Dirty Work Read online

  Later, when I was around seven, I would go to church with my father. He was trying out different churches then, looking for answers, something to do with the sins of the fathers, until he settled on one—a red brick monster, colder than a witch’s tit, with a droning priest who put everyone to sleep. If he was looking for answers, he did not find them there. After a while he stopped going altogether, his question about the sins of the fathers unto the seventh generation still unanswered. That was something that bugged him all his life. What had he done that haunted him? Had he dared to look at another woman; did he fear the wrath of hellfire from my mother, lowering the gin bottle at home, saying it was all rubbish? She may well have been right.

  What with my mother drinking and my father playing golf and bridge, the in thing to do was to send me to prep school. This was another cold place with stone stairs and secret tunnels swarming with ghosts.

  Even colder and draftier, the school church was one of England’s oldest. Its floors were like a riverbed, carved by shoes and knees over the years. If we couldn’t find a cushion, we knelt upon our folded caps. Like all British schoolboys, we had to wear shorts.

  Christianity was putting me right off and showed little sense of humour, as I found out after dressing up as a ghost and wandering the dorms, howling. I was discovered and taken to the owner of the school, a Mrs. Sinclair, a huge, old battle axe. She promptly asked if I had ever seen a ghost, because apparently she had, having lived in Judge Jeffries’ house. Known as the Hanging Judge, his house was chockablock with his victims’ ghosts. This encounter put the fear of God into me, but if she was trying to make me a Christian, she failed.

  My next attempt at work was at the local golf course where my father played. This was short-lived. My job was to go around the greens with a long tapered bamboo stick, flicking off the worm casts, which required a certain skill in the flick of the wrist. I also had to rake the bunkers. Feeling very hungover one morning, I fell asleep in one of them and was suddenly awakened by my father shaking me. He had hit his ball into the bunker I was in. That put an end to that job. Trying to get a handle on the employment thing on my school holidays, I started working on a farm. My first job was again dealing with shit. I had to clean out chicken houses and then spray the wood with creosote, which burns like crazy when it gets in your eyes or on your skin. When I complained to the farmer, he just said I could find another job, any time. This was tempting. But jobs were hard to find, and I needed money, so I decided to stick it out, covering myself with a plastic bag—which stopped the burning but made it very hard to see or breathe. Somehow, between stumbling around and gasping for air, cursing, I got the job done.

  The farmer must have thought I liked shit because the next job he made me do was making silage, a particularly foul-smelling food for the cattle. It seemed most work on this farm was dealing with shit in some form or another, like squirting a foul green solution down sheep’s throats while they shit all over you or being in a pen with hundreds of turkeys, trying to break their necks, being pecked to death, shit flying everywhere.

  The crunch came when I had to leave early one day, for ocean scull training. The farmer’s parting words were, “Farming, or boating? Make a choice.” So I left.

  Busking in Paris

  One of Roger’s friends was a strange bloke with a strange name. Pierre von Gruenewald looked like Jesus Christ. Was his name from the Gruenewald painter line? The Gruenewald horse-thief line? Either one suited him, as he was both poet and thief. We became very good friends, staying up all night talking about poetry and literature, drinking scrumpy cider with endless wafer-thin roll-ups. Old Holborn was his preferred brand, deadly strong.

  Pierre’s view on life was very different from anybody else’s I knew. He had already traveled a lot, mainly in Spain and France. He spoke both languages well. In Spain, he had lived with gypsies who thought he was the reincarnation of Christ, with his long blond hair and matching beard. In Paris, he had lived with poets and artists in the Latin Quarter. This all sounded brilliant to me and started me thinking that there was more to life than my ant theory.

  About this time, my college days were running out. Having accomplished about the square root of fuck-all, as a Scottish friend would say, and still not having any idea what to do, I considered Pierre’s suggestion to go to France. He told me he had a great system for playing roulette, betting on the black.

