JEREMY REED
BANDIT POET LONDON YEARS
JEREMY REED
BANDIT POET LONDON YEARS
MMXVIII
Bandit Poet — London Years by Jeremy Reed First edition published in the winter of 2018 by ZAGAVA® Ploeger & Nau GbR, Düsseldorf Text: © Jeremy Reed 2018 Cover Photo: © Barbara Piemonte Frontispiece: © Veronika Gallova/vgallovaphotography.com Text set in Minion Pro Titles set in Johnston ITC Design and typeset by Jan-Marco Schmitz With special thanks to James Rockhill All rights reserved. www.zagava.de ISBN 978-3-945795-27-9
For Paula Stratton
‘You’re all just pissing in the wind You don’t know it but you are And there ain’t nothing like a friend Who can tell you you’re just pissing in the wind’ Neil Young ‘Ambulance Blues’
8 ME SEEING YOU SEEING 58 MEET ME AT THE BOTT GUIGNOL FRANCIS BACO 112 NIFTY JIM 136 ALL MY 168 BALANCE AND SLEA PETE DOHERTY, AND THE 226 MEETINGS WITH A M 268 BRIGHTON BLUES 29
ME 40 WORLD’S END OM 78 THE GRAND N 98 LOVING THE LOST FRIENDS ARE FANS ZY 195 RED SNAPPER, GEEZER WITH A GUN ALE HAREM: DILLY BOYS 3 JUST A SHOT AWAY
ME SEEING YOU
GNIEES EM The skinny one—120 lbs—in the black John Smedley wool jumper, and tubed on pre-faded blue Levi jeans, the black Converse All Star baseball boots, who looks like a blond-streaked pop star in the Piccadilly crowd, is he selling sex or just inquisitive about the capital’s neon-drenched heartbeat? In the dusty late afternoon big-city nitrogen dioxide polluted air, is that me, my alienated look standing out in the crowd, black reflective aviators worn for defensive attitude, beret tilted at an angle, lick of eyeliner, a wired alert protecting me from recognisably dodgy punters, my pockets crammed with Valium 10 mg foils, is that me on the circular Piccadilly Circus radius, or the person I imagined myself to be in the endless potential for reinvention that London provides? Another five or ten minutes I tell myself, and I’ll be gone, untraceable, anonymous in the crowds, no matter that my looks provoke 9
eye-contact from the curious with persistent and alarming regularity. Often it’s girls whose glam made-up look, shares something in common with mine, who come at me full on, a little game that leads to heads being thrown round simultaneously, or it’s men, the type I’m looking for at the Dilly, who find me out with their stereotypical predatory need signalling sex. I’m not rent, just a pretty boy in makeup, androgynous as David Bowie, opportunistically pulling strangers out of the crowd to up or lower their purchase expectations on my terms. I have the looks and they have the money, and the two don’t always fit. I look for my type in them: sensitive, vulnerable, kind, generous, and hopefully with a subversive contempt for systems. You’ve got arguably five-minutes’ street time to assess a stranger’s complex, defensive biography, what the eyes express about personality, the name is always a lie, Phil, Johnny, Martin, Billy, because it’s all in the game, assumed identity. The punter’s often fractionally more nervous than me, and I like shyness and hesitancy, as it suggests care and thinking for others. And because I’m not part of the teen runaways slung over the black railings on the meat rack, or the tribal laws of the rent collective who work Piccadilly Circus, and because I blank unwelcome approaches, I’m there with a purpose for a type: moneyed, and preferably cultured British or American, as with the risks so high, it’s seminal to share a language. It’s language that holds this sort of deal together, that’s initially so edgy it often collapses at the start due to intuitive mistrust. I need money to write and preferably patronage, and how much of myself I’m prepared to give for that depends on the individual. We could both be anyone, but we’re not, instead we’re both acutely aware we’re ignorant of the other’s psychological compass of likes and dislikes. What I’m invariably meeting in what I do is the attracted person’s suppressed past: whatever has brought them to this moment in time, and of course most of it’s submerged in their personal history. I attract by conscious projection on my part, a facility I’ve put to such intense use in my poetry performances, both solo, and with The Ginger Light, and if you’ve used that dynamic on the street, performing comes easy—it’s all about invincible attitude that 10
you can’t get back on—take it or leave it on toe-points. Piccadilly was an academy of learning, like Soho, a place where the world came to you if you stood there looking available. Half the world streamed through there as a destination focus, a hub of commercialised energies, endemically used by rent boys as a circular dealing room for soliciting with coded signals. The exploitative and the sophisticated sold there, some to eat, find a place to sleep for the night if they were homeless, and some to experiment with sexuality, or like me make random assignations purely for money. It’s all in the game, or in the polluted Piccadilly sunshine, hazed into a smudged toxic rainbow, if you’re looking directly into the sun towards Green Park as a sort of urban mirage. I’m careful never to show on two consecutive