Let's Think About Living

I first saw Tim Webster perform at Maidstone Art College, probably late 1984 or thereabouts, most likely with the Sputniks. It would have been a college party organised by my friend Carl, who was president of the student union at the time. He'd known Tim since they were kids due to their dads having been good friends. I don't remember the music because I'd only just discovered drinking and was trying to do a lot of it so as to effect my transformation into someone more interesting, or at least more shaggable.

My usual drinking assistant was a fellow student who lived in Chatham, and whom I won't name because he was a massive twat. He shared a house with Tim's girlfriend, about whom he whinged and whined at length because complaining about that which didst emburden his Bohemian soul was his thing, and he'd given me a long list of Chatham persons whom I should consider enemies. Tim was one of them. I don't remember the details, but one of his supposed sins was the noisy and enthusiastic sexual intercourse in which Tim allegedly engaged when visiting his girlfriend. Also, Tim was in one of those fifties revival bands, and they were the enemy too. Having a general suspicion of nostalgia, it sort of made sense to me at the time.

A couple of years passed and I ended up living in Chatham, and because I was unemployed and therefore a gentleman of leisure, I spent most days hanging around a café called Gruts on the high street, near the Nag's Head. I met a lot of people who had been classified as the enemy by my former drinking assistant, and I had realised that actually I liked them more than I liked him because, as stated above, he was a massive twat. Tim's girlfriend - by this point ex-girlfriend - was funny and lovely, for one example; and Tim himself had a workshop just across the road from Gruts, so he spent a lot of time in the café and that's how I got to know him.

On the surface of it, it might seem like that mid-eighties rockabilly revival - the thing which brought us the Polecats and their like - had been a big deal in the Medway towns of Chatham, Rochester and others, but really it felt like something different, as I slowly came to appreciate. Billy Childish, the Milkshakes, the Sputniks, and others - and we may as well include the Prisoners, the Dentists, and the Daggermen while we're here - seemed to be responding to something inherent to their locality, something ingrained within those streets. It wasn't really a revival so much as something which still sounded good, which still worked now reclaimed from the soap powder salesmen who had tried to turn it into Seaside Special. Even understanding this, I was initially wary of Tim because he seemed like a big shot on the local stage, one of the cool kids, or at least someone too cool to bother talking to the likes of me - given my then representing an evolutionary intermediary between Worzel Gummidge and Roy Wood.

Happily I was wrong. Tim was fucking great, one of the best. Now passing fifty, looking back at the list of those I've known - and I'm assuming this will be true for many of us - it's depressing how many people turned out to be nothing like so wonderful as you thought they were at the time, notably my former drinking assistant; but Tim is one of the exceptions, someone you can genuinely say you were lucky to have known, possibly even a living legend by some definition.

He usually spent a couple of hours a day in Gruts, and it turned out that he was interesting, very, very funny, and an Olympic level spinner of yarns, many with shagging as the punchline, and many giving account of his frequent accidents and injuries, and the most viscerally memorable relating his employment at the local crematorium, the only detail of which I recall being a treatise on the art of disposing of ashes around the grounds without leaving them in big grisly piles, and the use of a shovel to smash up any bones which had survived the furnace.

He repaired guitars, amplifiers, motorbikes, scooters, pretty much whatever you had that was broken in his workshop, and in the evenings he was usually playing in some pub or other in one of his bands, the Sputniks, Timmy Tremolo & the Tremolons, Johnny Gash & the Sweet Smell of Success, Dean & the Hammonds, and I've no doubt there were others I never even heard about. I'm sure there were nights when he played twice at different venues with different groups, doubtless tearing across town on foot, somehow changing shirts as he went still with a guitar slung over one shoulder. He was always into something; he was one of those people who kept things interesting and he was great live, always tearing the proverbial roof of wherever the band found themselves that evening.

He taught me how to play chess, possibly so he'd have someone to play against as we sat around in Gruts. He referred to the pieces as prawns, horsies and so on, and I assumed he was some kind of undiscovered grandmaster because he always beat me. I eventually noticed that I seemed to be the only person Tim could actually beat; and Billy Childish routinely thrashed Tim, even if the games seemed to go on for a long time.

At one point, Tim had me draw a strip cartoon - which was sort of a commission - based on Johnny Gash, one of his bands. The idea came from a running joke about all four members combining like Voltron to become the Gashman, a weird, pulpy supernatural figure with a shitload of country and western in the mix. I don't think he knew what to make of what I came up with, but he was polite about it. I don't think I'd quite grasped what he was after, and in any case my efforts weren't really the sort of thing which would have made sense as a poster for a gig.

Eventually I left Medway and lost touch with Tim, but ran into him from time to time during occasional return visits. He always seemed overjoyed to see me while I was sort of surprised he'd even remembered who I was. He always seemed to have some new distracting injury - cast, neck brace or crutches - incurred during the most recent road accident, and his life still seemingly bore resemblance to that of the character played by Robin Askwith in the Confessions films. Tim had always been unusually popular with the ladies, or so it seemed to me, and his testimony often left me imagining him shinning down drainpipes at 3AM or in trouserless flight from enraged shotgun wielding fathers; but it was thirty years ago, and my memory may have exaggerated some of the details, hopefully.

Then he turned up on facebook, as we all do eventually, but hadn't effected the usual transformation into the Duke of Wellington, as tends to have happened with everyone you knew from school. I made the mistake of pointing out a spelling error he'd made during some exchange or other, to which he replied I'm dyslexic, you cunt, or words to that effect, then elaborating by explaining that he'd been expelled from school at fourteen or thereabouts, still unable to properly read or write. I hadn't known or even suspected this, but have to assume it to be true, or roughly truthful, which still surprises me even if it probably shouldn't. The man was a force of nature, like nothing could stop him. He could do anything, and often did. On some level I always knew I'd run into him again at some point, and we'd have a drink and a chuckle over his latest ill-advised escapades, and it would be like no time had passed. There was something fundamental about him and he would always be there doing his thing.

He was living on a boat, possibly on the Medway, or else somewhere up north - I never quite worked out where he'd ended up. I gather he had health problems, but I'm not entirely sure about that either. One evening he went out on the deck of his boat for a fag, then was found dead in his deck chair next morning. I can hear a little voice muttering that it's how he would have wanted to go, although I doubt that it was. He taught me how to play chess and got me through a shitty couple of years, and my life is better than it would have been for having known the man. I'm sure others will say the same. He was the heart of the music scene in Medway for a long time, yet is mentioned only once in Stephen H. Morris's Do It Yourself: A History of Music in Medway, and then for guesting on someone else's album. He taught Billy Childish how to make woodcuts. Traci Emin painted a portrait of him before reinventing herself as whatever she is now, then flatly denied it was her work when he tried to sell the piece. The Sputnik's released one great 10" album, and aside from a few tracks on compilations, that was the full extent of Tim's vinyl footprint.

He seems like someone who should be better remembered.

He seems like someone who should still be here.

Even during this last year, having come to resemble something in the general vicinity of old man Steptoe, it took only one glance to see that here was a man with character, a man of genuine substance; and he would have read this, rolled his eyes, and barked oh fuck off with that Sid James laugh of his.

The Road to Nowhere

'Let's go see the painted rocks,' Bess suggests. 'I've never been up there and I've always wanted to go.'

I already know what she's talking about because this isn't the first time we've discussed the trip. The internet has this to say about the painted rocks in question:

On a bluff along the banks of the Concho River in west-central Texas lies the most remarkable rock art site on the Edwards Plateau. The Paint Rock pictographs number over 1,500 and cover nearly a half-mile of a limestone cliff face a short distance upstream from the town of Paint Rock. In tones of red, orange, yellow, white, and black, native artists painted animals, such as buffalo and deer, human figures, some appearing to be clasping hands in a dance or ritual, and a kaleidoscope of geometric designs on the high bluff. Some left their handprints, perhaps as a way of signing their work or merely indicating that they had been there.

The Paint Rock site is unusual in that it is one of only a handful of sites in central and northwest Texas. Rock art is much more prevalent, more ancient as a rule, and better preserved in the Lower Pecos and Trans-Pecos areas. While it is impossible to know the date of the earliest pictographs at Paint Rock, archaeological investigations at the site have recovered arrow points and sherds of earthenware pottery. These artefacts indicate that the site was used at least as early as the Toyah period (ca. A.D. 1300 – 1650), and are reflected in drawings of hunters carrying bows and arrows. Paintings of horses and a church demonstrate that use of the site by native groups continued after contact with the Spanish.

'How far is it?' I ask.

