If there was I did not find it. My father and my elder brother were working; my two younger brothers at school; and my mother busy with all the domestic stuff, trying to make ends meet. I was company for her, kept my youngest brother from under her feet.
The money brought into the home by my elder brother was greatly appreciated. The cost of living was proving greater than anticipated. Our father’s wage did not go as far as all that. He was finding difficult the transition from self-employed tradesman to wage-slave employee. At home he had worked nine, ten or twelve-hour days, six days a week, and if he was five minutes late, so what? One way or another he got the work done. Now he had to cope with the timecard routine. A minute late and people took notes. He was not there in the guise of the gruff but loveable Scottish engineer who can build a spaceship from a dod of chewing gum, three nuts and a bolt. He had expected to be treated as a first-class craftsman, but the gallery used him like any other worker. His workmates were from Puerto Rico and Central America. He was also an immigrant; immigrants are cheap labour.
Most of the time I read or loafed about. L.A. was where the jobs lay but it costs money to look for a job. That had to come from the family budget. Busfares mount up. If you are out for several hours, a coffee and a sandwich enter the reckoning. I could not borrow if I could not pay back. It was donations or nothing and nobody wants charity, not even 17-year-olds, especially ones that have been independent for years. You become overly sensitive. I hated to be ‘caught reading’. But what else was there? I went out for walks but that area of Pasadena was fairly boring, besides which walkers were suspicious characters.
My mother made sandwiches for my father and elder brother. I took one when I travelled into the city, two or three times a week. Occasionally I walked to save money. It was 11 miles from Pasadena to downtown L.A. Coming home in the dark was worse, down across quite a wide stretch of railroad tracks and through Chinatown and then on, and on, and on.
I got to know the downtown area quite well. There was a single-window record store nearby a pawnshop whose entire window was devoted to Bob Dylan merchandise. This was a time for Elvis, the Everlys, Del Shannon, so it was an adventurous display. Back in Glasgow, Dylan had a cult following but only a hardy few; the rest of the population had succumbed months previously to The Beatles, myself included. I had the Please Please Me album and took it everywhere, until I lost it — I hope not at cards. Bob Dylan’s image did not last long in that record-store window.
Like most other exiled teenagers I was proud when The Beatles stormed the U.S.A. In Glasgow there was also a music scene. We had good bands of our own: Blues Council and the Pathfinders were just two; a third was George Gallagher’s The Poets. A couple of nights ago, as I write here in San José, January 2007, a local radio station featured two of their songs. It was a complete surprise, sitting staring out the window at 11 o’clock in the evening. I was expecting a wee lassie to jump out and shout, Ha ha Dad, April Fool!
The Poets split up in the 1960s. Individuals continued in other bands. In the 1980s some were doing gigs around bars in Glasgow and district, playing a role in local political campaigns. They reformed as The Blues Poets in the early 1990s and in 1993–4 they agreed to take the lead in my ‘musical’ One two — hey! The band took on acting roles as well as performing seven or eight songs. It was just a special thing altogether. Their performance night after night helped keep me sane during the media hullabaloo that followed publication of How Late It Was, How Late.
In 1964 The Beatles were everywhere. The first song to make it was ‘I Want to Hold Your Hand’. Young Americans walked about in a daze. Within two weeks or less The Beatles’ U.K. backlist was rushed onto the market and four more of their singles entered the U.S. top ten.
Not only was I proud, it made sense of my clothes. I had been walking about dressed in Glasgow-style; early mod and strictly working-class. Another couple of years passed before the art-school, cross-class culture appeared and dominated. On the east coast young males were still trying to look like Bobby Darin or Elvis Presley. Where I came from nobody of my generation wanted to look like Elvis — that was your auntie’s boyfriend. Teddy Boys and Rockers singing ‘I Don’t Have a Wooden Heart’, you kidding?
In California white youths were more influenced by Archie comics and the Jerry Lewis look; crew cuts and trousers that flapped six inches above the ankles; white socks and thick rubber-soled shoes. They would have been laughed out of Glasgow, Liverpool, Manchester and Newcastle. Thanks to The Beatles I was vindicated, strolling about in my box-cut short jacket, nay vents and cloth-covered buttons; open French-seam trousers, Boston-collar shirt, black socks and chisel-toed shoes.
I still attracted attention, mainly from men around the bus station at 7th and Main. I was naïve but not innocent. Young people of both genders suffer harassment in factories. I coped with it, I think. The situation in Los Angeles was different. My vulnerability lay in the economic. A few years passed till I came upon the work of John Rechy. His City of Night was published back in 1963. If I had found a copy then I would have viewed differently the downtown area around Central Library and Pershing Square. Maybe one of these early stories would have been entitled ‘Not Raped in California’. The York printer and the Extra-mural class at Glasgow University would have enjoyed it. Hubert Selby’s Last Exit to Brooklyn was published in 1964 and I had no knowledge of it, nor of the obscenity charges brought against his work in the U.S.A. in 1961, then later in the U.K. in 1968.
The courageous integrity of artists like Selby and Rechy can have an inspirational effect on young writers. Just get on with it, do it honestly, do it properly, tell the fucking truth, just tell it, do it. Whereas, in mainstream English literature young writers are encouraged to find their place in the hierarchy. As an existential experience working-class life was a taboo area and prostitution, like industrial cancer, is a working-class experience, essentially.
While in San José I attended a reading given by a contemporary of mine here in the Bay area. He is a decent writer and a likeable man but his public persona, like many another English novelist, appears modelled on Prince Charles taking a stroll down the charity ward of a Cambridge hospital. During the question/answer session that followed he declared to an audience of maybe 500 people that in his opinion the greatest influence on English novelists of the past thirty years was Philip Larkin.
Honest to god.
But Anglo-American audiences dote on that socio-intellectual embrace. Especially when the individual appears able to cope with the beastlier forms of street life. He reminds them of that English actor who portrays bumbling upper-class characters who stay calmly ironic while dealing with brute reality, even such horrors as having to buy a young black woman to service one orally. They understand such angst and often experience it themselves when making contracts with street people. Even young WASP women share a smile. They empathise with the man buying the woman! The idea of being on your knees in a back alley, staring up at a rich white bastard’s penis, seems not to occur.