Ghost Milk: Calling Time on the Grand Project (55 page)

The confusion I felt, in this new place, was not simply a question of orientation:
where was the Pacific?
And why, setting off to find the poet Michael McClure’s house, above Berkeley, on my first visit to California, did I drive into Oakland with Kathy Acker’s stories of being flung from a car, after turning down a threesome with Gregory Corso and his pick-up, putting an edge on my attempts to ask for directions? Now, years later, we were caught in the same loop. As a tribute to
Vertigo
, we took the lift up the bell tower at the university, before hiking a long hot way, down a featureless avenue, to the antiquarian bookshop of a dealer who used to trawl the stock in our Hackney bedroom. He was ill, terminally ill, and the shop, stacked and dusty, promised hours of serious investigation. While I made a desultory pass at this, Anna took a chair, the only one in the place, and chatted to the man who was helping out. She asked for directions to the ferry; we wanted to cross the bay, before returning that evening for a reading McClure was giving with David Meltzer. I liked the sound of Jack London Square. But after misreading the first road sign, we plodded for hours in the wrong direction, deep into the projects, over railways, under elevated roads. A sheriff’s car cruised alongside us for a block or two. We jumped a bus, reached the point of embarkation, another stalled marine makeover: to find white-shirted Asians, with polished black shoes, playing cricket under the palm trees.

The managed schizophrenia of my approach to the Bay Area went back a long way, to a schoolboy, roomed in the unearned splendour of an Oxford college for a hockey festival, devouring Kerouac’s
The Subterraneans.
Nothing, superficially, could have been less subterranean than my surroundings, outfit or appearance. The slender Grove Press paperback, with its Golden Gate Bridge by Roy Kulman, supplied the outline of a city I had no intention of visiting. There was enough morbid ripeness, in those intense, free-flowing pages, to seduce a British adolescent operating within strictly proscribed limits. There was hot language, first and last, ahead of narrative. Kerouac’s prose was confessional, stalling or lifting away with unrepressed surges of memory, before plunging into melancholia and blockage. The tang of a forbidden thing, the sex act and all its sticky mysteries. Urgent conversations, ugly solitude. Bars, cheap hotels. The ocean.

And then I discovered that San Francisco was a fraud, the true story of
The Subterraneans
took place in New York. Kerouac’s junkie angel, Mardou Fox (travestied in the film version as the very white Leslie Caron), was a black woman called Alene Lee. The shift, coast to coast, allowed Kerouac to distance himself from a one-night stand with Gore Vidal. Despite these tricks, San Francisco gains a double identity, in the exorcism of past shame and the anticipation of future
Dharma Bums
visits. Kerouac’s Pacific-rim town defines itself as somewhere sympathetic to poets.
The Subterraneans
is poet-truth, uncensored; street details are noted at speed, or on speed, with intoxicated excitement. The synopsis, sold to his editors, is the excuse for a frenzied monologue: the poem Kerouac was too modest or too shy to deliver at the Six Gallery reading on Union and Fillmore; where, in 1955, Ginsberg launched
Howl
, in the company of Gary Snyder, Michael McClure, Philip Whalen and Philip Lamantia. Kerouac’s city of vagrants, giant sunflowers on docks by the railroad tracks, is animated by pill-fired New York psychodramas. Like Hitchcock, he takes what he needs. He makes a contribution. He invents a territory in which we are invited to lose ourselves.

When I met John Baxter, who was hard on the trail of Ballard’s junkyard, the stories behind the stories from which a mythology had been expertly manufactured, he put me right about Brigid Marlin’s unwelcome cameo in
The Kindness of Women.
I had misinterpreted that interview as thoroughly as I was now misinterpreting San Francisco. Scanning the 1991 novelfor a feisty female painter, I missed that characteristic Ballard sidestep, the episode with a prostitute called Brigid in a Canadian hotel room: a ‘strong-shouldered blonde, naked except for the silk stockings rolled down to the ankles’. And the revealing way that this cloned Ballard, in anticipation of his beloved Delvaux, finds himself ‘looking at Brigid’s reflection in the full-length mirror’.

