Ready Steady Go.

·        
Simon weaves his Mini Cooper deftly through the West End traffic. It’s Friday and he is on his way to the Rediffusion Studios on Kingsway. Things have been going well. Work is progressing nicely on the mews house. His reviews and interviews are being well received. In fact between Monty and some American music mags he has more work than he can handle. Plus the offer of a job at EMI. Yes, things could be worse.

He’s been told he looks like Martin Amis. He likes to think of himself more as a sort of Hugh Grant…without the carefully nuanced bumbling mannerisms. Which gives the editor a minor logistical problem. She’s a big Hugh Grant fan and she knows he was born in 1960. So he would have been about seven years old when all this takes place. She wisely decides to just let it go. She also decides to go with first person singular.

Things are still messy with Samantha. She keeps talking about some kind of ‘commitment’ whatever that means. Marriage? She may be ready but I’m not (thinks Simon). Doesn’t bear contemplation.

Look how Arthur got stuck in that bloody shop. Poor bugger. His life has been a series of events, things that happened. It’s not as if he made any conscious choices…things just happened. I certainly don’t want to get caught like that. I make my own decisions. 

Who would have thought pop music would explode like it did? Me for one. And by some quirk of fate I’m right in the middle of it. It’s turned into a money machine for those nimble enough to see the opportunities. Rock writing is changing fast too. Style-wise I mean. At first it was just a question of talking about the group a bit, the drummer’s favorite colour, does the lead singer have a girlfriend, that kind of rubbish. Now a whole new generation of writers is starting to emerge. They’ve grown up on Kerouac, Miller, Burroughs and they’re taking it to another level. Rolling Stone has tapped into a whole new audience, drugs are going main-stream and now you’re getting gonzos. There’s a whole lot of new readers out there. Some of them want solid information, studio details, technical stuff, and some of them want you to take them off on mind trips. 

One of these days I’ll do a piece about a typical day in a rock-writer’s life. Maybe some yank mag would be interested. It could be sort of Hunter Thompson style but more English. Wonder how James Joyce would have tackled it. Lots of clever word-play and internal monologue probably. Clever bastard. Still I should be able to bang out a few thousand words on something like that. But first I need to catch up on the gossip.

So here we are in the Rediffusion Green Room where all the young dudes are already gathered. Andrew Oldham is there with Keith Altham, Rod and his Faces mates are warming up with some birds. Looks like Pan’s People on leave from Top of the Pops. The Who are getting psyched up in a corner. This being ITV most people are on their best behaviour. But not Keith Moon. He’s swallowing pills by the handful and I can see he’s in a dangerous mood. Cathy McGowan sees me arrive and comes over for a chat. I mention Moon’s condition and she says not to worry, he’s been warned, how’s things? I tell her things are OK but to be honest I’m not in the mood for socializing. I watch people dancing for a while and give Fordyce a nod but I decide to leave early. There are times when it all just seems silly somehow.

And of course Sam shows up right on cue…expecting me to take her home I suppose. I need a holiday.

·          

My bar.

    

·         Since I posted that last piece I’ve been barraged with requests for more information about Pattaya. So here's what we know. It’s about 100 kilometers southeast of Bangkok. It used to be a small fishing village until some G.I.s started going there during the Vietnam War. Bars popped up on the beach. Thai girls popped up in the bars and one thing lead to another. Now there’s hotels and bars all over and the Thai girls keep popping up. It’s very popular with single males from all over the world. The Thais are very tolerant in such matters, especially when money is involved.

I    I keep meaning to write more about that bar. It was called Dick’s, for obvious reasons. It was just a hole in the wall really but I managed to attract a colourful  bunch of characters. All kinds of degenerates found their way to Dick’s. Defrocked priests, disgraced politicians, bank-robbers, retired policemen and of course lots of CIA agents and SAS men on secret missions. I’d even get the odd axe-murderer. That’s when I met Chuck Woww. He was hawking his book ‘Losing the Plot’ round all the bars and I agreed to take a few copies. This was before he was famous. I used to get all types in my bar. Mostly the same types though I must admit. Middle aged blokes living in Pattaya. It was a surprise when Arthur walked in one day though. Hadn't seen him for ages and I had to look twice. Small world. He was surprised to see me too. Maybe even a bit embarrassed. Same old Arthur. We had a bit of a chat, talked about Simon and the old hippy days in London. Then he wandered out again.

