Read One Three One: A Time-Shifting Gnostic Hooligan Road Novel Online
Authors: Julian Cope
One Three One: A Time-Shifting Gnostic Hooligan Road Novel (16 page)
10pm, Sunday June 11th, 2006
Opposite Club, Santa Cristina, near Paulilátino
I was standing with my head inside a video booth, grooving like a fucker to one of my own ancient hits. After that brush with the Hertzog Girls, I’d needed validation, and quick. So I’d left Anna with the Separatistas kicking up a stink at the doorway of Opposite and sneaked inside for some early research. Besides, ‘Anastasia Anaesthesia’ by the Low Countries had always been one of my favourites. Good video, too. I was
so
young! Anyway, it was the low headroom of the booth which had really dragged me in here. Built to accommodate much shorter Mediterranean people, the booth allowed me to people-watch stooping safely and surreptitiously. In the booth next to me, a tiny longhaired Japanese guy was watching Deep Purple’s 1971
Top of the Pops
performance of ‘Fireball’, sampling the opening snare rolls with a hand-held microphone. That’s the single version, you cunt. You can tell from Gillan’s shite lip-synching.
Hidden inside my booth, I was far enough away from Anna to be very impressed with Opposite. If this is an illegal club, then lawless is the only way forwards. Not yet even officially open for another three days, Opposite was as fabulous a temple to the rock business as I’d ever encountered. Great drinks, great sound system, great lights, great internet café, great smells, even great carpets – the whole thing was done with incredible aplomb. Next to the video and listening booths, an elevated row of ten aircraft seats skirted the edges of two main walls, each seat wired with
its own headphones. A shorthaired Japanese dude currently sat mid-row, twitching violently under the headphones, his mouth moaning along to the inaudible singer and his short legs kicking out in front of him. Joe Cocker fans. When this place finally opens, all ten seats bopping? Mercy!
Thus far, the club’s bouncers had managed to contain the outraged hubbub of the Separatistas, corralling them all at the front entrance. But the MC’s unexpected announcement that the house band would be commencing their first set in a couple of minutes was clearly a step too far. Now the dam burst, and no amount of hired hardmen could hold back the flood of protesters. For these ardent Oristano Separatistas, 10pm rocking round Santa Cristina way was not what the Old Gods had in mind. Leader Angela Solarussa headed her troupe, dancing in and out of roadies and technicians, pulling plugs out randomly and tripping over a synthesizer, which set off a massive
Whoooosh!
across the P.A. Unfortunately, this afforded the strangely outfitted MC the opportunity to jump on stage dramatically.
MC
: Ladies and Gentlemen, please welcome Nurse With Mound!
But as the band roared into life, their unholy combination of dual vocals and Franklin D. Roosevelt samples stopped everyone in their tracks. ‘We apologise for nothing!’ screamed Nurse With Mound. Bouncers, bartenders, Separatistas, every one of us clasped our hands to our ears in horror. ‘We apologise for nothing!’ It was those two little Japanese guys I’d seen hanging out earlier. ‘We apologise for nothing!’ Then the MC removed his massive bunny ears, placed them ceremoniously upon one of the band members’ heads, and legged it off the stage. ‘We apologise for nothing!’
Whoa, now I even recognised
that
guy! In a microsecond it had all made sense. That was Bugs Rabbit! This rock club was the brainchild of none other than Bugs Rabbit! Yup, Spackhouse Tottu’s Machiavellian Mr Fixit was behind this entire zany enterprise. Bugs Rabbit, hmm. After the chaotic ending to Italia ’90, he’d entirely evaporated from my consciousness. But he’d certainly done well for himself by the looks of Opposite’s forthcoming line-up of performers – Make Fuck, Wire, Uri Gallagher, Manicured Noise, Spackhouse Tottu themselves – all were coming to play for Bugs. Now, even the pummelling music of Nurse With Mound could not keep me away from the fascinating rock’n’roll photographs pervading Opposite’s walls. Indeed, they were alive with the career images of their great club owner, many blown up into poster form or otherwise reproduced as good old 8″ × 10″ press shots – very Shaftesbury Avenue. So while bouncers and protesters alike sought refuge from Nurse With Mound on the slip road outside, I checked out our hero’s not-so-chequered career. Here was Bugs on Van Der Graaf Generator’s stage in Rome, sitting at Peter Hammill’s clavinet no less, replete with 1972 backstage pass. Very nice. Here was Bugs in 1973 with Klaus Schulze, depping for Steve Winwood on Stomu Yamash’ta’s
Go
. There was Bugs at the Vox Continental organ back in summer 1967, pumping out psychedelic soul with Cágliari’s Bilbo Hobbit. And this grinning fool sitting at the piano next to Sardinian soul singer Urna Washington? That was the seventeen-year-old Bugs on the rainy November ’66 day that Urna had recorded his classic song ‘Come Back and Haunt Me’, subsequently a worldwide smash. And here was Bugs in 1995 posing with the strongman from his new stage musical. Chunky. Throughout this visual feast, the unstinting Nurse With Mound assaulted us with song after song, each no
more than half a minute in length. These guys will be history long before the Grand Opening! I wandered over to the bar, where I ordered a Bubbling Bloemfontein for its name alone.