'Two, maybe two and a half hours drive.'

It's Saturday morning, the sun is out, and the boy has gone to Ruidoso with his dad this weekend. It's not like we have anything else on.

'Okay.'

We drive up I-10 so far as a town called Junction, which is about half the distance, getting on for a hundred or so miles; then take the smaller US-83 heading north towards Paint Rock. The strangest thing is that we're suddenly no longer in the hill country. The hills have levelled, the valleys have filled in, and even the plants at the side of the highway seem different. Looking on the map, I find we really are miles from anywhere. We have another hour of driving in a straight line, and we'll pass through a town called Menard, then one called Eden, and that's it, nothing else for miles and miles, just rolling planes on either side. It's not quite desert, but something in that direction with small scrubby trees, cactus, yucca and not much sign of human endeavour aside from the thing we're driving along. It feels as though we're quite high up, and the landscape reminds me of what we saw on the way to Roswell a couple of years ago.

We talk about nothing, or we listen to Lewis Black and Jim Gaffigan on CD. We pass through Menard, which has a population of several thousand, but still somehow seems a bit too small to have been left out here on its own. We're fine for gas so there doesn't seem to be any really good reason to stop.

Eden is about the same, and we make the predictable jokes: so this is where it all happened, and we talk about looking for a garden centre for the sake of a wearyingly obvious photo opportunity.

'I have the Road to Nowhere stuck in my head,' Bess tells me as we're expelled from Eden by agency of internal combustion rather than Himself upstairs. 'Was that the Talking Heads?'

'Yes,' I sigh as the song glues itself to my own internal jukebox.

We're on the Road to Nowhere…
 
Sun, sand, cacti, not much else, and we have about forty miles to go. Eventually we're there. Paint Rock has a population of just 273, according to the sign. I do a mental calculation and work out that this is probably less than the population of my local supermarket on an average weekday. It's a dusty road with buildings and a lot of space, propane tanks behind wire fences and no discernible corporate presence. We stop at the grocery store opposite a building purporting to be a Wool Warehouse. This would strike me as odd given that I've been in Texas since 2011 and am still to see a single sheep, but I'm too preoccupied with trying to imagine what it must be like to live in a town with a population of 273, at least forty miles from the nearest Dairy Queen.

There are two guys sat at tables eating tacos in the grocery store. The cashier is stacking shelves or something. They look at us but don't say anything. I buy tea and some sort of flapjack. The cashier fails to make the usual observation regarding my accent, which is nice. Maybe she realises that you ain't from around here carries a potentially disturbing subtext in a town where only 270 other people can actually be said to be from around here; and by definition almost everybody ain't from around here.

Bess returns from the khazi just as an enormous rooster struts up to the door outside and begins pecking on the glass. We watch him for a couple of seconds, sharing the inevitable jokes about what a big cock. He takes to marching back and forth as though waiting to be allowed in.

'Can you tell us how we get to the painted rocks?' Bess asks.

'Did you make an appointment?' the cashier asks in return. 'You need to call Betty Jo. She arranges all of the tours.'

'Do you have her number?'

The woman looks around herself. 'You know, I don't have it. Sorry.'

We return to the car, Bess fiddling with her phone, looking up a website. 'Here it is.'

She connects the phone to the speaker system by special magic of a kind I don't quite understand, or even see as necessary. Betty Jo answers. She sounds very old.

'Well, I'd just love to show you the paintings but you see I just got back from this morning's tour. I'm so sorry. You see I'm ninety and I can't manage more than one tour a day. I just can't do it.'

We wave our hands in the air as though she can see us. It's an inconvenience, but it is what it is, as they say. We're not going to force a ninety-year old woman into showing us the rocks if she's already knackered.

'Where are you from?' asks Betty Jo.

'San Antonio,' we tell her.

'Oh my - and you came all of this way. I'm so sorry.'

'It's fine. We'll make sure we phone to make an appointment next time.'

We turn around and head back towards Eden. It's been a day out, so we're not complaining. As we reach Eden, we take a left and head down US-87, reasoning that we may as well take a different route back for the sake of variety. The land east of Eden is a little more populous, significantly more farmed, and for the first time ever I see fields full of sheep here in Texas. In fact I see more sheep than I've probably ever seen before in any one day; so that clears up that one particular mystery and explains the Wool Warehouse, although it's only now that I've realised it had struck me as unusual.

We pass through a town called Melvin, which I find pleasing, and then the more familiar territory of Fredericksburg where we stop for something to eat, German sausage in my case. We seem to have had a pretty good day without really doing anything.

Tits

I've had another sleepless night for no reason I can identify, except possibly that it's uncommonly fucking cold and Bess and I have let Kirby stay in our room. Usually the cats get either the rest of the house or outside when we retire depending on which they prefer, but Kirby often spends the night on the corner of our bed because she's generally well behaved. Last night was the exception to the rule and she spent the hours of darkness walking across my face or otherwise engaging in cat aerobics; although I have a feeling I wouldn't have been able to sleep anyway. These days if I can't get to sleep - which admittedly isn't often - I get up and spend a couple of hours writing stuff no-one is ever going to read, then return to bed when I'm properly knackered; but on this occasion it hasn't worked.

So I have a slow day, forcing myself forward through the drudgery of my usual housewifely chores at quarter speed. I make the mistake of having the radio on and tuned to one of the stations which isn't wall to wall Tejano, but it's mostly news about how our President-elect is planning to outlaw rainbows believing they promote homosexuality, or he's appointed Dylann Roof to be the next Minister of Black People. A few weeks ago I made a mental note to avoid the news, but I keep forgetting. Later I go out on the bike, but it's still fucking cold. Frost is infrequent in Texas, but we compensate for the shortfall with icy wind of the kind Alex describes as a cold winter bastard in A Clockwork Orange. The Nahuatl speaking Mexica of Tenochtitlan - Mexico City as it has been since 1521 - associated their land of the dead with the north and divided the mythic realm into nine tiers, and one of these regions was called Itzehecayan roughly translating as Where the Wind Is Like Obsidian Knives, possibly deriving from some ancient fact-finding mission to San Antonio in the middle of January, or Izcalli as it would have been by their calendar.

It's been a long, slow day and by the time evening comes we decide to eat out seeing as the boy is staying with his father. We get in the car and Bess asks, 'Where do you want to eat?'

'Fuck it,' I say. 'Let's go to Hooters.'

Hooters is a sports-fixated restaurant chain seemingly sold on the idea of all the waitresses having great big tits. It was parodied as Bazooms in an episode of King of the Hill, and when I first moved here I was surprised to discover it was real. It seemed like an anachronism, something left over from Benny Hill's little known tenure as governor of Texas, but Bess had told me that despite any other concerns, the food was good, which primed me with the puzzling notion that people go to Hooters for the food.

Sure.

'Isn't it kind of er...'

I didn't need to finish the question for obvious reasons.

'Kind of,' she told me, 'but the food really is good.'

So along we went. The place is clean, bright, and cheery, but not quite with the depressing efficiency of McDonalds, and there are a million flat screen televisions attached to armatures all around the ceiling. There is a football game in progress, or handegg as it should probably be known. I don't know who is playing because it's not a game I understand - the Washington Racists versus the Fresno Basset Hounds or something. We are seated and tended by a waitress called Meghan who seems nice but is thankfully not my type. Being a happily married man, none of them are really quite my type even without taking the age gap into consideration. Having reached fifty it has come as a great relief to find that I'm not significantly attracted to younger women. I always feared becoming a dirty old man, but most women under thirty now seem physically peculiar to me, somehow nascent and unformed. I suppose the media has spent so much time presenting a certain female type as a physical ideal that I mistook it for how we actually work, and thankfully for the most part we don't. Although were I still in my twenties, I'm sure my nuts would have exploded before Meghan had even brought our drinks.

According to Wikipedia, an older version of the Hooters Employee Handbook reads:

Customers can go to many places for wings and beer, but it is our Hooters Girls who make our concept unique. Hooters offers its customers the look of the All American Cheerleader, Surfer, Girl Next Door.

So actually they're mostly just regular gals, admittedly very presentable regular gals, but far from the megatitted trainee strippers I'd been expecting. One of the team seems to be wearing a vest top which somehow has straps which, buckled tightly, make it appear as though she's transporting a couple of blancmanges - wibble wobble wibble wobble - but she's the only one. It comes as a bit of a relief. Despite the above protestations, and despite my inner Ben Elton, I am nevertheless a man who knows what he likes and who responds in certain ways to certain things even if I sometimes wish I didn't, and I'd probably find breasts above a certain volume something of a distraction whilst trying to navigate a menu, particularly with them hovering mere inches from my face.

