spoot

Dining out in Ethiopia

2011-09-02T12:14:00.004+01:00

All eyes are on Ethiopia again as refugees from its even poorer neighbour Somalia invade. Just back from the relatively prosperous uplands, after visiting his doctor daughter who has been working in a hospital there, Steve Overbury sees a less typical side of the country.

If the flights to Ethiopia weren’t the best part of £800 and if it weren’t for the obligatory pre holiday immunisations and the necessity to get a visa, and there was something to do around here except drink honey wine in dark shacks with prostitutes, this could be a viable tourist destination. Hotels for less than a fiver a night and good beer for 37p!

First night: best restaurant in town (Gonder), two salads, three lasagnes (a relic of an Italian colonial past), six beers, a bottle of almost acceptable Ethiopian red and three large gin and tonics - twenty-five quid. Compare that to the last family restaurant meal we’d had to celebrate my daughter passing her med school finals - OK, it was Claridges and true, we had a bit to drink - but the bill panned out at about three year’s wages for our liveried waiter who was on $20 a month. He was saving for university to study engineering or tourism management but the course would cost him 300 Birr a month ($15) and when you factored in food and lodging, he just couldn’t make it. However, his real ambition was to get out through Sudan and Libya and catch one of the leaky boats across to the Eurozone, as soon as he could he said, but six of his friends had already died that way.

Slim hipped, high breasted, elegant girls everywhere fetch nary a glance from the libidinous men. Girls for whom the word ‘pert’ may have been invented were ignored, however, the one in a thousand with ample bosom and a spare tyre had to beat them off with a goat stick.

No one smokes. Food takes priority over cigarettes. Thirty men clustered around a TV watching Manchester United v Blackburn and the only smoker was me. Or I would smoke if the matches would strike or my new Ethiopian lighter would work. The matches and the lighter had only one function but neither could perform it. Perhaps that’s why they don’t smoke, they can’t get a light; still, the matches were cheap like everything else in Ethiopia.

One big plus: no mosquitoes. In fact I’ve seen scarier insects in Brighton. Gonder is above the malarial belt and the only function of the anti malarial tablets I’ve been taking is to fill my nights with wild and vivid dreams worthy of Coleridge himself. But perhaps the mad dreams are more to do with the two arms full of yellow fever, Hep A, typhoid and tetanus injections, which dreams apart have clearly stood me in good stead, since I haven’t yet contracted any of those maladies yet. However, Ethiopia’s got disease and calamity if you want it – all of the above plus HIV, TB, cholera and dysentery, as well as malnutrition, deformed limbs and loads of kids burned by falling into campfires.

There are few private cars or sunglasses, no footballs, skateboards or iPads, just hustling street kids, ladies with umbrellas, ill fitting clothes, noxious fumes, circling birds of prey, Unicef trucks, holy men with crosses on their sticks, donkeys that know the way, sheep cheerfully trotting to the abattoir, men with ten chickens hanging from a pole; it’s the rainy season but the water supply is as sporadic as the electric. And just down the road is Bono and Geldof land.

Here’s the puzzle, from where I’m sitting, as far as the eye can see is rather beautiful and fertile agricultural land. How can it and famine sit side by side in this perplexing country? Is it that the people are lazy; is it distribution problems or some other government snafu? How does Ethiopia’s rather sleek airline sit alongside mud huts and Band Aid?

Before me a blind young mother with two clamouring babies sits in the dirt with a breast hanging out, begging for Birr, but her hat is full and it’s the locals who are giving. The street kids scrounge popcorn from the restaurant for her. Behind me, a plump businessman with a Rolex chats on a cell phone and makes a bit of money of his own.

Apparently they loathe their poverty stricken image, that indelible picture of a skeletal baby with flies crawling around its mouth, and you have to wonder how us Brits would like being typified as South Park’s Starvin’ Marvin or have Matt Damon or Angelina Jolie parachute in every now and again to pat us on the head.

One of the NGO’s arranges 3^rd World tours for the Americans at $1,600 + flights. Perhaps they are a great success, consciences are pricked and the mega dollars roll in but it smells like voyeurism to me. Then you see a youth jerking down the road and think he must be doing a little hip hop dance all of his own, but it dawns that the poor little chap has some ghastly, possibly preventable illness and it’s up to all of us to try and do something about it, especially us well fed Euros and Yanks via poverty tourism or whatever else it takes.

And I haven’t even seen the hospital yet.

When I do, it’s as grimy as a railway arch chop shop stuffed to the gunwales with the sick and their families, some of whom have trekked for days to get here. Everyone looks hungry, filthy and ill, even the relatives. Guards with AK47s stand at the gates sifting through the heaving queue. The relatives sleep in the grounds making campfires to cook on and wait as long as it takes.

A dazzle of white: a young female American doctor lectures thirty young Ethiopian medics under a tree. This is America at its best, giving, generous, hands on, trying to impose order on a dirty world.

I reflect on King’s College hospital in south London where gastric bands are fastened to the obese, where grey-faced smokers cough up their lungs, where weekend blood-covered, binge drinkers threaten the staff and spew on the floor.

In Gonder, patients wait patiently for ten hours or more to see a doctor without a murmur, and these people are properly ill, not self destructive, inconsiderate, ignorant or violent, just meek, tired, poor and sick, just pitifully, humbly, pathetically grateful.

When my white-coated daughter walks through the town, the kids shout, ‘Mrs. Doctor.’ The white coat helps us get cabs and also halves the fares. Before going to Ethiopia, she’d anticipated the squalor and the suffering, but was surprised by the calibre of the local doctors: overworked, unsentimental and brilliant she says. As ever, it’s the medics in the frontline trying to mop up the messes left by misguided governments and NGOs, by exploding birth rates (Ethiopia’s is the fastest climbing population in Africa), and corruption. Medicines in Addis Ababa are three times the price by the time they get to Gonder.

Perhaps the Chinese will put some money into the Ethiopian healthcare kitty before they’ve stripped all the minerals out of its earth, packed up their tents and left.

During a walk in the hills, I’d come across three youngsters lying on the grass in the shade of a tree doing their homework. The eldest of the siblings explained that he wanted to be a doctor, his brother wanted to work in medical sciences and the sister wanted to be a nurse. I muttered encouragement and praised their English, examined their archaic textbooks, noted their shabby clothes, and not for the first time thought how a little bit of money could transform their lives. I gave them my email address then became aware that the boy was explaining how expensive it is to go to college and what they really needed was a sponsor. I was being hustled and rather brilliantly at that. Did I want to put the three of them through college? Having only recently co financed my own two children through college, this proposition didn’t exactly thrill me and I made my excuses and left.

At the airport at Addis we saw a Dutch couple taking their two newly acquired Ethiopian children home. It smacked of 21^st century slavery to me but the daughter advised me that the youngsters usually come from orphanages. Option 1: Ethiopian orphanage. Option 2: comfortable home in Amsterdam. It’s a no brainer. If the kids had been able to express a preference then they would have undoubtedly agreed: The future’s bright, the future’s orange.

Back home I thought about the three kids I’d talked to and considered how one could do them some good without breaking the bank. Sending a few pounds to a charity didn’t seem personal enough. Maybe I’d send some textbooks to their school or buy the football team some balls. They had been so charming and bright and in need of a leg up. Yes, I’ll do something I resolved, just as soon as I get the begging email. But I waited in vain. There I was in the unique position of anticipating a hustling email from Africa and feeling a bit disappointed when it didn’t arrive.

Eternal Prayer - OBX

2011-03-14T12:17:00.003Z

Here's the 1993 video

And here's a fine remix by Jay Zoney

On to the end of the night my friend

Deep within your family

Though the sound and light might end

You’ll keep this for eternity

Look around you touch a hand

Fall in arms as warm as sun

This is not the Promised Land

Just the feel of what’s to come

Codes and robots break the chain

Keep us from our holy grail

Find the key to lower brain

And my people cannot fail

Star of wonder star of light

Burn your message in the air

Lead us to thy perfect light

This is my eternal prayer

By Steve Overbury and Loz McAree

Put to bed by The Hypnotist and Jon Tye

Wayward Lad

2011-03-11T15:49:00.032Z

Ever fallen in love with someone you shouldn’t have fallen in love with, and then woken up with them? How many have stayed too long in a bar and allowed the oozy-woozy effects of Jack Daniels to turn the face of the woman you’re talking to from gorgon to goddess? Suddenly something deep within twitches and you are launched on a doomed voyage.

No matter that you have known her for years, that you see her often and that you will have to face her every other day until eternity; no matter that she is a considerable distance south of the line called ‘standards’ you have the cheek to pretend you have, and that as well as facing her, you will have to face yourself in the morning. No matter that everyone in the bar is someone you know and that they are all observing this hideous act with a mixture of horror and hilarity and you will also have to face all of them in the days and years after the dirty deed has been done. But especially, overwhelmingly, appallingly, you have chosen to ignore the fact that the panic pick up you have in your sights, the over the hill, overweight, gone to seed, utterly pissed monstrosity you have decided should, within six minutes - five if possible - be naked beneath you and receiving your full and undivided attention, is the personal property of a notorious local nut job: Jimmy the Blade, a man that the dogs cross the road to avoid.

You magic up a couple of snifters for the road, the barman wipes the leer off his chops and pounces to the bottle, as he had done all evening, eager to play such a vital role in the unfolding drama; he doesn’t hesitate or stint; he doesn’t even bother with a measure just sloshes a couple off large ones into the tumblers, no time for ice. You barely notice as you reach for your glass and poke the last of your wages over the bar eyes fixed on hers, you offer a salacious wink and take a sip as she tosses hers back, belches and wipes her mouth with the back of her hand. This is after all Barstool Julie whose capacity is legend, having once been invited on the all-male May the Fourth be With You outing and been left the last man standing.

The tittering starts as you both ease off the stools and becomes bare-faced cackling by the time you’ve lurched to the door, where you theatrically leave in separate directions and bolt around the block. The illicit meeting at the foot of her stairs, the fumbling in the purse, her knickers round her knees before the key’s in the latch, the crash into the room as you topple toward the bed stripping, face sucking, making farmyard noises and yelps, and remaining madly oblivious to the one and only thing you should have tuned in on: “We’ll have to be quick or Jimmy will catch us.”

But when reckless passion is raised to these peaks, when you’re tanked to the gills and about to bloody burst unless this thing is done, then all caution has long been hurled to the winds and even that direst of warnings is shoved down a cranial drain, only to be retrieved once these floorboards have squeaked.

It was always on the cards. In fact this wouldn’t be much of a story unless it did, just a threadbare tale of two pissed old farts struggling and fumbling trying to douse an alcohol fire, to be rinsed in desire, to swim in the wave that had just washed over at least one, maybe both of you.

And it does; there’s the knock and the yell, the shout then the bell, “Julie! You got someone in there?” Coitus is well interrupted and you are violently untangled.

Passion and terror cannot live together. Julie throws the window wide and you are unceremoniously dumped out, clothes flung out after. Banging your head, you drop to the garden, the upcoming agonies as nothing compared with that of Jimmy’s shank slipping twixt your ribs. It drives you up and over in mad exertion, a naked man gripped with fear, clutching a bundle of trousers, a shirt, a sock, a boot hurdling the back garden fences of East Dulwich, the roses tearing at face and flesh as you crash ever onward, garrotted by washing line, impaled on thorn, sliced by rhubarb frame, up and over, onward ever onward, terrified bleeding and white.

When you dared show your face again in your regular, when the scabs had healed over, you slide in the bar and hug the walls dragging your shame behind you, to be met by ridicule and snicker. You attempt a leer of your own and try some bravado you cooked up in the bathroom mirror. Then they told you of your new nickname, ‘Wayward Lad.’ A small flush of pride breaks through the blushes. “Is that because I’m a bit of a lad, a bit wayward?”

“Nah, mate, it’s because Julie said you’re pretty good over the fences.”

Illustrations by Doug Gordon

Granddad's Vice

2010-03-11T18:22:00.014Z

Bored, the boy considers then rejects the greenhouse, good fun in winter but suffocatingly hot under the looming triffid tomato plants of August. He slips into Granddad’s shed, a long greasy shack racked up to the rafters with the kind of detritus that only very old men and very young boys covet and keep.

They'd never exactly said don't rummage through the boxes of regimental badges, engine parts, weird looking pumps and the shelves of bakelite radios, just that he should avoid the grinders, generators, band saws and drills, and the bottles of strange fluids, including the one with a skull and cross bones on it which Grandad explained contained 'Hydrofluoric acid," and was 'highly unflammable!"

The boy shivered in anticipation as he stared around the gloomy cavern. 'It's taken Granddad his whole life to accumulate this fantastic pile of... shit!' he thought.

Then he found himself staring at the locked cupboard inside of which hung the seriously forbidden fruit - a very old Very pistol.

But he is irresistibly drawn to it and takes the poorly concealed key from its ledge, pulls the pistol out of its spring clips and examines its wide barrel, holding the muzzle to the bridge of his nose and pretending to pull the trigger. "Booosh!" he yells and recoils. Then dropping the pistol on the bench laughing, he undoes the vice to its fullest extent - puts his head between its jaws and closes them around his temples. From this odd upside angle he notices Granddad slumbering in a battered armchair as he often was, the rum bottle between his feet. Double-checking that the old man is asleep, the boy continues exploring with impunity.

Unlocking his head proved quite difficult, but eventually he is free and staring around; he wiggles some switches then spots the big red push button on the wall. It was love at first sight, fatal attraction. It was red and it was button, and so he reasoned, it needed to be pushed; that’s what buttons are for, especially big red ones. He punched it and there is a sound like a spin drier starting up then the whole shed seemed to shake. Panicking, he pushed it again and the sound subsided; he looked around nervously at Granddad who dozes on, his hat low over his face.

But he button was irresistible; again he hit it with his palm and again came the sound and the shuddering, more resembling a spaceship taking off now. Again and again he pushed it on and off, each time leaving it on for a little longer until finally, recklessly he left it on its tone rising from a drone to a shriek, the walls of the shed began quaking, the windows vibrating rising to a cacophony, when suddenly the shed stirs at its foundations, lurches a couple of times, uproots itself then rises drunkenly into the air. Lift off!

He checked the old man was still there. He never usually travelled anywhere without Granddad.

The shed climbed up into the sky accelerating all the time and then hurtled towards a treetop only avoiding its upper branches when the terrified boy leapt to the vice, grabbed its handle in both hands like a steering wheel and swung the vessel away.

Higher and higher he goes and the shuddering and vibration settles to a whoosh. In the ensuing calm he began to relax, pausing to wave at the startled cosmonauts on the international space station as he steered the shed out of the galaxy. Asteroids whiz past soon followed by enemy space craft their lights tracing across the shed floor and his slumped granddad.

Unperturbed, the boy squinted at the attack ships and began shooting methodically as he steered with the vice, confident and devastating, swooping out of danger time after time and demonstrating flying skills way beyond his years. He cleared up the hostiles one by one as the old man snoozed, although his breathing had become louder as he inadvertently played his part in the boy's fantasy.

This was just like his SonicBoomBoy game. For every ship he shot down, he chalked a mark on the shed wall; they couldn’t get him; they couldn’t even get near him, he was invulnerable. The boy glowed with achievement and he wanted to share his joy; he knew Granddad would be proud of him, if only he were awake!

