Harringay

Graham Charnock

Woken by gleeful tra-la-lee of phone. My back hurts, my limbs ache, and I can’t see - only a white diffused glow behind my eyelids which suddenly explodes into shooting stars, Catherine wheels of light that sizzle on my retinae.

I feel miserable but I know it’s nothing really significant. Just everyday symptoms of tertiary clonal recovery.

Where am I? Memory is as blind as my eyes for the moment, occluded by the squirts of interference along my optic nerve, but it peers and squints and then everything floods back.

Harringay.

My tongue trips sweetly over the three syllables, teasing the first, tasting the second, sucking hungrily on the third. Harr-in-gay. Light of my loins, fire of my life.

It took me a while to recall the instruction set required to open my eyes. Doctors say responses will become more spontaneous as facial nerves renetwork themselves. It feels to me like a botched job. I would sue if it weren’t for the waivers in the contract.

The truth is that Andy has been dead too long. Clonal tissue sours after a while, the DNA destabilizes or something, molecules migrate from incorporated inert material; the amalgam in fillings, silicon from breast implants, the nylon that welds your heart together.

It was daylight. It was morning. It was bright, cruel, victimizing. Send out for Chano Pozo, the Doctor of Swing, put pennies on my dead eyelids and watch them turn cartwheels when the last kick of the heart tosses them in the air.

Heads or tails.

It was Walter Winchell. On the phone. He wanted to interview me and write it up as a book. I said I’d do it if I could photograph him masturbating, digitize it, and issue it as a limited edition floppy. He said he’d think about it and call back. I felt on safe ground. I don’t believe he can come.

I showered, powered up, kicked in the modem, and after it had run through its regular glitches - calling up NORWEB, NATWEB, The White House Catering Facility, the Walt Disney Interface in Fort Knox - I checked the Bulletin Board. There was more stuff from Hockney. Incoherent as usual. He uses a clinic in Hong Kong these days where a team of acupuncturists trained under Dr Chung Kuo work to locate the monofilament sutures along the median lines. I’ve told him it’s a big mistake. One of these days his face is going to fall apart and he’ll look like W.H. Auden.

Printed out a hard copy of Clone & Mart. Something tells me one day it may be collectable. The big news is that some of JFK’s internal organs have surfaced, supposedly in a laboratory in Tampa Bay. My hunch is that it’s another red herring and it will turn out to be more old, tired material from Rose’s corpse with a bit of genetic tailoring. I know a ten-year-old Puerto Rican kid who bought one of those faces. Now he’s a drag queen with red hair and freckles but not much else, works an Irish bar off Union Square. What a waste.

And some scam-running Zionist claims to have unearthed a cache of Belsen lampshades in a Bavarian wald, but they will probably turn out to be pig-skin like last time.

Not much new on the market. A twenty-year-old Jeremy Bentham from the mummy in the Oxford Union. What kind of investment is that? It’ll be fifty years before you can realize a return - even if the skin-bag survives that long - and who knows what the market in philosophy gurus will be by then?

You remember how they dug up those Romanov scraps and it turned out to be mostly servants and grooms? Well, apparently they did find a bit of cartilage from Tsar Nicholas III in amongst them. He’s seven years old now and a bit prone to puppy fat judging from the digipic. I wouldn’t have put him on the market just yet, but the Imperial Eastern Consolidated is such a volatile exchange, buying Maos one minute and Schwarzeneggers the next. I guess it’s true what they say - you can’t leave the chicken on the rack too long. If only they could find Anastasia. What a Holy Grail that would be. I might even bid for her myself.

Victor called at nine to take me shopping. He had an exhibition later at a gallery in Pont Street and was nervous about it, really on edge. He asked me if I had any acid. I can’t believe Victor does acid, not as it’s presently formatted. I told him, Victor, it’s not good for you. It scrambles the input channels from the genes - you could end up looking and feeling like a turkey. Literally.

He was wearing leather flares and they looked quite cool. They had a Vivienne Westwood label in them. He said he’d got them from BHS. I pointed out the tiny ‘made under licence in Saigon’ notice on the label. It rather clouded his day. ‘It’s the last time I sign any soup cans for you,’ he said.