I suppose I should explain how I came to be in Thailand in the first place. That was Oscar’s doing. We went there from the Philippines. Ah, but what were you doing in the Philippines Dick? That was Oscar again.

I was living in Spain and doing OK. Building villas for retired English folk. Got a letter from Oscar. This would have been late 80s. No email in those days. I’m not talking about ARPANET. People still wrote letters. Oscars came from Manila and it was short and to the point. ‘Get your ass over here!’ it said.

So I did. I’ll be writing something about Manila soon. On second thoughts I may not. Don't want to alienate any readers.

Gav and Kev.

Dao was tired so Arthur took her back to their hotel. Leaving her to have a nap he wandered along the sois that run off Beach Road. After his near death experience on the beach he felt like a beer so he popped into a small bar that didn’t seem too busy. Just a couple of what looked like Arsenal fans sitting at the bar.

‘Here comes another one.’ Says the smaller of the two.

‘Don’t mind them mate. Welcome to Dick’s,’ says a large balding middle-aged fellow behind the bar. That was me!! Balding? Well perhaps I was getting a bit thin on top.

Arthur orders a Singha beer. He still prefers it to Chang in some ways. Couple of Changs and he tends to doze off.

‘Orroit mite?’ says one of the other clients as Arthur takes his first sip.

‘Fine thanks,’ says Arthur avoiding eye-contact. They seem pleasant enough but you can’t be too careful in Pattaya these days.

‘I’m Gav and this thing here is Kev.’

‘Arthur,’ says Arthur.

‘What brings you to Pattaya Arfur, Pearl of the Eastern Seaboard?’ Gav asks.

‘Little holiday,’ says Arthur, ‘I live up North.’

‘Orroit ’ere innit,’ says Kev, ‘plenty of the old you know what.’

Typical Pattaya types thinks Arthur. Beer and sex.

‘I’m thinking of starting a website.’ says Gav to no-one in particular.

‘Oh,’ says Kev only half-listening, ‘what about?’

‘Sex tourism in Thailand of course.’

‘Gawd. Don’t you think there’s enough of them already?’

‘Mine will be different.’ says Gav. ‘It will be aimed at the modern punter. The way I see it there’s just too many Thai pornsites. We’ve got to come up with something new. What we should do is get some bald ugly old git….some really burned out bloke on his last legs…and let the girls do what they want with him. You know …whips and strap-ons and stuff. Empower the girls. Let them get their revenge. Move with the times. We could stoke him up with Viagra and see what happens. I think there’s a good niche market out there. People are ready for it.’

‘You’ll never do it.’ Says Kev.  ‘Start a website I mean. Too much work.’

‘Don’t be so sure,’ says Gav, ‘It will have lots of pictures of girls. I would call it Streetmeat or something.’

‘That would be infringing on their privacy I think.’ Says Kev.

‘You are probably right,’ agrees Gav, ‘what do you think Arfur?’

‘Well porn is certainly popular,’ says Arthur non-commitally.

It’s the landlord’s prerogative to regale the customers with accounts of his own exploits. I do it a lot. Customers listen politely. Constructive criticism is encouraged. Or they go somewhere else. It’s all the same to me. I start to tell them about my own days in the porn business.

‘We should call you Dickens Dick,’ says Kev, ‘the Dickens of Pattaya. Are you much of a reader Arfur?’

‘Oh yes. I’ve got a bookshop in fact.’

‘Bugger me.’ says Kev. ‘I just finished ‘Don Quixote’. In Spanish. I’m thinking of reading War and Peace now I’ve got a bit of spare time like. Can’t stand that ’arry bleedin’ Potter.’

