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SUBURBAN
TATTOO
Copyright Daniel Bourne 2001
Chapter
One
My body clock ticks away. My whole body is
aching, now I’m writing this on my side. At
intervals train sounds carry through the night
to my window, to me. I’m not far from the
tracks here, in this limbo of a place I vowed I
wouldn’t be living in at twenty two years of
age. The dimmer switch is on low and I lay
curled up in the corner of my rotting six ft
square bed, like a secret whispered in the dark.
I am here alone, and I am lonely; locked in this
time capsule of ordinariness but will not let my
surroundings get me down. Forget this spacious
council flat, the dampness within seeping from
the dark, dankish corridors connecting each
front door. The rain shadows, the stale stench
of urine that spray stains the walls of these
individual capsules that give the impression
they have been frozen in time.
I have been wasting away in recent times, not
that you would know by looking at me clothed, or
unclothed for that matter. For it is not my
physical whole that suffers, the corrosion comes
from within. For a long time my mind has been
wandering through baron wasteland, sidestepping
potholes on a dry and stony dirt-track. Up ahead
is a sign, a knee high cross pointing left and
right. If I go left I head for the Province of
Regret - 10km, and if I turn right I will end up
in the County of Hope - 15km. I decide to sit on
a rock next to this sign and remain here in the
State of Depression. Just for the moment anyway.
Someone across the way is playing records with
their windows wide open. The beginning of Iggy
Pops ‘Loco Mosquito’ travels through the
labyrinth of corridors and in-between the
concrete arch windows that overlook the car
park, erupting into a crescendo of punk rock ska
that explodes into the luke warm cool evening
air. It’s a gesture of optimism, harking the
wind-up to winter and the coming of springtime.
which through breaks in the clouds has promised
a few appearances.
Today’s music harks back to a bygone era. A
universal resurgence of punk has taken over the
music scene. Yesterdays boy bands have become
yesteryears The Jam, whose timeless protest
songs now ring out from this strangers
window-Going Underground, a song whose central
theme is being angry about, broadly speaking,
everything. Paul Weller shouting the odds about
the government “Those braying sheep on the TV
screen make this boy shout make this boy
scream”. These are the songs from the suburbs
but there’s no sound to cradle the loneliness
like the trains I hear in the night, their
thunder softened by the distance of the tracks
and slightly toned down by the guitars THRASH!
THRASH! THRASH! from the punk tracks that blast
out from the strangers window…Random souls in
empty carriages passing through the night like
caged time travellers. Where are they going?
(Far away)…begin with…begin with…forget
about your momentary isolation and begin with
the weave of magic that we once spun and the
days…Aaah! Those halcyon days…begin with the
olden, golden days…God! I loved these
days…begin with the suburbs, with history;
HIS-story and…
Hear me, listen to these words and if the truth
be told then I shall speak only the truth to
you.
Chapter One
I’m usually fifteen minutes late for work at
Tony’s Tattoo Tribe located on the corner of
Archway High Street and Holloway Road. The day
has broken with one of those rare mornings in
early February, as the sun glitters in a gold
glory in a cloudless blue sky. Fifty or so of
the West Ends working tribe have amassed in an
untidy queue outside the two bus stops, two
commuters thick and stretching twenty yards to
the end of the road where the Junction begins.
Tony’s studio takes up three shop fronts on
this side and two fronts on the Holloway side,
all glass fronted and now crystal clear having
just been given the once over by Tony the
Sponge.
I stand at the window next to the entrance door
and admire my freshly peroxide crop that I find
draws little attention from the Paul Smith and
Nicole Farhi suited commuters twitching
apprehensively between their morning newspaper
and the oncoming traffic. As if every yearning
double take will magic the arrival of the bus
any quicker. They have all seen my kind before
and have probably given up on the wonder of how
and why I look like this and why I am not
sitting cross legged outside the Co-Op nursing a
hairless mongrel and a dog eared piece of
cardboard on my lap They have not stood close
enough to read the labels on my Dolce and
Gabbana cut-off jeans or my ripped T-shirt
emblazoned with the Union Jack, and John
Galliano’s fashion statement of last
summer,’Think Punk, John G.’ graffitied on
its left breast side. People just don’t
appreciate the time and effort that goes into
dressing down in order to dress back up.
This morning, I woke up with autumnal radiance
filtering through my bedroom blinds and felt a
strange urge to avoid the early morning
congestion and get to work early. And here I am.