But the clanking of the vice and his grandson's manic activity had woken the old man, his rheumy old eyes had begun quietly observing as the boy rushed over to the shelves and started wringing the dials on one of the ancient radios, which hummed into life. "Hilversum, Athlone, Lahti, Moscow, Allouis, Luxembourg, Gibraltar." he read off the screen. "Where are we gonna land Granddad?" The old boy, swigging from the rum, can't hear over the radio buzz. "Huh, what?"

"Gibraltar then," shouts the boy. "Where's Gibraltar Granddad?" He leapt back to the controls. "Duck Granddad." the boy shouts as a flight of enemy vessels streams down on the stricken shed. Obediently the old man dipped his head. He'd always obeyed orders. That had been the problem.

'Gib,' pondered the old man gravely. Not again. "Surface boy," he barked. "Go up!" The old man, suddenly agitated, is once again under a blanket of 20 fathoms of dark water in an 'O' Class sub fighting for his breath, everyone's breath, frantically punching buttons, turning valves and at all times getting it wrong. His grandson’s features became those of Algy, his greatest friend. But the whole crew had been his friends, the friends he'd failed. He saw the spirits of his drowned shipmates drifting through the red light and chlorine gas haze.

Then there was shouting at the ship/shed door. "Dinner time," said Grandma's alien voice. "Not now Bosun!" bawled back the old man, "Break out the gas masks boy! Now climb!"

"I can't move the lever!" shouts the boy.

Granddad struggles to his feet and adjusts his mildew-covered cap. Christ, was this a rerun, a chance to play it again, a chance to get it right? "We're too deep," he gasps. Rivets burst and pop across the shed and water sprayed through. "Hyperspace!" the boy yells back helpfully. The old man shudders with a virility long unfelt, throws off his habitual coat and in his sweat-stained vest grapples with the vice handle. His cordlike muscles bulge under the grey tattoos as his huge oil engrained hands haul the vice clamp out. The boy marvels at his grandfather's strength.

To both of their excited minds the whole shed lurched upwards seemingly away free. To the boy they had just swept up over a mountain range on the face of a remote icebound planet. To the old man they were hopefully soon going to glimpse the surface of the ocean and he looked up at the shed roof but instead of the night stars, he saw the foam and once more felt the percussion of the depth charge blasts that he knew would cripple his sub and kill all his friends. To the boy it was an incoming space cannon shell, which had impacted on the craft, with a mighty explosion. But the old man knew it was a depth charge; he knew it had just blown the back end off his sub/shed and that soon water would rush in and extinguish the flames and their lives. Again he would be cursed to be the lone survivor.

The boy saw the enemy clearly through the screen and in his half crazed state reached for the Very pistol and blasted it off then looked puzzled. It was loaded! He stared down the smoking barrel.

The red flare crashed against the shed window and lit up the inside of the shed in a glare like burning phosphorous and hurled the blinded boy and the old man against the shed wall. Flames shot up to the asphalted shed roof and licked along its underside. The other flares stored in an old knapsack are ignited. The sub/spaceship/shed had become an inferno. The old man's coat is on fire. Paint tins burst, the petrol tank in the lawnmower explodes, bottles of screws and nails blow up and shrapnel shoots humming and whining all around the shed, the case of rum bottles started to explode like Molotovs. The boy rips Granddad’s ancient extinguisher from its mounting and triggered it in a powerful blast of white powder gas which blew him backwards in a recoil against the shed door.

All down the street windows fly open and neighbours lean on their windowsills to watch the spectacle muttering, "Silly old sod, he'll blow us all sky high one day." When they hear roaring torrents of water, they turn to each other frowning but they can't see anything just suburban back gardens and the pyrotechnic display emanating from the shed. Suddenly they spot rolling waves rushing through the back garden fences all the way from the far end of the street.

Sheets of water crash through the shed and assuage the blaze. They sweep Granddad and Grandson through the back end of the shed out into the garden where they wash up against the hedge. The two warriors lay soaked with foam and peppered with nail shot, blood spattered, burned and covered in paint.

The shed had surfaced, the ship had landed, the dream had faded. "What's that red button for then?" croaked the little boy.

The old man gazed at the lad blinking then pushed his cap onto the boy’s head and winked.

At least he'd got Algy out.

Illustrations by Doug Gordon

Black Velvet Jacket

2010-03-04T22:31:00.005Z

Well, I’d wear that,” was the highest accolade I achieved. After the piss taking. 'Fashion criminal, tragic bastard,’ they thought or they thought they thought. Instead they began to render grudging admiration.

I have committed some fashion crimes though, shockers some of them. But it was a way back and at last I can look at myself in the mirror again. Sewing my own hippie bag was one of them and that was made of black velvet too. Walking down the road wearing a green corduroy jacket, maroon loons and a black velvet hippie bag with a tasselled shoulder cord. Oh, and as I remember it I’d affected reflective shades and lit a cigar. Fuckssake, a cigar. Well it was the early 70s and I was all fired up, as indeed the cheroot occasionally was. The dog’s bollocks, a right young dandy. When I walked past the builders they all whistled and went, “Wayhey Sparko” and “Ducky” (the word gay hadn’t been invented) and I was honestly indignant. I looked furiously up at them, then down on myself, and thought, “How dare they. This is style this is. Sad tossers. Why don’t they see what I am?” And of course they had seen what I was.

Ponce. Perfumed ponce. Provincial poseur.

But in 2009 down the pub, the thing is, they couldn’t keep their hands off it - the jacket that is, everyone wanted to stroke my lapels, to the extent where I’m thinking ‘Fuck off, am I at a wedding? Stroking me, like I’m a cat. Then I realised, revelation, you love my jacket. You all want one. You all want my black velvet jacket.

It was a surprise, something inate, the need, the want at least, for a velvet jacket, especially a black one. They were standing on the pub doorstep roll ups in hand, going, “How much did you pay for that then? Thirty quid?” All disparaging. OK, I was definitely showing off, doing a bit of modelling, but I knew, that at that particular moment, they’d have paid anything, everything for my black velvet jacket. They, like me had themselves wanted one back then, as well as a Triumph Bonneville with Jane Birkin on the back.

Three hundred quid, I lied. That shit impresses people.

That was the reason I went for it, it was all built of history. I’d already had one but the wrong one, I remember a guy in college who wore one with aplomb. That was thirty years ago but a classic is a classic. Not like it’s been playing on my mind or anything… for thirty odd years. He had rock star hair as well, which didn’t help. Rock star hair – thick, black, wavy, Keith Richard’s hair cascading onto the black velvet jacket, which housed a crisp white shirt and hairy wrists that protruded through the buttoned cuffs, hairy but not too hairy.

That look; it was so definitive. And it wasn’t like I didn’t have a velvet jacket. I had a fantastic velvet jacket. I’d probably had it long before he had his. It was bought it in Lyons, when most of my friends hadn’t yet been out of the county let alone to southern France. I’d not only been there I’d bought clobber there. They’d definitely never bought clothes there and smoked a Gitanes in a boulevard café with a tasse de noir. And none of them had a velvet jacket from anywhere. I’d bought the brown velvet in Lyons, where I’d also bought my fuck off trench coat and my psychedelic pullover… oh and the maroon polka dot shirt I’d worn till it fell off me, and it was amazing – it fit like a glove and it was a perfect fit. French. It was a great jacket. It was velvet, it fit like a glove… but it was brown.

But the guy had a black velvet jacket and perfect rock star hair, and also perfect hairy arms and a crisp white shirt and it turned my head.

These things stick by you.

Until 2009 it seems. I’m glad I’ve got the jacket, finally, it took me a good long while and endless Ebay bidding. In the end it came from the USA but it’s Polish by origin. Polish. Have they been wearing great jackets over there all this time? It came from Poland by way of the US but it came in the end.

I made it all seem easy, the sartorial gamble. They don’t know how long it took, sizing them up, buying the wrong jacket, the expense, the false hope, the Ebay experience, post strikes. Weeks and months of false hope, then reality! It came, I saw, I wore. And I wore a crisp white shirt with it. However, the hair and the just so hairy arms? Well, you can’t have everything.

And the hard-bitten builder never seen out of denim said the impossible thing: “Well I’d wear that.” Magnifique. Une accolade.

The South London Mountains

2009-12-06T12:52:00.006Z

From the refuge high in the South London Mountains he looked down on the rows of Edwardian semis and the spaceport that nestled between them. Car headlights swept around the hairpins leading up to the abandoned broadcast tower and the Crystal Palace casino complex which shone out like a beacon among the towering Redwood trees.

Well... when he could see at all.

But now his sight and his sense of smell seemed to be returning and he was hit by a searing stinking wave of Neutrino 90 emanating from the hydroponic pastures far down on the Croydon plains.

The asteroid that had decimated central France had fucked up all the seasons as well as the topography. Birds of paradise nested around the chateau but he could see to the east of London a glacier gleaming quite clearly. That is, he could whenever the monsoons abated and between the monstrous tremors and associated blindness of the waves which ripped through his body.

They had given him the 'permanent' spike when he had been active in the ecstasy wars in the twenties. How was he to know it had been the Department of Health behind the network of dealers? They sure took it badly when he found that pill factory in Dagenham, they'd killed his partner, drugged him and dragged him here, shoved him into this armchair and filled him with Sodium Pentathol.

"Who had he told? What had he seen? How long had he known?" Jab after jab until he could taste the shit. He spilled his innocent guts time after time but they weren't having it; they figured he was from some wanky liberal UN hit team, which would undoubtedly have expressed some concern about one of its founder members routinely drugging up its population.

The best way of silencing such a man they thought, was to administer a 'permanent'. "Scupper his body, and his brain will follow", he heard them say. The dirty deed done - under clinical conditions of course - they had left and he hadn't moved from this armchair for fifteen years or so. Well it seemed like fifteen years. That estimate might have been ten years out in either direction. He was aware that somebody changed him and fed him from time to time but why did they bother he wondered?

He knew he'd been crying...

The 'permanent' had set off a jet stream of wind through his head - warm but irresistible, moaning, often shrieking, an incessantly rushing tinnitus. When they'd taped the soft sponges to the hinges of his jaws the visions had begun: he remembered fighting with some Bedouin, being severed at the waist and blood transfusions - perhaps some of it had been real.

Rendered immobile by the medication he was left in a sitting position, arms on the rests chin down. Whenever they came to move him he remained in the same position, comically rigid.

Then the spaceport had started running huge magenta personnel air freighters past the back of the shaking house. The booming ships usually carried incoming engineers home on leave, or outbound shoppers visiting the Blue Sky satellite mall tethered three miles above the clouds, just over the Brixton Cliffs.

It pushed him to panic every five or six minutes.

Each passing craft would cause acrid fuel vapour to burst into his face and the stench of it washed through the empty rooms. It ripped at his mouth, nose and throat, at his blind black eyes, and made his terror complete. But somehow, each time he had felt he wanted to give in, to let go and fall into the welcoming, swirl of the abyss, some spark within had flickered and driven him like a mauled insect clawing up the precipice yet again to flop feebly over into the right side of sanity. Every few minutes this had been happening, every night and every day for between fifteen and twenty five years. He knew he had endured the seemingly unendurable but too weary for triumph, he was only dumbly aware it had been right that he'd tried to survive.

They'd be back for him, now they knew he was recovering. But surely they wouldn't want to interrogate him again. He must have told them everything he'd ever known. The memory of the bitter taste of the truth drug lingered on.

He thought about his appearance for the millionth time. His hair would inevitably be white by now he figured but he couldn't be sure, since there were no mirrors. They and all the other reflective surfaces had been removed, the 180-degree floor to ceiling windows had all been treated so as to give no clue as to who he had become. There was only a blurred but incrementally expanding view of a world he hadn't set foot in or touched for half his life.

The sentence they had passed on him - the exquisitely agonising, hyper real nerve-edge on to which they had forced him to teeter for so long, somehow hadn't yet killed him and should therefore make him stronger… he hoped.

But then miraculously, with each moment his vision started clearing. The hurricane in his head was calming to an almost manageable rushing gale. In a month or two he might be able to move his mouth. With more time, maybe a couple of years he could consider trying to think his three shiny steel lower limbs into movement.

The woman narrowed her eyes at the stirring man opposite. He, was preoccupied by the progress of a spider as it made its way up over her knee and disappeared under the hem of her skirt. This sort of mild hallucination was run of the mill.

Unexpectedly he was gripped by a huge convulsion, the biggest he'd experienced in maybe ten years. His head dropped down between his shoulders, and, from the small of his back to the top of his head, he shuddered violently like a wet dog, teeth clenched, arms flailing, eyes jammed shut. But when the attack eventually passed, it left behind it a deep sense of finality, and a glimmer of hope that perhaps this seemingly eternal experience might all soon be over.

Then he was able to get his eyes half open. His vision became clearer and he even felt his numb mouth twitch. A day, or was it a week later, the mists cleared enough for him to realise that he was smiling at the woman, leering even.

"Hello Stephen", she smiled. "You've been away ages this time."

It didn't matter right now who this woman was, he had a far more burning question. "How long?" he gasped, uttering his first words in years. She looked at her watch. "About 30 seconds or so this time," she smiled.

They told him that he had been suffering from malaria, that the experimental treatment he had volunteered for was causing him to experience side effects - disorientation, slight memory loss and possibly mild hallucinations. He might be a little delusional perhaps, but nothing lasting.

When he talked of conspiracy, assassination, time shifting and ecological disaster they'd just smile indulgently and tell him it would soon all pass, and at least he would never have malaria again. He insisted, shouting, screaming but they and he grew weary of the questions after a while and acceptance set in.

But fifty times a day he was compelled to walk awkwardly to the window and resting on his tripod of legs, look down at the spaceport's shining tower. He was relieved that at least he was not insane; he was just on a different plain.

He earned money of course, as much money as anyone could spend. The companies that paid him so well always had trouble reverse engineering the fantastical machines he developed for them, but they were extremely grateful for the plans and maps of the future that he routinely handed over. At the same time they were full of pity for this melancholy yet vigorous young man who only ever saw himself white haired and stooping over his robotic limbs and who only feigned recognition of the wife who in reality was young and beautiful but to him was an aged stranger.

He had seen the future; he was living in it still and he was doomed to remain in it. For him there could be no return. That was the price you paid. Time's magnetic draw had robbed him of the youth that he still retained.

Have a Cigar

2009-12-05T15:21:00.008Z

Your flesh may be weak but your fillings will live on
You are a man. You’ve reached a certain stage, a certain status. You have a few bob. You can afford a few things, antiques, a hand made suit, a big house which you spend lots of money on to make it nice, a permanent house, not the fly by night flats, bed-sits, sofas, you’ve been used to in the past. No more tatty rags or man-made fibre; no more Ikea, no more boot sale watches or second-hand Rosé. You desire permanence, the heft of heavy furniture, gilt frames, Renaissance art, a Mercedes, Harris Tweed, a Monte Cristo cigar; these things have pedigree; they are somehow mahogany-ed brown like the weathered skin of the frequent flyer, the habitué of the Bahaman beach. They ooze arrival, status and forever.

But then you muse; how infrequently you got to sit behind that big roll top desk, how few the occasions your arse polished that smoker’s bow, how little time there is to ponder on your luck and vision, to dwell amongst your possessions.