I hate shopping, unless it’s for clothes, but he’d hired a car, a long-wheel-base Mercedes, which was very comfortable, and the nice looking English boy was driving, so I went along.

Harringay is a bizarre place, like a macho Venice Beach. The first week I arrived I ordered a kebab at the Lamaca Cafe. It took three hours to arrive and I lost $56.85 at cards while I was waiting. In summer, men sell bags of pistachios from the hoods of cars, and the stench of rotting watermelon is overwhelming.

Can you believe it? I saw somebody I knew who was still alive. It was Marty, who must have come over about the same time as me, after Three Mile Island Mark IV. He was under that big iron railway bridge with all the Turkish graffiti on it, where the pigeons shit. He was giving a tall blond man money, quite a lot of it. I pushed the button that wound down the window and waved and shouted but he pretended not to see me. Then I thought it’s probably for the best. Marty’s always dealing. I don’t mean drugs, he’s too clumsy for that. He just deals - comics, pom postcards of Madonna and Donkey - whatever’s in vogue.

(Madonna, now there’s a woman who actually looks better in the afterlife than in realtime. That Jewish bitch who owns first serial rights has done some serious tweaking.)

Victor was upset about something, but wouldn’t say what. He was wearing a cowboy shirt with embroidered roses and cutaway hearts. I loved it. Very David Byrne. Did David die yet, and, if he did, did anybody buy the rights to the flesh? The last time I saw him he looked like Harry S. Truman - the original, I mean, in that photo by WeeGee, not that hybrid upstart currently peddling his ass round Capitol Hill. I check the AIDS Gazette daily but it’s hard to keep track. So much bad news every day from the dark heart of Africa.

The English kid turned on the radio and it was that terrible salsa music. Apparently it’s very popular in north London, but I can’t believe anybody actually likes it. I think they just play it because it’s Fourth World. It’s boring, but that’s Britain.

For instance: two Nicaraguan restaurants opened up in Crouch End last week. Jimi was playing in one and yesterday I went because someone told me the Germans like him and he’d fucked Fassbinder. He was OK. He looked a bit too old, but that’s the problem with people who die young. But he still had his licks.

I asked him about Fassbinder after the gig and he said he’d never heard of him. We signed each other’s phonecards and swapped them. A girl in black leather who said she was from Time Out tried to come on to me. Would you believe it? She was really spaced. She was telling me they’d found an entirely new dinosaur in Bloemfontein, big and barrel-shaped, apparently with its scalp still intact. Do dinosaurs have scalps? I thought she might have been putting me on. You can’t tell these days. I sent her to the bar to get me a Babycham, but she never came back.

I went back to the Eric Hotel in a genuine black London taxi ($84.00) with a tart from a local radio station who asked me boring questions all the way, like, did Valerie Solanis really kill me? All that old conspiracy shit. I told her no, I converted to Catholicism, married Valerie, and we had ten kids. The truth is what you want to hear.

The bitch in the taxi was wearing leather too - and chains. Why are all the women in the British media industry into bondage? I took a Polaroid of her with her skirt pulled up to her waist, and her thongs down round her knees ($90), and finally pushed her out at Seven Sisters and told the cabbie to drive on. The taxi-driver told me how last week he’d been to Wisley to buy a rhododendron, and how he’d almost been run down by wrinklies in their electric wheelchairs. He was very interesting, but he drove very slowly I thought, so I trimmed the tip (8.42%).

I sat up late in the lounge at the Eric Hotel (cheeseplants and IKEA!!!) and talked with the night-staff. They were full of how a local mini-cab driver had been imprisoned for raping a Swedish au-pair up near Manor House station, except that none of the evidence hung together, and the woman couldn’t describe anything about the event the same way twice. But it was their big excitement of the decade. One of them actually knew the man who’d really done it.

