Gruts

Signing on for a three year fine art degree at Maidstone College of Art back in September 1984 was a big move for me. I'd just turned nineteen and probably had not previously been away from home for longer than a couple of days. I was loosely familiar with beer and the genitalia of one specific member of the opposite sex, but I was otherwise generally naive; and now I was living in Kent amongst complete strangers. Home was Warwickshire, which may as well have been on Mars, or so it seemed at the time.

Whilst I was doing my best to remain open-minded to new experiences, I had developed a general scepticism regarding poetry as something which really wasn't for me. What poetry I'd been obliged to read at school and then in further education would, so I believed at the time, have worked better either converted to prose or set to music, and poets themselves seemed a self-involved bunch. Admittedly I didn't have a great wealth of experience with poets amongst my vague circle of friends, but I'd watched The Young Ones on the box, and Steve the poet with whom I now shared a student house in Leeds Village was doing nothing to disabuse me of the impression fostered by Rik Mayall directing condescending odes at his enemies. Steve was both funny and amiable at a certain level, but I always had the feeling of everything being part of some larger chess game to him. He was barely able to buy a packet of crisps without it resembling strategy. His poems, so far as I could tell, amounted to everybody stop what you're doing and look at me. He almost certainly would have told me about the Medway Poets, about Billy Childish and Bill Lewis - these being people he clearly admired - but it wouldn't have made much sense to me. As I say, I wasn't really drawn to poetry as a medium.

Traci Emin, a noisy Turkish girl in second-year printmaking was in the habit of scaling tables in the college canteen to announce some event or other, and she would do this roughly every two or three days. The events for which she evangelised were rarely ever anything which caught my interest, and I wasn't sure what to make of the girl, so I generally paid her no attention. She knew Carl, then Student Union president, one of the first people I got to know at Maidstone, and still a close friend today. Carl had briefly introduced me to Traci, just as she barged into our conversation to haggle over Student Union business of some kind. She scowled at me and observed isn't your 'air 'orrible! with her wonky gob, dropping the aitches like a younger, vaguely Turkish Irene Handl.

Charmed, I'm sure, I didn't bother replying as I began to weep bitter internal tears of self-loathing.

Now she stood on the canteen table bellowing like a lonely mountain goat, and the words resolved into something about a poetry reading in one of the lecture theatres. My curiosity outstripped my scepticism as I recognised the name of one of those who was to read - Billy Childish. I didn't know much about him, beyond whatever it was that Steve had told me, but apparently he was a local name of some distinction. I now realised that I had read about his band, the Milkshakes, in Sounds music paper a year or so earlier. I'd never heard their music, but it seemed like it might be interesting to watch some bloke who had been in Sounds reading out his poems, and it was something to do.

The hour came and the lecture theatre was dark with just a table at the front. Billy Childish had short, severe hair and wore what appeared to be his grandad's demob suit. He didn't smile. He didn't look like a man who had ever found any good reason to smile. In the midst of flourishes of artistic flamboyance, he appeared streamlined, efficient, even ruthless. He rattled off his poetry as though reading out a statement in a police interview room. He demonstrated neither charisma nor stagecraft, a deficit which seemed curiously highly charismatic in its own way. He sounded bored, as though he was trying to get through the fucking things as quickly as possible. The performance was, in spite of itself, incredible.

Then there was Bill Lewis, loud, theatrical, and intense. It was poetry performed more as I had anticipated it would be, and yet it was impossible to keep from being swept along by the force of his words and their delivery. He had a presence with which one could not argue.

Traci later made an announcement to the effect that she was selling various books of Billy Childish poetry. I had a hunch that I would regret it if I didn't go and see what she had, and so I did. I ended up buying the lot - Poems from the Barrier Block, Prity Thing, Will the Circle Be Unbroken and five or six others. Poems from the Barrier Block was a proper square bound collection, but the others were slimmer volumes of cranky dyslexic verse - if you could really call it verse - all hammered out on a broken typewriter. There were few concessions to grammar or spelling, but for want of a better qualifier, you could tell it was the real thing, the genuine article:

