This Is Memorial Device

by David Keenan

  As soon as he caught sight of the bikers he broke ahead of us, leading us into the melee. I could see that everyone was taken aback. What the hell was this? That’s when I saw Mary; Mad Mary Bell. She didn’t look dishevelled at all. She didn’t look kidnapped. In fact when I saw her she was stood there smiling, talking to this pluky-looking young guy with long hair swept back and a pair of Ray-Bans on and with her finger in her hair like she hadn’t a care in the world.

  This ends amicably or not at all, Scotia burst, and he cracked his walking stick against the ground just like that so that it echoed all the way across the bridge and back again. I thought to myself this is more like a seance than a duel. Teddy Ohm stepped forward. At first he seemed reasonable. He started out with a long preamble about honour and territory and the code of the warrior and guff like that but Scotia interrupted him with another crack of his cane. Cease and desist, Scotia said. I know you. You’re Edward Thom, I remember you. I taught you at primary school. Look at you, he said, passing the stick around the outline of his body like he was casting a spell. What did I tell you about tattoos and earrings and long hair? Didn’t I say you would get into trouble? There were a few titters coming from the crowd. Listen, old man, Teddy said, but Scotia cut him dead. Old man? he said. Old man? Let me educate you, sunshine, in the true code of the warrior. First off, he said, the girl comes with me, and he pointed his stick at Mary who by now was paying rapt attention and who walked over to him like she had been magnetised. A warrior goes into battle foreseeing probable loss, Scotia said, and he mopped his brow again. That always stuck in my mind. Mars is a dead planet, he said. But there is that which remains. We long to taste of each other’s flesh, he said, and he nodded at Teddy and looked straight at him. I saw a few bikers recoil but he had Teddy’s attention for sure. Now Teddy seemed kind of nervous. What about the Mars behind the Mars? Scotia asked him. What about the star behind the stars? Teddy looked dumbfounded. Then Scotia cracked his stick one more time and sparks flew out in four directions at once. The pluky-looking kid with long hair let out a gasp and at a signal from Scotia we turned our backs and I took Mad Mary by the hand and we walked off, slowly, with Scotia at our head and all of these bikers struck dumb, standing around us like statues, afraid to make a move in case he just zapped them on the spot. It was amazing. Later on I found out that the pluky kid was Patty Pierce. This was years before he became a big deal on the music scene. Back then we taught him a lesson, though, that’s for sure.

  21. Every Disappointment Was Like Something Awarded You in Heaven: Street Hassle in a rare face-to-face interview with Ross Raymond.

  RR: Do you have a history of drug use?

  SH: A history would imply something that could be pieced together and that could be made sense of. In that case I have no history of drug use to speak of.

  RR: What were your early influences?

  SH: Rising late. Lighter fluid. That book, what do you call it, fuck knows. That film too. Questions, generally.

  RR: What questions?

  SH: This and that.

  RR: Why?

  SH: Do you mean for what?

  RR: What age were you when you first masturbated?

  SH: Thirteen, fourteen, something like that. I was a late starter and have been playing catch-up ever since. The first time I ever came it was so shocking that I thought I had broken my dick. Though for a while I was mixed up between urine and sperm. But that’s another question entirely.

  RR: If you could sum up the Airdrie music scene in one word, what would it be?

  SH: Pointless.

  RR: Was punk important?

  SH: No. Well, yes, in a way, because a lot of people that might have been doing something else with their lives suddenly realised they could get away with being themselves and still survive or even thrive, but also die, which was coming anyway, which was inevitable, but punk was a way of aggrandising weird character traits and specific tics and making levels of ability interesting because it got rid of any notion of a norm so everything became fascinating and every failure became a breakthrough and every disappointment was like something awarded you, in heaven, which suddenly was these back-room gigs and wash-out art-centre shows and rehearsal-room jams, which were like new routes to immortality, man, like for a moment everyone was beatified or forgiven but of course then everyone began trying to play like everyone else and grace was suspended and there was a whole new standard that got in the way of everything. Punk was supposed to deliver us from rock n roll but in the end it took rock n roll to deliver us from punk. Less specific orthodoxies are more interesting in lieu of the destruction of orthodoxies altogether.

