Step Across This Line: Collected Nonfiction 1992-2002

  All our bright hopes came to nothing. Like Sisyphus, we had to watch the undoing of all our work, as the great rock of our production ran away downhill into a Sri Lankan ditch. There is nothing as painful to a writer as wasted work, unless it be seeing the disappointment on the faces of people who have spent months and years working on your work’s behalf. As for me, the rejection of Midnight’s Children changed something profound in my relationship with the East. Something broke, and I’m not sure it can be mended.

  The story of a failure, then. But what has once been thought cannot be unthought, Friedrich Dürrenmatt wrote. Nothing stays the same. Governments change, attitudes change, times change. And a film brought into half-being by the publication of its screenplay may yet manage, someday, somehow, to get itself born.

  A POSTSCRIPT

  This essay was written at a gloomy moment in the continuing saga of the adaptation of Midnight’s Children. It turns out, however, that the cautious optimism of the last paragraph may have been justified. First, my own relationship with India has happily been renewed (see “A Dream of Glorious Return”). Second, the screenplays I wrote now form the basis of a stage adaptation of the novel for the Royal Shakespeare Company, directed by Tim Supple (who also staged a wonderful adaptation of Haroun and the Sea of Stories at the National Theatre a couple of years ago). Third, there is once again much interest in turning Midnight’s Children into a feature film . . .

  November 1999

  Reservoir Frogs

  (OR, PLACES CALLED MAMA’S)

  For the first time since the decline of Dadaism, we are witnessing a revival in the fine art of meaningless naming. This thought is prompted by the U.S. release of the British film Trainspotting, and by the opening of Lanford Wilson’s new play Virgil Is Still the Frogboy. Mr. Wilson’s play is not about Virgil. No frogs feature therein. The title is taken from an East Hampton, L.I., graffito to whose meaning the play offers no clues. This omission has not diminished the show’s success.

  As Luis Buñuel knew, obscurity is a characteristic of objects of desire. Accordingly, there is no trainspotting in Trainspotting; just a predictable, even sentimental movie that thinks it’s hip. (Compared to the work of, say, William S. Burroughs, it’s positively cutesy.) It has many admirers, perhaps because they are unable even to understand its title, let alone the fashionably indecipherable argot of the dialogue. The fact remains: Trainspotting contains no mention of persons keeping obsessive notes on the arrival and departure of trains. The only railway engines are to be found on the wallpaper of the central character’s bedroom. Whence, therefore, this choo-choo moniker? Some sort of pun on the word “tracks” may be intended.

  Irvine Welsh’s original novel does offer some help. The section titled “Trainspotting at Leith Central Station” takes the characters to a derelict, train-less station, where one of them attacks a derelict human being who is, in fact, his father, doling out a goodly quantity of what Anthony Burgess’s hoodlum Alex, in A Clockwork Orange, would call “the old ultraviolence.” Clearly, something metaphorical is being reached for here, though it’s not clear exactly what. In addition, Welsh thoughtfully provides a glossary for American readers: “Rat-arsed—drunk; wanker—masturbator; thrush—minor sexually transmitted disease.” At least an effort at translation is being made. Out-and-out incomprehensibilists disdain such coziness.

  How many readers of Anthony Burgess’s novel A Clockwork Orange, or viewers of Stanley Kubrick’s film, knew that Burgess took his title from an allegedly common, but actually never used, British simile: “queer as a clockwork orange”? Can anyone recall the meaning of the terms “Koyaanisqatsi” and “Powaqqatsi”? And were there any secrets encrypted in “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds,” or was it just a song about a flying girl with a necklace?

  Nowadays, dreary old comprehensibility is still very much around. A film about a boy-man called Jack is called Jack. A film about a crazed baseball fan is called The Fan. The film version of Jane Austen’s Emma is called Emma.

  However, titular mystification continues to intensify. When Oasis, the British pop phenoms, sing “(You’re My) Wonderwall,” what can they mean? “I intend to ride over you on my motorbike, round and round, at very high speed”? Surely not. And Blade Runner? Yes, I know that hunters of android “replicants” are called “blade runners”: but why? And yes, yes, William S. Burroughs (again!) used the phrase in a 1979 novel; and, to get really arcane, there’s a 1974 medical thriller called The Bladerunner by the late Dr. Alan E. Nourse. But what does any of this have to do with Ridley Scott’s movie? Harrison Ford runs not, neither does he blade. Shouldn’t a work of art give us the keys with which to unlock its meanings? But perhaps there aren’t any. Perhaps it’s just that the phrase sounds cool, thanks to those echoes of Burroughs, Daddy Cool himself.

