I
received the call on my secure line at the Roadkill Café & McLeod Bar in
Montana, where I had gone to straighten out after the events centred around the
World Club Challenge. Pausing only to finish my beer, I lit out for the
Airport. I could pick up clothes and a toothbrush when I got back to England.
Travel light, Bubba; that’s my trick. The seasoned Freak leaves a feather’s
footprint on this sick sad world.
I got off
the plane at Heathrow around midnight and no one spoke as I went down the
walkway to the lounge. The air was hot and heavy, like wandering into a steam
bath. Inside, pinstripers and fatbacks hugged each other and shook hands… big
grins and a whoop here and there: “By God! You old bastard! Good to
see you, old chap! Bloody good… and I mean it!”
In the
air-conditioned lounge I met a South African who said his name was something or
other - let’s call him Hugo - and he was here to get it on. “I’ve just flown in from Pretoria,” he said, “I live in
one of the nice neighbourhoods too. No wogs, just good people like me. I’m
ready for the match, ready for anything,
by God! Anything at all. Yeah, what are you drinkin'?” I ordered a vodka, but
he wouldn’t hear of it: “No, no… what kind of drink is that for Six Nations
time? What’s wrong with you, boy?” He grinned and winked at the
bartender. “Goddam, we have to educate this
boy. Get him something proper… “
I
shrugged. “Okay, a large Pimm’s.” Hugo nodded his approval.
“Look.” He tapped me on the arm to
make sure I was listening. “I know the rugger crowd, I come here every year,
and let me tell you one thing I’ve learned - London is no place to be giving
people the impression you’re not 100% behind the Six Nations. Not in public,
anyway. Shit, they’ll have you stitched up on the front page of the Sunday
Times before you can say ‘Simon Barnes’.”
I thanked
him and flipped a cigar into my mouth. “Say,” he said, “you look like you might
be in the rugger business… am I right?”
“No,” I said. “I’m a photographer.”
“Oh yeah?” He eyed my ragged
leather bag with new interest. “Is that what you got there - cameras? Who you
work for?”
“Playboy,” I said.
He
laughed. “Bloody hell! What are you gonna take pictures of - naked rugger
players? Hah! I guess you’ll be workin’ pretty hard when they run the team
baths.” He was laughing wildly. “Hell yeah!”
I shook my
head and said nothing; just stared at him for a moment, trying to look grim.
“There’s going to be trouble,” I said. “My assignment is to take pictures of the
riot.”
“What riot?”
I
hesitated, twirling the ice in my drink. “At the stadium. On the first day…
Black Power activists and a whole load of their friends.” I stared at him
again. “Haven’t you read the English newspapers?”
The grin
on his face had collapsed. “What the hell
are you talkin’ about?”
“Well… maybe I shouldn’t be
telling you… “ I shrugged. “But hell, everybody else seems to know. The cops
and the army have been getting ready for six weeks. They have 2,000 troops on
alert at Richmond. They’ve warned us - all the press and photographers - to
wear helmets and special vests like flak jackets. We were told to expect
shooting… “
“No!” he shouted; his hands flew
up and hovered momentarily between us, as if to ward off the words he was
hearing. Then he whacked his fist on the bar. “Those fucking kaffirs! God
Almighty! The Six Nations!” He kept shaking his head. “No! Jesus!
That’s almost too bad to believe!” Now he seemed to be sagging on the stool,
and when he looked up his eyes were misty. “Why? Why here? Don’t they
respect anything?”
I shrugged
again. “It’s not just the Black Power mob. The FBI says busloads of white
crazies are coming in from all over the country - to mix with the crowd and
attack all at once, from every direction. They’ll be dressed like everybody
else. You know - Barbour Jackets and blazers and all that kinda stuff. But when
the trouble starts… well, that’s why the cops are so worried.”
He sat for
a moment, looking hurt and confused and not quite able to digest all this
terrible news. Then he cried out: “Oh… Jesus! What in the name of God is
happening? Where can you get away from it?”
“Not here,” I said, picking up my
bag. “Thanks for the drink… and good luck.”
