Everything All Of The Time

"I'll laugh until my head comes off, I'll swallow until I burst, until I burst, until I..."

Can't get that song out of my head these last few days, Thom Yorke singing here I'm allowed everything all of the time over and over again inside my brain until I feel as though it might drive me insane. Funny thing is, listening to the song does nothing to alleviate the frustration of having it play on a loop between my ears almost all the time. In fact, I don't even particularly want to listen to it. I'm just trying to cure what ails me.

I have the day off tomorrow/today. The last one was Friday, but that feels like something that happened weeks or months ago. It's all this time spent focussing my attention on Home Entertainment abbreviations and Visas and all the Thank You cards I should have sent to the people who sent wishes and money when they found out I was getting married. I haven't been alone in my head much, and it's making me disinterested and irritable. I'm going to take care of everything I can tomorrow, and then I'm going to get drunk. If I'm lucky, Thom will shut the hell up.

We're not scaremongering
This is really happening
Happening
We're not scaremongering
This is really happening
Happening

An old friend came into the store a couple of days ago. It was a strange experience for me. One half of my brain was reeling at the change he'd gone through since the last time I'd seen him; the other immediately jumped back three years into the past, both to draw a contrast and to remember things I'd forgotten. It's funny how you sometimes think you're just wasting your time until you find a point of reference and realise that you've travelled a quite incredible distance. Back in the summer of 2002, my old friend and I were at the Leeds festival. He was holding court in front of the fire like some drunken Buddha, sitting cross-legged before a rapt group of converts that had just accepted him as some kind of mascot/messiah. I was standing back in the shadows, thinking about my own problems and not having much of a good time. Back then, it was a contrast to the year before, when C and I had run rampant on every substance that came our way, seen some amazing gigs, and had one of the great lost weekends of my life. That night there were more of us, and those numbers had somehow stolen the magic from the whole experience. I wasn't as drunk or wild as I wanted to be, disappointed both in myself and everyone around me. It was like returning to a fire you'd once lit and finding only ashes.

Ice age coming
Ice age coming
Let me hear both sides
Let me hear both sides
Let me hear both

He looked old and tired and somehow hollow, sunken eyes glistening with the glaze of exhaustion, uneven patches of stubble painting his cheeks and jaw.

"I'm working seventy hours a week," he told me, and then, as though it made everything okay: "The money's good."

I nodded, smiled, scanned the film he was renting.

"We should get together sometime, have a drink," he said.

"We will," I said.

We won't.

Later, I found myself thinking of the people I'd surrounded myself with back then, feeling a little sad for the ones I knew about, wondering about those I didn't. I wasn't sure how to place myself. On the one hand, I'm no longer one of the stumbling lonely. On the other, I'm working a stupid job for a company I actively loathe and going through a process that will hopefully see me eventually relocate some 5,000 miles away so that I can be with my wife. I'm more than happy with the probable outcome, but the process bothers the hell out of me. I keep thinking of likely dates for all this to be over and counting the wasted days between now and then, of all the things that could conceivably happen to one of us before we finally get where we're going. I hate it, and I wish I was the person I sometimes claim to be, the person that would have raised both middle fingers to the world, just gone to her and stayed there. In the end, I'm not that person, and I was too afraid of getting caught. I'm only ever an outlaw in my dreams.

There wasn't much time between the end of that shift and the start of the next, but when I got home, sleep seemed distant. I grabbed one of my stepdad's beers from the fridge and ran a hot bath. I lay down and killed the can in five or six hits, then read until the words ran together. Suddenly I was dreaming, living out in some American nowhere, working outdoors beneath clear skies and a sun that left me warm and aching. We cut down trees and built fences, carried wood and bales of hay on our shoulders. I was lean and pale and pretty, my hair growing ever lighter until twenty-five years of red finally gave way before the blonde I was born with. When the day came to an end, we sat around a fire drinking whiskey and smoking hand-rolled cigarettes. Someone played guitar and I invented new lyrics for songs I didn't know. The eyes of my audience were curious and surprised, and I was delighted that they didn't know me, that I could reinvent myself. With a buzz born of alcohol and acceptance, I'd go home to Jennifer and watch her eyes while our conversations rolled from the sublime to the ridiculous and back again. We'd make love and then lie there smoking cigarettes, sweat drying on our bodies while the moonlight streamed through the windows and rendered everything in black and white, like a scene from some old movie. I was happy. I was so happy that I never had to think.

I awoke with the book resting on my chest, its pages swollen with water. I walked naked to my room and stood at the window, watching thin clouds race across the midnight sky and wishing for a cigarette.

Women and children first
And children first
And children

The next morning felt like a hangover. I bought cigarettes on my way to the bus stop. Five minutes later, I crushed the unopened packet and threw it into a bin. It was trying hard to be spring, but angry clouds rolled heavy and low across the sky, propelled by a wind that threatened violence. The thought of seeing the same old bus people and then the same old customers filled me with a dread disproportionate to the size of the task. I toyed with my wedding ring and listened to the music in my head. I thought about the past and the future. I tried not to dream too hard.

Unexploded Thoughts

"This one's for all the dead rock stars."

I don't number any of The Ramones amongst my personal heroes. But when you talk about punk rock - and that's at least a part of what I'm going to do here - you can't help but mention them. They weren't the absolute pioneers, that was the domain of The Stooges and Television and MC5, but they were there when it mattered. Without The Ramones, there would have been no Sex Pistols and no Clash. Those bands would still have existed, but they wouldn't have had the influence and the exposure that the Ramones gave them. Maybe the media-savvy Malcolm McClaren would still have found a way to make Johnny Rotten and the boys the juggernaut they became for a short while regardless. But somehow, I doubt it. That whole movement was always more influential here in the UK, but it started in the US, and it was The Ramones who were its chief ambassadors.

Punk is dead. I don't mean the music and I don't mean the attitude. There are plenty of records you can go out and buy by bands that will dispute that until their dying breath, but the fact remains that it's a long way from the cultural influence it once was. Why? Because of the way the world has changed since the late seventies. In previous screeds about politics, I've mentioned how it's my belief that traditional political labels like right and left are a thing of the past, leaving this generation to exist in something of a vacuum as far as democracy is concerned. Our voting power is stronger than it has ever been, but there is nothing to vote for and nothing to vote against. Punk was and is about rebellion, about being yourself and doing whatever it is that you want to do, regardless of what the rest of the world might think about it. While that ethos is alive and kicking, its meaning is gone.

To get it out of the way, I wouldn't have voted for John Kerry. I didn't vote for Charles Kennedy. I wouldn't call myself a Socialist because to do so in England in the year 2005 essentially means agreeing with people who can put up sensationalist posters blaming the Tsunami on Capitalism. I think those people are fucking idiots, and I believe Karl Marx would be spinning in his grave if he were aware of the feeble-minded bullshit being perpetrated in his name. I've got a little anarchy in me, but I'm not an Anarchist. I have too many beliefs to be a Nihilist. And as for the stuff on the other side of the spectrum, well, I don't give it too much thought. I think believing in God exists on the same level as believing in fairies. And to vaguely paraphrase Bill Hicks (who is one of my heroes), I think anybody who honestly claims to be right wing probably has some serious personal issues they need to deal with. In short, I don't agree with anybody that's alive and in a position to put their viewpoint across at this point in the evolution of the human race. I think every last one of them is so full of shit that they squelch when they walk. I hope that clarifies my position some.