  In 1928, Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí co-directed the Surrealist classic Un Chien Andalou, a film about many things, but not Andalusian dogs. So it is with Quentin Tarantino’s first film, Reservoir Dogs. No reservoir, no dogs, no use of the words “reservoir,” “dogs,” or “reservoir dogs” at any point in the movie. No imagery derived from dogs or reservoirs or dogs in reservoirs or reservoirs of dogs. Nada, or, as Mr. Pink and Co. would say, “Fuckin’ nada.”

  The story goes that when the young Tarantino was working in a Los Angeles video store, his distaste for fancy-pants European auteurs like, for example, Louis Malle manifested itself in an inability to pronounce the titles of their films. Malle’s Au Revoir les Enfants defeated him completely (oh reservoir les oh fuck) until he began to refer to it contemptuously as—you guessed it—“those, oh, reservoir dogs.” Subsequently he made this the title of his own movie, no doubt as a further gesture of anti-European defiance. Alas, the obliqueness of the gibe meant that the Europeans simply did not comprenday. “What we have here,” as the guy in Cool Hand Luke remarked, “is a failure to communicate.”

  But these days the thing about incomprehensibility is that people aren’t supposed to get it. In accordance with the new zeitgeist, therefore, the title of this piece has in part been selected—“sampled”—from Lou Reed’s wise advice: “Don’t eat at places called Mama’s,” in the diary of his recent tour. To forestall any attempts at exegesis (“Author, Citing Dadaism’s Erstwhile Esotericism, Opposes Present-Day ‘Mamaist’ Obfuscations”), I confess that as a title it means nothing at all; but then the very concept of meaning is now outdated, nerdy, pre-ironic. Welcome to the New Incomprehensibility: gibberish with attitude.

  August 1996

  Heavy Threads

  EARLY ADVENTURES IN THE RAG TRADE

  In the summer of 1967, which I do not recall anyone calling the Summer of Love back then, I rented a room in a maisonette directly above a legendary boutique—legendary, I mean, at the time; there was something about it that was instantly recognized as mythic—called Granny Takes a Trip. The maisonette belonged to a woman called Judy Scutt, who made up a lot of the clothes for the boutique, and whose son Paul was a university friend of mine. (They were members of a family famous in medical circles for having six toes on each foot, but in spite of the psychotropic spirit of the age they insisted, disappointingly, that they themselves were not Six-Toed Scutts.)

  Granny Takes a Trip was at World’s End, at the wrong end of the King’s Road in Chelsea, but to the assorted heads and freaks who hung out there, it was the Mecca, the Olympus, the Kathmandu of hippie chic. Mick Jagger was rumored to wear the dresses. Every so often John Lennon’s white limo would stop outside and a chauffeur would go into the shop, scoop up an armload of gear “for Cynthia,” and disappear with it. German photographers with platoons of stone-faced models would arrive once or twice a week to use Granny’s windows as backdrops for their spreads. Granny’s had famous windows. For a long time there was a Warhol-style Marilyn painted over the glass. For a further long time there was the front end of a real Mack truck bursting out of a painted Lichtenstein-y explosion. Later, every boutique on the planet would boast an imitation
-Warhol Monroe or a Mack truck exploding from its shopfront, but Granny’s was the first. Like Gone With the Wind, it invented the clichés.

  Inside Granny’s it was pitch dark. You entered through a heavy bead curtain and were instantly blinded. The air was heavy with incense and patchouli oil and also with the aromas of what the police called Certain Substances. Psychedelic music, big on feedback, terrorized your eardrums. After a time you became aware of a low purple glow, in which you could make out a few motionless shapes. These were probably clothes, probably for sale. You didn’t like to ask. Granny’s was a pretty scary place.

  Granny’s people were scornful of the brash boutique-land of the “right,” Sloane Square end of the King’s Road. All those Quant haircuts and thigh-high “snakey boots,” all that shiny plastic, Vidal Sassoon, England-swings-like-a-pendulum-do palaver. All that light. It was almost as uncool as (ugh) Carnaby Street. Down there people said “fab” and “groovy.” At Granny’s, you said “beautiful” to express mild approval, and, when you wanted to call something beautiful, you said “really nice.”