  In France, roulette is played with 19 black and 18 red with 1 zero. There was a very simple system of always betting on the black, as there was one more black than red. After every red comes up, you double your bet on the black, so that you get your money back plus your original bet. The main problem was that you needed enough money to cover yourself when the red came up many times in a row, which we did not have. Pros played this system with big bank accounts; their idea was to win a little, five hundred to one thousand dollars each day. Actually, in the summer season they were paid to stay away from the tables. They would hang out at the Pam-Pam Bar on the Champs Elysées.

  Nothing was happening for me in England, so I figured, why not? We set out one rainy day for Deauville, in the north of France. We found a small hotel close to the casino, signed in, and went straight to the tables.

  It was like entering a cave. Everything had a certain precision, which left me cold. Pierre seemed quite at home. He secured a place at one of the roulette tables, spread out the charts, and started to play. We played for about two hours, winning around two hundred dollars.

  We managed to keep this going for two weeks. We received complete disdain from the croupier, who said we were not gamblers. The idea was to win a little money every night and then leave. There were a number of people who did this but for bigger stakes.

  One night, Pierre pointed to a rather ugly person who turned out to be Jean-Paul Sartre, pushing existentialism to the max.

  The next night, twenty reds came up. We were betting on the blacks, and not having enough in the bank to cover us, our run ended.

  With little money we set out for Paris. We found a place to stay and started looking for work. One of the bars in the Latin Quarter, Madame Popoff’s, was the home of one Marcel, who looked like Toulouse Lautrec and acted like he thought he was him. In fact, Marcel was the head of the street art mafia. He had sites all over Paris and needed a hand. Being no artist, I was not sure what I could do to help. He gave me a map of Paris with all the art sites; I was to recolor the drawings that were faded from people walking all over them. I set out with a box of crayons and a hat for the money.

  My first site was at the Pigalle, where I found the drawing, put out the hat and started coloring. It was Christ on the cross, about 10 feet by 10 feet, which took up a lot of pavement. This attracted the cops and also the Pigalle prostitutes, who looked like porcelain dolls. Maybe they felt that this image of Christ would somehow save them. As they put the most money in the hat, consequently, I spent a lot of time looking up their skirts. They might have also thought I was a sorry-looking fuck, which I probably was. So between the rain showers, hiding from the cops and looking up skirts, not a lot of coloring got done. All this seemed like quite hard work for a few dollars. I would take some money from the hat and get a beer and sandwich. The problem with beer is that you want another one. This took most of the money, and so with little money left, I went back to Madame Popoff’s. Marcel was there, collecting his percentage. He seemed to know how much should have been in the hat and told me I would have to make it up the next day. Somehow I always come up short. It was time to look for another job.

  Pierre always seemed to have some money, I never knew how. One day he asked me to help him. We went to a large bookstore. He asked me to walk around picking out books and to walk around with them, putting them down again. This I did for an hour or so, and then left the shop. Meeting Pierre later, he had a bunch of money from books he had stolen. I was the decoy.

  Another time, we went to a bar in St. Germain des Prés frequented by Jean Genet. At one point, Pierre d
isappeared, reappearing again with a bunch of money, saying something about being accosted in the bathroom. Somehow these money-making schemes were not my cup of tea.

  So I was glad to hear of a job riding all over Paris collecting old magazines and newspapers on a three-wheeled bike with a box in front. My first stop was on the Boulevard St. Michel, collecting mainly newspapers. I would sell the magazines to dealers on the river. Weaving down the road and dodging cars, finding I had no brakes, was pretty scary. The Parisian assumes you will just get out of the way. Getting back to the yard in one piece was touch and go. We were paid by the kilo which meant you needed a truckload to make any money, if you lived that long. So I needed to supplement my income. The New York Herald Tribune needed street sellers, but my voice was not loud enough. Instead they offered me a job correcting the crossword puzzles that people submitted to their competitions.

  Pierre was also working with me. He tried to find a way to win the puzzle and the cash prize, but we were unable to make this work.

  At about this time, some friends were putting together a street band. The band consisted of a guitar, conga drums, a rumba box, and me on the trumpet, which I played badly. One night while playing outside the Bonaparte Café, people leaving the Blue Note, the famous jazz club, just around the corner stopped to listen to us. They started dancing and singing.

