Kaleidoscope of dolls

Last night I went to a party on Broad Street where ‘Z.’ and Oscar live.

It was a predictable hippy gathering, which Lee, Stu, and I disrupted with our loud, strident behaviour. Lee continued his record of causing damage at every party he’s invited to by inadvertently kicking holes in the plasterboard walls during a Freddie Starr impression and then running around screaming. Later, four or five heavies gate crashed the party  one of them—Lonsdale sweatshirt, moustache—forced himself on a girl there (“I want to taste your lips,” etc)., which she politely but insistently refused. But when she went to the bathroom he forced his way in and shut the door, but Lee kept his foot in the way. I thought a fight was bound to happen.

I left about two or three and caught a taxi home alone.

On LSD the mind is an organ that vividly records prevailing sense impressions with great intensity. I’ve never had great revelations on acid (although last week came close, before things turned rotten). Instead the acid experience has always revealed itself in mundane ways; in the ‘fun’ of seeing perspectives distorted and disturbed; in people transformed into grotesques; faces into masks by turns ugly, amusing, or disgusting; a kaleidoscope of dolls and scuttling, rapacious insect-people; TV images fluidly melting from one frozen mind’s eye-instant to the next.

Young-couple-with-car syndrome

This evening at seven I met Jeremy in the Beatrice Hotel in Farnshaw.

Gillian Wade turned up not long after, as did Deborah Blakey and boyfriend Tony; Tommy never quite managed it. Gillian is off to study Philosophy at Rummidge. She was OK this time, not trying so hard and thereby coming across more as herself. Deborah and Tony showed up late; they’d been to Fiona Abery’s wedding (she was in the year above us at school). Julie Crabtree is married now too, and Sharon Horsfield has a baby. . . .

It’s an odd thought, because we college-types remain in identical circumstances to two years ago and live below the official poverty line. Deborah and Tony are sliding irretrievably into marriage and the young-couple-with-car syndrome, all set for the next few years.

Being fairly intolerant these days, I couldn’t understand what D. finds attractive about T. He seems particularly dull and dead. I nipped to the off licence at nine to buy a bottle of whiskey for Jeremy and I as were going to Addie Williams’ party “somewhere in Egley,” and then the five of us drove to Keddon and the Copper Kettle before dropping Gillian off at home. Deborah gave Jeremy and I a lift back to Egley and we tried to find the party.

Jeremy’d lost the invite but remembered it was at No. 11, so we tried 11 Egley Rise, then 11 Briar Avenue. The rain began to fall and we splashed through the streets cursing the heavens and ourselves.

Terrible times.

After an hour of this we were soaked and no longer cared about the party; we wanted to get there merely on principle. We eventually gave up at about one and went back to my house and sat up talking in the front room until three.

I give up on Easterby.

The thing

I went into Easterby again, to Suits Me to peruse their suits, and then to a Heel Bar to buy dark brown dye for my DM shoes that I’ve still only worn once—I dyed them from their original oxblood to black and now to a deep brown.

Jeremy rang me in the evening to persuade me to go to his house; I declined at first, but when he rang back at eleven saying I just had to go, I half-heartedly acquiesced—he said his step-brother Colin was having a party and it was “quite amusing” to watch. So I walked into Farnshaw and met he and Tommy beneath St. Anne’s steeple.

Tommy has transferred to Brynmor Poly and is on a design course, to which he commutes from Easterby. Jeremy has also transferred, from Bristol University to Edgestow, so in September he will be a new boy again. We walked the remaining miles up Whincliffe Road to Jeremy’s, where the beery gathering was reaching an inevitable and time-honoured finale. Jeremy’s Dad has married again, and so Jeremy has inherited a new family, a step-brother and step-sister, plus their friends and girlfriends/boyfriends. He says he feels like a stranger in his own home and wants to spend Christmases away now because he feels he no longer belongs.

For some reason, when we got there all the males present were stripped to the waist, Colin barely coherent, his eyes bloodshot, soon to pass out on the living room carpet. We then had to play host to one of his drunken acolytes, a self-professed biker who constantly impressed upon us the favour he was bestowing on us by actually speaking to us.

“Some of ‘em think yer should speak just to bikers, but me, I think that’s wrong.”

He demanded we share an opinion of him: “If yer think am' a shit then say so, I don’t care.”