BARMAN
: Bar’s not open yet, mate. No licence.
ROCK
: What?
BARMAN
: Not for another three days. Until then, you have to buy a CD or vinyl LP from the record shop and get a Bubbling Bloemfontein free with it. Sorry about that.
ROCK
: (
Eyeing Nurse With Mound shrinkwrapped CD on the bar
) How much is that house band’s album? (
Slowly, almost silently mouthing the album title
)
The Compleat Slap-Your-Tackle Home Demonstrator.
(
Grimacing
) That’s a bit much. Is it cheap?
BARMAN
: Yeah it’s cheap. Shrewd move, man. Only three euros
and
a free Bubbling Bloemfontein. Besides, Nurse With Mound are well collectable back home in NZ. Even Egg’s solo records do well. Make sure you get them both to sign it.
But as I stared at the drinks list, I suddenly became extremely disconcerted. For my delicious Bubbling Bloemfontein was merely part of a greater whole, a series. Had I known earlier, I could have picked from a Mafeking Makeover, a Shady Ladysmith, a Pretorian Guard or even a Taste of Old Cape Town. Outrageous. Here were another bunch of South African place names staring me in the face. Fuck me, even bigger than that. For right there behind the bar was that same peculiarly angled Sardinian map that I’d spied upon Barry Hertzog’s prison wall. On closer examination, however, a simple off-kilter map of Sardinia this was not. No indeed. For superimposed over this great Mediterranean island was a ghost map, a ghost map of South Africa. What was I seeing here? I’d landed in Alghero – so
why did it here say Mafeking? And why was Cágliari labelled up as Cape Town? What precisely was the meaning of this creepy new link to the omnipresent Hertzog? I shuddered but I kept on staring at the map. Where next for the ubiquitous Judge? Hertzog rent-a-car? His’n’Hertzog guru weekends? I hated it. But it compelled me. Unsurprisingly, the Hertzog Girls materialised as though out of nowhere, the smaller one now wearing a bandage on her hand. Due to repetitive strain disorder from too much MSN chatter, according to her friend, who was herself clearly exhausted from tonight’s frenetic events and too testy to respond to my combative jibing.
ROCK
: How about rock’n’roll as an alternative way of life to Christianity?
WENDY
: (
Irritated
) What? Rock’n’roll? And why not then include fire eating and other old-timer witchdoctor acts? Will you only celebrate the decadence of your streets? Wake up to a new independence of spirit.
Outside in the gloaming, I could see the evening drawing to a close through sheer anger and frustration, as Anna and the Separatistas took it upon themselves to kick seven shades of shit out of a long line of huge illegally placed drainage pipes leading away from Opposite up the slip road towards the 131. And as I burst out into the hot evening air, I was accosted by the now-hobbling Separatista Angela Solarussa, who had in her fury fallen from atop one of the largest pipes. She held out her hands to me.
ANGELA
: Can you imagine some Capitalist bastard opening a Hard Rock Café opposite your Stonehenge?
Rock, don’t answer that. Or at least think about it first. But frankly? No. Niet, non, nil, zero, no chance. It would not happen. Behind Angela, Anna was deep in a mobile phone conversation. She waved at me and pointed at her phone: ‘My dad.’ Then, she took my hand and we hurried out of there, back under the 131 to our Facel Vega still parked up at Santa Cristina. But tonight Anna could not be appeased.
ANNA
: (
Indignant
) See that? Now, even
we both
come to the sacred well but spend most time at Opposite. It’s not right. I’m the angriest woman I have been in a very long time. Also I am dead beat. Asleep on my feet. So I made a new plan with my dad. Tonight we two can both sleep most quickly at the Iloi Agriturismo. It’s beautiful and maybe fifteen minutes only from here. Tomorrow at midday we will meet my dad Giampaolo to exchange cars.