Then it occurs; these things will last longer than you: the Rolex, the suit, the Queen Anne dresser, and the Georgian house. The furniture and the house have already been around for centuries, the Rolex will last two hundred years if you look after it. Except you won’t be around to look after it and neither will the man who made it and neither will his son. So why do we demand such levels of weight and durability? Why do we yearn for that permanence? Is it because of the unpredictability and fragility of our own existence?

Is this the true extent of our immortality, physical accoutrements? In the absence of a statue dedicated to you, can you only live for longer than your allotted time by owning things that will outlast your own frail flesh? Do you desire for your DNA to become embedded in the grain of the oak around you?

Your son might inherit the house and the furniture (Alan Clarke scoffed that the ingénue Michael Heseltine had been forced to buy his own chairs and tables). He may even wear your suit and your Church’s brogues. More likely they’ll go to a charity shop or up in a back yard bonfire. He will surely highly prize the Rolex and might even talk wistfully about it and you whenever anyone comments on you or it. He may even get misty-eyed when he looks down on his weighted wrist, the hand beyond it gripping a 12 year-old Scotch. For a few fleeting seconds, he may ponder on the solid engineering and beauty and your desire to have owned such a thing.

What he may not consider or ever know is that the day you bought it you already had a vulgar little tumour growing inside you that determined that before many more sweeps of its face by the second, minute and definitely by the hour hand, you’d be cold in a grave or heated to extinction by the flames of the Co-operative furnace and that all that would be left would be the fabrics of longevity, the furniture that, God-willing worm-free, would survive, the wood and wool that had seen the ages pass like a brief interlude.

There may even be a dog, a great slobbering Labrador with a heart of gold that had worshipped you, panted at your feet waiting for you to hurl the stick, a stick that became more like a branch and harder and harder to chuck more than a few yards; until the walks diminished and then eventually ceased, until such time as the dog pants at the feet of a new master, its memory greyed, its disloyalties like those of a gold digging whore, transient, fleeting and venal, bound only to a bowl of food and a warm hearth; the dog they bought you late in life as a companion knowing all the time that there was every chance you wouldn’t see it grow out of the folding floppy skin of puppy-dom let alone into seniority.

The Asprey jewellery, the Purdey guns, the Jermyn Street hat, the dental implants; these are things of permanence, exquisitely manufactured to last a lifetime, in fact more than a lifetime, certainly more than your lifetime.

And so before you are interred, they remove from your wrist the ticking watch and the indestructible gold, from your finger the eternity ring, from your three hundred year- old safe the fading handwritten deeds to your ancient house. And all that is left intact of you while you slumber below is the perfectly functioning pacemaker, a titanium hip or two, the gleaming ceramic teeth and maybe if you are a woman, or at least a woman’s remains, the perfectly pert silicon implants, perhaps a few fillings and a small pile of bones; bones that were built of short-lived sperm and capricious egg, bones that have more resistance to the ravages of time than the clothes, the timepiece, even the towering brick built edifices we hold in trust for someone else’s future, certainly longer than the memories of your once-loved ones, who with the passage of time only now love you in those few fleeting moments of fading nostalgia when they grope to recall your face, how you spoke or what you ever did.

Monkey Boots

2009-12-05T14:42:00.004Z

"Your feet are the only two feet you got for your whole life and they will always be the ones who take you where you need to go. Treat them like kings because without them your face would be in the dirt."

- Tyson Schultz, Oregon Logger

The sixties were a simpler time. The life choices you made were clear-cut, Beatles or the Stones, Mods or Rockers, Fred Perry or Ben Sherman, Levi or Wrangler, Dr. Martens or Monkey boots.

The problem with Monkey boots is that they are a bugger to get hold of. Never to be seen in a High Street shoe shop, they are only ever found up side streets in cluttered army surplus stores, the domains of strange old men who smoke Old Holborn, wear quilted sleeveless body warmers and who retain bizarre fascinations for torches and padlocks.

“What size?” they enquire and disappear out the back. You wait patiently while the old guy balances his fag on a tank periscope then climbs a ladder and starts chucking boxes around and grumbling while you preoccupy yourself deciding whether you should get yourself a nine inch sheath knife with a bone handle while you’re there, or a compass perhaps, or even a chopper in a leather holster with holes for your belt loops.

Then the old geezer dumps the box on the counter, red faced and puffing and you get the chance to try the little beauties on, balancing on one leg and leaning on paraffin stove.

Monkeys were only ever for the truly dedicated because the pain they caused in their first two weeks of wear was excruciating. Vicious bruising across your feet, and huge purple blisters on your big and little toes is the least you will suffer. They are to be worn with great caution and in instalments with periods in between where you take respite in Radox footbaths and fluffy carpet slippers.

But the agony brings a singular ecstasy. Monkey boots have a great shape, and that shape, unlike our own, improves with age. They hug the ankle and taper to the toe in a boxer’s boot style. In fact some of the lads used to wear Lonsdale boxing boots on the street, but they had Rizla-thin soles and wore out very fast – still stylish uppers, but nothing twixt foot and floor - and since they cost more than Monkey boots they were a short-lived and expensive fashion statement.

The tread of the Monkey has a distinctive tractor tyre design and the composite material they are made from is durable. Monkeys can last a lot longer than DMs and mile for mile they are better value.

However, the ubiquitous Dr Marten is of course the more popular but that very popularity and the comparative rarity of the Monkey boot gives Monkeys a certain caché. The best thing about Monkey boots is the natty little half oval shaped stitching detail that stretches from the fourth lace hole down towards the toe end that charges them with an astronauty look.

Mostly available in black, you can occasionally find browns, but if you want to be really exclusive, scour your town for the almost impossible to find burgundy red.

The History of Monkey Boots

They were the standard issue Czechoslovakian army boot of WW2; light, strong and cheap, they were by a mile the most stylish army boot of any of the armed forces. Monkeys were adopted by the mods in the mid to late sixties and then by the skinheads and suedeheads. The punks adopted them in the late 70s and students have for forty years opted for their cheap chic. They are no longer worn by either the Czech or the Slovak armies but are still produced and sold by a company called Tuk. They are very popular with retro skinhead and goth groups in the USA and although never as popular as the DM, when worn with Levis and a Harrington jacket they have an incomparable and timeless street style – all for about £30.

Lager

2009-12-05T14:04:00.000Z

The pale golden liquid courses down your throat, slaking your thirst, renewing your spirit and loosening your tongue, but what on earth is lager?

Despite rumours that it’s going out of style, around 120 million pints of lager are consumed in the UK every week. That's two pints each. We are the ninth biggest consumers and the third biggest producers of the amber nectar worldwide. And while some tipplers are happy with a couple of halves in any one evening, others are happily chugging down eight pints of electric soup a night before going off for another couple to wash down the vindaloo.

If you are what you eat (and by extension what you drink) then a number of young British males are, by volume, lager and little else. Where once it was slugs and snails and puppy dog's tails; they are now awash with a yellowish substance of which they have only the dimmest knowledge.

So what is lager?

A rough straw poll taken on a recent stag weekend in Prague revealed that of the twenty lager drinkers, nay louts, in the party, seven hadn't any idea; five thought it was made from wheat and the rest just said grain 'we think.'

If you are a fan of the fizzy brew and get out quite a lot, you may be drinking twenty pints of it a week. Can you imagine swilling back any other liquid in that kind of quantity without knowing what it was? Large amounts of lager can make us feel violently ill but even then we don't query its content, we just gobble down some painkillers, have a bacon sandwich and wait for the pain to wear off before cheerfully going back for a gallon more of the stuff. In an ongoing experiment on our own bodies we routinely slosh down millions of pints of a highly familiar, slightly toxic yet unknown liquid.

What is your poison?

Lager, like darker beer is basically water, malt, hops and yeast. Malt comes from barley and barley is a cereal crop that isn't much use for making bread or cakes but is great for making beer. The barley is brought to the highest point of possible soluble starch content by allowing it to sprout roots - to germinate. The malster halts the grain's growth by heating it and a naturally occurring enzyme called diastase (that’s not distaste) converts the starch into sugar, or maltose, which in turn converts yeast into carbon dioxide and ethyl alcohol.

Add water and bingo! Falling down liquid - but at this stage the mixture is sickly sweet so the brewer adds hops.

A relation of the marijuana plant, there are two types of hops - the bittering variety that counteracts the brew's sweetness and the aromatic type, which give it its distinctive flavour and smell.

At this point the beer/lager brewing techniques diverge. Ale yeast ferments at the top of the vessel and becomes tasty more quickly (7 - 8 days). Lager yeast ferments at the bottom of the vessel over a period of 30 days (Stella Artois takes even longer). In fact the word lager derives from the German lagern, which means 'to store.'

The question of additives is a thorny one: surprisingly quite large quantities of flaked rice can be found in Heineken, Budweiser and Fosters while Kronenbourg and Colt 45 use flaked maize instead.

The 'reassuringly expensive' and legendary high-octane Stella Artois boasts that it uses only malt and hops but there have long been dark mutterings about chemical additives, perhaps as the only way to explain the blistering hangovers, memory loss and domestic violence that many associate with it.

This allegation cannot be verified since lager manufacturers are not obliged to print the ingredients on their tins and brewers jealously protect their methods.

In Germany the Reinheitsgebot law forbids any additives to its lagers but in the US, the FDA has approved up to 59 of them. It is hard to establish what goes into lager in the UK but it is suggested that some brewers inject carbonation and use artificial colouring and preservatives. Whatever goes into it, us Brits are oblivious; we know what we want and we know where to get it - and when this Friday night you and your garden furniture have to be rescued from the canal, you will at least know a little more about the reason why.

FACT FILE

Lager was invented by Bavarian monks about 500 years ago when they found they could produce a clearer brew by storing it during the summer in wooden casks in cold subterranean caves.

Germany and the Czech Republic are the biggest consumers of lager per head of population.

Kronenbourg used to be called Tiger Bock. It is a French beer with a German name owned by a British brewery.

Beer making may have originated 10,000 years ago in Mesopotamia. There is a Sumerian recipe for beer making that is 4,000 years old.

Beer is possibly a side product of bread making but it could be the other way round, since the bread making process is far more complicated!

© Steve Overbury 2007

She's Leaving Home

2009-12-04T23:24:00.001Z

The kids are off to uni. and I should be grateful for the peace and quiet but like many a dad I am suffering in silence.

So it’s only three more weeks until the birds fly. Off to university both and already I can hear the empty echoes around the halls. No more the daily blare of the hairdryer, the squeals about stolen underwear, arguments about the remote control, no more Friday night shrieking, no more the sauntering beauties that head for the door blithely shouting, “I’m staying at Emma’s,” when you, biting back the age old, ‘You’re not going out looking like that,’ have no idea who Emma is and fear she’s a Croydon crack dealer with a drawer-full of Johnnies.

They aren’t twins, though close in years and it’s true one had already flown but it hadn’t seemed so hard – one remained. I’m sure she felt the pressure as much as we did terrorised by being suddenly cast in the role of an only child, and when we turned the twin spotlight blaze of parental eyes on her, whether about either major triumph or minor infraction, she feigned to blanch where before those beams seemed less malevolent spread over the two of them.

Now that they are both to go, the odds for me have changed from three to one to one to one, odds I’d fancy if it weren’t for the downside. And to think that before I used to think the downsides would be upsides. No more hip hop music, no more walking into a cloud of hairspray that might have found use by Saddam against the Kurds, no more mascara stains across the shower floor, no more fake tan, no more wearing my sweaters, no more pleas to be picked up at four in the morning.

Instead there is to come a new regime of responsibility without the pleasure. There will be more bills to pay than ever but we can’t see what we are spending it on. The clamour has died to be replaced by a numbing silence. The visions of glamorous youth that inhabited this place have been replaced by reflections of middle age – a new world of reading glasses, teeth implants, routine and quiet melancholy. It’s like someone’s turned down the lights.

But I’ll survive – other fathers do. Maybe I’ll get an iPod and put some Mike Skinner stuff on it, maybe I’ll get Skype and a web cam and have jerky videophone conversations with them. Maybe we’ll go and visit them both a lot and hang out with them and their friends.

And maybe not, I’d rather fry my eyes. Can you imagine the horror of your parents ‘phoning you on a Sunday morning and insisting you put the web cam on? “Let’s have a look at you darling?” Can you imagine the hell of having your parents turn up every Friday night demanding they take you for a drive in the Lake District and play the latest Lily Allen track? My tunes will always be better but the times have changed and I’m going to have to change with them.

They don’t tell you this when you start going out with a girl and then marry her, no more than they tell you that you’ll shortly be paying £150 a week nursery fees. They don’t tell you that at some point you’ll be reduced to tears in Nottingham or Leicester having carried all their possessions up three flights of stairs and treated them to a cheap Chinese meal before kissing them goodbye in a car park. They don’t say that when you look back in the rear view mirror at their excited and scared little faces it’s like your chest is being pulled out of your mouth and all you want to do is slam on the brakes, reverse back and smother them in your arms and the old world of mummy, daddy, home and babies.

She’s leaving home, bye bye.

They also don’t tell you that over the years, the home visits will become fewer and more distracted as they instinctively pull away. And from now on all we will see is excerpts from lives that we used to observe in seconds and minutes. Apart from paying the bills and hopefully providing a secure retreat, we have become irrelevant, I more than my wife. She at least gets the telephone chats about the lectures, the boyfriends, all the minutiae – something that I and most men I suspect, do not have the capacity for, and the kids know it.

But I’m not going to turn to overt sentimentality and nostalgia – not yet anyway. I’m not going to pull out the box of photos and the old VHS tapes – not until I’m dribbling in a Bournmouth bungalow. For now I’m hardening my resolve to let this all happen without outward signs of misery. I shall treat it in the same way I treat other emotional crises with the simple proven prescription of Guinness and roll ups.

Maybe I’ll just drift into denial – an ersatz world where nothing’s changed. Now that I have complete control over the remote will I start sneakily watching Lost and The OC instead of Rumpole of the Bailey? Now that the phone is free will I start gabbling to the dialling tone about Angelina and Brad? Will I start buying Closer magazine and smuggle it home inside a copy of The Spectator? Will I force myself to like Quorn sausages?

I’ve started observing the family of blue tits in the back garden. They’ve had babies that have just left the nest but then they get to do it every year – and lose them every year. At least I’ve only had to endure losing my chicks once and the last eighteen years has been fun, but my Christ didn’t it go quickly.

Of course everything must change even if doesn’t seem like it will be for the better. Sic transit gloria mundi. I suppose it will be grandchildren next… now there’s a thought.

At least my razors are lasting a little longer.

Swill

2009-12-04T23:01:00.001Z

This piece was written when the foot and mouth epidemic was raging. It would have gone into the Sunday Mail had Michael Barrymore not thrown a swimming pool party that weekend. Still, they paid.

Swill. I’ve lived it, breathed it, worn it and sat in it. Pigs used to eat it

As a schoolboy in the late 60s I worked on a couple of farms in North East Essex - next to each other and owned by the same family. One kept chickens, the other pigs.