  RR: But what about all that blue-denim, we-mean-it-man rock n roll bullshit?

  SH: God saves.

  RR: Are you religious?

  SH: Oh yeah, sure, very much so. I’m like one of those hermits in the desert hanging upside down from a cliff with one toe. Only normally it’s the cenotaph in Coatdyke and I have fallen on my head.

  RR: Name three groups we should know about.

  SH: The Pin Group. Steel Teeth. Chinese Moon.

  RR: What was your first group?

  SH: Rat Tattoo.

  RR: What was the story?

  SH: We formed at school, this would be 1978. We dubbed cassettes from one player to another, released about five cassette albums. Our whole thing was, you know how there was like a gay channel on CB Radio? What if there had been a metal channel where everyone met up to play metal at each other? What would it sound like if you put a cassette recorder right up to your CB receiver and recorded it straight to tape? That’s what Rat Tattoo sounded like.

  RR: Primitive?

  SH: I would argue that it was pretty sophisticated.

  RR: What do you think about Memorial Device?

  SH: I think a bunch of things. I think that guy Remy is a clown and if I was him I would slip out of town fast and never come back. You can fucking print that. I remember him back in the day, it was at this party, and he was sitting around in these tight silver leggings and with all of this eyeshadow on and he was playing his crappy songs on an acoustic guitar, lying on the floor, slumped up against a wall and everyone was ignoring him or pretending that he wasn’t there. He was trying to reinvent himself but everyone knew about his synth-pop bullshit. I couldn’t believe it when he turned up in Memorial Device and everyone was saying they were hip. My balls are hip, I would say, but they ain’t making albums, although they have appeared in public on several occasions, all of which were outside my own control, I admit.

  RR: Your balls appeared in public?

  SH: You know how it is, you have a rip in your trousers, they fall through, what you gonna do?

  RR: Don’t you wear any underwear?

  SH: That’s the thing. I have a big sister, quite a good bit older than me and more experienced in the ways of the world, etc. She was always bringing boyfriends home, mods, rockers, punks, goths, trendies, you name it. One time she brought this guy home, a guy who was a DJ at this night in Glasgow that was a big deal at the time, Joy of a Toy it was called, it had been going since 1977 or something like that, they played punk and psych but also, like, classic rock and soul and alternative, it was schizophrenic, and it was New Year when she brought him home and they had split a taxi from town and my mum and dad were drunk themselves so they didn’t care, neighbours were falling all over the floor, it was that kind of night, so he got to stay the night and I remember hearing them having sex really loud next door, heaving and panting and begging and all that shit. The next day he was sitting at the breakfast table pleased as punch. He was wearing a pair of jeans and a black V-neck T-shirt and one of those checked seventies lumberjack jackets and a pair of baseball boots, I think, and I sat down next to him and asked him about music. He went on about Wire, Pink Flag, which was fine with me, but then he had this thing about Neil Young, he kept going on about Neil Young, about how his Harvest album was like the true country, none of this Acuff and Rose bullshit, he kept saying,
which meant nothing to me at the time, and he had this weird thing that he would do with his eyebrow where he would just raise his right eyebrow for a millisecond and it was like a bird shrugging, a bird flying away and shrugging and saying, you know, what do you expect, it’s what I do, something like that, and I was impressed, this guy is living it, I thought to my teenage self, living what, I don’t know, but then the thing that compounded it was when my sister told me that when he took his jeans off the night before he had no scants on, no underwear whatsoever, just his naked balls underneath the denim. It blew my mind, just naked balls, I thought, what an idea. I had been brought up on things like combs and toothpaste and socks and vests and underwear. It was crazy to me. I asked her, doesn’t it stink, I said, doesn’t it leave a stain? He said he washed his jeans when they got dirty, she said. Besides, she said, he doesn’t care about stinks or stuff like that. Then she smirked and said that she thought it was sexy, this penis so near the surface, just ready to strike, not caged up or anything. I admit I was a convert. From that day on I threw all of my scants in the bin and just walked about with my bollocks hanging carefree. After that it was every man for himself.

