One Three One: A Time-Shifting Gnostic Hooligan Road Novel (2 page)

But barely had the balmy breezes of that Catalan northwest coast begun their grand massaging of my throbbing psyche and knitted brows, when – ring-a-ding-a-ding – there on the road before us now flashed dangerous evidence of possible hold-ups and snags in our seamless itinerary: signs for Sássari. Sássari? My mind reeled, then rocketed up from its Ocean Floor consciousness at this unrighteous and unlovely information: may the heavens help us please, in some way, halt our inexorable and near-immediate slither into those sludgy commuter-fast hinterlands around white-baked Sássari City. Oh, why had Anna taken this route so easterly, so unnecessary? Vicious hunks of strewn concrete rubble, barely organised contraflow, after-the-fact road sign placements and scores of dithering, heaving antique estate cars all of Italian manufacture, many o’er-filled to bulgery with farm produce, and all apparently piloted in the third person by remote, daydreaming rustics out on their annual interface with civilisation. Judge Barry Hertzog may well have to wait. For Anna had her own business to clear up.

Oh. In front, a motorcyclist was ferrying a hawk in a cage so large that the rider himself was forced to perch upon his rear passenger seat, the caged bird up front and apparently at the
controls. Caught behind this perilous duo, Anna slowly navigated our spluttering Detroit land-yacht inch-by-inch up the heaving concrete causeway and on to the elevated section of the 131, where we promptly came to a dead halt, central Sássari City spread out below on either side of us. Movement? Zilch. Zip. Nothing. Hmm, maintaining a schedule on Sardinia, indeed, keeping to
any
itinerary was, on this mysterious Mediterranean Ireland, always going to be sphincter-puckeringly problematic. Adding Sássari into the equation forever reduced your journey’s average speed to about minus zero m.p.h. Still we sat, motionless, both lanes and in both directions. Directly in front of us, the beleaguered hawk ferryman suddenly lost concentration then control of his moped, which rocketed forwards into the tailgate of a builder’s wagon, smashing the ferryman’s head unconscious and sending the gilded cage somersaulting across the highway between two family saloons. People got out to check the hawk, lit ciggies, stared critically in both directions, some frowning, but most remaining expressionless. The moped rider was fine; the hawk was smashed up to fuck. Dead for sure. In Portugal, Spain, anywhere in the Mediterranean you see these mad cunts pulling this shit all the time, you suppose they must know something you don’t. Yeah, they’ll pull it off. Looks pretty shabby behaviour but you give them the benefit of the doubt. Back home, I’d have twatted the guy – you cynical cunt, taking a chance with such a beautiful creature. Take that, sir! But here, it merely made me wake up out of my stupor long enough to realise I needed a serious piss. Drat. It was about this time then that Anna – obviously well versed in the concept of chronic Sássari gridlock – concluded that the surefire way through our temporary auto enslavement was via a spot of Smalltalk. Me, I was just desperate for that piss.

She stared deeply into my eyes as she smoothed her right hand across the Buick’s dashboard. You do surprise me. But, not knowing her yet, I still managed to look appropriately impressed, the drool and cross-eyes probably undermining this somewhat though not catastrophically. Then Anna began to trot out auto facts to me, perhaps to keep me alert or for a short quiz later on. Measuring exactly eighteen-and-a-half feet from chromium prow to stern, this personal aircraft carrier was General Motors’ second most prestigious product of 1966, just below the two-grand-more-expensive Cadillac Eldorado … zzzzzzzzzzz … I probably dropped off for no more than thirty seconds; I certainly switched back on when she mentioned that Jayne Mansfield had been decapitated in exactly the same model as ours. Grisly. At last and apparently without reason, the 131 had now slowly started to move. And Anna, weighing up the Sássari gridlock from our elevated highway, judiciously decided that her own business in the city could hang fire temporarily – which was fine by me in a bit of a state and with such an important meeting ahead. Nevertheless, those twenty brief minutes of enforced 131-contraflow stillness had been my first non-forward motion in days. Sweet relief. Moreover, spending it lolling and foaming in Anna’s rather tasty convertible du jour was exactly the kind of high cultural level of pre-death experience that this Sacrificial Lamb believed he
should
be demanding. Now, what about that piss?