Bess describes another branch of Hooters where most of the waitresses seemed to be moonlighting as strippers and had those weird fake boobs which appear solid and overinflated, more like what I expected; so either that's just a different place or Hooters has been reigning it in a bit, going for a more family friendly vibe. The sign outside displays the name Hooters written with the oo as the eyes of an owl, although the oo also resembles tits; and okay, so owls make a hooting noise but the chain knows it's not fooling anyone. I had assumed the owl allusion might be part of some recent self-conscious rebranding, but apparently it's been around more or less from the start. Nevertheless my inner Ben Elton still isn't having it.

Hooters is selling sex, isn't it? Its success is reliant on the objectification of women, on reducing women to objects set on parade for our pleasure. Well yes, and three men sued the company for sex discrimination back in 1997, specifically for denying them employment and presumably because being men, their knockers weren't much to look at; to which Wikipedia responds:

In employment discrimination law in the United States, employers are generally allowed to consider characteristics that would otherwise be discriminatory if they are bona fide occupational qualifications (BFOQ). For example, a manufacturer of men's clothing may lawfully advertise for male models. Hooters has argued a BFOQ defense, which applies when the essence of the business operation would be undermined if the business eliminated its discriminatory policy.

So it is what it is, as they say. It's a symptom of a condition of society, and if we need to get pissy and start shaking fists, there are probably a million more deserving targets. The waitresses here seem just like waitresses anywhere, only with slightly less clothing and it's hard not to feel a little sorry for them. Even if you're a complete idiot and all you have going for you in this world is breasts, waitress at Hooters was probably never anyone's dream job; and it really doesn't feel like a strip joint. The place is rammed, and about a third of the customers are women, and there are children running around. The men are mostly big, hairy trucker types, paunchy and balding, oily jeans and baseball caps featuring the logos of agricultural feed suppliers. I just hope none of them came in here expecting to score. Surely no-one is that delusional.

Meghan brings our drinks. I order smoked wings and my wife has a burger. When the food arrives it really is delicious, and so delicious that you actually would go out of your way to eat it; so it genuinely isn't just about the boobies, which is a nice surprise.

A place like Hooters will always have its knockers etc. etc.

Children of Abraham I

Byron's invite stated quite clearly that he was expecting guests to make a bit of effort with their costumes this year, and he'd said more or less the same directly to Bess. Last year's Halloween party had been poorly attended due to torrential subtropical rain. I recall about eight of us showing up and I was wearing a sardonic t-shirt purchased from the local supermarket bearing the slogan this is my costume. I like to think that I was playfully questioning the medium of the Halloween party, obliging it to examine itself in a post-structuralist context, but I guess Byron didn't see it that way.

'Fuck it,' I said to myself whilst cycling to McAllister Park on the Wednesday morning. 'Why not?'

I don't really do fancy dress, or parties for that matter; and when I've made an exception I've historically regretted it, or at least spent most of the time wishing I were somewhere else. I once turned up to a costume party thrown by my friend Carl in work clothes. I was a postman at the time so I just wore the uniform, telling anyone who asked that I'd come as Sid James as seen in Carry On Postman, embellishing the conceit with an impersonation of Sid's distinctive laugh; and in case anyone feels inclined to check, no, regrettably there was never any such film as Carry On Postman.

On the other hand - so ran my train of thought on the aforementioned Wednesday morning - being fifty, I'd long since forgotten what the problem had been, so fuck it.

Cycling back from McAllister Park, I stopped to have a look around the local Goodwill, a charity shop large enough to house several fighter jets, should Randolph Air Force Base be having a spring clean. I figured I'd see something ridiculous which I could buy and wear, or which might at least provide inspiration. I saw a few decent looking suit jackets and a large cuddly tiger with such a winning smile that I found it really difficult to leave the store without buying him, but otherwise nothing seemed to suggest itself.

On the other side of the parking lot from HEB - the local supermarket to which I was ultimately headed - I noticed that an ordinarily vacant retail premises had once again been turned into a Halloween store. Once again because this is a yearly occurrence, the retail equivalent of tumbleweed or those fish suddenly born to puddles formed in the desert after rainfall, living just long enough to leave fertilised eggs drying in the mud, ready for next year's wet season. The Halloween store was full of costumes - Abraham Lincoln, Snooki from Jersey Shore, Spiderman; for just fifty dollars or thereabouts I might be instantly transformed into any of these through the magic of flimsy one-shot items of clothing and related accessories secured by elastic. I'd never been in this kind of store, so I found it weird and fascinating. I had no intention of purchasing one of these complete pre-packaged party identities. I was planning to improvise my costume, whatever it was. I just needed inspiration, some prop I could combine with whatever I already had at home.

The prop turned out to be a fake turban and a long grey false beard provided so as to effect transformation into a person of Indian or perhaps Arabic decent, a Muslim, you know - one of those people. Ignoring the obvious alarm bells, I decided I could combine these props with a kaftan and goatskin sandals brought back from Morocco and attend the party as Osama bin Laden. I made my purchase, then picked up a pack of party balloons in HEB along with the usual groceries.

Once home, I inflated one of the balloons and spent a day or two turning it into a bomb by means of papier mâché, acrylic paint, and a length of twine - specifically the kind of bomb wielded by villains in silent cinema or the Spy vs. Spy cartoons in Mad magazine, an ominous black sphere with a fuse and the word bomb painted across it in block capitals.

Next day I picked up an assault rifle from Walmart, a child's toy costing ten dollars. It was bright green and came as part of Kid Connection's Military Action Play Set recommended for ages five and upwards. I think it was supposed to light up and make a noise but the batteries were dead. I stood in the store reading the box.

Kid Connection toys are kid-approved and built for fun. Easy to understand with no complicated instructions, these durable toys keep you and your children happy. Day after day, smile after smile.

It's a fucking gun, I thought, which had obviously also occurred to the good people at Kid Connection:

Warning: This product may be mistaken for an actual firearm by law enforcement officers and others. Altering any state or federal required marking or coloration in order to make products appear more realistic and/or brandishing or displaying the product in public is dangerous and may be a crime.

To be honest, this bright green plastic toy was about as unrealistic a firearm as could be imagined without actually being the inflatable M16 I'd seen in the Halloween store marketed as Tony Montana's weapon of choice from Scarface; and in a country where Andre Burgess was shot by a federal agent whilst brandishing a gun which turned out to be the silver wrapper of a Three Musketeers candy bar, is it really going to make any difference?

The assault rifle came with a tiny plastic hand grenade and a similarly bright green handgun. It lacked any sort of carrying strap so I improvised one from velcro and the detachable strap of a holdall. Next day I noticed a far superior kiddie assault rifle in less lurid colours on sale in HEB for the same price. Aware of how seriously I was beginning to take this project, I didn't buy it.

I told my wife I was going to the party as Osama bin Laden, showing her the novelty turban and beard. She seemed initially shocked, then amused. 'Wouldn't you say that's a bit er...'

'I'm not going to black up, if that's where you think I'm headed.'

'Well, if you're sure.'

I'd considered all of this, wondering what distinguished me from minor royals dressed as Nazi stormtroopers on the cover of the Daily Mail. The point was shock and chuckles, I told myself just as Prince Gingerbollocks had doubtless told himself; but I've known many turbaned gentlemen, some of them Muslim, and I quite like Islam on the whole, in an admittedly wishy-washy liberal sense. I suppose I might potentially piss off the more redneck elements of the party, this being Texas and all - disgruntled fatties I imagined stumbling angrily towards me mumbling something about the twin towers and how I damn well better respect something or other. I suppose I liked this idea. Not to intellectualise a Halloween costume, but the problem with the political climate in the wake of the destruction of the World Trade Centre as I see it is that Osama bin Laden is remembered as a cackling mediaeval demon, a silent cinema caricature clutching a comedy bomb and twirling his moustache. He hated us and that's all we need to know. God forbid that we should ever try to understand the situation, or what drives those we term terrorists to do what they do, or that we should recognise a political landscape of any complexity greater than what you'll find in a Batman comic.

So that's what I told myself.

'I wasn't going to bother,' Bess said, 'but now I feel I have to make the effort.'

Saturday arrives and we attend the party as Osama bin Laden with his bomb and his bright green assault rifle, and Mrs. bin Laden by virtue of a burqa my wife has improvised from various scarves. I have my bright green handgun in a shoulder bag along with four bottles of Newcastle Brown Ale.

