, if she wanted it, even if in reality it was someone else’s, I had that feeling like I was walking into the future or more accurately being led into it by its chosen representative, plus she liked having sex in public places, it never appealed to me before or since but there was something about being with Vanity that made me want to be pointlessly daring, we had sex in train carriages, on buses, once in the back of a taxi, in the park, in the back row of a concert, at an open window, in the toilet at a party, she had a way before she gave you a blow job where she would very deliberately put on new lipstick and then she would run her tongue around her lips, as if she was moistening them, and it drove me crazy, I can still see it now, it was always an occasion, that was the thing with Vanity, it was never ordinary, it’s harder to keep that energy when you are older but I remember it and I still try to practise it, from time to time, and she would look up at me with those eyes, maybe an arm under her breasts, holding them up, and I would think, my god, we’re going to die far away from each other and in completely different lives, what a thrill, and that’s when she started appearing on record sleeves by local bands, everyone was after her, and for about a year or so it seemed like she was on every second release, all of which had a similar kind of look, you know, band name and song titles written in Tipp-Ex, then a fuzzy picture of her maybe with her legs in the air or kneeling up on a bed with her hands tied in stark black and white, some of them are worth a lot of money now, and her career as a porn star was starting to take off, she fell in with Imaginorg in Glasgow, the company run by Rod Stilvert before he launched Gamma Productions, back when he was based round the back of St Enoch tube station in Glasgow on the second floor of a sleazy walk-up and was still trying to make something artistic rather than the mindless wank fodder that made his name, she made a few films with Randy Jewels and Manda Candy, all of that first generation of Scottish porn stars, I partied with them a few times, it was kind of awkward, actually, there was a boxing match at The Tudor Hotel in Airdrie and Stilvert invited his roster along but the mix was all wrong, you know, all these sexually repressed thugs and slimy businessmen and gangster promoters on one
side and on the other side all of us, a bunch of punks, really, and all of these beautiful, fearless women in stockings and suspenders and with their tits hanging out and skirts up to here, it all kicked off when some drunken meathead licked his finger and went to slide it up Manda’s asshole as she bent over her handbag, they had no idea how to be around women, simple as that, but rather than cause a scene we all split back to Vanity’s house in Gartness but not before Manda got the guy by the neck and smacked him in the head with one of her heels. Vanity lived in a council house in Gartness with an abandoned flat underneath that had been burned out in some kind of domestic dispute, she lived in one room really and it was kind of shabby, for instance she always had an ironing board set up in the corner and that’s one of my pet peeves, all of her clothes lay in big piles on the floor, she lived in her bed basically, or on the stool in front of her dresser, she had no phone, that was another thing that impressed me, if she had a booking or you needed to get in touch you could arrange a time where she would wait at the phone box at the bottom of the street or you could write her a letter or of course you could just pop by but popping by wasn’t always a good idea, there were a few evenings, evenings where I couldn’t resist the urge, evenings where I knew there was something in the air, something that said, don’t go, it’s not your time, you’ll only get your heart broken, but sure enough I would call around anyway and sometimes the light in her bedroom would be on but she just wouldn’t answer or other times there would be lights in other rooms, rooms that as far as I knew were empty and never used and once I heard music coming from the back bedroom, a room that she said was just a storage room, yet one night I heard a song coming from it, through a crack in the window, I had climbed the fence after she hadn’t answered the door and had been startled by this sound, I call it a song but it wasn’t music really though in a way it was still a song, if you know what I mean, it rose and fell like a song, occasionally it would rise a little and then it would die down and at first I thought it was the central heating, then I thought it was a song coming back to me in my own mind and then I had an even worse feeling, that it was the song on the end credits of our romance, a song like something slowly fading, something being very gently deflated, like a dying plastic toy, though maybe that’s more with hindsight or cruelty, we played a few live shows together, we discussed having sex on stage but I didn’t fancy it, I didn’t want everyone to see my penis though it was quite big and I wasn’t ashamed of it, also there would have been problems getting away with sex in nightclubs and the next thing we knew we would have been in the papers for all the wrong reasons, which of course Vanity said would have been for all the right reasons but she came