by David Keenan
Three things I remember about Maya. Number one, she had the firmest buttocks I have ever held in my hands. They were a marvel to behold, her tiny skirt literally stuck out behind her at forty-five degrees and I remember her lying on top of me with her skirt pulled up above her waist and me with a hand on each cheek like the first man on the moon. Number two was her eyes. She had green eyes, like a cat in the corner of a dark room. Number three was her skin. Kissing her neck was like running your tongue along a cold marble pillar.
It didn’t last long, her father was having none of it and one day I got a note through my door, hand-delivered, saying that she couldn’t see me any more. She had walked all the way from Plains one summer afternoon, which isn’t that far, but somehow the thought of this journey and her sad determination really got to me. When that sort of thing happens to you when you’re young it feels like it was written in a book before you were even born and that the next chapter will be even more beautiful and tragic than the last.
In the short time that we had together I tried to educate her about music. I played her tapes of Pere Ubu, Peel Sessions, shit like The Only Ones and Suicide, and I turned her onto free jazz, Albert Ayler, Ornette Coleman, Frank Wright, stuff like that. I gave her an education that summer, that’s for sure. That was my own part in the story, as far as I’m concerned. From then on it was awkward.
RR: What do you mean?
SH: She got an older boyfriend and she would avoid me. I would bump into her in Glasgow, say walking down Queen Street, and her new boyfriend would walk on and not even stop so she would be left to say hurried hellos and then tear off after him and I would see the two of them shaking their heads as they crossed into George Square like I was just so much rubbish to be shot of.
RR: You were going to tell us what happened to Dark Bathroom. I had that demo tape they made, June 1941, and it was amazing, songs like ‘Easter Island’ and ‘Harm That Foot Down’, stuff like that.
SH: Yeah, okay. You know, I always wondered about that title. That was another summer, I suppose. When I get my shit together I’m going to get another band going as well. Plus I want to write a novel, a ghost story, probably. One morning I woke up really early and couldn’t get back to sleep and it was one of those weird really foggy autumn mornings and I opened the curtains and looked out the window and across the road in Katherine Park I could make out all these figures dotted about across the park, stock-still, motionless, just standing there, not looking at me but like looking away into the distance or just staring down at the ground, not even looking at each other. I’ll never forget it. There’s a story there somewhere, don’t you think?
RR: You were telling us about Dark Bathroom …
SH: That’s another ghost story. The whole place is full of ghosts.
RR: What place?
SH: Katherine Park. Airdrie. You name it.
RR: What happened next?
SH: Then I cut myself. This was right after the split with Maya. I took a knife and cut right into my arm. No reason. Except I felt like I was coming to a place where I was dying, the old me was dying, and all I could see ahead was everything that everyone else in my life had experienced, you know, peace and quiet, this kind of like-it-or-not sense of fulfilment, preparations for the grave, that kind of shit. It outraged me. It wasn’t a suicide attempt, far from it. It was an attempt on life. There’s an ancient myth where the arm is severed or the hand is sacrificed, something like that, you must have heard of it, where you give your hand, like in marriage, but to a new life instead. At this point it felt like there was a magnet stuck under me, that my body was metal, and that it was impossible to move forwards or backwards. So I stuck a knife in my fucking arm to see if it would bend or if it was still possible to give myself away to something new.
RR: Did it bend?
SH: Did it fuck. So Maya got with Patty for a while. At the time I thought he was kind of a ponce.
RR: How come?
SH: He was the sort of guy who would always have a novel conspicuously sticking out his pocket. In fact one time I saw him walking along the road and reading at the same time.
RR: What book was it?
SH: Under the Volcano. He was holding it up right in front of him so everybody could see it, as if anybody could fucking care less what you were reading in Airdrie. It just made you look like a three-speed.
RR: What’s a three-speed?