Junior wears his gas mask, a hooded cloak, and a novelty AC/DC t-shirt featuring not images of the Australian heavy rock band but Nikola Tesla and Thomas Edison. He tells us that he is Timeshare Man, which is something derived from his own private mythology. About a year ago he took to asking people if they would like to buy a timeshare, because he finds it hilarious for reasons which probably make sense when you're twelve.

'Would you like to know where the timeshare came from?' he asked us one day in tones promising a rare glimpse into the mind of a comedy genius.

'Yes,' we said. 'Please tell us.'

He described his hiding behind some door at school, then asking the next person to open the door whether or not they would like to buy a timeshare. I started to explain that this was simply an account of the first instance of his cracking the supposed joke and as such provided little insight into either its origination or why he considered it funny, but I gave up, recognising my enquiry as pointless. Junior does what he does unburdened by either disingenuous humility or an excess of self-awareness, and it's just how he is. It's not uncommon for his jokes to be supplemented with spoken appendices regarding how funny they were and how well he told them.

I really liked it when I said that.
 
Byron has as usual gone to obsessional lengths to decorate his house with the trappings of Halloween, and no rubbish either. The front room is a clutter of animated skulls, tiny haunted houses dispensing ghoulish noises, portrait paintings which become skeletal at a specific angle. Junior's contribution is the question would you like to buy a timeshare? painted on the door to the bathroom, and now here he is to complete the picture in his gas mask and his cloak and his hood, making hilarious sense mainly to himself. I'd suggest he's come as the general concept of trying too hard, but I don't wish to seem uncharitable given how much pleasure this bewildering timeshare schtick obviously brings him.

It turns out that Roger has come as a pimp - purple suit with zebra pattern trimmings and a huge floppy hat. There's something which makes me feel vaguely uncomfortable about the only black man at the party having dressed as an ethnic stereotype, but maybe that's what he was going for. He mentions something about Huggy Bear from Starsky & Hutch but it's okay. I get it, and I appreciate that it somehow takes the heat off me. No-one is going to expect either of us to explain ourselves, because it's a Halloween party not a thread on a self-important internet bulletin board.

It's only just gone six, still light, and not many people here, so we make our way out onto the decking and talk to Byron's parents and his brother. Byron's parents, for the sake of reference, may represent the closest I've come to meeting real life Ewings - as seen on the television show Dallas during the days of Ron and Nancy. Their fortune is founded on oil somewhere back in the depths of time, but there the resemblance more or less ends. They're sharp, quick-witted but personable, and despite that they might legitimately regard me as some sort of cuckoo rather than a mere stepfather, they seem to think I'm great. Jay, the brother, has been living in Austin whilst studying for what I understand to be a position in the Episcopalian Church. I ask him how it's been going. His answer seems to take the form of a protest, although I'm not sure against what because I don't quite follow what he's telling me beyond that no, he's not yet doing whatever vicars do full-time.

Bruce and Lori turn up as respectively a demon and an angel, personifying a moral balance which Lori probably jeopardises whilst allowing me to cadge a ciggie. Time has passed and it's dark and we're all gathered under the trellises Byron has built in the rear part of the garden. He's growing grape vines up the supports. He's going to make wine, and in keeping with the ambience I'm on my second bottle of Newcastle Brown Ale. It's going to my head because I don't ordinarily drink so much, or even at all. I don't smoke either, but I ask Lori if she can spare one because the moment seems right. I spend a second wondering what the acceptable American for gi's a fag might be, knowing it almost certainly won't be that. I'm unable to recall any scene of Humphrey Bogart helpfully scrounging snouts, so I try could you spare a cigarette, which is a bit like buddy, can you spare a dime?

It works, and thankfully I don't enjoy smoking it anything like as much as I thought I would, which at least means that this isn't me relapsing.

Bruce has turned himself into a demon simply by affixing two small horns to his forehead with adhesive. The horns really suit him, which is weird, although it's probably fitting that he's now telling us about some home brewed alcoholic concoction known by the delightful name of Thunderfuck.

'What's Everclear?' I ask, recognising the brand name from somewhere. 'Is that pure alcohol?'

Turner, who seems to know about these things, nods. My guess came from the context in that we seem to be talking about moonshine, or something like it, relating anecdotal instances of its distillation by agency of Everclear. I assume it's like the bottle of pure alcohol I nicked from the college chemistry department so I could clean the workings of my tape recorder, but it's alcohol brewed from corn and sold for human consumption in all but the nine states which have banned it.

Bruce made a batch of something called Thunderfuck at some point of his college years, and everyone else sat at the table beneath the trellis has a similar story.

I make it through a third Newcastle Brown and realise I'm drunk, or at least more light headed than I've been in years. It's quite a nice feeling, but it also means I'm done for the evening. Thankfully my wife is similarly partied out so we gather up Timeshare Man and head home. The hour, which we anticipate as being around ten or eleven in the evening, is half past eight. I've spent just two-and-a-half hours as Osama bin Laden, and it was a lot of fun.

Traditional English Teeth

A popular truism held by Americans regarding the English is that they - or rather we - have terrible teeth. Obviously it's a generalisation at best, approaching not entirely accurate providing you can afford to spend the whole day sat on your arse seeking out online articles to the contrary. I would say the truth is to be found in dividing the popularity of the Osmonds by how many American children end up wearing braces for most of their teenage years, and then adding the English love of sweets, cigarettes, and not getting too hung-up on appearance. I would say this, except I am myself English, and whilst I couldn't claim to have had the absolute worst teeth, I can think of only three individuals with marginally more disgusting oral furniture; and this is across the entire fifty year span of my life and is limited only to people I've actually known, so no Shane MacGowan or whoever. So even if it isn't strictly true that the English have terrible teeth, it feels true, as Spike Milligan acknowledged in his poem:

English Teeth, English Teeth!
Shining in the sun,
A part of British heritage,
Aye, each and every one.
English Teeth, Happy Teeth!
Always having fun,
Clamping down on bits of fish,
And sausages half done.
English Teeth! Heroes' Teeth!
Hear them click! and clack!
Let's sing a song of praise to them -
Three cheers for the Brown, Grey and Black.

My own engagement with this proud legacy began early, possibly through a combination of my grandmother filling me with sweets roughly every fourteen days and a suspicion that brushing didn't make much of a difference given that my teeth always looked exactly the same when I'd finished; so up until as late as my thirties, I was brushing once a day or not, depending on whether I could be bothered. Of my twice yearly childhood visits to the dentist, I can recall maybe two which didn't result in another filling, and yet somehow I never managed to quite make the connection between this and not brushing my teeth. My diary entry for Friday the 29th of April, 1983 accordingly observes:

Today I had five fillings done at the dentist, although to be fair I suppose three of them were minor.

My friend Andrew visited the dentist only twice in his life, once as a child, and then as he approached forty. He told me he'd made an appointment as we sat in the pub in Lewisham. I'd always found his teeth odd, fascinating even. They were small and peg-like - pale yellow, but a uniformly pale yellow like they were supposed to be that way. I said nothing because I had no positive forecast to share.

'They're all fine,' he told me next day, once again in the pub.

'What? Seriously?'

'Yup.'

'You haven't been to the dentist since you were a kid and you don't even need a filling?'

'He told me that I have naturally strong teeth.'

From this conversation I deduced that there might be such a thing as naturally weak teeth, and that this probably applied to me. Teenage periods of what I considered diligent brushing had been rewarded at six-monthly intervals with more fillings regardless, and so I had ceased caring because caring led to thoughts of dentists and injections and drills and pain. Besides, my teeth looked okay from the front and no-one had complained of my having bad breath, so it didn't seem like they could be that terrible. At least I didn't think so when I was a kid. Once at school I'd laughed out loud at some comment made by Juliet Prouse, and I'd laughed with such vigour that I threw my head back, mouth open.

'I don't know why you'd want to kiss him,' observed James Renton who was then busily waging some sort of weird hate campaign against me for reasons known only to himself. 'It would be like kissing a dustbin.'

I wasn't even sat next to him. If my breath had been that toxic there would have been other clues, so I assumed James had been referring to the quota of dental amalgam inside my mouth, the bilateral arcs of metallic grey exposed when I opened wide. More puzzling was the possibility that Juliet Prouse might have wanted to kiss me in the first place. Were it true, this would have been problematic because I found her slightly annoying but didn't feel myself in a position to be choosy. Given that she had exhibited more obvious and undisguised interest in at least three other boys, I assumed the romantic aspect of the jibe was simply what James had chosen as framework from which to launch his critique of my gob.