  RR: What was your first exposure to the music scene in Airdrie?

  SH: My mum had some records by Sinew Singer. She claimed she had dated him briefly in like 1960 but that he couldn’t betroth himself to any one woman because he was married to rock n roll, so he had all these partners and it didn’t work out, it couldn’t, my mum was the monogamous sort and besides there were all these women claiming that Sinew was the father of their sons, god knows how much of Airdrie he populated but he was my father for sure, spiritually. I used to do these dance routines to his records, you know like ‘Who’s Responsible?’ and ‘Tracing Paper Moon’, shit like that. Mrs Grey would come over who lived a few streets away with her husband Alec and I would put on a dance display in the front room and they would look at me with their jaws on the floor, not knowing what to think. I’d be flipping out all over the place. I guess that’s where I started associating art with madness or high energy or something.

  RR: What was your first instrument?

  SH: Bass. It was all I could manage, one note after the next. Plus it left space to, like, fall on the floor or jump off stage, stuff like that.

  RR: Did you ever see Memorial Device play with Mary Hanna on bass?

  SH: Let me tell you about Mary Hanna. I knew her at school. She would wear these tights. Fuck me, it was incredible, I can feel my bare dick in my jeans right now. Like pale blue nylons or once even red nylons. People used to yell at her stuff like Bedknobs and Broomsticks because it was rumoured that she had been caught masturbating with a bed end or the pole of a brush, something like that. But she didn’t care, she was above it all, at least that’s how it seemed. I always remember one time in chemistry where she was sitting on the floor next to a radiator, I don’t know what was going on, but she was sitting there and she had her legs pulled up against her chest and her arms wrapped around her legs with these heels on and just for a second I caught a glimpse of her stocking tops and it was unforgettable, it was seared on my mind forever, the tiny centimetre gap between the blue of her nylons and the black of her skirt. Oh my god, I thought to myself, that is a gift right there. Sometimes you would see older boys waiting for her after school but there were rumours that she was a lesbian, I guess because she was unobtainable. Then there was this time that I got into a fight. I wasn’t a tough guy, it wasn’t my style, but I was walking home one day across the fields and this guy, this older guy, sort of pushed into me and knocked me aside and I just lashed out instinctively and banged him one. He grabbed me by the throat and said, you’re in fucking big trouble, just like that, and he arranged for a fight the next night, up on the spare ground at Craigneuk. I didn’t want to do it, I wasn’t that tough, but it was on my way home and there was no way out of it. On the night I cut across the grass with some friends that I had talked into backing me up but they were no help whatsoever and this guy came out of nowhere and just cuffed me one and I fell back on the grass and saw the clouds coming up and birds zooming across my eyeballs. I managed to pull myself up on my elbows in time to see my assailant walking away with a leer on his face, they called him Spike, what a joke, and with him was Mary Hanna. At one point she turned around and looked at me and shouted, fuck off, you loser. I’ll never forget that.

  RR: Have you ever had a normal job?

  SH: I worked in a shoe shop in Coatbridge for one day and got fired. I couldn’t be arsed going into the stock room and finding different sizes so I would just automatically tell people that everything was out of stock. You genuinely can’t be arsed, the manager said to me, can you? He seemed kind of impressed, in a way. That’s well observed, I said, and after that it was all over. Of course I had a paper round, my dad was always putting my name down for paper rounds. Everyone in Airdrie had a paper round at some point. That’s a real job right there, he would say, and of course I would just go dump all of the papers behind a fucking hedge at Easter Moffat Golf Club and be done with it.

  My best job was as a postman in Holehills in Airdrie. That was a fucking eye-opener. There would be human excrement on the stairs inside the flats and you would hear all these crazy fights going on behind closed doors. Plus you would be delivering court orders and shit like that and often you would knock on the door and there would be this slamming noise round the back and you would see the guy who lived there fleeing across the back garden, leaping the fence and just disappearing into the distance. You were constantly being harangued, though, people would come up to you and say, you got my giro there, mate? I have to post it through the letterbox, I would tell them, it’s the law. I can’t just hand out fucking cheques in the middle of the street, what do you think this is, the ice cream van? But then they would start getting antsy, giving me shit like, I won’t be in all fucking day, I need my giro man, I’m fucking skint, I need to visit my maw in hospital, my dad’s a fucking diabetic, shite like that, so that I would just give in and give it to them on the spot, who knows if it was even genuine, but I was a soft touch and they knew it. Anyone with messy hair is a fucking liberal and will eventually give in to pressure, that was the philosophy of Holehills. Plus shitting on your own doorstep keeps the other dogs at bay. That was another one. It was like a fucking social experiment. What was that documentary where they all went to prison? It was exactly like that.

