"I could be the actress you be Tarantino"- XXXO- M.I.A,
"Yes love, love your attitude, because the nigger play pussy that's the nigger that's getting screwed"- Gimme the Loot- The Notorious B.I.G
------------------------
Ugh. Just woke up, and it's like something out of a bad teen movie, beer cans, empty cartons of chicken, no messages, that same old feeling that my life is falling away into middle age and I can't remember what it's like having sex sober. It stopped snowing yesterday, and Magic FM is happily informing me that parts of England are going to be flooded by all the melted slush. Last night I drunkenly watched Aldo Lado's "Night Train Murders", a fairly inventive spin on Wes Craven's "Last House on the Left", which was based on a Bergman film, "Jungfrukallan", which means that sixty or seventy percent of all banned video nasties took their influence from the artiest director Europe ever produced. I don't have toilet paper or tobacco, and on Thursday I had an email from my careworker which read:
Gentle reminder that your injection is due today!
I emailed him a link to my new music video on YouTube and told him to go fuck himself, which was hardly mature, but well. On Friday I went to see "Django Unchained" again, this time in the ghetto Odeon in Bromley, which doesn't have 3D capacity and charges four fifty a ticket. The screens are kind of tatty, the seats are threadbare and they have CCTV cameras in all of the theatres in case a fight kicks off. Me and Raf saw it on opening night in the middle class Beckenham Odeon, which saw a few walkouts and a general uncomfortable atmosphere from an audience that didn't know how to take the word "nigger" repeated almost every other word. American maverick director Spike Lee has publicly refused to watch it, saying it is offensive to his ancestors, which obviously smacks of jealousy. After I tweeted him that his slave movie "Bamboozled" was a toecurlingly bad film and that his intellect spoils most of his movies, he locked his Twitter account, which adds him to the list of celebrities who are blocking me, which includes EL James and Stephen Fry.
A group of black girls were sitting right behind us second time round, and if you know anything about black girls, you know that they are guaranteed to provide a running commentary of whatever movie they are watching, which, in the case of "Django Unchained", meant that by the end they had forgotten that anybody else was in the cinema.
----------
"Sharp scratch," Holly says. The needle tears a hole, that old familiar sting. I'm in the process of getting punked on Pynchon Ward, my two weekly date with a depot injection of Olanzapine straight into my left buttock. It's getting to the point where I don't even mind it anymore.
"I can't believe it's been two weeks," Holly sighs, and then: "Oop, it's bleeding quite a lot, let me get a plaster."
I wince, hoping that it hasn't hit an artery.
"Have you seen Django yet?" I ask, pulling up my jeans.
"I heard it was quite violent," Holly says, disposing of the needle.
I limp out of the medical room, scanning for an easy hit. I see an awkward looking man in his late thirties, smile at him and say:
"Can I buy a cigarette off you?"
"Oh," he says nervously, seeing the fake evil look in my eyes, "oh, oh, you can have one."
He leafs me out a Benson Silver, and I get a flash of what his life has been like to end up here. Shy at school, not much of an academic, some low rent jobs, a steadily increasing drink problem, a slightly too close relationship with his mother.
"Cheers mate," I smile, limping down the corridor to the smoking cage. Some random black zombie (the usual type of mentally ill homeless from the area that collects on the ward on a weekly basis), is following me in. Because I've been jacked up in this cage before (the worst was from a young pikey with an electronic tag who got six shots to my head before I managed to take him out) I gauge this zombie as pretty harmless but smoke in the corner just to be on the safe side. Another guy comes in, a clean shaven white guy with tracksuit bottoms on and the unpleasant scent of Lynx, sex addiction and schizophrenia.
"What's that then?" he asks, pointing at my HMV bag.
"A book," I say. I've brought in the new Misha Glenny crime epic, "Dark Markets: How Hackers Became the New Mafia", since I met an Anonymous hacker (who I will never name) in the Secure Unit last year.
"You read books, then?" he asks, confused and lecherous.
"Sometimes," I smile, putting in my earphones.
"My mum likes books," is the last thing I hear him say before I switch off. I'm listening to Redman's "Muddy Waters", definitely one of the best albums to get high to. I'm hoping they won't piss test me, since I smoked all night before I made my new YouTube video, which has had 82 views in four days which I guess is okay, but it's hardly Rihanna or Justin Bieber, the deities of YouTube. When the weird dude leaves the cage I text my producer to say that Lloyd Kaufman, head of Troma and creator of The Toxic Avenger thought the video was great. I have been tweeting him for a while. Nobody makes movies quite like him. Anybody who smokes weed loves that guy. I wander back to make a decaffeinated, lukewarm coffee, scoping the place for new faces. I recognize most of them. I probably know by sight all of the mentally ill people in the area, and the cogent ones recognize me. Usually if I see a homeless guy I know I'll buy them a couple of cans of Super T. They're all alcoholic or drug addicts, or both. Poor bastards. There but for the grace of God. A young black girl with a few gold teeth is staring at me. I take out my earphones.
