Chapter 4 -Heart Mortally Wounded By Six Strings-

HEART MORTALLY WOUNDED BY SIX STRINGS

Leonard Cohen was one of Sandy’s favourite singers. I was intrigued the first time I watched him place the vinyl of ‘Songs from a Room’ on his seventies turntable. It was not the kind of music I had expected to come out of the enormous vintage wooden cased speakers. Cohen did not fit Sandy’s profile. I would have expected ACDC, El Camaron or even Jimi Hendrix but Cohen? As the needle descended and the gravelly voice of the Canadian prince spurted out, I thought my father had made a mistake.

‘What’s this?’

‘You don’t know el hebreo poeta, hombre?’ 

‘No. Is he English?’

‘Que va. Un guiri would not sing like that. El tipo learned guitar de un gitano.’

It was the first time I visited Sandy’s flat after our meeting at Penelopes. I walked up the dark flight of stairs of the cement block of the upper Gibraltar neighbourhood, El Castillo, in expectation. I was excited to discover the location where my absent father had spent his time away. I had imagined and reimagined the space thousands of times but it was nothing like the flat I had envisaged. The one in my mind was a New York style penthouse but Sandy's place was actually small, very small and quite messy.. Piles of cigarette cartons and empty bottles cramped the living room and the dark narrow corridors. The bathroom was dark and the light blue paint was coming off the walls. The kitchen was not much better: dishes everywhere and open cans of tuna and old soup crowding the kitchen top and shelves. I remember the smell of old frying oil mixed with ashtrays and mould. Fortunately, in less than half an hour, Sandy lit enough joints to transform the odour of the place and convert the tiny working-class flat and, possibly the entire Gibraltarian Housing Estate, into a Chefchaouen coffee house. I remember thinking both rich and poor smell the same after lighting up a joint. Marijuana is egalitarian. It gets us all stoned and sometimes the not so wealthy have the best of it. 

‘Strongest hashish in the world,’ claimed Sandy. ‘Straight out of the fields of Morocco.’ 

My father had not said much since I walked in. He was getting used to my presence in his world. He passed me a bottle of Heineken from the kitchen and then shooed me to the living room where he sat on a beige plastic armchair and looked to the floor. Then Sandy started rolling one of the biggest reefers I had ever seen in my life. He lit the spliff and puffed several times before passing it on. I received the joint confidently and placed it between my lips. The joint was massive and I was shit-scared but I inhaled strongly, opening my chest as much as I could and sucking air from the roach various times, as if I was sucking from the straw of a Suntop in the heat of the African summer. Sandy was observing my every motion. I tried to act cool and composed but I was messing the whole affair up. My lips let out too much saliva which caused the cigarette paper to get soaked. It made the joint unshareable. I also managed to over-inhale and triggered a coughing fit. The coughing fired my consciousness into a cerebral limbo. 

‘Calma pisha,’ indicated Sandy as he took the joint back, placed it on the ashtray to dry and moved towards the player to turn over the Cohen record.  

‘Que va, I’m fine,’ I lied.

‘You don’t rush these things.’ 

‘I’m fine,’ I repeated, ‘I’m fine.’

I was not fine. I was embarrassed and my knees were wobbly. My thoughts were jumping all over the place. My mind leapt across the walls, over the black sofa and through the windows. I was firing thoughts in random directions. It was as if I was entering a land of poisonous spiders without a compass or a shield. How could a single canuto be so strong? I had smoked hashish before with los colegas outside the Bayside School gates but had never felt so stoned. My body and my sense of self were being pulled apart in different directions. It was embarrassing. This was not who I wanted my father to see. I knew he would  not be impressed. The halogen lights in the room became brighter. The smell of the hash became more intense. The resolution of the whole evening had been heightened in my mind. As if I my senses were suffering an overdose of reality. I felt nauseous and bewildered. I took a deep breath and tried to concentrate on the music: it was the only external stimulus I could tolerate. I closed my eyes and focused on the sounds of the voice. The baritone of Leonard Cohen was clear and strong. I tried to stay focused on the words. They made no sense at first but I was sure there was an important meaning beneath the singing, I figured I was just too stoned to understand it. I continued focusing the voice. It was so complete. So real. So unlike all the other voices I had heard before. Cohen’s timbre brokethrough the mental fog and offered me a point of reference. It was like a lighthouse in a storm of fast thoughts and dizziness. I breathed hesitantly and paid more attention to the thick and valve-engined vocal chords. I was slowly managing to gain composure and control over my senses. At least, I avoided running into the bathroom to throw up. 

‘El cantante, dad,’ I murmured. ‘What’s his name again?’

‘Cohen, niño, Cohen. Only a man with cojones can sing like that.’  

‘Why do you like him that much?’ I asked. 

‘Only an idiota wouldn’t,’ replied Sandy, emphasising the word idiota and moving his neck from side to side.

We listened to three or four of Cohen’s records. I had the sensation of meeting both my biological father and my musical guru during the same high. Sandy was silent. It was probably the only time I remember him concentrating on anything other than himself. I remember the precision and diligence with which he turned the records over as he put the vinyls back in the sleeves. That night, he could have been a surgeon or a nuclear scientist.

