Soho

the end of the world this time...

I crossed myself for the first time, in like twenty years today.

Sudden reflex thing snapping back to vague catholic upbringing!

Shuddering I acknowledged I was momentarily scared, certainly dazed, quite confused.

Nothing new there then! I pulled myself together and went about the darkening business of the day.

I turned on the radio, nothing, I snapped the handset at the television, nothing. I moved to the light switch, nothing. I picked up the bottle of wine on the floor, half full, thank God for that!

I needed a drink.

It was looking down from my eighth floor window onto the market and seeing all the bodies laid out made me shudder.

I poured myself a glass, sat in silent contemplation for a while then went for a walk.

It was like the Bowie song ‘Five Years’ had fruitfully fulfilled its poetic prophecy thirty so years after it was written, hey, better late than never. I wondered if Dave was dead too. Probably!

I stood in the doorway to my block of flats for a full five minutes, scratching my head, gazing in awe at all the dead bodies. Berwick Street market is always full, always, dead full, now it was just full of the dead. The gorgeous hippy girls in So High Soho, dead! The guys who work in the record and tape exchange who once sneeringly gave me twenty pounds in exchange for my entire bootleg collection of early Dylan records with all my jazz CD’s thrown in, dead! The perpetually smiley bearded man in the vegan whole-food cafe, dead! The irritating professional Cockney market trader geezer who waged a war of constant verbal attrition against the perpetually smiley bearded vegan man, well dead!

Looking through the window of The Endurance I saw that not one there had endured and a wave of sadness washed over me. For I saw many fellow soldiers who I’d fought drank laughed and cried with over many sodden campaigns, dead on their bar stools, slumped over the tables. Some with drinks still at hand.

So! What the hell was going on, what the hell is going on?

Initial questions…

Oh forget initial questions, the world has so obviously died!

I need a pint!

But it’s got to be the Blue Posts over the road.

And the Blue Posts fits this new death gig perfect.

For either at night, when it’s lit up with a golden glow, or on a day time when the sun filters through the dirty glass and haze of smoke, it’s got that beautiful fly preserved in amber touch that so befits the aged or ageing drinker. And today it really seems to have come into its own. A tailor that I know from the top end of the street is slumped over the bar and the two stalwart bar managers are literally dead on their feet. Looks like I’ll have to get my own Guinness then. I smile at some of the media guys over in the corner. They don’t smile back. Old Jackie is kind of simpering at me. But then she’s always kind of simpering at me. No change there. I pour her a swift half of Stella and go and place it on the table in front of her, taking up the overflowing ashtray as I do, neatly replacing it with a clean one.

I pay a little more attention to my pint of Guinness then replenish the pint glasses of the media guys. Four Stella’s for those chaps, open a bag of peanuts for my self. Pint of Guinness lovingly poured for the tailor, with only slightly less attention paid to it than my own which is now full to the brim and ready to be sunk. I try to do a shamrock but it goes disastrously wrong otherwise my debut behind the bar is blinding, like I’m a natural, born for the job. Shame it’s just…time to move on.

Back out on the street a ticket inspector is slumped over a four by four and I wave to the naughtily attired mannequins in Agent Provocateur. They don’t wave back, but then, they never do, snooty bitches. Forget about them, the era of bling they inhabit is dead, it’s gone.

And I’m off to meet a better class of person in the public house across the road.

The Ship! Full of ghosts as usual, I squeeze in between Jimi Hendrix and Eric Burdon up at the bar. Nothing unusual there, they often appear after a few pints and join me on my sessions, been hanging out with me for years. We tell each other our problems, share dreams, conspire in visions, admire women, talk philosophy of rock…and roll…and blues…and soul.

All that venerable ancient bullshitting jive jazz!

Saves me from talking to creeps no marks and losers, such as myself.

And if you’re going to have a couple of swell ghostly drinking buddies, well, you could do worse than have these two sixties aristocrats of hedonism on either side of you. Hold on I hear you say, Burdon’s not dead! Will be now though, eh? Eh?

Calm down.

I’ve never felt calmer. I tell you what though you should never let an alcoholic loose behind a bar. And this dipsomaniac is no exception. Much spirit is consumed and many, many fine hours are passed in leisurely drinking and idle conversation, until Burdon passes some sour remark about me not taking this death number seriously. I’m not having that and the next thing I know I’m storming off into the night. There’s got to be something better happening than this dead rockers museum, surely.

Besides, there’s a touch of hunger in my belly now so I step over the doormen at Mezzo and into the main restaurant. The fare on the tables still looks kind of edible. There are not many flies about anyway. So I step up to this obese chap all dead at his table and relieve him of his roasted peppers and his salad. And after a moments hesitation I go for the steak too. A healthy dose of Balsamic vinegar, and if I am struck down by food poisoning, well, I should be too blind drunk and insensible to notice. A bottle of champagne lies propped in a bucket just begging to be opened, sweet! I belch and burp and blunder my way out of the building.

Manage to drink half the bottle walking down Wardour and cutting in to Meard Street. Don’t ask me the vintage or even the make. It has bubbles and it tastes alright, that’s all we need to know. I give the bottle, half empty, to a dead tramp in the doorway of Gossips nightclub. A symbolic effort of course, but one hopefully appreciated by Gaz who will be rocking blue by now, in God’s great hostel in the sky.