It probably didn't help that I enthusiastically took up smoking as soon as I left home, and that in leaving home I had removed myself from an environment containing anyone who might occasionally give a shit about my teeth or the wisdom of my going to see the dentist every once in a while. I still brushed at least some of the time, but my technique was closer to voodoo than actual brushing - movements to appease the spirits of the undertaking rather than specifically tailored towards the removal of plaque. It isn't that I was oblivious to the perils of poor dental hygiene so much as that I felt it was already a lost cause. I'd been having nightmares in which my teeth fell out one by one ever since I was a kid. The lore has it that such dreams tend to stem either from the subconscious fear that one may actually be a bit of a munter, or else anxiety regarding the security of one's living arrangements, but my theory is that these dreams were more to do with a fear of my fucking teeth falling out. Accordingly, a diary entry dated to Wednesday the 18th of May, 1988 states:

I've got a very strongly ingrained fear of dentists, but on the scale my fear of dentists has been balanced out by fear of my teeth falling out because the other day I was prodding about and there is a hole in one of them into which you can insert about three millimetres of fingernail and then waggle it about; and when you look at that tooth it looks like it has come out of a packet of Rolos. It's very worrying so I went along and made an appointment, and I have that at 2.30PM tomorrow. It's the first time I've been to a dentist in about five years, so it serves me right I suppose.

Then on Friday the 17th of June I report:

I went to the dentist as I said I would, and it was quite good. In fact I find it difficult to understand what I was so nervous about. I had to go back about four times and like I say there's that tooth which was really rotten - he put a completely new crown on it and it was all right; and this last time that I went he said right, that's your lot, which was good because I thought I would need about six months worth of treatment.

My next visit was in 1990 and I was living in Coventry with my dad. It was two years since the above cluster of appointments, from which I had somehow developed the idea that it will probably be all right might reasonably be adopted as a practical philosophy of dental hygiene. I think this degree of optimism sprang from the fact that he'd said right, that's your lot and that I still had teeth despite that which I had foreseen in my dreams. The Coventry dentist seemed to regard my optimism as premature, warning me, you really need to start looking after your teeth right now. You're going to have serious trouble with them by the time you're fifty if you're not careful. He also told me that I had gum disease, but I'd heard this one before. You have gum disease, without explanation of what it was or how it might be treated, and I was reluctant to ask because when sat in a dentist's chair I usually feel sufficiently well stocked for bad news and am reluctant to seek more. He may as well have said I see that you are wearing shoes for all the difference it made.

After Coventry, I moved to London, failed to make the effort to hook myself up with a new dentist, and then on Friday the 29th of November, 1991 I noted:

I've had a couple of shocks this week. The second was, you know how you probe around your mouth with the tip of your tongue after you've just eaten something? Well I've come across an enormous hole in one of my teeth - big enough to use as an echo chamber. I can only assume it's where a filling has come out because I looked in the mirror and it is a long way back and that tooth already has other fillings in it; and that size of hole, I'm sure I would have noticed before. It can't just have appeared out of nowhere. It looks like a visit to the dentist is in order at some point.

But I wasn't in any pain so I decided a period of adjustment might be okay, a month or so during which I could really dedicate myself towards working up the courage to think about making an appointment. Months inevitably became a year, and then disaster struck. Surprisingly the agony came from a wisdom tooth which had suddenly decided to act the cunt, although the tooth with the echo chamber was still fine - which I felt rather proved my point, whatever it had been. Equally surprising, this was the first time I'd experienced genuine dental pain of the kind which isn't induced by a dental practitioner using either a needle or a drill. Until that moment my understanding of toothache came mostly from the comics I'd read as a kid, Whoopee or Cheeky Weekly in which toothache necessitates a spotted handkerchief tied around one's swollen jaw with a knot the size of a tropical butterfly flapping around on top of your head, with treatment generally involving a door handle and a length of string. The reality of toothache turned out to be at least as agonising as Whoopee and Cheeky Weekly had promised. I dabbed the tooth with oil of cloves, a natural analgesic recommended by Peter Laycock from work, and while it took off the edge, it was obvious that I really did need to get myself to a dentist.

I found one on the Lee High Road, just across from the pub in which Andrew had told me of his own perfect free-range teeth. The dentist asked me whether I was aware of having gum disease, and then out came the needle like an old friend looking very much as I remembered, a huge silver assagai of the kind you would expect to see piercing Kenneth Williams' quivering buttock in a Carry On film.

'Are you numb?,' he asked after a minute or so.

'Not really.'

'Well, if you go and wait in reception, I'll call you back in when you are and we can take a look at that wisdom tooth.'

This was a new, slightly puzzling development, but there didn't seem to be much point in arguing. I shuffled out to the waiting room and sat down. Another patient was called in. Fifteen minutes passed and this second patient came back out, because it was now his turn to wait for the anaesthetic to take full effect.

'If we could have you back now, Mr. Burton...'

I resumed my position in the chair and he poked around. It was still painful. He gave me another injection and told me to return to the waiting room a second time whilst he continued treating the other patient. I suppose if the practice had been able to afford more chairs he could have had a whole line of us, five or six in a row all being worked on simultaneously.

Eventually the anaesthetic kicked in and he was able to yank my errant wisdom tooth using an instrument resembling the sort of pliers with which I might adjust the gears on a bicycle. There was no pain, but it felt as though I was wearing a motorcycle crash helmet and someone was attacking the side of my head with a hammer. Following this he turned his attention to the echo chambered tooth after another spell out in the waiting room as further patients were juggled. He ground the tooth down to a nub, glued a crown in place, and informed me that I had terrible gum disease and should therefore be sore afraid.

My mouth seemed to be back in some sort of working order, and I considered a vow of not bothering to go to see a dentist ever again if I could help it, without actually quite making that vow. An indeterminate count of years later I found myself once again obliged to see a dentist as the crowned molar flared up. I'd moved to East Dulwich and so signed myself on at the Townley Road dental practice, clutching my swollen gob and making muffled noises about how their earliest available appointment would be nice. The dentist to whom I was assigned seemed to take the state of my teeth personally, and may as well have suffixed most of what he told me with you piss-taking fuckface. It transpired that the Lee High Road dentist had done something of a rush job on that back tooth - which didn't come as much of a surprise given the multitasking which had characterised the appointment. The decay had continued beneath my hastily fitted crown and there was some infection involved. This newest practitioner did what he had to do, then asked 'did you know that you have gum disease, you piss-taking fuckface?'

I'm really never going to the dentist ever again, I told myself as I paid up and left, not out of choice, I'm not. I might be hit by a bus whilst crossing the road tomorrow, and then the future state of my gob won't matter one way or the other. Who can say what will happen?

I was back again six months later, same tooth but more agonising than ever. The dentist numbed me up, had a look, and deduced that the nerve within the same naughty molar was now at death's door and had hence begun to make a fuss. This was a detail which the previous dentist - the one who had taken the state of my teeth personally - would have been unable to detect as he capped my molar with the sort of care it should have received first time around.

'We'll need to extract the nerve.'

I didn't even know this was a thing. Unfortunately, once my latest dentist had drilled enough to get at the nerve to perform an extraction, her next action felt like several thousand volts of electricity passed through the tooth, regardless of anaesthetic.

'Oh dear,' she said, 'it seems the nerve is not quite dead.'

She told me she could cover the tooth with a temporary cap then try again in about a month, and at least I wouldn't be in any pain in the mean time. Under other circumstances my response probably would have been fuck off, but for the first time ever my dentist was female and - as I couldn't really fail to notice - gorgeous.

'Yes,' I said, adopting a serious expression to show that I understood, and that I really, really cared about my teeth, and that together, we could crack this thing. So I went back another four or five times at two week intervals, Dr. Patel attempting to extract the nerve on each occasion but having to admit defeat, still finding it was too sensitive. In the end she gave the tooth a semi-permanent cap and suggested I return when I experienced further discomfort. This seemed fair enough. Quite aside from the obvious appeal of my dentist being what might be described as a hottie, she was also a whizz with the anaesthetic. As she worked I had realised with considerable surprise that, aside from that electric jolt of decaying nerve, I'd otherwise felt nothing and that this was a first. There had always been some small degree of pain during the drilling or the chipping away or whatever else they got up to in there. Either anaesthetic practice had come some way since the late eighties, or Dr. Patel was just a better dentist than her predecessors.

