Marlboro Nights

Marlboro Nights

MMVII/I

“Like a nightclub in the morning,
you’re the bitter end.
Like a recently disinfected shit-house,
you’re clean round the bend.
You give me the horrors,
too bad to be true.
All of my tomorrows are lousy ‘cos of you.”

John Cooper-Clark.

Chapter I : December.

I had spent most of the night kaffled adrape a table at Goa Spice, gagging for air and with all the economy of movement of a sloth.

He really was the Unity Mitford to my Hitler : an English beauty, previously untapped and exploited for purposes unbeknownst and evil to me. His friends hated me surely, I had wandered into their midst, their self-exalting antisocial lives with the precariousness of a butterfly, and had snatched him away like an eagle to a sheep. Their casual veneers and “whatever-makes-you-happy-makes-us-happy” façade was enough for him, but I soon realised it was farce, as did they. I was ephemeral to them, and surely the old crones were right in saying this, but only to the extent that even if I were not around for long, my contribution would be seen for a long time, and this defiance spurred the relationship on longer than any love or lust felt by the both of us. I crammed him into my mould of the perfect man, forced clothes upon and plagued him with pictures of the beautiful and the damned, Amy Winehouse and Blake Fielder-Civil ; fleeting creatures who represented the generation, and who when it snuffed would have nothing to feed off, retreating to their drugs or decaying like silent movie stars, whichever came first.

And if any further assurance was needed that I was no good, it was this. Sprawled over the table in the seat of honour, for all the world to see. I was a bastion of otherworldliness : they couldn’t understand the condition I was in, and this xenophobia towards someone high as a kite made their attitude towards me akin to if I had the plague. Toking isn’t contagious, but still they roused me with old wives inherent knowledge of rubbing my back to soothe me, making me talk, and getting me glasses of water. In truth a thousand clammy hands on my back didn’t help the situation, and four hoys and a regurgitated Cheese String later I was away.

I was smuggled in a long coat by two halves of a broken relationship, each one vying for my attention as if to get one up on each other, but I was nothing more than a rag doll, from what I remember anyway. A Catholic priest being foisted away into the night by other like-minded members of the populace, I left nothing behind but a burned out match and smouldering boulders of ash in the night.

Bonny Sedgwick was one of my dearest and most divine confidants in all the world. While others may think that I was the eurotrash of the outfit, she was surely the class behind it : the kind of girl who would one day, almost certainly would be one of Karl Lagerfeld’s muses, or perhaps in a different lifetime, a Warhol superstar. She infatuated me, other girls turned up to parties half drunk and wearing the average wardrobe staple of tee shirt and footless tights, but Bonny would appear, always fashionably late and with a mist of something unearthly permeating her vintage 70s cocktail dress and fur stole. She simply didn’t care what other people thought, and never was a bone of contention felt towards her, because she was frankly fabulous, a celebutante in a microcosm of short lived, and irrelevant affected eccentricity. She was a goddess to me, but what was more astounding was that in all my crudity, she appreciated me and took me under her wing, cutting a rug like a Studio 54 relic, with a more pious coke habit.

It was like there was a party in my head, and everyone was being sick, and logging onto MySpace I read the usual degenerate ingenuous epithets that go with Christmas : as inextricable as turkey, or A Christmas Carol. The demos had filled up my bulletin boards with constant reminders that there were X amount of sleeps until Christmas, a fact I was none too fussed about. I am of the opinion that, people return to a sense of naivety at the hint of winter festivity, because it is so much better when you’re a child. Not the candid memories that it holds, trying out your presents on Christmas morning, but the fact that up until you’re 13, you don’t have to buy anyone a fucking thing, or at least you’re not expected to anyway.

***
The whole affair was Oedipal-in-fucking-magnitude to me, the only words I could reconstitute from the sheer sordidness of it all. I peeked out my sky-light, toot in hand, pensive like some imagined Carrie Bradshaw in a Manhattan apartment. But as I once thought my sexploits were things of whimsy and of delight to be cackled over with the Bitches of Eastwick, the gravity of the circumstance hung around my neck like an albatross. I couldn’t deal with the absolute nausea I felt, it was uncanny, and I soon realise why the eff I had never been one to be in a relationship anyway, I realised with a coy, albeit unsettling sense of irony I’d been accosted by the karma police. Incarcerated with their gallows humour in one fell swoop, a move all too befitting my debauchery. The Marquis de Sade, and in deep moral turmoil in-fucking-deed.

The instigator in question was one of those people who you never really knew how you picked up. Ted, wandered into my life like most gayboys, through lines of subtle detective work and tenuous assumption, but he had sought me out, and even though I was seeing Unity, who was a close friend of his, he pursued me with a torrid rage that can only be attributed, and can only be a product of raging hormones. Suffice to say, he had been successful, as greed would have it I was a sucker for another grammar school boy, I wanted a collection, or at least a reputation. I won’t go into detail about what happened, it was a real eyewaterer even in my books, and half way through I had to concede some sense of conscience about it and leave. But now, as I looked back with a noir regret, I realised I never should have done it in the first place.

