by David Keenan
I gave him some books to read. Use these for sustenance, I told him, and then I blew him a kiss across the table in an attempt to turn around the atmosphere. You don’t have to come here any more, he said. We can still write to each other. Okay, I said, it’s a deal. Let’s pick up from where we left off.
In his first letter he talked about the Beasts, that’s what he called them, the paedophiles and the sexual offenders. You wouldn’t recognise one of them in the street, he said. There’s no particular look or style or approach. They all know each other and talk away with each other instantly. Sometimes you’ll find yourself talking to a guy, a real nice guy, you’ll think, and then you’ll walk up the stairs with him and he’ll turn off to the right and you’ll realise he was actually a Beast. Plus they get much more privileges than us, we need to earn television time and things like that, whereas they get it when they want it.
Early on he told me that he now had his own private cell. My cellmate decided to leave, he said, that’s all. I thought to myself, I don’t know this person at all.
Music is always more than life, he wrote. His thoughts had been turned around. It’s life’s duty to live up to music, he wrote. When is life the equal of music, except in memory, except in dreams?
I could relate to that.
Music is another world to me, he said. No need to remember the music but think of me, he said, in your dreams, tonight. Goodnight, he said, as I scanned his letter while smoking a cigarette out of the window and listening to music and wondering what the hell it had to do with memory or prophecy or the past or the future. I imagined him looking out through the bars of his now-empty cell, at this upturned wheel made up of streets and houses and people’s comings and goings, this endlessly repeating past, and I thought of the music of Memorial Device without him, this music that never changed, it seemed, but that still relied on time and I thought of performance art and nonsense like that and I thought he’s wrong, you know, it’s life that we need to live up to, it’s art’s duty to rise to the occasion.
I came across some photographs of my father as a young man; it must have been sometime in the fifties. He was sitting on a low wall and behind him there was a rose garden. Something told me he had planted it himself, something in the way he was sitting, straight-backed, with one leg crossed casually over the other, a cigarette in his hand, not looking at the camera or at anything around him, really, but staring slightly to the right, not focused on anything, at least anything that could be seen.
I told Richard about it. You might as well be mourning one of the clouds in the sky, he said. I started to think that he was some kind of Zen master sent to taunt me but that didn’t stop me resenting him. I met some Rosicrucians in jail, he said. Some Masons too. I covered the metal frame of the bunk above me with mottos and drawings and phrases. Whoever goes in there next is in for a treat. Then he told me he had decided to read the complete works of Shakespeare while he was in confinement. No better time for it, he said. He gave me a running commentary as he went along. He hated The Tempest, couldn’t stomach it. He had always liked A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Hamlet was good. He would trade sonnets with the prison guards; who knew they were such a well-educated bunch?
He heard a rumour about his assailants, how one of them had lost an ear in a fight. I might turn up with an ear in my pocket one day, he said, that’s all I’m saying. He fell for the moon in a big way; I know that for a fact. I keep moving towards the light, he said, no matter what. Then one night he wrote me this amazing letter, which I lost, unfortunately, but where he talked about how he had watched the moon rise over the houses in the distance, in the corner of the window, through the bars, rising over the semicircular estate and casting it in a strange silver glow that made it seem like it was on fire, like ice on fire, he said, something like that, and that he stood by the side of his bed and put his head back and outstretched his arms and that he felt like a crystal being cleansed.
He got out in October and had nowhere to live. His parents still didn’t know whether he was alive or dead, never mind back in the country and fresh out of jail. His wife – well, god knows what she was doing with her life. I had no contact with the music scene by this point, so I had no one to tell, although I did see Remy in a chemist in Sauchiehall Street one afternoon but I resisted approaching him. Of course I thought things would all go back to normal once Richard was released, that we would resume our afternoon hang-outs, that once more I would have my study partner back, my walking companion, my sweet friend. That’s typical of me. I’m always wishing things back, despite all of my talk. But it wasn’t to be. Richard put his name down on a waiting list for a council flat but in the meantime he lived in a hostel near Glasgow Green where he had to wrap all of his possessions up in his jacket at night and use it as a pillow in order to prevent them from being stolen. We met up for a few afternoons in the East End, we took a few walks along the Clyde, but he wasn’t the same person any more. Not that he seemed unhappy; it was more like he had become porous, like there was no longer any barrier between himself and the outside world. He would constantly mishear things so that conversations would be either extremely frustrating or extremely magical, depending on the mood you were in. He would come out with words, single words, like he had just plucked them out of the air or from your thoughts or the world’s thoughts, more likely. Stranded, he would say. Did you just say you feel like you’re stranded? Or, one afternoon, an avowal, he said, an avowal? At first I thought he was talking about a woman but then he just took a long drink from a carton of milk, that was another new development, and said, no, I just thought you were about to assert something. Plus he had all these plukes on his face which frankly made him look disgusting. How can I put it? It was like standing at the very edge of a precipice, at the top of a waterfall, and hearing all of these sounds echoing below and picking out a word from this distant roaring that might have been language, like language itself was vertigo-inducing, and sometimes when he would pluck these words out of the air I would feel a tremendous sense of anxiety, like the floor had just been pulled from beneath me and I was running like a cartoon character in mid-air and I would feel the way I did when I visited him in prison that first time, that I had to get away, that I could never come back, that there was a final step that I was unwilling to take, a final leap that was just too terrifying to contemplate. Still, I did what I could to help. I filled in some forms for him, loaned him a fiver here and there, tried to maintain our friendship. My dad was my example. But sometimes the story is not about you. One day I disappeared from his life like a cloud, like a cloud that nobody would mourn, just as he had predicted. It wasn’t the end of either of us but sometimes I think back to that waterfall, that torrent of language, and I have an image of us together, lying next to each other in the grass, quizzing each other over books, in the open air, and I wonder if the rot didn’t set in right there, if we didn’t catch something from those books that made it impossible for us to be happy. Of course I kept his letters and I cherish his memory. But listen to his music again? You have got to be joking.
