London Calling (25 page)

The writer Ned Polsky remembered Trocchi’s time in New York:

In one sense Alex was an evil man, because he made junkies out of people. Alex begged me, on more than one occasion, to try
heroin… there were plenty of weak-willed people, including some of the women he was involved with, whom he turned into junkies.
That was a terrible thing. Given the lives that junkies had to lead then, and still do, it was condemning them to a terrible
life and I felt that was an evil thing. Heroin became the focus of all his objections, all his anarchistic existentialist
objections to the powers that be and anything he could do to promote it, he did.
¹⁰

Polsky and Trocchi eventually fell out because Trocchi asked Polsky to forward letters to Lyn Trocchi. She was living with
her parents, trying to get off heroin, and her parents were opening any letters coming from her husband. Trocchi enclosed
heroin for her in the letters, which not only endangered Polsky, who was being used as an unwitting courier and could have
gone to jail had US Customs intercepted the letter, but also angered him. Polsky saw it as a clear case of Trocchi trying
to undermine Lyn’s efforts to stay off junk.
¹¹

After some problems with the law in Glasgow, Trocchi, now joined by Lyn and his young son, Marcus, moved to London in March
1962 and rented a flat in Kilburn. He made a little money as a reader for Weidenfeld and Nicolson and did the occasional lecture
or broadcast. Until then Trocchi had spent very little time in London but he was assisted in getting to know the city
by Guy Debord, the founder of the Situationist Internationale (SI). Trocchi’s involvement with the Letterist International
in Paris from 1955 onwards had made him an early member of the SI. He survived a remarkably long time, not being expelled
by Debord until 1964. Trocchi told Greil Marcus:

I remember long, wonderful psychogeographical walks in London with Guy… He took me to places in London I didn’t know, that
he didn’t know, that he sensed that I’d never have been to if it hadn’t been with him. He was a man who could discover a city…
There was a magical quality to Guy. Distances didn’t seem to matter to the man. Walking in London, in the daytime, at night,
he’d bring me to a spot he’d found, and the place would begin to live. Some old, forgotten part of London. Then he’d reach
back for a story, for a piece of history, as if he’d been born there.
¹²

Trocchi and Lyn moved to flat in Baring Street, north of now fashionable Hoxton, found for him by his new friend Michael de
Freitas, the slum- landlord Peter Rachman’s enforcer. De Freitas quickly found him a better place in Notting Hill, in St Stephen’s
Gardens at the top end of Chepstow Road, the heart of the Westbourne Grove ‘scene’. There was a pleasant balcony, where Alex
and Lyn could sit outside and play with Marcus, now six years old, and Alex could pipe-dream about world domination.

In 1963 he came up with a magnificent junkie idea: Project Sigma. In essence this entailed Alex taking credit for other people’s
ideas and actions by adding them to his ‘Sigma Portfolio’, a cheaply mimeographed set of documents available only by paying
a hefty subscription. Alex was a very persuasive writer; he would have done well in advertising. His sales pitch for the
Sigma Folio
was masterful:

The sigma portfolio is an entirely new dimension in publishing, through which the writer reaches his public immediately, outflanking
the traditional trap of publishing-house policy, and by means of which the reader gets it, so to speak, ‘hot’ from the writer’s
pen, from the photographer’s lens, etc. In a sense you might be said to be subscribing to an encyclopaedia in the making;
in another sense you will be participating in a tactical historigem, to coin a word. In subscribing to the sigma portfolio,
you are stimulating the growth of an interpersonal log constructing itself to alert, sustain, inform, inspire, and make vividly
conscious of itself all intelligence from now on. You will receive various future informations and tactical objects and can
judge for yourself at what points you can participate. Again, the portfolio is what we call a ‘futique’ (what will be prized
as an antique tomorrow); you will possess
a first edition of this new dimension of publishing, the expanding file of our activities.
¹³