‘Is he known?’

‘Quien?’

‘Cohen,’ I insisted. ‘Does he come out on MTV?’

Sandy looked at me and scoffed.

‘Smoke good hash boy. Singers like Hashish are always best when they are fresh and unrefined. 

‘What do the songs mean?’

‘Who cares. It is real and the hash is the best you will know.’ 

Sandy was right. It was the best stuff I would ever have. It was so good. Probably too good for a sixteen year old. The nerves and Leonard Cohen plus the high quality gear brought on the first ‘whitey’ of my life. I actually didn’t know what a ‘Whitey’ was before that night but I would learn quickly and traumatically. Do you know what it is? A ‘whitey’ is exactly what it sounds like: an invasion of whiteness, a surge of paleness which turns you into a ghost: your skin turns the colour of cow milk  because the blood stops flowing through your veins. It's the closest you will ever feel to a zombie. Even expert Moroccan smokers, with their golden desert skin, encounter it regularly. They call it the tiny death, a taster of the final curtain, a way to acquaint yourself with the end of your life.  

‘I can’t breathe,’ I muttered. 

Sandy laughed. He had witnessed this kind of reaction to good shit before. 

‘Papón,’ he mocked with his gravelly voice. ‘A Durante with a whitey, what’s next? Just have some whiskey and relax. Can you feel your tongue?’  

I could not feel my tongue. I wanted to say that there was a white wall in front of me and I could not see my consciousness beyond it. I wanted to say I was terrified of not being able to return to my pre-whitey self. I wanted to say that the vertigo was making me twist and turn like a spinning top inside an epic hurricane. I wanted to say that I could not move a finger. Not even to puke. I wanted to say I wanted him to save me, to give me an antidote to the nausea and the pain. I said nothing. Whiteness was all I could see and taste. I could not speak. 

‘Whiteys and Durantes don’t go,’ repeated Sandy. 

Sandy left the living room scoffing, while I moved my limbs to the black leather sofa he had stolen from the Gibraltar docks and lay there wishing some form of normality would return. I was so stoned that I could not get up to flip the vinyl. Consequently,  Leonard Cohen did not accompany me across the dark forest of my first sleepless night. It was my first experience with the caverns of my mind. 

   ***

‘Jez please, not now,’ I pleaded from the bunker of the stained winter duvet. 

It was too hot to sleep under a five inch duvet but I was too tired to remove it. I camped inside the heavy linen wondering why it is usually impossible to sleep past 8am on a bloody couch. I felt like a packet of soggy crisps. I had pinches on my back muscles and the core of my spine ached as if it had been stretched with pliers overnight. The foul piece of furniture was to blame. Jez’s couch was made of upholstered foam. It was an incredibly thin couch: like all the sleep-murdering couches you find in student houses and dodgy student accommodation. No one pays much attention to students' couches in the U.K. Not even students, yet on average there are more people sleeping on nasty student couches than on any other type of couch in the bloody country. It is a shambles. Jez was not a student but, by his lifestyle, no one would have guessed he had ever quit university. He rarely shaved, wore torn jeans and old trainers, and fed himself from tins and jars. That morning the longhaired white Beat generation impersonator barged into the minute, style-less living room waving his hairy arms in the air and screaming that he had looked it up on Google and according to the Fideirikio Garsia Lorca 1933 lecture in Buenos Aires, dueindei, was a dark gnome, in love with death, and completely at odds with fatherhood and families. 

‘You see,’ he proceeded ignoring my complaints . ‘Lorca was the real thing. Not Cohen. And he for sure wanted to be gay. The Spanish prince knew that true art would not come from being a conventional prick. One cannot be a poetical genius and be straight, right?’

‘Quit talking shit and make some coffee, will you?’ I managed to murmur among coughs and sighs. I was sick of Jez’s sudden interest in poetry. I had failed to convince him to read a book for years and suddenly, following his encounter with Tara, he was ready to take on Dante’s Paradiso all by himself. 

‘I read all about it mate. I spent the whole morning surfing the net,’ he continued. 

I rolled over and covered my head with the coffee-stained anorexic pillow. Jez’s bum landed right beside my ear. It was too early and a football team of overweight kangaroos were bouncing inside my cranium. My stomach felt like a boat in a tropical storm. The last thing I needed was a lecture on the fatality of my artistic life since inseminating the cosmos with a new strand of DNA. To be fair to Jez, I had always gone on about duende and its superiority over the muse, but I never thought he was listening. How was I to know he actually gave a rat's ass about Lorca?  

‘I am only saying this for your sake.’ 

Jez was an expert at triggering my fears. He often assured me it was a benevolent method to keep friends on their toes but I suspected he wanted to feel on top. Or, perhaps there was a bit of both in his actions. Rivalry and devotion had always been part of my relationships in the London singer-songwriter scene and I had learnt that it was practically impossible to separate them. I was full of envy and love myself so how could I blame him? And yet it was clear that he had made it his mission to shit on my happiness for the past couple of years. The more I seemed to enjoy my life, especially the musical side of it, the more he would pour poison on my open wounds. 

