Sticky Fingers Pt.5. Big Sur

Arthur gets from the airport into the city OK. He has decided to spend a few days in Bangkok before going back to the village where he lives. He needs to collect his thoughts so he’s taken a room in a cheap hotel. It’s the one where he usually stays, just off Sukhumvit Road.

Probably the Crown on Soi 8. I’ve stayed there a few times myself. Not one of the world’s great hotels but ideal for thought collection. Dick here again, your friendly master of ceremonies. So Arthur is recuperating. Fair enough. We’ll catch up with him later but first I want to mention an article about Harold Pinter I came across the other day in The Scotsman I think it was. He describes himself as ‘written out.’ Hello I said to myself, I’m hardly in Harold’s league but I think I can identify with that feeling. Not that I was ever 'written in' but I know how difficult it is to come up with something original and interesting.

If you’re reading this Harold, take heart. Here at Team Headley we are old hands at backfilling the existential void. Thanks to our dedicated team of researchers working round the clock we do our best to amuse, inform, and, in our own modest way, educate, whilst maintaining a carefully cultivated aura of ironic self-detachment. To accomplish this we use mostly words interspersed with the occasional illustration gleaned from the internet. Did I say occasional? I mean a lot of pictures because as everybody knows a picture is worth a thousand words and I’m a lazy bastard. It also helps those who can’t read.

Words, words, words. The ‘stench of words’ J.D.Salinger called it. They do tend to get a bit tedious don’t they? Not that I don't like having a bit of a lexical ramble (in a base morpheme sense) myself. But words alone do tend to get up one’s nose. We could get all Joycian I suppose, or do a Syd Barrett on acid but that's not quite what we're after here. Deconstruction is the key I think. What we want is a sort of pastiche. A good old Milleresque stream, you could say, something that makes sense but in an elusive kind of way. Nothing too concrete...something fluid and constantly evolving, bloglike, where nothing is fixed, everything gets dissipated and there aren't any editors to worry about. Just lots of words all run together into one paragraph without much punctuation for that spontaneous effect.

Ideally the end result should be a gimpy hybrid style. Part Kingsley Amis part Charles Bukowski but whereas they could get away with lots of filth and misogyny I’m just another dirty old man. It’s OK for them to show simultaneous compassion for, and disgust with, humanity but if I try it I alienate even my most broad-minded readers. Of course if I was a successful writer then I could be rude and everybody would say ‘That Dick, he’s a card’. How come Martin Amis and that lot can write books about pedophilia, gratuitous violence, porn and the inner workings of yellow journalist’s minds and get hailed as having their fingers on the cultural pulse? They’re examining burning issues of our age of course that’s why. But if I do it I’m just an old perv. It’s very depressing. I spend a lot of time toiling over a hot keyboard trying to write something interesting and all I get is one rejection slip after another. It’s enough to drive one to drink.

And it’s not as if I don’t aim for emotional honesty. Like every teenage mum who says fuck a lot I understand how important it is to present my intimate musings in a positive, progressive, and gender sensitive way, while remaining brutally frank about my own sexual shortcomings and not offending any minorities or animals.

At the same time I strive to remain as apolitical as possible. Not that I have anything against politicians, most of whom are clearly dedicated to the public welfare. It's just that politics gets on my tits and leads to arguments. I prefer to focus my attention on cultural matters. Michel Houellebecq's predictions, the music of Barry Manilow, Pamela Anderson's implants. Things like that. I also try to keep up with any new developments in the world of art, literature and internet communication. Pure self-indulgence? Perhaps, but it gives me the illusion of being part of something larger than my Self and it takes my mind off the finite nature of things.

Talking of Henry Miller, Arthur ran into him in Athens once. It was when he was hitch-hiking to India in the Sixties with his friend Simon. I’ll be talking more about that later with a bit of luck. It’s a sort of Herman Hesse take off. I might make it into a separate section. Depends how the editor feels when she gets back from Tuscany.

Anyway Arthur and Simon left England and went over to France. This was in the early Sixties and girls were just starting to say fuck a bit. They stopped in Paris, hitchhiked down through Italy and took the boat over to Greece.

So there they were in Athens one sunny day. The Plaka to be precise, home to artists and beatniks at the time, now a picturesque ghetto for millionaires. They’d just been on the Acropolis chatting up the pear-shaped oversexed liberated American college girls who used to sit, caryatidlike, on the steps of the Parthenon each with her precious copy of ‘Europe on $5 a Day’, first published in 1957 and 'Franny & Zooey' (1961). You could tell they were liberated because they said fuck occasionally.

Arthur and Simon were walking down some steps between small whitewashed houses when who should be coming the other way but Henry Miller! They knew it was him because he matched the photo on Arthur’s copy of ‘Tropic of Cancer’ (first published in Paris in 1934).

‘Mr. Miller…,’ Said Simon.

‘Fuck off.’ Said Henry.

Which taught Simon a valuable lesson. If you want to interview somebody make sure you do the groundwork first. To be fair Henry had a few things on his mind at the time. The case of Grove Press versus Gerstein was going through the courts and a lot depended on the outcome. Would ‘Tropic of Cancer’ be deemed pornographic? The future of Western Literature was at stake. On top of that he wasn’t quite sure if he even had another book in him. He certainly didn’t want to deal with scruffy young sycophants.

Rumour has it Henry died at his place on Big Sur while watching Japanese girls (who are too polite to say fuck) play nude badminton. It’s very possible. If we had a helicopter this might be a good time to do a panoramic journey up the West Coast of North America swooping condor-like through the majestic tree-lined bays and rocky inlets of Northern California. Look there! It’s Monterey Bay. Next up is San Francisco of course then we cross the Mendocino County Line. Further up the spectacular Oregon coastline we spot Portland, then, moving right along we come to Seattle, where we catch a glimpse of the Boeing factory, and Redmond where Windows come(s) from and across the Juan da Fuca Straits and the Gulf Islands to the even more spectacular West Coast of Vancouver Island with its giant cedars, rugged rocky coves and long empty beaches. Look there’s the ferry from Campbell River to Prince Rupert and thence to Haida Gwai! We could continue up the coast to Alaska but you’ve probably had enough for one day so what better place to end our little tour than the beautiful Comox Valley on the sheltered side of Vancouver Island which of course is where Pamela Anderson, a girl with multiple interests who probably says fuck a lot, but not in public, comes from. Perhaps next time you fancy a virtual tour of the East Coast from Texas to Labrador? Would that be nice? We can stop in New York along the way for hot chocolate with the Naked Cowboy in the Seinfeld Café. Or coffee if you like. But I digress. This is supposed to be a novel. Get that finger out Dick or we’ll never get anywhere.