SH: A three-speed gear, a queer. As soon as Maya got with him everything changed. He always wore these boots, I don’t know if you saw them, these quasi-military leather boots that almost went up to his knees and the next thing you know Maya is kicking around in thigh-high leather boots and smoking cigarettes and acting moody as fuck. They would walk down the main street in Airdrie and everyone would be turning their heads, Patty with his glasses on, these little irritating Lennon specs, the kind you would never tire of smashing, and with a fucking top hat and this floor-length trench coat on and Maya next to him, only she’s wearing a white fur coat and fucking white leather trousers and boots and a pair of shades, looking round with this total disdain for the world but still trying to impress it, if you know what I mean. I saw her in the chemist’s one day, buying white mascara or some fucking thing, and she was wearing these ultra-tight leather trousers and you could see the thin V of the black thong she was wearing coming out the top of the trousers and I thought to myself, when the fuck did she start wearing lingerie? She made me feel like a rapist when I bought her lingerie. Of course I was annoyed at myself. How come I couldn’t turn her?
RR: But weren’t you in Occult Theocracy with Patty for a bit?
SH: That group was completely bogus. If I hadn’t been such a fucking otherworldly channel it would just have been pub rock.
RR: What about Dark Bathroom?
SH: I mean, Dark Bathroom, come on. Who the fuck came up with that? The next thing you knew she had this band, this all-girl bathroom band, I can’t remember the names of the other two but Maya was on guitar and vocals and Mary Hanna played bass with them for a bit. Mary was in all the good groups, the bitch. They had this thing where they all dressed really severe like dominatrixes with skintight PVC dresses and long hair with blunt fringes and white skin and red lipstick and they would have like a chair sitting centre-stage and they would play this music, it was all improvised, in other words they made it up on the spot, using metal slides on electric guitars, just this screaming electric noise, and they would build to these insane crescendos where it sounded like a magnetic storm and then their sacrifice would appear, usually some young damaged boy, some clueless follower, and they would strap him to the chair and then torture him. It got them banned from venues. Sometimes they would tie him up and break eggs over him and then Maya would push him backwards, the chair was suspended by ropes, and she would put the heel of her boot in his mouth and he would suck it and they would play this music where it was like the mother goddess tribe were back to take over the world and then they would cover him with feathers or jam or melt candle wax on him and sometimes Maya or one of the other girls – I never saw Mary do it – would wear a strap-on plastic dildo and they would ejaculate over him, god knows what was in there, I heard it was yogurt but who knows. I saw them play and my jaw was on the floor. I felt like I had been dating a five-foot-high black hole.
RR: Wasn’t there a thing with a cheesegrater?
SH: Yeah, I saw that, it was mental. They took a cheesegrater to this guy’s dick. All that was left was like this wilty blue vein, ha ha ha ha ha. I spoke to Maya a few times, after shows, I was still friendly with Patty, but she was always stood there looking at me like I wasn’t even worth torturing. Who knows, maybe I wasn’t, or maybe I was just doing too good a job myself. I got another group together but it was a heavy scene, we were into shit like Wire, Gang of Four, Eyeless in Gaza, This Heat, scratchy shit basically. Keith Levene’s guitar playing on Metal Box was massive. The lead singer – I was playing bass – was into new wave French movies and art and shit but he was a
user, they all were. We got a few gigs, we played at this pub in Finsbury Park in London, this big show where there were journalists from NME and Sounds turning up but we were so incoherent and fucked up that they scrapped the idea of even reviewing us. I thought it was a plus, that we had pulled off some kind of ultimate coup, but that shows just how completely fucked-up I was. I started using myself, a bit. Of course we had no money to get back home and the singer, I won’t mention his name, he’s dead now, you know who he is, he fucking pawned our guitars to pay for a prostitute in this fucking bum-dungeon in King’s Cross, which is where we were staying. We were there for two nights and had left our guitars in a back room at the venue but when we went to pick them up the bar staff told us the singer had been there already and taken off with the lot of them. We confronted him and he was totally matter-of-fact about it. I needed my hole, he