But let's get back to the point, which is an argument that went unfinished when I did a few reviews of movies I liked and got criticised (by my own elder sibling) for not giving enough credit to hip-hop as a force for social change and a cultural backdrop to the movie La Haine. According to Catherine, that review came off as 'uncomfortable', especially when compared to the others in the same post. Now, she and I continued that argument in private both over the internet and on the phone, but we never really came to a point of compromise or agreement. That sat just fine with me. Catherine's musical poison happens to be in one area, while mine happens to be in another. But there are some correlations there that I feel cannot and should not be ignored.

You see, the thing that irks me is when my sister (and it isn't just her. Ray made a similar comment in my direction one night in a Newcastle bar a couple of years back whilst disputing my jukebox choices) refers to my taste in music as 'kiddie rock'. This because I like my music stripped down, simple, and to the point. In short, I like what tends to be referred to these days as 'punk', though a lot of it really isn't. According to these nay-sayers, the music I listen to - because it relies on simple melodies and few chords and is largely driven by emotion rather than musicianship - is for kids. Unlike hip-hop, my sister (though not Ray, I hasten to add, before he comes knocking on my door) argues, which has its roots in inner city alienation and is therefore valid and 'real' where the records I buy are but the whining of middle class, middle American males whose parents didn't buy them that pony when they were thirteen.

Clearly, there is a huge amount of generalising going on here from people who simply aren't familiar with the scene I'm into and prefer to make their judgements on the basis of one or two songs from the 'punk' bands they hear on the radio. Meanwhile, of course, they're happy to think of The Clash and The Sex Pistols as 'proper' music deserving of their attention. That's fascinating to me, because what separates The Clash from, say, Rancid is neither their musicianship nor the quality of their songwriting. It's time. The Clash were a self-confessed garage band. They were at their peak when they wrote three-chord classics like White Riot. They were a product of an era that celebrated the kind of music they were making, and when they stopped making that kind of music and fell into experimentation, they fell apart. Their time had passed, and they couldn't metamorphose into whatever they needed to be to survive. When people refer to London Calling as a classic record, they're largely referring to the fact that it came out at a time when that image and that sound were destined to be iconic. The Sex Pistols were a similar beast, except for the fact that they were, at best, a manufactured product. It isn't the Pistols that should be celebrated for their genius, it's Malcolm McClaren, a man who understood and captured a zeitgeist and made both a lot of money and cultural history. To my mind, the only difference between the Pistols and the pop acts so prevalent today is that the Pistols had an immediacy, relevance, and originality that was still new back then. In the end, though, they were still an act that was thrown together with the central idea being profit. Which isn't really very punk rock, is it?

My point is that the idea of punk rock is very much tied into those bands that had crossover appeal back in the late seventies. When that appeal was essentially decimated by the arrival of Reagan and Thatcher and the ushering in of a whole new era of politics dominated by a healthy economy that brought about a new hegemony based very much around the free market, punk went back to the underground from whence it came. Of course, if you were paying attention, you'd have noticed that the genre was alive and kicking right through the eighties and nineties, spawning bands like Reagan Youth and the Dead Kennedys, and keeping the New York and California scenes very much alive. But because it was no longer new and shocking and relevant to the mainstream, it pretty much disappeared from the radar.

I'd argue that the legacy of punk rock continues to taint the mainstream today, even if the bands that are referred to as 'punk' no longer have the same meaning and relevance as their predecessors. It only takes one listen to the artists (The Strokes, The White Stripes, The Killers, The Delays, etc.) leading the whole back-to-basics charge that's dominating today's rock scene to hear the very, very strong influence of bands like The Ramones, The Stooges, and The New York Dolls. In fact, that sound is as prevalent today as it was back then. What's different is the environment.

Which brings me to hip-hop. You see, I don't deny that hip-hop is the sound of the inner city and suburban kids of this generation. Its influence reaches much further than punk ever did, and its artists are far bigger stars. But a force for social change on a par with the punk movement? Not anymore. Hip-hop was a force for social change when it was political, when the likes of Public Enemy and NWA crossed over into the mainstream and scared the shit out of the establishment in much the same manner as The Sex Pistols did a generation before. Instead of being about class, though, this was a rift based on race, and its heroes were the likes or Huey Newton and Malcolm X and even Louis Farrakhan. This period in the late eighties and early nineties is where a comparison can be drawn with what happened a decade earlier, when punk became politicised and so was drawn into mainstream culture. Of course, hip-hop was a massive social force both before and after this time, but I'd argue that rather than being radical, it was far more supportive of the status quo.

These days, hip-hop artists are entrepreneurs almost by default. Hip-hop is political only in the sense that it inspires a generation to rise up not as revolutionaries, but as Capitalists. It celebrates the trappings of wealth and holds lifestyles based around cars, jewellery, and beautiful woman up as examples of success. The genre has been so effectively absorbed, even assimilated, by the dominant hegemony, that it's really no longer about race or about fighting The Man. It's about becoming The Man. While those in power may still mount the occasional crusade about lyrics that demean women or glamourise the 'Gangsta' lifestyle, their own ideology - when you take away the slang and the MTV style - is essentially the same. It's The American Dream gone insane. The haves live the life of kings while the have nots dream not of deposing them, but of joining them. It comes from the inner cities and it comes from the streets, but it isn't the sigh of the oppressed creature so much as it's the war cry of the envious. It isn't about equality, it's about Number One. It isn't about helping your fellow man (and it IS man), it's about treading on him on your way to the top. It's business, baby. It's Capitalism. It's money. In political terms, it's so fucking retro that it'll probably never die.

So yeah, if you ask this boy, punk and hip-hop have a lot in common, and chief amongst those similarities is the fact that - in terms of how they might, as movements, have changed the world - they're both dead. In the end, those of us who grew up even vaguely radicalised by either genre have no real right to criticise the other. For while each still has those who seek to keep the voice alive, they've both been lost as legitimate agents for political change. And that, not the arguments about which is more influential or musically valid, is the real tragedy.

Leaving New York

"You might have laughed if I'd told you. You might have hidden a frown. You might have succeeded in changing me. I might have been turned around. It's easier to leave than to be left behind."

It's been awhile wince there was any fiction here, I know. I'm trying to write, but what's coming out is mostly random and nonsensical. I wrote a short story the other night called Nothing Untoward. It was funny and - in a way - heartbreaking. It was about losing the past and how you sometimes forget how much you care. A friend of mine, the same friend that struggles not to laugh when that plane flies into the side of that building, would understand the sentiments and the words a hell of a lot more than anyone else ever could. If I ever put it up anywhere, I guess I'll dedicate to him. Everyone else would appreciate the writing but miss the deeper meanings.

Welcome To Forever will not be finished by the end of May. Not a chance. For that to happen I'd have to sit and do nothing but write from now until then. The way my life is now, that'll never happen. Perhaps I had an inkling that things would be this way when I made that promise, but I didn't say anything. Now I've told a lie and broken a resolution, and honestly, I don't care that much. I'm comfortable and confident that the thing will get written soon. No more promises. It'll be done when it's done.

They sound sad, these words. When I read them to check my spelling and my grammar, I find myself wondering how others will take them, what impression they'll get about how I'm feeling. For the record, I'm lonely. I miss Jenn. I miss the things I don't have and the things I haven't yet left behind. I feel like I'm reaching out to the future while at the same time unable to take my eyes from the past. It's an odd state of mind, but not entirely unpleasant. Bittersweet, I suppose.