  Suddenly the police arrived and we had to do a runner. The next day, my friend Pierre told me what had happened. The noise had awoken Jean-Paul Sartre, who lived above the Bonaparte Café. He had been shouting, “Shut up, you motherfuckers, and let decent people get their sleep.”

  In the Shit

  My various talents in France were wearing thin so I decided to return to England, which was somewhat of a shock. The weather, people, and buildings all seemed oppressive.

  Needing money, I got a job in a hotel kitchen. The first thing I had to do was peel hundreds of potatoes by hand, which seemed impossible. I told them I was only used to peeling machines. They had a machine but never used it, and I soon found out why.

  Basically, it was a large spinning drum, rough on the inside, with a rubber lid. After putting ten pounds of potatoes in the drum, I put the lid on and turned it on. I went away to wash the dishes and suddenly I heard a strange noise from the machine. To my horror, the rubber lid had lifted from the drum, throwing dirty water all over the kitchen. I managed to turn it off, but the potatoes were worn down to almost nothing. At that moment my boss came in and seeing what had happened, she shouted, “You’re not the boy for us! Get out!” This must have been the shortest job I’ve ever had.

  My next attempt at work was in a hospital, which of course was mainly cleaning up shit. The Armenian Transcaucasian esoteric teacher George Gurdjieff said that a person’s being attracts his life. If this was true, what did all this shit mean?

  One of the pluses at the hospital was free food. There was enough for me to take back to my friends Pierre and Ivan who were staying with me in a tiny flat off Tottenham Court Road.

  At that time pot was the in thing in London. The Jamaican immigrants in London always had a good supply. Pot opened me up to literature, painting, music…and also to the possibility that maybe I myself had something to say. Dope, drinking, hopeful sex, trying to understand the ideas of Mr. Gurdjieff, blurring moments, glimpses, spaces, holes, dozing sleep. Waking to work, bringing back food for Pierre and Ivan, but somehow something was missing. What. All around me London waking, writing, music, painting, Francis Bacon, Lucian Freud, Peter Blake, up the deep end at the French pub, watching the hoo-ha from the shallow end of the bar, trying to make sense of it all.

  Two Karmapas

  After hearing that malformed creature scream during my last experiment in hypnosis, my mind had become a bit unhinged. I thought I would take a trip to the country, where my family had a farm. It was early autumn, with cool nights and warm days. Leaves were changing to red, orange, yellow; the woods glowed with the different hues of color. I lay down in a glade of golden glow, imagining my body lit with this glow.

  Dozing off, I dreamed dreams full of color. One was vivid. It must have been in Tibet, in a monastery. A very high Lama, the Karmapa, was giving a Black Hat empowerment ceremony. This ceremony will make anyone who witnesses it become enlightened. Somehow the Karmapa was trying to communicate something to me. Another Lama appeared though, trying to push the Karmapa from his seat, trying to sit there himself. An argument started. The Karmapa seemed to just dis-solve into different colors, like a rainbow.

  Waking with a start, I could feel something crawling on my back. Taking off my shirt, I tried to see what it was. My neck was not long enough, nor were my arms long enough to reach around to knock whatever it was off. I went back to the house to get a mirror, but I still could not see anything. After a while, the crawling feeling stopped, and thinking that whatever it was had left me for better pastures, I forgot about the incident. Then the dream started to come back to me. What was it about? What was the Karmapa trying to tell me? What was the other Lama doing? Then I remembered the hoo-ha between the two Karmapas.

  The Karmapas are the spiritual heads of Tibet, like the Dalai Lama, but a different sect. They leave a letter before they die, with instructions on how to find their next incarnation. The Sharmapa, one of the four regents of the Kagyu sect, has said that the letter found by Tai Situ Rinpoche, which led to the finding of the present seventeenth Gyalwa Karmapa, was a forgery. The Sharmapa said that he had found the rightful heir to the Karmapa throne. This has caused a lot of trouble in the Karma Kagyu sect.