t.v. poetry scotch n piss

the t.v. said - 'we wanna make a film'
they said 'you read with this group of poets'
so i said 'yeah'
n they get us to do some readings
n this producer said to me -
'yeah great stuff - this is your program - you make it - we just film it' n i said 'yeah'

the contract said -
they give us a couple of qwid
for the filming then they could
use the film anytime they liked
with no payment
they said time place n the way to dress
this was ment to be a documentary about the real stuff

well a thew qwids a thew qwid so i said 'yeah' n signed
i got a cigar of one t.v. bloke n a double scotch of another
i went to the bog

i couldnt find the gents so i went to the ladys
i put me scotch down n had a piss
most of it got in the bowl
but some spatered in me scotch

it stank of piss but i drank it anyway

Reproduced without permission and probably (c) Billy Childish June 1982.

The oldest of the books I had bought was called The Man with Wheels, dating from 1980 and revealing Billy's formative interest in Kurt Schwitters, which made one hell of a lot of sense to me. I could see the progression. His poems were made of the dirt and the rubbish. They were unvarnished - raw and invigorating. Poetry had been men in silk cravats scoffing vol-au-vents and spicing overly elaborate love poems to unremarkable girls with a naughty word here and there, not so much to let us know that they were themselves from the mean streets, but that they knew at least one chap who was, and he was a really splendid fellow with his working class accent and leather jacket. Whatever Billy Childish was doing, it bore no relation to such distractions. It was not something in which he dabbled for the sake of something to do. It seemed like he was writing in an effort to keep himself from braining someone.

Some of the books were signed for Traci, with love - Billy, or addressing her more intimately as Dolli. The two of them had been romantically involved for a while, and I guess that this was around the time they began to drift apart; and so she sold me his old stuff, the books he'd had printed and had dedicated to her.

Over the next couple of years I became acclimatised to Kent, it being the county in which my adult personality was formed, adult in this case quantifying age rather than development. Finishing at Maidstone, I moved to nearby Chatham because half the people I knew seemed to live there by that point, and the town had some great bands. In fact the town had a scene in the sense by which Liverpool and Manchester have on occasion been described as having scenes. There were pubs which put on gigs, bands which played live and even put out records, fanzines, poets, artists, and people generally doing their own thing regardless of whether anyone else liked it.

Alun Jones of the Dentists said that Chatham, or specifically the larger Medway conurbation of which Chatham was part, was in some respects like a northern town transplanted to the south of England. At the time I rolled my eyes a little, having come to resent the popular cliché of the north of England as some sort of cultural Mecca inhabited by a friendlier, more down-to-earth, somehow more valuable people. I've never found people in the north of England significantly friendlier than those in the south, nor more culturally vital, and as for down-to-earth...

What would I need with your fancy book learning and your so-called toilet paper and indoor lavatories? I'm down-to-earth, me.

Nevertheless, Alun was right. Medway was a reasonably tightly knit community with its own distinct identity founded upon a major naval dockyard established in the 1500s and significantly expanded during the industrial revolution, around the same time as all those sprawling northern towns founded upon coal, iron, weaving and Hovis advertsing. Even in the 1980s Medway felt like the setting of Ada's Apron or some other typically harrowing television drama in which pramfaced chain-smoking schoolgirls made veiled references to men's cocks and disapproving matriarchs would address each other as chuck from across the washing line. It was the rain-soaked rooftops of utilitarian housing, row after row after cramped bricky row of hardened smokers coughing up their lungs in time to Herman's Hermits. You get the picture.

Within weeks of my settling in to the septic tank I had rented in Glencoe Road, I discovered Gruts café, a small establishment just before the railway bridge on Chatham High Street. A couple of summers earlier, my friends and I had discovered Ivor Cutler and had become so quickly and dramatically obsessed with his haunting monologues that by the time school came back around in September we were having trouble shaking off the soft Glaswegian lilt we'd developed during the holidays.

I walked past the café a couple of times, deeply impressed that there could be an eaterie named after one of my favourite Ivor Cutler pieces. Eventually I summoned the courage to go in, probably having at last spotted someone I vaguely knew sat on the other side of the glass. Being unemployed and without access to a television by which I could watch children's programmes and other daytime broadcasting at the taxpayer's expense, I became a regular customer at Gruts; and given the pitiful state of both my cooking and the cupboard which served as my pantry, the toasted ham and cheese sandwiches prepared and served by Gerald and Caroline - mine hosts - were probably what kept me alive long enough to see the nineties.

