Alan was deeply puzzled by Q’s depiction of the cyber vigilante in his novel. This criminal, on the loose in London, lynched his victims and turned out to be a black American cop. The cyber vigilante was killing paedophiles and the narrator appears to approve of this. Given the racial connotations of lynching, Alan considered it completely unbelievable that a black American would choose this as a method for disposing of paedophiles. It didn’t even seem credible that the black British narrator of Deadmeat would approve of lynchings. Alan didn’t understand what Q was trying to do, he was confused. He didn’t know whether Q was using irony and ambiguity to implicate certain of his readers in the perpetuation of a white bourgeois subjectivity, or whether the narrative merely reflected the author’s inability to escape the dominant code. While double consciousness doesn’t protect you from the code, it certainly gives you different perspectives from which to reflect upon it.
Over coffee Alan discussed Deep Cover: An FBI Agent Infiltrates the Radical Underground by Gril Payne. The author of this work narrates the process by which he became disenchanted with his employer and thereby lost his sense of identity. No longer a conservative or a radical, Payne becomes a hostage to fortune, tossed about on the seas of adversity and stripped of his sense of self.4 Alan viewed the book as a cautionary tale, a warning to those who wanted to get involved in the murky worlds of intelligence and counter-intelligence. Once Alan had paid the bill, we hit Union Street for a quick fix of commodity fetishism. I bought lipstick and a new pair of shoes. I dragged Alan into Waterstone’s because I wanted to buy The Lonely Planet Guide to Iceland. Bedtime reading that would take my mind off my college work. We were thrown out before I could make my purchase because an assistant spotted Alan rubbing a pornographic novel against his crotch. Alan repeatedly hissed the word ‘bibliomania’ as we were escorted from the premises.
Alan had a backpack full of books and after I’d done my shopping we trudged up to the Old Aberdeen Bookshop. The proprietor wasn’t in, so Alan left the books with his wife after arranging to return the next day when he’d be able to negotiate a price. Then we wandered down to the seafront and had a coffee in the Inversnecky Café. We were filling in time until Alan could pick up his car from the garage. A side window had been smashed by a thief who’d stolen some booze that Alan had left on the back seat. I announced that I felt like the narrator in Tania Kindersley’s novel Goodbye, Johnny Thunders. Alan said he’d given up on the book at page 13 when the narrator described a man who’d shafted her as having politics to the left of Lenin. Alan thought that it was the job of novelists to deal with specifics not generalities. He’d wanted to know whether the shit in question was a Bordigist or a councilist, whether he favoured the politics of Rosa Luxemburg or Otto Rühle. Lenin had attacked the entire proletarian milieu in Left-Wing Communism: An Infantile Disorder and Alan snorted that it simply wasn’t good enough to say that someone’s politics were to the left of a right-wing reactionary.
I defended Kindersley, saying the whole point of her novel was its pointlessness. The story wasn’t worth writing, a poor little rich girl playing at being bad and having a hard time getting over an affair with a complete loser. Besides, Kindersley clearly didn’t intend readers to take her book seriously. No one was going to find characters whose musical tastes incorporated both Johnny Thunders and mid-period Pink Floyd in the least bit credible. The book was arch and ironic. It was futile to dismiss it as a complete waste of time. Goodbye, Johnny Thunders was aimed at avatars of boredom, individuals who were seeking out new ways to waste their time and found tedium comforting. It was a book for sad tossers who considered drugs both glamorous and dangerous. Alan didn’t try to counter these claims. He just looked at his watch and paid for our cappuccinos. We chattered about monstrous twins as we made our way to the garage to collect his car.
I was disappointed when Alan’s motor turned out to be a Fiesta. I’d expected something flasher. Still, it got us to Stonehaven, where Alan had located a photographer who was happy to take hard-core pictures of selected clients. I’d expected a bloke but it turned out that Alan had hired a woman to snap us in pornographic poses. Angela had tattoos and piercings but she was wearing baggy sportswear when she shot us making out on her waterbed and in her dungeon. It was all pretty clinical. Alan seemed to get off on it. I guess being a porn star isn’t an unusual fantasy in our post-modern world. There were a whole set of routines Alan wanted to work through. Sucking, fucking and licking. He got extremely excited sitting on a chair with me perched on his lap, his cock up my cunt. Pure pornography. Alan insisted that the photographs of this pose should be taken full frontal with nothing hidden but the three-quarters of his prick buried inside me. This classic variation on a heterosexual theme proved to be the penultimate entanglement of the session. The last shot, predictably enough, was Alan coming in my face. The climax was fun but I didn’t have an orgasm.
After we’d done Stonehaven Alan drove back to Aberdeen. In the car and over a light meal at Gerard’s Brasserie we talked about books. Alan seemed to have William McGonagall on the brain. He had read No Poets’ Corner in the Abbey: The Dramatic Story of William McGonagall by David Philips as well as the collected works of Scotland’s alternative national bard. He knew a great deal more about McGonagall than I did at that time. McGonagall wrote doggerel but considered himself the equal of Shakespeare and Burns. He’d started life as a weaver but once the muse descended on him he endured 20 years of poverty as he determinedly followed the poet’s calling. He was mocked and assaulted as he plied his trade in Dundee, pelted with eggs and rotten fruit during his readings. Indeed, his success as a buffoon was such that he was eventually hired to read nightly at a local circus but the disturbances whenever he performed became so riotous that he was banned by the local magistrates from appearing in public.
The upper classes in Edinburgh preferred to mock McGonagall in a gentler fashion. Feigning admiration for his would-be immortal works and paying handsomely for his entertainments. It didn’t take the rich long to tire of McGonagall. They moved on to other things, leaving the poet to die in poverty. Alan considered many writers to be modern-day McGonagalls. The most perfect instance of this phenomenon was Joyce Cary. Obviously, I Love Dick by Chris Kraus elevated not only its nominal author but also her husband and collaborator Sylvere Lotringer to a similar status. Martin Amis fell into this category alongside all his scribbler friends. Sometimes it seemed as if there wasn’t a living or recently deceased author who Alan didn’t consider to be suffering from the McGonagall syndrome. Baudrillard remained one of Alan’s favourite examples since no one could take seriously a man who accepted Sylvere Lotringer as his translator. According to Alan, all these hippie hipsters could think about was getting other men to shag their wives.
After our meal we drove out to the airport. Well, not really to the airport. We drove along the edge of an industrial estate behind the airport and then up a rough track, curving around a field. We’d arrived at Tyrebagger Hill and all we had to do to reach the recumbent stone circle situated on it was climb over a gate and cut across a field. Abandoned electricity pylons towered above us while a constant stream of planes and choppers soared into the sky from the airstrip below. Oil had made Aberdeen a busy airport. The stones were in a circle of trees and the site was extremely ambient. A surreal juxtaposition of ancient and modern. The airport, the industrial estate, the abandoned pylons and the stone circle. Alan claimed this combination was a killer. Real magic. No wonder K. L. Callan kicked off 69 Things to Do with a Dead Princess with a visit to this site. Since I hadn’t even looked at the book Alan had given me the previous evening, I didn’t know what he was talking about. However I did think it a little strange that Alan weighed down his ventriloquist’s dummy with bricks and carried it up to the monument. I didn’t