18. This Is Where I’m Gonna Sit It Out and Then Impregnate the Future: Airdrie and Bobby Foster remember Teddy Ohm.
There was this guy called Teddy Ohm. He called everyone groover, you know, like, alright groover? But he was hip. He had been in some group in the sixties, I dunno, some local beat group that had dropped acid and blown their minds and that were famous for staging an anti-Vietnam gig in Airdrie Town Hall. I mean, we weren’t even in Vietnam. Plus he had published this really early fanzine where he would write about The 13th Floor Elevators and The Chocolate Watchband and where he would talk about rockabilly and the blues and shit like that. He said that Eddie Cochran was a psychedelic avatar, whatever the fuck he meant by that.
He was everybody’s connection. Pills, blow, you name it. He looked like Edgar Winter crossed with Frank Zappa crossed with Cher in the 1970s, effeminate but tough and kind of scarier for it. Yeah. What I’m trying to say is he was str
iking. He would walk down the road wearing a full-length leather jacket, sometimes white, sometimes black, with this long grey hair flowing down, and besides the drugs he made his money supplying props to movies, mostly historical shit: he had a crazy collection of swords and maces and daggers and chainmail and all that kind of shit. He was a hard man alright. They say he was on first-name terms with Mel Gibson. What the fuck would I know? I heard he wore floor-length leather jackets because he was always packing a shotgun in the inside pocket. But the other thing is that he was a record dealer. He had golden fingers. He could uncover all of the rare shit. His speciality was weirdo private-press shit, bombs like the Fraction LP, Circuit Rider, D. R. Hooker, garage stuff like The Bachs and Index and rural shit like Relatively Clean Rivers and Hickory Wind, you name it. At some point I picked up all of these from him, insane shit, and most of it in at least Ex+condition.
You would go round his house. He lived in a house he had designed and built himself outside Caldercruix in a field, smack bang in the middle of this featureless field with nothing but a motorcycle track leading up to the front door, it was weird, and with a view out to the reservoir where he would fish for his dinner. That’s another thing: he had a deep freeze in his garage that was packed to the gills with fish. Anyway, yeah, you would go out there and his house was totally like an early 1970s crash pad, you know, with like a lower-level living room down a couple of steps that had shag rugs everywhere and wicker chairs suspended from the ceiling and brick bookcases with books about the zodiac and pharmaceutical catalogues and the occult, shit like that, and of course beat literature and science fiction and even more weird shit like books on biker cults, what the fuck. So you would ask him for a particular record, say you were after like a mono copy of the first Red Krayola album. Okay. So he would sit you down, all the while in complete silence, like a heavy fucking deal was going down, like a ritual was taking place, this fucking occult ritual, and he would make a big deal of getting out this vaporiser, he was the first person I ever knew that had one, you know what I’m talking about, like made of glass and you plug it in, and he would load it up with this grass, this grass that was time-killing, that’s the only way I know how to describe how strong it was, that it would actually kill time dead – no question – and then he would pass it to you and take out the record you had requested and he would sniff it: he would sniff it and he would grade it visually and by its smell. Ah, he would say, taking a big dirty sniff, that’s a fine pressing, groover. It was unbelievable. Ever since then I got into sniffing records. It’s like fine wines, in a way.
So somehow I got into his confidence, don’t ask me how, maybe it’s because I was naive and clueless but enthusiastic and also I had a little bit of money because I had left school at sixteen and got a hotshot job in financial services, which I basically used to fund my hobby and my weekends, so that I was regularly buying shit from him.
Okay so one day we were sitting around sniffing vinyl, I think we were spot-checking like a copy of John Fahey’s Days Have Gone By, which is actually my favourite record of all time, cards on the table, when he asked me what I was going to do about the end of the world. What do you mean? I asked him. What you gonna do when it all comes down, groover? he said. I’ve never thought about it, I said. I guess I’ll run towards the blast and hope I get blown to pieces or dissolved, whatever it is this shit does to you. I intend to sit it out, he said. Then afterwards I’m gonna impregnate me some women. Then he sold me the record and shooed me out of the house because he said he had a party later and that I should leave before I got myself incriminated. That was the exact word he used.