days or to requisition the same spot. I don’t have to solicit, I get too much attention and most are rejected. I dose myself for an hour maximum—5 mg Valium—a blue bitten in half holds me up against raw potentialities of the place to turn against me. I tell myself it’s just an interlude in my writing day to get immersed in a dangerously compulsive habit to win. Twenty minutes ago, I met a man briefly under the street on the station concourse, on the curved ventricular maze of sign-posted corridors leading to the seven street exits, and he goes off briefly only to return. Now he detaches from the commuter pour and stops. Forty something, clearly nervous of doing this in a policed space, black and white check jacket with a red fleck, black shirt open at the neck, and silver slacks with tan desert boots—I notice these things. It’s always the look I observe first, as the inner attention to outer detail. It’s the same process as writing: how you look interfaces the design of your work. He stands off apprehensively; then tries it on. ’Would you have time for lunch, we could go some place near, if you’re not busy?’ ‘I’m a vegan,’ I reply, ‘so it’s going to be difficult, but certainly tea if you like.’ There’s no inquisitively sharp angle to his approach, he isn’t police, I know that intuitively, and he’s got an expensive voice and could be the right hit. Although we’re two strangers in the crowd, we’re sure 11
to be watched by someone suspecting an illicit assignation, so I tell James, as he calls himself, to go ahead to Patisserie Valerie on Old Compton Street, and I’ll meet him there. If we leave together there’s a chance we’ll be done, or the Dilly eye will be waiting the next time I show up with my distinctive looks. Somebody knows what I’m doing, and the worry infiltrates my nerves. And with James gone into Soho, I wait five minutes and follow, as a zingy shower comes on beady with particulates. When I arrive, I find James seated at a table, and even better he’s got a Penguin copy of Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye beside him on the table, and it’s yellow-eared and clearly read. ‘I don’t usually do this,’ he says, lying, because they all say that, generic punters. ‘I just thought you looked so different I’d take a chance. Are you an artist, a musician?’ He carefully avoids asking me directly if I sell sex, although it’s an accepted fact that if you hang on the Dilly radius you’re going to be taken for rent. We take it for granted, like a concealed gold filling, that I’m exploiting my looks for money, and I tell him I’m a poet who also writes novels, and that I live at Regent’s Park, and the address puts him at a disadvantage, as punters manipulate the fact most rent is homeless. ‘You look like David Bowie,’ he punts, ‘what would you want if I asked you to come back with me, if you’re into that?’ ‘What do you do?’ I ask, and he’s quick; ‘oh a bit of family banking, Goldman Sachs,’ he says, like he’s brushing off the fact before it settles. ‘I’m sort of retired early,’ arguably true on my radar. His eyes are bitty blue, and I say to him, ‘It’s £200 for my looks’—Dilly street prices are £20-£50, depending, and he doesn’t flinch. He tells me he’s got a Soho floor on Little Chapel Street, ‘It’s recreational’ he says, ‘I’m married and it’s a bitch.’ We’ve known each other thirty scrupulously intense minutes, so I have to take him on trust, and I do. ‘It’s O and M only,’ I tell him, ‘oral and masturbation,’ assessing him as probably sharing the same fastidious attention to body health as I do. We agree, and walk through a drizzly Soho to his minimally furnished top floor in an unreconstructed urban corner where red light dissolves into arty 12
brokers. Inside, there’s a living room with jade washed walls, a brown leather sofa and chairs, television and the unlived-in feel of bespoke car ergonomics. I ask to use the bathroom and the shock is it’s black on black. The unit’s monochrome black ceramic subway tiles, there’s a black claw-foot tub, black finish on plumbing fixtures, an ebony stained mirror, and the only habitable evidence of James is a solitary bottle of Penhaligon’s Sartorial, that being a brand freak I dust on in fizzy squirts. The room has a gentleman’s club look, a forensic cold climate feel, and when I go back to the living room a jacketless James is drinking Booth’s gin from a tumbler, a plastic bottle of Schweppes Tonic Water as mixer. He’s relaxed, nervous and yawny, and I immediately sense this is his hideaway for Dilly assignations. I’ve got a foil of Skinless Skin condoms concealed in a jeans pocket, and I tell him I won’t blow him without a rubber. He seems surprised, but doesn’t object, and for me control is seminal in this slippery game of money for love. I take the money first, and the sex lasts 20 minutes on top of a blue duvet throw; he’s not unduly big, but a bit self-conscious he’s paying for it with a stranger, and the slowness is in proportion to the price. Nobody pays poets, but this does. When it’s over, he wants me to stay on and talk about helping me with money, and of course there’s the implicit