"Hello," I smile.
"Are you staff?" she asks.
"Nope," I say.
"What's that?" she says, pointing at my bag.
"A book."
"You can get books in HMV now?"
"Mostly the hip, drug culture classics, or music biographies, or serial killer histories," I explain, stopping when I realize she doesn't understand.
"How long have you been in?" she asks.
"I've just come for an injection," I reply.
"Oh. Are you a heroin addict?"
"No."
"Oh."
I sit down and read my book for three hours. I have to wait this length to ensure the medication doesn't kill me. It's an urban legend that you can die from a depot injection. This time round I'm okay. It's been a calm day on the ward. I eat dinner there, and leave, wandering back to my flat in the freezing sleet. On the bus I watch the streets of the suburbs pass by, remembering nights out, people I used to know, things I used to do. It hits me as a dull epiphany as I watch the rivulets of rain snake down the window. I don't really have any ties left in England. My parents don't even live here. Pynchon Ward is the only home I have.
A.W.M 28/01/2013
Monday 28 January 2013
Thursday 10 January 2013
THAT GIRL AND A CHRISTMAS VACATION
"And if there's a wish, pay your visit to Mr. Dickens. For he, like many another literary man, is bound to adore you, fatherless child."- Norman Mailer, Marilyn
"You should marry a librarian," she said, lost in some impulse, her eyes half closed, the computer screen some window to a library somewhere, me, older, wiser, quieter, reading some strange book as my wife carefully annotates a newer stock of antiquated stories. I spooned some sugar into my coffee (decaffeinated) and said:
"Nah, I'm gonna marry Rihanna."
She reacted quickly, shaken back to the secure unit where she, guard and protector of the criminally insane, needed to quickly bring me back to reality. The other female staff, tough, black women with a penchant for the needle and the school of hard knocks, looked horrified.
"That's insane," she said, finally looking frightened.
Some moment in the past (by now I had completely lost track of time, my diary would date days past, strange, coded entries, and I would realize that I could not remember writing them) I had overheard the nurses talking about Fifty Shades of Grey with the same reverence as the King James Bible.
"I'm joking," I sighed, and then: "Can I get a light?" The rules of the secure unit were that clients were allowed to use the staff lighters once every half an hour, and, after midnight, on the hour. She looked up at the clock. It was twenty six minutes past nine.
"Five minutes, Andrew," she said, looking hurt.
"Why a librarian?" I asked.
"Oh," she said, lost in that same impulse. "The way you are with all these books..."
A million hours ago (or two weeks, or whenever) I had slid all of my books out of the two inch gap in my window, making a composite artwork and protest of controversial books in the gap between the window and the iron webbing that trapped the unit like some giant metal spider. The Cliff Notes for One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest lay proudly in front, announcing to the passing police and security staff that there was at least one client in the secure unit who had a bit of imagination left. As a punishment my window was locked (despite it being August) and my pillow was replaced with a hard blanket. But it was that girl's impulse to dream of my future with some mystery librarian that I am thinking of now, sipping a Sailor Jack's and Coke in a small bar in Furengirola on New Year's Eve 2012. Mick Jagger sings "Keys To Your Heart" on a TV showing a Stones stadium gig somewhere in Japan. My brother (who had a tooth extraction this year, and as a result has quit smoking) is saying: "It's called regressing to the mean," explaining to me a concept in some high class book on the nature of thought he's stoically been reading the past three weeks in Spain.
"See, a pilot may pull off, like a great move, a double spin, and execute it perfectly."
"Uh huh," I say, sipping my rum, staring around in the dim neon light of for women under forty, finding nothing. The bar is like a bad impression of a bar, a bar doing an impression of a hip NY rock pub. It has everything but the Wurlitzer.
"But it's a one off. Afterwards, his maneuvers became a bit shaky again. He's regressed to the mean. On average, he will always return to the same standard. And another pilot may make an error in flight, but, in the same way, his level will always rise again, his mean is higher. He regresses upwards."
My brother (who I can't help but always see as the helpless baby who looked so cute when he cried) has a degree in Neuroscience and is in his final year at medical school. He does not have my permission to become a psychiatrist.
"Interesting. Can you apply that to the notion of humanistic progress?"