I wanted to seize this glorious day and live
every moment of it as if it were my last. It was
a sensation of the rarest occasion that comes
with not spending the previous evening partaking
in a particularly heavy drinking session. A
state of consciousness I can only describe as
the opposite of a hangover.
I’m not too sure how long I have been waiting
for but it feels like a good twenty minutes. My
bus ticket was issued at 08:34 and I know the
ride here takes just under eleven minutes.
Turning from the crowd and facing my reflection
once again I raise a quiet smile and for a brief
moment have an oddly infantile feeling that I
have one up on my boss.
“Sorry Chalks. God have you been waiting long?
Thanks for hanging around but I didn’t get in
till half five this morning, heavy night on the
old loopy juice…”
“Hey Tony, no prob’s man, I’ve only been
here for…” (Stretch left arm out and with
violent shake of wrist watch face emerges from
under cuff, bring wrist bearing watch face to
point blank proximity of our respective faces)
“…Christ is that the time? Nearly two hours
I’ve been here but no worries Ton’, it was
just great to be here at work half an hour
before we open. Just thought you’d be here
man, this being your business after all”.
Just as this last self satisfying thought has me
now grinning perversely, a flicker of bright
white lights unsteadies the faint outline of the
tattoo machine, perfectly silhouetted by the
darkness in the very far corner of the parlour.
All at once the whole interior is illuminated by
beaming strobes, six in all suspended from the
ceiling in two rows of three long thin bulbs.
Through my reflection I see Tony, a giant
grizzly bear of a man, staring straight at me
through these sun kissed triple glazed windows.
He gives a wry smile and advances towards the
entrance looking somewhat the worse for wear and
in one huge, furry hand waving a bunch of keys.
Tony gives the impression of an ageing hippy.
Declared on his left wrist are the words: TO
TOUGH TO DIE. His waist length silvery white
hair is compressed into a singularly perfect
ponytail and fat, ashened sideburns run a good
three quarter length down the side of his
chiseled face. A carefully symmetrical break on
each side separates these Elvis keepsakes. To
finish off, a bristling grey fuzz
circumnavigates his mouth. He refers to this as
his Wild West goatee.
It is this artful mess of facial shag and the
eighty or so tattoos camouflaging every virtual
inch of this man’s six foot seven inch frame,
that he claims sets him apart from your average
‘Jesus bearded hippy drip’. A former biker,
he once ran with the London Chapter Hells
Angels, before a violent disagreement with the
tribes head honcho saw him abandoned by the rest
of his leather bound clique. Tony says it was
over rumours of him being seen having it off
with a black bar maid a few nights before. When
the clans honcho was in mid-sentence, explaining
to his rowdy comrades how all black women were
flat back, stank whore Jezebels, Tony lunged
forward, grabbing him by the throat and then
dragged him outside in to the pub carpark.
From the little detail he gives of the moments
after that, all I know is that he was set upon
by a dozen bikers who each took turns punching
and kicking him into a bloody pulp that saw him
waking up in a hospital bed two months later. He
says he awoke a changed man, got himself better,
ditched the drugs and the attitude and decided
from then on that he was his own best company.
After traveling around the country he settled
down in London and set himself up in Holloway,
where we now stand face to face.
Tony presses the control that releases the
electric steel cage slowly upwards and uses
three keys to unlock the thick glass front door.
Still wearing that mocking smile he lets out a
hearty “ Fuck me Chalks your early”, does a
hasty turn and as I take a step inside, the now
released door comes slamming to within an inch
of my forehead. If it had not been for an
intervening foot I would now be lying on my back
watching fairies dance drunkenly in circles
against the clear blue sky above me.
Closing the door on the chaotic rush hour smog I
breath in the studios light musky air and relax
into a standard routine that Tony and I have
established from the very first day I worked for
him. It is customary in the world of Tattoo
Tribe that all wage earners must attend to the
chief’s every whim. The fact that the total
number of staff on Tony’s payroll is just me
allows a certain informality in relations
between numero uno and single staff member. So
while I enjoy the freedom to belch, fart, use
offensive language and come to work looking like
the abandoned love child of Johnny Rotten and
Courtney Love, when the boss says jump I turn
into Egor and ask “Very good sir, how high
would that be then?”
“Do us a cha Chalks, I got some of that new
Green Tea stuff, supposed to cleanse and
revitalize tired bodies, none of that Morning
Breakfast shit anymore. From now on we’re
drinking the Chinese way”. Tony is your
proletariat philosopher, at any time he can pull
out of the bag quotes from Jean-Paul Sartre,
Noam Chomsky and Bob Dylan, but I am in no doubt
his conversion to Green Tea from our most recent
Morning Breakfast brand was triggered by an
interview he read in Rolling Stone magazine with
one of those middle aged, born again pop legends
who, while composing fluffy elevator tunes for
Walt Disney soundtracks, announced that Tantric
sex and post coital mug of Green Tea was the new
lifestyle option.