I had mastered the art of sitting around in pubs a few years earlier, and had reached the stage at which one realises that it can sometimes be fun to walk in a straight line or to wake in the morning without a splitting headache; and so I quickly adapted to the Chatham equivalent of café society because it was cheaper than the pub and better than sitting at home. Of the regulars I already knew there was the aforementioned Alun of the Dentists and Prez of the Martini Slutz, one of the most entertaining bands I've ever seen live. Tim Webster of the Sputniks and later Johnny Gash ran his own musical instrument repair business out of a workshop over the road, and would wander across for lunch with his apprentice, Tim O'Leary - lunch being one of Gerald's guitar maker's fancies, which Tim O'Leary recalls as being possibly the best egg mayo baguettes I've ever had.

Bill Lewis has written of Gruts as having been known as the poets' café. I don't remember this at all, although maybe that's because I was never a poet. The description is probably justified by the regular presence of himself and Billy Childish, and even Sexton Ming on a couple of occasions. I got to know Bill Lewis fairly well as it turned out that we were almost neighbours and had mutual interests. Any idea I've ever ripped off from an American underground comic artist can most likely be traced back to the huge stack of comics by Harvey Pekar, Robert Crumb, Skip Williamson and others that Bill sold me. Bill would drop around for tea and tell me about Sandinistas and his time in Nicaragua, tales from a world I was yet to discover. I tried to paint his portrait, but my efforts were so awful that I threw the thing away. Like Billy Childish, he seemed in some ways a man out of time, someone who always seemed like he should have known Allen Ginsberg and Lenny Bruce; but it was only that he contrasted so dramatically with the feckless apathy of our respective generations.

I had never been introduced to Billy Childish and was slightly in awe of him. He was an imposing presence before which I was sore afraid, suspecting that whatever came out of my mouth would probably be dog shit.

Excuse me, Mr. Billy, I think your poems are really ace!

Happily the fears of my inner teenage girl fell by the wayside as Billy spent so much time in Gruts that my self-consciously marinading in silent awe whilst attempting to effect nonchalance in the presence of relative greatness became impractical, and obviously ridiculous. Aside from anything, it turned out that he was, if not exactly a nice guy by conventionally sappy terms, thoughtful, ruthlessly honest, and very, very funny. He was also pretty good at chess, a game I'd only recently been taught by Tim Webster and Prez one afternoon as we sat in the café slurping tea and smoking. The game became something of an obsession, and I took to playing every day, but unfortunately everyone else was better than me. I played Billy, and the match was over in about four minutes. He wiped me off the board. He'd spent most of that time staring out of the window or talking to Gerald. His matches against Alun, Prez or Tim Webster lasted longer, and were more enjoyable for the spectator. I seem to recall that he usually won, although I could be mistaken.

An exchange student from Germany named Andreas became a regular for a couple of weeks. He and Billy would talk about Hamburg, and he too was drawn into the never ending chess tournament. After one particularly long, drawn-out game he beat Tim Webster and Billy bought everyone a round of tea in celebration.

'I don't get it,' I said. 'It's not like this is the first time anyone has beaten Tim.'

'I know.' Billy sported the faintly disturbing smile of Harry H. Corbett. 'But this is the first time he's had an international thrashing.'

Gruts became much more than just a place to hang out with friends and talk crap. It became our place, almost a livelihood. Poets and writers sold their work from a small bookcase next to the counter, and Billy's own Hangman Records had taken to releasing an album more or less every month - beautifully pressed brand new long playing vinyl records of himself, Sexton Ming, the Pop Rivets, and others, and these were joined by releases from the Dentists' Tambourine label. Even the subject matter was locally sourced in Wally the 2nd Hand Salesman - one of the noisier compositions on Sexton Ming's Which Dead Donkey Daddy? album - being named for Wally, the proprietor of a junk shop just on the other side of the bridge. Billy had gone in there to give the man himself a copy of the record, so he told us. Wally had mumbled some token of potential gratitude and tossed the album into an open trunk full of rusting nuts, bolts, spanners and the like. He didn't really seem like a big record collector.