said. What a line, I’ll never forget that, and then he just shrugged, like it was fair enough and we could all understand it and sympathise with it. This guy was like five foot one and with greasy hair sticking to his face and a biker jacket that was about three times too small for him. I don’t know how he did it. The lead guitarist and the drummer, whose name was James Begley, maybe you know him, they just split immediately, walked out and left me holding the cat, as it were. We had no way of getting home so the two of us had to hitch a lift. We stood up near the exit to the North Circular Road, right next to that sign for Hatfield and The North, but the first night we only got so far as St Albans, where we slept in the park next to the cathedral. The next night we thumbed our way to Carlisle, where the singer talked this truck driver into dropping us off at the services outside Hamilton for the price of a blow job. I couldn’t believe it. He came back totally calm and collected, like he had just negotiated the greatest deal of all time, like he had taken this guy for a mug. I just have to suck his cock, he shrugged, while he’s driving the truck, that’s all. That was a bridge too far. It has to be while he’s driving? I asked him. It’s the only way he’ll get off, he said. C’mon, he said, like I was a total prude, live and let live. I couldn’t believe what I was fucking hearing. And where am I going to be while you’re slurping this guy’s dick beneath the steering wheel? I asked him. You’ll be right there, he said, watching me. That’s part of the deal.
Sure enough, we drove from Carlisle to Hamilton with the singer on his knees choking on this truck driver’s rancid cock while the trucker, who seemed to be on amphetamines or something, did like a hundred miles an hour up the motorway, occasionally looking round at me and nodding, you know, like this is how it’s done, son, now we’re living. Fucking hell, I thought to myself, I’m in a rock n roll band at last.
Then he died, maybe you heard about it? He found this credit card, he didn’t steal it, he found this jacket in West End Park, just across from the hospital, and there was a wallet inside it and there was a credit card in there and I think he took it as a sign, like a blessing from God, and like a good soldier he spread it out amongst his friends. There was this famous day, this last day, where he took a group of his friends on a trip to Edinburgh, all expenses paid on this found credit card. I wasn’t there myself but I heard they were all drinking on the train in the morning and buying records and had a slap-up meal in a restaurant and then a tab at a bar in the Pubic Triangle, where everyone was dancing with strippers and getting it on. He must have known that it was a final blow-out, that he had effectively dug his own grave. Before he could even be arrested he hung himself from a tree on the Carlisle Road. There was a piece about it in the newspaper and of course I thought about that song, the one about strange fruit hanging from the branches.
RR: What are you working on currently?
SH: I’m writing lyrics, writing songs. I’ve had a few bands since then but nothing has gelled, nothing has really felt right. I’ve become very interested in Aleister Crowley and the occult and as soon as I clean up my act I intend to start practising the rituals and get serious about my life and my magickal practice. And of course there’s that ghost story I want to write. It’s in there somewhere, I’m sure of that.
22. Ships Rising Up and Passing Through the Water Full of Sunlight and Memory the Tricks That It Plays: Bruce Cook on Autonomic Dreaming with Lucas and Vanity and all the baggage that comes back to haunt you like ghostly ships at the bottom of the ocean in a graveyard beneath the sea breaking free and rising to the surface.
If I remember it right Patty’s mum and dad were Italian – or half Italian – or something like that. I could be wrong. They owned a little shop on the main street in Airdrie that sold Italian chocolates and cigarettes and ice cream. Stuff like that. You would see his mum every night when she closed up, walking along the road with these boxes of cigarettes under her arms. She never left them there at night. It was too much of a temptation for burglars. They’ll kill you for a fag in Airdrie.
The first time I ever tried a Turkish Delight, it was in there. I bought it with my pocket money and I almost spewed my ring, man, seriously. But I kept going back for more, maybe it was seeing the advert or something but I got it into my head that it was romantic and sophisticated – you know, like garlic or pasta. Sometimes I would see Patty – he was just a boy then – sitting at one of the tables in the back, eating a sherbet dip or a tube of Smarties and I would think man that boy lives in heaven so he does.