I rummage in my pocket for my Nokia thinking to phone a friend. But of course no friend answers my call. And all around me, not a phone in sight, no more stupid ring tones, no more banal texts. I throw my phone as far as I can. And what a feeling that gives me. Oh all too mortal world what use your blasted technology now.

I peer into the Groucho but it looks pretty dead. The Colony Rooms feel like a morgue and the Coach and Horses is just full of stiffs. Well, what do you want me to say? I help myself to a pint of Stella optioning an Absinthe chaser and take my place at the bar. I am suddenly filled with a loathing and contempt for my compatriots, half my life I’ve spent wasting in their company and here they are, dead. But shouldn’t they be, more dead than this, like dramatically dead, drastically dead, dangerously dead with eyeballs bulging out and blood running from nostrils, and pain and utter fear, contrition etched in to their faces. It is obvious rigor mortis has set in, but apart from that these guys just look too, too, too bloody benign.

I pick them up and slap their backs. Hold them in front of me and kick them in their groins, trying to shake some life into them; screaming in their faces for deserting me so. The shine of the day has gone make no mistake and a faint malevolence is starting to creep in, like all that lies ahead is the dark side.

With tears in my eyes I bring a stool over the head of a bar man who used to despise me, how useless, how stupid my action. I rip off the framed caricatures of the caricature’s caricature Jeffery Bernard and throw the pictures of the revered old drunk to the floor.

- Fuck you Bernard and the century you came from. Loved by everyone but me, I hate you, hate all of you. No I don’t, you know I love you. Don’t you? Don’t you? Please! Please! All I ever wanted was to be…

I am screaming now as the last of the sun slips down over the skyline and I throw myself at the feet of a woman I used to have a thing for, for so many years. A silly token gesture, she ignores me; like she’s ignored me for so many years before.

More drink, I must have more drink, if I’m to deal with this.

Oh the darkness is coming in fast, isn’t no-one going to switch the lights on? Where is Norman the Landlord? I want to make a complaint. Light is not forthcoming. I decide to make a little fire out of the Bernard Pictures. I break a few stools, and one or two of these tables can go too. Cloth burns well, I strip the bodies of their clothes and they go on to the bonfire, oh for some fireworks now, and some potatoes to bake, and a vat of cider, and a good woman in a nice jumper by my side.

What a party that would be.

Instead I induce a cruel vision of hell, a photo from Baghdad, a picture painted by Brueghel, a penalty shoot out played with guns, paid for by the devil, presided over by no one but myself.

For soon I have a fair blaze going. And it’s just like old times. As all the faces flicker in the flames. Skin is on the turn. Pink to purple to blue. Ha Francis Bacon where are you now? The corpses shine all waxy and purple and puffy and puckered and blistering in the light that is cast, and stricken shadows jump and leap about the room as hair starts to singe and stink and the whole thing is just too horrible for words. I’m drinking straight from the absinthe bottle now. There is a sickness in the pit of my stomach and there is smoke everywhere. I back for the door for already glasses are starting to shatter and the old wooden bar goes up in a roar and I’m thinking, hell, I’ve just burnt down an institution. The most loved and cherished public house in London. I’ll be crucified for this.

But who will play Judas, who will make my cross? Who will hold me up? Who will hammer in the first nail, which two thieves will take their place at my side, which tender whore will bathe my feet? Who will witness the glory of my pain as I die?

No one!

I’m on Old Compton Street and it is pitch black. I am stumbling over bodies and wanting to walk down the middle of the road but having to stay close to the right hand side. Abandoned bicycle rickshaws and stalled black cabs. Drinking is a necessity now. I break the window of the Vintage

Wine shop and pull out the first bottle that comes to hand. My elbow is cut, it bleeds. I am beyond caring.

Silence…

Except for a caustic whispered rustling that could be rats or could be my soul. Or could just be my imagination. Running away with me…

I manage to turn onto Wardour and cut across Brewer Street. Sheer habit and drunken intuition carries me past old Madame Jo-Jo’s and into Walkers Court. Suddenly the moon cuts out from behind a cloud and I vomit as the whole extent of the thing hits me. This debris of corpses strewn amidst the bad apples and bruised peaches, the rotting cabbages and burst peppers. The thrown away fruit and vegetable matter splattered on the pavement littering the path. There’ll be no more bin men come to clear you away and no more Albanian whores to service those bin men. No more pimps and no more players, no more gangsters no more gamblers. No more flower sellers to aid and abet drunken fumbled seductions with media high flyers put on earth to shaft artists and shift units and play sleight of hand with our hearts and minds. No more window cleaners looking in on the whole joke, no more journalists jockeying for position to cover it. All bets are off. No more big red buses, no more black cabs. No more late night bars in front rooms up back alleys, no more tea in Maison Bertaux, no more cider in the French House. No more Jerry’s, no more leching at women in the square. No more tears, no more cum, no more scowls, no more smiles and no more drinks to be had, last page, the book is shut. Soho, the centre of my world is dead.

And now all I want to do is sleep.

I don’t dream.