What starts when the italics end is a story that is also bittersweet. It's the final part of a series I wrote that began with Want You Like A Pisces Rising. The others are still sitting on my hard drive, but I doubt I'll ever share them with anyone but Jenn. This is what happens at the place where fiction and strange realities meet. It was written a few months before I first went to the states. I hope you like it.

He emerges from the bathroom naked save for a bright white towel that hangs oh-so-loosely about his hips. He’s slimmer than I remember from our initial meeting, more confident than he was in those first few days and weeks. Still the same smile, though, still the same curious eyes painted a washed-out blue.

“It looks okay,” he says, running a hand through his hair. “You could’ve been a hairdresser.”

I smile, but I don’t really feel the emotion that should be behind it.

“You okay?” he asks. We’re just getting to that point where we can really read each other, and that thought cheers me up some.

“End of the line,” I say, lifting a hand that feel oddly heavy to wave at the window, at the city beyond.

He purses his lips and his gaze follows the gesture as he absently pulls the towel away and walks to the chair to pick up his jeans. Even now, I find myself unused to his nakedness, still capable of being surprised into arousal.

“Life has a certain…gravity,” he says, speaking in what I think of as his Writer Voice. “It pulls you back, pulls you down. You knew that. We both did.”

He turns back to me just as he reaches down to zip and button his fly, shows me a flash of his cock and his untidy pubic hair. I think of him in my hand, in my mouth. I think of how many times I’ve had my legs wrapped around his waist. I remember Philipsburg, where everything got just a little out of control until the spell was broken in the exhausted aftermath of the violent sex we had up against a junked car on some backstreet I don’t even remember the name of.

“I’m in love with you,” he’d said. “Let’s not lose this.”

This being my hands buried in a torn canvas roof, skirt hiked up on my hips, panties bunched around my knees. I felt dirty and sweaty and somehow beautiful in cold Pennsylvania air. He made me feel like a whore. He made me feel loved in some huge and indefinable way. He knew exactly what he was doing. So, for that matter, did I. That thing between us, the Bonnie And Clyde thing, we just let it off the leash for a while. No-one got hurt. Not really.

“I don’t want you to go,” I say, back in reality, back in the hotel room where he’s now sitting beside me.

“I’ll be back,” he says. “Or you’ll be visiting me. In the end, we’ll be together. It can’t be any other way.”

“I know that. I just don’t want to miss you.”

“There are ways,” he says. “We’ll do what we have to.”

Like in Pittsburgh, when he was complaining about his hair and I snatched a hat I liked straight off some guy’s head and we ran laughing down the street. Like on the road, when we hitched a ride with a woman and she left us in the car when she stopped for gas and he messed around in the glove compartment and found a wad of cash and a Saturday Night Special and she came back to find us gone. Like in Philipsburg, when I pretended to be a whore and demanded cash up front for services never rendered, when he played cards for money and did better than we expected, when an argument in a bar turned nasty and the guy came out swinging and suddenly the gun was in his hand and pressed hard into the guy’s forehead. There were maybe ten people in that bar and we were so calm and professional it frightened me. He made them toss their wallets on the floor and face the wall. I collected the cash without being asked. We slipped out into the night. We were flushed and excited and triumphant and he fucked me so damn hard up against that car that I was sore for days. Even then I wanted it harder. I wanted him to fill me up. I told him so. He kissed me and held me and I felt warm and safe.

“Bonnie and Clyde,” I murmur, tracing patterns on his bare back with my fingertips.

“Clarence and Alabama,” he replies.

“Nora and Mark.”

And we’re both laughing and maybe a little sad at the same time, remembering how he drove my car down I-15 into Primm, Nevada like a man possessed while I sucked hungrily at his cock, how we made love in the wet grass beside Lake Michigan and words came out of my mouth that I never believed I could say and he cried into my chest, how he sang to me in our hotel room that same night, when we’d both been drunk and the light fell from the moon and skimmed the surface of the lake and all I’d wanted was to stay there forever and ever.

Forever and ever. All these songs. Alkaline Trio back then, telling us about the thoughts in our heads, dirty as fuck and never leaving us. It’s about time – my lover had sung in my ear that night – that I came clean with you. At that song’s final punchline, his voice had cracked and I’d felt myself trembling with feelings that were so new and so powerful that I had no words to define them. What do you say – his breath hot against the side of my face – your coffin or mine?

Now we’ve come full circle and it’s REM again, the same distinctive vocals that had haunted his thoughts on the plane that brought him to me, this time singing about leaving New York, this time soundtracking the desperate melancholy of knowledge. I told you I love you – he sings in the mornings – I love you forever.

“Forever is a long time,” I say, without really meaning to.

“The longest,” he replies.

“Do you?”

“Do you?”

“I asked you first.”

“What are you gonna do if I don’t answer?”

“Not let you do what you wanna do.”

“Oh, and you think you can stop me?”

“I could scream. They’d lock you up.”

He grabs hold of me and pushes me down onto the bed, presses his weight down on top of me, clamps one hand over my mouth.

“Scream,” he says.

I scream into his hand and it’s so muffled that there’s really no way it could be heard outside the room, not unless some maid happened to be pressing her ear to the door. I think how it would be if he was just some guy sneaking in here to have his way with me, how I like it when he does shit like this, when it’s rape but it isn’t. I start struggling. I want him to hold me down and fold me up and fuck me till I’m dizzy. I can feel how he’s hard inside his jeans and against my belly.

“However long forever is,” he says. “I love you.”

He takes his hand away from my mouth and kisses me. I react with a confusion of emotions, a whirl of passion and lust and affection that has my lips describing tender pouts against his while my hand goes down between us to grab at his crotch. He pins my wrists to the bed, but not really. He leaves enough give that I can pull free of his clutches and fight him. We wrestle in a tangle of duvet and limbs. I get the front of his jeans open and then he holds me face down for long enough to haul my tank-top up around my shoulders and then off. I grab his cock and he shoves me away. I try to crawl to the floor and he pulls down my panties. We end up with him seated on the edge of the bed. I’m in his lap and we’re lost in a kiss. His cock is trapped between our stomachs and I’m lifting myself a little and trying to push it down, gasping into his mouth when its head slips over my clit and then divides me and finds my opening and I push my weight down and he’s up inside me with his clever hands massaging my breasts. I ride him fast and frantic, chasing an orgasm that’s been small and hot in my lower belly since those first thoughts of rape. He leans back on his elbows and watches me. He loves to watch me. I feel sweat on my face and between my breasts and my shoulderblades. I find my pleasure in the friction of my insides against the hardness I drive myself down on time and time again. His eyes follow my hand down over my belly and watch my fingers move over my clit. I let my head fall back and stars dance across the cracked and patterned ceiling and it feels like his cock is growing huge inside me, like he’s filling my belly and my chest and my throat and my skull with this pulsing warmth that squeezes my lungs and flicks playfully out at the tensed muscles of my thighs so that my legs twitch and spasm beneath me and I have to stretch and move my toes like I’m suffering a cramp. I say his name and then I say God’s name and then I swear and then it’s all torn away by a cry that feels like it’s dragging my heart up into my mouth and rolling back my eyes and making it so that I can’t breathe or move or scream until this massive fist is done kneading me all over and I fall spineless and exposed into his embrace.

“You’re so beautiful,” he says, and what makes it good is the awe in his voice. “You’re the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen. Forever, I swear.”

I bury my face in his neck. I kiss his warm skin. I fall into a state that is neither conscious nor unconscious. I remember.