Jeremy’s step-sister was pissed as a newt and flopping giddily about, falling onto Tommy and making him flush with embarrassment, before she disappeared upstairs with her boyfriend for a giggle and a grope. She came back down in a dressing gown, saying she felt embarrassed, “in front ‘er so many men.” Jeremy, Tommy and I watched The Thing on video while the revelries subsided and Colin locked himself in the toilet—he had £100 stolen that evening too.

I went to bed at five.

What difference does it make?

I went to a party on Holtspur Road with Lee and Pete. Lee and I stayed perhaps five minutes in total. It was a one room, red-lit affair, The Smiths blaring above the din of party chat and laughter. Pat Duncan and his shaven-headed friends loomed around the doorway, PD looking drugged and/or drunk, blinking and staring around at the walls and ceiling and people as though he’d forgotten glasses or was wearing new contact lenses. . . .

It was the worst party I’ve been to for quite a while. As such moments I vow to myself never to go to another party again, for I’ve yet to go to one that I’ve thoroughly enjoyed. L. and I walked back, leaving Pete to be sociable . . .

Wessex Road was alive with ambulances and police motorcycle escorts racing past with wailing sirens and flashing lights. There were quite a few skinheads about. I overheard two in the Pembroke earlier saying they were down from Broadbourne to “fuck modettes” . . ..

Reverberations

I didn’t wake up until two o’clock this afternoon.

Went to a party last night at, 44A, our old place. Stu, Gareth, Penny, Lindsey, Susie and Ade came along too. Stu and I left soon after arriving to try buy some more acid from Kevin Yettram but no one was in. Back at the party, Gareth drunkenly chatted up Anita, one of Susie’s friends, crushing himself close. Jason, Barry and Stu and I went back to Ade’s: we chased a couple of dragons (man) and I got back to the Grey House for three a.m.

I’m closeted in my bathroom hunched over this script. The house is quiet. Instead of spending the time writing about what I’ve done, I should write about what I’ve thought or wondered. I must apply myself to a couple of hours writing each day to become practiced at the art. My essay on Burroughs remains unstarted. I have to hand it in next Wednesday.

I haven’t been too well the last three or four days and I’ve got a bad cold, catarrh, pains in the head. It’s so hard to apply myself to anything constructive living like this. I spoke to Dad on the ‘phone, wished him a happy Father’s Day, and things fell into a sort of order as the breath of stability blew through me.

I’m strangely unaffected by the news about Lindsey and Jason, and instead I'm curiously but pleasingly free of all mental tremors and reverberations.

Fragile eggshell mind

Ben had a ‘party’ at the Vicarage to celebrate what I heard was an “indefinite extension” Oculus have agreed to (supposedly arranged in London in negotiations with Desmond Ardingly, MP for Watermouth), on the condition that we agree to leave within twenty four hours of notice being given. That changes things slightly; maybe I should stay on for the last three weeks of term at the Vicarage?

Quite a few people turned up to the party, and when I looked in, everyone was sitting in his room talking and smoking; Morris had collapsed in a drunken heap on the threadbare sofa.

Sarah has already arranged for a few homeless wimmin to move in at the weekend. Morris has decided that he’s going to stay in Gav’s room for a while to supervise the haphazard comings and goings: there’s an escaped nut called Tom who believes he’s Jim Morrison and who’s living in Gav’s old room for a couple of days.

Life-locked

I’ve been to two parties, the first one at Castle Mount Court last night with Lee, Pete, Mo, Barry, and Stu where I ended up drunk, asleep on Mo’s bed. Mindless. On my way home I was sick and woke up this morning with a terrible hangover and was sick again. I went round to Stu and Gareth’s during the day and collected the mail from Jervis Terrace. Our electricity bill up to April 30th was £119.

Another party tonight at Hurst Road (off Cotham Avenue) that was no better and consisted on the whole of the usual crowd, sitting about silently.

After the party a group of us (me, Alex, Lee, Gav, Pete and Mandy) set out with torches and a crowbar to take a look at a derelict building near the Cathedral that Gav had told us about and which sounded worthy of exploration. Lee and Gav scaled the locked gate topped by barbed wire while the rest of us hung about outside, expecting them to open the gate from the inside; we were eventually moved on by a pub landlord.