to see my side of the story, in the end, but Glass Sarcophagus played that show, the big one, the one with all the Airdrie groups, though I don’t remember much of it, there was a fight, inevitably, some kind of incident during the Memorial Device show, something about their visuals causing offence, I knew Vanity had been involved with Lucas from Memorial Device when she was younger but when you saw them together it really made no sense, size-wise, even, it was all wrong, she looked tiny next to him, I remember Nein Nein Nein did one of their refusenik pieces where they refused to change the chord, just this one-chord mantra, it was really good, it was just before they went fully experimental, back when they still had this dirty psychedelic rock thing, I loved it, but people were throwing things and shouting abuse, it was the first time I had been around a lot of the musicians, I was putting faces to a lot of names, people I had corresponded with or whose tapes I had stocked, and it was true that Vanity and I were local celebrities by this point and I still think it was one of our best shows, everyone was expecting us to be very confrontational, we had that reputation, but on the night Vanity did these really soft, heartbroken vocals, at least that’s how they seem now, she kept repeating a single phrase, I can’t remember exactly what it was and you can’t really make it out on the recording but it sounds like Back to nowhere but someone else said it was Parting always and I’ve even seen it written up as Fucked in no way but that seems too obvious to me, I was playing the guitar with a bow, I had about three strings on it and I was putting it through a Space Echo and then for the second piece, there were two numbers but the second piece was never recorded, the tape ran out or someone forgot to press record, for the second piece I just kept playing these three single notes but in weird rhythms until they started phasing against each other and clanging and clashing, it was really loud and it went on for about twenty minutes before Vanity began singing and again it was just one simple phrase, Do you remember?, that was all, again and again, as it went on it wasn’t like she was asking if you remembered a specific thing or a place or a time, it was more like do you remember at all, like it had something to do with space and time and experience and backwards and forwards and our own relationship and I wondered was I living it or remembering it or just wishing it had happened and we both got really drunk afterwards, we were spaced out, we went back to hers where we had really amazing sex but when I came on her tits I noticed that my sperm seemed like it was shot through with silver, like there was a metallic quality to it, oh my god, I said, I’m coming silver, but when she rubbed it between her fingers she panicked, that’s not cum, she said, I’m leaking, sure enough, there was a tiny hole under her left breast, a vampire puncture, and it was leaking a sort of gelatinous silver liquid, I looked out the window and it was a full moon, or maybe not quite, something is going on, I said to myself and at first I felt bad, I had been slapping her tits around with my dick and I have quite a big dick, I had really been beating on her, and I half wondered if I had caused the damage myself, don’t worry, she said, I’m sure I can get them fixed, but there was something in her voice that told me that this was more of a deluge than a puncture, in the meantime, she said, I can just cover up, do lingerie sex, stuff like that but in my mind I was paranoid, do you remember, I kept thinking to myself, she went to see the surgeon, it was worse than we thought, there were numerous leaks inside the breast and it was causing tissue damage as well as causing the flesh around the side of the breast to lose elasticity and crack apart, she came home from the clinic and we both cried, a rebuild would be a very difficult procedure, they said, we had dinner at our favourite Italian restaurant in town, how about flying to Europe, I said, they have the best clinics don’t they, their technology is leagues ahead of our own, but it was an idiot fantasy, we had no money, we thought about a benefit gig, you know, Save Vanity’s Breast, but we knew it would bring out all the told-you-sos and the puritans and to tell you the truth, it didn’t look too bad and there are a few movies that she made round about the time where you can hardly tell, except for at certain angles where you can make out a thin strip of masking tape just behind the bra strap, honestly though, things had been coming to a head in terms of Vanity’s career anyway, she had peaked too young, she said, all the other girls had held back, they hadn’t done girl-on-girl right away, they hadn’t done anal or double penetration, and so they were able to demand higher fees and gradually move up the pay scale, but Vanity had been doing it all from day one, she wasn’t a goddamn businesswoman, she was a passionate artist, and here she was paying for it while all of these cynical bitches, who couldn’t even take a cock up their ass without going cross-eyed, were moving up the ranks, truth was she had nowhere left to go, no special trick to turn or ability to unveil, she had given it her all and that was her mistake, at least in the eyes of these maggots.