He grabbed
my arm, urging me to have another, but I said I was running late and hustled
off to get my act together for the awful spectacle. At an airport newsagent I
picked up a Sunday Times and
scanned the sports stories: ‘…the biggest sporting event in the world…’, ‘The finest Rugby (sic) players in the Northern
hemisphere’, ‘Rugby League is dying. Simon Barnes on why attendances and TV
ratings are irrelevant.” At the bottom of the page was a photo of Jason
Robinson, soon to play for the England Rugby union team in the Six Nations. The
rest of the paper was spotted with ugly news and stories of ‘TV ratings for
Rugby Special’ were conspicuous by their absence, especially compared to the
other broadsheets. There was no mention of the Challenge Cup.
I went to
the Hertz desk to pick up my car, but the pizza-faced young android in charge
said they didn’t have any. “You can’t rent one anywhere,” he assured me. “It’s
the Rugby; our luxury car reservations have been booked for six weeks.” I
explained that my agent had confirmed a white Mercedes convertible for me that
very afternoon but he shook his head. “Maybe we’ll have a cancellation. Where
are you staying?”
I
shrugged. “Where’s the Rugby crowd staying? I want to be with those people.”
He sighed.
“You’re in trouble, then. Those kinds of hotel are full. Always are, for the 6 Nations.”
I leaned
closer to him, half-whispering: “Look, I’m from Playboy. How would you like a job?”
He backed
off quickly. “What? Come on, now. What kind of a job?”
“Never mind,” I said. “You just
blew it.” I swept my medical bag off the counter and went to find a cab. The
bag is a valuable prop in this kind of work; mine has a lot of baggage tags on
it - Angola, Chechnya, Barrow, Lima, Kabul, Bangkok, that sort of thing - and
the most prominent tag of all is a very official, plastic-coated thing that
says “Photog. Playboy Mag.” I bought it from a pimp in Neasden and he had told
me how to use it. “Never mention Playboy
until you’re sure they’ve seen this thing first,” he said. “Then, when you see
them notice it, that’s the time to strike. They’ll go belly up ever time. This
thing is magic, I tell you. Pure magic.”
Well…
maybe so. I’d used it on the poor geek in the bar, and now humming along in a
Cab into town, I tried to feel a little guilty about jangling the poor sod’s
brains with that evil fantasy. But what the hell? Anybody who wanders around
the world saying, “Hell yeah, I’m a rugger fan from Pretoria,” deserves
whatever happens to him. And he had, after all, come here once again to make a
nineteenth-century ass of himself in the midst of some jaded, atavistic
freakout with nothing to recommend it except a very saleable ‘tradition’. Early in our chat, Hugo had told me that he
hadn’t missed a the Six Nations since 1984. “The little lady won’t come
anymore,” he said. “She grits her teeth and turns me loose for this one. And
when I say ‘loose’ I do mean loose! I toss cash around like they were
goin’ out of style! Whisky, women… shit, there’s women who follow rugger who’ll
do anything for money.”
Why not?
Money is a good thing to have in these twisted times.
The next
day was heavy. With only thirty hours until posting time I had no press
credentials and - according to the ‘Rugby’ hack I had spoken to - no hope at
all of getting any. Worse, I needed two sets: one for myself and
another for League Freak, the Aussie who was coming from down under to
collaborate with me on this project as a photographer. All I knew about him was
that this was his first visit to the Old Dart and the more I pondered the fact,
the more it gave me fear.
How would
he bear up under the heinous culture shock of being lifted out of Australia and
plunged into the drunken mob scene at the Six Nations? There was no way of
knowing. Hopefully, he would arrive at least a day or so ahead, and give
himself time to get acclimatised. Maybe a few hours of peaceful sightseeing
might calm him. My plan was to pick him up at the airport in the huge Toyota
Ballbuster I’d rented from a used-car salesman named Biggish Al, then whisk him
off to some setting that might remind him of home. I improved the Toyota’s
looks with a couple of stickers: ‘100% LEAGUE, 0% UNION’ and ‘PETER WHEELER CAN HAVE RUGBY LEAGUE WHEN HE PRIES MY COLD
DEAD HAND OFF IT AND NOT BEFORE’.
Biggish Al
had solved the car problem, and money (four times the normal rate) had bought
two rooms in a scumbox on the outskirts of Hounslow. The only other kink was
the task of convincing the moguls at Twickers that TotalRugbyLeague.com
was such a prestigious sporting journal that common sense compelled them to
give us two sets of the best press tickets. This was not easily done. My first
call to the publicity office resulted in total failure. The press handler was
shocked at the idea that anyone would be stupid enough to apply for press
credentials two days before the kick-off. “You can’t be serious,” he said. “The
deadline was two months ago. The press box is full; there’s no more room… and
what the hell is TotalRugbyLeague.com anyway?”
