Give the Anarchist a Cigarette by Mick Farren

Author:Mick Farren [Mick Farren]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Random House
Published: 2002-07-03T16:00:00+00:00

Enter the Canadian

Paul Rudolph was a huge lumberjack from British Columbia with hair past his shoulders and a withered right arm. He’d had polio as a kid and been given a guitar as occupational therapy. He had arrived at Heathrow with a cherry-red Gibson and a Fender Precision bass. What clothes he had were stuffed into any spare space in the two guitar cases. He had checked into the airport at Vancouver with a suitcase as well, but, when Air Canada told him that his luggage was overweight and liable for surcharge, he had dumped it in favour of the instruments. The move was typical of Rudolph. The Deviants’ new guitar player had virtually no interest in anything except playing his music, smoking the best dope he could get his hands on, occasional sex and, as we’d learn later, riding state-of-the-art racing bicycles. He never went to the movies, only watched TV by default, infrequently listened to anyone’s music but his own and the joke was that he’d read a book once, but hadn’t liked it and hadn’t tried again. His sense of style was all but non-existent, as was evidenced by the way he arrived in London in hideous elephant-cord bell bottoms and a shirt that appeared to have been stolen from a convict.

With so little in common, it was hardly surprising that Rudolph and I didn’t exactly see eye-to-eye. I really dug his guitar playing, but this wasn’t quite reciprocated in his attitude towards me as a poet and performer. It wasn’t that we didn’t get along. On the surface he was amiable, but the Freudian waters ran deep. The conspiring factors that had landed him, his guitars and his Freudian waters in our world were, to say the least, complicated. The fulcrum had been another Canadian called Jamie Mandelkau, plausible, good-looking, bespectacled, with flowing Haight Ashbury locks, who started showing up at 212 essentially at Joy’s behest. I had no grounds or even much motivation to complain when the two of them started seeing each other. Joy and I were doing nothing more than sharing an apartment. I brought girls home fairly regularly and, after some vestigial awkwardness, the situation settled into a reasonably workable routine, a little out of the ordinary perhaps, but by no means outrageously unorthodox by the standards of the time. Or maybe I was both deceived and deceiving myself. Let’s not forget that, after some three years in the depths of the underground, my appreciation of the orthodox was extremely atrophied.

That Jamie should actually move in was never discussed, but rather came about by increments and fait accompli. The actual transition from Jamie the gentleman caller to Jamie the resident was also camouflaged by an outbreak of high drama. As far as I could piece the story together, Jamie had been hanging out in Earls Court with a partner who went by the name of Longhaired John. John unfortunately wound up dead, apparently the victim of some bad speed that someone may or may not have given him by accident.

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