confidentiality clause— this dodgy excerpt in a routinal day effectively never happened. I give him thirty-minutes, as I want to get off and write. I need to be alone and get out of character and back to me, the person he’ll never know. James wants me to visit his Soho floor once a week for the same arrangement, and I promise what I won’t do: come back. There isn’t enough of him in me to hit the right note. The two expectations don’t form a colour. I leave James and go back into Soho and write about what I do to increase my body weight by the ten twenty pound notes in my pocket. The thrill for me is in the torch-up of Piccadilly energies, the manic chancy milieu to which I gravitate like the place sucks me in, and away from it I’m liberated from the pull. I only ever do one and quit and don’t come back sometimes for weeks. Being vulnerable I play the game of probability. Writing poetry is real experience, and my aim is always to collapse the 13
distance between text and reader to create punchy immediacy; and there on the capital’s intelligence I feel a lifetime move through me in an hour, and put on black reflective shades periodically to protect me from the crowd. Earlier that week I’d struck rich on Denman Street, just back of Piccadilly Circus, from the patronage of the artist, and lawless Soho bohemian, Francis Bacon, whose blackout glasses, charcoal broad-stripe Savile Row suit, and peeling foundation had him stand out for his defiant look, independent of his excoriating individual art. Bacon whom I was to meet regularly over the next three years, always at the subterranean White Bear located in the tube station at Piccadilly Circus, had been shown my first novel, written as a student, The Lipstick Boys, and had briefly entertained the idea of doing a cover for the book, that never materialised. We’d met briefly to discuss it at the Colony Rooms, and sighting me in Denman Street, Bacon who seemed habitually compromised by his afternoon’s drinking, beamed in on me with the intensity of one outlaw recognising another in his familiar Soho barrio. Because he insisted on being paid in cash—ten thousand a week from the Marlborough Gallery—Bacon, as I learnt, was usually stuffed with cash, and assuring me that edge-walking poets like me needed patronage, he spontaneously produced an uncounted wedge of notes, insisted I take the stash, and as soon disappeared in the direction of the tube. Quickly concealing the money in my shoulder bag, I returned to Regent’s Park, my expectations confirmed that London was a place where anything and everything could happen, and counted out what amounted to two grand to help sustain my writing habit. Much later I was to write the poem ‘Piccadilly Bongo’, that attempts to capture something of Bacon’s indomitable presence in Soho, his menacing ankle-length black sleek leather Gestapo coat, instantly recognisable as his, standing by the tube exit at Piccadilly Circus, in the mauve carbon footprint, power revving in his arteries, having spent the morning in his studio imaginatively exploding his subject into distorted anatomical meltdown, like acid stripping a tin can to plastic. What attracted me to Piccadilly was the gravitational pull of big city surprise the place asserted, like a black hole dragging matter to 14
its centre. I was temporarily addicted to risk and the endorphin boost it triggered, and the endemic thrill of not knowing who I would meet there, in the confused, hallucinated footage the Dilly provided as a localised radius sunk into London’s core energies. The place pre-pedestrianised was a convergence point for sex tourists, gay politicians in denial, pop stars, middle management on 200k, the pathologically alienated, the lonely convinced they’d strike lucky, street junkies and geographically a streaming gateway filtering into adjoining Soho. I was living at the time at Flat 39, 22 Park Crescent, a white Nash block at Regent’s Park owned by Marie, an Alexandrian/Egyptian/ Persian cocktail of multicultural genes, petite, blond, optimally sensual, trained as a Sotheby’s fine arts specialist, vivaciously extravert, and with an explosive temper periodically stoked to a domestic warhead. Marie’s narrated succession of dead marriages, and unrequited fixations on gay men, read like a stock market crash, but her irrepressible bite on the moment, that had her personality fizz, somehow always got her above a collapsed past. It was Marie who taught me very quickly through her impulsiveness that poets need luxuries and not necessities. I used to spend the mornings writing in her flat, and look out through the slatted Venetian blinds at a high-end slab of Harley Street, with its repurposed lofts and sky floors looking like dead plasma screens, before the lights came on at night, transforming the converted penthouses and customised upper floors into a compact London W1 microsphere of the privileged living up above the world. Marie was attracted to my obvious sexual ambiguity, and the fact that I was a poet who wanted nothing to do with institutionalised poetry. I was the questionable outlaw, with his nails painted punk black, who seriously disrupted her notion of what poets do with their days, by writing directly in her face, in public, and hanging out at Piccadilly Circus where I continued to write sometimes on the street. I told her convincingly that the milieu of occasional pick-ups like me, found it preferable to sell sex or sympathy, rather than engage with a system in which the body is capitalised in the workspace in the interests of economic growth. You can for some reason rent a 15