  I actually got bit by a dog there. I used to have this old mod parka that I would wear and this fucking dog just leaped at me in this guy’s driveway and attached itself to my arm. I lifted the fucking thing up and it was still hanging on by its jaws, just clamped around my arm. Luckily the parka was thick enough that it couldn’t sink its teeth in but when I got back to the post office they were all really cool and the head man sent this letter out, it was brilliant, he had it delivered to every house on the street, saying that until this guy got his dog under control no one would be receiving any mail. You could never get away with that now. But back then the post office had your back, it felt good, even though the head guy was the dad of my first girlfriend and had banned her from seeing me because I was a Protestant and she was a Catholic, which is fucking nonsense. I wasn’t even an atheist. I wanted nothing to do with the whole fucking deal. Maybe you know her, Maya McCormack, she played in that all-girl group Dark Bathroom?

  RR: Whatever happened to them?

  SH: It’s a long story. They started out as a kind of jangly sixties girlgroup thing, you know, like The Shangri-Las meets the Buzzcocks, that kind of thing, it was happening all over in the early eighties. Actually, I think they were called something else back then, something like The Ladybugs, something cute like that. I was getting the train into Glasgow once and I met these girls that I knew, this kind of notorious pair, and Maya was with them. I don’t know if she had ever been into Glasgow before, or if she had it was only her second or third time, but there was an air of expectation as we pulled out of the station, the four
of us. I looked at her legs, I can still remember them, she had a short black-and-white go-go dress on with dark woolly tights and ankle boots and she had her dark hair all pulled up in a wild beehive with loose curly strands all hanging down in crazy corkscrews. She seemed nervous and delicate but also poetic and a little unhinged. In other words she was ticking all the right boxes.

  They were going to some club in town, maybe it was Joy of a Toy, I can’t remember, but I decided to tag along, even though Maya told me she was meeting her boyfriend there. What a joke, I said, this girl is mine. Her boyfriend was the typical sensitive intellectual feminist type that is completely unattractive to women. I sat with the three of them at the table and made deliberately vague comments designed to undermine him. It worked and soon the tension was palpable. At one point Maya and her boyfriend went outside to talk and I’m not really clear what happened but it seemed he was getting more and more wound up and that he went to hit her, though probably not really, maybe he just lunged at her or something out of frustration, who could blame him, but the next thing I knew the bouncers were restraining him and she came rushing back in with one of the other girls from her group, Megan, I think, and all the while I could see him shouting and banging on the glass outside. I felt evil, like I had just trapped an insect in a jar or something. There was a big fuss, the bouncers said they could smuggle Maya out of the back door to keep her out of harm’s way. What a joke, they were leading her right into harm’s way, really, ha ha ha ha ha, but soon the three of us, me and Maya and Megan, were making a dash for the train back home. When we got to Airdrie we jumped in a taxi but then Megan lost the head when Maya insisted on going home with me. If I had known that’s what it was all about I would never have helped you in the first place, she screamed, and then she beat her fists on the door and leaped out of the taxi and ran off crazy in a huff. That was the end of The Ladybugs right there, ha ha ha ha ha ha. We went back to mine. I had this flat just above Benny’s, this chip shop in Clarkston where everyone would hang around outside and get up to no good. The previous tenant had died in his bed and the body had lain there for weeks undetected, it was a big deal at the time, so it meant I got it cheap. No one else would live there. But it was an artist garret for me, although I did nothing but stare out the window at the park and drink beer sitting on the edge of my mattress and have sex with confused girls, like on this particular night, and if you’re reading this, Mr McCormack, we even used a condom, so fuck you.