We sit in a small space toward the back of the
parlour, partitioned by a sheet of transparent
perspex that Tony likes to think of as an
office, when in reality all we ever do in here
is drink different kinds of tea and shoot the
breeze when there are no appointments. I look at
the appointment list and see that in the morning
space where there are usually three sessions
booked up to midday a single name appears, one
that Tony has highlighted with green fluorescent
ink as if to reinforce the importance of this
visit. It is not a familiar name, which may be
reason enough to warrant my rash curiosity since
most of our client list is made up of familiar
Camden locals or regulars.
“Who’s Casey Montando Ton’?” Tony looks
up from his sketch pad. “Monty? Thought
you’d have heard of him. He’s an old mate of
mine, used to know him back in the Sixties down
in Soho where he did a Saturday night. He went
onto much bigger things mind you. Bumped into
him last night in a bar off Piccadilly, he told
me he’s got a dozen clubs on the go in the
South. Very big in A+R too, signs up all the
kind of bands you’re into. Took me to one of
his gaffs, huge place in Shoreditch”. Tony
downs the rest of his Green Tea, swirls the cup
around and empties out a small mound of Green
Leaf pap into a chunky jagged edged glass
ashtray. He observes the mush with acute
concentration. “Bloody Trance night but we had
a blast in his office for a few hours knocking
back a few bottles of that Crystal shit.”
“What’s it like Ton’?”
“Great juice, shit hangover”
“No I meant the…,”
It’s no good, there is little point in
disturbing Tony during these quiet moments he
spends reading tealeaves. To do so would be akin
to doing a three minute Morris Dance in front of
a Queens guard outside Buckingham Palace, arms
flailing, legs rehearsing Tai Chi moves with
bells a jingling. And then stand there expecting
the soldier to raise a smile.
Two minutes pass and Tony does his routine
“snapping out of trance” shake of the head
and looks unexpectedly frustrated.
“Chinese bloody tea, can’t understand a
bloody word of it, sorry Chalks, you say
something?”
I spend half my life reading underground music
rags, know a fair few people on the band scene
and never have I come across this mans name.
Maybe I’m reading the wrong magazines or going
to the wrong clubs. You don’t get anyone
sipping glasses of Bolinger at the kind of
places I go to. The Boston Arms in Tufnell Park
or The Garage down Holloway Road pride
themselves in serving only the finest watered
down lager and spirits at £1.50 a pop.
Turning on the CD player, the Sonic Youth cover
“Now I Wanna Be Your Dog” breaks down this
placid start to the day with a punk kick that
has Tony bounding from behind the screen and
hollering above the screams of Kim Gordon to
“Turn that fucking noise down”. Tattoo Tribe
has a strict music policy of playing any type of
background music but Punk. Only this is Punk
Lite and Tony has confessed in the past to
enjoying the rest of the album. He says that
Gordon sounds too panicky singing “I Wanna Be
Yer Dawg” over and over, and it spoils the
Parlours comfortable vibes and puts our clients
on edge. The last thing he wants is a jittery
body in his hands. Just before I dip a mop into
a bucket of soapy water and begin wiping the
floor, I turn the volume up, just for the rest
of this track, just for the moment anyway.
The loud revving of an HGV snaps me out of my
hygiene-programmed daydream. The two front doors
are swinging back and forth and a Mediterranean
looking man with a day-glow complexion stands
defiantly before me. Faint plumes of exhaust
fumes cloud around him, his facial luminosity
moves steadily from left to right, like a
lighthouse beacon surveying its thick, misty
surroundings. As the Holloway pollution clears
he walks towards me, taking each step with a
slow, almost regimental, action. Now
face-to-face, he raises his right hand outward.
Palms face down. And I’m half wondering
whether he expects me to kiss it or to follow
suit and shake it.
“Casey Montando”, he says “Here to see
Tony”.
I clasp his hand. There is no wavering response
on his part so we stand for a moment, his hand
laying impotent in my grasp.
“Chalky, I’m Tony’s assistant. Welcome to
Tattoo Tribe”.
He has a kindly but almost deadpan face that
softly nods at every second word I say, his eyes
looking into mine as if reading the thought
processes that culminate into my slightly over
the top greeting.
