An Old Pub Near the Angel (17 page)

I assumed I would become a painter. Art was the only class
that interested me at school. My first proper art teacher, Mrs Harper, was strict but ironic, the best kind. She let us choose and sort out the materials for ourselves; charcoals, brushes, get our own water from the sink. To be granted such responsibility was an extraordinary experience. You were also allowed to talk to your classmates, females as well as males, as long as you kept it quiet and did not laugh too loudly.

Nevertheless, school proved too much for me even in the short run. I turned 15 and needed out. I returned to start a fourth year in August but those first days were a living nightmare. I had failed third year in the most miserable fashion so this fourth year was a repeat year. A careers teacher was seeing pupils so I took that opportunity to escape a double period of History which, as I recall, was devoted to the Exciting Adventures of the later Diaturnable Drones of Imperial England. I discovered I was out of cigarettes so went along to hear the careers teacher to pass the time. He asked if I was interested in anything. Art, I said.

Well, I have the very job for you.

The printing trade. A firm down the road in Partick was looking for a boy and my qualifications were spot on: Boys’ Brigade and Protestant Senior Secondary School.

You did not have to be a Protestant to work in that printing shop but it got you entry into the better occupations. Protestants became compositors. Catholics did the labouring and semi-skilled work. If they made it as time-served journeymen it was to the level of machinemen, printers. They wore boiler-suits. The very idea. Compositors wore dustcoats.

A drawback to hourly paid work is how it crushes the spirit. First Year Apprentice Compositors had their own defences. If you were at your wits’ end and desperate for a day off, you injected yourself with lead. You drew blood around the area of the wrist and rubbed in some of the fluid from the lead type,
then waited to see if it ‘travelled’. The thing that ‘travelled’ was poison. It ran a thin red streak up a vein in the inside of your forearm. It was great when it ‘worked’. You showed the thin red stripe to the gaffer and he sent you home. But you were not to let the red line move beyond your elbow. If that happened it went right up and through your body and just was there and ‘it’ would not come out, thus one had breathed one’s last, that was you, deid. You had to flex your upper-arm muscle as tautly as possible and grip your inside elbow very tightly. That stopped it.

My father and mother decided to emigrate with the family to the U.S.A. in 1963. They were in their early forties with five sons, aged from three to 20. My father advertised in different newspapers across the U.S.A. and received replies from around seven prospective employers, including Houston, Texas; Springfield, Missouri; and Hartford, Connecticut. Dr Honeyman had written his references. He and my mother chose Los Angeles, California, working for a private art gallery in Pasadena. A house went with the position. They gave myself and my elder brother, Ronnie, the choice to go or stay. I could finish my apprenticeship – my other grandparents, my mother’s parents over in Govan, offered me a place to stay – then emigrate later. To go with my family meant severing my apprenticeship, but it was an easy choice. Ronnie also decided quickly. He worked as a clerk for the old Glasgow Corporation and was glad to escape. Our younger brothers Alan and Philip were still at school while Graham, the youngest, was only three.

The secretary of the union, S.O.G.A.T. (the Society of Graphic and Allied Trades), advised me that it was a serious matter and amounted to voluntary expulsion. I would be finished with the trade in this country, except for non-union shops. But he wished me well and gave me a good letter of introduction for any printers interesting in hiring me.

On the day before we left I went into a bookie’s at Partick Cross and stuck my entire life savings on a horse by the name of Pioneer Spirit. It won at 4/5. I got £9 back. Arkle and Mill House were around in them days. Sea Bird II had won the Derby.

Los Angeles proved an ordeal. I had been working for about two and a half years in Glasgow. Now I was in a country where at 17 I was too young to work. I went looking anyway, scouting about. Surely I would find something. My elder brother had found a job, earning real dollars.

In Pasadena they had a labour exchange office near Colorado Boulevard. I tried it a few times. A printing factory needed ‘experienced men’. I took a chance and they gave me an interview. They knew of S.O.G.A.T. and were impressed by the secretary’s letter. It was a non-union shop along Colorado Boulevard. In those days the non-union shops had their own sort of union or society. Their interview included practical work with the composing stick and a case of type. It was too easy for a Second Year Glasgow Apprentice and they were keen to start me. But I had to bide my time until my eighteenth birthday. There was nothing else for it, they had no choice. They said they would write me later. I continued trudging around Pasadena but there was little doing there. I began travelling into Los Angeles whenever possible. Surely some sort of under-the-counter job existed?