I uttered
a painful groan. “Didn’t they call you? They’re flying a real pro over to do
the photos. League Freak. He’s Australian; very famous over there. Yes. I just
got in from the USA. The Jacksonville office told me we were all set.”
He seemed
interested, and even sympathetic, but there was nothing he could do. I
flattered him with more gibberish about the ‘challenge’ of watching the
‘intricate technicalities’ of Rugby union, and finally he offered a compromise:
he could get us two passes to the Press Bar but the Press box itself was out of
the question.
“That sounds a little weird,” I
said. “In fact it’s unacceptable. We must have access to everything. All of it. The spectacle, the people,
the pageantry and certainly the tradition. You don’t think we came all this way
to watch the damn thing on television, do you? One way or another we’ll get
inside. Maybe we’ll have to threaten somebody.” (I had picked up a can of Mace
and a neat little Gerber Silver Serrator from a mail order catalogue and
suddenly, in the midst of that ‘phone call, I was struck by the hideous
possibilities of using them out at the stadium. Macing ushers at the narrow
gates to the clubhouse inner sanctum, then slipping quickly inside, firing a
huge load of Mace into the governor’s box, just as the match starts. Or Macing
helpless drunks in the clubhouse restroom, for their own good…)
By noon on
Friday I was still without press credentials and still unable to locate League
Freak. For all I knew he’d changed his mind and gone back to Australia.
Finally, after giving up on League Freak and trying unsuccessfully to reach my
man in the press office, I decided my only hope for credentials was to go out
to the stadium and confront the man in person, with no warning - demanding only
one pass now, instead of two, and talking very fast with a strange lilt in my
voice, like a man trying hard to control some inner frenzy. On the way out of
the hotel, I stopped at the front desk to check for messages from TRL.com.
Then, as a useless afterthought, I asked if by any wild chance a Mr L.Freak had
checked in.
The lady
on the desk was about fifty years old and very peculiar-looking; when I
mentioned League Freak’s name she nodded, without looking up from whatever she
was writing, and said in a posh voice, “Oh yes, he did.” Then she favoured me
with a quizzical glance. “Yes, indeed. Mr Freak just left for Twickenham. Is he
a friend of yours?”
I shook my
head. “I’m supposed to be working with him, but I don’t even know what he looks
like. Now, goddammit, I’ll have to find him in the mob.”
She
chuckled. “You won’t have any trouble finding him. You could pick that
man out of any crowd.”
“Why?” I asked. “What’s wrong with
him? What does he look like?”
“Well… “ she said, still grinning,
“he’s the strangest looking thing I’ve seen in a long time.” She nodded.
“You’ll know him when you see him; don’t worry about that.”
“Good” I said curtly “Strangeness
is my business.”
Creeping
Jesus, I thought. That screws the press credentials. I had a vision of some
nerve-rattling gimp all covered with matted hair and string-warts showing up in
the press office and demanding TotalRugbyLeague.com’s press pack. Well… what the hell? We
could always load up on acid and spend the day roaming around the clubhouse
grounds with big cameras, laughing hysterically at the natives and swilling
Pimm’s so the cops wouldn’t think we’re abnormal. Perhaps even make the act
pay; set up an portrait booth with a big sign saying, “Let a Foreign Artist
Take Your Portrait, £10 a pop. Do It NOW!”
I took the
motorway out to the stadium, driving very fast and jumping the monster
Ballbuster back and forth between lanes, driving with a beer in one hand and my
mind so muddled that I almost crushed a Volkswagen full of nuns when I swerved
to catch the right exit. There was a slim chance, I thought, that I might be
able to catch my antipodean colleague before he checked in.
But League
Freak was already in the press box when I got there, an Aussie wearing a
leather coat and sunglasses. There was nothing particularly odd about him. No
facial veins or clumps of bristly warts. I told him about the hotel woman’s
description and he seemed puzzled. “Don’t let it bother you,” I said. “Just
keep in mind for the next few days that we’re in Ruggerville. Not London. Not
even England. This is a weird place. You’re lucky that mental defective at the
hotel didn’t jerk a pistol out of the cash register and blow a big hole in
you.” I laughed, but he looked worried.