Another decade passed, or something like a decade, although  I'm no longer certain quite when this particular divide occurred within the natural history of my teeth. It was almost certainly the frequently capped molar with its seemingly immortal nerve that sent me back, muttering a sheepish apology for having left it so long. The molar was at last dealt with by means of a root canal undertaken by Dr. Shane Curran. I'd initially resisted the notion of seeing a practitioner other than Dr. Patel on the grounds that I could tolerate some discomfort if I fancied the dentist a bit, but being in my forties I had at last begun to grasp that not having shit teeth should be considered sufficient inducement. I began to see the hygienist on a regular basis and agreed to twice yearly check ups from that point on - this more or less coinciding with a significant downward turn in the state of my teeth, even considering that they had never been great at the best of times. The Coventry dentist had warned me, you're going to have serious trouble with them by the time you're fifty if you're not careful, and my dental chickens were coming home to roost.

This was all due to a combination of gum disease, inexpert brushing, and smoking. I still had no idea what gum disease was beyond that I had it, and I was brushing morning and night more or less without fail, but without the sort of technique which would have made a difference. I had the vaguely expressed intention of giving up smoking at some point but found it difficult because life was otherwise just too depressing and miserable. Eventually and inevitably, some of my teeth had begun to feel loose.

Gum disease, as it was finally explained to me, is expressed as the gum receding from the tooth to expose the lower parts of the root which it would ordinarily protect, ultimately resulting in the decay of the bone surrounding which should support the tooth; which was why mine were beginning to rattle.

'What can I do?' I asked, uncomfortably aware of an irony black hole created in the wake of this newest display of concern. There didn't seem to be any single answer, possibly because you're probably fucked has never been considered a helpful expression in the context of medical diagnoses. 'Are you really sure this isn't just moving deck chairs around on the Titanic?' I asked Dr. Patel as she gave me yet another filling. 'I mean if I'm looking at false teeth, maybe it would just be easier to get it over and done with.'

She didn't really have an answer, but she chuckled at the joke about the Titanic which made me feel warm inside.

I was signed on for a course of deep cleaning at King's College Hospital, once a month, six sessions or something like that. The specific problem was that gum disease creates pockets down the side of the tooth wherein bacteria can collect and flourish, gradually destroying both the tooth and the bone in which it is set, and with all of this occurring below the gum line, brushing doesn't make much difference. My dental pockets were measured as being of about 5mm depth on average, but some were deeper and getting worse. The hygienist at King's College Hospital wrote me a prescription for Corsodyl, an antibacterial gel which I was to use in conjunction with interdental brushes referred to as tepes which could be inserted into the gaps between teeth; and I had to floss daily; and to brush properly, angling the bristles down towards the gum line. In addition to this I had an appointment roughly once a month during which the hygienist would manually scrape and chip away the plaque which had calcified around the roots of my teeth. It wasn't a huge amount of fun, but it seemed to be making some difference in that my pockets weren't getting any worse. Some were even beginning to close up and heal, although by now I had a few over one centimetre in depth - the point of no return, so I was told.

In 2009 I left London and returned to Coventry for a spell, living at my mother's house whilst preparing for my move to the States. Unfortunately this meant it became impractical for me to continue treatment at King's College Hospital in London. Simply I couldn't afford the train fare. I reasoned that with America being the land of Osmond brothers and perfect smiles, I would be living there soon enough providing everything worked out. I would worry about my gob once I'd moved because I had other seemingly more pressing concerns for the present; or so it appeared until I lost a filling whilst eating a cheese sandwich. I found a dental surgery in Coventry, but they were unable to continue my course of deep cleaning treatment owing to the convolutions of NHS funding and my no longer having an income, so it became a matter of damage limitation. I kept on with the Corsodyl and the tepes, and the dentist at the Balkrishna clinic pulled a couple of the really rotten ones which now, having lost all support, waggled freely from side to side in the back of my mouth. He never seemed particularly happy to see me, and even pulled one of the worst teeth without charge, having taken pity on me because the extraction had been performed with a simple tug, like removing a pebble from the tread of a bicycle tyre.

'Make sure you are seen as soon as you've moved,' he warned me darkly. 'You no longer have the luxury of sitting around and thinking about it for a while.'

I moved to America.

Prior to our marriage, I had warned my wife about my traditional English teeth and how they would almost certainly require work at some point, and that the work would doubtless be quite expensive; but having moved to the States, I was reluctant to bring the subject up again because I was fairly certain that the work would comprise someone pulling the lot and then measuring me for a pair of dentures. I presumed it had always been on the cards, yet despite everything I was still in part banking on my teeth eventually returning to full health of their own accord. I didn't want to commit myself to the idea that they definitely wouldn't return to full health of their own accord, and I was therefore naturally cautious of making any hasty decisions. I had given up smoking, and I knew at least some of my trouble had stemmed from the necrosis of the gums caused by tobacco smoke. My gums would probably grow back, and my teeth would begin to feel firm once more, I decided.

Typically, within a week of my arriving in America another filling popped out as I chewed on a soft, slightly crappy McDonald's cookie. Oh for fuck's sake, I thought.

I visited a dentist in Alamo Heights. He took an x-ray, then shrugged and delivered a verdict along the lines of how he wouldn't even know where to begin, and that the tooth from which I'd just lost a filling was probably a write off so there wasn't much point in him fixing it; for which he charged me eighty dollars.

Months passed, and then a year, and a second dentist told me the same as the first regarding the lost filling, specifically that he couldn't really commit to the idea that the tooth was worth saving in the first place. He proposed giving me a bridge - pulling a couple of teeth and attaching a sort of armature to those left standing, along which would be arranged a couple of false ones. He also recommended I seek a second opinion from one Dr. Stalker, apparently something of a whizz in this particular field. 'If anyone can help you, it's Stalker,' he told me, a slightly faraway look in his eyes as though he were referring to the last of the fabled Jedi Knights.

The proposed bridge sounded complicated and unpleasant, but my wife had been left sceptical of Dr. Stalker having been treated by him on a previous occasion. Nevertheless, a second opinion couldn't hurt and so I went to see Dr. Yarbrough who, rather conveniently, practiced just a block away from where my wife and myself were living. Dr. Yarbrough's second opinion was pretty much the same as the first had been, right down to the invocation of the mighty Dr. Stalker. He could deal with the lost filling, but it wasn't really even worth considering until Dr. Stalker had taken a look.

'Well, what do I know?' my wife sighed. 'They all seem to think he's the best. Maybe I was just unlucky.'

Dr. Stalker proved an amiable and knowledgeable practitioner, one of those people who immediately puts his patients at ease, or at least he put me at ease.

'Give it to me straight, doc,' I said, if not in those exact words, 'have you seen anyone with teeth worse than mine?'

'Well, they're not great,' he chuckled, not unkindly, 'but we're not without options.'

He took x-rays, prodded around for a while and then made his proposal. It wasn't going to be cheap, but it seemed worth a try. My wife's medical insurance covered some of the expense, and we borrowed the rest; and so Dr. Stalker went to work. I was unconscious under general anaesthetic for three hours as he pulled those teeth which were beyond repair, then opened up my gums and scraped the rest of the decaying matter from out of the bone support. Then he introduced some newly developed concoction utilising my own blood plasma which would, so he hoped, stimulate fresh bone growth around the roots of my remaining teeth, giving them greater stability; and then he sewed me back up.

I had a mouth full of stitches for a couple of weeks, and I was on a diet of pain killers and soup for about the same length of time, but when the stitches came out, Dr. Stalker seemed optimistic.

'It's looking good so far,' he told me, 'but I guess we'll know for sure in a couple of months. In the meantime you should get that rear molar capped.'

I returned to Dr. Yarbrough's office and was seen by a young Polish dentist. Without quite being able to say why, I found her abrasive, far from the reassuring presence which had been presented by Dr. Stalker, or even Dr. Yarbrough himself on my previous visit. She prodded and poked, drilled and filled some minor cavities I hadn't known about. She told me she had once been to London but couldn't remember much about it - which I presumed was her equivalent of bedside manner. Unfortunately any charm generated was quickly dispelled by her habit of discussing me and my terrible teeth with the dental assistant as though I were either deaf, stupid, or absent.

'Has Dr. Stalker treated him yet?' the assistant asked.

'No, I don't think he has.' The Polish women scowled into my mouth, apparently finding no evidence of several thousand dollars worth of surgery followed by a couple of weeks spent in serious pain.

She spoke directly to me. 'You have terrible gum disease, you know. It really is quite bad.'

'Still?'

'Yes.'

'I thought the surgery was supposed to deal with that.'

'You have already had the surgery with Dr. Stalker?'

'Yes I have, and apparently it hasn't made the slightest bit of difference.' I was almost in tears.

'You are going to have implants?'