We stand there for another slightly uneasy
moment until Tony comes loping out from behind
the transparent boundary and accosts his old
acquaintance with a massive hug. Again Casey
Montando fails to reciprocate this friendly
gesture and I’m beginning to see that this
maybe a part of a forgotten British reserve from
a bygone era.
“Monty, good to see you showed up”, Tony,
says, “I was half expecting you to cop out at
the last minute”.
Once again Casey Montando is nodding his head
slowly as Tony speaks, as a deaf man may do when
scrutinizing the lips of his conversant.
“Tony my old friend, you should know from all
those years now that my word is bond”. He
speaks with a cool aplomb, a man who exudes the
qualities of self made success. Casey turns to
me.
“I’ve known this giant nearly thirty years
now and you may find this hard to believe
looking at me now, but we got into some real
dodgy situations”.
He wraps a proud arm around Tony’s shoulders.
“And somehow this man would always be there to
bail us out in those hairy, scary times”.
Tony looks down at him, then looks to me.
“Yeah, this was after I rolled with the
‘Angels Chalks, I was just settling in London.
Christ, thirty years ago now”.
Tony demands cups of tea for all, “ None of
that green shit. This is a special session so
bring on the Earl!”
I return with the tea to find our guest of
honour sitting in the tattoo chair, naked from
the waist up. He has a toned but physique with
tight, saggy flesh that you on topless, ageing
rock stars playing stadium gigs. Meeting him
with his clothes on I assumed he was Tony’s
age, somewhere in his mid- forties. But looking
at him now with a bed of mostly white hair on
his chest I can see he is past the big Five-0.
As I hand them their mugs I catch Casey in
mid-sentence.
“…A beautiful woman with a size eight figure
and tits to die for, only she’ll have huge,
angel like wings that rise high above her
head”.
He raises his arms above his head, mapping out a
huge circle.
“And so big they’re visible either side of
her”.
I have never known Tony to recreate a body
design unless he has a specific blueprint of the
customers' image. I can tell from the way Tony
is listening to Casey that he’s not happy.
As Tony explains to him that he will need a much
more vivid description of Casey’s sexy cherub,
Casey begins again to paint a more vivid picture
of this celestial beauty. As he describes first,
her facial features, I reach for my pad and
sketch her eyes, nose and mouth. She has thin,
fragile skin and in the following forty-five
minutes I have imagined on paper my very own
interpretation of Casey’s daydream lady. She
is possibly younger than his version but I like
her. Impulsive sketches like this one are always
outlines, a first draft if you like, of an
illustration that, along with a dozen others,
may take weeks to complete. The telephone rings
in the office and I put the pad down and go to
answer the call.
“Casey, you don’t quite get it do you?”
Tony says to an increasingly crabby half naked
man.
“It wouldn’t be proper for me to take what
you’ve just described and then instantly
reproduce it on your back”.
Casey, appearing fidgety, sits forwards in his
chair. He suddenly looks to Tony like a man who
always gets what he wants. Only when Tony has
made up his mind on something there is nothing
that will persuade him otherwise. Casey stares
intently at Tony’s silent face, a man
controlling a momentary anger, a small rage that
shows in his tanned glow, that is now slightly
more reddish in pigmentation. Tony stares back
with a calm assurance that his old friend is too
consummate a professional to allow a juvenile
tantrum to surface and make a scene.
“Look” Tony says, “Lets do it this way.
We’ll call this a consultation and end this
mornings session”. Casey now rises from the
chair.
“And I’ll draw up three different versions
of what you’ve described to me. I’ll call
you when I want you in again.”
Casey is now pacing up and down the corner of
the studio where they sit. Tony rests back,
unmoved and observes the same, slow, almost
robotical manner that struck me on his earlier
entrance. Tony can see Casey’s simmering
indignation has now died down and he has
returned to the cautious, businesslike manner
that Tony recalls earned him so much respect
back in Seventies Soho.
Casey has ceased walking back and forth and
reaches down to pick up something that is out of
Tony’s vision. “This is it!” Casey
exclaims. Tony sees his friend coming towards
him. Casey’s physical mood
suddenly swings from that of sulking spoilt
child to excited spoilt child. Holding
Chalky’s opened sketchpad under Tony’s nose,
he says, “This is exactly how I imagined her
to be, this is the blueprint”.
“Absolutely no way Monty, that’s not an
official blueprint. Chalk’s quite a nifty
little artist but he’s still learning the
ropes and…” Casey interrupts
“ How can you say what should and what
shouldn’t be good enough to be considered a
blueprint. You said yourself that you were only
worried about the prospect of having an unhappy
customer. Well, look I’m happy and you
haven’t even started yet”.