The Eric Hotel is gross, but the discomfort of its mattresses is just about made up for by the splendid after-dark infra-red views across Finsbury Park. I saw a dwarf coupling with a leopard once, I swear I did. But I must move on soon. My bones were always the least tolerant of my internal organs.

At about 2 a.m. I glued and went to bed, not realizing that I didn’t have to glue until the next evening. I didn’t wake up till ten, and by then I was totally unglued. The whole thing was a waste of a glue.

Can you wonder I was so grouchy first thing?

Victor asked me where I’d like to shop and I said I’d quite like to see the new Tesco store. The English kid said he’d been there and it was really neat. He said he preferred it to Sainsbury’s because they sold things like chinos and toys as well as food. I couldn’t believe that a company as big as Sainsbury’s would just sell food. Who would want to go to that kind of place?

In the car I told Victor how Larry Gagosian had called earlier. He said David Geffen was bored with Hockney and wanted to buy something more of mine. The last thing he bought was a Marilyn in 1973 ($240,000). I said I could probably find the sleeve of a Velvet Underground album I could sign for him, but Larry said no, David wanted me to make something new. Can you believe that? I told Larry I’d stopped doing new things and certainly wasn’t going to start again for a man who wears trainers and a baseball cap back to front.

We stopped at some lights and this Hell’s Angel started to clean our windscreen for us, without even being asked. He had huge muscles, and tattoos all over his face. The cute English boy said it was illegal, and I said what for someone to clean our windscreen, and he said no for someone to have tattoos over their face, and I said you mean you can’t even disfigure yourself, what sort of country is this?, and he just shrugged and held his hands palm upwards like someone trying to adopt Latino mannerisms. Anyway I paid the guy with the tattoos 80c and took a Polaroid of him, so at least that was all right.

The English kid said he’d heard that the Angels were the new Mafia, and Victor said, what happened to the old Mafia? It ain’t broke so don’t fix it. It was embarrassing, as if Victor hadn’t heard of the United Nations embargo on Family corpses. No one laughed.

I wanted to ask Victor about this new pop group who mutilate themselves on stage and whether I should do something for them, but I sensed this wasn’t the moment, and anyway I guessed I’d already decided. It’s hard to find anybody these days who deserves fifteen seconds, let alone fifteen minutes.

As we were driving into the car-park the English boy scraped the fender of a BMW and this woman jumped out and started bad-mouthing us, then she stopped, embarrassed. Apparently she knew me from somewhere. I couldn’t recall her. It turned out she had Italian connections, and a forefather who was an ancient Duke of Lombardy. Apart from that she wasn’t famous at all.

She’d been to the seafood counter. She’d flown over specially from Castille, because apparently seafood is now cheaper in England than in Spain, or anywhere else for that matter. It won’t last. It’s only a matter of time before the algae works its way up from the Mediterranean to the Cinqueport lagoons.

She’d bought up practically everything there was as if she had a shipping contract - squid, octopus, lobster, prawns, whelks, oysters and two whole congers. She was flying back home that evening for a weekend barbecue and invited me along, and I said I’d go, but I honestly don’t want to, and I shall probably not show. My surgeon told me how they use a gel derived from sturgeons’ swim-bladders to put a sheen on reconstructed cheeks. I can’t eat fish with a clear conscience these days.

They had these huge recycling hoppers in one corner of the car-park. We didn’t have any stuff of our own, but there was a woman with a whole trolley full of cans and bottles and we helped her sort them out. She recognized me and asked me to sign something for her so I signed an old can of cat food. Do you know what she did? She took it and dumped it straight in the hopper. It was wild. I wanted to stay around and sign more stuff for people to dump, but the English boy and Victor were keen to start shopping.

The new Tesco store was wonderful. I don’t know why they call it new, unless it’s because it’s just been built. That’s possible. It’s hard to tell with supermarkets and shopping malls. They all look new no matter how old they are. That’s the point. Who would want to go to a mall that looked old? Victor disagreed. He said one day they would be old and we’d all love and treasure them for that very reason. The Surrey Docks would be the new Versailles. Brent Cross would be the new Vauxhall Pleasure Gardens.