“Just pretend you’re visiting a
huge outdoor loony bin,” I said. “If the inmates get out of control we’ll soak
them down with Mace.” I showed him the can of “Chemical Billy,” resisting the
urge to fire it across the room at a rat-faced man from the Telegraph typing
diligently in corner. We were standing at the bar, sipping the RFU’s Scotch and
congratulating each other on our sudden, unexplained luck in picking up two
sets of fine press credentials. The lady at the desk had been very friendly to
him, he said. “I just told her my name and she gave me the whole works.”
By
mid-afternoon we had everything under control. We had seats looking down on the
centre line, colour TV, a free bar in the press room, and a selection of passes
that would take us anywhere from the stadium roof to the changing rooms. The
only thing we lacked was unlimited access to the inner sanctum in sections “F
& G”, and I felt we needed that, to see the whisky gentry in action. The
Boss Hogg of Leicester, a swinish neo-Nazi hack named Peter Wheeler, would be
in “G,” along with Ian Duncan Smith and Peter Salmon. I felt we’d be legal in a
box in “G” where we could rest and sip whisky, soak up a bit of atmosphere and
the Six Nations’ apparently special vibrations.
The best
bars and dining rooms are also in “F & G,” and the bars on matchday are a
very special kind of scene. Along with the politicians, society slappers and
local captains of commerce, every half-mad dingbat who ever had any pretensions
to anything at all within five hundred miles of Twickenham will show up there
to get strutting drunk and slap a lot of backs and generally make himself
obvious.
These bars
are probably the best place to sit and watch faces. Nobody minds being stared
at; that’s what they’re in there for. Some people spend most of their time in
the bar; they can hunker down at one of the many tables, lean back in a
comfortable chair and not bother watching the ‘action’.
Waiters in
white serving jackets move through the crowd with trays of drinks, while the
pundits drone on and on at the cameras and ex-players make laboured jokes in an
effort at laddishness. There is a constant flow of traffic to and from the
windows facing the pitch to see if anything has happened. Then, as kick-off
time nears, the crowd thins out as people go back to their hospitality boxes.
Clearly,
we were going to have to figure out some way to spend more time in the
clubhouse on matchday. But the “walkabout” press passes to F & G were only
good for thirty minutes at a time, presumably to allow the newspaper types to
rush in and out for photos or quick interviews, but to prevent drifters like
League Freak and me from spending all day in the clubhouse, harassing the
gentry and rifling the odd handbag or two while cruising around the boxes. Or
Macing the governor. On matchday the walkabout passes would be in heavy demand,
and since it took about ten minutes to get from the press box to pitchside, and
ten more minutes to get back, that didn’t leave much time for serious people-watching.
And unlike most of the others in the press box, we didn’t give a hoot in hell
what was happening on the turf. We had come there to watch the real
animals perform.
Later that
afternoon, we went out on the balcony of the press box and I tried to describe
to League Freak the difference between what we were seeing today and what would
be happening tomorrow. This was the first time I’d been to a Six Nations
fixture, but before I discovered Rugby League I used to watch the tournament on
TV every year. Now, looking down from the press box, I pointed to the huge
stands enclosing the pitch. “That whole thing,” I said, “will be jammed with
people; sixty-plus thousand or so, and most of them staggering drunk. It’s a
fantastic scene - thousands of people fainting, crying, copulating and
trampling each other. More action than on the pitch. We’ll have to spend some
time out there, but it’s hard to move around, too many bodies.”
“Is it safe out there? Will we ever
come back?”
“Sure,” I said. “We’ll just have
to be careful not to step on anybody’s stomach and start a fight.” I shrugged.
“Hell, this clubhouse scene right below us will be almost as bad as the
infield. Thousands of raving, stumbling drunks, getting smugger and cockier as
they make more and more business deals. By mid-afternoon they’ll be guzzling
beer with both hands and vomiting on each other. The whole place will be jammed
with bodies, shoulder to shoulder. It’s hard to move around. The aisles will be
slick with puke; people falling down and grabbing at your legs to keep from
being stomped. Drunks pissing on themselves in the toilet lines. Dropping
handfuls of money and fighting to stoop over and pick it up.”