Baxter told me that Ballard, unlike this celebrator of the kindness of women, never flew solo. He did his basic training and dropped out, having taken what he required from the experience, as from the dissection of corpses in Cambridge: a stock of potent metaphors. The lost painting that Marlin had resurrected – and improved, as John confirmed – had not been destroyed in the war. It had been recovered in Belgium. Thereby altering, at a stroke, the mystique of the duplicate. And the complex equation of Ballard’s infinitely revised forms of subverted autobiography. Much of the writing, Baxter told me, in those early days when a morning’s work was kick-started with a tumbler of whisky, was dictated into a tape recorder. The Shepperton author was not the anchorite with the pencil, depicted by Marlin in her portrait, but a suburban William Burroughs, doing the voices, testing the rhythms, over and over, to achieve flow. Rinsing hard, Ballard spat out pure gristle:
CUT THE WORD LINES. TALK TO MY MEDIUM
.

Prepared now for a return to Hackney, and eager to patch in Baxter’s information, I shut out a snippet of conversation overheard in the lobby of the Holiday Inn, as we waited for the minibus shuttle to the airport. ‘Flights cancelled.’ A German, collected from another hotel, confirmed the worst: a volcano in Iceland had erupted, throwing up a dust cloud and leaving the travel industry in a state of confusion and panic. They didn’t know how to spin this one and they reacted by doing nothing, closing down airports, falling back on the reflex stratagem of a clapped-out Nude Labour regime: no comment. The upbeat mode, responding to the latest disaster from the Olympic Park, was to rattle off statistics like a concrete poem. The statistics for Icelandic volcanoes were not encouraging. ‘Three months,’ said one of the check-in uniforms. ‘Three years,’ said another. ‘The last time this happened, volcanic activity went on for three years.’

In a few days, a week at the most, financial imperatives would begin to bite and the fuel-guzzling, dirt-farting tubes would be back in the air, come dust cloud, firestorm, terrorist outrage. The final word is always profit. The airline on which we were booked for our return to Heathrow had nothing to offer: no news, no compensation, no beds. A weary shrug. A booking can be made for next week, but it won’t be honoured. Acting promptly, we get a smaller room, right next to the lift, back in the Holiday Inn: at a higher price. There are five rooms left. Take it or leave it. Next move, the street. Eyes peeled for a Cormac McCarthy trolley.

The lobby was heaving and smelt strange, a sickly sweet blend of coconut oil, patchouli and burnt popcorn. My way to the hotel basement, where they kept the internet connection, was barred by a bearded woman with flawless skin. She was wearing a cut-off black T-shirt and her powerful arms and shoulders evidenced a strenuous iron-pumping regime. ‘I’m sorry, sir. No access without accreditation.’ She pointed to the board on which the day’s events were outlined: plenary session on cross-gender migration, demonstrations of knots useful in bondage, whips you can trust, one-on-one massage seminars, and a keynote costume orgy.

There had been a shift in delegates since we took the morning bus. The Christian fundamentalists with the lapel badges and threatening smiles had moved out and a regiment of amiable hardcore lesbians had captured the castle. Making every trip in the lift, every weaving passage through the lobby, a theatrical performance. Anna expressed her admiration for a pair of the more flamboyant boots on display and the seven-foot jarhead responded with a flush of pride, a conspiratorial wink. Paramilitary kit, stripped from some whimpering Bruce Willis, was much in evidence. Leather cowgirls. Cyber slaves. Barbarellas in see-through plastic sheaths. The lobby, before the evening festivities blossomed into the surrounding streets, was a wedding scene from a Genet brothel: kidney-crushing corsets, eye-popping cleavages, stilt heels. Hell’s Angel studs in impossible places. Streams of travestied and actual aircrew intermingled. Grounded pilots and tight-skirted hostesses dragged wheeled luggage alongside gash-mouthed Idaho librarians in fleecy Ballardian flight jackets. As the days rolled on, the hormonal reek of peanut-butter bodies and their pleasure seminars cooked up a microclimate that oozed into the cafés and bars on Polk Street, dives where traders were grateful to accept the custom of well-behaved tourists. Every ascent to our room was an adventure: we made polite conversation with one of the course leaders, a ponytailed black academic in
Midnight Cowboy
gear, carrying a supersized ebony dildo with the delicacy of a connoisseur coming home from an auction house with a bargain Giacometti.

‘You can’t write about this,’ Anna threatened. ‘They’ll never believe it. I’m not sure that I do. It’s not happening.’

I gave up my morning swims in the rooftop pool when the towels disappeared and the surface of the water was covered with an oily film in which you could make out the footprints of the previous night’s party. Rags of costumes, the shed skins of moonlighting superheroes, were draped over white plastic loungers. I scanned rooftops for the sniper from
Dirty Harry.
The washing machines in the laundry room had a horrible death rattle. Once started, you couldn’t turn them off. The only solution was to keep walking. Every day a different direction. Every night the hotel shuddered.