building, but not your body, according to law, the only real possession you own. And it was invariably the punter who lost out in this game, the fugitively married city accountant, who couldn’t for any incentive offered, buy in a clinically depersonalised room at the now demolished Regent Palace Hotel, or banged up in a car park toilet, any conceivable emotional access to the person they were attempting lucklessly and often ruthlessly to make over. To this day, a number of the best poems I have ever read were written at the age of eighteen by a runaway teen Dilly boy, JC, forced by homelessness into working as rent with looks and attitude in the early eighties. Desperately, unrequitedly infatuated by a pop star, whose flat on Brewer Street he shared briefly in 1984, John’s streetwise writing, collected in two self-published books, Angel at the Door, and Twilight Shift, are instances of raw visceral feeling converted into black nuggets of poetic imagery. John’s untutored, courageously confessional poems like ‘Breakfast in the Ruins,’ ‘Piccadilly Persona’ and ‘Room 9 at the Plaza Hotel’ are lawless instances of elevating personal degradation into a powerfully focused lyricism. Written hurriedly in inspired surges, mostly in cafés like Burger King on Glasshouse Street, or outside on the rain-drenched benches in Leicester Square, John’s poems are often spontaneous emotional responses to devastating rejection, letters to real people, in which despite being the apparent loser, he maintains trust in writing as his way out of trouble. Much to Marie’s understandable consternation, I used to keep pinned on a green baize notice board in the kitchen, pre-mobiles, the weekly litter of hurriedly written propositioning notes given me by girls and men on the underground. These scrawled notes with their often illegible details impulsively handed me before exiting, were given me in the hope I would make phone contact in a capital with twelve million inhabitants packed into 210 zip codes, like praline condensed in a Quality Street Big Green Triangle. Tube travel became another source of fired-up stimulus for me, in which compulsively polarised eye contact and chance sexual encounters were the opportune reward for going underground. The prospect of meeting the perfect stranger of either sex, randomly, accidentally, packed 16
into the suffocating aisles on the red Central Line or black Northern Line, in a deep-level tunnel under Tottenham Court Road, was all part of my belief in the irrational laws of probability. Riding the tube, high on Valium to manage anxiety, provided another chemical peak in exploiting my unusual looks to private advantage. Anything could happen and it did repeatedly, and I got off on it, this game of coercing interested strangers on the underground into riskily losing their personal boundaries. To help finance my largely unpaid writing as a poet and novelist, I worked two days a week as a personal assistant and emotional support to Jonathan, a wealthy Westminster/Oxford educated stock broker with literary leanings, who lived at Pembroke Gardens, Kensington, having responded to his advertisement for a PA. Generous, metaphysically as well as financially speculative, masculine, excruciatingly lonely and in his mid-forties, and characteristically dressed in chunky white Pringle Shetland jumpers, and white knee-length shorts, Jonathan’s patronage provided me with a weekly income that allowed me five days in which to write without acute financial anxiety. Jonathan’s indomitable revengeful firepower directed at a financial sector he both ruthlessly brokered for personal gain, and despised in equal proportion, was in part a compensation for being gay, alienated, and little disposed to social networking. Introspective, romantic, and largely friendless outside family, Jonathan’s exhaustive quest was to find in rent or a homeless teen a relationship in which idealised love overcame inequality. Jonathan’s acquisitive wealth, and contempt for corrupt fat cat bankers, was built into a paradoxical manipulation of a system he despised. No matter his personal assets Jonathan’s real support was always with those who lived outside the law, the street hoodlums at Piccadilly Circus or Earls Court, seeing in his opposite a freedom he’d always been denied. Late afternoon he’d drive up to Piccadilly and monitor its radius as a trouble-shooter in search of trouble, on one occasion bringing back a boy who having robbed him pursued him at knifepoint out into the street. Part of my job as his PA was to try and find him a suitable partner through formulating highly original personals for inclusion 17