This had been an earlier proposal, but a vague one depending on the success of Dr. Stalker's work. The gaps between my teeth left by those pulled might be filled with implants which could be screwed directly into the bone of my jaw, depending on how much bone was there. It sounded painful and expensive, and not entirely necessary given that I was getting on fine with the teeth I had left.

'No. I'm not going to have implants.'

The dentist returned to her conversation with the dental assistant, again discussing me as though I had left the room. 'Make a note, would you? When he comes back for his implants we shall—'

'I'm right here, you know.' This was too much. 'I can actually hear what you're saying; and I'm not having implants as I'm pretty sure I just said.'

She made some noise along the lines of well, just think about it, and then you can decide a bit later, and then ground my rear upper molar down to a nub and glued a temporary crown in place. This was the tooth from which Ronald McDonald had robbed me of a filling now over a year before.

'This is a temporary crown?'

'Yes,' she said. 'We need to order the permanent replacement, and then you will come back in again.' She showed me a catalogue offering a choice of different types of crown. I didn't have a fucking clue what I was looking at or why what seemed to me like a single job should require multiple appointments, and so got my wife on the phone and had her speak to the woman. After further discussion the dentist ordered the most expensive replacement crown, it being the best option, from what any of us could tell. I would need to return in another couple of weeks in order to have it fitted.

'Can you come with me?' I asked my wife. 'That dentist makes me nervous.'

Bess assumed I was probably freaking out over nothing, but nevertheless agreed to accompany me. The dentist fitted my new crown and we left.

'You were right.' Bess told me. 'I don't know what it was, but I didn't like her at all.'

A month or so later I returned to Dr. Stalker's office for the first of my regular deep cleaning appointments. The surgery had not been a success, I knew, so I was dreading it.

Dr. Stalker had a look around in my mouth and seemed quite pleased. I related what had happened at Dr. Yarbrough's office, and he responded with a slight frown. 'Trust me,' he said. 'It's early days, but there's already significant improvement here.' He didn't actually say, the woman doesn't know what she's talking about, of the dentist who had failed to recognise several thousand dollars worth of surgery, but I'd begun to suspect as much. I told him how keen she had been to sign me up for implants I didn't want, and he sighed. The impression I got was that things had been much better when Dr. Yarbrough himself had been running his own practice.

I've been back to Dr. Stalker's office every three or four months since, and on each occasion the cleaning has been less and less laborious as what teeth I have left have begun to recover from four decades of abuse. I have ten teeth less than most people, but the gaps are all at the rear of my mouth and I have no difficulty eating or chewing. I have a gap on each side of my upper jaw, same place each side, so where there were once three molars in a row behind each upper canine, there are now two with a space between them leaving those at the rear isolated, each stood alone at the back like the rock tower in Close Encounters of the Third Kind, or the stumpy tusks of some weird Paleocene herbivore; it felt weird at first, but it's really no big deal.

My most recent appointment was distinguished by the announcement that the pockets which once ran so deep into my gum line are now entirely gone, fully healed despite my having once been told that I was stuck with those over a centimetre in depth. Dr. Stalker's verdict is that I will almost certainly be keeping those teeth I have left because my mouth is in good shape with no sign of gum disease for what is probably the first time in my life. Bess has concluded that her own initial scepticism regarding Dr. Stalker most likely came from frustration. He'd been unable to treat a fragment of shattered bone that had come loose in her jaw and had suggested that her only option was to grin and bear it, not through professional indifference so much as simple honesty. The fragment would work its way out and it would heal, but in the meantime there was nothing he could do. With hindsight she has concluded that this was at least preferable to snake oil, or to the practitioner who sees the patient only as a fountain of revenue.

On this latter note, the hygienist at Dr. Stalker's office recently noticed the beginnings of a cavity in one of the borderline teeth, one of those which almost got pulled but was left in the hope of it being worth saving. I was recommended to the excellent Dr. Woodbridge as a dentist who dedicates himself to the work which needs doing rather than what he can justify. Dr. Woodbridge filled the cavity and then asked about whether I'd intended to have implants. I said no, told him why, and asked what had prompted the question. He told me that my most recently and expensively capped molar had been fitted with a crown of a kind quite specifically tailored to accommodate neighbouring implants.

I suppose I might be justified in feeling slightly angry about some of this, as I was when I submitted an unfavourable account of my treatment at Dr. Yarbrough's clinic describing some of the above to Yelp, a website by which members of the general public share their experiences of medical centres, dental clinics, hospitals, restaurants, garages or anywhere else you might hope to avoid getting fucked over for the sake of a dollar. Curiously my review has been removed from the supposedly impartial site, leaving just the one which gushes with praise; but it no longer bothers me given that I no longer have to worry about my teeth falling out, or rotting into stumps, or the lottery involved in seeking further treatment should it be necessary. Given that I've spent my entire adult life having nightmares about the state of my teeth, I'm still not sure I've even quite taken any of this in.

Of course it also means that I am essentially the English male equivalent of a Thai bride as purchased from a catalogue; and that I no longer have quite such traditionally English teeth because Bess had me all fixed up just as soon as I came out of the packing crate, but I think I can live with that.

The Big, Fat Working Class Sunrise

I'd seen Gary around Dulwich since the mid 1990s, although I didn't know his name at the time. He was a grown man with a paper round and was always walking his dog - something big like an Alsatian, like him in fact. He wasn't really fat, just a great looming lump, like a dole queue Bernard Bresslaw and always a bit scruffy because once a month down the launderette probably wasn't quite often enough; a bit red faced and slightly balding. He looked as though he could probably demolish brick walls with his bare hands if someone paid him to do it, which was a possibility given that he seemed to be an odd-job man. I passed him every morning, usually at the same time, same place, the corner of Friern Road as I snapped rubber bands from the bundle of mail for all the old age pensioners down Rycott Path. I said good morning a couple of times, because when a face has achieved a certain familiarity, it's embarrassing to pass by without some kind of acknowledgement; but he never replied, just stared back with those boiled egg eyes, seeming almost afraid.

What did I know?

What was my game?

Then suddenly he is my neighbour. The house next door has been divided into four flats, one to each floor. The basement flat has been broken into a couple of times, our part of Dulwich being particularly susceptible to burglary, and I myself have been similarly hit twice. The previous tenant has moved out, taking her horrible kid and criminal boyfriend; and now here he is, adult paper round man grinning over the top of the wall, and it's the first time I've ever seen him smile. 'You're the postman, aincha?'

'That's me.' I'm a little surprised that he remembers me from those mornings as we passed each other on the corner of Friern Road.

'I fort so. I seen you around.'

The council have placed him in the flat. He introduces himself as Gary and tells me a little of his story, but it's difficult to follow and is annotated with testy defences of alleged crimes at which he will only hint, and which in any case weren't crimes 'cuz he weren't doing nuffink wrong and you can arse anyone. He'd been living, so I gather, in one of the tower blocks up Friern Road with an ambiguous tally of pets - cats, dogs, budgerigars, fish, and possibly a squirrel. There had been complaints but he remains unspecific and anyway he hadn't done nuffink wrong and he was always doing little fings like putting the wheelie bins out for people or getting you a pint of milk from the shops or bringing in your mail from the boxes down at the bottom when the postman couldn't be bovvered to climb all them steps because the lift was bust, and he never even arsed for fanks or nuffink and it just went to show how two-faced some people could be dunnit. All that can now be said for sure is that Gary is gunna behave himself. He ain't gunna be doing nuffink silly again. He ain't gunna be writing on no walls or nuffink silly. He has learned his lesson.

So have I, namely that asking for specific details of the occurrence to which Gary occasionally alludes is more trouble than it's worth, and seems to upset him. Sometimes he'll arrive there under his own steam, in which case it's best to shut up and let him get it out of his system, and most of all to avoid the temptation to dig further no matter how darkly intriguing the testimony.

'You know women, right?'

I could answer well, not all of them, but it will only complicate things so I just say, 'yes.'

'Always arseing questions ain't they?' He scowls as though finding himself once again let down by half of the entire human race. I have a brief, horrible image of this particular train of thought leading to bodies uncovered from beneath an unevenly laid patio, and so I keep my mouth shut.

He seemed like an ordinary bloke, I will have to lie. Always kept himself to himself, except he never does.

'Funny bloke, ain't he?' Bill, my ageing Landlord, stands on the doorstep. I am paying the week's rent and our eyes have been drawn across the top of the wall to next door's garden and Gary labouring away on the latest of what he refers to as his projects.

'I can't figure him out. What does he do exactly?'