I don’t believe it. Whenever a building gets to look old these days, people just bleach it with chlorine and sand-blast it back to new again. And anyway, in a few years’ time I’m sure they’ll be able to resurrect buildings much the same way they do humans, from the hex in the crystal, the code in the stone.

New Angkor Wats will arise in the mangrove swamps of the European Shelf. Mayan temples will surface and overlook the paddy fields of the Fens. Ozy mandias will stride out of the tumbled rocks of the peaks, with reconstituted limbs and torso and proclaim himself, once again, king of kings. The monoliths of Stonehenge will thrust upwards through the soil of Salisbury Plain, as if seeded from some magical silicate spore, to form a newer, grander fairy circle. The Sphinx will be reborn in Birmingham’s Bull Ring, a minotaur with a ring of gold in its new nose. The perfect geometry of the pyramids will be scattered once more upon the spoil tips of South Wales, like die cast from the hands of gods.

Victor pouted, like he wanted to start an argument, but was afraid of where it might go.

One thing I liked about the store was the doors, which opened automatically before you even wanted them to open. I tried to fool them by stepping backwards when they started to open, but it didn’t work.

We went in and the first thing we saw was a tramp trying to sell on a bunch of Welfare Lottery tickets. What a great idea that is. Only the Brits could think of it. Instead of paying out social benefits from tax revenue, you fund it with a lottery, giving out a ration of free tickets to the registered underprivileged (which of course they immediately negotiate on the black-market, instant relief always being better than hope deferred). The rich buy the tickets at markdown prices and continue to get richer on their winnings, while the poor continue to subsist, but now they blame their condition on bad luck. Nothing ever changes in this Belle Isle.

These vouchers certainly looked genuine, with a watermark of Jeff Koons humping La Cicciolina. I bought a dozen and gave them to the first people I saw. None of them seemed particularly needy but I noticed none of them refused. The English are a strange, perplexing race.

There were lots of trolleys, and I liked that. The English kid grabbed one and he went straight to the houseplant section. He lives in Chelsea. He bought a yucca. He said it would look good in his patio-garden.

We had a lot of fun at the supermarket, but I didn’t buy anything. There was nothing new I needed.

Back in the parking lot the car phone rang. It was Sigmund Freud who was selling equity in a new company he’d formed to market dysfunctional psychotics. He already had Charlie Manson under contract and was waiting for him to die. I declined the option (although it was on very favourable terms) and reminded him that psychoanalysts like him used to be called ‘alienists’.

He didn’t like that one bit, and called me anal-retentive. I switched him off. Fuck him. The guy needs a shave.

The English kid started up the BMW. We stopped at the lights opposite McDonald’s and a woman wearing an anti-pollution-mask tapped on the window and asked for a contribution for the British Nazi Party. I did what I always do, and signed a blank cheque, from a cancelled chequebook. Victor told me off, saying she’d sell it as an original and get the money that way. I said, fine, then everybody would have participated in the artistic process, and wasn’t that what it was all about? Victor just snarled at me.

I think he is becoming jaded. He needs a holiday. I should take him somewhere different. Australia, perhaps. East Coast. They say the shopping marinas on the Barrier Reef are magnificent and the sharks are really friendly and will give you rides on their backs and let you be photographed with your head between their jaws. I’ll book the tickets tomorrow.

We drove up to Alexandra Palace and sat in the car, drinking beers as dusk fell, looking out across the railway yards and the sewage farms. I love that view, it’s like the view across Laurel Canyon, back when it was safe to live there. Bob Dylan was busking in the car park, going from car to car like a gypsy violinist in a restaurant. I gave him $9.47.

We played that game of who would you like to be if you weren’t you, and Victor said Marilyn. It would really be something to have fucked a president. The English kid passed me a joint and said he’d just like to be famous in his own right one day, then he wouldn’t have to be anyone else.

Maybe it’ll happen, he said. Maybe tomorrow, who knows?

We all said, sure, but I don’t think so. Here in Harringay tomorrow never comes, and anyway, we all have to be someone else, sooner or later, don’t we?