He looked
so nervous that I laughed. “I’m just kidding,” I said. “Don’t worry. At the
first hint of trouble I’ll start pumping this ‘Chemical Billy’ into the crowd.”
He had
done a few good snaps, but so far we hadn’t seen that special kind of face that
I felt we would need for a lead photo. It was a face I’d seen a thousand times
at every Derby I’d ever been to. I saw it, in my head, as the mask of the Old
Fart - a mix of booze, money and a terminal identity crisis; the inevitable
result of too much inbreeding in a closed and ignorant culture.
One of the
key genetic rules in breeding dogs, horses or any other kind of thoroughbred is
that close inbreeding tends to magnify the weak points in a bloodline as well
as the strong points. In horse breeding, for instance, there is a definite risk
in breeding two fast horses who are both a little crazy. The offspring will
likely be very fast and also very crazy. So the trick in breeding thoroughbreds
is to retain the good traits and filter out the bad. But the breeding of humans
is not so wisely supervised, particularly in a narrow Home Counties society
where the closest kind of social inbreeding is not only stylish and acceptable,
but far more convenient - to the parents - than setting their offspring free to
find their own mates, for their own reasons and in their own ways. (“Good Lord,
did you hear about Charles' daughter? She got drunk in Cheltenham last week and
kissed a pleb!”) So the face I was trying to find in Twickenham that weekend
was a symbol, in my own mind, of the whole doomed atavistic culture that makes
the Six Nations what it is.
On our way
back to the hotel after Friday’s reconnaissance I warned League Freak about
some of the other problems we’d have to cope with. Neither of us had brought
any strange illegal drugs, so we would have to get by on booze. “You should
keep in mind,” I said, “that almost everybody you talk to from now on will be
drunk. People who seem very pleasant at first might suddenly swing at you for
no reason at all.” He nodded, staring straight ahead. He seemed to be getting a
little numb and I decided to cheer him up by taking him to the local Greek
restaurant for dinner that night, to flesh out the details of our mission.
We moved
into a new hotel, where rooms had just become available. The receptionist
seemed nervous about our appearance and quiveringly asked if we were going to
be well-behaved. I smiled as best I could: “Trouble ma’am? Hell no, we’re the
Pros from Dover. We just flew in to croak a scag baron known as ‘The Sheriff’. We aren’t going to cause a ruckus.”
Given the
time of year, we both had St Valentine’s Day Moussaka as I explained “In the
runup to the Six Nations, our allies have been picked off with surgical
efficiency. In an horrific, but admirably ‘retro’ touch, Dave Hadfield’s body
was recovered from a submerged car at Chappaquiddick. Ray French is missing
too, presumably gone to the same place as Jimmy Hoffa.”, I paused, wondering if
the Freak was ready for this heavy trip I was laying on him, “Our mission is to
transfer Arnold Toynbee’s theory into practice and record the outcome. Not a
real bomb, of course, but something foul that would make Rugby union people
double over and start squirting both ends.”
Back at
the hotel we talked for awhile about Australia, the Dream, England - just
relaxing a bit before dinner. There was no way either of us could have known,
at the time, that it would be the last normal conversation we would have. From
that point on, the weekend became a vicious, drunken nightmare. We both went
completely to pieces. This added a certain amount of strain to the situation,
and since poor League Freak had no choice but to take whatever came his way, he
was subjected to shock after shock.
Another
problem was his habit of snapping people he met at awkward angles and in
unflattering light and poses - then giving them the results. The results were
always unfortunate. I warned him several times about letting the subjects see
his foul renderings, but for some perverse reason he kept doing it.
Consequently, he was regarded with fear and loathing by nearly everyone who’d
seen or even heard about his work. Ho couldn’t understand it. “It’s sort of a
joke,” he kept saying. “Why, it’s quite normal. People don’t take offence. They
understand that I’m just putting them on a bit.”
“These people regard what you’re
doing to them as a brutal, bilious insult.” I said. “Look what happened last
night. I thought Cuckoo was going to tear your head off.”
League
Freak shook his head sadly. “But I liked him. He struck me as a very decent,
straightforward sort.”
“Look, Freak,” I said. “Let’s not
kid ourselves. That was a very horrible photo you gave him. It was the face of
a monster. It got on his nerves very badly.” I shrugged. “Why in hell do you
think we left the restaurant so fast?”
“I thought it was because of the
Mace,” he said.
