Illustration by Brian DeGraw |
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Vice: When did you start writing fiction?
I used to put out fanzines when I was a teenager. Sometimes I would invent my own imaginary bands and interview them. Later I got a job writing the quotes that go with the photo shoots in porno mags. I’ve carried on making things up ever since.
A couple of people said this piece was a bit of a dig at Vice.
Well, it was originally a pre-recorded spoken word piece that was used as part of a night put on by the artists Brian Degraw and Oliver Payne. I recorded it on a Dictaphone at six in the morning before getting hit by a car outside the Houses Of Parliament thirty minutes later. It’s a dig at a lot of things, including myself. |
had been tipped off in advance that Dave wanted to see me. A cross between David Koresh and David Ike dressed from head to toe in Japanese street wear brands, Dave was the owner of the trendy clothes shop I worked in. Someone had told him that I was selling the limited edition Nike trainers the shop sold, on eBay for ten times their recommended retail price. I’m ashamed to say, this is all true, but in my defence I had paid for every pair I sold. Surely then, I mentally rehearsed, it was my business if I wore them or gave them away or sold them for a vast profit or loss. What if I held on to them and gave them to my children who then sold them as antiques after I had died? Would that be so different? But like I said, I wasn’t supposed to know any of this, so when Dave’s PA phoned to ask if I would come into his office for a meeting I cheerfully agreed.
Like so many jobs, working in a trendy clothes shop was only meant to be a stopgap thing whilst I tried to find my feet again. After free falling for most of my twenties, the routine the job offered had come as a welcome relief. I saw it as a chance to straighten myself out. At the time I had nearly finished writing a rambling first novel. Now I thought I would be able to find the time in my new boring life to pursue my writing more purposefully.
Seven years later I was still struggling to finish it. The longer I stayed in the shop, the more I became convinced that without the routine I would effortlessly slip into one of the many ruts I had once been stuck in. But the rut I was in now was bigger than any possible rut that I was trying to avoid.
At least I had something to say before. The longer I remained in the shop the less I seemed to have to write about. What could a middle-aged man working in a trendy clothes shop possibly have to say that’s remotely interesting? If you’re looking for life you’re more likely to find it in a morgue than in a trendy clothes shop. A post office or six years on the dole doing nothing but smack and watching Third Reich movies (thanks Tony Ogden R.I.P) but never in a trendy clothes shop. It’s dead end but it’s not so doomed that you can dress it up as poetic or romantic. Charles Bukowski would never have written a book called “Trendy Men’s Clothes Shop”. I was neither the struggling pianist playing for tips in a bar or the ballet dancer who works as an exotic entertainer to pay the bills. Even the same customers I pitied confided in me because they saw themselves when they saw me festering like a trendy zombie behind the counter.
Like others, I dreamt of leaving a mark other than just my gravestone to prove that I too had walked this earth. How I was to go about this changed as I got older. At first it had been as a footballer but later it had been as a front man in a rock’n’roll band. By the time I reached my mid twenties and working in a desperate sex shop in a piss alley in Soho I had made a compromise: I was going to be a writer. That had been over ten years ago.
By now I knew I was never going to be a Nabokov or a Capote but I knew if I could somehow turn around my life I could still be a something. I was trying to be realistic. Once upon a time I dreamt of writing the literary equivalent of the 36 Chambers but I couldn’t see this happening any more. Don’t get me wrong I still had hope. I could still picture myself—if I pulled my finger out—writing something on a par with a later Lieutenant Pigeon single that only got played infrequently on German radio in the 70s. That’s not so bad I would console myself. Jarvis Cocker even chose “Mouldy Old Dough” by the Pigeon as one of his Desert Island Discs. At least they’ve got something to say, if their grandchildren ask them but what have they ever done? Not a forgotten classic like Emmanuel Bove’s “My Friends” or Tom Kromer’s “Waiting for Nothing” but still a forgotten something. It was better than nothing. It was a mark. A tag on one of life’s walls to let them know I had been here. It might not be playing live in front of a quarter of a million people at Knebworth while Patsy Kensit watches from the side of the stage but it was still was a mark. Only one other person in the world other than myself had to read it to prove that it wasn’t just a figment of my imagination. It didn’t even have to be a novel. It could be a short story. If I could write a single sentence in my lifetime to rival one of Fitzgerald’s I would be happy. It didn’t even have to be a book. Plenty of great stories appear in newspapers and magazines, but before you get any ideas, I’m not advocating not reading new books either. It didn’t have to be the Literary Review. It could be Dazed And Confused (I used to sneer that I would never write for such a rag but now I would beg them for a chance) or the Radio Times. Or one of those magazines that look a bit like Dazed and Confused that only the editor’s mates know the names of. I was so desperate that I would consider writing my own obituary for one of the free magazines they give away in the clothes shop. I just needed a chance to prove that I was alive.
MATTHIAS CONNOR
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