my autobiography (contains swearing)

[wytchcroft]

 

“The problem with autobiography is it sounds like having a wank.”

My friend squinted at me across the café table, his fingers slipping a little on its sheeny plastic surface as he pushed himself back away slightly. “This isn’t an interview you know” he said, “I’m not here for the pleasure of your sound bites.”

“Fuck you. I mean it.” That’s me, piling on the Freudian, gotta have a subtext oh yes. “All those auto words sound creepy; Auto-erotic, Autonomic, Auto…biography, right?”

“Huh.”

I dodged the smoke as he lit a cigarette and in doing so I gazed through the clear glass of the window and out into the blurry streets; seemed an odd reversal, clean windows and unfocused life. There were people and there were vehicles. 
One of the vehicles was a milk van; I watched it traverse the screen of the glass in a neat line, left to right and out of frame. Took a second or so. In the old days milk vans were called ‘floats’ they were electric vehicles and moved incredibly slowly with a distinct airy sound. Whatever happened to them? I have no idea.

I must have been a bit too absorbed because my mate coughed. “Spill.”

“Milk float” I said. “Memory: 5.am and summer and lying on the roof, drunk as a skunk and watching the sky spinning around until the float got to near my house when I’d roll off. Made for a great taxi service.”

“Pop video.”

“Mo-fo advert.”

“From the 90s.”

“Yeah. See?”

I’d been making a point abut how cheesy autobiography was – and how a person’s memory turned everything into visuals anyway, because that’s our culture. We grow up on a diet of fast visuals. And just as autobiography leaks out so the cheese factor and the datedness of visual articulation leaks in.

“Ok,” said my mate, “fair point.”

I nodded and giving in to the smell of cigarettes reached into my jacket pocket for a packet of my own and lit one.

“Thank God,” my mate grinned, “for a moment I thought you’d gone mad and given up or something.”

I didn’t bother to answer; I just carried on looking out the window and waited for the inevitable irritated footsteps up to our table. I didn’t have to wait long.

“I’m sorry.” The waitress’s voice indicated sharply that she was not sorry at all, “You can’t smoke in here.”

 “Get stuffed” I said.

“Fuck off,” my mate directed.

I never said we were nice people.

Part of the trouble was that the shiny new coffee house was on the spot of what had once been The Red Knight pub, which we had frequented on a regular basis, and for many years, sitting in this exact spot. One difference now being the aforementioned cleanliness of the window - there was also the lack of alcohol and most importantly the recently introduced ban on smoking.

This was hardly the first time we’d been reminded of that. The waitress hissed angrily and retreated.
“Hmmph…” said my mate.

“What?” I asked, annoyed.

“You,” he said, “Bit bloody half-hearted.”

I twitched a lip at him. Truth was it was awkward; I hadn’t looked at the girl because I couldn’t face doing so. I knew her. Her name was Dei-de and she and my friend had been having something of an on/off affair for a few weeks now – and damned if I wanted my mate to know that I knew about it. Not yet anyway.  I liked her well enough though; she was short, sharp and lively, liked to dance apparently and had an explosion of pink hair that only just managed to behave itself when manacled into place for work.
“Getting old I suppose,” I eventually murmured.

My mate enjoyed that, I knew he would, feeling like he’d scored a point on me. Our friendship had always been adversarial that way.

“Autobiography,” he said.

I faced him. “Not that old,” I said. He raised an eyebrow. “I mean I never understand – how can you write, really write, an autobiography until you’re dead anyway?”

“Eh? How can you write anything when you’re dead?”

“Ghost-writing, you facetious git.”

“Ha.”

I dropped my cigarette stub into the long emptied plastic coffee cup while considering my argument.

“No, but right, how can you? You say, I was born blah, blah, got married, blah blah blah, house, blah blah, dog, blah blah, and success – riches – drugs – downfall - religious period blah bah - clean up and rehab blah bah – comeback – critical acceptance - awards and, finally, autobiography.”

“Yeah?”

“And then the thing gets published and your wife runs off with your daughter’s teacher, the house gets repossessed – so you reboot your life and you move to some unknown fucking island and become a successful painter under another name and – what, you do a ‘My Life part two?’, ‘My life – updated and revised? C’mon…”

“People do that all the time.”

“And they all suck.”

He pondered. “Yeah, there is that.”

“You could fictionalise it,” he obviously liked the idea of that because his eyes flashed a bit and swept quickly around the café as if he were sweeping his arms or something. My mate has stumpy arms, it’s the Irish in him, and he’s learned not to sweep them if doesn’t want people to throw fish at him.  “Think of the lies you could come out with!”

“Better yet”, it was my turn to score a point, “you could tell the truth but write under a pen-name and who’s to know? I always hope Presley secretly wrote ‘Elvis; What happened?’ that book is a fucking masterpiece.”

“True.”

I nodded, but… “The thing is, don’t you have to BE Presley first, I mean successful? Why the hell someone wants something by someone who aint famous… I” –

“Oy!” Indeed, I’d gone too far with that. My mate dug a furious hand into his coat and slammed his mobile down on the table. “Here’s my fucking phone, why don’t you ask my agent, eh? Go on – go, the fuck, on!”

There were irate sounds from behind the counter and I could feel the bristling of the patrons too. Not one of our better days.

“Shh!” I made placating gestures, spreading my fingers and waving my hands down towards the table. “Look I’m sorry, straight up, I” –

“You only say straight up when you’re lying.”

That ‘s true actually.

“Oh. Yeah. Ok. Well, no, I really am, crossed the line there mate, sorry.”

He calmed down then – he was a hot and cold kind of bloke anyway – but I had to endure the sort of scowls that could lacerate a Klingon cruiser let alone a fairly hapless journo like me.

Still, it was probably for the best, him sat there all chest heaving and macho pride, more likely to want to write the articles he was struggling with back in that death trap of a flat he called 'home'.

“We could swap!” I said suddenly, the idea, so obvious came to me then in a flash.

I watched the scowl slide away, ebbing from his face like a friendly outgoing tide. The rest of hs face was a genial beach.

“That,” he said quietly, “is genius. You’re on.”

He fumbled for another cigarette.

Lighting it, he passed his packet to me. Subtext – I haven’t forgotten see? He blew ruminative smoke.
“Where would you start though?” he asked. “You have to have a good start…”

“Like Elvis and the hit men.”

“Exactly, you can’t just write – ‘I was born in a small town in November of yawn, yawn, and yawn.’”

“No worries.  It’s simple as.”

He shook a wayward curl of dark hair from in front of his eyes. “Really? Go on then…”

“Dei-de was a disco dancer. She practised every morning in the front room of her flat which, lucky for me, was directly opposite, separated merely by a couple of panes of glass, a few yards and an unceasing ocean of traffic.”

I ducked the oncoming fist.
 

Mostly.

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this one's for dr_nyman