This Is Memorial Device

by David Keenan

  – He wore vests. White vests. He smelled of the sex of long ago. A leather jacket, a pair of jeans. Classic. It all comes back to me right now and I can see him and taste him on my fingers. At night when I was ill, sweating with a fever or with palpitations (I was troubled with palpitations so much that Ronnie compared my heart to a rose that flutters every time a single drop of dew falls on it), he would sit sentinel outside the bedroom door. Not even beside the bed. As though he were a bodyguard for a celebrity. And he wouldn’t sleep. It was the same at my performances. He would sit in the front row or stand just offstage. He believed in me. I could see it in his eyes. And what a cook. I would sit at the table and shake my head in disbelief. If it wasn’t coq au vin it was something with beetroot. We began to resemble each other, the way that old couples do. We morphed into each other. I was the more talkative one I admit it. Ronnie’s style was to sit next to you on the couch and hold your hand. And look into your eyes like you were the Buddha or Diana Dors. I could’ve told him anything. I did. I lectured him on art. I read him poetry. I drank with him while he sipped carrot juice. I introduced him to marijuana. Nothing could derail this great spirit. He would still be the one to carry me to bed at the end of the night. And then he would have breakfast waiting for me in the morning. As well as telling me about all of the mail that had arrived for me. Which was a little annoying. I have to admit it. That was one thing. He opened all of my personal mail for me. But it seemed part and parcel of this whole mother without a vagina thing.

  – He would always suggest a remarkable new experience. He was brave that way. Let’s kayak on the River Kelvin he would say. We did that once. It was a disaster. Let’s go climb a mountain he would say. That was too much for me. I’m a city girl don’t you know Ronnie I would say to him as I sank a bottle of wine halfway up the Cobbler;)

  – This is my good example of how sweet and untouched he was. One evening as we smoked marijuana – he had become quite partial to marijuana. I had pushed it on him, dear me! You’re developing a vice! I said to him. You had better watch it boyo! We had a game we liked to play and it goes like this. You give a name to each moment. Instead of counting to 60 you pick out a personality. One per minute. One after the other. When I say personalities I mean atmospheres. Then you live inside them. You try to experience them. Ronnie taught me how to do it. For instance this moment right now, he said, this moment right now is definitely Casino Royale. Okay I said to Ronnie. I can roll with this. It’s a new minute, Ronnie said, now we welcome The Odyssey! You’ve got it wrong, I told him. This whole minute wasn’t written by the Latins! It’s simpler than that, I said. This is ‘Borderline’. The next minute, ‘Like a Virgin’. The next minute, ‘Live to Tell’. Ronnie was blown away when I came out with that. What the fuck was that? he said. That was incredible. He was naive that way. I fell even deeper in love.

  – And what a scrotum. Forgive me but that’s the only way there is to describe it. A great scrotum. It wasn’t this cock and balls. It was a great animal scrotum. Like a rhino that had to have its way. That had to be milked, regularly. Which of course was my pleasure;)

  – I’m afraid I’m not even going to go there. I’m sorry. I’m not even going to dignify it. I never heard a peep out of Leigh Bowery and all of a sudden there he is, wearing a motorcycle helmet with this clown make-up. Hello!?

  – I put an advert up in Airdrie Library. That’s how we did things back then. That’s where all the real freaks hung out. It read: Desperately seeking local saints, secret deities, fantastic film stars for possible Relate-tionship. Inexperience an advantage, style a no-brainer, must have been present in his body for at least 18 years. Duties include: overthrowing, brainstorming, seducing, romancing, usurping and distilling. Then I put my post office box number. I signed it: a man under sentence of death. I was big into my Dostoevsky. No one wrote. Not a single fucking saintly 18-year-old in all of Airdrie!

  – Then I went to the fateful New Year’s party with Ronnie. I wrote marry me to Remy. I don’t know why. I had this perfect relationship at home. All except for the opening of my personal mail thing, which I could put up with. But here I am lusting after young crumpet. Dreaming of being married off to some young hunk. The place we were at had a balcony. A very small balcony. Remy and I and Ronnie squeezed out there together to smoke a joint. I was in such a bind. I just kept squeezing my thighs together. And reaching down for my foot and pulling my leg up behind me. I was in contortions over this guy. Save me, I thought. I just want the sun to come up and blind us all and put an end to this madness. But then I got it in my stomach. It was like my cock was a string that rang a bell in my solar plexus. A wedding bell.

  – Remy told me he played music. This young man. This beautiful young starsailor. I wanted to cup his face in my hands and take a long cold drink. He told me he was a musician. Now there were light bulbs in my balls. I’m putting together a group! I burst. I’m looking for secret deities! Wait a minute, he said. Did you put that advert up in the library? Are you a man under sentence of death? Yes, I said. Yes, that’s me! I thought there weren’t any of you left, he said. Darling Ronnie interrupted him. He always had my best interests at heart. Dom is a great artist, he said, a serious conceptualist. Who are you, Remy asked him, his mother? That was cheeky. I’ll end up as your son-in-law if he has it his way, Remy said. Then he pointed at me and he winked. He was ringing all the right bells.