The first farm consisted of two innocent looking aircraft hanger-sized sheds that concealed a hell of screaming chickens stretching off into the distance. The hens were jammed in tight, standing on mesh bars, with just enough space for them to stick their heads out for food and water. The eggs dropped through and were routed into collection trays, the shit would fall onto a flat metal floor surface which would be scraped off. The chickens lost all their neck feathers through rubbing against the bars when feeding and they would die in their hundeds as a result of suffocation, exhaustion, disease or fighting.
Twice every chicken day we would enter these stifling hell holes (by controlling the shed lights the farmer fooled the hens into thinking there were two days to our one day, driving them to lay twice). The squawking was deafening and the smell made everyone gag, so the objective was to get in and out as fast as possible - feed them, water them, collect the eggs, pull out the carcasses that were being trodden into the bars of the cages, turn on the scrapers, hose down the shit tray and scarper. But my weekend job didn't last long, I couldn't stand that smell - far worse than pigs, cows or even humans. It was the smell of terror. I had to leave and went to work for the farmer next door.
This was a large-scale industrial farm heaving with swill pigs and meal fed pigs. The farmer had a contract to pick up waste food from local institutions - schools, hospitals, offices, as well as restaurants, cafes and a Butlins holiday camp. Every day his fleet of swill lorries would arrive and tip brimming bins of waste food onto a conveyer belt – vile brews of blancmange, milk bottle tops, rotting pork chops, broken glass, rancid milk, plastic bags and anything else that might be casually chucked into an open swill bin by a kitchen hand - were emptied off into two vast steam heated cookers.
We had to rifle through this food with our bare hands as, the farmer insisted, it was the only effective way of finding the cutlery and large bones that might be concealed in it and which might damage the cookers. The swill was boiled and pumped down into a pit over which we had to walk to get to our rest room. Here we'd sit on grease covered armchairs and eat our sandwiches just feet from thousands of gallons of steaming swill, great clouds of it wafting in through the door like noxious burps. Swill smells revolting, it gets in your hair, clothes, ears and eyes but somehow you get used to it - although my mother never did and used to make me get undressed at the bottom of the garden and hose me down before letting me in.
One day an unmarked lorry arrived and tipped at the top of the driveway. Us boys were sent to cover the load with a tarpaulin 'in case the health people drop by'. The pink mess had come from a well-known chicken processing factory and consisted of rotting chicken giblets and other chicken body parts. The smell made me retch and we had to use handkerchief masks before we could get near it. Then we heard the cheeping sounds. One of the farm lads waded into the squelching matter and frantically started pulling out slime covered live chicks, scores of them. Some he couldn't find and the pathetic cheeping didn't stop for a couple of days. Each day a certain amount of the pink filth was forked into the cookers and mixed with the waste food. They didn't want to use too much of it in case it harmed the pigs.
Often a pig would die - at least one or two a week. The carcasses would be butchered and tossed into the cookers. Whatever had killed the pigs was fed back to them.
One of the other farm lads and myself were told to clean out the cookers one day. They were cylindrical tanks with circular hatches on the top like a submarine, where the waste food was put in and where the hot grease was scooped out (not for health reasons but because when the fat cooled it would congeal inside the swill pipes and block them). The farmhands drained the tanks, opened the hatches and, wearing only our underpants we were dangled inside. The only light was from the hatches and there was a foot of hot swill washing around our feet, long shafts ran the length of the tanks with paddles attached for stirring the swill. We sat on the shafts in the steam filled tanks our legs dangling in the brown liquid and bent double to feel for cutlery, broken crockery, bones and all the other stuff that gets thrown into waste food bins. Another important task was to cut and pull out any string or entrails that had wound around the paddles. Within seconds we were wringing with sweat and gasping for air.
I can often win 'what's the worst job you've ever done?' competitions with this story.
Generally the swill pigs got sicker than the meal pigs. They used to piss and shit in their own beds, they would lose all their teeth through lack of use and they seemed to have constant diarrhoea. Their pee seemed highly acidic as well and a pair of boots would rot away in a couple of months. In contrast the meal pigs were cleaner and happier. The problem for the farmer was that the meal pigs grew at half the rate of the swill pigs - that would go from piglet to fifteen stone porker in about six weeks. The economics were obvious. The farmer got away with it. The pigs didn't contract any significant disease, neither did they cause a dangerous epidemic, well not that we ever found out.
That particular generation that grew fat on the slime were taken on a double decked articulated lorry to the Walls factory just the same as the others (usually five or six would die in transit - of suffocation usually. Some would arrive with broken legs). We'd watch the pigs being fed in the door of the processing plant and as we walked alongside it to get to the staff shop, our pigs were killed, rendered and their waste body parts were slopping down chutes into skips positioned along the length of the factory wall. We unsentimentally bought sausages and pies for our families at discount rates and headed off home.
We were blithely complacent about the health risks involved and one hopes that things must have improved in the nearly forty odd years since but even then we all knew that we shouldn't be feeding this muck to the pigs, that it was deeply wrong. The farmer knew as well and had been concerned about being caught doing it but it was cheap food and he had a red E type Jaguar, house improvements, a swimming pool and a predilection for fine cigars to support. The farmer has now, fortunately for us all, abandoned farming and gone on to build a huge waste disposal business – something, obviously, for which he was already highly qualified, although I worry about what he dumps where. In any event, now the farmers are casting around for consolation and compensation, perhaps they’ll forgive me if I demur.

Here She Comes

2009-12-04T22:08:00.006Z

An epic Christmas day labour. Santa bought terror, pleasure and just a whiff of the supernatural!

“She’s been here before that one,” observed the huge-bosomed West Indian midwife. I blinked down at my wrinkled, cheese covered first born who had finally emerged a few minutes after midnight on Boxing Day.

‘She’s been here before?’ She’s lucky to be here at all!

My wife had selfishly gone into a labour at 5.30 pm on Christmas Eve and finally given birth (or conducted a hostage release or perhaps a cell extraction might be a more accurate description of what occurred) 30 hours later. It was a labour with a soundtrack by Quentin Tarantino.

I considered the past day and a half – the swearing, the sweating, the tears, the panting, the greedy consumption of nitrous oxide - and then it was the wife’s turn.

The long suffering midwife, had when his shift finished (notice I said his shift), quite reasonably made an attempt to go home to his mother’s for Christmas dinner but my wife had other plans for the talismanic young chap, “Stop him!” she hollered Don’t let him go! Bribe him to stay!”

Dopily rejecting the crumpled fan of notes I offered him, the poor sod stayed for another four hours anyway and then ended up having to get a cab from south London to Slough on Christmas day.

I thought of our uncooked Christmas dinner at home – home where our two mothers sat in mute antipathy.

When I helped the midwife – a man let me remind you - hold the stark naked, ballooned up mother-to-be over a bedpan, I gathered this was to be no regular Christmas Eve.

I thought about the baby monitor machine. They’d clamped the sensors to the baby’s head and explained that providing the LED’s stayed in the green everything was OK but if they turned red for more than a few seconds at a time then the baby might be in distress. From that moment on my eyes were riveted to the infernal box going hot from not blinking, while I fixed a smile of reassurance on my face for four hours with the damned light jammed into the red. The expectant mother-to-be bucked on the bed like Linda Blair in the Exorcist but she couldn’t see the lights thank the Lord.

A nurse seeing my glazed grin of desperation whacked the side of the machine saying, “stupid thing it’s always doing that.”

When my wife had done in the Pethidine and was still grabbing visiting doctors by the hair, they called for the epidural specialist… the mechanic.

She arrived with a face like a bag of spanners and dropped a bag that clanked like a bag of spanners then quickly plunged a syringe like a cake icer into my wife’s back, who gripped my hand and pleaded, “Tell me when they’re going to put it in.” I stared down grimly at the needle buried up to its haft.

Then with the stress swept away, the kid fell out, blue-faced, covered in cream cheese and with the cord wrapped around her neck. At that moment I knew she was dead but no one else seemed to have noticed. “Overcooked,” they explained yanking at the cord.

I gawped then started mindlessly humming,‘La de da de da de da’.

Then she breathed and I had to resist the temptation to pluck her from the medicos and hold her up to the sky, baying at the moon.

Later in the ward I stared at her.

Her coal black eyes stared back – deep pools, calm, all knowing, mysterious. I shivered.

You might think I’m making too much of this, just another dopy doting dad, but you should have been there. The West Indian midwife was spooked too. She knew something was going on.

“She’s been here before that one,” she said.

Meanwhile the years have passed faster than a David Beckham cross. The first-born does piano lessons, plays the French horn and bashes drums in an orchestra. She gets straight A’s at school, is in the debating society, plays lacrosse and has just done the Duke of Edinburgh’s Award.

And soon she’ll leave us but frankly we’ve been blessed. Your children are only on loan after all - held in trust. It’s been a privilege and I’m glad to have done my little bit. The melancholy will pass. The sense of wonder and pride won’t.

At the moment she can’t decide whether to be a vet, to go and work for charities in Africa, or to marry Prince Harry. Then she’d meet the Duke of Edinburgh for real of course – as her grandfather-in-law. She doesn’t want to marry William though - she doesn’t want to be the queen or anything – but just like every little girl, she wouldn’t object to being a princess.

Whatever she does will be done with imagination, poise, purpose and a pure heart. She is confident, respectful, wise and has a kind of inner peace that frequently makes me catch my breath.

Whether she’s been here before or not, who else would you want at the helm of our brave new world?

Havana - Heaven and Hell

2009-12-04T17:15:00.010Z

It's a few years old this one and a bit long but you should see the stuff I had to leave out...

“Real travellers are the ones who just take off somewhere for the sake of it; with a light heart, floating like a balloon, always following their destiny and though they don’t always know why, they always say, ‘let’s go!’”

Charles Baudelaire

Initially our idea had been to go somewhere to hear some good music and an early choice of destination had been Jamaica. But my blonde haired friend had an excitable nature and a knotted handkerchief-on-the-head concept of holiday wear so Trenchtown was possibly not the best idea. Then Cuba crept into the conversation.

Always fly BA – expensive but if you really try you can recoup half the fare in free Champagne - that is until you pass out completely or they apply plastic wrist restraints and radio ahead.

When we snuffled awake from our free bar binge, a Panama hat type in the next seat, expressed considerable admiration for our attitude to flying and recommended Havana’s Hotel Ingleterra; very Graham Greene.

The terrace bar at the Ingleterra had a salsa band and many other forms of Havana nightlife set against a backdrop of 50’s Pontiacs. Fighting off the attentions of a prostitute who looked like Mike Tyson in drag, we sat meditating on life with a bloke called Mark from Deptford who interviewed illegal immigrants for a living and had needed a break from work. He couldn’t stop looking at the girls but denied he was sex tourist. “This is f****** madness,” he said for the third time, pinballing across the bar.

Our first guide in Havana was called Lossario. He had fought with the FNLA in Angola – two years of being shot at by the South African backed UNITA forces. He’d taken a bullet in the leg in a fire-fight and his face was covered in little scars which he may have picked up in jungle skirmishes or more likely from the garishly painted nails of the whores that sat around us eating the ice creams we’d just bought them.

They wolfed them down like school kids, which is quite possibly what they were.

Lossario was a linguist who spoke fair English and German, a bit of French and Russian and quite a lot of Angolan but he was less accomplished as a guide, having failed so far to get us any further than a bar twenty metres from our hotel, where he cheerfully drank free rum for eight hours.

During one of his many highly animated moments Lossario had spotted a small hole in my bemused companion’s Beach Boys T-shirt and stuck his finger right through it. With several violent tugs he’d ripped the entire shirt off, spurred on by the whooping girls.

We’d only been in the country half a day and already one of us was standing in a town bar stripped to the waist, surrounded by whores and drinking with a scarred, pissed Cuban vet. When the cop with a gun rushed over I thought, ‘That’s it, five years in a Cuban jail,’ but incredibly he just wanted me to stop me leaning with my Doctor Marten boot up against the wall.

The real trouble started when the erstwhile stable English girl we’d encountered six Mojitas ago (a Mojita is a rum and mint drink), inferred that our guide was actually a pimp - a savagely cruel but quite accurate observation - but delivered as it was towards the end of a rum binge, truly bad timing. The deadly insult caused Lossario’s cow pat neck to go rage purple, and he began swearing in all five languages and sweating neat Havana Club. His flexible sense of honour had been slighted and a rum red mist descended on his brain.

My friend held him back making soothing noises while I stuffed dollars in his pocket, all the time beating a backward retreat to the door and yelling for a cab, making our escape as he beat on the Lada roof going, ‘Fucking English beeech’.

Leave the party when you still look good as Che might have said. And as Che certainly had done.

But before we scarpered we encountered Wilfredo, the charmingly corrupt barman, who at various times offered us one or all of the girls, his mother, a boy, some cigars, the name of a great restaurant, some ganja and, when he saw we had no intention of fornicating or eating, some cocaine. Then he told us the story of an ex-IRA man, a local, who having done 11 years in the Maze and emigrating to Cuba, was prevented by the authorities from taking his beautiful mulatto wife back to the UK. He was never sure if the problem was because he had once been an IRA assassin or that the lady was Cuban.

For the locals, getting a Cuban passport isn’t apparently that hard but getting out of Cuba is. It seems lots of money has to change hands before the documents do. Then, when the traveller finally gets out of Cuba, wherever he may roam, Fidel insists he report regularly to the local Cuban consulate to hand over yet more bucks, that’s the fee for taking a break from the revolution.

For us, back in Havana hell, every morning was the same – the hangover fug, the stench and the swearing about the hustlers, the hookers, the food, the bad service, the dog shit and rubbish, the foul Canadian, Bulgarian and Euro sex tourists. Every morning we’d think ‘How the hell can people live like this?’

And we weren’t the only ones thinking it. Two sunken-eyed fellow Brits on the next table were trying to hold their heads up and deciding whether to order a pizza or to go off menu and ask for a bucket to throw up in with a side order of wet wipes. “We’ve got to get out of this fucking country said the one that could speak. The other stared back insanely but didn’t disagree.

In the space of an hour a Cuban cafe kitchen might reluctantly let you have a couple of fried eggs with maybe some Spam peppered with capillary holes and served up with a Bonio. You are at the same time, being ignored by the staff and bothered by whores and cigar salesmen while watching the regular breakfast time entertainment of rutting dogs, the finest of which, a wirily heroic young onanist back-breakingly humping away at himself in a traffic stopping spectacle - like Buckaroo in reverse.

The service is bad because the staff doesn’t care and neither does the management. It’s not their café; it’s Fidel’s.

Why can’t you buy a bit of bread in Cuba?

You can get bread in any country I’ve ever been to - sourdough, unleven, rye, pitta, or large, white bloomers - bread.

Even street-to-street searches produced only a few miserable soft rolls, or even filthier fare – a metre-long loaf that turned either to ashes in your mouth or dust on your plate and which would blow away if you didn’t suck it up speedily.

And why is there so little veg, and what there is of it so withered and pockmarked? The whole island seems to consist of farms with bizarre tower blocks poking up from their fields. But then there are the frequent petro-chemical plants, one burning off gas right opposite the capital’s tourist hotels. These collapsing heaps of pipes and spewing chimneys hadn’t seen a decent plumber since the British and American oil companies had been chucked out and looked about as reliable as a Chernobyl reactor parked ominously alongside Cuba’s beautiful northern shores. Perhaps it was their foul smoke that was blistering the veg – and probably the kids as well.