“New York isn’t like this,” I’d told him. “I mean, we’ll need a place to stay.”

That was much earlier, back in Missouri. Later, in Philipsburg, he’d used the gun one last time, leaving me alone at the cheap motel we’d been staying at for several hours before returning with a credit card he held out to me with a flourish and a grin.

“Where did you get that?” I’d asked.

“It doesn’t matter. It’s safe for a few weeks.”

“How do you know?”

He’d shrugged. “I just know.”

“You robbed someone?”

He’d nodded. “Money with menaces, I guess. I give the guy a couple of weeks before he goes to the police.”

“The gun?”

“Gone. I dropped it down a sewer. I just wanted to buy us New York and safety.”

“You’re crazy.”

“About you,” he’d said, and pulled me into his arms.

I snap out of it and we’re lying together on the bed. He’s awake with his eyes closed, his flaccid cock a soft shape against my cunt. I can feel how my arousal has covered our skin and dried there. I slide slowly down his body, feeling how the blood makes his cock move and swell against my belly and between my breasts. My knees find the soft carpet beneath his dangling feet and my mouth finds him semi-erect and hardening. He tastes and smells of my sex. I bring my hand up between his thighs and his balls are swollen and full. He groans when I squeeze a little, his erection mine to play with now, straining upward between my lips as I work my tongue around its tip. I can already taste the prelude to his orgasm and I grip him firmly with my other hand, begin to stroke his shaft with the same rhythm as I’m now kneading his balls. I hear his hands moving over the sheets, feel his body reacting to my caresses. I let my head move up and down, adding the friction of my lips to these myriad pleasures. He stiffens. His knee brushes my flank. My mouth is flooded with warm, thick come. I swallow theatrically, so that he sees it, tasting him, letting my throat work at the stickiness threatening to coat it.

I climb back up onto him, laughing at the colour in his face. He puts his arms around me and we wriggle up to the pillows together.

“It won’t be long,” he says, his face serious. “I know it’s not easy.”

“I can’t,” I say.

“Of course you can. I don’t make you who you are any more than you make me who I am.”

“I know that. I need you.”

“And I need you. That’s why we’ll be together. We did it once, we’ll do it again.”

“Such a confident boy,” I say, touching his face.

“It’s you that does that. You make me feel like I can do anything.”

We kiss for a while. We sleep.

That fucking song, they’re playing it everywhere. In the cab, we listen to the radio jabber on about things we care nothing for and then those familiar, haunting notes pour into our space once again. He’s looking out of the window because he’s only really seen New York through glass. We’ve been poor tourists. He told me the only sights he wanted to see were behind my eyes and inside my clothes. Still, there were things that mattered, places that meant something. We drove through the Mojave Desert and we kissed on the banks of Lake Michigan. We had shared memories of music and films and books, all those little references that brought us together in the first place.

Michael Stipe tells me that life is sweet and he tries to take what it brings. Loneliness wears him out, though. It lies in wait. My stomach turns a lazy somersault and I’m glad there was no time for breakfast. I feel horrible. I feel like he’s gone already.

I turn to my own window and reflect that leaving New York is no big deal. Manhattan skyscrapers reach for a chilly winter sky while people and cars scurry between them like insects. I hear a million radios, a million voices, the endless tramp of stylish commuter footwear on colourless pavements. Horns blare, patience wears thin, and somewhere in the distance is a dog that just won’t stop barking. I don’t give a fuck about leaving New York. Let it burn. I just don’t want to leave this. How can he be so calm?

“Where you flying to, man?” asks the cab driver.

“England,” he replies.

“You British, huh? You going home?”

He shakes his head and I see the frown that creases his brow, making him look troubled and unhappy. During another airport journey in what feels like another time, there was a similar reticence about him, a sense of internal struggle, of a battle between a steel-trap mind and a much-abused heart.

“I’m going away,” he says. “But not forever.”

Like synchronicity and serendipity, he says those last three syllables at the exact same moment they are sung from the radio. The cab driver seems repelled and distracted by the sheer size of the atmosphere this generates in the back of his little yellow car, and we pass the rest of the journey in silence.

“Enjoy your trip, my friend,” the driver says, as we exit the cab. “And your lady, too.”

He pays the man through the open window, nods and offers a thin smile that grows to a familiar grin as we pass between the sliding doors of the terminal. I grope for his hand and he laces his fingers through mine.

“What are you smiling at?”

“He told me to enjoy my trip, and to enjoy you.”

“He…” I’m thinking back. “…fuck off.”

He laughs and lifts my hand, kisses it with mock gravity. We find each other’s eyes and before I’ve even thought about it I have thrown myself at him and we’re kissing, wrapped up in each other while the tourists and travellers grumble their way around us, heads down and eyes averted.

“It’s like dying,” he says.

We’re sitting against a monolithic pillar in the terminal, looking up at the departure board, around at the antiseptic briefness of the airport, where people scurry aimlessly in all directions, dragging their possessions in wheeled boxes that take on the guise of fashionable little coffins in the harsh light of his words. An abrupt female voice announces delays and cancellations and flights boarding. Above us loom two huge screens that display adverts and news updates. Everything seems false and unfamiliar. We have removed ourselves from the world and I no longer recognise faces that once inspired comfort or outrage. It makes for a surreal sight, all these talking heads with lips moving silently, expressions contorted into grotesque parodies of sincerity and sympathy. Neither of us knows who the president is. Neither of us really cares.

“I’ve been someone I always wanted to be,” he says, “and I feel like I won’t be that person anymore. It’s like going knowingly into a coma, going back to sleep. I don’t want to waste anymore time. I’ve done enough of that.”

On the heels of this monologue comes the abrupt woman announcing another flight, announcing his flight.

“Don’t,” I say. I throw a leg across him like I could hold him down, pin him here until the plane has left without him and he has no choice.

He mouths my name but no sound comes from his throat. He takes hold of my waist and pulls me into his lap. I think he’s going to kiss me but he just stares. He touches my hair. He runs his hands down my face and over my neck, along my shoulders and the length of my arms. His fingers brush mine. He shapes my breasts, smoothes my belly, cups the curves of my waist and my hips. He squeezes my behind, caresses my thighs, fingers slipping briefly between and then down; my knees, my shins, my calves, even my feet. He’s looking into my eyes and smiling just a little, like he knows there’s something ridiculous in this but it’s just love and love has no shame at all.

“I’m going to miss you,” I tell him. “But not for long.”

“No, not for long,” he says. “Come on. Walk me to the gate.”

We go slowly, hand-in-hand, as close as we can be without tripping over one another. He has nothing to declare but the clothes he’s wearing and the ticket in his free hand. The sign tells me I am not allowed beyond this point and we halt right in front of the faceless customs officers. I lean in to kiss him and it’s tender and brief.

“I have a kiss for you,” he says, still smiling that strange smile, “but I’m going to save it for when we next meet. Call it a promise. Things to say to you and do to you. I’m going to keep them all for next time. That’s the best goodbye I can come up with.”

“I’m going to hold you to that,” I reply, and for a moment his jaw clenches and I can see how close he is to tears.

“Take care of yourself,” he says, his voice just barely a whisper.