‘I see,’ says Arthur. Strange that. Kev hadn’t looked like the literary type. Just goes to show how wrong you can be about people thinks Arthur. He makes a mental note to himself …stop judging people by their piercings and tattoos.

‘I’m reading Foster-Wallace at the moment.’ Says Arthur.

‘Infinit Jest?’ asks Kev.

‘Well Broom of the System actually.’

‘You like a bit of the old post-modernism do you Arfur?’ asks Gav.

‘That seems to be my genre of choice lately yes.’ Says Arthur. ‘In as much as we have a choice in these matters.’

‘Ah yes,’ says Kev, ‘the old free choice. Now there’s a topic. Me and Gav ’ad a go at that one on the plane over didn’t we Gav. Gav the Chav we call ’im. ’Ee’s something of a determinist.’

‘Really?’

‘Yes. And don’t get me started on reality. What is reality when you get right down to it?’ asks Kev, ‘you tell me.’

The conversation is getting a little deep for Arthur’s liking. He decides to finish his beer and bid farewell to his new friends. He starts to pay his bill but Gav stops him.

‘This is on us Arfur. Nice meeting you mite.’

‘Yes indeed,’ says Kev. ‘Enjoy your ‘oliday. And go easy on the old introspection.’

Tripping.

‘And how is Alice?’ asks Simon.

‘Fine. Putting on a bit of weight.’

That’s an understatement. She is ballooning at an alarming rate. The trouble is she can’t stay away from the Cadbury’s products. Smith’s Crisps, Mars Bars….she is starting to get enormous. Nothing Arthur says seems to make any difference.

‘Mars Bars?’

‘Mars Bars, Smiths Crisps, Tizer you name it.’

‘I hope she’s not consuming all the stock.’

‘It’s not funny.’

‘Of course not.’

‘I’m not sleeping well. There’s a genuine danger of getting crushed.’


Arthur is making one of his periodic trips to London. Usually he pops into the Tate….then he ends up visiting Simon. They have just taken LSD in Simon’s Ladbroke Grove bed-sitting room. It's a first for Arthur. He isn't not sure what to expect.

‘You feel anything yet?’ Simon asks when they are waiting for the train. 

‘Er…no,’ says Arthur, ‘not really.’ But something is happening. They’d got to Notting Hill Gate Station without incident and bought tickets from a machine that pulsated with chemical light. More so than usual Arthur thought. Colours were getting brighter, the rush of the train when it came, the swoosh of the doors which opened and sucked them in, the tube itself where everything became electric…even the multi-coloured passengers. Sitting across from Arthur is a Chelsea pensioner with the consistency of a Dali watch. There are vibrating walls, melting floors, unidentifiable lizard-headed creatures and all the other psychedelic special effects that are to make ‘Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas’ virtually watchable so many years later. 

The train is moving through a time tunnel. That’s obvious. ‘Real time has collapsed in on itself,’ says Simon, ‘seriously perhaps, who knows?’

‘It could be a spiritual experience.’ says Arthur. Simon appears to agree. His head is nodding precariously. ‘Perhaps we’ll see God,’ he says. Then for no real reason they both start giggling and don’t stop till they get to Tottenham Court Road. 

‘UFO,’ says a hand painted poster. ‘This must be the place,’ says a disembodied voice where Simon had just been. They ooze down a flight of carpeted stairs into a dark cavernous room full of people dancing, wandering around or just standing staring at a stage. On the stage are some musicians playing a rambling psychedelic symphony and behind them a backdrop of amoeba like shapes projected against the wall. The shapes seem to be emanating from a dark scaffolding construction. 

Arthur stands taking it all in. The music seems to be everywhere. So does the acid. People are getting hard to distinguish from each other…it is all one…patterns are starting to swirl around him. ‘It’s alright,’ someone says and it is. For the moment. He becomes aware of a frizzy-haired head-banded chocolate-brown Sioux maiden dancing in front of him. Dancing? More like swirling, writhing…like a gypsy on a beach. One hand waving free. 