That day we watched a fisherman carrying beautiful bunches of glistening fish up from a harbour boat. He delivered them to a house next to the restaurant while we poked at slices of $4 fish that had been battered four years ago. And we were just ten yards from the sea.

The explanation for the lack of fruit, fish and veg is obvious. The pragmatic farmers only sell the scabbiest stuff to the shops and the tourists, keeping back the best stuff for themselves and their mates - because they know they’ll have to fork out 70% of their profits to their piss-up-in-a-brewery Presidento.

Through sheer necessity and for the Cuban cause, a whole nation has been driven into the black market.

You have to take a real deep breath for the full Havana experience – dumpster bins, sewers, the heavily leaded diesel that the trucks chuck out (apparently the Yanquis refuse to help them to produce any cleaner stuff), all mashed up together with the pervasive mosquito fumigation smoke.

Regularly fumigating all the buildings in Havana City is one of Fidel’s big ideas. Travellers, beware. Be prepared for the unmissable experience of incurring a full on gas attack from a truck belting past firing anti mosquito smoke from a cannon that totally fills the salsa bar. Trying to move is potentially suicidal; you have to stand still, choking, for at least 30 seconds before you can vaguely make out the form of the person you have just been talking to.

The town council is forced to fumigate the hotels, the shops and the bars; it’s the law. And one night they enthusiastically did it three times, all in the same bar, all from the same truck, steaming by with outriders, indiscriminately gassing locals and tourists alike, leaving us thinking maybe USA Delta Forces were about to burst in shouting, “Are you in here Mr. Bin Laden?”

Apparently the Havana authorities used to favour an insecticide spray that the mosquitoes used to lap up. To them it was like an amphetamine/Viagra mix that got them terribly excited and sent them into a stinging frenzy. So the authorities sacked their old chemists and got new ones, who were currently experimenting on the mosquitoes and the tourists with some new stuff.

Christ! Perhaps it was for the tourists!

Each time we heard the insecticide truck coming down the street and while we could still see, we’d leg it to the sanctuary of a shop next door, but in the third attack we were a bit slow and the two of us crashed, blinded into a road works hole bang outside the bar door, bruised, gassed and soaked knee deep in some pungent sludge from the pit.

Wafting through the clouds came a riot of Spandex. “Vive la revolucion!” one of the whores cackled, watching us crawl out from the mud hole.

We slopped back across the bar. Whose round was it?

Che once invented an insecticide. He was a qualified though inexperienced doctor with a basic bedside manner fit for the battlefield. He was once criticised for pouring a whole bag of iodine on to a wounded man’s leg but was renowned for his battlefield dentistry. It is said that one day, while on the run, he had to choose between picking up a bag of medical supplies or his ammo.

He chose the gun.

Havana has hundreds of magnificent, dilapidated Spanish mansions that have rotted sometimes to extinction since the 1959 revolution. It seems like they're trying to repair them but it's a slow process. Somebody told us that up to 300 houses a year fall down in Havana.

‘Aah,’ explained the guide in the few remaining lucid moments before he went unacceptably crazy. ‘In the old days, when you went to the shop to buy paint, you could only find brushes. And when you wanted brushes then there was only paint.’ We paused to consider this. “That’s no answer – you’re just lazy bastards,” someone shouted.

“The truth is that to repair the houses,” he sighed – (the whole of Havana old town is a UNESCO World Heritage site) – “that’s a lot of money and we’d have to let the Capitalistos back in to Cuba, and then the Communista dream would be over.”

Fidel might then have to take the revolver to his study – as Hemingway had done.

When they do renovate a house then all the occupants of that house – maybe 30 or 40 people – are dumped a hundred miles or more from Havana, in communes in the country, never to return.

We saw the communes - blocks of flats ten stories high marooned in the middle of wide expanses of fields – nothing but sugar cane for miles and then maybe 300 dirt-poor Cuban paysans living in a solitary Peckham tower block. The poor displaced sods had been scratching a living in the streets of Havana all their lives then phooom! They’re scratching for food with the Cuban chickens - part of an agri-experiment.

“Individualism is a bourgeois aspiration,”

Che

“But the people love Castro, yeah?” we asked in hushed naivety. Lossario looked around the bar. “He is a fucking arsehole,” was his unequivocal reply.

“Then what about Che Guevara?” The guide stopped dead; maudlin tears started rolling down his cheeks, “I love this man from here,” he wailed clutching his heart. “I would die for this man.”

Bandjaxed as he was, at that particular moment he utterly meant it, he would have willingly laid down his life for his Che – Havana’s unsanctified saint.

“I’m no Christ.”

Che

Indeed he wasn’t. Although Guevara showed great heroism many times, notably once rescuing a wounded man at great personal risk, he had killed men in combat and, post revolution, may have personally supervised a bloodbath of up to 500 executions, revealing a darker side to his character.

But instead of getting the chance to die for the people’s hero, Lossario the guide had almost become a martyr to Castro’s mad adventure in Angola, one of 20,000 troops conscripted into a ten-year war, a world away. All around Havana’s tourist trap begging bowl area there was stark evidence of the Angolan war - amputees and guys in wheel chairs, ex-soldiers with no welfare, no pensions and no legs poncing from the tourists. There were other old soldiers (or their widows), ancient, original veterans of La Revolucion reduced to selling the Rebelde propaganda paper at a dollar a throw – making 50 cents a time for themselves and their families – the Big Issue for revolutionaries.

The rummy, tearful ex-soldier guide peeled down his trousers to show us the bullet wound that had taken out half of his thigh muscle. He must have had a good doctor we said, trying to think of something positive to say to this crying man with his trousers round his ankles standing at a bar with an Englishman wearing only the neck and one sleeve of a Beach Boys T shirt.

“In Havana, a doctor gets only $20 a month,” he started ranting. We considered our drinks rounds that had been running at $10 a time for the last few hours.

Wilfredo the waiter, pimp, procurer, supplier and storyteller legally earned only $10 a month. “I live on tips,” he explained and added, “But the fucking police they get $40 a month.” “Why?” we asked dumfounded. “It’s a police state,” he laughed mocking the stupid gringos.

Perhaps it was time to reveal the true nature of our mission. I was a journalist and my friend a photographer. ‘Forget Guantanamo Bay and Camp X-Ray, we’ve come here to find out who killed Che Guevara.’

Lossario paled, his eyes swivelling around the bar again but his nervousness soon passed; things have loosened up a bit security-wise in Cuba. He spluttered an angry reply. “Iss Fidel,” he said. “Him and the CIA. For once, him and the fucking CIA agree on something.”

I’d had Che’s poster - that legendary poster, on my bedroom wall in 1968 – the photograph taken by Korda set on a bright red background. It was just one year after Che had died and the ripples caused by his killing had washed across the Atlantic to the youth of a highly politicised Europe. We didn’t know who this magnificent warrior with the beret, the star and the 1,000-yard stare really was, but he obviously meant it.

And did he play the guitar?

That year there were riots at the US Embassy in Grosvenor Square and at the LSE, the Oz Little Red School Book had just come out. The Paris students, behind barricades, had ripped up the cobblestones to hurl at the Gendarmes and set fire to the cars. The Stones’ Street Fighting Man was on the jukebox.

We wanted a revolution of our own.

“Be realistic. Pursue the impossible.”

Che Guevara

Mismanaging an economy

The story goes that when Fidel had been first trying to assemble some kind of government, (the average age of which was 30), he asked the room full of green garbed fighters if any of them was an economist. Che hadn’t been listening properly and thinking his compadre had asked ‘Is anyone a communist?’ stuck up his hand. He was immediately appointed head of the Cuban National Bank. “Every Guevara business goes broke,” commented Che's father laconically.

It was a revolutionary idea indeed - to give the keys to the bank to the bloke who looked like a pop star/film star – but then he was also a guy who didn’t seem to want money – a beatnik.

Che was nicknamed ‘the pig’ because he wore the same dirty uniform all the time.

And now Castro has seven homes. Or not. It doesn’t really matter whether he has or not, they think he does.

But this is Cuba, North Korea apart, the last Communist country left in the world, and it’s not in the first world or indeed the third. Like Mexico, Cuba is the second world.

Sadly the old ideals have left Cuba a place stuck in time. The Cubans know the revolution is over. They’re hungry and ready for change but they can’t find a way to rejoin the world without having to lie back and love Uncle Sam.

But there is no McDonalds in Havana yet and few mobile phones… except in Guantanamo.

As Castro gets older, the Yanquis are flocking to his once forbidden island and that’s not the only US presence. Of course there is already a notorious US military base down the road hidden behind its minefields.

Back in President Batista’s time, many Cubans had worked at Guantanamo Bay, but when things went sour between Castro and the US, they were all thrown off the base.

The presence of a US base in hostile territory is a curious one but easily explained. The Americans had occupied Cuba between 1898 and 1903 and ran Cuba’s puppet governments for forty years after that.

They granted themselves a lease on the property that the naval base occupies at an annual rent of $4,000. One hundred years later, the USA stays put, the rent gets paid and the only objection that a frustrated Fidel can mount against having the Yanquis on his turf is to religiously refuse to pay in their rent cheques. There are apparently hundreds, un cashed, brimming out of his office desk drawer.

Cuba has to be seen, smelled and experienced before it’s trapped-in-aspic traditions are swept clean away by the onslaught of the inevitable. But be quick. Soon gone will be the old Cadillacs and Buicks - all shipped off to collectors on the mainland. In will come the hotels and casinos just like the 40’s but to the power of ten. All the locals will be evicted, their dilapidated houses will be done up and flogged off in Miami. Some will get to return but only as cleaning staff.

Gone will be the old men picking over street corner rubbish piles and the kids playing handball and baseball. Lost will be the brilliance of Cuban recycling, their resourcefulness, the refusal to be crushed by their rich, rough neighbour looming just 90 miles to the north.

‘Let them eat cake.’

Marie Antoinette

No bread but such cakes! A Communist cake is a two-foot square gateaux spread with engine grease and finished off with two-pint swirls of Swarfega.

There were more scrubbers than loaves of bread in Havana and some of them looked just like the cakes. The regular $10 whores were marked out by fluorescent spandex stretched over barrage balloon arses while the ultimate $25 slut’s suit was a lurid magenta one piece with broad black vertical stripes.

If Dot Cotton were to donate a day’s washing from the Albert Square laundry to the ladies of Havana, it would raise the level of sartorial elegance of the neighbourhood by 200%. It must be the only capital city in the world where you can’t buy a baseball cap – they’re crazy for baseball but they don’t do baseball caps.

Some corner shops might sell just milk, a few bags of rice and some latherless soap. You think, is it possible with these few ingredients you might knock up something quite delicious; a stew, perhaps, maybe with a crumbled up cigar sprinkled over it as a garnish.

One shop had a window display of cross-eyed dolls. Another sold only electric fans and shampoo. Big shop, no stock.

The only well-fitting clothes around were on the backs of the cops who sported snazzy grey tunics and matching berets with Saddam moustaches, hefty batons, guns, walkie-talkies, leather straps and handcuffs. And the best-tailored cops of all were the motorbike boys - jodhpurs, high leather boots, mirror shades and even chromed spurs to gee up their Moto Guzzis.

The police presence on every street corner was for the benefit of the tourists we were told but the cops would get around to us gringos later.

Mainly black, the policemen only ever seemed to pick on other blacks, constantly hassling unlicensed guides and imposing on-the-spot fines - fiddles galore. One of our guides attempting to show us the way to (one of) the Hemingway bars, was arrested en-route and we never saw him again. Then our top guide Tony was forced to let a trooper trouser 200 Pesetas, forced, because of a small discrepancy in his papers, to subject himself to the officer’s free enterprise interpretation of the law.

But then as the stinking Havana mornings turned to sultry afternoons and when a couple of $1 Cristal beers had taken the edge off and when we become less frazzled by the cigar and scrubber salesmen; when the music had het us up a little bit more and performed its mighty, nightly feat of beating the angst out of us, before dumping us into some kind of oozy Cuban mambo glue, then we began to see what these people were at, how they’d got here, where they are going to and where salsa, cha cha and timba, the pumped-up contemporary style of salsa favoured by younger Cubans, comes from.

Cubans are a mix of Spanish dashed with the progeny of pirates injected into a gumbo of African slaves all washed up against a long coast and then strained through the few remaining local Indians that the Spanish Conquistadors had failed to slaughter. Thirty per cent of them are mulattos. We’ll all be Cubans one day.

And when full understanding, heat, rhythm and beer all hit the same spot at the same time then, yet again, we’d surrender ourselves up as gringo ingredients for their spice filled melting pot. ‘Only four days to go!’ we moaned that morning. ‘Hey let’s stay a month,’ we roared that evening.

There was a band called Corazones de Feugo (Hearts of Fire) in the Café de Paris one night, who with the aid of an eight stringed guitar, an amped up double bass, two saxes and a percussionist pounding a cowbell made out of a Pontiac fender, reached up through the ceiling into some starry salsa, acid house frenzy heaven and pulled at a lever that tipped the band, the bar and us right over the edge of cliff Cuba.

We moved from the hotel to a private room. It was cheap ($35 a night) and clean but then we went for a drink in the most bourgeois hotel we could find, got drunk and checked in ($220 a night). Sinking brandies and smoking lengthy $3 cigars, in green armchairs, staring up at the stars, through the retractable roof of the Hotel Florida was just too good. “You don’t even have to inhale these fuckers,” said my friend inhaling, “the smoke just soaks through the top of your mouth into your brain, straight down your spinal column.”

Che used cigars to ward off the mosquitoes and to provide relief from his chronic asthma. He wrote to a friend, “I am writing this letter with the help of an army plate for a desk, a rifle at my side, and a new addiction between my lips: a cigar.”

We succumbed to a street cigar salesman one day. Well, it had to be done. He didn’t have a display case on him of course. Instead, he beckoned us through the streets to a rat hole slum up some stairs and past men who though radiating slit-your-guts-out menace really only wanted to flog us some cigars.

English paranoia.

The apartment was a six-foot wide corridor, a front room led to a kitchen leading to a kid’s bedroom with a toilet pan in its corner. The guy peeled back the bed blanket and there they all were: Monticristos, Romeo y Julietas, Partagas and Bolivars; cigars from a mere six inches long to full fence posts – all apparently rolled on the inner thighs of fourteen year old virgins – if there are any in Havana.

Boxed and cellophane-wrapped, they were a tenth of the price that Arnold Schwarzenegger pays. The cigar dealer went out in the street to check that the coast was clear, slipped another guy half the money and we furtively made off with our brown paper package.

Even if the boxes had been empty, we’d had $40 worth of fun playing at contraband smugglers but they weren’t knock offs, they were the full Monticristo.

They not only fear Fidel, they insult and revere Fidel. Apparently, the old dog recently blacked out half way through a speech – at about the same time as George Bush was choking on a pretzel. George came through it with a grazed cheek but Fidel had to have an operation. He’s 83 now but won’t give up the fight. He’s seen the whole Communista dream crumble around his ears and nearly take him with it but when he came round he could still quip, “Don’t open the champagne yet,”

… So he knows. He knows they’re all waiting.

All around Havana are huge queues and clumps of people just hanging around. Some are waiting for the Mad Max buses, (artic tractor units, puffing pitch black smoke, and hauling single decked trailers with up to 200 people suffocating inside). Others seemed to be just standing somewhere, merely because others were already standing there, no shop or anything, just mindlessly standing and not even talking.