'Well, that's nicely filed away for future reference,' Billy observed, although I'm not sure if that was what he said to Wally or simply part of his account as told to the rest of us.

The albums were a fiver each, which meant that Gruts actually served as a better record shop than Our Price a few hundred yards along the road, not that Our Price was really up to much in the first place.

At one stage, I hung a load of my own pseudo-Futurist paintings on the walls of the café, following on from previous exhibitions by Billy and others. Mine weren't for sale, but the main point was that they were seen, and this even drew interest from the local newspaper, the Chatham Standard, who sent Judith Mullarkey along to do a short feature on me. The first entry in my comments book came from Billy:

I've seen this man's work before, and I said, and say it again - to the funny farm with him!

Sometimes we would watch the local crazy woman as she passed by outside, shouting mysterious accusations at the river. She too seemed to appreciate the art, and once dutifully came in to hand Gerald a drawing she'd produced of crabs at large on Easter Egg Island, according to the caption. Her technique wasn't great, but you had to admire the spirit in which it was done.

For a while life seemed to revolve around Gruts to the point that my friend Carl phoned the café on a couple of occasions, knowing I would be there, sat on my arse and weighing up my employment options. As I had no telephone, it was a better option than calling directly at my bedsit in the hope of my being at home.

It felt like being part of a family, and at the same time, because of all the stuff that was going on in and around Medway, it felt like we were part of history even at the time. It felt as though one day we would all be looking back and recalling where we were when we first heard Billy's calypso cover of Anarchy in the UK.

We were in Gruts, obviously.

He'd just bought in a freshly minted stack of the Blackhands album, and Gerald had stuck it on the record player so we could all have a listen. Some people remember seeing the Beatles at the Cavern Club, and some of us remember Gruts.

Naturally it didn't last, there being a limit to how much tea anyone could reasonably be expected to drink in a single afternoon, and although the place was nearly always full, or at least rarely ever empty, whatever Gerald and Caroline were making out of it wasn't enough. They closed, and it became the Bridge Roll, a well intentioned but similarly doomed tea room style café with laminated Gingham tablecloths run by a couple of middle-aged women, whose enthusiasm reminded me of my grandmother once harbouring an ambition of being known as good for a cup of tea and a bun amongst long distance truck drivers. The Bridge Roll wasn't terrible, but the new decor had the feel of something aspiring to the custom of a better class of diner, or at least better than we were.

Like all good things, it was over.

The Self-Blowing Internet Trumpet

A little over a week ago I received a message from my friend Nick Sweeney inviting me to participate in something called The Writing Process Blog Tour. It seemed potentially somewhat spammy as an idea, and as a general principal I dislike the great majority of writers' blogs. The process of writing, I feel, does not need to be of inherent interest to anyone other than the individual at the wheel, so to speak; and those How I Done It style self-blowing internet trumpets wherein a person of whom I know nothing facilitates for my edification a fascinating glimpse into the daily life and inspiration of his or her undiscovered genius serve only to ensure that I will never read their work, because life is simply too short to care about where someone with no impact upon one's existence gets their ideas, such as they may be. Equally, I tend to avoid the work of those who qualify themselves with declared epithets - Banzai Turnpike, Writer or Jedbert Aggrandizer, Journalist. If the person is indeed a writer, an artist, or whatever, then this will be apparent from their work and requires no formal declaration, particularly not one carrying the insistence of a small child putting a cardboard box over its head and screaming I am a robot! The process of writing is not, I would suggest, inherently interesting in and of itself, and so I prefer to keep it in my pants, figuratively speaking.

Then after another few hours I decided it would probably be fun to respond - at least fun for me - and it might get a few more cyberbums on virtual seats, and was therefore probably the sort of thing for which I should make the effort to engage my enthusiasm; and so here we all are, pretending to enjoy ourselves.

Nick Sweeney, to whom none of the above reservations apply by virtue of his consistently delivering the goods, has written a very fine novel called Laikonik Express which is published by Unthank Books. See more from Nick at http://www.nicksweeneywriting.com

Each participant in The Writing Process Blog Tour will attempt to answer the following four questions.