Two minutes later, I was clinging on for dear life, struggling in vain for non-existent seatbelts and peering helplessly into so-called reality as if through a kid’s kaleidoscope. Accelerating
from zero to 80 m.p.h. whether their vehicles were capable or not, everyone on the 131 southbound was now nose-to-tail surging collectively across vast valley-spanning EU road bridges and through precariously placed EU tunnels. And everybody was attempting to travel faster than everybody else, although here everybody’s inexperienced at travelling fast and really unused to being in a bunch, so no fucker in the outer lane thinks to give you space when that 12 m.p.h. instant JCB digger – appearing out of some ‘Works Only’ exit – slips seamlessly into your slow lane … Oo, yer bastard. And nobody dares give it less than Jenson Button, because they’re Sards and they’re exercising their All-Too-Infrequently-Exercisable EU birthright. Oo ja! For most of their driving lives, your 21st-century Sardu drivers have no choice but to tootle along at about 40 m.p.h. on un-restored and potholed pre-war roads band-aided together decades ago by post-war concrete and industrial staples. This means that time spent on the 131 motorway is just about the only Sardu opportunity to experience what the rest of EU Italians daily take for granted; and which is why riding this section of the 131 is rather too much like sitting in a London bus that’s been entered in Ben Hur’s chariot race down a scree slope through the foothills of the Alps. However, at least this Strictly Sardu version of ye Common Market experience offers we Foreigners the rare opportunity to share said experience with – on this blessèd occasion, at least – a gawping toothless octogenarian in the outside lane straddling his melon-laden Piaggio three-wheeler jalopy (pre-war, what war?), all the while thumbs-upping me to death, winking at me, and staring right through me to cop a lusty visual of Anna. Oh, the 131. Imagine a very bustling UK trunk road arduously excavated through the most precipitous crags of South Wales, but madder, faster and tailgating like cunts while
permanently squirting out the full beams over the shoulders of the Unfortunate in front of you, and you’re there. Well actually, no you’re not, I am. Unfortunately with neither hat nor suntan lotion, I’m also approaching a look that’s fresh out the microwave, grilling up a UK bacon complexion; rasher-pink blistering to Full Body-Pucker in one bolt of radiation. Darling, any chance of that pitstop in the near future?

Blissful blissful pissings. And with volcanic vistas, too. Staring down open-mouthed from this steep-sided eastern escarpment, squinting eyes a-blazing and cock in hand I pissed forever. Becalmed I was at last and safe behind a huge myrthus bush, which shielded me from Anna’s extravagantly improvised arse-out-into-the-traffic parking spot on this rather too dodgy curve up the lane to hilltop Florinas. Mick’s phone calls had finally subsided and, as I inhaled the primeval views of Sardinia for the first time in long, long years, I was forty-three years old and in compassionate mode. Be good to yourself, Rock Section. Just as the too-brief inertia of the Sássari contraflow had been quite long enough to Send Me, as the hippies used to say, so now did this brief Piss Stop yield me up to a sundrenched half-world of volcanoes and prehistoric cooling towers, yield me up to the Gods of extinct Mt Sassu ahead of me across the Ploaghe valley, and to its numberless regiments of rockstack sentinels that crowded the horizon like eager henchmen. And so, too, did this Grandiloquent Inertia yield me up not only to Sardinia, but also to its screaming Ur-shadow, to its Sardu-within, to that very kernel of its culture, that core of this blistering island – itself no more than a bobbing and defiant husk that rages upon the surface of the Med. But such a husk as rages forever: S A R D E G N A. I was back in
the sunbleached, tar-black heart of that Eternal, Impenetrable, Impermeable and Unconquerable volcanic massif in whose remotest parts doting sons had, right up until the 1950s, still accompanied their doddery dads up to the local suicide cliff; a land wherein licensed women known as
S’akkabbadòra-hèmina
had legally euthanised the old and the infirm until Mussolini had put a stop to it all, and where local Catholic priests were forced by convention to wage singing wars with flamboyant
bruxas
and
bruxos
, themselves druid-styled after the ‘old religion’. Oh, this blissful, blissful Inertia. It was as though Time had – on this unforgotten mountainside – granted me a temporary pause from the chaos, safe from the death, safe from the treachery; pulled me into a dark entry unknown: sssshhh! I grabbed my throbbing brows with my left hand, and pressed my large flat fingertips into the temples. Gouging at the precise points of my cranium that I believed to be structural, I alternately dug then gouged, dug and gouged along the presumed cranial course in an attempt to free some psychic plaque from my stultifying noggin. Still staring out across the valley having a good old dig I was, when Anna – her head visible over the myrthus bush only if I strained my pissing figure counterclockwise – piped up from the driver’s seat.