Jiving, stomping, twisting…doesn’t matter what they called the latest gyration Arthur is hopeless at it. Most of his attempts at dancing are like folding a deck-chair in the wind. At this point the best he can manage is a sort of embarrassed shuffle. But during a lull he feels relaxed enough to mutter something about not being much of a dancer and the girl, an American, says ‘Hey don’t worry about it man. We’re all freaks.’ An answer Arthur finds less than re-assuring. There’s madness in the air and only he can see it. His anxiety is blocking the road to total abandon. And he knows it. His values, his parent’s values, are a burden. ‘I’m Marsha,’ says the girl.

Simon joins them and immediately gets into the groove. Simon, always comfortable in any situation. Fluid and graceful, Simon knows how to approach girls and hardly ever gets rebuffed. He gives himself effortlessly over to the beat. The three of them dance together separately for a while. For a few beautiful moments Arthur is dancing. Really dancing. Like magic. Dancing outside himself. Above the ground…free. Then he remembers something.

‘I’m off then.’ Says Arthur.

‘What!?’

‘I’ve got to sort newspapers in the morning remember?’

Suddenly out of nowhere a surge of warmth wells up inside Simon. He is almost in tears as he says, ‘You really are amazing Arthur, you know that?’

‘In what way?’

‘Oh never mind. Be careful how you go.’

Arthur buys a ticket at Goodge Street Station from a Francis Bacon octopus in a cage. Once on the tube, nerve ends still flashing and sizzling, he narrowly avoids fusion with a group of grotesque revelers wearing kilts. Somehow he arrives at Victoria in time for the last train back to the sanity of suburbia. Had he seen God? Hard to say. He’d certainly seen something. As he lets himself quietly into the shop he wonders what cultural undercurrent decrees that everybody should walk through Portobello Market on Saturdays wearing old military uniforms. On the kitchen table, gently throbbing, is a ham sandwich.

Simon and Marsha, meanwhile, have left UFO and taken a cab to the place where Marsha is staying. It turns out to be a Regency house on Cheyne Walk. There’s a spacious bedroom on the second floor. Soft lighting, Indian bed-sheets, Moroccan cushions, joss sticks, standard hippy décor, but there are some classier, expensive-looking touches too, deep sofas, Persian rugs, a Hockney swimming pool or two. Simon asks about the owner. Not here, says Marsha rolling a joint, don’t worry about him. So he doesn’t. The hash is the very best Red Leb. The acid waves keep rolling in. They surrender to whatever it is and immerse themselves in the mysteries of human flesh.

The Gods are Hungry.

Arthur leans back in his deckchair, which could be anywhere, but isn’t, and stares out across the Gulf of Thailand. He can do this for hours. When he lived on Samui he spent most of his day on Chaweng Beach…always on the same stool in the Coconut Bar…staring out to sea. But that was before Chaweng became a sort of tropical Skegness. He’d moved to Lamai, barely one jump ahead of the fish ‘n chips shops, and thence to Isaan, the undeveloped Thai hinterland which he had found much more to his taste. Isaan was slow, unhurried, with little in the way of tourist attractions. It was easy to slip into the rhythm of the place, wet season followed dry, hot got hotter, and days blurred into one another. 

The bookshop took up most of his time. One evening by the bug zapper, Dao, his wife of 7 years, had suggested a trip to Pattaya. Arthur had agreed. A change was as good as a rest…not that he really needed one, but he had always liked Pattaya. It was honest in its own seedy way; never pretending to be other than what it was…until quite recently anyway…when the local council started performing mental acrobatics trying to balance sin and safety.

In fact Arthur doesn’t care much what the Thais do with their cities anymore. Neither does Dao, who, sensibly, is in another deckchair, to his left, tucking into a plate of deep-fried prawns she just bought from one of the vendors that swarm like sand flies among the pink and red foreign bodies. This is Dao’s second visit to Pattaya and she loves it, doesn’t find it tacky at all. Neither, after a beer or two, and a bit of a paddle, does Arthur. He is content to just lie back and relax. Try to anyway.