I nod, unable to manage even that. I watch him turn away and offer himself to be patted down and scanned with the wand one of the officers wields like a weapon. He walks through the gate and away from me, into the crowds that mill aimlessly in the lounge beyond. He turns back and I see him as he is, as an entity separate from me, just a boy in dirty jeans and a Dead Kennedys T-shirt on his way back to a place that has never been home. It is a moment of complete understanding; how he feels, how I feel, what we are to each other. He raises a hand and smiles and the water that fills my eyes makes my vision blur. I blink to clear it and he’s gone. My confident boy is leaving on a jet plane.

On the flight back home, exhaustion overtakes me and I sleep. I dream he’s over the Atlantic with airline stationary in his lap; a pen and a few sheets of paper. He looks out at an azure sky filled with wisps of winter cloud. His hand begins to move, and in his childish scrawl he writes: “Memory fuses and shatters like glass. Mercurial future, forget the past. It’s you. It’s what I feel.”

Instead of writing his name, he signs it: “Forever.”

He smiles. He tears this strip away from the sheet. In the logic-free domain of dreams, he calmly opens the window and lets the shrieking wind drag it from his hand, where it twists and flaps like a paper butterfly, carried back towards the continent and the girl he is leaving behind.

My car is full of music and memories. His Jimi Hendrix CD starts up when I turn the key in the ignition and I start laughing and crying at the same time. Interstate 15 will never be the same. I am tired and numb and I keep catching my concentration slipping away, trying not to focus on the life I’m returning to.

Home is stale and empty. I am not ready to face this world and I fall straight into my bed, where I wrap myself in blankets that still smell of us and sleep until I feel heavy and sick with it, until I can do nothing but sit staring at my computer, knowing that typing at him is no longer enough yet aching for any kind of contact. It is still too early, of course. No doubt his exhaustion is the equal of my own, and jetlag is not a problem I have to contend with. He may not even be there tonight.

I take a shower and feel better. I drag our bags in from the car and open the one we filled with CDs. I’d like to hear a little Alkaline Trio, I think, some loud guitars and bittersweet lyrics to get me angry and sad and ready to start living my life in rebellious silence once again. The disc I want is at the top of the pile, and I hear my heart beating loudly in my head when I see the strip of paper folded untidily in front of the inlay card. I open the case and pull it free, unfold it half expecting to see the airline logo, feel both relieved and somehow disappointed that it isn’t there. His childish handwriting is exactly as it was in my dream, though, quoting a different lyric from the same song: “And all not lost, still in my eye, the shadow of necklace across your thigh. I might’ve lived my life in a dream, but I swear it, this is real.”

The signature at the bottom is not “Forever.” It is his name. But that’s okay. In my mind, they mean the same thing.

Transcending The Giggle Loop

"It's always funny until someone gets hurt. Then it's just hilarious."

I admit it, I spent the first evening I've had to myself in some time continuing my steady progress through Season 2 of Buffy The Vampire Slayer. I've seen most of it before, but usually drunk or engaged in conversation or both. And...(deep breath)...my name is Michael, and I'm a Buffy fan.

Whew, I'm glad we got that out in the open. I mean, I'm still a ways away from admitting I'm partial to A-ha and wrestling (though not at the same time), but this is an important step in the right direction, the first confession of many I will make to my readers so that they will finally understand that I am so not cool. I know some of you may have been fooled by the suave penmanship, moody headshots, and beautiful wife...but I'm afraid the rumours are all false. I am a nerd, a geek, and a dork. It's time to stand up and be counted.

And anyway, Buffy was a good show. I mean, even after Sarah Michelle Gellar became the Maybelline skeleton and took up with the Prinze Of Darkness, it still had a lot going for it, namely pitch-perfect characterisation and an almost uniformly strong script, especially in the dialogue department. Sure, seasons four, five, and six bit the big one, but then every show jumps the shark eventually, and Buffy came back strong enough in the home straight to evoke memories of the glory days. And even if Buffy herself had gone to the Dark Side (as in the one where you get date-raped by Matthew Lillard rather than the one where you bust funky Force shit with Darth Vader), there was still Faith. And Xander. And Spike. And...enough.

The reason I bring this up now is because I wanted to talk about human behaviour. You see, there are advantages to being gainfully employed by the Home Entertainment people, and one of them is access to a wealth of cheap movies, TV Shows, and videogames. This leads not only to many opportunities for reliving old favourites or discovering fresh ones, but also to the kinds of conversations that always make me think of Kevin Smith's Clerks.

There were two things my co-worker one night last week did to indirectly inspire this post. The first was to join me in a conversation we had about a TV show called Coupling (The non-British may not be familiar with it, though I gather there's a dire American remix out there someplace). Now, I've always found it quite funny, but never to a degree that would make me watch it religiously. My co-worker, however, was clearly a big fan, and spent some time that night explaining a concept that had played a major role in one particular episode; the Giggle Loop.

Now, you may not know the phenomenon by that particular name, but I assure you that you know it. The Giggle Loop is when you're in a situation where it is imperative that you do not laugh and in a position where you're going to. Unlike regular laughter, this forbidden amusement simply will not die. Instead, the longer you remain in the sombre/angry/tragic/inappropriate moment, the stronger the urge to laugh becomes. Eventually, you either escape from the predicament and rush to a place of safety, only to discover that the hilarity has mysteriously passed, or your poker face simply collapses before the pressure of the Giggle Loop, rendering you a shaking, weeping, hyperventilating social embarrassment. Pretty much everyone I know has at least one tale of misfortune based on the latter scenario.

So my co-worker and I exchanged our stories of Giggle Loop defeats, shared a laugh, and then moved onto other subjects. It was only later that same evening, when he finally snapped beneath the weight of the trailers and adverts that play - ironically - on a loop in the store, that I boarded the train of thought that eventually resulted in this post. It was around eight o'clock on a long, slow night, and for what seemed like the millionth time that shift, the televisions were playing an appeal for a charity that the Home Entertainment people support. In this particular vignette, a young girl with a terminal disease gets to go into a studio and record a single. R&B star Miss Dynamite turns up, and the girl and her parents go into spasms of bittersweet celebrity-worship. During the advert, the girl's mother and father provide a voiceover explaining their daughter's situation and how the charity has helped them. If you saw it once, you'd be honestly touched. But both I and my co-worker had seen and heard this particular commercial more times than we could possibly count. It was only a matter of time before something gave.

"It's always been her dream to record a song," the voiceover mother said, in a voice touched by both sadness and pride. "She'd like to have a number one single."

"Well she won't have a number one single!" my co-worker suddenly shrieked. "Because she'll be DEAD!"

For the briefest of moments I was mortified - a situation I have to tell you was morally reassuring - but then the Giggle Loop had me - had us both - doubled over with mirth that was okay because it was just he and me and an empty shop.

But it's weird how we laugh at spectacularly inappropriate things sometimes, isn't it? I don't think there's a rational explanation that covers all cases. It's one of those strange quirks of human behaviour that I find fascinating. For example (and it's an extreme one), I have a friend who once confessed to me that when watching the footage of that first plane crashing into the World Trade Centre, he started laughing. Unforgiveable on one level, yet fascinating on another. What is about what must be the most tragic and enduring image of our time that could possibly make a person start to laugh? I mean, that's the polar opposite of funny. And what's even more interesting is how once he shared that knowledge with me, we got caught in the Giggle Loop. Now, every time the subject is raised, I see the shameful smirk start to appear on his face, see the way he tries so hard to control it...and it makes me want to laugh. When he sees me struggling at the sight of him struggling, it makes his burden all the heavier. So now, the mere mention of that fateful day invariably leads to the pair of us grimacing and gurning until we can take it no more and the Giggle Loop has its way.

