The flat. The living room, the phone cord unplugged. Do you know what would happen if I plugged it in?, the poet says. I'll get phonecalls, dozens of them! I'll get phone assaults from my friend the drunk.
He thought of him the other day, when he was walking past the tennis courts. A leather-jacketted drunk with a six pack in a plastic bag was wandering up and down the courts, asking for a light. Outside the courts, on the other side of a chain-link fence, children on BMXs laugh at the drunk. That's your dad, that is!, says one to the other. The children shout at the drunk, and the drunk shouts at the Indians playing tennis. Great shot!, he says. Love-thirty, he says. Say hello to your dad, says one of the kids.
It's began to rain. The Indians stop playing, and the drunk follows them out of the tennis court, and I see him close up. He's young, though his face is ruddy and hard. He looks happy, more than happy. Beatific, muttering to himself and smiling. Alright, mate, he says to me. Have you got a light? No light, I tell him, and he walks away, then turns and gives me the kind of wave you might get from passing royalty. He's king of the afternoon, I thought to myself, and we - the Indians, the kids on their bikes - are his subjects.
That's when I remembered my friend the drunk, the poet says. He's king of the night, king of the late night, holed up in his flat in another part of the city, already drunk. Drunk and getting ready to go out to make trouble. To stagger out of his door, full of aggression, and steer himself up to the drug dealers of Hulme and Moss Side. He's a romantic, my friend the drunk, the poet says. He sees himself as a beat poet, as a kind of seer.
A few years ago, I moved into a dry house - there was no alcohol there, no drugs. We all had our troubles, the poet says. I had mine, though it's none of your business. I took the room of the guy who became my friend the drunk, which was still full of his things: the plays he'd tried to write. A kind of journal he kept. His books on new age religions - on shamans and astral projection and the like. His Kerouac and Ginsberg. His Vonnegut and Heller. He'd been evicted, because he'd started drinking again, my friend the drunk.
It was a dry house, a calm house. We were there to put our lives together again in peace. There to slump in the great sofas, and sit out in the back in the old stable, smoking our cigarettes by the beheaded statue of an old saint.
That's where I'd sit with my friend the drunk a year later, when he moved back in, hoping, ever hopeful, to keep off the booze. I gave him his old room back and moved to another, vacated because another tenant - another Scot, like my friend the drunk, a worker on the oil rigs - had started drinking again and was threatening to rape me.
My friend the drunk arrived with his mess of possessions. He had joined the Hare Krishnas recently, and been expelled. He still had his saffron robe. He had been expelled from the Buddhists, too, but had kept a collection of Buddhist tracts and some Japanese art prints. Two big bin bags of dirty clothes. Beanies. Hippy gear. A box of LPs. A broken turntable. He'd pawned his hi-fi, he said.
He wanted to get back to his writing, he said, my friend the drunk. He wanted some time to think, some peace. He hadn't had much peace, of late. What had happened? I knew from others he'd been arrested several times. The police had come to our door more than once, my friend the drunk having giving them our address as his permanent residence. He'd been bothering people in a bar. He'd been driving under the influence. The police would take him into their cells for the night, and release him blinking into the morning.
He used to phone us now and again, my friend the drunk, filling the answering machine with his sing-song. We ignored him. He drawled. He accused us of things. He thanked us. He asked whether we were his friends. He said we were his friends, and that he knew he could count on us. He drawled. His voice filled the house. Sometimes he would appear, at the back door rather than the front, banging on the window, and my landlord would give him a couple of twenty pound notes from the rent I'd just paid him, and my friend the drunk would stumble out again into the sun.
*
Once, a long time ago, my friend had been an environmentalist. He'd dropped out of university and went to defend the hatching places of turtles on a Greek beach. There was a documentary made about him in the Netherlands. Later, when he'd moved back in, we watched it together, my friend as a young man with a beard, a bearded Adonis, speaking with great earnestness about the threat of tourism to the Greek ecosystem.
