Bruce Bethke
The Skanky Soul of Jimmy Twist
It was late in the spring of 1977 when I returned, not by choice, to London. I'd been on the bum about the continent for some two years, busking for change and just generally enjoying life. The busking went well; I'm a good guitarist, a fair singer, and blessed with the sort of thin, blond, boyish good looks that appeal to the wallets of tourist women.
Unfortunately, the "enjoying life" bit climaxed in a brief but intense affair with Katrina, the pudgy daughter of a Hamburg banker. When she and I parted company that May there were no regrets, no accusations, no hard feelings and no words about the skin-headed young thug she was engaged to marry before she met me. I do wish she'd mentioned him.
For as it happens, he followed me to Amsterdam, bashed me silly, smashed my guitar, tossed the pieces in the Oude Schans Kanaal, tossed me in after it, and landed the both of us in the Jordaan clink. His family's solicitor arrived the next morning, of course, and took him back to Hamburg less a 50-guilder fine for dumping rubbish in the canal but I went before the dock for vagrancy. By noon they'd seized my passport and put me on the train to Vlissingen, thence to spend another cheery night in jail before catching the morning boat back to Mother England.
I really do wish she'd mentioned him.
Not that I felt bad for being deported; the Dutch don't have proper beds in their jails, just concrete slabs with a thin pretense of mattress. I didn't mind leaving.
Trouble was, I was going back to England with no money, no prospects, no choices, and above all, no guitar. I'd been quite attached to that guitar; it was a lovely old 1953 Gibson LGO that'd belonged to my Uncle Lewis, and now the dear thing was a clutter of kindling floating somewhere in the Zuider Zee.
Still, as Rasham was to later tell me through Jimmy Twist: The cold rain it must fall to bring the bountifulness forth.
The dark pain you must feel to love the gladful tidings more.
I will admit that if he'd tried to tell me that just then, though, I would have broken his nose.
The next day was spent in wallowing across the Channel from Vlissingen to Sheerness. In the morning I parked myself in a cold metal chaise lounge on the foredeck and claimed I was making plans, but mostly I stared. Stared at the oily grey sky. Stared at the somewhat darker oily grey sea. Stared at the gull droppings and rust streaks on the deck. Then I opened my kit bag and stared awhile at the neck and peghead of my guitar: the only pieces I'd managed to rescue during the preceding two days' lunacy. The poor thing would never play again, but I resolved that if I ever lucked into a mansion, I'd mount the neck above the mantelpiece.
It was while my eyes were drifting back toward another good stare at the sky that I realised I was being stared at. Sitting balanced on the starboard rail, with nothing behind him but five hundred miles of open sea and then Norway, was a Jamaican, dredlocks whipping in the breeze. The start that came with realising we were looking directly into each other's eyes nearly tipped my chair.
It wasn't as though I'd never seen a rastaman before I'd partied with quite a few of them; they always had the best ganja but this man seemed a focus of intensity. His eyes were black volcanic glass set in ivory, binding mine. Standard English deference demands you quickly look away from a stranger, but I could not. Perhaps I'd been among the sun-starved Northern Europeans too long, but he seemed darker than black.
Then he smiled? His lips parted, his cheeks grew taut, he bared his teeth: I certainly hoped it was a smile. In any event, I flashed my best Stan Laurel in response, and he threw his head back and laughed hoarsely, the thin sound streaming away in the breeze. I used the opportunity to glance away; when I looked back, he was gone. At first I thought he'd pitched over the rail, but as I looked 'round for someone to report it to I saw him sauntering aft, singing softly in the same hoarse voice. With great relief, I went back to soaking my feet in a pool of self-pity.
We ran into a bit of weather in the afternoon, and I moved to a vacant chair in the ship's salon, where I remained unable to decide what I would do after the ferry docked. Get my passport reinstated and return to the continent? Appealing, but impossible. Until I repaid the fine and the fare, I was stranded in the U.K.
Stay on in Sheerness, then, or Gillingham? In Gillingham?
Seriously…
Hitch to Birmingham and drop in on Mum and Dad? Well, yes, I could, but either Dad would beat me for losing his brother's guitar, or Mum would tell me again how I was headed to a bad end just like that ne'er-do-well Lewis.
Still, I was stuck for a better idea and had just resigned myself to crawling meekly back to Birmingham, when one really nasty thought popped up and queered the deal. Mum had always treated the guitar as if it were the first cousin to heroin. Suppose she welcomed me with open arms, for finally being rid of it?
That left London. London is the sump of the Isles; if you can't make it anywhere else, you go to London, tell people you're a musician, and live on the dole. Even in London, though, I knew I was in for a tough hang of it. Nearly 25, I still wore patched Levi's and long hair, and my taste in music ran to American Rhythm & Blues, which at that moment was out of vogue again. (British music fans have no rivals for fickleness, excepting perhaps this Italian heiress I met on Mallorca.)
But I had some borderline mates I could look up on Fonthill Road, and with a bit of research…
By the time the ferry docked I had a rough sketch of my future. Clearing Customs with the usual annoyance, I converted my last few guilders to pounds and pence, nicked a copy of Time Out from a news-stand, and hung my thumb out on the motorway. Two days later I resurfaced in London; along the way I'd traded my least ratty Levi's for some camouflage commando knickers, borrowed a scissors and done a nasty job on my hair, and changed my name to Stig Bollock.
London, in the summer of 1977, was a marvelous place to be impoverished, unemployed, and living on the cheap. I stayed for a bit with some lads I'd met in Milano, and they introduced me to Gina, who took me in for two weeks and gave me urethritis, but Public Health cleared that right up.
Gina in turn put me on to a bunch of squatters in Finsbury Park, and from there I went to a Mrs. O'Grady's rooming house, which was not as cheap as squatting but a bit safer from a materialistic standpoint. By the end of June I'd a rathole flat, a Fender Squire with no serial number and a dubious past, a matching amplifier, and a bit of a reputation as a guitar player. The crowd I'd fallen in with was exciting, and my prospects for getting into steady gigging were quite good; on the whole it was a keen turnabout, given that six weeks before I'd been bobbing in a sewage-laden canal and wondering if anyone would bother to fish me out. Everything was falling together wonderfully 'til I met Mr. Twist.
Jimmy Twist moved in on the morning of the first of July. I remember because Old Duckbury and I were sitting out on the front stoop that morning, having a particularly bad chat. Duckbury was a retired career soldier, one of those grim relics of empire that should be declared part of the National Historic Trust and only allowed out on holidays. Tall, cadaverously thin, yet with a thick bristling white moustache and hair to match, he claimed to have served in the Boer War, served in Burma, served in Normandy he carried himself with such magnificent Prussian arrogance I kept expecting him to claim he'd served at Waterloo.
Anyway, Old Duckbury and I had taken to sitting out on the front stoop in the mornings before the heat built up, chatting a bit and sharing a Guiness or two. The conversations were hard to follow, as he had a habit of slipping from war to war, but it was his Guiness, so I did my best to look attentive. The morning that Twist moved in, Duckbury was telling a particularly tedious story about some tart he'd met in Paris, and I was nodding politely and thinking of getting out my Fender to try a bit of busking old habits die hard when suddenly the most clapped-out Cortina I've ever seen came bouncing up to the kerb and a half-dozen blacks leapt out.