What are you working on at the moment?
At the moment I am working on the cover painting for Liberating Earth, a short story collection edited by Kate Orman to be published by Obverse Books at some point or other. In terms of writing, I am presently transcribing and editing five diaries kept whilst in Mexico City from 1999 to 2005, to be self-published mainly for reasons of vanity some time soon. The work which I really should be getting on with, from which I find myself continually sidetracked, comprises fifteen or so short stories, three novels, and two novellas. All of these exist in completed first draft form requiring editing and rewrites to greater or lesser degrees. The novellas both feature the character Señor 105, a surreal Mexican wrestler created by Cody Quijano-Schell. The novels are called Golden Age, The Small Men, and Early Morning - all science-fiction for the sake of argument, although I like the term blue collar science-fiction because both Harvey Pekar and Charles Bukowski have been an influence. Once I've finished all this stuff I'll try to figure out what to do with it.

How does your work differ from others of its genre?
It revives the non-ironic use of gnomes, has no desire to be made into either film or television, nor to be part of any existing popular trend.

Why do you write what you do?
Because if I didn't I would explode, no-one else seems to be writing it - possibly excepting Cody Quijano-Schell, and because I wish to read it. My ultimate, possibly unrealistic ambition is to produce fiction of such astonishing power as to shame others into either giving up, or at least making a bit more of a fucking effort.

How does your writing process work?
I write in blocks of around eight-hundred words a day inspired by the technique of A.E. van Vogt. I try to let the narrative develop itself, bringing in whatever element is necessary to either move the story forward or to at least ensure that I continue to enjoy writing it. I keep to this regime regardless of inspiration until I have produced something which can then be carved into a form suggesting both purpose and foresight on my part. Throughout the process I try to remain aware of my own capacity for bullshit, in order to keep myself from propagating any more of it.

Next week, Andrew Hickey and Richard Dominic Flowers will be on this branch of The Writing Process Blog Tour. Andrew is author of the forthcoming Faction Paradox novel Head of State, and of a great wealth of excellent self-published material, both fiction and non-fiction. Richard is working on an ambitious series of possibly Discordian novels - or at least that's how it looks to me - under the heading aNARCHY rULES, of which I have read the first, which is tremendous and promises much for those volumes to come. He was also one of the first people ever to provide constructive criticism of my own writing, and as such should probably be mentioned on one of those were it not for etc. etc. lists. Andrew and Richard will be answering these same four questions on their blogs, respectively Sci-Ence! Justice Leak! and The Very Fluffy Diary of Millennium Dome, Elephant.

My Postcard from Harvey

In September, 1987 I moved from a house I'd shared with other art students in the village of Otham, near Maidstone, Kent to a bedsit in Glencoe Road, Chatham. By coincidence it turned out that I had moved to within a hundred yards of the home of Bill Lewis, renowned local poet, writer, painter and associate of Billy Childish. I didn't know Bill, but I recognised him from readings, and we knew some of the same people; so once the opportunity arose - in Gruts, café on the High street at which we had both become regulars - I introduced myself.

For a short while we were each semi-regular visitors at the other's house, drinking tea, talking about art, religion, the supernatural, and whatever other common preoccupations we shared at the time; and somehow this led to Bill selling me a big stack of American underground and ground-level comics from the late seventies and early eighties, the work of Robert Crumb, Gilbert Shelton, Bill Griffiths, Skip Williamson, and a host of others with whom I was less familiar. He sold me these comics as a job lot, and although there were a few titles I found initially mystifying, the price was good, so it would have seemed churlish to pick and choose. Within the pile were two issues of American Splendor which stood out due to being magazine sized, autobiographical, and written by someone of whom I'd never heard - Harvey Pekar - although one issue featured art by Crumb and was thus of obvious interest.