It was Germans, he told me. The great fat Germans with their beachtowels. The newly hatched turtles couldn't move for Germans and for beachtowels. How could they find their way to the sea? And sometimes the Germans sat on the turtle eggs that lay buried in the sand. What a fate for the young sea turtle, my friend said, to be squashed by a great fat fucking German!
So he moved back in, with his pile of stuff. My landlord gave me two twenty pound notes: take him out, he said to me. So we went out to the Chinese restaurant and ate for the first time in twenty years. He ate all the meat on the menu! And my friend told me how he'd decided to become a yuppie, to shave off his beard and buy a suit. And that's what he did: he bought a suit and shaved; he was handsome, he didn't look like a drunk; his olive skin was clear and unlined. Older than me, he looked younger, bright and strong and handsome.
Months passed. He ran a computing business from one of the rooms in the cellar, and we played network Quake there on the weekend, chasing each other's avatars through gloomy corridors. We downloaded Stan Ridgeway and Wall of Voodoo songs and sang along. We downloaded Ghost Riders in the Sky and Islands in the Stream, and sang along to them, too. We watched the X-Files and the WWF. We formed a society called Friends of the Kitchen. We sat out by the headless saint and chatted about life.
Months passed. My friend took the upstairs flat, and moved his office up there. But now he was away from us, away from the household who would always eat together every evening. He began to drink, smuggling bottles of wine into the house. He no longer appeared at meals. Soon, he hardly came down at all during daytime.
You could hear him moving about upstairs. You could ring him, on the internal phone. He didn't want to speak, he said. He was busy. He would only come downstairs at night, when everyone was asleep. At 3 AM or 4 AM, he'd sit out in the outhouse to have a smoke. So he was evicted, and took his possessions downstairs in boxes, loading them up into a van.
The police visits began again. He had been caught drink driving. They stopped the car and he came after them with a golf club. He was going out to murder someone, he me later. It was lucky he'd been arrested. He was full of murderous rage.
He was sent down for a year. He staggered; they held him. They led him down from the courts. They drove him off first to Strangeways, and then to a low security prison. He asked us to send him a package every month. He wanted stacks of FHMs, he said. They were a prison currency, he said.
Later, he told me he passed his time smoking dope in his cell. They all did. He was tough. He could look after himself. No one bothered him. The days passed, almost exactly alike. And then, six months on, he was let out.
Fresh air! He exclaimed, when I ran into him on the street. There's nothing like it! He seemed happy. He had great plans. He'd revive his business, he said. Revamp it. He'd expand into new areas. He was going to throw himself into work.
For the third and final time, he was allowed to move back into the house, although not into the flat or the cellar. He was to stay in a single room, which was to be his bedroom and his office. And we preferred, we said, if he joined us for dinner. So in he moved again, bringing his things up the stairs. His books. His records, though he still had no hi-fi. His clothes.
He painted the walls of the room a disgusting purple, and pinned up pornographic pictures of Czech models. He set up what was left of his computers in his new room, though he left them turned off. He was sick of working, he says. He went on benefits like the rest of us, and he and I would go out walking along the river.
*
In those days, which I remember as an eternal summer, the last of the good times, we used to be visited by a bedraggled cat, whose owners had bought a dog. Henry - that's what we called him - used to sun himself in our garden, rolling fully stretched in the dust.
His long white fur was always matted and dirty. His nose, too, was flecked with dirt. There was dirt round his eyes and his ears were torn ragged from a hundred fights. You could feel his spine when you stroked his back. Great tufts of white fur sprouted irregularly from his tail. He was sticky, too - never quite clean, although sometimes my friend would comb out all the dirt from his coat. Then Henry would stand purring in his glory; he was handsome again, proud and young. He stood up and arched his combed-out tail, a ragged plume.
Henry was my friend's cat, really; or my friend was Henry's man. Cat and man recognised an exile in one another. Both were loners, really - they had their own problems - but for a time they enjoyed the luck of a house that welcomed them. Henry was old, and these were his last months.
