Fragment 14: The Life & Times of a Social Experiment

Growing up. Well, sort of.

Image: Shutterstock

Now, where were we? Oh yes, me at around 16, 17 years old.

From age 15 to 25 is a key decade in any life - the all-important hinge from childhood to adulthood. Will it be a time of wonderful new experiences and happiness? Or embarrassing foul-ups and misery? Almost certainly both!

So I thought, perhaps, at this point, it would be timely to review some growing-up elements of my life. Here’s my checklist:

• Tobacco

• Alcohol

• Jazz

• Sex

Hmm, that’s an extremely limited list, you might say. Fair point. But I hope what I have to report on each of these will give some insight into the sometimes tragic outcomes of an aspirant adult human.

Tobacco

My induction to the nicotine addicts’ club was mentioned in an earlier post. The basic training involved a three-step process: Inhale, Vomit, Repeat. In time, this spontaneously reduced to the more-manageable two-step smoker’s process: Inhale, Repeat. I then inhaled and repeated for the next forty or so years. Indoors and out. In fair weather and foul. Throughout all the waking hours.

It’s hard to imagine now but, for at least the first twenty of those forty years, one could smoke pretty much anywhere. At home. In pubs and restaurants. In public transport (although there were non-smoking areas) including in aircraft (although, irritatingly, one was supposed to stub out one’s gasper for the final approach and landing). And, of course, at work.

I recall an occasion in the 1970s when I was sales promotion manager for a large hotel company. The sales director and I sat down in his office to do some budgeting. Back then, it was all done with sheets of paper and pencils. Or perhaps more precisely sheets of paper, pencils and cigarettes. The budgeting task was an all-day effort - just the two of us. We were fortunate: being a hotel company our employer provided branded ashtrays that were each the size of a small dustbin lid. At the end of our session, perhaps because we were in analytical, measuring mode, we decided to count the number of cigarette butts in the ashtray. The total was 63.

Alcohol

Alongside the nicotine came alcohol. Alcohol, really? Yes, despite - or, more likely, because of - George and Nellie’s abhorrence of alcohol, lifelong membership of a leading temperance organization, and earnest insistence that I should at all costs avoid the stuff, I gave it a try. Of course I did. At the first opportunity I could. And I liked it. A lot. Too much. Because it changed the world.

It evaporated the diffidence, insecurity, uncertainty that I felt bothered and limited me a great deal of the time. Although then as now it was illegal in the UK to buy alcohol under the age of 18, it was fairly easy to acquire the stuff when 16 or 17. It was (and is) even legal to drink alcohol from the age of 16 if the booze is bought by someone aged 18 or more.

Alcohol was a revelation: it opened up the world even if, sometimes, it then closed it back down again with a vengeance the following morning. And nicotine and alcohol seemed a beautiful combo. Sitting in a hostelry with a pint and a cigarette, shrouded within the fug from all of the cigarettes in all of that little world, became one of life’s great joys. Inhibitions evaporated. Conversation flowed. Time disappeared. For however long it lasted, it was a safe, self-contained, microcosmic world. I know, I know, this is what’s called euphoric recall and it wasn’t like this on all occasions. However, when it was, it was wonderful.

Alcohol, as you may gather, played a huge part in my life. As for so many, it helped me enormously, and it harmed me.

Jazz

Then there was Jazz. For me, this started one afternoon at school. A friend asked me, “Have you heard what’s going on in in the hall?” I hadn’t, so went to investigate. A record was playing unfamiliar sounds. Turned out I was listening to the jazz pianist Thelonious Monk (1917-1982) playing a track called  Locomotive¹. It was not like any piano playing I’d heard before. I loved it.

Listen to Monk with your eyes closed and you can almost see his fingers hovering over the piano keys, deciding where next to go, which unlikely but always perfect notes to select. I think it was Whitney Balliett (1926-2007), jazz critic and book reviewer for The New Yorker, who described Monk’s ability to ‘find the gaps between the notes’. Locomotive isn’t Monk’s finest number: Blue Monk, Just A Gigolo, Epistrophy and other titles are superior, but Locomotive has a special place for me because it straight away transports me back to that time and place.