As I struggled back into the car, my heavy heart smiled as my eyes alit upon a large hardback nestling in Anna’s folded cardigan on the sumptuous rear bench of the Buick, emblazoned with the words
Jim
Morrison: Poems (1979–84).
Perhaps it was just a co incidence I thunk to myself – could be Anna’s dad’s copy for all I knew – but this was by far my favourite period of Jim’s poetry, and I knew this volume inside out. A good luck sign. For me, so much of Jim’s recent stuff had become too scholarly, too rigid, just too obsessed with ‘righting wrongs’. Bad idea for an American. Where d’you stop? But this early-80s stuff was Jim at his absolute finest. All the mystical poems were in there, the occult ones too. And each of the naval poems was accompanied by its original essay, so Jim’s two epic American Civil War poems ‘The Monitor’ and ‘The Sinking of CSS Alabama in French Waters’ could really be appreciated for the rigorousness of that fucker’s research. Yeah man, your ultimate exploratory Jim in a single volume – and here’s my hired driver with a big old hardback edition on board. Sweet. I slid back into the passenger seat with a new vigour and stared at Anna, who was actually a bit of all right. Now no more than ten minutes away from our destination, we surged upwards into the outskirts of mountain fast Florinas. Can I have a quick Fernet Branca in the local bar? Like a very quick one? I was starting to cluck somewhat. But the drink impacted immediately on that oz of squidgy black, and I had to make a chase for the lavatory. Outside, Anna kept the car engine running, and as the weather now grew overcast we headed into the mountains.

Barely ten minutes later, the castellated walls of Florinas Penitentiary tormented the skyline to our right. Farther down the valley, skeletal monolithic fingers of jagged basalt rock took over beyond where the castellations terminated, in this rare instance Nature’s extraordinary randomness perhaps even more brutal than those ordered man-made walls. Miserable as fuck. Almost too dreadful to contemplate what conditions could be like inside.

At the drystone-walled prison entrance, Anna – in one graceful motion – swung Jayne Mansfield’s Ruin expertly between the two huge brutal outcrops of gnarly rock that passed for gateposts, then navigated up the penitentiary’s rugged 600-metre-long causeway at full tilt, our whitewall tyres screaming so outrageously on the once tarmac’d road that I semi-expected a waiting armed guard of reproving pistolleros when we crossed the drawbridge still at considerable speed. Where was the barrier? Where was the gate? Was this great elevated fortress not Florinas Penitentiary? Of course it was. This gargantuan façade was merely its gatehouse, its preliminary line of defence. Shadowed now behind twenty-feet-high walls, Anna and I were ushered into a Portakabin for passport and paperwork by a lame, tragic-looking warder named Klötz, who pointed up to a tiny rock-fast pillbox situated high in the crags above and – grinning obsequiously at both of us – declared: ‘Hertzog!’ Klötz was no more than five-feet-two-inches tall, extremely fat and sported a buckled leather jerkin w/metal nametag. His institutional haircut – a cartoon skinhead number 1 – was subverted by what looked like Soviet Issue sunglasses. Truly amazing shades. Gimme. But the poor guy wore a calliper on his lame leg, and a symbol of Authority he was not. Klötz invited Anna to pull up a chair in the Portakabin’s cosiest corner, poured her a cup of something hot, then hobbled over to the door and yelled: ‘Ourgon! Gorgo!’ My escorts were on their way.

Now there’s only one kind of behaviour an Englishman requires from prison warders, even a drugged-up fucker like this motherfucker. He wants, or rather I want them to
look
and
act
like prison warders. I want to know precisely where I stand. They’re not my friends, my buddies. Indeed, as evidenced by the lameness of Klötz, who was currently holding on to my passport and travel papers, prison warders are in possession of great powers. So when around the corner sprang these two tiny, rotund warders, jerks of the lowest order both, each virtually identical to Klötz and each sporting those same buckled leather jerkins bearing the nametags? Well, I had a real icky, suspicious feeling about this place. Not good at all. And when this jocular duo started slapping each other around right there in front of me, it just didn’t even feel real. Give it a break, fuckers. Worse still, although Ourgon and Gorgo had the look of chronic slug’n’snail gourmets both of them, these two Dumptys in two-minutes-flat danced me dizzy with their rough housing and bumpy slapstick routines. They both had far too much snap in their tails for me to feel remotely comfortable in my present state. Especially when we began to climb that precariously steep rock-cut staircase up to Barry Hertzog’s cabin-in-the-stars, when I utterly did not appreciate one of them jostling me and tickling me in the ribs. Boys. Boys. Up and up and up I struggled, my gozzy eyes focusing then de-focusing, focusing then de-focusing, genuinely shocked by the great spires of rock that jutted out alarmingly just beyond Hertzog’s cell. And as the leather soles of my worn-out city boots finally grasped once more at the kind of sensible, horizontal walled-concrete platform they’d been designed for, both of those size-11 stinkers audibly sighed a fart of relief … hhhhwwwwwsh.