I wasn't there when my friend discovered Henry's body stretched out on the kitchen floor, and I wasn't around when he started drinking again. By the time I'd returned - I was visiting my family in the South - he moved out for the last time. He'd got a flat in the suburbs and lay drunk on the sofa all day, drinking.
At night, he would head towards Hulme and Moss Side, looking for trouble. He smashed a troublemaker's face in with a bicycle U-lock, and won the respect of a high up dealers. They smoked crack together in Platt fields at dawn. How do I get out of this life?, the dealer asked him. But he wanted to get into it, said my friend.
He addicted himself to crack deliberately. He was bored, he said. He wanted an experience. Now they would hangout, my friend and his dealer, watching films together in his flat and taking puffs on the crackpipe.
They visited the crack houses of Levenshulme, smoking with the others. He was liked, my friend; he was generous. The Gentleman, they called him. He liked it. He had a street name. It was pretty fucking cool. He'd buy crack for the whole house, and they would watch University Challenge together and he'd get all the answers right.
Prostitutes would sit on his knee, and sometimes he'd go back off with them into the bedroom with a painting by Stubbs on the wall. He was the one who identified it as being by Stubbs. They liked horses, the crack whores, my friend thought. They reminded them of their lost innocence or something.
*
I've long since moved away, but my friend the drunk still rings me. Write down my exploits, he said, I want it all written down. He intended to write himself, he said. Have I read Trainspotting?, he asked. We spoke about Burroughs; he loved Kerouac and for him Leonard Cohen was the greatest of all drunks. Then he turned to the music he had loved as a child when he lived with his divorced mother. They would listen to Kris Kristofferson and Glenn Campbell. Now when he phones he sometimes holds the phone to the speaker. Not a word except, listen!
The last time he rang, he was very meek. He had no friends left, he said. No one rings him. Instead, he has to ring them, and he knows they don't trust him. We speak of our great mutual friend. She doesn't trust me, he says. It was 11.00; I was tired. You don't want to speak to me anymore, he said. Alright, I'll just go. I said, it's good to speak to you, I'll give you a ring sometime. He said, yeah in six months or something. I put the receiver down and he is still speaking, half-resentful, half-aggressive. And I'll come and see you, he says.
He speaks of the woman in the burkha next door. She has beautiful eyes, he says, but it's not enough. He plays cricket with her sons and sometimes she invites him in. It's not enough, he says, but her eyes are beautiful. Write that down, he says, everyone should know about me. He always asks for that - for his life to be recorded and for me to record it. One day he will write it all down, he says, but in the meantime, I should record it and share it with others.
He speaks about himself, his business. It's always about to fail, but there is always hope. He speaks about golf, and then football in which he knows I have no interest. He speaks about music, and finally, just when I show signs of leaving, he asks me about myself. But he's not interested; he cuts in, he becomes aggressive. You think you know everything, he says, but I'm pretty clever. I may not be as clever as you, but I have a great general knowledge, he says. Then a name I don't recognise. Do you remember that name?, he says. And then, it was from that game of Trivial Pursuits we played, do you remember? The pole vaulter.
I was a legend, he says, and I'm still a legend. Are you going to remember, he says, are you going to write this down?, he says. I'll write it down eventually, he says, like Burroughs, do you remember that line, "Me and the Sailor were working the yard", he says. You should keep a record, he says. Do you remember when we went out to that restaurant when I first moved in, he says, when you made me eat meat? You should write it down, he says, it would make a good story. Someone should write it down, he says, it's worth remembering. You think you're so clever, he says, but you should try and live my life. Go on, write it down. That'll give you something to write, he says.