My new-found fascination with Monk’s music led me, in short order, to other jazz performers - most notably John Coltrane (1926-67). Particularly, at that time, John Coltrane with the Red Garland Trio. Coltrane played tenor saxophone with an intensity and attack that made him a leader of the hard bop movement but, as when he played a Monk composition, Ruby My Dear, alongside Monk, he could deliver liquid lyrical loveliness.

I’m referring here to 1960 or ‘61, so, rather than following the progress of what was also an exciting developmental phase of pop music, I tuned in to modern jazz and the works of the Beat Generation poets and authors that seemed to form a natural accompaniment to it all. The works of William Burroughs, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Allen Ginsberg and, of course, Jack Kerouac, fascinated me. Here’s Kerouac’s potted history of jazz from On The Road:

Once there was Louis Armstrong blowing his beautiful top in the muds of New Orleans; before him the mad musicians who had paraded on official days and broke up their Sousa marches into ragtime. Then there was swing, and Roy Eldridge, vigorous and virile, blasting the horn for everything it had in waves of power and logic and subtlety - leaning to it with glittering eyes and a lovely smile and sending it out broadcast to rock the jazz world. Then had come Charlie Parker, a kid in his mother’s woodshed in Kansas City, blowing his taped-up alto among the logs, practicing on rainy days, coming out to watch the old swinging Basie and Benny Moten band that had Hot Lips Page and the rest - Charlie Parker leaving home and coming to Harlem, and meeting mad Thelonious Monk and madder Gillespie - Charlie Parker in his early days when he was flipped and walked around in a circle while playing. Somewhat younger than Lester Young, also from KC, that gloomy, saintly goof in whom the history of jazz was wrapped; for when he held his horn high and horizontal from his mouth he blew the greatest; and his hair grew longer and he got lazy and stretched-out, his horn came down halfway; till it finally fell all the way and today as he wears his thick-soled shoes so that he can’t feel the sidewalks of life his horn is held weakly against his chest, and he blows cool and easy getout phrases. Here were the children of the American bop night.²

Sex

And last, but far from least, sex. I honestly cannot recall my first coupling. I know, I know, it’s one of the things that supposedly sears itself into our memories, but I really do not remember the occasion. I recall instances of petting but not ‘the first real thing’. Maybe the petting became so heavy that it merged into full-on sexual activity? Maybe it was combined with alcohol use to the extent that things were kinda hazy afterwards. Whatever, I do know that around the age of 16 I lost my virginity.

And I do remember J. A year or so younger than me, she was pretty, bubbly and - how shall we say? - an enthusiast!

As it happens, I was very fond, too, of her Mum and Dad. The thing was, J’s parents went out for dinner on Saturday evenings, usually to a hotel in the centre of Market Harborough or to a village pub a few minutes’ drive out of town.

One cold autumn Saturday evening at J’s house, with a fire burning in the lounge fireplace, she and I waited for her parents to set off as usual. When we heard the car heading away from the house, there was an enthusiastic shedding of clothes. Kit all over the place, and within a couple of minutes we were happily stark naked on the carpet in front of the fire.

You can probably guess the next bit. We were so wrapped up in one another (literally) that we didn’t hear the car. Something had caused the parents to return. I have no recollection of what the issue was but the outcome was clear to see. When the realization dawned upon us, J’s father and mother were already standing in the lounge doorway. Dad was tall and powerfully-built. Mum was petite. He was behind her but his height meant that they both had a fine front-row stalls view of the two of us.

To say that there was embarrassed scrabbling would be an understatement. And J’s Mum seemed particularly shocked and upset. But her ire was directed exclusively at her daughter – I recall the word ‘whore’ being thrown in to the onslaught. And ‘disgusting’. And ‘tart’. That sort of thing. J was led from the room.

So I was left with her Dad. Yikes! “You’d better come with me,” he said and strode off in the direction of the kitchen. I completed getting dressed and followed him, wondering what I was in for.

In the kitchen he signalled me to sit down, then reached into a cupboard. I was scared … then amazed because from the cupboard he produced a bottle of fine whisky: “You probably need a drop of this.”

And that was that.

I don’t actually remember but I like to think I lit a post-coitus-interruptus cigarette to accompany the whisky, and maybe even imagined myself to be a cool child of the American bop night.

Thanks for reading.

1. Thelonious Monk, Blue Monk, Volume 2 (recorded 1954)

2. Kerouac, Jack. On The Road (1957)