Finally, I scaled the wall myself, and I was eventually directed to a second story window that could only be reached via a tall fence and drainpipe. Inevitably, my lumbering efforts to squeeze through the opening caused havoc and sent glass from the window showering down into the yard below. Lee cursed and I told him to “fuck off,” angry more at my own ineptitude than at him.

Inside the building was quite sound, a narrow three or four stories that didn’t seem to have been touched since the 1930s; there was a dumbwaiter, fully fitted bathroom, and even a chemistry lab in the cellar. A large front room had bay windows that faced onto Maynard Gardens and the Cathedral. We got out via an attic skylight (I broke more glass), ducking over roofs, clambering down three fire escape ladders and back over the barbed wire.

Life-locked, I strode back to the Vicarage, painfully aware of my distance from Lee who seemed very remote as he enthusiastically discussed the house we’d just been into with Gav . . ..

The body count continues

Barry, Guy, Lee and I went into Debdenshaw and bought some food and rented a video, Friday the Thirteenth, Part Two. We watched this tale of multiple murder and butchery with some enjoyment. I also received the cheering news that Athletic had beaten Purswell 2-0.

Barry’s ‘party,’ not billed as such but destined to become one, attracted a fair number of people, I would say about twenty. Pete and his London friend Tony arrived at teatime, and various other old faces and new made their entrance throughout the evening, including Barry’s friend Phil (how I like him!), carrying his wisdom like an awkward and solemnly intense schoolboy. His loneliness and isolation seemed etched deep into his long, sombre face. Patrick carries his insights and wisdom in an altogether more arrogant way. There’s a lot to dislike about him.

I didn’t really talk to anyone, and it seemed as if I was apart and unable to bridge the gulf separating me from everyone else. I couldn’t summon the necessary energy or commitment to actually talk, and I couldn’t escape a sense of futility and meaninglessness. I endured the conversation and the laughter and the dope and drink and didn’t really feel excited or sad or anything particularly . . . I was just there. Lee kept to himself.

The onset of the new year wasn’t acknowledged by anyone—it came and went and we were none the merrier (or sadder) for it.

I dragged myself on until four a.m. and then I found a bed and tried to go to sleep, but Phil sat at my bedside and talked to me. Then Barry came up too and we all talked about our mutual realisation of the need for change in ’84. It should be a ‘make-or-break’ year for me. I’ll know by the end of this year if I really am incapable of any fruitful form of commitment and resolve or if I’ll be destined to follow this course to its mundane conclusion. I must know.

Black label

Evening saw most of us at a party on Marion Place, at the same house as before. This time the place was not so crowded and Lee was there too, doing his anti-social bit, falling into the packed crowds and tripping others up. “What is Lee on?” someone asked. “How much has he drunk?” To both questions I could quite honestly reply, “Nothing.” Lindsey was there too, in a shortish black dress.

A glass pane in the front door was smashed by gatecrashers who were refused entry, and Barry and Pete were cut, so a few of us piled out and did our threatening machismo bit on the street corner, face-to-face with a gang of rockabillies.

We got home at four a.m., stopping by the derelict pub on Meadspike Road on the way. Amazingly, we found loads of booze in the cellars, so we made two trips, Lee and Barry descending into the darkness while Pete and I kept watch. The three or four bags we had with us were handed up full of clanking bottles and we struggled proudly up Windmill Ave. bearing ninety six cans of Carling Black Label and Breaker’s Lager, fifteen bottles of cider, and half a dozen bottles of Guinness and Tennent’s Export, plus three party cans of bitter.

We whooped and jumped about like kids when we got it all inside, making a pile in Pete’s room to admire. Free booze until New Year. We are getting dangerously adept at this sort of thing.

Grey triangle

A brief resumé of my movements to date; I haven’t slept in my bed for two nights and I’m still at Lee’s. I spend the nights on his floor which is a little hard but not too bad. This is how much 44A Jervis Terrace has affected me. . . .

Yesterday, at about seven, Lee and I went to Mo’s birthday party at Livingstone’s. We didn’t feel like going at all but turned up for Mo’s sake. John and Del were in an exuberant, amusing mood, John even more so as he said he’d scored the previous evening with Liddy, which surprised me as I didn’t think her susceptible to the Turney blitzkrieg tactics. “I’m a man, you’re a woman; let’s go to bed” was how he won her over, or at least that’s what he told me.

