When I was four my sister taught me how to scrape the hard discs of chewing-gum off paving stones and get the last of the mint out by pressing them between my tongue and the roof of my mouth. The best place for this was outside Auntie Dot’s corner shop on Goodison Road, and we got away with it most days until my mother caught me scraping a Bazooka Joe off the kerbstone and popping it in my mouth. My sister of course was away down the street, skipping a rope, and it was me who got in trouble. She was a bad influence and that was exciting. And I’ve been looking for bad influences ever since.
In March 1982 I came unstuck in Paris. After a night sleeping on the banks of the Seine I ended up with hypothermia and the only way I could get warm was to huddle up on an air vent sucking warm air out of the metro. We abandoned the plan to hitch to Marseille and my girlfriend and I caught the bus up to Amsterdam with a bottle of Jack Daniels for a heater. We headed to a squat on Van Hogendorpstraat that we’d heard about from friends of friends, where I collapsed in a shivering heap on the floor of a mad man called Bill the Wolf, the fire-engine-haired Quentin Crisp of the Staatsliedenbuurt tenement squats. He cooked me a broth sucked from the bones of a pig’s head and insisted that sometimes vegetarians had to take a night off. I was home.
Deliberately living my life by accident, by that stage I had become somewhat delinquent. I had the feeling that I couldn’t write a novel or be a poet because I hadn’t lived enough life. So throwing myself recklessly into chaos and romantic failure might give me plenty of life to write about. I’d been here before when I was seventeen, bumming around Paris and staying in a dive on Rue Gît-le-Coeur, as close as I could get to the Beat Hotel, running out of money fast, existing on bread and oranges, returning to Liverpool eventually, where I signed on the dole and more or less slept for a year in my mum and dad’s house in the suburbs, only venturing out to Eric’s to watch Mark E Smith or Howard Devoto in awe, or to spend my Giro in Atticus Books—anything published by City Lights, Black Sparrow and New Directions, Grove Press and Olympia Press Traveller’s Companions.
A lot of this was wilful immersion in disruption… impressionable, youthful over-exposure to books like Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer, the bible of the wayward, confused readings of Jean Genet and William Burroughs, something in the words and the very smell of the books telling me that poverty and holy barbarianism was a sacred calling. Not having any school qualifications was my qualification, for sleeping in bus stations and smoking weed with church-door tramps, and hitching to European cities and generally falling to pieces.
So here I was in Amsterdam drinking pig’s head broth and watching mice help themselves to dog meat. Tomorrow you must go and steal yourselves some bikes, said Bill, strands of day-glo hair falling into the gas flame as he stirred the broth, the stench of sulphur mingling with cannabis and wet Alsatian. I could feel the book I’d never write forming in my head as I drank it all in. A squat! A mad man! Drugs! In Amsterdam!
Bill the Wolf—flamboyant, gin-soaked, a carnival in stack-heels, all chiffon scarfs and rouge—had been in a concentration camp in the last months of the war. He had had one novel published a long time ago, a story of dockside cafés and brothels, loosely autobiographical, a Jacques Brel song come to life. It was his outlook on the world and the way he interpreted it that captivated me. He was a fabulist, a weaver of strange, disturbed tales as he stirred his broths like potions, stirring for hours. He disrupted every street he walked down and he was heroic, a sacred monster, and he was madly in love with Harry, a much younger man who lived downstairs in an abandoned electrical shop. He would clean Harry’s needles and wounds with lemon juice and sometimes when Harry was cold and lost in narcotic withdrawal Bill would take him into his bed and hold him tight. We didn’t have a kitchen so we’d use Bill’s gas stove, and sometimes at night we’d hear him singing softly to soothe Harry to sleep—Bill, Harry and the Alsatian dog all huddled up in a heap of rugs and blankets. I used to scribble their stories in my notebooks, trying to get the colour of their characters down, trying to learn to write about these people. I had the feeling I was living in the sort of underground novel I loved, but I was a complete novice—a novice at writing and a novice at living.