The majority of people who should have been his readers could not afford the high-priced subscription, and when new pages
were added to the portfolio, few subscribers received them because Trocchi inevitably could not afford the postage to send
them out. Whether he ever actually believed in it is hard to determine. The couple in the flat below Trocchi in Westbourne
Grove, Marcus and Sally Field, became good friends. Marcus became Trocchi’s ‘secretary’, taking care of the of burgeoning
paperwork generated by Sigma, though a secretary was hardly needed to help bring out a mimeo magazine one page at a time;
there wasn’t even any collation to do and Alex naturally got people like Jeff Nuttall to do all the actual mimeograph printing.
In three years he produced thirty-nine pamphlets, often single pages, many of which were simply given to him ready-made by
the author or by another publisher –
The Invisible Generation
by William Burroughs, for instance, was first published in
International Times
, where it reached a probable 50,000 people but Burroughs asked that an offprint be run off to be given to Trocchi as he had
been pressuring Burroughs for a text for months. About a hundred were distributed by Sigma.

William Burroughs told Allan Campbell:

I wasn’t ever involved with it really and it never went anywhere at all.… I think in many ways it was just an excuse not to
write.… as far as I know he never wrote a book after Cain’s Book.… It was a big idea of getting all sorts of pivotal people
together, like ronnie Laing and, I don’t know, others.… Sigma never got off the ground.
¹⁴

However, Trocchi’s flat rapidly became a centre of underground activity, with visiting American poets such as Robert Creeley,
Jack Micheline and Gregory Corso dropping by, as well as local Notting Hill artists and activists, house guests and, of course,
drug addicts and dealers. When Burroughs moved to London in 1965, he was still using heroin: ‘When I met him in London, he
used to help me shoot up. See my veins were gone in my arms. Old Alex could find a vein in a mummy.’
¹⁵
A visit to Trocchi’s pad was not for the faint-hearted as he was an exhibitionist junkie who loved to shoot up in public,
once even attempting to do it on American television. Trocchi:

One thing that heroin does for me, is I am immediately transported into a world where I am immune from all these worries that
besiege me. I can then, without the least diminution in the sharpness of my intellect, apply
my whole intellectual… and emotional organism to whatever problem is at hand. At the same time, experiencing a tremendous,
artificial if you like, but tremendous elation, and an inviolability. Things that come from the outside don’t worry me. I
see them as not important to the problem in hand. And therefore, I am able to… with this very good feeling inside me, to get
on with the job.
¹⁶

Trocchi was full of plans and in many ways this must have been the happiest time of his life since his days in Paris. He was
so relaxed that he even returned to his old hobby of collecting stamps. Despite the fact he had no art training, he lectured
at the sculpture department of St Martin’s School of Art, but mostly he cultivated his image as London’s premier junkie so
that whenever a radio or television producer needed ‘the junkie viewpoint’ Alex would be wheeled out to pontificate – for
a fee. He was very good at it. In his autobiography Christopher Logue remembered:

When he was invited to appear on television to justify his views, he began by announcing his self-appointment as Drug Addict
to Her Majesty the Queen. Then defended his right to take any drug he chose to take. The murderous behaviour of most modern
states – Auschwitz, Katyn, Hiroshima, Dresden – having led him to find contemporary societies so vicious, any drug that weakened
the loyalties they aroused was holy, a blessing.
¹⁷

Had Sigma actually amounted to something, it would have inevitably ended in chaos because Trocchi would not have been able
to work alongside anyone. As Ned Polsky said: ‘Alex didn’t want to be part of any political party, Alex wanted to be the star
of the show.’
¹⁸

In 1966, Alex and Lyn moved to a luxurious penthouse apartment in Observatory Gardens between Holland Park and Kensington
Church Street. The rent was only £245 per annum but Trocchi had to find £1,000 key money. It was a fortuitous discovery and
quickly became another centre of cultural and drug-taking activity. Alex presided over his visitors in a wonderfully gloomy
book-lined study. The shelves were fronted by his painted ‘futiques’, driftwood painted in garish primary colours, crushed
paint tubes, used syringes, and discarded manuscripts and papers littered the floor, over which prowled the Burmese and Siamese
cats that he loved. Trocchi took to wearing a long purple, green and blue embroidered gown and a tasselled fez or smoking
cap. Near to hand was a large hookah, the brass mouthpiece of which he used to gesture at his guests. He certainly had a high
opinion of himself and could be rather humourless should anyone contest it.
Lyn was quoted as saying: ‘Alex, who is a great man, but no bargain, says “I will not tolerate a world that rejects me.” He
thinks he is God, he really does.’

