To justify dropping out of a BA Honours degree, it was imperative I read a lot of books – if only to prove to myself I wasn’t actually thick. I tended towards ‘underground’ writers – Russian, Irish, Black American and even occasionally women – until I was put right off by a rambling old soak who called herself Joyce. For light relief, I enjoyed the cartoon Peanuts and especially the character Snoopy, mainly because he was a dog rather than a stupid human.
Soon I had turned to music, performing distorted, down-tuned bass guitar and snarling facial expressions in a band called Swing – art-noise terrorists who would sabotage polite jazz soirées and confront the audience with dissonant squalls of feedback. Alex – half-Indonesian, Baudelaire-obsessed and fond of wearing a monocle – was the star of the show. He would manipulate an old miked-up violin with a food mixer before studiously sawing it in half, as though performing a magic trick at the London Palladium.
Alex slept in a customised open coffin and tried to convince me that golden autumn leaves are nothing more then ‘tree shit’. Instead of making a big deal about thinking outside the box, he just kicked back and thought inside the box. Alex was intensely lazy and rarely left the flat, possibly on account of the ridicule he invited from passers-by, but he was my friend and I didn’t care. In fact, that’s what bound us together – neither of us cared. Or at least, we tried not to.
I took my cue from the opening passage of Henry Miller’s ode to apathy, Tropic Of Capricorn: ‘Once you have given up the ghost, everything follows with dead certainty, even in the midst of chaos.’ One day, in the midst of said chaos, my father reappeared out of the blue, after 16 years without so much as a bang on the ear. He possessed a magnificent beard and a shit-eating grin that spread from one big ear to the next like bush fire. I had to admit, when push came to shove, he was my father. And as long as he didn’t try to push me, I’d try my best not to tell him to shove it.
How To Do It Till You Go Blind
At my father’s invitation, I went to visit him in the West Indies. Home was a swanky hideaway on the island of St Kitts, up in the mountains – the former governor’s private residence no less, with stunning panoramic views of the sea. It was amazing what all those withheld child-maintenance payments could get you.
It was hard to make up my mind about him – he was a tropical Rasputin one minute and a reallife Pirate Of The Caribbean next, possessing all the qualities of Oliver Reed except for the ability to act. No one who met him could fail to notice a spectacular scar, etched like the fossil of some ancient caterpillar, around his right eye socket – 47 stitches worth. He’d been glassed by a West Indian ‘yardie’ in a bar, after trying to impress my younger brother Chris by telling a group of them to ‘Keep the bloody noise down so I can talk to my son.’ (Austin had inherited some of the belligerent headmaster rituals of his own father who’d worked his way up to that position from a family of coal miners, lording it over the son at both home and school).
But he wasn’t an outright monster. When we first went sailing together I couldn’t help discovering an old-fashioned prude lurking within. We were enjoying a drunken day’s cruising around the island on his yacht, Monkey Hanger, when Austin noticed us drifting into a coral reef in choppy water. He barked orders at his Texan girlfriend, Kirsten, who was in the galley below, to come up on deck and help. I’ll admit I noticed she wasn’t wearing any underwear as she dashed to adjust a sail and her long, but not long enough, T-shirt flapped upwards in the wind – but really it wasn’t such a big deal. After all, wasn’t this supposed to be an emergency situation? Austin’s priorities abruptly changed, however. ‘COVER YOURSELF UP, WOMAN!’ he growled in his Hartlepool accent, as if his and his two sons’ lives depended on it. It didn’t make any sense to me. Imagine if we’d ended up coming a cropper, all over the forbidden glimpse of a Texan beaver?
Our father was a gracious host at first, but after a week or so started resorting to type. Were we really supposed to feel that grateful for his re-emergence into our life? If it was thanks he wanted, I might as well have thanked my bum for taking a shit. I did agree to take his Alsatian, Marley, for a walk twice a day, up to the volcano and back, but that was just to get out of the house. On the way, we’d see the spider monkeys playing in the sugar-cane plantation. What a life they had, lolling in the sun, sucking on the sugar and shamelessly masturbating all day long. Despite their rotten teeth and fading eyesight, they looked happy enough to me.
I was broken out of this reverie when my father and brother told me they had plans for a jungle expedition. It took us a whole day’s trek, then we spent hours making clearings with our machetes for the planting of mangoes. At least, that’s what my father told me the clearings were for…
I was smoking a lot of weed for the first time in my life – there was a lot of it around. And that should have given me a clue, yet still I didn’t see the connection. Being a stoner had transformed me from the space cadet I’d always been into a lethal space commando. In the midst of a stoner haze, everything seemed within reach – as long as you sat well out of reach. Months of Caribbean living passed in a blur of sunny basketball humiliations at the hands of local street kids, while the heavenly tropical breeze caressed away the blisters and our family discord.
One day, my father flew to Miami to pick up a vacuum-packing machine. On the way back, he explained to Customs it was for peanut farming. That wasn’t so inconceivable – peanuts were popular, after all. Surely only people who were allergic didn’t like them?
It was more than symbolic that the 250 vacuum-packed pounds of Caribbean marijuana were destined to arrive in Scotland. You could call it a sentimental homecoming for a father and his two sons, but strategically it made sense too. The coastguard in Oban consisted of an old dear who came on board for a natter and, though the cargo was stashed directly beneath her as she sat sipping tea, there was never any great panic.
An inconspicuous Honda was hired to journey southwards, where the goods were stored in a Brent Cross lock-up. My brother and I rented a dingy basement flat on a Camden Town backstreet while my father checked into the swanky Regents Park Hotel. It soon became apparent, however, that 15 years in the Tropics had left him out of sync with city life. The unaccustomed comforts and distractions turned his head to mush and he duly got taken for a ride, fronting 20 and 30 parcels at a time to dodgy third-hand contacts who’d then disappear on him, never to pay up.
It was easy to disappear in London and pretty soon Austin did likewise, sailing back to his Caribbean idyll and asking us to shift around 120 leftover packages. Unfortunately, the stash was getting drier by the week, losing its moist green stinky appeal. As loyal sons, however, and on a cut of £300 for each bag sold, we endeavoured to do our best for him.
Steed, as I’ll call him, had one of those scary, immobile faces and something of the Frankenstein doppelganger about him. He was an old-school ducker and diver who brought us huge boxes of knocked-off sausages in his vintage Jag and always talked like he was underwater and in slow motion. You could almost see the bubbles coming out of his mouth. I never got round to telling him I was a veggie – it might have caused a screw to come loose and a bolt to drop out.
He may well have been One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest next to our Cheech and Chong, but Steed had his connections and an uncanny knack for shifting stuff, regardless of what shape, form or quantity said stuff came in. I imagine he’d have been ideal as a washing powder, ‘shifting’ the stains normal detergents can’t reach. Within six months we’d cleared the lot between us and made a fat chunk of lovely cash for an absent but delighted father – not forgetting a tidy wedge for ourselves.
There were a few scary moments.