I think that's awful, I really do. But that somehow makes it all the funnier. Even with the above explanation, it's not something I feel entirely comfortable sharing. I can't imagine how it would be were we to lose it over that particular subject in public. How would people react? Would they be absolutely horrified, or would that dark and uncontrollable laughter spread? Is it possible that one guy stumbling into some lunatic situation where such a thing becomes a trigger for giggles could eventually lead to a whole room full of people laughing at hideous tragedy without any idea how it happened?

Not if I have my way. You see, earlier today, I beat the Giggle Loop.

It was a normal morning. I'd been up late talking to Jenn and I was pretty tired, but other than that, all the dials were in the green. As the Manager On Duty, I'd gotten to the store first, unlocked and switched off all the necessary devices, and was in the process of printing out a lengthy report containing yesterday's figures. Then today's co-worker arrived. Unlike the lad who'd unleashed a shriek of monotony-inspired joy at the potentially agonising death of another, this particular co-worker is very sincere, very moral, and very God-fearing. We get along just fine in the context of having to work together, but she isn't somebody I'd go out on the town with. I like her, though, and because of her demeanour and beliefs I'm more than happy to treat her with kid gloves and keep my more extreme opinions and traits out of sight. I'm pretty sure she does the same, and every time we work together, we take part in this neat little dance where the point is simply to engage in small talk without treading on any particularly sensitive toes. Most of the time, it works.

Today, however, the usual greetings gave way to silence as she checked-in last night's returns and I stood by the printer waiting for it to finish vomiting out what was fast becoming a novel-sized sheath of paper.

"Did you see that documentary on Channel Five last night?" she asked me, in a way that made the preceding silence feel more awkward than I'd believed it to be.

"I was out," I said, without adding, "at the pub."

"It was about this girl who was born with no face."

I gritted my teeth and bit my lip and focussed my attention on the printer. For reasons I'll at least try to explain momentarily, the previous sentence had dropped a big fat fun bomb in the pit of my stomach. The resulting explosion was filling my lungs and reddening my cheeks. I was going to absolutely scream with laughter.

1. For the non-Brits: In England, before satellite and cable became the norm, there were only four TV channels. In the midst of the digital revolution, some bright spark decided we needed a fifth, and Channel Five was born. It was and is rubbish. This is a station entirely dedicated to people who like incredibly bad chat shows, faux-reality TV, soft porn, Corbin Bernsen, and Argentinian baseball. In other words, it caters to alcoholics, stoners, the unbelievably bored, and students. Mostly it caters to all four. In terms of knowledge, enrichment, and value, it's a complete vacuum.

2. 'A girl with no face'. When you read those words, do you see a tragically disfigured person living a life of torment and bravery, or do you begin to imagine a person that quite literally has no face? 'Cause I saw the latter, and the harder I tried not to think about it, the more I thought about it. The more I thought about it, the funnier the mental image became. I saw ears and hair and then...this blankness. It was surreal, it was ridiculous, and - yes - it was fucking funny.

"Really?" I somehow managed to say.

"Really." My co-worker replied. "She kind of had eyes, and then...just...a tongue."

I was carrying Mount Hilarious on my shoulders, and I was walking. I was the Patron Saint of the Poker Face.

"That's...terrible," I said. An expression of genuine pain crossed my features.

"And people care so much about their image, man. It makes you think," she said. And then - sweet baby Jesus wept - she crossed herself.

I opened my mouth and a desperate sigh wheezed forth from my straining insides. My co-worker shook her head sadly and went about her work. The printer had finally finished its work, and I snatched the paper from its grasp and scurried from the shop floor. With a door between me and my apocalyptic battle with the Giggle Loop, I finally relaxed.

But I didn't laugh.

In fact, I spent the next few hours not laughing, though the image of the faceless girl on Channel Five kept creeping into my thoughts whenever I was behind the counter with my co-worker. I resisted it, though. From nine in the morning until almost two in the afternoon, I held my own against the most formidable of foes. I was proud. I was also late back from my lunch break, though not because of bad timekeeping. No, I was tardy because I'd been out in Barnet learning the secret of defeating the Giggle Loop. Its name? Displacement.

Like my morning, my afternoon began innocently enough. With an exhaustion born of both half a day of work and my internal struggle, I decided to head for a coffee shop in the shopping centre over the road, where I enjoyed a cappuccino and a chocolate chip flapjack before heading back to Planet Home Entertainment. As I left this home of small town commerce, however, my life was forever changed by a small child that came hurtling past me at quite some speed for one carried on such tiny legs. "I WANT A WEE! I WANT A WEE! I WANT A WEE!" it screamed, before karma intervened in the form of a tiled floor made dangerously slick by the efforts of an elderly man and his mop. The child lost control of its bladder-inspired scamper and went into an wild and impressive slide that lasted some two or three seconds before being brought to an abrupt halt by the sudden traction of the pavement outside. There was a long moment of airborne silence, and then it crashed to the ground with a thud that would truly have satisfied anybody who has ever been trapped on public transport with a screaming toddler.

Laugh? I fucking howled. I laughed so hard that my legs gave way and I fell against the window of WHSmith's, sliding to the floor and embracing hysteria as my eyes streamed and everyone stared and the cackling demon took me so completely that there was no room left in my heart to care. I laughed until my stomach hurt and I couldn't see. Then I laughed some more. The mother retrieved her errant spawn, the bystanders went on their merry way, and I laughed and laughed and laughed. It was fantastic.

Eventually, with the evil exorcised and control of my weakened limbs regained, I struggled to my feet and walked back to work like a man on some incredible high. I greeted my co-workers with a smile on my face and a victorious spring in my step. The rest of the day could be nothing but easy. I owned the Giggle Loop.

Album Review: Mezmerize - System Of A Down

"This is my front page, this is my new age. All you bitches put your hands in the air and wave them like you just don't care."

A friend of mine, on first being exposed to this album, told me it was the best anti-pop, pop record he'd ever heard, the bastard lovechild of Justin Timberlake and Slayer. Having worn out single B.Y.O.B. - a dizzying slice of post-millenium pop-metal with a chorus so catchy it wouldn't be out of place on an Usher record sharing the same three minutes with lead singer Serj Tankian screaming about sending Presidents to fight the war over the crunchiest of riffs and some 120bpm drumming - I believed him. Following the breakthrough of 2001's brilliant Toxicity, System Of A Down were clearly itching to push their schizophrenic, experimental boat into deeper waters. With Mezmerize, the first part of a two disc set (Hypnotize will be out later this year), they've done just that. The resulting record may well make up one half of an album that will eventually be hailed as a classic.

On Toxicity, it was often hard to tell where SOAD were being sincere and where satirical. While many tracks were clearly heartfelt, the band's extreme political agenda - referencing various conspiracy theories and even writing a sympathetic song about Charles Manson - left them open to being lumped in with lesser bands like Rage Against The Machine and massively misunderstood. Perversely, Mezmerize addresses these issues by muddying the waters still further, throwing the meaningful, meaningless, whispered, and screamed at the listener with wild variations in style, volume, and pace, often within a single song. This is a band confident enough to open a track (Cigaro) by shrieking "My cock is much bigger than yours!" and then have it be a catchy folk/metal song about corporate control and addiction. Clearly, their balls are quite sizeable, too.

