‘Sunday Drive’ - Remembering the Event (May 2006)
They say the event cannot be anticipated, that this is, in part what
defines the event, that it must come, without warning, as out of a blue
Indian Summer morning, trans-forming.
Memories are easier, easier on the eye. They have settled in, like long
term lodgers occasionally met on a landing, always present, but rarely
brought to mind, they help to establish an illusion of normality.
Once events become memories, they tell all kinds of lies, tricking the mind’s gullible eye (its one good eye, and never the evil one which misleads and mistreats us so).
Thus, I recall that night, back in ... as a shower of ‘pizzazz’, and the art that I witnessed as a fire work of booms and light that sent glamour into new social orbit - ‘sent it up’ that is.
Its hard to forget personal circumstances too, which inevitably colour the scenes recalled. The two of us, my lovely partner and I, living carelessly and gambling daily at the ‘crasspoint’, as unlucky punks driven to do so by a world that seemed to offer us no real chances. Each in our own way a kind of immigrant.
And so we found ourselves that night scraping barrels, and like all beggars, needing even from those we feared and sometimes loathed. A bus home and some beigels, the best part of a borrowed fiver -or something like that (memories tell all kinds of lies, some sweet, some sour).
Inevitably dream-like as the reclaimed Freudian lands become, I wearily recall (woken here and now at dawn by supernatural calls), canyoubelieveit? a bar built from a church, a chapel filled with drunk revellers where we had to pull the wool over the doorman’s eyes (cash strapped as we were) rather than be welcomed by a priest.
Inside, outlandish girls caricatured their mother’s own woman-hood, or perhaps pastiched clay pages of monthly mags. Their heels were high -for sure- and they were tipped into dizzy wigs, suits of Pink-ish pseudo-Chanel, and surrendered their identity (like hostages to camera) under lipstick, liner and a ruthlessly regimented loony uniformity.
These gleeful sisters -yes, still hard to believe- stepped out sassily from a milling crowd -a clubby crowd, expectant, dream-like, a crowd from a boxing ring, a fashion show, or a ‘banger’ race, a crowd intoxicated and hoping for -what a decadent scene the artists had whipped up from nowhere- at least a little sweat.
Inside the one-time church, as if to mark the millennium at which Christianity’s credit (like my own) became exhausted (with God’s house sold to a brewery!) we found, not only whisky, and not only coke, and not only some ogling and Vogueing, but also the emptied husk of yet another Western dinosaur -the motor car.
Those mythical ones who manufacture tales and jokes say that the artists stripped all the weight out of the car, but none of its width, and so (it is said, like the tales of Jesus) when it came to the symbolic moment when the foul vehicle would penetrate the holy place, then, like a drunken pig of a man it fumbled at the door and couldn’t get it right. Hence, professionals were called in, bringing strength, experience, a cool head and a little imagination to the proceedings, deftly hoiking up the embarrassed Volvo on an allright jack so that it could glide with pride like a bride through the holy portals, fucking God at last (Phew!) but only with its tail (the filthy exhaust) between its legs.
But all that happened earlier and out of sight. It was in fact a kind of preparatory myth, a dream recalled by the later dream (a dream that dreamed ‘I must be dreaming’) and yet, it too is a significant image (albeit of an event that I never witnessed) with its own host of meanings that tumble out along with words-who-would-be-masters, like cereals from a pack.
Let me tell you, that the crowd were elated, like drooling paparazzi, when, from among their very ranks, the aforementioned gang of girl-art-terrorists sprang, shimmying well stitched hips and shoulder pads and letting-off the occasional backward smile in-sync with massed ranks of flashing cameras, and in keeping with the cacophonous back-shelf bass of some groovy tune.
But this was no cat walk, the space cleared by the crowd -as if for a good scrap- was where the vulgar Volvo waited, with all its ooomph! torn out (sans engine, sans gearbox, sans padding, sans all). The hypertypical bourgeois vehicle, a Volvo Sunday drive estate, efficiently designed by proud engineers to induce trauma for back-seat entrapped teenagers bursting with zits and other misdirected eruptions of desire. A car fatally formulated for the suicidal terrors of the safest, most Swedish, of journeys.
But tonight the belligerent UK, with its gum-spattered pavements and messy empirical governance, was in the house and kicking arse, and as the uniformed glitz of girls entered the car they whipped identical darling-little torches from somewhere in their linings, planted well-shod hooves through Flintstone holes craftily cut in the car’s floor, and -highlighting their sparkling heels with said torches- used their own not-insubstantial calf ‘n’ hip-might to move the vehicle (now bereft of any screwy Dad driver and cleaned of all gas guzzling guts) and thereby moved the crowd.
The drive wasn’t long but at least went nowhere (which is the most reliable kind of infinity), nowhere except from one end of the misused, disused chapel to the other, while the audience whooped and laughed out loud. Reaching the ends of the room (first forward, then reversed, each time in ‘top gear’ with immense, combined heel, toe and girl power) the bodywork pranged into immense steel sheets, suspended on frames so that they boomed like the crude gongs of some disorganised religion and pleased the crowd like an MC dropping a Def rhyme. Yes! it was Nu Yoiky, like those camp fantasies that 80s London had of wannabeing NYC and all its glamour-trash joy-riding bombed electric trains of a city burning out its pagan arteries.
Other than this, there’s little I recall. The booms of steel were satisfying, like something longed-for, and each -solemnly denoting the end of a short clumsy run- only promised more of the same. As the piece rolled-on, the girls became dishevelled by the heat, by the costumes and by the effort of pushing this ghostly husk of Dad around while all smothered in Mum, so that, when they finally re-appeared (like early Beatles from a fabulous flicker of four opening doors) their smiles were now over-sticky, wigs had slipped a bit, and here and there an ankle-strap needed adjusting as they tried to maintain fleeting superstar status, gleaming off into a sea of applause.
Thus, events (necessarily unprepared-for) sink, gently tumbling, like
dropped earrings and shiny coins, into amber pools of viscous memory,
where they sparkle amid the dim, and differently, at every turn we take
to look on them anew.
© 2006 Paul O'Kane