One Sunday we saw 200 people queued up for the ice cream shop in the park… an ice cream shop.

“They’re all waiting,” said my friend.

Waiting for what?

“Waiting for Castro to die,” he said.

Then we saw a load of kids hanging around. “What are they doing then?” I asked.

“They’re training to wait,” he replied. “Wait training.”

But that’s why the CIA isn’t sending Fidel exploding cigars anymore. The US needs him to stay alive just a bit longer – the people need him to stay alive a bit longer. Yet again, Fidel and his arch-enemies of 45 years have a joint purpose.

Miami, one of the richest places on earth – golf courses, jet skis, glasses of Chivas Regal, so close you can almost hear the ice cubes chinking, is only 90 miles away. The Florida Keys radio station was carrying ads for pet therapy phone lines where someone will talk your neurotic dog down for $40 for half an hour, a month’s wages for a cop. The Cubans can pick all this shit up on their crappy transistors and a lot of them don’t like the sound of it.

Seventy-five miles to the east however is one of the poorest bits of dirt on the planet – Haiti – voodoo land, a place where even Che didn’t get to visit.

We found a top guide Tony, who took us into some busted up dives we’d never have dared venture into on our own. He’d been a history professor before he’d become a guide, and had given up his $30 a month job at the university on the 10th of September 2001 - if you can believe that. He gave up an honourable $30 a month for a dishonourable $30 a day from the tourists. He could treble it if he got you a girl. Tony exchanged his profession for pimping on the day before the towers tumbled and the arse fell out of the Cuban tourist business.

But he knew his history and he knew his voodoo too.

One courtyard had a mural of a goddess on the outside wall. “I come down here to rumba on Sunday afternoons,” Tony explained. Inside were strange swirling circles, golden eyes, geometric shapes, crosses, a God/man with straw-hat face holding a chicken’s neck in his hand, a beheaded chicken beside him.

“Santeria,” he explained. “Voodoo!” laughing and making a face like the bogeyman when he saw our startled English expressions.

“Do they drink the chicken blood?” we felt obliged to ask.

“Well I drink the rum but you can drink blood if you want to. You should come.”

Chicken blood – that would be the only thing we hadn’t drunk this week.

We took respite in the middle of a tourist square and had a political chat. It was both Tony’s paranoia and some of our own that prevented us from sitting casually in a bar and doing it. We felt safer and a little saner in the centre of the beautifully restored posh bit of Havana, the unsmelly bit, the bit with the Benetton shop which sold jackets that would cost a local eight month’s wages. This is the only bit of Havana that the fat cocooned Yanquis get to see.

In Cuba, those in power who might stand a chance of succeeding Castro - the last of the great revolutionaries – they don’t want the state funeral and all the crocodile tears to happen too soon. There are no obvious successors to Fidel and no openly talked of plans for a successor because no one even dare have the conversation. The paralysed government did recently, have a timid talk along those lines but nothing like consensus broke out.

“If Fidel died now,” Tony said, “there would be chaos. There are so many factions; it’s like Afghanistan….”

He paused and laughed, “We need a revolution!”

“So who killed Che, Tony?”

“Che killed himself,” he answered enigmatically. Then related his version of the end game - that after the revolution Che hadn’t known what to do with himself. He was a fighter not a politician. He’d been around the world trying to flog the Cuban sugar harvest, then bored with finance and politics, had gone to Africa to help various rebel groups who, although they’d heard of the great Che – the hero who’d stuck it to the Yanquis, were disconcerted to discover that he was a white man.

But Che continued his armed struggle, however in the Congo, there were no cigar shops and he had to resort to smoking a pipe. He was also presumably taking even fewer baths because he became ill and had to leave the front line to recuperate in Prague, where he developed a love for the Beatles. But then the stateless rebel found another cause and was driven to fight another fight for yet another country in yet another year. He went on to Bolivia.

His mother wrote to him, “You will always be a foreigner.”

He didn’t write back.

The Bolivian government army and the CIA would have no Cuban revolucion exported there and a US trained group accompanied by a CIA operative, shot and wounded Guevara, then tracked him down and finished him off as he lay in a shed.

Recently released papers seem to suggest that The US expressly ordered that Guevara be kept alive so as not to provide any future revolutionaries with a martyr for their cause but either the CIA man made a contradictory assessment of the situation or the Bolivian Colonels would have none of it. They instructed a soldier, Sergeant Jaime Terán, to shoot Che in the body not the face, so that the wounds would be judged to have been incurred in battle.

The soldier who killed the man and launched the myth was trembling as he entered the shack.

Che’s last words had been provocation “Shoot you coward, you are only killing a man.”

Other soldiers entered after they heard the initial shots and shot Che again, all keen to be in on killing him now he was already dead.

“Death wish,” added Tony.

After Che’s body had been injected with formaldehyde, they gave him a haircut, shaved him and propped him up. Forced to get his fingerprints by the CIA, they cut his hands off and put them in a jar, and the CIA man took his Rolex watch for a souvenir. Hearing of the death, Castro said, “Che Guevara will rise from his ashes as a phoenix: trained and combative and healthy.”

Our Cuban adventure ended at the graffiti-plastered tourist trap that most regard as the Hemingway bar.

Havana – the one time home of two Ernests - both legends - Ernest Hemingway and Ernesto Guevara - Che’s real name – both with a death wish.

We had ten minutes spare before the airport car arrived, the bar was packed with touro-scum and we ordered two one dollar beers, which came to six dollars. “I’m not paying that,” I shouted at the fat bartender guy as I backed out. “Keep the beer”. Suddenly, all the staff were out in the street, with me, one of them pushing his face against mine. “Iss not my problem, iss your problem my friend,” he promised, surrounded by weighty looking back up. Then a cop clattered over - a cop well aware that the bar he was watching over was charging tourists a doctor’s week’s wages for two beers. His hand was on his stick, his eyes set hard on my head. “Pay up,” said my friend. “It’s time to leave the party.”

Nate’s Inflatable Bar I

2009-11-18T09:56:00.000Z

Nate is a mystery wrapped in an enigma, wrapped in a black overcoat. He’s been around the block. He’s been around the world. He runs the Inflatable Bar. His customers are some of the most interesting dead people in music.

Each week one of them is featured in a half an hour episode. Otis Redding, Sam Cooke, Kurt Cobain, Sid Vicious, Phil Lynott, Marvin Gaye, Brian Jones, John Lennon, Jim Morrison, Joe Strummer, Mama Cass, Marc Bolan, Syd Barrett, Keith Moon.

There is a heavy atmosphere on the desert road like there’s a constant sandstorm. Nate is driving a 1973 Mustang; he veers over to the left hand side of the road and his arm comes out of the window and plants a sign in the dirt ‘Nate’s Inflatable Bar 1 mile’. He wheel spins away and after a mile stops again, gets out, takes a pile of rubber out of the trunk, inflates the bar and walks through the swing doors under the neon light. The dog pads in after him. The bar is a haven with the feel of a last chance saloon, rugged, on a frontier. Inside the lights are low; there is a long bar with a Rock-Ola and a pool table. It’s hard to tell how big the bar is.

Nate is the gatekeeper; he’s a dark figure, strong and silent, with a strange tattoo on his hand, a good listener, with a Bruce Willis smile but he keeps his sentences short. He often fidgets with a pair of dice.

Each week the featured artist appears in a classic car: Otis in a chauffeur-driven black limo, Sam Cooke in his 1964 Ferrari. The artist is as yet unidentifiable. The car pauses near the ‘1 mile’ sign then moves on; every week it is stopped by a Highway patrol cop. The cop is the narrator, a bit of a redneck, doesn’t really approve of pop/rock stars and you can tell it from his world-weary delivery.

‘Where are you heading?’ The artist motions down the road and mouths something about a bar. ‘There is no bar’ says the cop. ‘I just saw a sign,’ says the artist, ‘Nate’s Inflatable Bar 1 mile’. The cop takes off his hat, looks down the road, scratches his head, shrugs: ‘OK mister, if you say so. The car pulls off, arrives at the bar and the featured artist walks in.

The artists are look-alikes. The body of the programme consists of conversation between the artist and Nate, narration from the cop, library film clips and song extracts with occasional re-constructions i.e. Sam Cooke’s final moments. However this is not straight documentary, there is an odd, slightly surreal air. Although there is only a cast of two, occasionally other strange figures appear and disappear – a ghostly Dolly Parton barmaid and other spectral bar staff, who never speak and who Nate ignores. The bar walls open and close like it’s alive.

Illustration by Doug Gordon

Nate's Inflatable Bar II Sam Cooke

2009-11-17T10:55:00.001Z

Sam Cooke

Nate and the dog sit in the otherwise empty bar. At the end of the bar is a TV set with a fire and brimstone evangelist in a white suit and a shit-eating grin making out he’s healing people. Nate looks at the screen for a few seconds, shakes his head, reaches up, gets a Jim Beam bottle, hefts it in his hand, looks at the label, then hurls it the full length of the room into the screen. There is a satisfying crash and a puff of smoke, then the screen heals up… but the preacher has gone.

“Dog, I’ve gotta find that remote,” he grumbles.

A 1965, convertible red Ferrari broadsides in the gravel outside Nate’s bar. A man wearing only an overcoat and one brown shoe bursts through the doors. He glances at Nate then races down to the far end of the bar, looking for somebody, something.

“Where is she?” he screams. “That whore took all my money, took all my clothes and then got me shot. Look at me. I’m dead. Two hours ago I’m in a business meeting; I’m gonna expand my record company; get some other artists, do some production, start running some tours and now I’m dead! What the hell happened?”

Radio: “This is WNIB Radio. We are receiving reports that Sam Cooke the singer was shot dead at the Hacienda Motel in South Central Los Angeles at around 3 o’clock this morning. He was pronounced dead at the scene of the shooting and his body has been taken to the morgue. There are no further details of the circumstances of the shooting at this time. Cooke who was born in 1931 in Clarksdale, Mississipi, hometown to other famous musicians: Robert Johnson, Muddy Waters, BB King, Howlin' Wolf, Ike Turner and John Lee Hooker. He was the fifth child of eight and the son of a preacher. He was raised in Chicago where his father and his brothers and sisters used to perform gospel songs as the Reverend Cook and His Singing Children. Later he had small scale success with the Soul Stirrers before his performance of You Send Me on the Ed Sullivan Show in 1957 which saw the record rise to number one in the Billboard chart the following morning…. In 1963 Cooke’s son Vincent tragically drowned in the family’s backyard pool. It seems that another tragedy has struck the Cooke family tonight and our thoughts go out to his wife Barbara and their children.

More on this story later”.

Nate: “What the hell did happen Sam?”

“That crazy broad picks me up at Martoni’s on the Strip. She’s beautiful, long hair, kind of Asian looking. Turns out she’s half British and half Chinese. I’d seen her before. She was hanging out with the guys from the band. She started comin’ on to me, wanted me to take her to that Rat Pack mob joint down in Santa Monica - PJ’s . We drove down, had a few drinks there then I catch her talkin’ to some other guy, acting fresh and shootin’ looks at me over his shoulder. I figure she’s trying to make me jealous so I tell this guy to leave her alone. He wants to fight me and I see her smiling, getting off on the situation; two men fighting over her. The guy gives up and goes and then she tells me she wants to take me to a motel… not any motel mind, she wants to go to this specific place where she knows people, miles away down in south central. Why? I dunno exactly but she’s insistin’, keeps chewin’ on my ear as we’re drivin’ along and telling me what she’s gonna do to me when we get there.”

“You were taking a bit of a risk headin’ down to Watts in that car Sam”, says Nate.

“Well it sure turned out that way Nate,” he says. Sam thinks then looks puzzled. “How d’ye know about my car?” Sam looks over his shoulder. The whole front wall of the bar has melted and there is the red Ferrari clear as day with the driver’s door wide open. Sam shakes his head bewildered and then turns back to the bar. The wall closes up behind him

“Yeah, it was a helluva risk but she told me we might have trouble getting a room in Hollywood because I’m black and she was kind of white lookin’. She said this place would take anybody. It says ‘Everybody Welcome’ on a sign outside. That means blacks are welcome. It’s a code.

One time I tried to get into a Holiday Inn in Shreveport Louisiana and the manager turned me and my buddies away. We argued with him and then we went outside and shouted a bit and honked the car horn. Next thing I know we’ve been arrested for disturbing the peace; my wife Barbara, my brother and another guy. That got me so riled. There I am, a major artist with number one records and appearances on TV, the Ed Sullivan Show and the Tonight Show… everywhere. I play to thousands of people, sell millions of records and yet they treat me like I’m a shoeshine boy. I make more money in a week than that chump hotel manager makes in a year and he treats me like I should be round the back taking out the garbage rather that trying to book a room in his rat hole hotel. Later on I wrote A Change is Gonna Come out of frustration, just to get it off my chest”.

Suddenly, there is a load of motorcycle noise, the bar door opens and about a hundred Hells Angels troop in and stand up at the bar, occupy all the seats and start playing pool. On goes the jukebox and Sam’s song You Send Me is being played. Miraculously several staff appear from nowhere. They serve drinks to the Angels. Nate and Sam don’t move; they just keep talking. It seems like they are in slow motion while the Angels are moving at high speed. As suddenly as they appear, they leave. The staff evaporates. Nate and Sam are alone again as if nothing had just happened.

“When we get to the Ha-ci-enda, this snotty desk clerk makes me sign in as Mr. And Mrs. Sam Cooke. We go into the room and she’s all lovey-dovey, takes off her clothes and I take off mine. I’m just a red blooded boy, you know that Nate?”

“I guess you’ve had your share Sam”.

“That’s for sure”, he sniggers. Then she insists I take a shower so I go to the bathroom. I’m only a couple of minutes but when I get back into the room, she’s gone and so has all my money and my clothes ‘cept for my coat and one shoe. She’s taken the other one. What the hell did she take one shoe for? They were two-hundred-dollar brogues. What’s the point of taking one shoe? And why take the clothes? My pants and shorts, a silk shirt, my jacket. She’s got my money, my American Express card, my Diners. I had about a thousand bucks in my wallet. Why does she take the clothes?

“I guess to stop you followin’ her Sam”.

“Unless there was someone else there….”

“Yeah, you may be right. But it didn’t work that way. I put on my coat and went after her. I drove around to the front office to look for her. I was sure she knew that dame that worked there; sure she was in the backroom there. The door was locked so I was pounding on the glass, sayin’ ‘Let me in. Where’s the girl?’ She was on the ‘phone and shouted at me to go away and that I should call the police. I got crazy and beat the door in. She started screamin’ and shoutin’ and we just sort of tussled for a bit. She tried to bite me. Then she got this little gun out and shot me. Three maybe four times. Why did she do that? Four times. That seems like a bit of an over reaction. I guess maybe she thought I was gonna rape her or somethin’ where I was pretty much as naked as a jaybird. Why would I want to rape a fifty-five year-old motel clerk who looked like a man? I’m Sam Cooke. I don’t need to pay for it and I don’t need to rape nobody. Anyhow, it all gets a bit hazy then and I don’t remember much. I recall somebody was hittin’ me round the head but I couldn’t make out if it was her hitting me or somebody else but they sure did hit me hard. She was a big woman but I felt like my head was gonna come off my shoulders. And that’s about it. Here I am shot dead and half naked”. He looks down. “I can’t stand here like this”.