Bill belongs to the generation raised upon a solid work ethic. He doesn't really understand concepts of either unemployment or disability, and Gary seems to fall somewhere between the two.

'He works up at the flower shop on the corner,' I report, seeing no harm in telling just Bill. Gary has sworn me to silence, but so far as I can tell, most of our neighbours already know him as Gary from the flower shop on the corner. I'm not quite sure what the work entails, besides lifting and carrying anything which is too large or heavy for regular humans.

Bill sighs. 'He delivers the bleedin' newspapers and all, you know. I seen him in the mornings.'

I nod, uncertain of why we're having this conversation. Gary is an odd one for sure, but it doesn't seem like there's much to be done about it.

Over the next few months we watch Gary's projects come to fruition. The garden of the house was intended by the owner to be shared by the residents of all four flats - an intention formed from a fairly basic misunderstanding of human nature, particularly in London. Gary has taken over the entire garden, not a passive-aggressive occupation of territory but simply because he doesn't know when to stop, and none of those living above him care enough to complain. In addition to the flower shop and the paper round, he sometimes undertakes gardening jobs, often returning with plants or even small trees discarded by some client, now transplanted to his own garden.

He's a human magpie, transposing anything bright, shiny, or even just available to what has become his garden, which now includes all manner of plaster features and figurines, dry fountains shaped like sea shells, pink flamingoes, ornamental wooden arches and trellises, chunks of rotting wood that looked kind of interesting, and even a gravestone. It's not really a gravestone, although it's roughly the same shape, and I'm staring over the wall trying to work out what the hell he's doing now.

'I'm painting it Chelsea colours, ain't I. Whatchu fink?' He steps back to allow for an inspection, clearly proud of his work.

'I see.' I don't really see at all.

'You into football?'

'It's not really my thing, Gary.'

He indicates the letters he's begun to paint across the gravestone. The paint comes from half empty tins of emulsion which someone or other was throwing out, red, white and navy blue. There's a name which I can't read followed by a date in fat, uneven letters.

'She was my dog,' he explains. He is silent for a moment, almost thoughtful. 'I always fink when I die, they'll all be waiting for me up in heaven, all jumping up and down and pleased to see me like dogs are, you know?'

I grunt because it's a moment of unusually tender understanding. Gary's vision is comical, but it is absolutely sincere.

'They'll all be up there, all me dogs, me rabbits and me cats, all being friends.'

When Gary first moved in I promised myself I would keep my distance, that I would avoid encouraging him. I have no need of a new best friend, but Gary has other plans. He begins to call around to have a lend of my bicycle pump or to use my phone to make a call which sounds like an emergency. I'm knackered. I've had a hard day. I'm trying to watch the box, but Gary is stood directly between my eyes and the screen. He fumbles with a scrap of paper, dialing the number scribbled in blue biro. He considers the television then turns to me and grins. 'I was watching the football.'

I was watching a DVD of The Sopranos, but obviously I'm not doing that right now. It doesn't seem worth mentioning, because the call is clearly something important. I hear a faint crackle as the call is answered.

'Hello. Have you still got a budgerigar I can buy?'

Crackle. Crackle.

'I just want one. How much is it?'

Crackle.

'Yeah. Is it a boy budgerigar or a girl budgerigar?'

During the winter of 2004, I go to work on Bill's neglected garden, attempting to restore it to horticultural capacity following the destruction wrought by another tenant, George Marshall. George  offered to look after the garden a year or so before as it had become obvious that Bill was no longer physically up to the task, but George's efforts were weird and cranky and borne of no apparent gardening experience, more like a child playing in the mud. Having spent many years in the army, George rationalised the garden by digging the whole thing up to a depth of about three feet, then sifting all but the tiniest of stones from the soil. This resulted in a lifeless crater of clay with a mountain of stones at the far end, at which point he lost interest. I have taken it upon myself to reverse the damage.

My first task, as I see it, is to restore the soil by mixing all the stones back in. I have a wheelbarrow and a spade, and it's fucking cold with frost still on the ground at four in the afternoon, and my breath hangs in the air. After a couple of hours I'm knackered, and haven't really got anywhere. I realise that this will take months.

'Whatchu doing?' Gary's face has appeared over the crumbling garden wall like a big, fat working class sunrise, like the solar baby from Teletubbies in later years. I explain what I'm doing, and before I can finish the first sentence, he's over the wall and shovelling away like a steam engine. I race backwards and forwards with the wheel barrow, bringing clumps of damp soil then taking Gary's blend back to fill in the craters. I have the easy job and I can barely keep up, and I hadn't even arsed for his help. The mountain of stones is gone in about forty minutes; no more weird craters, just ground waiting to become a garden.

'That's better,' Gary observes happily, leaning on the handle of the spade and not even short of breath so far as I can tell. 'That should be nice now. Get some flowers and that.'

'Yes,' I croak feebly, hoping he'll go home, that he won't volunteer for anything else which might need doing and thus oblige me to help. I already feel like the weakest link in my own chain.

Over the following weeks I begin to stick in a few plants and to lay down grass seed. A regular flow of rescued shrubs still finds its way into Gary's garden, and inevitably he begins to run out of room.

Bang bang bang like the Incredible Hulk doing home visits.

I open my front door.

Gary stands there grinning, the stem of a newly rescued shrub clenched in a mighty paw, held forth like a prize snatched from the jaws of a dragon in a distant and mystic realm. 'E'are!, which means here you are, in case you were wondering.

'Thanks, Gary.' I've told him how I like to sleep afternoons because I start work around five in the morning, but he doesn't seem to get it. I leave the shrub by the kitchen door for later and go back to bed.

The years pass, and each day I am out in the garden at some point, weeding, planting or watering; and each day there is a big, fat working class sunrise over a garden wall which is still crumbling but has been recently fortified with old doors and sheets of hardboard found at the roadside as another of Gary's projects.

He always wants to know what do I fink of this or that.

Who's the best - U2 or the Rolling Stones?

Have I got a hat he can have a lend of for the U2 concert?

He wants to buy anuvver dog - a girl dog in fact. I ask him what kind, and he tells me a white one so he can name her Snow.

He arse for my help lifting up a fish tank. He just found it. They was chucking it out. He's gunna put it inside and put stones in it. He's gunna paint the stones all Chelsea colours. I can't really say no because it's Gary and, as the cliché goes, he'd do anything to help you out, and often does.

He lifts one end. The fish tank is like a motorway support of thick green glass. I can't lift my end. I can't even budge it to one side, and I realise that I have no reference point for what it must be like to be as strong as Gary. He's practically superhuman.

The big, fat working class sunrise is worse in the summer because he never seems to wear a shirt, and he has these great big sweaty man tits, and he pongs a bit now that the weather is warm.

Eventually, due to circumstances beyond my control I have to move out. Gary gives me a leaving present, a handful of old CDs he is chucking out and don't want no more.

'You can have them if you like. I ain't bovvered.'

Two of them are Sex Pistols live CDs, which surprises me. Gary explains that he saw them a couple of times when he was a kid. Johnny Rotten walked past him after one of the gigs.

'That was brilliant,' Gary told him.

'You weren't supposed to enjoy it,' Rotten gurned, laughing.

I move out, but eventually I make my way back to the old place, mainly just to see what has become of it, and once or twice I run into Gary, and I am astonished at how glad I am to see him. He once drove me up the wall to the point that I would often pretend to be out when I heard that distinctive bang bang bang on the door, but it's been a good couple of years and I've had some time to reflect, and I've come to realise that despite all his flaws, the worrying allusions to past misdemeanours, this gentle and slightly aromatic giant with a personality somewhere between that of a twelve-year old boy and a big happy dog, Gary is still one of the nicest people I've ever met. He has no hidden agenda, and no propensity for bullshit or delusion - least of all self-delusion. Of all the writers, artists, and musicians I have ever met, you would need to combine a good sixty or seventy of them to come up with someone even half as decent as Gary.

So it's Thursday the 19th of May, 2011, and Gary and I stand in the street talking for about an hour, stood outside the house in which I lived five years ago. He often wondered what happened to me, and how it all worked out in Texas, and he's so unconditionally happy for me that it's embarrassing. He still has his little projects, and the latest has apparently been the transformation of his garden into a zoo with dogs, cats, rabbits, guinea-pigs, and a not unimpressive aviary full of small birds. He's made the aviary out of things found laying at the side of the road. He tells me a little about his weekends. He goes fishing out in the country quite a lot. His dad used to take him when he was a kid, growing up in Camberwell, and he always loved it; and where once I regarded him as a well-meaning pain in the arse, now I realise just how lucky I am to have known this bloke.