  I started borrowing my friend Paul’s bedspread jackets and beads. I started nodding my head a lot, wisely. In the quest for cool, it helped that I was Indian. “India, man,” people said. “Far out.”

  “Yeah,” I said, nodding. “Yeah.”

  “The Maharishi, man,” people said. “Beautiful.”

  “Ravi Shankar, man,” I said. At this point people usually ran out of Indians to talk about and we all just went on nodding, beatifically. “Right, right,” we said. “Right.”

  In spite of coming from India, I was not cool. Paul was cool. Paul was what a girl in a teen movie had called “straight from the fridge.” Paul had access to endless long-limbed girls and an equally endless supply of dope. He had a father in the music business. It would have been easy to hate Paul. One day he persuaded me to pay twenty pounds to take part in a photo session for aspiring male models that was being run by a “friend” of his. He said I could wear his clothes. The “friend” took my money and was never seen again. My modeling career failed to take off.

  “Wow,” said Paul, first shaking, then nodding his head philosophically. “Bad scene.”

  At the heart of our little world was Sylvia. (I never knew her last name.) Sylvia ran the shop. She made Twiggy look like a teenager with a puppy-fat problem. She was very pale, probably because she spent her life sitting in the dark. Her lips were always black. She wore mini-dresses in black velvet or see-through white muslin: her vampire and dead-baby looks. She stood knock-kneed and pigeon-toed after the fashion of the period, her feet forming a tiny, ferocious T. She wore immense silver knuckle-duster rings and a black flower in her hair. Half Love Child, half zombie, she was an awe-inspiring sign of the times. I had been there for several weeks without exchanging a word with her. One day I plucked up my courage and went into the shop.

  Sylvia was a dim purple presence in the bottomless depths of the boutique.

  “Hi,” I said. “I just thought I’d drop in and introduce myself, since we’re all living here, you know? I just thought it was time we got to know each other. I’m Salman,” and at this point I kind of ran out of steam.

  Sylvia loomed out of the dark, coming up close and staring, so that I could see the contempt on her face. Eventually, she shrugged.

  “Conversation’s dead, man,” she said.

  This was bad news. This was like heavy. Conversation was dead? Why hadn’t I heard? When was the funeral? I was and am a talkative sort of fellow, but I stood before Sylvia’s scorn, stunned into silence. Like Paul Simon in “The Boxer,” I was enthralled by the tribes of “ragged people” of whom Sylvia was clearly a dark princess, I wanted to be among them, I was “looking for the places only they would know.” How unfair that I was doomed to be excluded from the inner circles of the counter-culture, to be banned forever from where it was at, on account of my chattiness. Conversation was dead, and I didn’t know the new language. I slunk tragically out of Sylvia’s presence, and barely spoke to her again.

  Some weeks later, however, she taught me a second lesson about those unusual times. One day—I think it was a Saturday or Sunday, and it was only around noon, so naturally nobody was up, and the shop was shut—the doorbell rang for such a long time that I struggled into a pair of red crushed-velvet flares and staggered downstairs to the door. On the doorstep was an alien: a man in business suit and matching mustache, with a briefcase in one hand and, in the other, a copy of a glossy magazine open at the page on which a model was wearing one of Granny’s latest offerings.

  “Good afternoon,” said the alien. “I have a chain of shops in Lancashire . . .”

  Sylvia, naked beneath a rather inadequate dressing gown, cigarette dripping from her lips, came down the stairs. The alien turned a deep shade of red and his eyes started sliding around. I retreated.

  “Yeah?” said Sylvia.

  “Good afternoon,” the alien finally managed. “I have a chain of shops in Lancashire selling ladies’ fashions and I am most interested in this particular garment as featured here. With whom would I speak with a view to placing a first order for six dozen items, with an option to repeat?” It was the biggest order Granny Takes a Trip had ever had. I was standing a few paces behind Sylvia, and halfway up the stairs, now, was Judy Scutt. There was a tingle of excitement in the air. The alien waited patiently while Sylvia considered matters. Then, in one of the defining moments of the sixties, she nodded a few times, slowly, fashionably.

  “We’re closed, man,” she said, and shut the door.