System Of A Down have captured a fractured zeitgeist with frightening clarity. While their message is often none-too-subtle (B.Y.O.B.) and their cultural targets are too big to miss, their finely honed sense of the ironies and absurdities inherent in the things they stand both against and for blurs the line between laughing with and laughing at just enough to make this a fascinating and even astonishing listen. Some say metal hasn't been this intelligent since Faith No More released Angel Dust. I say simply that metal has never been this intelligent, diverse, or relevant. System Of A Down raised that bar in 2001, and now they're raising it again.

From the mournful opening melodies of the introductory Soldier Side to the jaw-dropping climax of Lost In Hollywood is a trip of a little under thirty-seven minutes. In that space of time, SOAD lead us from politics to the cult of celebrity, taking in scenery that includes porn, drug abuse, and the evils of large corporations, with a sound and worldview that are very much their own. They also reference Tony Danza.

Mezmerize represents a band who may well be hitting their creative peak just when their work is most relevant. That doesn't happen too often. This IS the best anti-pop, pop record ever, and if you don't have System Of A Down in your life right now, you officially suck.

10/10

Homecoming (Part Two)

"I am thinking it's a sign that the freckles in our eyes are mirror images and when we kiss they're perfectly aligned. And I have to speculate that God himself did make us into corresponding shapes, like puzzle pieces from the clay. True, it may seem like a stretch, but it's thoughts like these that catch my troubled head when you're away, when I am missing you to death..."

I had my phone open and poised, set to capture whatever it is that lay beyond the words, whatever it was I felt I couldn’t express. Every vista that grabbed my attention, every lonely stretch of road that seemed to murmur my insecurity, I grabbed a picture of. I was the impotent writer, the guy who – last time he was here – remarked casually that it was a nice view and then spent months kicking himself for being unable to find the words. Again I was defeated, though I didn’t know it at the time. The camera in my phone, so able when it came to snapping off shots of my walk home from work, found itself overmatched when it came to capturing the view from Interstate 15 through a windshield smeared with dust and dead insects and bird shit, burning beneath the glare of a distant but powerful sun. The images that seemed so striking at the time were eventually rendered blurred and indistinct. There were some good shots there, but nothing to give power to my feelings, nothing to hold those moments that so enthralled me.

I forget what we were listening to, what we said. The last time we were here, it seemed there was time to deconstruct and analyse. This time, there is nothing but that white-hot sun and the thing we’re going to do. This is the kind of sky you expect to see vultures circling in, the kind of commitment you can never turn back from. This is a road you can only ever travel once.

Vegas is like returning to the scene of a crime, but not in a bad way. It’s a feeling that we did something terrible here once that no-one ever found out about, like we’ll be okay so long as we wear shades and keep our hats down real low. This time Jennifer made the reservations and has to speak to the girl at the desk. I’m just here to laugh at her parking and then lurk in the background like the token English guy in some bad movie. Any minute now, I think, my henchmen will jump out from behind these pillars and I’ll reveal that it was a set-up all along, that I only went along with this charade because I want the forty million dollars sitting in the safe downstairs.

It doesn’t happen. As much as I want to suddenly be a cackling Hans Gruber, I remain a nervous Michael O’Mahony. We go to a room startingly reminiscent of the one we shared the last time and I call the chapel to let them know we’re here. They offer us an earlier slot and I damn near drop the phone, overcoming a sudden panic attack to tell the guy that the one we have is just fine, that we won’t be ready. We could have made the time he offered, but I’m not prepared for that. I need time to breathe, to stand in front of the bathroom mirror in my suit and tell myself that I’m doing the right thing for the right reasons. At this stage of the game, despite the surety I’d found when I was still at home, I’m as nervous as I’ve ever been. Nervous, in fact, is not the word. Terrified is closer to the truth.

Still, somehow I get myself ready, though I have no recollection as to how. Somehow I sit kneading my keys and fretting about the papers I’m supposed to have until Jennifer emerges from the bathroom and takes my breath away. Now I understand why it is that the groom isn’t supposed to see the bride until the ceremony. It awakens every doubt I ever had about this stunning girl being too good and too special for me, every bad dream where we got to the altar and she suddenly realised that I was the loser guy redeemed only by a talent for putting the words together in the right way. I am not good enough for her. I am here by some freak collision of mighty coincidences. At some point, she will look at me and realise she is making a mistake, and I will crawl back to the lonely life that was always my destiny. Jennifer. Jesus, Jennifer. Beautiful, wonderful Jennifer. Please God, I have never asked you for a single thing, but if you let this be real, I will forever be your humble servant.

This girl takes my arm and lets me lead her past all these desperately admiring casino glances, all these chancers hoping for just one lucky fall of the die. I feel like the guy who just keeps on rolling sevens, who has a goddess on his arm and some deity smiling down on everything he does. I feel lucky, blessed, charmed. I feel spectacular. I feel like everything bad that ever happened to me was purely to make these moments feel as special as they are. Amongst the gamblers of Vegas, I have hit the ultimate jackpot. I am ten feet tall and there are six of me and everywhere you turn you see only my smiling face. I win, and fuck everything and everyone else.

Outside we wait, our uncertainties dampened by the guy who’s seen it all before, who tells us when and where our ride will turn up. We hold cold, sweaty hands. Right on time, the limo shows. The driver shows us in and it’s not as luxurious as expected, not as bright and warm. He gives us forms to fill out and then drives us to the courthouse, where he tells us it’ll be forty minutes to an hour and then drives away. We go inside and nobody else is dressed for the occasion. It’s all jeans and T-shirts and bad humour about making mistakes. Even here, though, I feel like the winner. Maybe I’m the only guy getting married tonight, the only guy going through with the thing right here in this city, but that’s cool with me. I’ve got Jennifer on my arm and that’s enough, I’m sure, to make all the other husbands in the queue consider their options.

Faster than the driver predicts and we expect, we’re outside and I’m once again calling the chapel to let them know we’re waiting. On the steps of the courthouse, we stand dressed for marriage and lighting inappropriate cigarettes. It feels silly and yet somehow right, just another detour on the strange road that brought us here, a road that continues to twist and turn when it’s least expected. Finally the driver returns and this is it, no more forms and queues, no more promises and waiting. When we get out of the limousine, we’re getting married. There’s no longer an exit.

We get out of the limousine and a slimy guy is waiting for us. Tall and slimy, that’s all I remember. He directs us inside and into the chapel, leaving us standing awkwardly until the minister appears. I’m looking at the soft focus whiteness of the place, at the piano that sits in one corner, at the arch of twinkly lights and pale flowers that curves over the spot we’ll stand to take our vows. I’m waiting for a fat guy with sideburns and a jumpsuit to jump out and start singing Love Me Tender.

Instead of Elvis, though, we get a little old lady who strides up to the altar like she’s done this ten million times before. She confirms that we’re the couple she thinks we are and then places us by the door with violent hand gestures I later realise were because they were recording everything. Then she pushes a button on the portable tape recorder she’s carrying and it’s the Wedding March in gloriously cheesy mono, accompanied by furious hand gestures that guide us up the aisle and into her presence.

She’s good, I’ll give her that. In fact, she’s the only really genuine thing about the whole experience. Not once while she’s speaking do I feel like we are going through something scripted. Even when talk of God makes me realise that we are doing the ceremony in a way I would normally abhor I am only slightly distracted. She gives me my lines and I repeat them with feeling, only laughing when I cannot get Jennifer’s ring onto her finger without some effort. I say I do. I say in sickness and in health, till death do us part. I notice that she says husband and wife and not man and wife. Somehow, that reassures me.