‘Don’t get me wrong,’ he said as he lifted his bottom from the mattress and moved towards the stove. ‘Dante is ok, but it’s not like you are going to write ‘Like A Rolling Stone’ now right?’ Not like this.

 ‘Like what?’

‘Like talking about nappies and baby wipes.’ 

I wanted to strangle Jez but my head hurt too much. I could hardly twist my neck to face him. I remembered the bottle of whiskey we had purchased from the twenty-four hour off-licence on Commercial Road moments before engaging in an all-night discussion about the literary qualities of Leonard Cohen’s work. The more we drank, the more he pressed me with his half-brained arguments. He ended up saying the lyrics of Cohen and Kayne West were basically the same thing and that the Canadian general would have made for a better pop star than a poet. 

‘Fuck off Jez,’ I said when I remembered the previous night’s conversation. ‘How dare you question the General?’. 

‘Bloody get the mojo on!’ insisted Jez. 

‘Two sugars,’ I bemoaned from beneath the sheets.

‘I tell you mate! You are not twenty any more,’ claimed Jez as he stared into my misty sleep-covered eyes. He was trying to suss out my reactions to his attacks but I was too hungover to care. All I wanted was for him and my headache to disappear. Eventually Jez got off the bed and walked into the kitchen. 

‘What the hell do you know about songwriting?’ I asked scornfully. 

‘More than you’d think. Where’s the boy today?’ mocked Jez before he tried to fill the basin of the mouldy Italian coffee-pot.

‘He’s with Natalie.’

‘Doesn’t she work at all?’

‘She has Thursdays off, why?’

‘Good. Good. Now you can write.’ 

I wanted to jabber about Dante’s eyes, his hair, the way he had tipped the Moses basket all by himself. How he could lie on his back for hours without a care in the world. But listening to myself expand on these matters made me feel ridiculous. I remembered how insane and pathetic first-time parents had seemed before Dante was born. How uninteresting and common they appeared when they expanded endlessly about the features and behavioural changes of their newborns. I resorted to keeping baby talk to exchanges with proud mothers in toddler groups. However, when I got carried away and started speaking about writing  poems and the underground songwriting scene,  the yuppie mummies would look at me with a mixture of annoyance and dismay before scattering off to breast-feed their little weeping monsters. I resented those milk-filled mothers. Dante would look lewdly at their inflated breasts and I had nothing to offer him but a plastic cylinder and a rubber nozzle. Watching them breast-feed was both an insult to my insufficient biological functions and a threat to my manliness. I connected with them superficially. 

‘Well, the thing is, I have not had much time at all because…’

‘Are you thinking about him again?’ complained Jez. ‘We are not going to land a Grammy like this, mate.’

‘The concept of duende was invented by Lorca to validate and intellectualise his Deep Song music contest in Granada, which was planned to promote Gypsy music as the national sound of Spain.’ 

‘It worked, didn’t it?’ 

‘Yes it did but I am not sure how it relates to us now.’

‘What the hell!’ exclaimed Jez. ‘You were the one who kept selling dueindei as the hottest thing in England. You said that in our fucking savage capitalist society dueindei was the only means of resistance because it could not be sold or some shit like that. Where is all that bollocks now?!’ 

‘It’s duende Jez joder, not dueindei! Lorca would spit at you from the grave!’

‘So how the hell are you going to get dueindei now?’ 

‘And you? How are you planning on finding it?’ 

‘Breaking your balls until you find the drunken dwarf.’ 

‘You know what they call people in Spain who are inspired? They say these people have angel. I was going to call him Angelo but his mother went for Dante. She is a fan of The Divine Comedy.’ 

‘The divine what?’

‘Exactly.’

Jez had managed to burn the coffee as he got carried away with his attacks on my current lifestyle. I could not stand him that morning. It wasn’t even funny. I had only indulged in the conversation for the promise of the dark and foamy substance which, together with two Ibuprofen pills, could deliver me back to humanity. 

‘I will find my heightened awareness of death when you kick the fucking calendar,’ I concluded. ‘You bastard. Make me a coffee and shut up!’

‘Tesco coffee sucks tits.’

I missed Dante deeply. When I spent more than a day with him, changing nappies and preparing pot meals, I wanted to escape. I wanted to drink myself to oblivion in a seedy bar in Clapham Common. But more than 24 hours away and I pined madly for his face and his tiny hands. Being around Jez reminded me how fate had blessed me with Dante  but I also had to admit that I needed his annoying poking finger to return joyfully to my family plot. 

‘Duende is love,’ I concluded. ‘The longing for the impossible which reminds us of our mortality.’ 

‘Yes, whatever! What’re you gonna do now?’

‘I am going to write about the love of things that cannot yet love you back. I am going to write about Dante.’

‘Good luck with that. Who with half a brain wants to read about babies?’ 

Jez took the burnt coffee and poured it outside the window that looked upon the patio. I got up and left his unit muttering beneath my voice and sulking and sighing. My head hurt and I looked like shit but I was determined to write.