Okay so he keeps banging on about this end-of-the-world business every time I see him and eventually I ask him how he intends to survive. This bungalow will be blown sky-high, I say to him, and there will be no skanks left to impregnate. That’s where you’re wrong, groover, he said. Then he asked me if I fancied a drive. I sat on the back of his motorcycle and at first I put my arms around his waist but then I realised I had made a major faux pas and that it was kind of gay, so instead I put my arms behind me and held onto the metal bar at the back. The drive was exhilarating. We weren’t wearing helmets and the wind was messing up his hair and it was blowing back in my face and whipping me and wrapping itself around me like fucking Medusa or something. We drove for a few minutes before he pulled up next to another featureless field somewhere outside of Slamannan. We jumped the fence and I followed him across the damp grass where we came across what looked like a simple manhole cover sunk into the ground. Check this out, groover, he said, and he opened the cover with a dagger with specific nicks cut into the blade and we climbed down a metal ladder into a deep dark space. He flicked a switch and the lights came on. It was an abandoned nuclear bunker that he had bought from the government for £15,000. Wow. Okay. The place had its own filtered air system to deal with radiation and poison gas attacks and it was reinforced with a steel Faraday cage and with twenty feet of concrete. All around us there were piles of decommissioned electronics, crazy shit, Second World War communicators, shortwave radios, oscillators, you name it. The room was half the size of a football pitch plus he was growing marijuana down there. It’s undetectable, he said. It’s the dream set-up. Plus he had doublers of every LP in his own collection, all Mint or Ex+, in alphabetical order on a shelf that spanned the length of one wall. This is where I’m going to sit it out, he said, and then impregnate the future.
Don’t ask me to take you there. I mean it. I couldn’t find it again. Besides he’s probably sitting in there as we speak, in the pitch black, sharpening a fucking Viking axe. Okay so one day I show up at his house, I’m looking to buy a copy of the Savage Resurrection LP. Teddy turned me onto Blue Cheer and told me about their producer, Abe ‘Voco’ Kesh, who was involved with this whole subterranean biker scene based around guys like Allen ‘Gut’ Turk, who Jack Kerouac wrote about, and of course I became obsessed and began collecting everything I could that had anything to do with him, thinking to myself, in a way, that Teddy was like the Lanarkshire equivalent and that I was buying into some kind of fucked-up psychedelic biker lineage.
Okay so Kesh had produced this album by The Savage Resurrection that was reputed to be like two guitarists soloing non-stop for about forty-five minutes and of course I had to have it. Teddy had two copies, inevitably, one in the bomb shelter and both Near Mint. I turned up for the spot-check and the sniffing session and the whole ritual and there was this young guy sitting kind of awkwardly on a hammock by the window and looking kind of sheepish, with like big spots on his face and a runny nose. Who’s this doughnut? I thought to myself. Then I was like, wow, wait a fucking second here, is this his bitch or something? Okay. I have no idea what kind of taste these gays have. But then I remembered him telling me how he was going to impregnate himself some women after the apocalypse happened but of course, who knows, maybe that was just so they could give birth to more boys that he could imprison in his shelter. I hope to god he never reads this, by the way, otherwise I’m a fucking dead man. Okay so the guy with the acne turns out to be Big Patty, or Patrick Pierce as I knew him. He must have been about fifteen years old at the time. What are you buying, I asked him? The Velvet Underground, he said, Live 1969. Amateur, I thought to myself.
Teddy took out the vaporiser, loaded it with the grass. As he passed it around he took both the Velvet Underground LPs out of their sleeve – it was a double album – and held them under his nose. Then he put the first LP on the turntable and cued ‘What Goes On’. Okay now there’s a keyboard solo at one point and that was when I lost it. It was like someone had pulled the carpet from underneath my feet and I was freefalling into Teddy’s underground lair. I saw Patty on the hammock, rocking back and forth and grimacing and with a little bit of drool running from his mouth. There was a poster on the wall, it had a skull on it, some horror poster, and the skull began to melt and run down the wall. Jesus fucking Christ, I said to myself. I need to move. Okay so I can’t remember what happ
ened next but somehow on the way to the toilet I walked into a cupboard instead, a cupboard with all of these empty cardboard boxes used for packing records. And I climbed into a box and just curled up and lay there. The only thing I can remember is the face of Jesus bleeding through the ceiling in silver and dripping onto me and stinging my flesh with every drop. Wow. It really fucking stung but it felt good. I must have been in there about an hour or so, just curled up in this box with this face with an agonised expression melting at me but when I started to come down I pulled myself together and walked back to the lounge where no one even said anything about where I had been or how long I had been away. Okay but the thing that had changed and that freaked me out was that Teddy and Patty had swapped positions. Teddy was now sitting on the hammock and Patty was sat on the chair and all the while this Doug Yule organ solo on ‘What Goes On’ was still going. It was impossible. Right? These people are trying to fuck with me, I said to myself, there’s more than meets the eye here or something like that. Anyway, I bought the Savage Resurrection record and split and left them to their gay-boy scene, maybe, but don’t print that.