If there was I did not find it. My father and my elder brother were working; my two younger brothers at school; and my mother busy with all the domestic stuff, trying to make ends meet. I was company for her, kept my youngest brother from under her feet.

The money brought into the home by my elder brother was greatly appreciated. The cost of living was proving greater than anticipated. Our father’s wage did not go as far as all that. He
was finding difficult the transition from self-employed tradesman to wage-slave employee. At home he had worked nine, ten or twelve-hour days, six days a week, and if he was five minutes late, so what? One way or another he got the work done. Now he had to cope with the timecard routine. A minute late and people took notes. He was not there in the guise of the gruff but loveable Scottish engineer who can build a spaceship from a dod of chewing gum, three nuts and a bolt. He had expected to be treated as a first-class craftsman, but the gallery used him like any other worker. His workmates were from Puerto Rico and Central America. He was also an immigrant; immigrants are cheap labour.

Most of the time I read or loafed about. L.A. was where the jobs lay but it costs money to look for a job. That had to come from the family budget. Busfares mount up. If you are out for several hours, a coffee and a sandwich enter the reckoning. I could not borrow if I could not pay back. It was donations or nothing and nobody wants charity, not even 17-year-olds, especially ones that have been independent for years. You become overly sensitive. I hated to be ‘caught reading’. But what else was there? I went out for walks but that area of Pasadena was fairly boring, besides which walkers were suspicious characters.

My mother made sandwiches for my father and elder brother. I took one when I travelled into the city, two or three times a week. Occasionally I walked to save money. It was 11 miles from Pasadena to downtown L.A. Coming home in the dark was worse, down across quite a wide stretch of railroad tracks and through Chinatown and then on, and on, and on.

I got to know the downtown area quite well. There was a single-window record store nearby a pawnshop whose entire window was devoted to Bob Dylan merchandise. This was a time for Elvis, the Everlys, Del Shannon, so it was an adventurous display. Back in Glasgow, Dylan had a cult following but
only a hardy few; the rest of the population had succumbed months previously to The Beatles, myself included. I had the
Please Please Me
album and took it everywhere, until I lost it – I hope not at cards. Bob Dylan’s image did not last long in that record-store window.

Like most other exiled teenagers I was proud when The Beatles stormed the U.S.A. In Glasgow there was also a music scene. We had good bands of our own: Blues Council and the Pathfinders were just two; a third was George Gallagher’s The Poets. A couple of nights ago, as I write here in San José, January 2007, a local radio station featured two of their songs. It was a complete surprise, sitting staring out the window at 11 o’clock in the evening. I was expecting a wee lassie to jump out and shout, Ha ha Dad, April Fool!

The Poets split up in the 1960s. Individuals continued in other bands. In the 1980s some were doing gigs around bars in Glasgow and district, playing a role in local political campaigns. They reformed as The Blues Poets in the early 1990s and in 1993–4 they agreed to take the lead in my ‘musical’
One two – hey!
The band took on acting roles as well as performing seven or eight songs. It was just a special thing altogether. Their performance night after night helped keep me sane during the media hullabaloo that followed publication of
How Late It Was, How Late
.

In 1964 The Beatles were everywhere. The first song to make it was ‘I Want to Hold Your Hand’. Young Americans walked about in a daze. Within two weeks or less The Beatles’ U.K. backlist was rushed onto the market and four more of their singles entered the U.S. top ten.

Not only was I proud, it made sense of my clothes. I had been walking about dressed in Glasgow-style; early mod and strictly working-class. Another couple of years passed before the art-school, cross-class culture appeared and dominated. On
the east coast young males were still trying to look like Bobby Darin or Elvis Presley. Where I came from nobody of my generation wanted to look like Elvis – that was your auntie’s boyfriend. Teddy Boys and Rockers singing ‘I Don’t Have a Wooden Heart’, you kidding?

