Clothes, Clothes, Clothes. Music, Music, Music. Boys, Boys, Boys. (14 page)

Tits T-shirt from Sex; studded belt, The London Leatherman; white PVC skirt, homemade; white ballet tights, Freed of London; white patent calf-length boots (unseen), made to order at a shoemaker’s in Camden Town; spotty hair ribbon, Berwick Street Market. All the different places you had to go to put a look together

32 BLOW JOB

1976

I’ve only ever been in love with a beer bottle and a mirror.

Sid Vicious

I’ve moved out of Davis Road into a huge artist’s studio in Fulham. I have the downstairs studio and Jane Ashley has the upstairs one. It’s only £10 a week rent because it’s subsidised for artists. It’s as big as a bus garage with a double-height ceiling, huge doors onto a courtyard and no windows or furniture, except my mattress – which I found in a skip – up on the little mezzanine.

I’m lying on the mattress now, with Johnny Rotten. We’ve ended up in bed together a couple of times, but usually we’re with loads of other people because we’ve all missed the last tube home and there are no night buses to the other side of town. It’s not very private up here; John Grey, Rotten’s mate from Finsbury Park (Johnny never goes anywhere without a mate) is downstairs. Iggy Pop’s
The Idiot
is playing on the record player.

I’ve always found Rotten attractive, I like his paleness and androgyny and we get along well, but there’s never been any hint of us getting together. I’m with Mick anyway, or should be. Am I with Mick now? I can’t remember, we split up and get together again so often, I lose track. Hopefully we’re on a break. Anyway here I am, and here John is, on my mattress with all our clothes on. We gossip about Sid for a bit and when we run out of conversation, John asks me to go down on him.

I’ve never given anyone a blow job before – really, I haven’t. I suppose I should’ve done by now; I’m twenty-two. I’ve snuffled around down there enough times, but I haven’t actually tried to make a guy come by sucking him off. I think the main reason I haven’t given anyone a blow job is that I’ve never seen porn. Nor have my girlfriends. We reckon it degrades and objectifies women. Where’s the turn-on in that? Anyway, I’ve never looked at my own vagina and I’m not interested in looking at anyone else’s.

You can only get to see porn films at special cinemas in Soho, and I wouldn’t waste the money just to have a laugh, I’d rather go round someone’s flat and play records. I’ve learnt a bit about sex from watching films like
Last Tango in Paris
, Andy Warhol’s
Trash
and
Heat,
and a Dennis Potter series on TV (I didn’t bother with
Deep Throat
or
Emmanuelle
, they sounded dull), but I know these aren’t average people in everyday situations, so I just watch them like I’m watching a nature programme, not sure what’s acceptable or not. (Butter up the arse?) When I was at school, a boy would sometimes bring in a magazine he’d found under his dad’s bed and flash pictures at the girls – I acted all snooty, like I didn’t have those bits on my body. It was the only way I could deal with the embarrassment. Things have changed over the last six months: all of a sudden, every guy you know is trying to get you to go down on him, in the toilets of a club, in an alleyway, in the bathroom of a squat. It’s not exactly presented in an appealing way, to make you want to do it, more like something to get
out
of doing. Blow jobs and hand jobs are considered acceptable because no emotional involvement or eye contact is needed. Full-on sex isn’t so popular, anti-emotion is the prevailing doctrine.

John has no idea how inexperienced I am, or that it’s my first time giving a blow job. From the outside I look very confident and sexually experienced. I think to myself,
I’ll give it a go. I’ve just got to lick it and suck it. How difficult can it be?

I slide down to his crotch. He gets his willy out. He smells of stale piss. So do I. We all do. I like it – it’s familiar. That smell is nice and cosy to me. None of us wash before or after sex. It doesn’t occur to us. It’s not very spontaneous to hustle off to the bathroom and then present yourself smelling of Wright’s Coal Tar soap (Cussons Imperial Leather if you really want to impress). I’m not squeamish about bodily smells, I’ve grown up with them. I expect it to smell different down there and to be dark and hairy. Maybe even a bit crispy if you haven’t been home for a few days. That’s the whole point: it’s mixed up with, and close to, all your most basic functions. I may not have given a blow job before, but I know what smegma is. I’ve known that word since I was thirteen. I’ve seen it on almost every knob I’ve ever encountered.

I tentatively start sucking.

After a little while of licking away, I hear an imperious voice from on high, like Quentin Crisp and Kenneth Williams mixed with the Artful Dodger – you know, that nasal North London whine – ‘Stop it, Viv.’ I look up.
What’s he want? I’m busy down here
. ‘Stop it, Viv,’ he says. ‘You’re trying too hard.’

I laugh, but I’m mortified. I wipe my mouth on the back of my hand and sit up. John zips it away and we go downstairs to join John Grey – did he hear everything? It could have been worse I suppose, he could have said, ‘Stop it, Viv, you’re useless.’

I make us all a cup of tea; John and John drink it and leave. I cringe inside, imagining them laughing at me as they walk to the tube station.