  One of the high Kagyu Lamas died in a car crash, which some think was caused by the followers of the Sharma-pa. Also, henchmen for the Sharmapa have armed, trying to take over Rumteck Monastery in India, which is the seat of the Karmapas. In my dream, I was not sure which Karmapa was which. Was it the Sharmapa’s candidate who had beckoned me, or Tai Situ’s? Somehow, I felt it was very important for me to find out. I had a good connection with Tai Situ Rinpoche, having attended many of his teachings in Scotland and Woodstock, New York. It seemed clear that the Karmapa doing the Black Hat ceremony in my dream was the one found by Tai Situ, and the one predicted in the letter left by the previous Karmapa. The puzzling thing was why the Sharmapa was presenting another candidate.

  I had also met and taken teaching with the Sharmapa, and had found him very open, sharp and funny. This made the rumors even more difficult to understand. Why would a seemingly enlightened person do this, even though there was certainly a lot to gain? Rumteck Monastery, the seat of the Karmapas, with all its treasures, plus their other monasteries all over the world—the power and money would be worth a great deal.

  Indian politics are very complicated and clumsy. The Sharmapa has many political friends, which made it difficult for Tai Situ to find a solution, so that he and his candidate for the Karmapa could work together, as has been done in the previous incarnations.

  Tai Situ and the sixteenth Karmapa were very close. Since his amazing escape from the Chinese in Tibet, and his meeting with the Dalai Lama, who recognizes him as the authentic reincarnation of the sixteenth Karmapa, the seventeenth Karmapa has virtually been under house arrest in India, unable to meet with Tai Situ.

  There is another possibility with all this hoo-ha of the two Karmapas—that is, by having two, which is possible, as there can be many manifestations according to tradition—the two could set up a field of energy, rather like a magnetic field. This could give energy to practitioners of the Kagyu lineage. Gurdjieff had done something like this when he split with P.D. Ouspensky, causing a seeming rift between the two of them; in fact, this split helped Gurdjieff’s ideas spread further afield, making them accessible to many more people, but still keeping the essence of the teaching pure. A great deal of energy was also released, which used in the right way gave their respective students a large boost for their practice.

  Many years later, I would begin to see how these events and dreams would affect my life.

  Girls<
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  My fascination with the dodgy side of life continued as I carried on with my spying activities. My brother had a friend called Charlie Corner. My mother was always warning my brother about him, saying he was no good, lazy, and dishonest. My mother had great insight into other people’s flaws; she could spot weakness a mile away, but this nagging only seemed to egg my brother on. He was practical, and his hands showed it; his nails were always broken and dirty. Spying one day, I followed my brother and Charlie Corner to an old mansion. Charlie climbed the drainpipes onto the roof, up to the ridge, and climbed up the chimney stacks. What was he doing? Reaching the top, he put his arm down the stack and pulled something out. It was hard for me to see what was in his hand. He pulled a hanky from one of his pockets, somehow attaching it to what he had in his other hand, then threw the hanky off the roof. It floated gently to the ground, where my brother picked it up and put whatever it was into a bag. What was it? I was too far away to see. More hankies were floating down, and then I heard chirping sounds and jackdaws flying towards the chimney.

  About six months later, jewelry started disappearing from people’s houses. The police could not figure out what was happening, as there were no signs of break-ins, no broken locks or broken windows, nothing.

  My mother kept a sharp eye for things that threatened her view. One of her pet gripes was Charlie Corner and his girlfriends. One of his girls was killed when the scarf she was wearing caught in the back wheel of Charlie’s motorbike, pulling her neck and her to the ground, where her head smashed. She died later, and my mother forbid my brother to see Charlie after this.

  According to my mother, girls, particularly the ones across the street, were not good enough for me. This piqued my interest. I would sneak across to the girls’ house when my mother was out. Once one of the sisters said she had a new game to play. She led me to some thick undergrowth and began to take her clothes off, telling me to do the same. I was around eight or nine years old at the time, so this seemed a little strange, to say the least.