Though he was getting his heroin and cocaine legally from Lady Frankau’s clinic in Wimpole Street, the police still focused
their attentions on Observatory Gardens because they knew him to be supplying others. One raid netted £2,000 in jewellery,
stolen from the Hilton Hotel by one of Trocchi’s house guests. The police also found opium and residue of hashish in the hookah
but by now Trocchi was the recognized authority on drugs, the BBC’s ‘tame junkie’. Trocchi knew many public figures and
police found it hard to make charges stick against him because he claimed to be giving ‘drug advice and counselling’, even
though in reality he was trying to get as many people addicted as possible. Dan and Jill Richter were finally persuaded to
try heroin by Alex with disastrous results. They lost a child and Dan remained hooked for many years. Lyn herself lost a baby
when she accidentally suffocated it in the night. Normally a mother’s reflexes prevent her from rolling on to her child, but
her senses were so dulled by heroin that the baby died. It was attributed to cot death. After several heroin-related breakdowns,
Lyn herself died on 9 November 1972 of liver failure caused by hepatitis. Then, at the age of fifteen, Alex and Lyn’s son
Mark was diagnosed with throat cancer and three years later, on 21 May 1977, he too died. Being around the Trocchis was not
a life-enhancing experience. Trocchi himself died of pneumonia on 15 April 1984, followed nine months later in December by
his eighteen-year-old son, Nicholas, who committed suicide by jumping off the roof of Observatory Gardens.

The mimeographing for the Sigma portfolio was done by Jeff Nuttall on the school duplicating machine where he taught art in
Barnet, in North London. One of his fellow teachers, a poet and cultural organizer, Bob Cobbing, was also using it, in his
case to publish poetry booklets in his Writer’s Forum series. Nuttall quickly saw the possibilities:

I turned out
My Own Mag: A Super-Absorbent Periodical
in November 1963, as an example of the sort of thing we might do. My intention was to make a paper exhibition in words, pages,
spaces, holes, edges, and images which drew people in and forced a violent involvement with the unalterable facts… You can’t
pretend its not there if you’re throwing up as a result.
¹⁹

Nuttall used vomit, shit and piss as ways of shocking his readers into some clearer view of reality; unfortunately his own
sexual obsessions, such
as his fixation on stockings, suspenders and old-fashioned ladies’ bloomers, tended to make the results more amusing than
shocking, scatological though they were: more Donald McGill than Hans Bellmer. However, his drawings of vomiting individuals
were a sort of precursor of the bad behaviour of the punks.

He wrote to William Burroughs, then living in Tangier, to ask him to contribute to
My Own Mag
, recognizing that what Burroughs was trying to do with
Naked Lunch
was make people see what was ‘really on the end of the fork’. Burroughs agreed with Nuttall’s belief that individuals needed
to be shocked into seeing the true horror of the human condition and for several years became his most regular contributor,
often using the last two pages of the magazine as his own newspaper called
The Burrough
. When they finally met, they found they had little in common; Nuttall was not interested in drugs or guns, Burroughs’s two
major preoccupations; nor was he gay. Nuttall’s working-class nostalgia for pubs and old men in cloth caps supping their pint
cut no ice with Burroughs, who bemoaned the lack of service in British bars, the early closing times, the tiny measures, and
the lack of ice; ‘The only service you get in Britain is Senior Service,’ he growled (referring to his brand of cigarettes).

Aside from
My Own Mag
, Nuttall’s main contributions to the London scene both involved Better Books, the avant-garde bookshop at 92 Charing Cross
Road on the corner of New Compton Street. Throughout the fifties and early sixties this was where the Angry Young Men came
to catch up on the little literary magazines; where the directors and actors involved with the British Free Cinema came to
buy copies of
Cahiers du cinéma
and obscure imported Hollywood titles; it was where Beatniks could find everything published by City Lights Books and artists
could catch up on the latest abstract expression-ist works in the American art magazines.