“You don’t need clothes in here Sam… Would it make it any easier if I took mine clothes off?”

“Thank you Nate but no”.

“Would you like a drink Sam?”

“I don’t think I should Nate; I’ve got a bit of a hangover and I’m driving”.

“I don’t think that matters now Sam. I’ve got somebody to drive you home”.

“Thank you Nate; I’ll have a whisky, Chivas, straight up”.

Radio: “This is WNIB radio: Police attending the scene of the shooting of Sam Cooke at the Hacienda Motel in South Central Los Angeles early this morning say that they discovered the singer’s red Ferrari convertible in the motel car park with the engine running and the driver’s door wide open. On the front seat were a whisky bottle and a Muslim prayer book. It is reported that Cooke had arrived at the motel in the small hours of December 11^th with a young lady whom he had met in a restaurant in Hollywood where he had been having dinner with business associates. The young lady alleges that Cooke had tried to rape her and that she had escaped from the motel and called the police. The manager of the motel Bertha Franklin says that Cooke burst into her office and attacked her and that she had shot the singer in self-defence. It is not thought that the singer was armed”.

“You know that’s been my downfall,” says Sam ruefully.

Nate: “What has, the Chivas?”

Sam looks down at his glass. “Mmm, that too. I’ve been drinking a bottle a day recently. I gotta ease up. No I mean women, easy women, party girls, whores”.

Nate: “You just said you never paid for it”.

“Well maybe once or twice. My producer Bumps Blackwell once said that I would walk through a good woman to get to a whore”.

Nate: “What’s it about then; the drinking and the skirt chasing?”
“I don’t rightly know, except that it’s all available. It’s all out there. I used to watch Sinatra and Dean Martin, the whole Rat Pack putting them away, in Martino’s or when I ran into them in Vegas, so I started to drink the same drinks. I wanted to be a cool cat like them. And they were always surrounded by these beautiful women…

“But I never had to learn how to get girls like I had to learn how to drink. There’d be girls throwing themselves at me wherever I went. It got so I’d get fed up with it and it used to irritate me. Then later in the evening after I’d had a couple of drinks I’d be bird doggin’ around the place trying to find the best lookin’ women in the room.

“This could all be a put up job you know; the girl, the motel clerk. One is a prostitute thief and the other has a gun and shoots me four times. There are plenty of people who’d like to see Sam Cooke out of the way. I met up with some of them recently. People who’d like to get control of my businesses, get their hands on my songs; people who don’t like the idea of a black man having his own record company; people who think they had everything to do with my success and that I’m just some face-on-a-stick singer who should do as I’m told, that I was just some hired hand; people who think I should give them my wage packet, just hand over my record royalties and touch my forelock and bow and call them Massa. There’s a lot of green eye and hatred in this business you know Nate and whenever there’s some success, everyone thinks they are entitled to a piece of the action; they want money for nothing… my money”.

“You know it could have been one of those black power groups that did for me. They ain’t never forgiven me for writing songs for white audiences, for wearing a cardigan when I did the Tonight Show dressed like Perry Como. But I never wanted to be a gospel or blues singer. I done my time singing church songs. I wanted big hits, to be a big star, not slogging around the chitlin’ circuit. I wanted to be like Nat King Cole… Sammy Davis Junior. I wanted to be on TV and maybe make movies like Elvis… only better than Elvis”.

“This is embarrassing Nate; me and a two-dollar hooker in a three-dollar motel; getting shot with a toy gun and beaten to death with a broomstick. It ain’t in the script. I’ve got a house in the Hollywood Hills. I’m the first black man ever to own a record company. I’ve got powerful friends. I’m a friend of Cassius Clay. When he beat Sonny Liston and became the world heavyweight champion, Cassius hauled me up to the ring and introduced me to the crowd and the cameras as 'the world's greatest rock and roll singer.' And you know what Jerry Wexler said about me? He said, I was ‘the best singer who ever lived, no contest'”.

Nate: “Yeah, but didn’t Jerry say that you had sold out when you recorded You Send Me… that you’d forgotten where you came from?”

“Well thanks for reminding me Nate. He may have thought that but what did he make of Chain Gang? Did he think that was a whitey’s pop song? I don’t reckon it’s that. When we were touring down in Georgia one time, we saw this huge red dust field. There were all these black men in white clothes alongside the road. It was a colourful sight… a kind of beautiful sight. Then we saw the chains around the ankles of the black men and we saw the shotguns all being carried by men in uniforms… white men in uniforms. After that I wrote Chain Gang. Does that sound like a white boys pop song to you Nate? A couple of years later I wrote A Change is Gonna Come; that sound white?”

Nate stands quiet.

Sam isn’t finished. “Bring it on Home to Me. Does that sound white?”

“Bring it on Home to Me…” Nate muses. “That’ll be a big hit for The Animals next year Sam”.

“Next year? The Animals? Ain’t they just had a big hit with House of the Rising Sun?”

“That’s right Sam. The songs will live on Sam… for ever”.

Cop:

This is one version of the Sam Cooke story.

Clarksdale sits near the junction of Highway 61 - the road immortalised by Bob Dylan - and Highway 49. This is the famous crossroads where, according to the legend, Robert Johnson supposedly sold his soul to the Devil in exchange for mastery of the blues. This is the same junction where blues singer Bessie Smith died in a car crash.

Sam was born in Clarksdale but the family moved to Chicago where they became a singing act. He joined the Soul Stirrers when he was 19 and the group played over 1,000 concerts coast to coast and made dozens of records. But Sam wanted to cross over from what he regarded as ‘race music’ to the ‘chess board’ crowds of blacks and whites that Little Richard, Chuck Berry, Fats Domino and Bo Diddley were used to. And the music didn’t really fit in with his lifestyle for despite the gospel songs, Sam had an unholy problem; he was a serial skirt-chaser. Aged only 22, Sam had three pregnant girlfriends, two in Chicago and one in Cleveland. The three children were all born in a five-week period and paternity lawsuits would plague him for the rest of his life. Sam didn’t marry any of the mothers; instead he married a singer from Texas called Dee Dee Mowhawk but she called a halt a couple of years later because of Sam’s wandering eye. A year after that he married Barbara who he had been seeing for some time. Soon he would be cheating on her too.
These attractions would prove to be fatal.

Sam Cooke achieved stardom in 1957 with his first pop single You Send Me. Unlike Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin and the others he admired, Sam wrote his hits: Cupid, Wonderful World, Bring It On Home to Me, Chain Gang, Change is Gonna Come, Shake, Only Sixteen and Another Saturday Night. He also produced much of his own work. The most successful black recording artist of his time, he was also a masterful businessman who owned his own recording, publishing and production companies, blazing a trail for the likes of Puff Daddy and Berry Gordy. He helped launch the careers of Billy Preston, Lou Rawls and Bobby Womack. He had taken on a new manager, the legendary Allen Klein who would later manage the Beatles and the Rolling Stones. Just before Sam died he had signed an historic half million-dollar deal with RCA and had only weeks prior to the shooting picked up a cheque for $100,000 from them. He saw himself more and more writing and producing for other artists and had his eyes on a future career in movies. Sadly his plans were unrealised.

Sam had become involved in the civil rights movement and had become interested in the Islamic religion influenced by his friend Cassius Clay who had just converted and become Muhammed Ali.

There is nobody remaining who could tell the real story of what happened in the early hours of December 11^th 1964 at the Hacienda Motel. Sam was shot dead; Elisa Boyer the girl who accused him of rape has subsequently died, as has Bertha Franklin, the motel manager who shot him. The truth accompanied them to their graves. All there is left is Sam’s wonderful songs, a whole load of questions and some rich material for conspiracy theorists. Was it a date gone horribly wrong or a drunken rape that ended in a shooting? Was Elisa Boyer an innocent victim or a prostitute on the make? Which of them was it that wanted to go to that sleazy hot-sheets motel in the first place? What did Boyer think was going to happen there, a couple of drinks, a chat and maybe a kiss goodnight before a quiet night sleeping in single beds? How could she not know that sex was on the menu? If Sam was planning a rape, why did he sign the hotel register using his real name? Why when he was signing that register didn’t Elisa, who had been sitting in the Ferrari, make any attempt to get away? Why when she walked into the motel office didn’t she tell Bertha Franklin she was being kidnapped?

We only have Boyer’s version of what happened in the bedroom. She says Sam stripped her, groped her and then went to the bathroom. She told police she picked up her clothes and some of his and fled. Again there are more questions than answers. If he was kidnapping her and intended rape, why did he leave her alone? Did he only go to the bathroom because she insisted he take a shower, a trick she had used before when she had robbed other ‘clients’?

Did she think she could stop him chasing her if she took his clothes? His shirt, shoes and pants? He was left with only a coat and one shoe.

We have Franklin’s version of what happened in the office and also the evidence of Edith Card, the motel owner who was on the telephone to Franklin when Sam burst through the door and Edith says she heard the whole incident take place. But again there are questions. Where was Boyer when Sam burst through the office door? Hiding out the back or up the road phoning the cops as she claims? If she was merely robbing Sam why did she stop to call the police? Could there have been somebody else in the office, someone with murderous intent? Why was Sam shot with a .22 calibre handgun when Bertha Franklin only had a permit for a .32 handgun? Why did no other guests of the motel hear or see the altercation? Wouldn’t a half naked singing star driving around the building in a bright red Ferrari shouting and beating in doors attract just a little attention?

The conspiracy theories surrounding the killing of Sam Cooke just will not go away. Could the killing have been a mob hit arranged by shadowy figures jealous of Sam’s success and angry because Sam wouldn’t part with any shares in his businesses or songs? The police report said that as well as the fatal bullet wound, Sam had a lump on his head and some scratches to his face. However, the singer Etta James states in her book Rage to Survive, that she had seen Cooke’s body in the morgue and that the singer had been so badly beaten that his head was almost decapitated from his shoulders; his hands had been crushed and his nose was broken. These injuries do not seem commensurate with a couple of swipes with a broom handle.

“I couldn’t comment on the behaviour of my fellow police officers, however this would seem to suggest that the LAPD somehow colluded with a person or persons unknown to conceal the truth from the coroner’s jury for reasons unknown.

The Cooke family believes that Sam was enticed to the motel and that an accomplice of Boyer shot him in the motel room but botched the job and when Sam fled to the office, the accomplice followed him and either shot him or beat him to death there. Franklin was either bribed or threatened into silence.

Sam’s wife Barbara turned up at his funeral on the arm of Bobby Womack. Bobby was wearing one of Sam’s suits as was his brother. A mere three months after the funeral her and Bobby were married. No will was ever found despite several friends of Sam’s reporting that they were sure he had made one, and his widow inherited all of his estate.

Elisa Boyer, the girl in the motel room was arrested for prostitution a month after Cooke's death after agreeing by phone to have sex with an undercover cop for $40. In 1979, she was found guilty of the second-degree murder of her boyfriend.
Sam’s body was taken to Chicago for a wake. There were 200 cars in the procession. Some reports say there were 80,000 mourners there; almost double the number that attended the funeral of Dr. Martin Luther King. A few days later, Sam’s body was returned to Los Angeles where there was another highly emotional service that featured singing by Lou Rawls, Bobby Bland Arthur Lee Simpkins, the Staples Singers and Ray Charles. Mowtown stars Mary Johnson and Smokey Robinson were in the crowd alongside Muhammed Ali who stated that if Sam had been a white singer, ‘if he had been someone like Elvis Presley or one of the Beatles, the FBI would still be investigating and someone would be in jail.’ Philadelphia DJ and civil rights activist Georgie Woods alleged that the LAPD were in possession of facts that had been kept from the coroner.

Allen Klein, Sam’s manager went to Los Angeles convinced that someone had killed Sam for his money. It was well known that Sam always carried plenty of cash. Klein hired a private detective who reported that he was convinced that Elisa Boyer, was a ‘professional roller’ who usually worked with an accomplice. Sam’s wife Barbara asked Allen Klein to discontinue his enquiries.

When an interviewer once asked Rod Stewart how he was doing, Stewart replied that he was not so great — Sam Cooke was still dead.

Nate's Inflatable bar III Otis Redding

2009-11-16T10:55:00.000Z

Otis Redding - Hard to handle.

Zzzt! Zzzzt! Nate’s neon sign fizzes and flickers in the first specks of rain that fall into tiny balls in the dust before becoming little rivulets, tiny pools and then noisy streams as the storm digs in. A far off dog moans low and the breeze picks up, flapping the gate in the busted fence behind the inflatable bar.

There are still streaks of light in the black clouds above the mountains but they are darkening fast, moodier and angrier by the moment. Suddenly a fireball flashes in the distance. It goes down behind the bluff and there is a silent gasoline explosion, followed seconds later by a hollow WHUMP, which arrives with the wind.

Nate raises his eyes when he hears the sound and then frets with a jagged fingernail and starts quietly moaning, him and the dog. Very odd; he was usually so cool.

It’s a rainy night in Georgia.

The long black sedan pulls over next to the cop who’s dressed in a waterproof cape. The electric window silently winds down. The dark driver sits motionless as the cop tells him there has been an incident and that he should turn back if he knows what’s good for him. “There’s trouble up ahead”, he yells in the storm. He’d heard it on the radio. The driver remains silent, winds the window closed and slowly drives off while the cop is still talking and gazing off in the direction of the fireball. “Hey mister”, the cop yells and reaches for his car radio.

The sedan pulls in front of the inflatable bar and parks next to a rain soaked T bucket. A passenger emerges with a coat over his head and makes for the door. The sedan glides away.

The passenger stands at Nate’s bar with the overcoat around his shoulders and his head bowed, hands on the counter. He just stands for a very long time. Pools of water gather at his feet. Nate is almost hidden in the gloom at the far end, taking peeks at the newcomer, then looking away apprehensively. He clears his throat and makes his way down to the stranger.

“Helluva night”.

Nothing.

He looks down at the stranger’s hands and they are covered in blood. Under the coat, the stranger is wearing a shiny mohair suit, the remains of a bright coloured shirt ripped to rags with a blood-blotched white undershirt beneath it.

“Would you like a drink mister?”

Long silence.

“Something to eat? I could make a sandwich”.

Silence then, “Is this your bar?”

“Yeah. I’m Nate”.

“Nate huh?”

“Yeah. Nate”.

The stranger snorts a laugh.

“Well you could say I’m fort-u-nate”.

“How’s that mister?”

“Because Nate, just a short while ago I was at the bottom of a lake. I looked up at the surface, at the raindrops falling down on me and it was so hard to breathe down there I thought it was the end. So I took a deep breath, a real deep breath and that made it better. I felt much better, so good that I thought I could sleep. Sleep right there down at the bottom of a lake. Sleep forever. Do you believe that Nate?”

“I hear some strange things mister. In this job people tell you crazy things all the time”.

“Yeah I guess so… but have any of them ever mentioned sleeping underwater? I don’t suppose they ever said that did they?”

“Um, no they haven’t mister. Listen let me get you a drink, you look like you might need one”.

The stranger looks up. It is Otis Redding.

“I’ll have a cup of coffee and a cigarette if you’ve got one Nate”.