I got a job as a night porter in the Parima Hotel on Warmoesstraat, run by the ex-prostitute Magdalena who liked to sit on the pavement, smoking robustos and peeling potatoes into the bowl of her skirt. There were cockroaches everywhere and no one ever paid for drinks in the hotel bar. Down the street was the bar where Camus’ The Fall is set, a low dive squeezed between leather bars, yards away from the Zeedijk bridges swarming with heroin dealers, and the dark street where Chet Baker fell to his death. I haunted the docks of the Red-Light District, got to know prostitutes and sex-show hustlers, sat for hours over a kleintje pils, searching for some spirit of disruption that might ignite my would-be Bohemian imagination. And then one late morning on my way to pick up my wages I saw him…
The ruins of Gregory Corso sat propped up in a bar at the rat’s end of Zeedijk—a bar with a curtained-off corner where prostitutes could take their drunken clients. Tobacco and smoking paraphernalia spilled out of the pockets of his leather waistcoat and he had two pairs of glasses hanging around his neck on lengths of string and bootlace. He had been beautiful once but now he was nowhere near holding it together. His teeth seemed to move around in his mouth. His hair was like a mop of dirty worms. He drank what looked like cough mixture, but if it was cough mixture it wasn’t working because he had a hack like a dog. This was the man who stole Jack Kerouac’s girlfriend and now he looked like a man who stole shoes off sleeping beggars. He was derelict. Apart from his eyes. I could see his mind working inside his head as he watched the mad parade of Zeedijk. He was still in there, inside his own ruin.
To me he was a kind of shaman, another sacred monster, a direct link to the counterculture, to subversion, to cultures of dissent. I watched his flickering eyes. I knew he’d hung out with Chet Baker. From where he sat he could probably see a vision of Baker tumbling to his death, suspended in eternity, falling forever and never hitting the ground. I plucked up the courage to go and speak to him, told him I loved his poems and was a big fan of the Beats. He was sick of the Beats, he said, particularly the ones out West telling farmers how to plant potatoes. He told me we were living in a Jean Genet novel, but what did Genet know? Corso said he had once painted murals on the walls of a house in Paris and upset the landlord. Genet, who was a friend of the landlord’s, came round to the house and gave Corso a good telling off. Corso finished his tale with a sneer, ‘Genet is so fucking bourgeois.’
Laughing at his own story, Corso signed his autograph on the back of a postcard.
—To Jess, Hi, Gregory Corso—
I told him my name was Jeff, not Jess and he scrawled two cursive F’s over the S’s. And that was it. He sat there playing with sugar sachets and spoons and staring at the street. And after a few minutes I left him to it and went to the Parima to collect my wages. On the way down Zeedijk I stopped at the spot where Chet Baker had fallen, and the fusion of jazz man’s death, Beat poet, street full of heroin dealers and smell of weed mingling with dim-sum was so powerful that it didn’t matter when I got to work that Magdalena fired me. She said if anything I owed her money…
Bill the Wolf was also falling to pieces. As we watched mice climbing over the sleeping dog he told me he knew he would never write another book. He would sometimes read my own attempts at poetry and stories and cross out the bits he didn’t like with an eyeliner pencil. Maybe I could write a novel and publish it under his name? he suggested. Was this because he could no longer get published and he could claim my own words as his own? Or was it something more generous? Was he offering me a way to sneak into publication in disguise? He didn’t explain. I watched him walk with his dog, into the kaleidoscope of Amsterdam, into insurrection. On Museumplein the Number 10 tram was in flames.
Tensions between the squatters movement and ‘The Mainstream’ had been building for years. The Staatsliedenbuurt where I lived had been visited by a member of parliament, who proclaimed it was, ‘no longer a part of the kingdom of the Netherlands. Authority has ceased to exist there; the laws of the squatters reign. Because of safety concerns, the police no longer patrol.’ Pragmatic negotiation had failed and so violence was the new consensus. The violent eviction of the Lucky Luijk squat had turned nasty. The squatters’ pirate radio station hacked into the city cable system to transmit news of the uprising. Hundreds of squatters took to the streets in direct confrontation with the authorities. For three days the streets were an orgy of violence, and my girlfriend and I roamed Amsterdam until the curfew closed the city down. Armoured cars patrolled the streets. I saw Bill the Wolf slowly walking like a revenant through coloured smoke and torn-up pavements. He looked just like a man walking his dog on a pleasant evening, oblivious to the war-zone all around him. He was singing!