“Look Monty its just wouldn’t be right. For
me to copy a body print that wasn’t designed
by me, it’s…”
“It’s what Tony? It’s not right? It’s
not fair? Who’s acting like a spoilt kid
now?”
“It’s unprecedented, that’s all Monty.
Chalk’s a good kid, a real good kid but I
don’t feel he’s ready to…”
“Ready to what? Have one of his sketches
turned into a real bodyprint? It’s still your
work Tony. You should stop undermining the poor
boy. He could well be your next protégé.”
Tony thinks for a minute and looks at the pencil
drawing. There is nothing wrong with it. Infact
it is a typically fine example of one of my
first drafts. He knows that somewhere in his
relationship with me he had made a conscious
decision to nurture my talent. But he finds his
paternal instincts are at odds with an arrogant
stubbornness he rarely acknowledged he has. He
always saw me as his student. He also knew that
he was my hero, probably a hero to hundreds of
young men who hung around his studio over the
years. The father figure. They watched
everything he had done. But he wouldn’t tell
them anything because this was his bread and
butter. He didn’t want some jerk to open up
next door to him or down the road. Let some
other master in a faraway land show them the
ropes. But I was different. I had a real passion
for body art, I lived the life of a young punk
and tattoos were at the very heart of this new
wave. So he had always known the day would come
when !
he would have to let me experiment with real
life; paying customers. This was one step
towards that time and in Casey’s naivety,
perhaps he is right. This wasn’t such a big
deal after all was it?
In silence, Tony motions for Casey to return to
the chair. He carefully cuts my page from the
pad and pins it at eyes view above the apparatus
table. In my absence, he prepares the necessary
needles, mixes the necessary ink.
“You’re sure you only want the finish in
black and white, no colours whatsoever?”
“Exactly that”, comes Casey’s reply and
Tony begins sketching the outline of this
spiritual being.
Not feeling in a particularly social mood, I
return to find my former solace only to discover
the sketchpad has been removed. I can see Tony
in deep concentration, studying a piece of paper
attached to the white brick wall. As I walk
closer I am taken aback by the sight of
Casey’s freshly shaved back displaying the
bloody red-raw outline of the woman I have only
just conjured up.
“Tony, you know she wasn’t quite finished
yet?”.
Perhaps not the best moment to broach Tony on
this apparently irrelevant subject. I know that
he wouldn’t have used my work as a blueprint
had he not deemed it worthy. There is no way
that Tony would have been persuaded into doing
something he didn’t feel happy with
undertaking. And it had always been assumed that
all works carried out are based at least on one
of his own designs. There is no response from my
boss and looking at Casey, who is very quickly
discovering how to achieve a higher pain
threshold, I return to my seat and decide to
watch this rather surreal scene from a near
distance.
A while passes in complete silence. Tony pauses
for a second and then places the needle
carefully down. He beckons me over.
“Well what do you think so far?” he says,
looking up from Casey’s torso and inviting my
response with a smile.
I know he has some kind of perverse hope that
I’ll be overwhelmed with uncontrollable
elation and seems slightly hurt by my lack of
excitement, over an almost perfect reproduction.
But I am too distracted to muster up this glee,
exhausted from a phone call that I wish I
hadn’t answered. Tony, put out, asks me why I
was gone for so long. I tell him it was one of
my brothers ringing from Belfast. He was drunk
and picked up the phone to tell me that our
mother is lying in at home in bed, breathing her
final moments of life. She had instructed Gary
(or Gazzer, to his ‘leaning on the bar top
‘CHEERS’ stylee’ drinking pals), to call
and tell me of her imminent departure. His
subsequent series of abuse recalling my
desertion from the
family roots, how five brothers, three sisters
and two Irish Wolf Hounds had ‘never fucking
liked me anyway’. Obviously her last wishes,
in reaffiirming my long stand standing status as
black sheep of the family. How this took almost
an hour to convey, is beyond my comprehension.
It should only take two minutes to inform me
that my mum is knocking on heavens door, and a
further five to hurl the predictably drunken
rage I have grown accustomed to when receiving
calls from any one of my brothers. Only
Gazzer’s on a roll of Herculean proportions.
He explains how, because I am not by her
bedside, the family does not feel whole. That
there’s a piece missing from the family
jigsaw. It is a 500 piece Picasso, and I’m
half an eyebrow piece that perfectly fits into
the ugly guys head . I stand for all this time.
