Flexed in pseudo-sobriety, I dunno: I mooched to the riverside. Bank to bank that part of the Spree is about one-hundred meters of medicinal gruel and the sky is medicinal gruel because my brain is or was when by a wall near the tram bridge, by the south abutment, I stood. A man who goes for lonely walks. Wind wafted my hair, blew the cigarette-paper when I rolled and eventually I sparked-up and watching the water thought she must flow cos all rivers are female and all flow but from the eddies and the ripples, from an orange FANTA-in-the-sun can bobbing on the surface, I couldn’t decide which way the current runs. Cig between lips, I wrote: Does she coil west toward the zone? Began to taste like shit, the cig I mean and another thought was Job Centre. You getting old. What’s the point of me? It’s in my rucksack, carrying two books because my urge was to read simultaneously like my mind’s split-screened and able to unwind two sentences at the same time: but no I can only read sequentially, left to right, brick to brick and in my bag was The Adventures of Augie March which I dip into when I’m squeezed on how to survive the city grind. The other was DH Lawrence and Italy, a travelogue but in my terms it’s a beat novel and the beat is proto acid house. Both texts, the styles are angular yet fluid. And I’d been thinking about Jackson Pollock, his howl, the voice you can hear in his paintings, the splats are as original as the sentences in both these books. I said to Martin Amis once, told him Augie March is a jazz beat novel and he said his son reckons that and I said my family never talk Bellow and I was nerved. You’re chatting like an oik, said the squirm in Amis’s eyes and he paused as if to add: What’s this kid talking to me about Saul for? You don’t come up to me spouting Augie March, that’s my novel, I revived its rep and this wiry greaser is insinuating a claim to it! He’d talked about violence and american lit at Manchester University and the american lit you’d expect to be talked of in a talk about violence and american lit he ignored and it was all Saul, Saul, Saul. Now we stood in a lobby crowded with attendees: fans, readers, dunno. One of his students perhaps, a tall young man smirked at us. From his glint I could tell he was thinking: Look at him schmoozing Mart. It happened in a kind of three second drumroll, I sees this guy smirk as I’m stood with Amis who thinks I’m dickish already, I know that before I clock the guy and I notice thru this cluster how he looks at me and smirks and I don’t know what to do. I just said to Amis: In a bit.* And went. Brisk and demotic, one stylist to another, saying in a bit felt right and yet maybe I said cheers-thanks-bye and then bolted. I dunno. That evening in Manchester skirted my thoughts as I leaned on this wall by the Spree, a green mass of unflowing liquid, my American Library copy of Bellow’s first three novels open at page 776. Chapter XVI. Unlike the others it begins with an epigraph: And strange it is that nature must compel us to lament our most persisted deeds: Anthony and Cleopatra: I wondered: Why did Bellow put that there? Didn’t he hang-out with Pollock? It’s unso much the idea of the american novel that steeled and vitalised me for the pneumatic pressures I experienced in the zone. The beat is its nucleus. Then the hooks. Like acid house. The spark you need to survive in one of those stories is inspiring. It’s all about skazz. I dunno.
. . .
* Think I might’ve said in a bit because from 1979 to 1997 I grew-up round Tamworth, a town that in the 1960s expanded with Birmingham overspill housing-estates and for goodbye it’s West Midlands slang to say: In a bit.