  Where Granny’s stood, opposite the World’s End pub, there is now a café called Entre Nous. I have lost touch with Judy Scutt, but I do know that her son Paul, my friend Paul, became a serious casualty of the sixties. His brains fried by acid, he was working, when I last heard of him, at simple manual jobs: picking up leaves in a park, that sort of thing.

  Recently, however, I met a man who claimed not only to know Sylvia but to have gone out with her for years. This was genuinely impressive.

  “Did she ever speak to you?” I asked him. “Did she actually have anything to say about anything?”

  “No,” he said. “Not a bleeding word.”

  October 1994

  In the Voodoo Lounge

  Clap your hands, Mick Jagger commands Wembley, and seventy thousand people obey. It looks like one of those mass calisthenics demonstrations the Chinese used to go in for. Yeah yeah yeah WOO, he prompts us in the middle of “Brown Sugar,” and yeah yeah yeah WOO we reply. “You’re in good voice tonight,” he flatters us, and for a moment we feel as if we’re all in the band. When I was twenty I was “volunteered” from a student audience to ding a cowbell for Robin Williamson and Mike Heron’s Incredible String Band, but on the whole it’s better singing back-up vocals for the Rolling Stones. In a successful stadium rock show, the audience becomes the event as much as the performers or the set, and Jagger knows that. So for two and a half hours, while Keith plays his monster riffs and kisses his guitar, and Charlie lays down the law on his drums, Mick plays us.

  What’s that like, facing tens of thousands of people and working them like a small room? A couple of years ago (never too early to begin your research) your correspondent found himself, for a few minutes, up on the Wembley stage with U2, and is accordingly able to offer a brief report.

  Light surrounds you like a wall. You can just about see beyond the bouncers to the first rows of upturned faces but, beyond that, zilch. The space feels almost intimate; then the invisible crowd roars like a sci-fi beast and you, well, if you’re a novelist who has somehow strayed out here, you panic. What are you supposed to do with an audience this big? Sing to it? But—as in all the best nightmares—you can’t sing a note. At which point, the authentic Rock Star takes charge. Standing next to the Star, watching him coax, caress, and control the invisible Hydra out there, you feel more than impressed. You feel grateful.

  I had met Bono a few times, but when I looked int
o his face on the Wembley stage I saw a stranger there, and understood that this was the Star-creature that normally lay hidden in him, a creature as powerful as the big beastie it sang to, so overwhelming that it could be let out only in this cage of light. The Star-creature in Mick Jagger was rampant at Wembley on Tuesday night. It had been going a lot longer than U2; it was old and huge and brilliant.

  All the old-age jokes have been trotted out this past week: Rock ’n’ Wrinkle, Crock ’n’ Roll. I sat next to a man who remembered seeing the Stones on their first tour, September 1963. Thirty-two years ago—thirty-two years!—I saw that tour, too; as a sixteen-year-old schoolboy I skived off from school on the bus. My neighbor and I couldn’t agree on who had topped the bill that autumn: one of those guys who died in a plane crash, he thought, while my vote was for Gene Vincent singing “Be-Bop-a-Lula.” But we were both wrong. It was the Everly Brothers and Bo Diddley. The Stones have been going so long that their original audience’s memory has started playing tricks; that’s how long.

  On your way to a galaxy-sized rock supershow like Voodoo Lounge, you must pass through meteor showers of facts and factoids. As well as all the age stuff—did you know their average age is higher than the cabinet’s?—you hear, once again, the old yarn about Keith Richards having all his blood changed; from a disgruntled hatter who failed to gain Jagger’s favor you learn that the great man has a “really tiny head”; it is even suggested—is there no respect anymore?—that Mick has a penchant for exaggerating his assets by shoving assorted fruit and vegetables down the front of his leggings. We also know, by now, that even though the tour is sponsored by Volkswagen (“Stones Team Up with Beetles”), Mick drives a Mercedes; and that, in spite of all their rebellious postures, they’re just social climbers, really, in it for the money and the swank. We know that the Ramones are retiring and have advised the Stones to do the same, and that they won’t, not while the megabucks are pouring in. We have heard that squillions of dollars are raining down upon our heroes. What can a poor boy do ’cept to sing for a rock ’n’ roll band? Maybe, these days, they should be singing “Diamond Life” instead.