In California white youths were more influenced by Archie comics and the Jerry Lewis look; crew cuts and trousers that flapped six inches above the ankles; white socks and thick rubber-soled shoes. They would have been laughed out of Glasgow, Liverpool, Manchester and Newcastle. Thanks to The Beatles I was vindicated, strolling about in my box-cut short jacket, nay vents and cloth-covered buttons; open French-seam trousers, Boston-collar shirt, black socks and chisel-toed shoes.

I still attracted attention, mainly from men around the bus station at 7th and Main. I was naïve but not innocent. Young people of both genders suffer harassment in factories. I coped with it, I think. The situation in Los Angeles was different. My vulnerability lay in the economic. A few years passed till I came upon the work of John Rechy. His
City of Night
was published back in 1963. If I had found a copy then I would have viewed differently the downtown area around Central Library and Pershing Square. Maybe one of these early stories would have been entitled ‘Not Raped in California’. The York printer and the Extra-mural class at Glasgow University would have enjoyed it. Hubert Selby’s
Last Exit to Brooklyn
was published in 1964 and I had no knowledge of it, nor of the obscenity charges brought against his work in the U.S.A. in 1961, then later in the U.K. in 1968.

The courageous integrity of artists like Selby and Rechy can have an inspirational effect on young writers. Just get on with it, do it honestly, do it properly, tell the fucking truth, just tell it, do it. Whereas, in mainstream English literature young writers are encouraged to find their place in the hierarchy. As
an existential experience working-class life was a taboo area and prostitution, like industrial cancer, is a working-class experience, essentially.

While in San José I attended a reading given by a contemporary of mine here in the Bay area. He is a decent writer and a likeable man but his public persona, like many another English novelist, appears modelled on Prince Charles taking a stroll down the charity ward of a Cambridge hospital. During the question/answer session that followed he declared to an audience of maybe 500 people that in his opinion the greatest influence on English novelists of the past thirty years was Philip Larkin.

Honest to god.

But Anglo-American audiences dote on that socio-intellectual embrace. Especially when the individual appears able to cope with the beastlier forms of street life. He reminds them of that English actor who portrays bumbling upper-class characters who stay calmly ironic while dealing with brute reality, even such horrors as having to buy a young black woman to service one orally. They understand such angst and often experience it themselves when making contracts with street people. Even young WASP women share a smile. They empathise with the man buying the woman! The idea of being on your knees in a back alley, staring up at a rich white bastard’s penis, seems not to occur.

If only I was a fucking musician, man, why did I have to be a writer, I could just get on with the work as honestly as I could. Music had Eric Burdon, Them, the Stones. We writers had Kingsley Amis and the Angry Young Men.

In the name of fuck.

In those days the clearest statement of my own position came via Steve Marriott and the Small Faces:

and then shout like fuck and bang yer drums and whistle and stamp yer feet. Instead one is to learn firstly the rudimentaries that one might come to respect, not simply Standard English Grammatical Form, but its exigency, how to be a good literary chap, and know yer place.

Poverty types do exist but it is bad manners to air them publicly. The bourgeoisie expect beggars to apologise for their lack of invisibility. Regrettably some beggars do just that. Thus they seek a pitch nearby a public sewer. Sorry guv, I aint one of em reds, give me twenty pee and I’ll plop dahn the plugole.

Young artists learn how not to deal with life on the street except at a distance, to subjugate the impulse to create original art, and look to the fiction-as-sociology mainstream. Stay with the objective third-party narrative, or that whining first-person present tense: assimilate that conventional grammar at all costs, that one might come to describe those curiously shabby, odorous creatures from the outside, without having to touch, taste or smell them. Do not attempt to gain entry into their psyches, you will find that a contradiction in terms; amorphous mobs and baying multitudes do not ‘have’ psyches.

Earlier writers tried something different. They knew the lives of ordinary people and attempted to work from within. It was not necessary to have experienced everything. But you have to be sufficiently touched as a human being to address these areas; you begin from solidarity – a mixture of sympathy and empathy, a tricky emotion for those in an economically advantaged and socially superior position. I was ignorant of American writers like Saroyan, Caldwell, Le Seuer, Ellison. I had no idea of the existence of stories such as ‘Blue Boy’, ‘The Daring Young Man on the Flying Trapeze’ or ‘King of the Bingo Game’?