PRISON WRITINGS
Midnight, Monday June 12th, 2006
Iloi Agriturismo, overlooking Lake Omodeo
How unsubtle do
I
feel? Blimey, I’m hardly myself at all. What a fidget I was, thrashing about in the massive double bed, pointlessly attempting to grab some kip. Why not just accept it? I was sitting bolt upright totally sorted, staring out through the Agriturismo’s big picture window on to the moonlit Lake Omodeo, a full half-mile below me. Wrapping myself in an improvised white sheet toga, I struggled over to the window and stared. ’Struth, youth, such vistas still exist? I grinned and sank into an ephedrine haze, still buoyed up to the max by my brief headless phase at Goronna. But my free decanter of red wine – supplied with the room and grown on these very slopes of Iloi – had most certainly contributed to my current feelings of psychic splendour. And the moonlight was so full as to be blistering my skin as it pulled at me, hauling out my reluctant tidal self, badgering me, needling me to contemplate my current fortunes, which were many-faceted and all Far Out. Back home in the UK, my everyday need to score is always so pressing that it was now feeling somewhat peculiar being so, well, chronically replete. These regular visits to the great Doorways of Sardinia were really keeping my pecker up.
But like it or not, my thoughts kept returning to those weird Hertzog Girls and their obsessive quoting of page numbers. Highly impressive, I had to admit. So for want of any better strategy, I retrieved my copy of the Judge’s
Prison Writings
from
my bag and attempted once again to make either head or tail of it – one or the other would most likely do me. Like pulling teeth it was reading his book on the plane. Put me in even more of a stupor. But that was before I’d clocked that his Tourette ranting about Half Man Half Biscuit was gaining him devoted female followers. Now I wanted to know why, and fast. So I began once again at the first chapter, and – despite that highly intimidating title – read slowly and carefully.
Chapter One: Why I Am Your Judge, Western Europe
I was born in Groningen, Netherlands, in the sunrise of 1945, as the darkness lifted across the Western Hemisphere. I laugh. I was fathered by a brave Englishman, a Liverpool lawyer called Edward Hertzog, who gave me his name as he gave his life against Nazism. They shot him in the head in Vichy France in the last days of the war. I hear the shot still. I was mothered by Wendy Dawn, the youngest daughter of Groningen writer Femke Dawn, but the Nazi scorched earth policy had laid such waste to our North Netherlands that Mother Wendy died of bloodloss during my arrival.
Raised by aunts and uncles who loved me, I grew up in Drenthe’s lost North Netherlands too near to our Torturers’ border and impossible still to defend. So throughout my post-war childhood, I stalked and observed the Border Germans, always careful to remember that the Children of Nazis might revert at any time. I loitered around at their Hamburg rock and roll clubs, okay for a week at a time, watching with suspicion while they grew their hair and danced away the memories of Jewish forced
marches. I secretly gloried in my Liverpool place on earth, even though until my eighteenth year it was no more than some Celto-Viking backwater. And when the Beatles shone an international light upon my beloved back water, never again would I permit its importance to slide or return to the UK sidelines where for so long it had been forced to malinger.
In Groningen, my Liverpool roots being well known, I pretended not to be quite so obsessed with my ancestral home on the Celtic Sea, and I affected a love for the Animals and the Rolling Stones, which led me directly into Black America and the soul of Detroit and Stax. There, from the African-American perspective, I learned more of my own people than from any book since the great Hendrik Van Loon published his defining text
The Story of Mankind,
or since C. S. Lewis propped up the whole of European thought with his prophetic
Mere Christianity
. For I saw that African Americans were striving for what we White People already had: that which we too easily parcelled up and gave away.
I am a Mind Child of Malcolm X. I am a Free Child of Boerish extract. I am a Love Child of 1960s Liverpool. I am not the media’s Immoral Springheel Jack that ‘corrupted’ Italia ’90. I am your only hope for the West. GOD HELP YOU ALL. Is there a man among you who would stand against Vichy Mindwash? Is there a woman among you who would trust your man to handle your future? Is this not the time for Personal Responsibility? If not you and yours marching in the street, then Me and Mine shall be doing it for you. Artists, DJs, poets, spray-gun vandalizers. So you will only celebrate the decadence of your streets?
Then Me and Mine will Be The Law and judge accordingly. And in stout defence of your Reticence, I now must take up cudgels, Western Europe.
Fucking hell, this all sounded very much like the Judge Barry Hertzog who had so loathed me just yesterday afternoon up at Florinas Penitentiary. Full of defiant declarations and fist-clenching vengefulness, the Judge offered only his side of the fence or the deep blue sea. Like Cromwell’s beheading of Charles I, Hertzog similarly regarded the death of Hitler as having been our own opportunity for a Year Zero. But from his words in
Prison Writings
, Hertzog was clearly emphatic that our new beginnings should be achieved only by employing almost all of those same familiar Christian building blocks. His was a post-war swastikaphobic Lutheran Fear-trip and Malcolm X was his Haile Selassie. And all I could hear were the Hertzog Girls’ voices in everything I read.
Chapter Two: God Wants You In Church Often
‘
Reality, in fact, is usually something you could not have guessed. That is one of the reasons I believe in Christianity. It is a religion you could not have guessed. If it offered us just the kind of universe we have always expected, I should feel we were making it up.’