Now, picking at the empty skeleton of my bed, epiphany and metaphor bled into one another, nicotine into a white wall. I realised that as long as this fuckery continued, the only thing I would be getting from people, ultimately, was broken slats and hearts.

***

“I couldn’t resist him.
His eyes were like yours,
his hair was exactly the shade of brown.
He’s just not as tall,
but I couldn’t tell,
it was dark and I was lying down.
You are everything,
He means nothing to me,
I can’t even remember his name.
Why you so upset ?
Baby, you weren’t there,
And I was thinking of you when I came.”

Amy Winehouse

***
New Years Eve 2007/2008, and the furore that ensued were comic to say the least. Bonny and I rocked up, her uninvited, and I met with deathly silence and deadly eyes, in a complete sense of, well, array. As we made our grand entrance, which had been meticulously planned of course, I was greeted with the inebriated yells of the proletariat, the “who the fuck is she” ’s, being screamed at me six ways from Sunday. I even shocked myself with the tenacity of the situation; I had barely managed to scrape an invitation, and nonetheless had brought along the best dressed woman there, beehive and all. After everyone had got off my case, like white on rice, we just bathed in the ambience. Sedgwick flitted about an ethereal being, a fictional hostess and she topped up and plied others with drinks and food she had no right to, whilst I sat in artificial melancholy, sipping on babycham straight from the bottle and absorbing the whole Back to Black album an inordinate amount of times.

I was taken back to the warm up at Bonny’s house, the precursor to the night which in some opinion was more fun than the actual party. We dyed, styled, bleached, washed and preened and basked in her amazing and unique music playlists, belting out frank Sinatra, and some soothing Elvis whilst we worked. I recalled her sister, and extremely glamorous woman, taking me outside, offering me a Marlboro Red and making me assure her that if we were getting anything special in, that I should notify her immediately. I told her that Bonny wasn’t into that scene, but in retrospect I wish I had taken some Ketamine. Bonny has told me stories of her sister chasing the K-Hole, and subsequently vegetating in front of Alice in Wonderland, intoxicated and enthralled in Lewis Carrols allegory ridden nightmare. This party reminded me of every other bad party I’d ever been to, lightweights who’d had one snifter of a barman’s apron and had passed out for the rest of the night, in between vomiting of course. But one particular anecdote that rang true, was of one where me and my good friend Kay-Kay Caswell were attending to a girl who had passed out. I bandy the word ‘attended’ around with some licence, we merely smoked rollups over her limp body, like The Bride in Kill Bill, and waited for her parent/carer to come and collect her. I’d be damned if I got sick on my new winklepickers, so we casually threw an old blanket on her prostrate bulk, and waited on the driveway for her guardian or an ambulance, whichever came first. I remember Kay-Kay telling the formidable figure when asked if any drugs had been present at the soiree, that if there had been, we’d have taken them by now.

It was on this thought that I was struck with chilling déjà vu, and was brought back to the whole banal affair with a sense of gratis, and Bonny Sedgwick, who had obviously been plying loading herself up with drinks, as now decorating her Ronettes ‘do were the baubles from the proprietors Christmas tree, which has previously been put together with the military precision, of someone either who was extremely anal, or entirely neurotic. A tricolour business, it was nothing compared to the patchwork of sentimentality Jenny Nolan had slung upon or own tree, which was real, unlike this one. It was the kind of tree that, however many presents were underneath it on Christmas, could never be enjoyed by a child. It set the tone for the rest of the house, an alarming place that whilst seeming innocent, masked a catastrophic malignity. The house that fun forgot, I quipped later.

From there on in, the night was a blur. A fat girl was wearing an identical Burberry scarf as to one I had, and when I notified her, her face alit with drunken amour. This displeased me, I had intended on a sardonic note, I mean she was wearing it about her like some cheap some cheap Primani knock-off, so I knocked her off her pedestal again with a swift retribution, commenting that, of course I wouldn’t be wearing it again. Bonny was present, and at this she half-turned in a maelstrom of silent laughter, bent over and facing me, she called me the biggest bitch she’d ever met, as the girl stormed off as passé as she has come. But beside this and a few other Mini-adventures, I remember, or chose to forget the rest of the night. I was involved in a swiftly resolved fight over my close friends ex-woman and my tongue, an incident involving a pork pie, and of course some Unity Mitford related trouble, which resulted in a hastily finished rollup in the morning, and a stupid-o-clock hoy home, to cocktails at Bonny’s 60’s, Middle Eastern mansion, frozen in time and space.

Nothing was complete, and a massive raucous had been left behind, but in that one moment, enjoying cigarettes and Blue Lagoons in some secluded rendezvous, life was good.

“They were careless people, Tom and Daisy — they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made…”

The Great Gatsby