America, I decided before coming, would be about staying out of cars. We could hike or use public transport. After Texas, where a black limo, chauffeur in dark suit and dark glasses, met us at the airport with ‘When I’m done with you folks, I’m gonna come back for Elton John’, we stuck with the programme. There was a cab home, on our first night, when Anna, worn out by grandiose avenues, weird lighting schemes, unfamiliarity, felt ready to collapse. Our boutique Mansion Hotel, the driver revealed, used to be a drying-out clinic for junkies. He had done time there himself and recommended it. ‘They’re cool.’

I lined up with a row of dealers and conspiracy freaks nodding over their laptops in an internet café on Polk. Heathrow was shut down. Those who had taken, in panic, any flight out of the West Coast, found themselves camped on a terminal floor in Chicago or Boston. There was an invitation for me from the
Guardian.
Would I like to do a Hackney piece on how calm and quiet London was, basking in sunshine, without aircraft overhead? The city as it ought to be.

I remember Moorcock, in his
Letters from Hollywood
, telling Ballard how uneasy he was in San Francisco, where everybody he met thrust drugs at him, in the belief that he was the manifestation of his fictional mask: Jerry Cornelius, the dandy assassin. The city was so pleased with itself, he said, that it seemed to consist of nothing but societies for the preservation of defunct societies. He’s not wrong about that: the spray-painted surfaces of Haight Ashbury, the Xerox bohemia of North Beach, where tragic writers have become street names. In the Beat Museum (relic supermarket), they have a large sign:
FREE TO BROWSE
. They don’t object if you take a photo of the Neal Cassady automobile that is now definitively off-road and in the shop window.

The aspect that meant nothing to Mike, but which sustained me, was the sense of a town sympathetic to poets. They could perch for a time and make a contribution. Polk was where that astringent Objectivist George Oppen lived, a man who knew when to step back, to vanish into Mexico. He published nothing between 1934 and 1962. John Wieners wrote his first book,
The Hotel Wentley Poems
, in an area he described as ‘Polk Gulch’. He had a room above Foster’s Cafeteria. Poets picked up on traces and they were the traces, spoors of the real. The figures camped on rugs in doorways understood it perfectly. ‘The story is not done,’ Wieners protested. ‘There is one wall left to walk.’

Moorcock, in a conference hotel on Sutter Street, just up from Union Square, felt trapped by too much recycling, he couldn’t wait to get out. ‘An old friend of Linda’s has promised to show us who actually wears the peacock-feather suede cowboy hats sold in Carmel.’ He had only to drop around to check out the delegates at the Holiday Inn. ‘San Francisco makes me homesick,’ he said.

Back at the airport, after a week walking the territory, through Golden Gate Park to the Pacific, where Anna rushed forward to paddle, and round the headland through Lincoln Park to Golden Gate Bridge, where Kim Novak posed for the suicide jump she never made, nothing had changed: beyond the length and aggression of the queues. Information was a commodity. Nobody was flying anywhere. A state of limbo was confirmed.

I took Anna, who was beginning to feel the physical pain of her enforced separation from children and grandchildren, to the Ferry Building on Embarcadero. We sipped green tea and listened to tinkling wind chimes. My instinct was to find a boat. A ride across the bay to Sausalito would soothe our spirits. Hackney had never appeared so attractive. I thirsted for the canal path, London Fields, the lovely chaos of Ridley Road Market. Even the devastation of Dalston Lane would be welcome: as a symbol of honourable opposition by Bill Parry-Davies and his associates. But it was too late, we were banished. We had sold out to Texas. I think I knew there was no going back when two men in suits approached me after an event in the Round Chapel on Lower Clapton Road. They asked if I would stand for mayor against Jules Pipe. A hopeless business, as they admitted, in the face of a supremely efficient political machine. The Lib Dems didn’t care what my politics were, I would generate publicity and bring together a number of disaffected splinter groups. The sole pitch was public accountability. They spoke of numerous scandals they were unable to make known, because of the rules of council confidentiality: manipulated budgets, million-pound pay-offs hidden from ratepayers, everything you’d expect in a rotten borough. Clint Eastwood took over Carmel, I recalled, but I didn’t have a restaurant to promote.