  – Ronnie started dressing in this inexplicable outgoing style. It was new to him. I think he felt the competition. He looked like a Puerto Rican street killer. He would wake up in the morning and immediately roll out of bed. Then he would start doing push-ups on the floor in nothing but a white vest. His big scrotum would be schlonging off the floor. Wap, wap, wap. Really schlonging. And he always worked out to the same song. ‘Party Fears Two’ by The Associates. It sort of became our song. I think of the way it starts. It gets under your skin. You kind of breathe it in. You get a sniff of memory and it’s knockout. Sexy enough to generate a feeling of experience. But then maybe that’s just me. Maybe that’s just me getting all moment in time again. Who knows? But there were moments in time. And there were ideas that went along with them. And every time I hear it, it takes me back there. To my lovers. To my young lovers. Even though it was all a long time ago now. Can music preserve a moment in time? Can it Ross? Do you think it can keep alive all the ideas that went along with it? Can it keep it young forever? Why is the future so quick to snatch it all away? That last line’s a quote by the way. From Sinew Singer, do you know him? He’s a great hero of mine. I will send you his record if you don’t know him. He really should be in your book. It’s a song he had, ‘Why Does the Future?’ where he sings all of these questions. Not really to the future, but about the future. As if he is the future. But like he’s still a mystery to himself. Now that the future has come, now that I’m living there on my own without a wife or a mother or a boyfriend to look after me, now I finally know what he means.

  Darling Ross I hope this helps you out and that it really doesn’t ruin your book despite what I said and remember how much I worry about you!

  Dom x

  26. I Saw All These Dead Moons Circling a Star: Paprika Jones recalls the last days of Lucas Black.

  Complete contentment, that’s what it said, if you must know.

  I’ve never told anyone that before.

  Why?

  Because it doesn’t make sense.

  Or because it makes perfect sense.

  Or because it somehow implicates me, my part in his happiness, my part in his death.

  I don’t know.

  I had been on the scene for a few years.

  As a young girl I had blown my own mind.

  It was one sexual epiphany after another.

  I had grown up in the sternest, most backwards, illiterate, repressed motherfucking viper pit in the west of Scotland.

  And that was just my family.

  It was all guilt and suffering and penance in the name of dai
ly life.

  I had been brought up to believe that every indulgence was punishable, that every time I listened to my heart I would be beaten down, like there was some objective standard for living that traded suffering for peace, though not really peace, more like a holding off of punishment, like the more broken you appeared the less torture you were forced to endure, as if all that reality desired was your complete debasement and obedience and that a confession of guilt obviated the necessity of breaking you forever.

  But when you feel that first cock pressing at the back of your throat or your fingers disappearing between the legs of some stranger, if you can really feel it, you realise that life doesn’t have it in for you in the slightest.

  But it takes a lot of cocks to hammer it into your head.

  I remember hearing ‘Venus in Furs’ by The Velvet Underground and thinking oh my god this is like the soundtrack to the escape from my brain, you know, the storming of the citadel, the lowering of a rope down into the wilderness.

  I immediately based my persona on this fantasy idea.

  I became a seducer, a spy in the house of love. My entire life was dedicated to encounters.

  I began to think of people not as individuals but as destinations, as map points across this inhospitable desert, like an oasis of flesh, a port of spit and smell, and sometimes I would breathe it in, you know, with my legs spread in the back seat of a car or in a nightclub or in some bushes next to a train station and it would smell so bad that I would say to myself give me my own rotting corpse over the death in life of a suburban marriage, stick a glass bottle up my ass before you slide a ring onto my finger.

  I saw all these dead moons circling a star.

  Fuck you, I said.

  I’m the fucking star.

  I fell in with the music scene.

  The art scene was up itself.

  The fashion scene was vacuous.

  The book scene was going on behind closed doors.

  You have to understand that when you’re talking about a local scene you’re talking about an international scene in microcosm. We had our own Syd Barrett and Brian Jones and Nico and Pete Perrett. The thing about the music scene was it fostered belief. It encouraged you to take the music and the lifestyle at its word. So there were all these people, living it, probably living it harder than their role models. After all, it isn’t easy being Iggy Pop in a small town in the west of Scotland. It takes some kind of commitment. And there was something about the backdrop. Seeing Patty and Maya with their matching floor-length coats and their wraparound shades outside the dole office in Airdrie town centre, or what was that guy, Street Hassle they called him, I can never remember his real name, I don’t know if I ever knew it, with a cut-up T-shirt and his mum’s fur coat on passed out on a bench next to the cenotaph in Coatdyke and with all of the cars honking as they went past. And then there was the indiscriminate drug use, the drinking, the staying up all night.

  The first thing I wanted to do was to invert day and night.

  So that immediately appealed to me.

  I started going to house parties and having sex in the bathroom or on the coats in the bedroom.

  Then I began picking up musicians.

  The first musician I slept with, I guess he’s a footnote now, but it was Starkey, Richard Starkey, who at that time had a project called The Beguiled which was something to do with how he had been a poet and then got a mental block and so refocused his attentions onto music.