“Sure mister, sure”.

“I shouldn’t do it really,” says Otis, his bloody hands taking the cigarette and looking at it, accepting a light from Nate’s Zippo (with a death’s head on the side) and inhaling. “Bad for the pipes. I just had a throat operation too”. Then he starts coughing and laughing. “But I guess it don’t matter any more”.

“You’re a singer mister”, said Nate as a matter of fact, pouring the coffee.

“You could say… or at least I was”.

“Soul music”.

“They called it soul music. That’s what they told me to call it. They even called me the King of Soul. Can you believe that? A dirt-po’ kid from a Georgia farm. Me. The only king I ever saw was a crab, it certainly weren’t in my mirror… They also called me Mr. Pititful after a tune I wrote”.

“Did you play shows?”

“I played everywhere Nate. I used to play the local talent contest; I won it fifteen times in a row and then they stopped me from entering; said I was spoiling it for other people. I played churches, chapels, barn dances, christenings, funerals; I used to sing in church with Little Richard when I was a kid. You ever heard of him?”

“Yeah… Little Richard”.

“Well, his daddy was a bootlegger till he got himself murdered. I don’t know whether he used to sneak a drink of his daddy’s booze or what but at the age of ten he thought he was a healer. He thought he had the gift, you know, the healing hands? Used to go around touching people… and I guess he never stopped”. Otis laughs heartily, coughs again and looks at the cigarette stub before crushing it out. “You got another one of those Nate? I’ve had a kind of a weird day”.

He takes another Lucky Strike.

“I guess I could do with him now”.

“Who?”

“Little Richard”. Otis looks at his own hands. “Healing hands Nate. Do you believe in that kind of thing?”
“In this job….”

“Yeah you said. In this job you hear a lot of crazy things”.

“You could say…”

All of a sudden there is a blinding flash, a bang and a load of laughing.

Otis: “What the hell was that?”

“Sorry mister, there’s a couple of guys from England round the back. They’ve been letting off bombs all day”.

“Why they doin’ that”

“I don’t really know; they’re British… and they’re drummers”.

“British drummers? I worked with one of those out in California when I played at Monterey. He was a crazy bastard. The Who… Keith Moon. They smashed up all their equipment. That feller Moon; he walked straight through his drum kit. Never seen anything like it. All those guys were on acid and speed… goin’ somewhere faster than everyone else”.

“Moon… yeah, that’s the guy”.

“Round there? He’s here? I should say hi”.

“I wouldn’t do that mister. One of them has got some kind of whacked out gun. It’s like gas powered or somethin’. They’ve been shooting holes in the jukebox all day”. (Camera shot of the Rock-Ola healing itself up.) “They haven’t eaten anything or gone to the men’s room in 72 hours. Just drinking and letting off bombs. I think going round there could be risky. I’d hate for anything to happen to you”.

Otis stares down at himself arms outstretched.

“I think something already did Nate”.

A stunning waitress comes from round the other side with a tray laden with empty shot glasses. She doesn’t acknowledge either of them, just puts the tray on the bar and disappears… literally. Otis shakes his head but goes along for the ride.

Otis: “You get many musicians in here?”

“That’s all I seem to get… wherever I am. Funny thing is, you can always tell they’re musicians as soon as they set foot in the door”.

“Wherever you are? How de’ ye mean Nate. Are you saying that you move from bar to bar and they follow you. Changin’ jobs, something like that?

“Kinda…”

Nate changes the subject. “Little Richard. He played over in Europe didn’t he?”

Otis: “Yeah man, everywhere, clubs, army bases all over. Germany everywhere. He used to play in Hamburger or whatever it is, in those German clubs by the docks. Used to play with the Beatles there. You like the Beatles Nate?”

“Who don’t?”

“Yeah, the Beatles. He loved them and they loved him. They loved him so much he was nearly their manager one time but he turned it down. Can you imagine that Nate, turning down a job running the Beatles?… A few weeks back after my throat operation I couldn’t sing for a while so I just lay up in my house and I was listening to their Sergeant Pepper’s album over and over again. It took them months to record; you know that? And you can hear it; all that work, days and weeks, some fantastic songs and all these little screwy noises and stuff. You heard that Nate? That’s a great record. Don’t you agree? But it makes me laugh the idea of spending months recording an album like that. I used to do my albums in three or four days; worse ways a week.

I played in Europe a while back. Just one tour, not so many dates as Little Richard has done. His real name’s Richard Penniman, Dicky Penniman. Hasn’t got the same ring to it as Little Richard… eh Nate?

Yeah, Europe was great. Back home we were still playin’ on the chitlin’ circuit, haulin; round these crummy clubs but over there we played in these swanky concert halls; the audiences were all these rich white kids and they kept telling us we were big stars. The Stax Volt Revue. Big time. Everybody was all hopped up. Sam and Dave, Booker T, Eddie Floyd, it was great.

Sam and Dave were so hot. They had been gospel singers too but boy could they dance! Dance like the devil. They figured they should have been top of the bill instead of me. So energetic, they used to just vibrate and spin round together, so excitin’. They’d steal the show if I’d of let ‘em. They sure gave me a run for my money every damned single night. We used to have the same manager. I told him I wasn’t gonna do any more dates with them because they were just too good. Funny thing is, they never liked each other. Well they did at first I guess but then as time went by they started travelling separately and would have their own separate dressing rooms and didn’t even talk to each other; they’d fight like a cat and a dog, but then later on, on stage, they’d be jumping around in matching black suits and white shirts, harmonising so good you’d have thought they were brothers.

Yeah those Europeans went nuts, Norway, Paris France, Great Britain, they treated us like royalty… like the Beatles. D’ye know John Lennon and Paul McCartney even sent their Rolls Royces out to the airport to pick us up? Then they came to see us play, all of them, and the Rolling Stones, all those guys. Even Herman and the Hermits. It was one of the greatest moments of my life”.

Otis reflects for a bit.

Nate: “Hold old are you mister?”

“Twenty six”.

“Young”.

“Too young Nate”.

Otis: “We played in front of 30,000 people in Monterey. Hippies. I was the only man there in a suit. We were all real nervous but they just kept us waiting. It was around 1am before we got on the stage and a lot of people were either asleep or so high they didn’t know if it was day or night. Anyway, when the drummer counted in Shake it was all too fast. We’d grown used to doing it faster than the record just to compete with Sam and Dave but this time it was even faster, way too fast and it was like 1-2-3-4 meet you up the other end. I had to take off at about ninety miles an hour just to keep up with the drummer. Way too fast. It was just because we were all scared, but it was OK when we all caught up with each other and then, the band started sounding great. It was like a race. They just ran at it man, pushin’, shovin’ each other on, racin’ along to the other end but staying in time as well”.

Otis does a spin, punches the air. shakin’.

“We sure woke those hippies up… You know what I said when I went off stage?”

Nate raises his head.

“I’ve got to go now but I don’t want to…’ He chews his lip; changes tack.

“You know, after that, Janis Joplin used to come to all my shows. She said she wanted to learn how to sing like me… Imagine… I got to meet Brian Jones and Jimi Hendrix there too”.

From the back bar: BANG! Ha ha ha!!

Otis turns to the sound.

“And Keith Moon… Who’d you say the other guy was, the guy with him?”

“John Bonham. He’s the drummer with Led Zeppelin. That’s his T Bucket out there in the rain”.
“Led Zepp-eling? I don’t know them Nate”.

“No. I guess not… They’ve got their own plane, a huge plane, you know, like a passenger plane, to get from show to show. It’s got beds and a bar and even a fireplace on it. Can you believe that? A fireplace on an aeroplane? With some fancy clock on it. Frrench. A gold clock”.

Otis shivers. “I don’t like flying Nate”.

“No. I guess not”.

“All the years I hauled around the US of A on a bus or in the back of some crummy car and I never so much as broke a fingernail, so then I thought we should have a plane, you know, to get us to the shows in good shape and cut down all the driving but also to show off. I was saying ‘look at me. I’m a star now and I don’t have to drive on freeways all day long. I can fly right over your heads’”.

“You ever been poor Nate? We were poor. My dad – he was a preacher – he was always ill. I had to drop out of high school, go to work so I could help support the family. I went digging wells for $1.25 an hour and then I became a hospital orderly”. He laughs. “I was sacked from that job for singing in the corridors.

“It wasn’t a shack we lived in but you know what I mean? It was hard for my mother. I had to drive a band around to shows and recording studios and such like and that was when I got my chance. I was hanging around at Stax in Memphis and I kept jumping up and saying, ‘I sure would like to cut a track’ and after a while - I guess I got on their nerves so much they let me have a go. I recorded a song I’d written called These Arms Of Mine and then Stax pretty much signed me up straight away. I must have recorded fifty songs with them and I must have played a thousand shows down south and up and down the east and west coasts. But it was all small stuff and I was going nowhere Nate.

“D’ye know how I got my break? My big break? I went over to Great Britain and played on a TV show there called Ready Steady Go. The English just loved that music; me and that music, and it all kind of took off after that. I read in the British newspaper that they reckoned it was the best show they ever did… better than the Beatles even. Hey! What about that?” Ain’t that strange? I have to go three thousand miles across the other side of the world just so as I can get a halfway decent gig back in my own country. Crazy isn’t it? I make it big in Europe and all of a sudden Americans start calling me a star. A few weeks before that I had been a chauffeur in LA trying to make ends meet and now I’ve got a chauffeur of my own”.

Otis looks searchingly around the darkened bar, his brow knotted in concentration and maybe a hint of fear like he’s forgotten something.

He bounces back: “Now I’ve got horses, land, a farm with horses on it”, he chugged on. “Me a southern black kid breeding horses, playin’ cowboys. If my daddy could have seen that…”

He pauses, looks down and says to himself. “Who’s gonna look out for the horses now?”

Then: “You believe in luck… good fortune? Fortune telling Nate?”

“No one can look into the future mister”.

“You don’t believe that we can look into the future? D’ye think we could maybe go into the future? In a time machine… or visit the past?

“Impossible”.

“Why do you say impossible?”

“Because someone would have done it. They’d have come back… from the future… lots of people would have come back”.

“Maybe somebody already has and we just don’t know it. Maybe we can’t see ‘em. Maybe there’s only one time machine in the year 2525”.

“Yeah, but what about in the year 2535; if there’s one in 2525 there’s bound to be a hundred of ‘em in 2535”.

“You talk weird Nate”.

Nate: “What did you see in your future?”

“I was gonna build a new barn, have another kid – I’ve got four so far but I need another - and then try and get a number one record for myself. I had a few hits a while back like when I sung Tramp with Carla Thomas but I’d love to get a number one of just me… well me and the band; something to tell my mother. I wrote a song called Respect, which Aretha Franklin had a number one with in the summer. But I ain’t had one myself yet and I’m determined to. But there’s this other song waitin’. Only wrote it a few days ago. And everyone thinks it’s going to be a big hit. S’what they keep tellin’ me. Sittin’ on the Dock of the Bay. It’s all an open E. I wrote it on a houseboat down in Sausalito. Steve Cropper, you know him? He wrote Knock on Wood and the Midnight Hour? Everyone used to think he was black. Steve taught me some chords - it’s all an open E and I wrote the tune one night on one of his guitars, a few chords. When we did it in the studio, I hadn’t written the words or a proper tune for the end so I just started whistling something and they left it on the tape. Just whistlin’. It sounds OK, a good song. I think it might have made it”.

“It did. It made it”.

“It did? Great”.

Nate: “The boys in Vietnam used to call it the ’Homesick song”.

“Is that right? They get to hear my song in Vietnam?”
“Yes they will”.

“You got a spare room here Nate? Could I check in for a while?”

“You don’t want to stay here mister”.

“I don’t?”

Again the magic waitress glimmers in to view from round the corner. She has just cleared another tray of shot glasses from the drummers’ table and is straightening her brassiere. She dumps the tray on the bar. Mysteriously the previous tray has vanished. Otis watches and smiles.

“You sure I don’t”

“What’s the band called?”

“The Bar Kays. Bar Kays? I think they’re all dead now. The Bar Kays. Ye know, Soul Finger? We were a multi-cultural band. Us, Booker T and the MGs. Black and white. All these race riots goin’ on. We even had a white manager. We used to get into a lot of trouble. Making us sleep in separate rooms in motels and all that. They didn’t do that to us in Europe. They treated us with respect. Yes sir, no problem sir; French people - white people; white people carrying my bags, unpacking my suits. They treat us blacks differently over there. You’d even see rich black people in Paris”.

The door swings open and Otis turns to look. A huge dark dog trots into the bar, its nails clipping on the bar floor. It puts its broad front feet up on the bar standing taller than Otis and raises its head to Nate like an acknowledgement, then drops down and clips off down the room into the darkness. A moment later, four men walk in, wearing matching beige suits and black silk shirts with the collars outside their double-breasted jackets. They are smiling and chatting; they nod at Nate and one of them says “C’mon Otis” and they head off after the dog. It’s the Bar Kays.

Otis muses: “Well, I didn’t get time to be a big star but then I didn’t get time to flop, to be a failure, to get disappointed and all messed up… and I didn’t get time to grow ugly so I guess that’s OK”.
“What are your plans mister?”

“I’m gonna spend my time singing until I’m as good as Sam Cooke”.

“He’s probably spending his time trying to be as good as you are mister”.

“Thanks for the cigarettes and coffee Nate”.

He starts to walk down the bar after the others.

Nate: “Hey mister”.

Otis turns.

“My wife used to say that Try a Little Tenderness made her want to cry but then she’d end up dancing”.

“That’s good enough for me Nate”. Otis follows the band out whistling the end section of Dock of the Bay.

Nate watches him go and mutters, “I’ll look after your horses Otis”.

The cop says:

Dock of the Bay was cut on December 7, 1967. Three days later, Otis ended a concert in Madison, Wisconsin and boarded a brand new twin engine Beechcraft to fly to Cleveland.

The plane took off in heavy fog, and four miles out dropped like a rock into Lake Monona. It sank within seconds, and Otis Redding was killed, along with four members of his band, the Bar-Kays.

One of them had missed the plane and the fifth member, the trumpeter, escaped the wreckage and swum to shore, the only survivor. At Otis’s funeral, 4500 people filled the Macon City Auditorium. Joe Tex, Joe Simon, Johnny Taylor, Don Covay, Percy Sledge, Solomon Burke and Sam Moore of Sam and Dave were the pallbearers. He was buried on the ranch he loved so well in Round Oak, thirty miles out of town.

British music magazine, Melody Maker had voted him Top Male Vocalist Of The Year in 1967, an honour that they had given to Elvis Presley in the previous eight years. It looked like 1968 was going to be his year. He would never find out.

Although Aretha Franklin’s version of his song Respect became a number one while he was still alive, he would never know that it would become her trademark record, earn two Grammy awards and would become a landmark song for the feminist movement, or that it would be placed at number five in the Rolling Stone’s list of the 500 Greatest songs of all time.

He would never know that Dock Of The Bay, released in January 1968, would reach number one. It went on to sell more than four million copies and earn two Grammy Awards for Best R&B Song and Best Male R&B vocal performance.

His wife Zelma continues to live at the 300 acre Big ‘O’ ranch outside Macon Georgia

In 2002 a seven foot bronze statue of Otis was erected in the Gateway Park in Macon Georgia.