C. S. Lewis,
Mere Christianity
, page 33
Here we are White People very new to the earth. We have vigour about us forced upon us by cold weather and hardships. Scientists suggest blue eyes are a response to the dazzling sunlight upon snow. So now I shall remind
you all of how we northerners got stuck up here. Remind you? Yes, for this tragedy I tell now is a story that only your most aged soul remembers. If it sounds far-fetched at times please just remember that C. S. Lewis quote above.
The true story of the White People and how we got here was only first revealed in 1965, by the African-American prophet Malcolm X, whose autobiography explained it in great detail. ‘Then, the first humans, Original Man were a black people. They founded the Holy City Mecca,’ writes X. However, exactly 6,600 years ago, after the creation of ‘the specially strong black tribe of Shabazz, from which America’s Negroes, so-called, descend,’ an evil scientist named Mr Yacub planned his revenge against humans. According to X, ‘Though he was a black man, Mr Yacub, embittered towards Allah now, decided, as revenge, to create upon the earth a devil race – a bleached-out, white race of people.’
Brother X goes on: ‘Mr Yacub, to upset the Law of Nature, conceived the idea of employing what we today know as the recessive gene structure, to separate from each other the two germs, black and brown, and then grafting the brown germ to progressively lighter, weaker stages. The humans resulting, he knew, would be, as they became lighter, and weaker, progressively also more susceptible to wickedness and evil. And in this way, finally he would achieve the intended bleached-out white race of devils. He knew that it would take him several total colour change stages to get from black to white. Mr Yacub began his work by setting up a eugenics law on the island of Patmos.’
Even though Mr Yacub lived to the ripe old age of 152, he ‘never saw the bleached-out devil race that his procedures
and rules created. A two hundred year span was needed to eliminate on the island of Patmos all of the black people – until only brown people remained. The next two hundred years were needed to create from the brown race to the red race – with no more browns left on the island. In another two hundred years, from the red race was created the yellow race. Two hundred years later, the white race had at last been created. On the island of Patmos was nothing but these blond, pale-skinned, cold-blue-eyed devils – savages, nude and shameless; hairy, like animals, they walked on all-fours and they lived in trees.’
But so savage were White People that ‘within six months’ time, through telling lies that set the black men fighting among each other, this devil race had turned what had been a peaceful heaven on earth into a hell torn by quarrelling and fighting. Finally the original black people saw that their sudden troubles stemmed from this devil white race that Mr Yacub had made. They rounded them up, put them in chains. With little aprons to cover their nakedness, this devil race was marched off across the Arabia desert to the caves of Europe.’
At first, I read Brother X’s words with derision. For I never had heard of this story before. Standing back and viewing it with the open mind of the truth seeker, though, I recognised a kernel of reality. For, as C. S. Lewis writes on page 33 of
Mere Christianity
: ‘It just has that queer twist about it that real things have.’
The Old Testament described The Fall of Mankind. But as most Christians see that as a Jewish account of things, they tend to overlook its roots, forgetting that nothing should
be overlooked in the quest for the truth. Who knows? Perhaps the Jews – being nomads and slaves for much of their history – had from time to time been persuaded by outside forces to modify their beliefs. Certainly the Jews’ precarious cultural position combined with their uppity belief system would have made them at all times – despite their staunchest efforts to avoid the contamination of their Word – targets of enforced religious change.
Perhaps the wrong-headed ideas of Mr Yacub’s White People had butted in successfully at some time during their successful 6,600-year reign. Perhaps the Jews’ Old Testament was merely borrowed or stolen from even earlier times. First-hand, second-hand, even third- or fourth-hand. Fifth-hand even. However I considered it, I could not ignore The Old Testament any longer. So I dived in and read it voraciously and thoroughly. I was not disappointed.
Above all, the contents of
Prison Writings
made a coherent argument for keeping the Judge incarcerated as long as possible. So what if Malcolm X had believed that the white races had been created as a Cosmic Joke against the rest of humanity. I think perhaps I’d suspect something similar if my own people had been the chronic victims of such hate crimes. But then, unlike the Judge, I’d never had the meanest bunch of jackbooting Neo-Pagans of all time trampling through my democracy. And neither had any aunties of mine been forced to shag Nazis in exchange for food parcels, so what did I know? I closed up
Prison Writings
and laid it face down on the floor. Where to next, mate? Is it all backwards from here? The Koran? The complete lyrics of Cat Stevens? Now, as the 1am moonlight cast long shadowy fingers across the waters of distant Lake Omodeo, my
mind bulged with thoughts of Judge Barry Hertzog. And as I sank at last into genuine sleep, I was under no illusions that it was into a 100% Hertzog-informed dreamstate that I would now pass.