  I saw him play in Coatbridge and he played the guitar while wearing black leather gloves, he could barely hold down a chord, and it blew me away, this commitment to image, and the sound he got from the guitar, this muffled sound that felt like it was embalmed, and these lyrics that were all like, beat me, pound me, finish me off. We went back to his, he lived with his mother who had a council flat just down the road from Sunnyside station in Coatbridge, and he had a mattress on the floor, it was the first time I had seen that in real life, and he used his record player as an ashtray, it was covered in ashes and butts, I thought this was amazing, it was alive, it was an installation, and he put on the third Neu! album, Neu! ’75, and it started to snow outside and the snow was all lit up orange from the street lights and I thought to myself, oh my god I’m falling in love in slow motion.

  Of course there were clichés.

  It was inevitable.

  Some people became ‘poets’, other people became ‘musicians’, but the good thing about a local scene like Airdrie was that everyone was so originally weird as to prevent most of them from servicing any fixed notion of possibility. It was impossible to be possible. That was the byword of the whole scene.

  I stopped smoking marijuana.

  It was using up all of my imagination.

  Drinking became boring.

  But sex never let me down.

  In the space of six months I fucked Ray Gordon, whose penis was barely three inches long but was sexy nonetheless, like small tits on a young girl.

  Then Richard Warden, whose penis was more like nine inches.

  Then Tom Beatrix, who was more like a seven.

  Then two women, Samantha and Bridget, who between them were packing eighteen inches of dildo.

  Then another Tom, Tom C, let’s call him, whose penis I could barely get my fingers around.

  Then Rodney, The Rod, ha ha, whose penis was perfectly sculpted and clean and shaved, an immaculate cock, I would call it, but who couldn’t ejaculate unless there was some kind of pain involved, only you couldn’t harm his cock, that was off limits, so you had to find ways around it, you know, like inserting things up his ass or squeezing his balls or one time taking a razor and slitting open his sac, wow, that was amazing, like taking a lemon and biting it open just to see what was inside.

  The thing about Memorial Device was that you always had the feeling that it was their last gig ever, like they could fall apart at any moment.

  Of course it was literal with Lucas – you know, did he remember a single damn thing, did he know where he was, what was the history, was it the first gig of his damn life?

  Of course people accused them of exploitation.

  He’s mentally ill, they would say, he’s disturbed, as if that somehow disallowed his entire experience, as if that meant he should curl up on the floor of a locked room and cry himself to sleep, which was actually what the gigs were like, sometimes, so they had their fun, these bastards, these useless cunts.

  I remember one show in particular, it was at their rehearsal room, which to me looked liked their mum had decorated it, with tables and chairs and paintings and even a few potted plants dying away from the light and they came on stage and there was this moment, everyone felt it, where it was as if Lucas was wide awake, as if he was suddenly transported there, from out of nowhere, from out of no history, right in front of us, and it was electric, his eyes snapped open and he took the mic and he said something about standing at the edge, something about hello here I am, again and again, like he was in a cave and he was listening to his own echo, like if he kept repeating it, it would become something else, something that wasn’t himself.

  Still, it all came with a price, for me at least, a psychic price.

  Escaping all of that programming and all of that baggage is no cakewalk.

  When I was a kid I used to laugh at the idea of dark places.

  You have to exorcise your dark places, they would say.

  Give me a horror story, I would say in return. I’ll exercise them that way.

  I would seek out frights, sit up all night and spook myself.

  I was really into horror movies.

  I sought out madness, read poems about sea creatures in the deeps and islands being swept away by typhoons and Atlantis and UFOs.

  But when the time came I was forced to come face to face with my own madness.

  Doppelgängers stalking my mind dressed as storm troopers,

  nightmares where I would dream that I had woken up in a different room entirely and that f
elt so real that I would question my own sanity, wondering if I had had a blackout the night before or if my partner and I had checked into a hotel room and I had simply forgotten about it and then the whole thing would reveal itself to me as a dream,

  a dream of bedrooms with the curtains closed that I couldn’t wake up from

  and other nights I would be caught on trains and placed on suicide watch and swept deeper into dark tunnels by torrents of water and assaulted with gas canisters by children who were out of control and pursued by smiling toy phones and zombies who raised their hands up and brought them back down again.

  I would have vivid dreams where I would fly between floating islands in the sky with castellated towns hidden amongst great rock formations and I would swoop down and look for sex.

  I’m dreaming, I would tell myself, so find your dream lover, and I would fly low across the surface of the water and pass rows of multicoloured cottages ranged along the shore and I would find my partner, plain, simply naked, unappealing and unsure, quite ugly, frankly, and as I moved towards him the windows would come in and the walls would pass through each other and I would walk outside and there was the same storm trooper watching me from the distance, only this time with his hat in his hands and his face exposed to the sunlight for the first time, though still too far to see, and I would realise that if the dream continued any further that he would pursue me to the ends of the earth and so I would struggle to wake up, throwing my body, in my mind, from side to side and then sitting up straight in bed and screaming, this blood-curdling scream that must have terrified the neighbours.