My brother now has a habit of unhooking the false tooth in his mouth and clicking it up and down, almost unconsciously. Earlier today he told me he had dreams now where all of his teeth would fall out, usually in the presence of beautiful girls.
"Explain," he says, sipping his drink.
"The idea of human progress. Eventually the standard, the average ability of everybody on the planet regresses to the mean. All things may be possible in the universe, but not for humans. Our mean is too genetically low."
He considers this, smiles sadly. I'm drunk.
"What's the time?"
"Five minutes," I say. 2012 has been the year of personal apocalypse. I lost myself in grief after the Dark Knight Rises Massacre. I have sold copies of my school shooting books, Smoking Is Cool and Fear of a Tabloid Planet in the US, and thought I had given James Holmes the idea, which led me to self harm and offer myself as a karmic sacrifice as I tried to incite the nurses on an acute psychiatric ward to kill me. They did force me to eat a cup of Benzodiazepine tablets (a drug family more addictive than heroin) and then shipped me off to a secure unit. I spent a month there during the Olympics. Two weeks after my eventual discharge an ex-girlfriend of mine hung herself in a psychiatric ward. Then floods, fires, hurricanes, and a final dreadful massacre of children in an American nursery school, in which the babies were each shot twice with an automatic rifle designed for military combat, wielded by a baby faced psychopath who first shot his mother who had bought him the gun.
"Happy new year, dude," I smile, feeling tears well in my eyes. We're now sitting outside, and I'm smoking a cigarette, remembering her words: "You're a really good kisser," spoken softly, shyly, like a little girl who has always had a schoolyard crush on her English teacher. I think about asking my brother to take me to a brothel. I need the feel of a woman to take away this guilt and sadness, even if the intimacy is only commercial.
"Love you dude," he says.
-------------------------------
She is sitting across from me on the plane. The takeoff was shaky, and I had gripped my arms in panic, knowing that I had used all the Benzos to help me sleep in Spain. Now we are cruising at altitude, and I am drinking the last of my Euros in miniature bottles of Jack Daniels and cans of lukewarm Pepsi. She is strikingly beautiful, but her eyes betray the evil of her experience. She has taken on many men, and she is young yet, her stamina can take it. Her eyes are pale blue, her skin a china white, lips red like a Greek prostitute who has bled her finger and applied the blood to her mouth. The plane is shaking now, and I am clutching my drink with terror as she opens her mouth. Her teeth are rotten and sharp, one by one they fall from the diseased gums, she will show me this, and then smile a closed lipped smile, opening, closing, opening, closing, and then she says: "Please fasten your seatbelt as we prepare for our descent into London Gatwick..."
I wake with a start. Sitting across from me is a fat, unlovely looking girl, clutching a teddy bear and sobbing. My whisky has leaked onto my trousers like a child's accident and through the earphones in my depressurized eardrums, Marilyn Manson's cover of Carly Simon's poem to Warren Beatty is taunting me with the words: "You walked into the party, like you were walking into a yacht..."
It is 2013 and I am back in London. As soon as the plane lands safely, the girl has packed her teddy bear and is sitting with a soft smile on her face. She has beaten death once more.
"You're so vain... you probably think this song is about you... don't you... don't you..."
A.W.M 10/01/2013
"You should marry a librarian," she said, lost in some impulse, her eyes half closed, the computer screen some window to a library somewhere, me, older, wiser, quieter, reading some strange book as my wife carefully annotates a newer stock of antiquated stories. I spooned some sugar into my coffee (decaffeinated) and said:
"Nah, I'm gonna marry Rihanna."
She reacted quickly, shaken back to the secure unit where she, guard and protector of the criminally insane, needed to quickly bring me back to reality. The other female staff, tough, black women with a penchant for the needle and the school of hard knocks, looked horrified.
"That's insane," she said, finally looking frightened.
Some moment in the past (by now I had completely lost track of time, my diary would date days past, strange, coded entries, and I would realize that I could not remember writing them) I had overheard the nurses talking about Fifty Shades of Grey with the same reverence as the King James Bible.
"I'm joking," I sighed, and then: "Can I get a light?" The rules of the secure unit were that clients were allowed to use the staff lighters once every half an hour, and, after midnight, on the hour. She looked up at the clock. It was twenty six minutes past nine.
"Five minutes, Andrew," she said, looking hurt.
"Why a librarian?" I asked.
"Oh," she said, lost in that same impulse. "The way you are with all these books..."