Here atop the basalt cliffs of Florinas Penitentiary, all the
while grasping for support at that meagre wall, I stared both aghast and impressed at the bizarre rock-cut cavern that passed for Hertzog’s incarceration. Only in Sardinia. How could it be? Surely this hermit’s cell was not a place of punishment but of Enlightenment. What a magnificent space. Its flat, vertical walls, its great hearth and chimney, even the ingeniously faked wooden beams of its high ceiling. No stranger to Sardinia arriving here for the first time could even have noticed that this clean, fresh, white-emulsion reception room had actually been excavated straight out of the living rock itself. Affixed above the entrance was a large red-and-yellow shield in the colours of Dokkum’s Be Quick F.C., next to it upon the near wall hung a great black-and-white poster from the Dutch WW2 movie
Soldier of Orange.
This impressive three-in-a-bed scene depicted a topless Susan Penhaligon being kissed by another whilst a particularly young Rutger Hauer looked on. Even more impressive was another carved low doorway that led into a lower antechamber beyond, wherein a large and well-lit map of Sardinia hung upon the wall at a curiously off-kilter angle. Well curious, about 20 degrees clockwise, I’d wager. The map had been festooned with hand-written nametags rendered in capital letters so large that even from my spec a full twenty feet away, they broadcasted loudly their culty disinformation: Mafeking, Durban, Pretoria, Cape Town. Mmm? But it was not until Warden Ourgon alerted Hertzog as to my arrival that the Judge emerged from his hiding place and acknowledged my presence in his clipped, formal tones.

He still looked virtually the same, though what ‘the same’ really meant I dunno, as the World Media has fixed him forever in my mind’s eye leaping out of Italia ’90 as an X-faced Rave Grim Reaper atop an Eiffel Tower-sized World Cup TV gantry. That dreadful afternoon leading up to the England–Republic of Ireland match, I’d endured fire, gore, mob violence and water hoses right there below that bagpiping fucker. But it’s still the media photos and CCTV videos that stick in my mind nowadays. My only other personal contact with the Judge had been after one of my DJ sets back in Spring 1990, when – as a guest at his fucked-up mobile Rave club Slag Van Blowdriver – I’d found myself on the receiving end of one of his particularly prickly ‘Not all Netherlanders are from Holland’ rants. But now, after all the arduous paperwork that had finally brought this present meeting to fruition, I was somewhat taken aback that the Hertzog I was encountering was still entirely combative.

He glared at me so reprovingly that it left me feeling itchy and scratchy. I flicked my left ear, made a couple of those ‘mwuh, mwuh’ faces that you do when a bogey feels caught in nose hair, then reached down to pinch the wedgie of my clean kecks out of my butt cheeks. Then I had a couple more fumbles in the kecks area just to rearrange the pocket material, which was all
ridden up and lumpy. But right as I pulled out my left hand, a tiny wrap of once-glossy paper dropped out and bumped its way on to the desk in front of me. Hertzog seized the wrap and handed it triumphantly to one of the dumpty wardens. It was speed. Preludes. Two of those waxy lozenges I’d scraped down into yellow amphetamine. I’d forgotten about that.

I was now hearing from the mouth of Hertzog himself the absolute antithesis of everything I’d thus far managed to extract from his hit book
Prison Writings
. Indeed, everything that I’d allowed myself to pass for truth these past sixteen years was imploding
and taking everything else down with it. Beyond gutted, I was hanged, drawn, quartered and distributed across four counties. The Hapless English motif had run unchecked throughout my entire two previous decades. I’d always believed that the kidnaps had fallen upon the four of us through sheer bad luck. Well, bad luck and Mick’s cuntish decisions in the Kidnap Capital of Europe – that had been my conclusion. What a total and utter not-thinking-about-it Brain Dead Twat I’d been … For despite all of the bad trips and weird scenes I myself had experienced up at Slag Van Blowdriver way before Italia ’90, and for all the creepy Groningen tales told by musicians I trusted, I’d still allowed my damned hatred of Authority to shield me from considering genuinely the possibility of Hertzog’s World Fiendishness.

Having dwelled so negatively all these years on the shaky response of the Italian Authorities to these crimes, rather than considering the wider issue, I suddenly understood that I’d allowed Dean to kill himself in utter ignorance of why any of
it had happened. Two thirteen-year-old boys go to Italia ’90 and events get so fucked up that neither sees thirty. The sum total of this new knowledge was now overwhelming me. During the fighting at Poett Beach and Sant’Elia Stadium, we’d had no organisation as such. But so soon after his big chart hits with Brits Abroad and Full English Breakfast, Mick – after years of social worker status behind him – had at thirty-two years old been so On One that he’d fully expected to take their beach at Italia ’90. Why? Because he was a poet and their beach was called Poett. That fucker had Roky Erikson’d us all into believing – mesmerised and shamanised us with his Chart Positions. We’d lost Full English Breakfast in a fatal fall that might have been a fatal shove, and ruined lives proliferated around us. These past sixteen years I’d spent consoling myself about the random nature of our kidnap. But never once had we been accidental victims; all along we’d been fucking targets. Mick’s song ‘Last Tango in Paris’, its international success, their wind-up performance on
Top of the Pops
, even the band calling themselves Brits Abroad: every last detail had conspired to get them and me kidnapped at Italia ’90 by highly organised Believers in extremely dubious causes. Not victims, targets.