I feel like a grown man listening to an
Alzheimer’s induced rant from his sick
grandmother. Only the voice at the other end is
of sadly repressed thirty year alcoholic,
slurring and stumbling his way through a well
worm script, casually crafted beside a lager
smeared bar top, in a lovely, unobtrusive public
house on a Belfast council estate. I tell myself
it isn all water off a duck’s back. When Gary
decides to end the call by hanging up !
on me, I actually smile at the thought that,
perhaps, I am not in her will after all. Tony
mutters something about ‘the ungrateful
bastards’ and carries on tattooing Casey.
Casey suddenly pipes up. “Family huh? Can’t
live with ‘em, can’t shoot ‘em!”
I’m kind of taken aback by Caseys callous
remark. It seems such an overly familiar
declaration to make to such a recent
acquaintanceship. I’m struck by an urge to
counteract his obnoxious rhetoric with a
sarcastic “Cheers Casey ,that’s made me feel
a whole lot better”. But that would make it
personal and I let the moment pass. He looks to
me like the kind of guy who gets away with
saying the wrong things at the wrong time. All
seeing but unfeeling. Being a third party to a
situation like this is about as upfront and
personal I can get without physically evading
his body space. Watching his inexperienced
facial muscles waver between a simper and a
carefree grin, eyes squinting as the single
needle penetrates the very bony parts of his
lower back. Tony looks as if he’s in one of
his trances again, possibly a daydream, it’s
hard to tell. The contrast between their two
mind states couldn’t be sweeter. Casey
desperately trying to find a state of mind that
will numb the !
intense, nagging pain. A fleeting thought he can
grab and wrap himself into, use as padding
against the threadlike soreness that bores into
his lower ribcage. Tony is in a state of
hedonism. I love watching him like this, in a
state of hedonism, self indulged, almost
hypnotised by his genius strokes, while painting
another Tattoo Tribe masterpiece.
It takes just over two hours for Tony to
complete my angel design.
“There we go, all done now”
A look of relief resides over Caseys face as he
watches Tony rocking his head violently from
left to right, as if to break a mild spell he
now wants to shake off.
“Wasn’t too bad was it?”. Tony single
handedly dismounts a large mirror from the wall
behind him, the bronze gothic frame heavy in his
grip. “Turn your head and have a look”.
Casey looks behind him and sees the still,
slightly bloody and freshly inked beauty, and
smiles. He then looks my way. “Aaaargh!” He
raises his head up toward the ceiling and
scrunches his face up in pain.
“Bit sore, huh? That’s the way it should be
in the next couple of hours. I’ll patch it
over and don’t take it off until teatime”.
Casey sits for a moment like a distressed animal
coming to terms with a new flesh wound. I act on
the assumption that now would be a good time to
make a cup of tea, always a soothing distraction
to take the mind off nagging pain.
When I come back I find Casey and Tony are
arguing over payment for the new tattoo.
“Look old friend, take the two fifties and
we’ll forget about the money for the pain”
“I don’t want your cash Montie. Take it in
the spirit it was given in for Christ’s
sake”
Casey puts the two notes back into a silver clip
that must measure an inch thick with fifty pound
notes. He folds the stash and shrugs his
shoulders. “The generous act of admitting an
old chum with prolonged pain more like. Only
joking, Tony, but you’ve got to admit that you
can cause as much pain with a one millimetre
needle than you used to with your bare hands
outside Whisky A Go-Go back in the Soho days.
Nothing changes huh?”
Tony smiles at the mention of the days when he
worked sometimes as a doorman. He has told me
some stories about when things would get out of
hand. Gangs of punks and mods would get drunk
and start fighting along Wardour Street. Even
without backup, Tony would wade through the
crowd, smacking heads together and pushing the
crowd towards the Leicester Square end of the
road. There they could smash each other up to
their hearts content as long as it didn’t
interfere with the control of peace Tony had on
this pass way through to Soho village. I suppose
it was Tony’s way of adjusting to normal life
outside of the Angels. He now had control over a
situation and there was always a reason why he
would throw a punch. Even so, he admits that you
can take the man out of the Angels but you
cannot unlearn its dogma. “Okay, let’s do it
this way”, says Casey, “ I’m starting a
new night at the old Limelight. It could be a
messy one but we’ll do the whole VIP treatment
thing, limo’s!
, beautiful girls, Bolly. It’ll be a real
crack, come on what do you say?”
Tony sighs. “As much as I hate to admit it,
last night proved to me that I'm not cut out for
all this clubbing anymore. Six pints of London
Pride at the Boston Arms is about as wild as
things get for me nowadays.”