I’m still cringing now.

Making tea at my Fulham studio. Rubber stockings and pink patent boots from Sex, Sid’s leather jacket, rest from jumble sales. 1976

33 CHAINED

1976

At our first band meeting, Sid told me that his name is John Beverley but everyone calls him Sid Vicious because he’s got into a few fights. He tried spelling his name with a y (copying Syd Barrett) for a bit, but nobody took any notice and now he just writes it as ‘Sid’.

Sid’s demeanour is sheepish and bashful; he stands with his shoulders hunched – like people who are embarrassed about their height, as if he wants to minimise his presence in a room. He talks like that too – although he has a deep masculine voice, he mumbles shyly, he’s almost coquettish. He acts the clown, the village idiot, like Ollie in Laurel and Hardy: he’s no fool so he must want people to underestimate him. Maybe he thinks it gives him an advantage. Sid’s whole persona is a mask, which is weird because he despises fakery and bullshit. He makes me think of that Jamaican expression, ‘Play fool, get wise.’ He’s watching everything and listening to everyone, but tries not to let on how clever he is.

Sid swears a lot and spits all the time. Once when we were waiting for the night bus in Trafalgar Square we were bored so he tried to teach me how to spit. Not propelling the spit through the gap in your front teeth like skinheads spit, but coughing it up from the back of your throat, curling your tongue into a channel and blowing. It only looks good if you get a nice clean ball of spit and project it a long way. If any of it dribbles down your chin you’ve failed of course. I think it’s called flobbing. I was useless. Couldn’t do it. It made Sid smile to see me try. He never laughs out loud, just smiles or smirks. He doesn’t give away much about himself and he’s never completely relaxed; consequently I don’t feel relaxed when I’m with him, even though he’s always very polite to me. We go everywhere together but it’s a bit strained between us, overly respectful, and I always have a little knot of tension and anxiety in my chest. The conversation between us doesn’t flow, he isn’t a flowy sort of guy, he’s stilted and monosyllabic and seems to relish the awkward atmosphere. There’s a physical attraction between us but we never talk about it or act on it.

With Sid in a pub

One day we’re bored and Sid has the idea that we should handcuff ourselves together. ‘For a laugh,’ he says. Everything is ‘for a laugh’. It’s the only reasonable justification for doing anything. Any other reason is pretentious. It’s a good idea but I feel sick at the thought of it. I can’t be seen to be scared of anything, or worse still, embarrassed, so I agree. Now we have a mission, something to occupy us for the day. We travel to the depths of South London, to Queenstown Road, where there’s a hardcore gay sex shop called the London Leatherman. (There are rumours that this is where the Cambridge rapist bought his leather face mask.) We stand outside on the busy main road, lorries thundering past, honking their horns at us because we’re dressed in black leather with studs with spiky hair. Sid raps on the heavy wooden door. It looks like the door to a castle or a dungeon. It’s a door to keep people out. A little hatch slides open and a guy looks at us. He flicks his eyes up and down, giving us the once-over, then slides the hatch shut and unbolts the door. The guys in the shop look puzzled. They’re not very friendly but they tolerate us because we’re obviously outsiders too.

We buy a set of handcuffs. Sid can’t wait to get outside so we can chain ourselves together. There’s a bit of a tussle between us on the pavement about who gets to hold the key. I insist it’s me but as he’s stronger, he wins the fight; he’s very smug about that. Once we’re chained together, we realise we haven’t got anything to do, nowhere to go, so we just get on and off buses, pulling each other up and down the stairs to the top deck, ignoring people who stare at us. We decide to go round Barry’s house (Barry Black, big record collector and runs the Roxy club) and sit there for a while listening to records. Sid drinks tea. I refuse the tea, I haven’t eaten or drunk anything all day because I’m very shy about bodily functions and would rather die than go to the bathroom in front of Sid, which is of course what he’s hoping for and smirking about. He loves to make people feel uncomfortable. He yanks me off to the bog and pisses in front of me. I stand half out of the room and don’t watch, I think he gets off on doing it, he doesn’t wash his hands afterwards. I’m so happy when the day is over. Life is a series of excruciating tests for me, and Sid enjoys putting me through them.

Getting a minicab to the Speakeasy club in Soho one night, we are just about to leave my place when Sid goes, ‘Can I wear your jeans?’ My heart sinks; those jeans have an old period stain that I can’t get out, I didn’t wash them soon enough after it happened. I can’t possibly let Sid see that, he’ll never let me forget it. ‘You look good as you are. Anyway, they’ll be too short for you,’ I say. ‘Yeah,’ he says. Phew. We get into the cab but just as the driver is pulling away Sid says, ‘I’ve forgotten something.’ He nips out and runs back into the house. He comes out a minute later, grinning all over his face, wearing my jeans. I could kill him. Now he knows why I didn’t want him to wear them. I stare out of the window for the whole car journey. He chats away, knowing he’s winding me up. He doesn’t tease me about the blood stain, that’s left unsaid.