Del tried it on with Lindsey but got nowhere and told me that they’d instead spent two hours talking about me. “I did a good job for you. . . .” Of John and Liddy, Lindsey said, “her side of the story is not the same as his,” but I was drunk by this time and can’t remember what else we talked about, though it wasn’t for long. I didn’t say much all evening and spent the longest time talking with Inga’s friend Ebbe about her impressions of England and the English.

Ian was there, and Mick too, but we didn’t talk much. Ian exudes a superficial air of mystery and the bizarre that’s dispelled the more you get to know him. He said that when Barry, Lee and I interrupted he and Mick the other night they were on their way to set fires in the crypt, dressing this act of destruction in ritualistic talk.

The latter half of the evening turned into a fragmented whirl of half-remembered impressions; trying to stand and having the world spin crazily around me, retching among the bins and rubbish outside a club, Del and Lee pouring cold water over my head to sober me up . . . With drunkenness came silence, and I was quiet for the cab journey back to Lee’s Residence Halls.

I slept until three today, so ate breakfast as the sun was setting, although only the pink tinge of the clouds betrayed this fact. Lee has gone out on his bike for some more food. It’s nearly midnight; a German film plays to itself on the TV, the sound turned down so the images flicker silently across the grey screen.

Lee and I have come up with a symbol for our film project, a grey triangle, the mark given by the Nazis to ‘anti-social’ elements who were interned at Dachau—tramps, vagrants and the like. Lee even intends sewing the grey triangle on all his clothes to reinforce his stance of ‘new Puritanism’ that he plans on unleashing in all its ascetic glory at the new year . . . A thread of continuity uniting so many (possible) things, a banner under which to rally and to leave people guessing.

I’ll be tolerably pleased if I even manage to commit one idea to celluloid, for I’m very lazy and let myself down so often . . . It’s important I get a really fine place to live.

Phoenix

Barry, Ade and I called round to the Art College to see Lee. We found him in room 312 hunched over a tidy grey and black Remington Rand typewriter newly acquired for £15 second-hand from a nearby shop.

We left B. and A. battling on Phoenix and walked the few hundred yards to the shop where I bought an angle-poise lamp for £3. Lee’s Easterby Art College friend Michael Pugh was coming down at six-thirty, so I arranged to meet them both in The Quayside at 7.30. Much to my annoyance, they didn’t show up and so I sat for an hour alone in the crowded noisy pub listening to two girls arguing about the merits/demerits of some bloke they had both been going out with.

At half-eight I wandered down to The Anchor to meet Pete, Mo, Ade, Barry, Guy and Kamran and we went to two pretty crappy parties, the first one at 29 University Gardens, where we went over the top a bit and had a water fight on the back verandah, bombarding Guy and Barry who cowered down below in a doorway. I nearly crushed a little girl whose drunken tearful mum, for some reason alien to me, had brought her along to what must’ve been a very unpleasant, frightening place, full of loud, stupid people looming up out of the throbbing gloom. As a result, words were exchanged between our lot and a rugby-type who voiced the opinion that he thought we ought to “clear off.”

Party no. 2 was equally crap, a laid-back affair near White Deer Park, the rooms thick with the smell of dope, everything very silly as parties usually are, everyone hugging and laughing and screeching.

World at war

Barry came back from Tasha and Lucy’s soiree in a gloomy mood of resignation, as his great hope Elisa—the Clare Grogan girl—had (as Barry put it) “got off with some flash spade in a leather jacket” and more or less ignored Barry who’d invited she and her friend to the party in the first place. He felt she was obliged to at least talk to him, and I wondered if she’d been put off by his obvious intent.

“You’ve got to set your stall up to sell your goods,” he says. I’m no good at flogging what ‘wares’ I have to offer; consequently I don’t bother and none get sold!

Today has been a forgettable and uninspired day of lounging about; Lee stayed to watch The World At War at 7.15.

Talent

Another drunken night; a party at Lindsey’s friend Liddy’s last night, which everyone attended. While Barry and I went to meet Stu in The Cat and Lizard, everyone else set off in Del’s Hillman Imp.

Stu went to dump his washing and Barry and I had a game of darts, but we got sick of waiting so we hung about outside. It was wet yet again, and as we waited Barry spotted Lee who was wending his way down Meadspike Road towards the derelict pub’ at the bottom. He saw us, waved, and came across. He had a hammer and screwdriver with him and was just about to break in to the pub when we’d seen him. He’d called round Jervis Terrace but we’d just gone.