“What about you, young man. What sort of music
are you into?”
“Folk, Country, I like the odd Skiffle but
I’m not too into the way Van Morrison plays
it”
Tony laughs out loud. Any fool can see that
I’m part of the new wave. Classic punk
material, from head to toe, there is no
mistaking my tribal colours. When I walk down
the street, people actually stop and stare at
me, kids holding mummy’s hand point their
fingers at me, old people cross the road when
they see me coming. That’s the whole point of
dressing the way I do, being the person that I
am. A young punk, pissed off and in your face.
“He’s joshing with you Montie. He likes all
the old stuff. The Ramones, John Cooper Clarke,
The Slits. All the old skool banging shit you
used to play at the Whisky.”
“Played it, never really liked it. Anyway
Mr.Young Punk, I can’t promise you a lot of
that but there’ll be plenty of that rap music.
It’s all the same to me, people shouting down
a microphone. Half the singers I sign up
nowadays can’t sing a bloody note, all they do
is stand there and shout. That’s what kids
like these days, lots of shouting”.
I haven’t the energy to go into the point of
shouting lots of things down a microphone. When
you listen to the lyrics to White Riot and God
Save The Queen, it gives you the chance to look
at life in a different way. For people like me,
to believe in the punk ethic that anyone can do
anything, is the most important rule to live my
life by. I have a feeling that Casey believes
this too and is acting like an old man for no
reason other than wanting to act like an old
man.
For some reason I am looking past Casey and can
see the graphic equaliser lights bumping around
insanely on the LCD screen. The music is playing
but there is no sound coming out of the
speakers. I tell Casey to pick me up here when
we close and he then turns his attention back to
Tony in an attempt to persuade him to join us.
The remote for the stereo is nowhere in sight.
Being the nihilistic anorak that I purport to
be, I walk over to the stereo eager to find out
exactly which track on my self produced punk
compilation CD is provoking such manic wildfire
that illuminates the top half of Tony’s much
prized Denon sound system.
“There’s gonna be a borstal breakout!”,
sings Jimmy Persey in his trademark cockney cry.
“There’s gonna be a borstal breakout!”
bellow the rest of Sham 69. Dave Parsons belting
guitar in a perfect 4/4 sync with drummer
Dodie’s absolute caning of parchment, as the
end of each chorus line is finalised with a two
beat hammering of strings and percussion. As the
Ramones “Blitzkrieg Bop” begins, I turn the
volume down to a level more attune to Tony’s
perceptive organs of hearing .
That’s when Raffy arrives through the front
door. Raffy, struggling Romeo, prospective
Turner Prize winning Graffiti artist, and my
best friend, slides towards me with a mock,
gangster pimp swagger. We softly touch knuckles,
a motion of acknowledgment that began back in
our Boys N’ The Hood Days. Those prepubescent
years, when staying in on a Saturday night meant
renting out a couple of the latest hiphop
gangster flicks, downing a litre bottle of 20%
Proof Thunderbird and smoking a full packet of
twenty Marlboros in the back yard before
Raffia’s mum came home late with her
boyfriend.
Raffy turns his head and acknowledges Tony and
Casey with a casual nod. Casual being very much
the operative characteristic in my lifelong pals
mental makeup. We grew up living in our compact
two up, two down council pads stuck together, or
that was how we used to describe it. Running
around in each others front room boxes, Raffy
would always be very far behind in the race to
run nowhere in particular in that aimless, winky,
wonky fashion that two year olds do. With
probably the same science of reasoning that
marks him out these days as the shrewdest person
I know, he would be leaning against the wall,
not as support for his weak legs, but he was
simply hanging out. Bringing new meaning to the
phrase ‘chilling out in ‘da crib’.
Raffy’s mum affectionately nicknamed him
‘The Loller’, a term that stuck throughout
his childhood years as Raffy realised that
acting like the black Jimmy Dean in the school
playground would get him much further in the
kiss-chase stakes, and much further still on the
annual two day school trip to Cologne.
Graduating from Islington Boys with no more than
an A-grade GCSE in art and facing tough reality
on the fortress ghettos of Holloway Road, Raffy
became a self styled ‘player’. A charismatic
jester, possessing the looks and body to charm
the ladies and the quick, acerbic tongue to see
off all challengers to his feline prizes. All
rolled into his serenely, unfazed front that, at
any given time, allowed him the privileges of
pussy. Being unemployed, and reaping the
financial boon of the state UB40, limited him to
magnetizing only the council estate babes A
relaxed cod, if you like, in an ocean of
Islingtons 9-5 darting Dover Soul.