You wouldn't last a minute inside, he says. X. (the dealer) respects me, and do you know why?, he says, because I'm hard. It goes back to when I was inside, he says, I handled myself. I used to trade cigarettes and FHMs, he says. They respected me, he says, the lads. I used to trade cigarettes with them, he says, they were so stupid. Write it down, he says, you should write about real things, he says. I'll give you something to write about, he says. You wouldn't last a minute in the crackhouses, he says, but they respect me. I talk to crack whores about Stubbs, he says, what do you think of that? Write it down, he says. You should write about real life, he says. I'll tell you about real life, he says.
Did you think crack whores like Stubbs?, he says. She didn't know it was Stubbs, he says, I told her it was Stubbs. She showed me a painting and I said, it's Stubbs, he says, and they were really impressed. They had this painting and they thought it was an original, they thought it was a real Stubbs, "is it worth anything?" they said, he says. So I picked it up and looked it over very carefully and I said, I - think - it's a copy, he says. But they were very impressed, he says. I always buy enough crack to go round, he says. We all smoke it, he says. It's not like you think, he says, actually it's not that addictive, he says. Not like drink, he says.
You should write this down, he says. Real life, he says. Not middle class life like yours, he says. And I'll tell you what, they were so tight in that house, he says. They wouldn't buy proper Coke, only Panda cola. They used to buy Panda cola because it was cheap, he says, it was really funny. I told them to buy real Coke, he says. It's the real thing, I told them, he says. They didn't know how to take it, he says. They're not used to having the piss taken out of them, he says. You couldn't have got away with it, but they thought I was okay. They trusted me, he says. I'm quite hard, he says. You know me, I can handle myself, he says. One day I'll write it all down, he says. Have you read Trainspotting?, he says. Like that, he says. You wouldn't understand it, he says, it's in Scots. I love bagpipes, he says, they make me cry. They remind me of the old country, he says. You never cry, do you?, he says. You don't know anthing about life, he says, real life. It's going on under your nose, he says, and you know nothing about it.
Stubbs, he says. "Me and the Sailor were working the hole", he says. It doesn't give you enough, the burkha, he says, you can only see her eyes, he says. But she has pretty eyes, he says. But it doesn't give you enough, he says, you can't see what she's like, he says. I play cricket with her lads, he says, and she makes me dinner, he says. She likes me, he says, but then I'm a good looking bloke, he says. Always was. Not that you aren't good looking, he says, but I was the good looking one, he says. It's because I'm tall, he says. Women like tall men, he says. Can you hear that?, he says, it's Leonard Cohen, he says. The greatest drunk of them all, he says. Can you hear that?, he says. It's Kris Kristofferson, he says, Sunday Morning Coming Down.
No one trusts me anymore, he says. You don't trust me, do you?, he says. I have been drinking a bit, he says. Business isn't going too well, he says. Haven't worked for months, he says. Been playing golf, though. You have to play golf for business, he says. Anyway, he says, I'll let you get on. I know you don't want to hear from me, he says. You've never rung me. How many times have you rung me? Twice?, he says.
Stubbs, though, he says, I knew you'd like that story. Write it down. I'll write it down one day. I'm reading again, he says, I knew you'd approve, he says. Vonnegut, he says. Have you read him? he says. Hilarious, he says. And I know you don't like Kerouac, but Dharma Bums, it's great that, he says. "Me and the Sailor were working the hole", do you remember that?, he says. Burroughs, he says. Anyway, I'll leave you to it, I'll let you get on, he says, I can see you want to go. What are you doing? Turn the television on, he says. It's Dylan, he says. He's great, Dylan, he says. Shall I tell you who the new Dylan is?, he says. Shall I tell you?, he says.
You don't know anything, he says. I've got the answers, he says, I've lived, he says. I've seen life, he says. Stubbs, though, funny that, isn't it?, he says. But I won't keep you, I know you've better things to do, he says. You never want to talk to me, he says. No one wants to talk with me, he says. I know I ring too often, he says. Three times a night? Yes, sometimes, but I just want it to be like the old days, he says. Do you remember?, he says. No one has a sense of humour anymore, he says. Witchita Linesman, he says, listen!