When Stu turned up he and Barry strode off into the rainy night leaving Lee and I to our own devices. We walked all the way to Stoneways Road and there caught a bus into New Lycroft, found Lindsey and Susie out, but discovered them with everyone else in the Nelson Inn nearby. John and Del were on acid and in loud jocular spirits; Lindsey said she found them “irritating.”

Liddy’s party, evidently quiet and cultured before we arrived, turned manic after we showed up. John and Del immediately set to work chatting up “the talent,” including Inga, a friend of Pete’s from Sweden, who seemed a bit overwhelmed by the deluge of Turney-speak which hit her. Lee squirted twin streams of saliva from his glands at various people and spat lemonade all over one girl’s back, I stood on his head with my para boots and ground him into the sofa as he sat there leering at me (he then squirted lemonade in my face). Finally I poured the bottle over John’s head as he sat talking to a girl.

A jumble of images and vague memories of excess . . . I kicked a door at someone, glaring threateningly, but needless to say, I remember none of this (but was told it later). Why I was in the mood I was in I don’t know . . . We all piled out and into a fast food place nearby, and I think we were on the verge of getting kicked out of the party anyway.

Today we drove up to the restaurant at Nick’s Hill for a meal but found it closed and ended up forking out £3 each for food at a King’s Road restaurant which we could only partly eat.

I’ve spent all evening working on the history of the civil rights movement throughout the ‘50s and ‘60s for my Black Americans tutorial. Next week our collective scrutiny turns to SNCC.

Almost a drag

I spent the afternoon typing up a contract for the sub-letting, cobbling it together with wordy rhetoric I dreamed up and paragraphs copied from our original contract with Crown Racing. As I did this Susie and Shelley listened to Yvonne tell tales of nude night-time frolics in the sea.

Throughout the day, Guy kept asking me to go down to the coffee shop with him and pestered me with suggestions about what we are going to do in the evening. Now that Barry was gone it seems he's turned to me for succor. It was almost a drag at times.

In the evening we found ourselves in the bar with Shelley, Susie, Gareth and co. Guy annoyed S. and S. by rudely dismissing and ignoring them; Shelley, in low persuasive voice, cajoled me into going with she and Susie to Miles Beattie’s party in Watermouth.

Guy came along too.

We got a train to Wessex Road, then a taxi to the party at some forgotten address, where we passed the time sitting upstairs on the landing outside the toilet. I got a bit drunk. Downstairs in the kitchen I had a mock-fight with Mike Ritchie, attacking him with a plastic bottle & getting drenched in water.

I moaned and grumbled, feeling cold and sorry for myself. The way my mind works! I tramped the miles back to University in a gloom of despair and tender feelings.

Flux

I spent the day in New Lycroft searching out contracts for sub-letting. No success. I did actually buy a contract but discovered on the train platform that it was the wrong kind, so I was an hour late to my prearranged rendezvous with Pete at Crown Racing on Old Priory Road. He was inside paying the rent when I got there; we got everything sorted out and wandered back through Westdorgan Park in the sweltering heat.

We dropped in on an American Studies end of year party in the bar of the Millikin Arts Centre; Pete and I cased up the adjacent gallery while the drinking and genteel chatting burbled on downstairs until Guy arrived and we walked across to the Town and Gown.

The French-windows were open so people could sit out on the grass and we sat there drinking and watching Brenda, our forty-something but still glamorous and (desperately) fashionable school-secretary flirting with, then openly groping, being groped by and finally snogging, several bronzed student-types. We couldn’t believe our eyes.

Pete scored speed from some bloke in the Millikin Centre toilets and we sat snorting it in his battered Renault in the car park while all around us people enjoyed the fine evening. The melodrama of the situation appealed to me. Afterwards we retired to Wollstonecraft and thence to Westway Loop Bar where I talked with Shelley and Carl Cotton (down again to do the RCP stall with Barry). I found him unexpectedly easy to talk to.

Guy, Pete and I ended up catching the tail-end of a party in Wilberforce where Pete and I spent the night chatting to a girl called Doreen who, in eight months, I’d never once seen around campus. We left her asleep sitting up in bed and tracked down Guy over at Fabian’s where he was wrapped up in a conversation that had been going on for hours—the usual speed-inspired fluxes of enthusiasm and awareness of spontaneous joy, knife-edges of excitement, tingling and pulsing down through my legs.