Chewing gum? No thanks. Newspaper? No. Not even the Bangkok Post, thrust uninvitingly in his face by yet another vendor, can hold his attention for very long. Hang on a sec…he buys one anyway…somebody called Isis on the rampage in Iraq…hmmm…a mess to be sure…but Arthur is more interested in watching the clouds. He isn’t looking for omens or anything but he enjoys the constantly changing and evolving shapes.  Above him immense billows are forming faces of Obama, Putin and Bin Laden…potent images that dominate his thoughts these days…more and more he is seeing pagan gods among the clouds…vengeful old Egyptian and Hebrew Gods…Osiris, Anubis, Set, Moloch and Yahweh, Zeus programming a handful of smartbolts, Mars in his war chariot, criss-crossed by parasailers…and of course old Priapus is up there too, ogling the banana-boat-load of topless waving bargirls. 

It must all mean something thinks Arthur…these images from school history books surprisingly well etched into his memory, redolent of English summers, hours spent avoiding homework, lying on his back in the long grass listening to the sharp clack of willow bats meeting leather cricket balls. Then Sunday School and another kind of God…a stern but loving god who valued good table manners highly…who thought that children should be seen but not heard and whose first commandment was “thou shalt not pick thy nose or otherwise embarrass thy parents in front of the neighbours” and the second was “don’t play with your winkle there’s a good boy”.

Ukraine, Syria, people getting blown up left and right, it must all worry Obama surely…assuming he worries about anything. It worries Arthur. But he’s not sure why. All he has to do is lay back and let the sun shine down.

What is wrong with people these days? Where does all the anger come from? Has it always been this way or was life simpler before? Before what? Now it’s all Ishtar and Gilgamesh weeping in the ruins of Babylon and fighter planes and drones piloted by wholesome young men and women from Texas and Indiana eager to demonstrate that everything is manageable if you just punch in the right data. 

Well CNN can spin it anyway they want but they can’t fool Arthur. There will be no mass Christian baptisms in this ancient land...just the scowling, bearded Gods of Mesopotamia, impassive, enduring, trotting along on their little donkey carts...biding their time…or perhaps sullen and confused…annoyed and irritated at having their retirement years disturbed by strange clanking chariots…and what’s this glittering Grail-like object dangling before Arthur’s eyes…ah…a fake Rolex...no thank-you…

Meanwhile, up in the clouds, the gods are still hard at it…the sky is full of them today…jostling for his attention…inscrutable Old Chinese deities, a procession of anthropomorphic Hindu chaps. Buddha? Not that he was a god exactly but is he up there too? If so he is probably happy just to exist…probably doesn’t feel quite the same need to assert himself and vie for people’s attention as the other fellows…

Am I going to die here? Arthur wonders…in Thailand? People did die here…by ‘people’ he means foreigners of course…they die all the time…in accidents, from natural causes, poisoned by jealous wives. What happens to all the bodies? Does anybody really want them? Will Dao have his body burned or have the bloody thing shipped back to England? Whichever is most economical probably…Her Majesty’s Government were unlikely to want it anymore…no I do not want a bloody cigarette lighter thank you…not even that phallic one. Very irritating these vendors. They’ve grown much more rude and persistent lately…in fact the worse business gets the ruder and more persistent they become. How much could they make selling that stuff anyway…a hundred baht a day? Two? The woman with the cigarette lighters…she probably walks miles every day and if she’s lucky she might sell one…

Arthur likes to complain about how Thailand isn’t what it used to be but he has enjoyed the best years…long before the Internet and the tattooed midriff-raff…before the bargirls started calling him Papa. Could be worse Arthur old chap…at least you’re not under a bridge somewhere sniffing glue.

What dear? Oh yes, thank you …Dao has just dismembered a crab and she is offering him a prime morsel … “I very angry,” says Dao. She means hungry of course, it’s a long-standing joke they have…one of many based on language misunderstandings. Dao is enjoying herself though…she’s had a tough life and she’s been looking forward to this trip. Good to see her making the most of it.

He starts to think about England. But not for long. Somebody is waving something under his nose...a grilled chicken foot it looks like…er…no thank you…but I will have …let me see…a boiled egg and a slice of pineapple…