Afterwards, the tall, cheesy guy comes in and asks us to stand in crap poses so he can take photos. I’m thinking that this is only for the family. I’m thinking that I’m married, that I’ve done it. All my doubts have faded away. I know that I am here with the right person for the right reasons. Everything I ever did, right or wrong, is somehow validated because it got me here. I love her. Yes! I made it. I’m alive and I was right. I waited and waited and when I finally broke all those promises I did it out of love, I did it the way I dreamed I’d do it. I am vindicated and broken all at the same time. I am the boy I always wanted to be and the boy that fell on the way. All I know is that the arm in mine is the right one. The loser in my head, against all expectations, has finally won.

I’d intended to carry Jenn across the threshold of our room. I’d intended a real wedding night. Like everything else, though, it goes against the grain. We go back to our room and change before heading back to the bar. We get drunk and play the slot machines. We eat where we ate before, at Lucky’s, the most aptly named diner in the history of eateries. I’m so exhausted that it’s all I can do to keep myself upright in the elevator that takes us back to the seventh floor. There is time to undress, to fall into bed, to murmur conversation about the amazing thing we’ve done. Then there is sleep. I don’t dream. I don’t need to anymore. In my head I am still wide awake. I am in the chapel. The little old lady is talking about God and commitment and till death do us part, and all I can say, all I can feel, is I love you. I love you, I love you, I love you.

Finally, I’m home.

Homecoming (Part One)

"I see it around me, I see it in everything. I could be so much more than this. I've said my goodbyes, this is my sundown. I'm gonna be so much more than this."

Home is where the heart is, and my heart has never truly been in North London and the Hertfordshire suburbs. It’s too drab and damp and broken here, too many bad memories threading their way between all those sad, semi-detached houses and the ever-diminishing pools of cool, green silence I used to love discovering. As the year I allowed myself for contemplation draws to a close, and the darkened room I used to spend so much time in grows ever more accustomed to a life without my constant presence, I find myself wondering what I’ve learned and what I intend to do with it.

This began, you may recall, with my birthday and with my family. My mother and stepfather and I took a train to East London to celebrate my twenty-fifth and have lunch with my sister. Now, almost a year on, I remember only sitting there eating something inappropriate and kicking one leg of my chair with a light but insistent rhythm, waiting for questions I only ever have vague answers to, especially when asked by members of my family. Later, we walked back to my sister’s place in the rain, and I moved ahead of the umbrellas and the conversation, letting icy water soak my hair and trickle into my collar. My mind was somewhere else, and all I really wanted was to go home.

In the end, almost everything I write is about going home. The thread I’m grasping at really is that simple and that obvious. The Darkened Room, in both literal and metaphorical terms, is a refuge, a place to hide when I feel as though I can no longer cope. And really, when you take a look at the last twenty-five years, you’ll find that coping isn’t something I’m very good at.

When I was about six, my infant school class was asked to write a story about something that had happened the previous weekend. I find it hard enough to remember the motivations for things I did when I was eighteen, so I can neither justify nor analyse this, but for some reason I penned an outrageous lie about a lightbulb going on the first floor landing of our house, and my dad slipping and falling down the stairs as he tried to change it. My teacher of the time (Miss Barnes, I think) bought it hook, line, and sinker, and when my mum came to collect me from school that day, she enquired as to whether my dad was okay. Both were horrified when they discovered the imaginative detail of my lie. The worst thing about it, I recall Miss Barnes saying, was that it was meaningless. I had committed one of the ultimate childhood sins for no apparent gain but my own amusement.

Sometimes, when I was little, I honestly believed that my fictions were a depiction of what had actually happened. Over time, some of them even replaced the truth. It wasn’t so much that I was deluding myself, as I’m pretty sure I was always aware when I was lying. It was more that the talent I had for sidestepping the truth while leaving just enough detail in there to make it all the more convincing made substituting the fantasy and the reality all the easier. I was a good liar when it didn’t harm anybody. I still am. If I’m stubborn and lucky enough, I might even make a career out of it.

When I first moved to Borehamwood, I was fourteen. It was only a few months after dad died. I was in the middle of puberty, dealing with the loss of a parent, and being dragged to a new town where I had no friends and no life. The concept of home became important because home was the place I’d been taken from. In some indefinable way, I felt that if I went back to our little house in Burnt Oak, everything would be okay. It would be the Burnt Oak of about 1985, my family would be whole, and it would be always be those first glorious weeks of the summer holidays, when I’d go to Watling Park and watch the older boys play football until they finally relented and let me join in, humouring me with dramatic missed tackles and then theatrical goal celebrations when I finally managed to put the ball between the piles of coats that served as posts. I thought about that a lot during those first few months in Borehamwood, but events were forcing me to grow up faster than I wanted to, and over time those images slipped away. It’s only now – with so many years between the kid that wanted only to score the winning goal and the man that got married less than two weeks ago – that I can look back and see those precious times for what they were without wanting to be or save the child I used to be.

King’s Lynn and Cambridge were the next two places I lived. I was eighteen then, and so desperate to escape from Borehamwood that even my spectacular failure to live up to A-Level expectations didn’t stop me from returning to the lies that had served me so well in childhood. Of course I wanted a Sociology degree, and of course I was willing to take history alongside because for some bizarre reason that was the only criteria on which Anglia University would take me. What more could a boy possibly desire from life? Certainly not a clerical error that sent me to a backward college in the middle of Norfolk where the average age of the students was about forty, that much is clear. Seven years on, I’m still confused as to how I came to be living in the converted loft of a huge house on a street I forget the name of in a town where everything closed at five in the afternoon and everybody spoke like they were from some mental Victorian farm town. My three months in King’s Lynn were, I think, the absolute low point of my entire life. On the average day, I spoke only to answer my name in class. Home? I think not.

Cambridge was ruined for me by the messy break-up of my first relationship proper and my struggle to find some kind of identity for myself. It was and is a beautiful city, and I have surprisingly warm memories of 68 Garden Walk, where I spent a strange and exhausting year living with four Greeks and a Spaniard, reeling from the highs of plate-smashing parties and life-affirming 3am conversations to the lows of collapsing in drunken tears at the Student Union bar and sitting in my room all night trying to work up the courage to use the cheap plastic razor I held against my wrist. I learned a lot about myself that year, but the idea of returning is a horror.

It was in returning bruised and hungover to Borehamwood that I learned to live inbetween. I spent all of my time at work or out in London, doing my job and then spending my wages on so many insane nights that the details became something I’d invent just to have something to say. I’d remember the beginning of the evening, and I’d remember where and how I woke up. I’d remember the dramas and the moments of clarity. Other than that, it was back to white lies for the simple reason that the only other thing I could possibly say was that I’d gotten wasted, danced like a maniac, and done all manner of strange and stupid things because that was all that lay between me and the realisation that in all these years I’d gone nowhere and done nothing. That was how I coped.

Home is a feeling, not a place. Home is a certain warmth and a certain security. Home, if you’re as nomadic a soul as I am, can be just about anywhere, even that winding stretch of Interstate 15 that can – with the right kind of eyes – look like the loneliest place in the world. Home can be looking across from the passenger seat of a rented car and realising that everything you’ve been uncertain about is nothing but the fading doubts of all those years you didn’t know where you were going and how you’d get there. It took me twenty-five years to figure that out, and that makes me feel both old and naïve as hell. The road was long and not without detours, but eventually, I found one of the things I’ve been looking for. I found home.

That, in case you were wondering, is the point of the story that follows…