A million hours ago (or two weeks, or whenever) I had slid all of my books out of the two inch gap in my window, making a composite artwork and protest of controversial books in the gap between the window and the iron webbing that trapped the unit like some giant metal spider. The Cliff Notes for One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest lay proudly in front, announcing to the passing police and security staff that there was at least one client in the secure unit who had a bit of imagination left. As a punishment my window was locked (despite it being August) and my pillow was replaced with a hard blanket. But it was that girl's impulse to dream of my future with some mystery librarian that I am thinking of now, sipping a Sailor Jack's and Coke in a small bar in Furengirola on New Year's Eve 2012. Mick Jagger sings "Keys To Your Heart" on a TV showing a Stones stadium gig somewhere in Japan. My brother (who had a tooth extraction this year, and as a result has quit smoking) is saying: "It's called regressing to the mean," explaining to me a concept in some high class book on the nature of thought he's stoically been reading the past three weeks in Spain.
"See, a pilot may pull off, like a great move, a double spin, and execute it perfectly."
"Uh huh," I say, sipping my rum, staring around in the dim neon light of for women under forty, finding nothing. The bar is like a bad impression of a bar, a bar doing an impression of a hip NY rock pub. It has everything but the Wurlitzer.
"But it's a one off. Afterwards, his maneuvers became a bit shaky again. He's regressed to the mean. On average, he will always return to the same standard. And another pilot may make an error in flight, but, in the same way, his level will always rise again, his mean is higher. He regresses upwards."
My brother (who I can't help but always see as the helpless baby who looked so cute when he cried) has a degree in Neuroscience and is in his final year at medical school. He does not have my permission to become a psychiatrist.
"Interesting. Can you apply that to the notion of humanistic progress?"
My brother now has a habit of unhooking the false tooth in his mouth and clicking it up and down, almost unconsciously. Earlier today he told me he had dreams now where all of his teeth would fall out, usually in the presence of beautiful girls.
"Explain," he says, sipping his drink.
"The idea of human progress. Eventually the standard, the average ability of everybody on the planet regresses to the mean. All things may be possible in the universe, but not for humans. Our mean is too genetically low."
He considers this, smiles sadly. I'm drunk.
"What's the time?"
"Five minutes," I say. 2012 has been the year of personal apocalypse. I lost myself in grief after the Dark Knight Rises Massacre. I have sold copies of my school shooting books, Smoking Is Cool and Fear of a Tabloid Planet in the US, and thought I had given James Holmes the idea, which led me to self harm and offer myself as a karmic sacrifice as I tried to incite the nurses on an acute psychiatric ward to kill me. They did force me to eat a cup of Benzodiazepine tablets (a drug family more addictive than heroin) and then shipped me off to a secure unit. I spent a month there during the Olympics. Two weeks after my eventual discharge an ex-girlfriend of mine hung herself in a psychiatric ward. Then floods, fires, hurricanes, and a final dreadful massacre of children in an American nursery school, in which the babies were each shot twice with an automatic rifle designed for military combat, wielded by a baby faced psychopath who first shot his mother who had bought him the gun.
"Happy new year, dude," I smile, feeling tears well in my eyes. We're now sitting outside, and I'm smoking a cigarette, remembering her words: "You're a really good kisser," spoken softly, shyly, like a little girl who has always had a schoolyard crush on her English teacher. I think about asking my brother to take me to a brothel. I need the feel of a woman to take away this guilt and sadness, even if the intimacy is only commercial.
"Love you dude," he says.
-------------------------------
She is sitting across from me on the plane. The takeoff was shaky, and I had gripped my arms in panic, knowing that I had used all the Benzos to help me sleep in Spain. Now we are cruising at altitude, and I am drinking the last of my Euros in miniature bottles of Jack Daniels and cans of lukewarm Pepsi. She is strikingly beautiful, but her eyes betray the evil of her experience. She has taken on many men, and she is young yet, her stamina can take it. Her eyes are pale blue, her skin a china white, lips red like a Greek prostitute who has bled her finger and applied the blood to her mouth. The plane is shaking now, and I am clutching my drink with terror as she opens her mouth. Her teeth are rotten and sharp, one by one they fall from the diseased gums, she will show me this, and then smile a closed lipped smile, opening, closing, opening, closing, and then she says: "Please fasten your seatbelt as we prepare for our descent into London Gatwick..."
I wake with a start. Sitting across from me is a fat, unlovely looking girl, clutching a teddy bear and sobbing. My whisky has leaked onto my trousers like a child's accident and through the earphones in my depressurized eardrums, Marilyn Manson's cover of Carly Simon's poem to Warren Beatty is taunting me with the words: "You walked into the party, like you were walking into a yacht..."
It is 2013 and I am back in London. As soon as the plane lands safely, the girl has packed her teddy bear and is sitting with a soft smile on her face. She has beaten death once more.
"You're so vain... you probably think this song is about you... don't you... don't you..."
A.W.M 10/01/2013
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