“Easy” says Raffy, never one to use he
customary ‘Hey, how are you. What you been up
to?’ greeting. When one word sums it up so
simply. “ Easy”, I repeat back to him. Now
that we’re both comfortable in the knowledge
that our lives are as unremarkably easy as our
compressed reports confirm, Raffy turns his head
back, looking at Casey laughing hard at
something Tony has just said. Probably relating
to Tony’s recently admitted to inadequacies on
big nights out.
“Who’s the old guy, Guy?” Raffy enquires.
“He’s a friend of Tony’s from back in the
day”, I tell him.
“The days of LL or Grandmaster Flash?”.
When referring to a moment in history, Raffy
always uses the name of someone who achieved
iconic status to pinpoint that particular time.
If the time referred to has taken place since
1980, he’ll quote a legend from the past three
decades of hiphop. For instance, the late
seventies and early eighties are the Grandmaster
Flash years, the mid eighties become the LL Cool
J years and the late eighties becomes De La
Soul, from the Daisy Age of rap. Early nineties
is Ice Cube, mid-nineties Snoop Dogg and towards
the end of the millenium and beyond, the Wu Tang
era. He can also call any time in the 1990’s
Dr.Dre, so even if you somehow catch on to this
nonsensical perspective of recent history,
things can become even confusing.
“Oh, way before Grandmaster Flash”, I tell
him. Raffy gives a 45 degree nod of his head and
smiles, revealing two gold plated incisors on
his lower jaw. “Proper old school”, he says.
“Yeah but he’s also kind of new school”, I
tell him. He looks at me with a look of
puzzlement. “Ya mean like Jimmy Saville with
that Nike Air Shell suit thing going on?”.
“Er, yeah,, but a bit cooler”.
“Is he down with the London ting?”.
“He dictates the London thing”, I say
knowingly, all at once feeling excited by making
contact with this shaker in a world I know
nothing about.
I pull up two chairs and tell Raffy about
Casey’s request for our newly found VIP status
at his launch night at the Limelight, a two
hundred year old converted church along Charing
Cross. Raffy looks unimpressed and I sound
unconvincing. Who am I trying to kid? We are two
head-banging street boys, from the wrong area in
the right side of town. We live in our own
suburban bubble, staying on the right side of
the track and never hanging out further than
Camden Town. On a big night out, that means
drinking at The Forum in Kentish Town till Four
in the morning, feeding our drunken hunger from
neighbouring Abrakebabra and walking the booze
induced sweat from our pores, on the three mile
hike back to Angel. Cabs home are always a rip
off as they wait patiently along the kerb for a
necessarily drunk enough group of mascara
smeared, successfully unattached girls, to walk
past in their twos and threes. Even with the
alcohol-induced stupidity that clouds their
usually sober, u!
nschooled judgement, to jump into a beaten up
Volkswagen Passat with a beaten up looking man
who barely talks a word of English, screams out
for a reliable night bus service. But then
waiting at the bus top alongside the rabble of
continental lager-fuelled Camden boys, wearing
ready-for-it-all-to-kick-off stares, the sixty
minute trek home, off the beaten track, through
the tree lined back streets of Tufnell Park and
Archway, is perhaps the safest option.
Raffys face lights up at the idea of a ride in a
gleaming black stretch limo in the company of
Casey’s “beautiful ladies”. “What time
are we off then?” he asks. He unfolds his arms
and stretches them behind his head in a way that
says ‘Its been a long and uneventful journey
through life but I’ve finally arrived’.
The clock above the Salvation Army says it’s
quarter past eight, a time that hasn’t changed
since it stopped its ticking five years ago.
Still mid February, the daylight is drawing out
a little more but there are no more shadows
inside the studio walls of the passing traffic.
The sun is sinking into a blloodied cloud red
sky, accolading, perhaps, a night of ardour and
discovery. Casey and Tony hug one another. He
comes over to us, and without introducing
himself to Raffy but addressing us both, says we
should be outside the studio for half seven
where the limo will be waiting to pick us up
As he walks out, we both have our feet up and
overlapped arms propping our heads up. Maybe we
have arrived after all. As the last ray of
sunlight flickers behind a clouded eclipse in
its final attempt to keep the world alight, a
shaft of sunbeam yellow shoots out from behind
the clock tower, deflects off one of Raffys gold
plated incisors, hits me straight in the eye,
forcing me to squint, as I lose balance and fall
off my chair. |
