I got
given a gig in Brighton by a London based agency who had seen me work on Carnerby
street.
I was living in a squat just off baker street and it contained all the romantic
masochism my young heart could handle.
I lived in a bare room on a bare mattress, inside an army surplus sleeping
bag with arms that allowed me to open the cans of baked beans and cartons
of milk that I lined next to my bed for survival
I would wake, check the window for drizzle, fumble with a can opener, drink
the bake beans from the can, wash them down with milk and go back to sleep
so an offer of work around x-mas was a comparative windfall .
I was transported out to Brighton with some other performers who were booked
by the same agency and we went into a small rented hall to entertain a group
of 70 or so office workers, whose sad function it was to drink as much alcohol
as was freely provided for them and then, using the freedom it gave them,
try to deposit their seed or gain some forlorn pleasure from simulating meaningful
relationships in the pursuit of genitalic friction. Woman with flushed defiant
pride in their perceived availability staring with glazed sexual aggression
at men who leaned over them manfully trying to finish sentences that some
deep recess told them was mandatory in the leg opening protocol passed from
father to son or locker room to locker room.Everyone was completely legless
and this one night a year was a highlight of their social calendar
It takes scenes of cumulative sadness on this scale to allow me even a chance
of comparative self esteem.
I tottered about dancing on my stilts, always careful to keep moving so as
to avoid any real engagement, watching with a cruel superior detachment as
the x-mas party descended into hell.After my contractual obligations were
over I made a point of obtaining as much alcohol as I could carry and on the
trip back to London I quaffed liberally and without mercy until I was dropped
off outside my squat, check in hand, bottles in pocket and a clinging desperate
need to obliterate the whirling darkness within.I succeeded. As I’m
sure did the party-goers on whom I projected my self pity.