Because American Splendor seemed less conspicuously humourous from a cursory glance, and was concerned with the mundane daily existence of some guy from Cleveland, it took me a while to get around to reading it as I worked my way through Bill's stack of comics, but when I did, it had a profound effect upon me. I was poor, single, living in a strange town, moderately fearful regarding an uncertain future, and had just started working at a job I was not sure I really liked too much; and so Harvey's Awaking to the Terror of a New Day in American Splendor issue three really struck a chord. The story is nine pages of introspective musings upon one man's struggle to make it through a single day of which it has become tough to find the positive aspects. It's about the point at which you realising you're not so much living as merely surviving, and it somehow seemed that a middle aged Jewish guy from America had said more to me about my own life than Morrissey or any other supposed voice of a generation. I became fixated on the comic, and quickly hunted down all the back issues I could find.

Harvey's autobiographical tales often appeared to have very little in the way of subject matter, but the art is in the telling; and somehow these stories just had to be comics, even if truthfully they were barely ever more than illustrated prose. As raw text, the emphasis would be all wrong, but with an artist underscoring each seemingly unremarkable scene of Harvey trudging on through his life, somehow the pace is exactly right. Harvey's stories often felt oddly profound in their zooming in on some seemingly inconsequential event as though it were of cosmic import. My favourite example remains Stetson Shoes, drawn by Gary Dumm and also from that third issue, an account of Harvey buying a pair of shoes from a second-hand store. It's sheer simplicity, the satisfaction communicated as our man finds that the shoes fit and are a good price, is a thing of beauty, despite how absurd that may well sound.

Harvey Pekar saw value in the most unlikely places, with no subject so trivial as to be undeserving of attention, and his rambling, doubtless indulgent strips probably need to be read to be truly appreciated. There is no angle to his writing. He offers no zen parables on the minutiae of modern life, and there is none of the ruined melodrama of Bukowski. He wrote about the pleasure of finding a cheap pair of well-made shoes when they were most needed simply because it was a small but significant moment that would be lost in almost any other narrative context; and his work endures because it's honest, and because most of us inhabit the same world.

On more than one occasion I've seen the Pekar name employed as a yardstick by which to beat at the supposed inherent tedium of narrative realism, but the argument has not thus far ever been much less than moronic. Endless retellings of Superman are the art form at its most elevated, so it is claimed, but to reflect on daily existence, to experience wonder at the purchase of a pair of shoes shows a lack of imagination; and so imagination is presumably easily identified because it wears a cape, flies in a spaceship, or delivers snappy Samuel L. Jackson style one-liners just like on the telly; as opposed to an ability to take pleasure in whatever is there in front of your eyes. It's the cretinous Doctor Who obsessive swearing he would rather gouge out his own eyeballs than sit through a Mike Leigh film, because real life is boring, yeah? It's the fundamentalist Christian stood before the Grand Canyon, entirely unable to appreciate it as it is, or to articulate any sense of wonder that doesn't invoke his or her belief system. It's the child who screams and refuses to eat any more green beans and yet still has room for a bright turquoise bubble-gum flavour ice cream cone. It's terminal adolescence offered as a statement, because it's either that or accept it as a failing. If a person is unable to engage with either a Harvey Pekar story, or at least a story of its type, then I feel genuinely sorry for them, and for their inability to deal with our world without first spooning on the sugar.

In 1991, I had the big idea of writing to Harvey Pekar and offering my services as a cartoonist. I sent him photocopies of my work, and crossed my fingers, prematurely excited at the thought of illustrating the prose of someone who had been such an inspiration. Of course, I knew it probably wouldn't happen, but when I received a handwritten postcard from Harvey himself it still felt like an occasion for celebration, regardless of the fact that he had effectively told me thanks but no thanks; specifically:

Dear Lawrence,

Right now I'm set as far as artists are concerned, because my next two projects are being entirely done by Frank Stack (a 200 page graphic album) and Joe Zabel and Gary Dumm (a 32 page comic). I appreciate your interest in my work however, and think the stuff you sent me, the writing as well as drawing, is good.

Sincerely - Harvey Pekar

Like so many of Harvey's stories, this one doesn't so much have either an end or a conclusion as a point at which it simply draws to a halt. I no longer produce comic strips, although I do write, and Harvey passed on at the age of seventy back in 2010. I still get a tremendous thrill when I read the postcard, and think of that guy in Cleveland, Ohio going through my stack of photocopied comic strips. It seems a small yet wonderful thing.