Sometime later I went to hear Gregory Corso read his poems. He sat at a table with a bottle of Duvel and a pack of cigarettes, switching between the pairs of glasses hanging round his neck on string and bootlace. He read in a voice like a Times Square hustler, which is exactly what he was. And I realised, it wasn’t really his poems that I liked—if anything his poems were surprisingly conventional, formal, old-fashioned—it was the idea of him, that someone brought up in reform schools and orphanages, in Bellevue and the Tombs and the years in state prison, could discover poetry in jail. ‘To the angels of Clinton Prison, who, in my seventeenth year, handed me, from all the cells surrounding me, books of illumination.’ I was romantically—naively—in love with the idea that a street hustler, a drug addict, a thief could become a poet. If someone like that could be a writer then maybe I could too. His reading was electrifying, unruly and disruptive. He was Shelley and Rimbaud and Patti Smith rolled into one toothless ruin of a man.
When Bill’s boyfriend Harry went into rehab we moved downstairs into Harry’s place—the old electrical store littered with syringes and ampoules—where we inherited his dog Dullo and the fleas that lived on him. Bill seemed to grow old with loneliness, and the madness that had always simmered beneath his skin seeped up to the surface.
‘My body is burning,’ he said. ‘Their instruments are inside me. I am falling into oblivion. I am sixteen years of age. My parents are invisible. I am an orphan. I have no tomorrow. Not to believe. I misdirect Germans. They ask for the museum. I send them to the recycling. I have scattered flowers at memorials. All the pretty boys are ashes. My body is an experiment… When it ends I wander empty streets and everyone is dead… ’
I would write down the things he said and try and decipher them, and I realised they were coded recordings of war trauma, of terrible things that had happened to him in prison. The words came out of him like William Burroughs cut-up tapes and they were beautiful and ugly at the same time.
*
And then we moved away, to the relative peace and quiet of the Willemstraat where, apart from Alan Reeve, the Maoist provocateur and squatter activist having a shoot-out with cops in our back garden, everything settled down…
Bill the Wolf and Corso were bad influences; the lives they lived beyond the pale, the thoughts they had, the words they wrote, their complete disregard for convention and rules… all this was thrillingly delinquent and made me want to be imaginatively disruptive, to be unruly and troublesome. Even Amsterdam was a bad influence; its street life, its anarchic fervour, the whole riotous kaleidoscope of sensory and sensual derangement.
Later, back in Liverpool, to create a place to scavenge for ideas and stories I construct my strange arcades of sacred monsters. Sometimes I do this literally—I find a place with a unique psychic atmosphere. I know it when I’ve found it… it just feels like the right place, the place where the action is, where the fault line or disruption is, perhaps where the rain falls like the tiny bulbs in torches, where the night-shift kitchen porter feeds the fox. And then I make a kaleidoscope of this world in my imagination. And into this place the muses walk, the broken, the strange and wondrous characters, the outlaws and drinkers, the ones who do not compromise, the night owls wired to the moon. Gregory Corso once said that for him, ‘It comes, I tell you, immense with gasolined rags and bits of wire and old bent nails, a dark arriviste, from a dark river within.’
And when it was time to move on again we couldn’t find Bill to say goodbye to. People said he walked and kept on walking until he disappeared. And when he was gone Amsterdam was like a city when the carnival leaves town. We went to Berlin, to Barcelona, to Morocco, to Portugal, to Paris—back to Paris where the hypothermic journey began—and then I went home, to the city of chewing-gum paving stones, to Liverpool, with the disruptive spirit inside me now, and I began to write.