We ended up becoming friends, I was coming in that often, and we would hang out at his house, which was this amazing gloomy mansion – you shoulda seen it, it was freaky – with toilets that had sloping floors and a basement playroom that was just like an open wooden frame that led off into the darkness and that was really creepy and that was good for watching horror movies or science-fiction films late at night on his black-and-white portable. His mother would bring us down sandwiches, though really they were just single slices of bread with cured meats on them and olives and hummus, and it added to the feel of being somewhere else completely.
Our friendship didn’t last long – it was one of those things, man, no big deal either way – and then my parents moved to Shettleston and that was that. I grew up and went to college – total waste of time, why bother – then got a job at a cooperative grocer’s in the East End. I was produce manager and I enjoyed the work. I rented a small house with a garden where I grew my own food – or tried to, man. We were a total bunch of hippies back then, we were into solar panels, grains, Buddhism, incense, yoga, cushions, ha ha … know what I mean? But we were socially plugged in too – it was important for us to be in the East End and change what we could there. What is it Gary Snyder says about seeing where you are and what can be done? That was a big thing with us. I started teaching a martial arts programme in a back room at Shettleston Library in Wellshot Road on Saturday mornings. It was a funny bunch, man – old retirees looking to stretch their muscles, a couple of serious headcases, some pregnant women, the kind of strange hermits that lose themselves in the East End of Glasgow, a few of my hippy friends – then one day this guy shows up, this huge guy with a scar on his head – that wasn’t uncommon in the East End – but with these huge hands and feet. I remember when he first came in – he was dressed in a white T-shirt and a pair of long white shorts – and I caught sight of his hands and they were like shovels. If I get hit by one of those, I thought to myself, I’m a dead man.
It turns out he couldn’t fight to save his life, which was lucky for me. I asked him why he had decided to start training and he gave me this whole story, man, this whole thing about how he had dreamed a dream where he had been given some Sanskrit name that meant The Defender, The Protector – something like that, seriously – and that now he had to live up to the title. I asked him if he had any experience of fighting and he talked about manning the front line in his brain – straight up, this is how he talked, man – about how he was well up on strategy and theory, he started talking about historical models, man, these gambits, what did he call them – things like The Oslofjord Gambit and The Lundtoftbjerg Compromise – and I realise
d he was talking about the Second World War. Wesertag, he said, pointing to the scar on his forehead. Weserzeit. He kept referring to a small notebook that he kept in his top pocket. He said his organs were in bad shape and asked me if I could do anything for them. I told him that martial arts would definitely streamline his body and bring his organs into a more harmonious relationship – that was what it was all about, you know what I mean, at least the way I taught it. He seemed relieved. My organs have been giving me nightmares, he said. Then he told me that dreams were the language of the organs. Wow, I said, that’s pretty heavy, man, tell me more. Then he said that dreams were actually your own internal organs talking to you. Like, for instance, certain organs speak in certain ways. The kidneys, he said – and I remember this in particular, it was way-out stuff – the kidneys don’t talk the way you think they would. They don’t talk about water or deserts or whatever. No, he said, the kidneys were more like panthers, man, like jackals and lynxes prowling in the light of the moon. Heavy, right? Or like sex with very feline women, he said. That’s your kidneys talking. I was blown away, man. I had never thought of it like that and I recalled the old maxim, you know, as above so below. I pictured the bloodstream as a network of voices, man, information-rich, tides of this and that, it just came to me right there and then – tell me more, man, I said, tell me more. Then he told me that the heart was the ocean beneath the ocean – you believe that – that the genitals were represented by elephants. Speak for yourself, man, I joked, but he was deadly serious. No, he said, not just elephants – check this out – but circus animals and beasts of burden with heavy eyes. What do you have to learn from me, man? I said to him. You’re the man. Movement, he said. Balance. Coordination. We need to get this guy teaching, I thought to myself, we need to get a class going.