“What Mace?”
He
grinned. “When you shot it at the head waiter, don’t you remember?”
“Hell, that was nothing,” I said.
“I missed him… and we were leaving, anyway.”
“But it got all over us,” he said.
“The room was full of that damn gas. You were sneezing and I was crying. My
eyes hurt for two hours. I still couldn’t see all that well when we got back to
the hotel.”
“That’s right,” I said. “The stuff
got on your leg, didn’t it? Yeah… well, okay… Let’s just figure we fucked up
about equally on that one,” I said. “But from
now on let’s try to be careful when we’re around people I know. You won’t snap
them and I won’t Mace them. We’ll just try to relax and get drunk.”
“Right,” he said. “We’ll go
native.”
It was
Saturday morning, the day of the Big Event, and we were having breakfast in a
plastic hamburger palace called ‘Frying Tonite’. Our rooms were just across the
road in the Brown Suburban Hotel. They had a dining room, but the food was so
bad that we couldn’t handle it anymore. League Freak liked ‘Frying Tonite’ because it had fish and chips. I preferred
the Meat Pie,” which really wasn’t all that good, but old habits die hard.
Beyond
drink and lack of sleep, our only real problem at that point was the question
of access to the press box. Finally, we decided to go ahead and steal two
passes, if necessary, rather than miss that part of the action. This was the
last coherent decision we were able to make for the next forty-eight hours.
From that point on - almost from the very moment we started out to the stadium
- we lost all control of events annd spent the rest of the weekend churning
around in a sea of drunken horrors. My notes and recollections from Derby Day
are somewhat scrambled.
But now,
looking at the big red notebook I carried all through that scene, I see more or
less what happened. The book itself is somewhat mangled and bent; some of the
pages are torn, others are shrivelled and stained by what appears to be whisky,
but taken as a whole, with sporadic memory flashes, the notes seem to tell the
story. To wit:
Rain all night until dawn. No
sleep. Christ, here we go, a nightmare of mud and madness… But no. By noon the
sun burns through - perfect day, not even humid.
League Freak is now worried about
fire. Somebody told him some story about the press box being torched two years
ago. Could it happen again? Horrible. Trapped in the press box. Holocaust. A
hundred people fighting to get out. Drunks screaming in the flames and the mud,
crazed Old Farts running wild. Blind in the smoke. Grandstand collapsing into
the flames with us on the roof. Poor League Freak is about to crack. Drinking
heavily, into the Courvoisier.
The
Ballbuster roaring down Nelson Road, scattering Volvos and Range Rovers.
Destination - Pig Central. “Take a shot of this, League Freak,” I yell over the
engine roar. “it’ll send your penis to Venus!” I hand him an unmarked phial and
he loads up, ready for combat.
As we crash through the gates, we
encounter Mickey Skinner and Brian Moore. They are being ‘personalities’ for a
herd of fans through the medium of wearing amusingly designed waistcoats. It
doesn’t take much to entertain some people, which is why the Six Nations
exists. We grease our wheelnuts with their entrails.
Sidewalks full of people all
moving in the same direction, towards Twickers. Kids hauling beer coolers for
their parents, failed P.E. teachers from minor public schools, many Range
Rovers… full of barbeque gear, most likely… cops waving traffic along.
The mob was thick around the
entrances; very slow going in the crowd, very hot. On the way to the press box
elevator, just inside the clubhouse, we came on a row of stewards. A man
walking next to us said they were waiting for the governor and his party.
League Freak eyed them nervously. “Why do they have those clubs?”
“Black Power insurgents,” I said. Then I remembered
good old “Hugo” at the airport and I wondered what he was thinking right now.
Probably very nervous; the place was teeming with cops and militia
types. Excellent! We pressed on through the crowd, through many gates, past the
tunnel where the players emerge.
Million-pound
business deals will be made today. Many winners, more losers. What the hell.
The press gate was jammed up with people trying to get in, shouting at the
guards, waving press badges: The Independent, Metro… most of that type were
turned away. “Move on, chaps, make way for the propaganda press.” We shoved
through the crowd and into the elevator, then quickly up to the free bar. Why
not? Get it on. Very hot today, not feeling well - this rotten climate. The
press box was cool and airy, plenty of room to walk around and balcony seats
for watching the match or looking down at the crowd. We got a programme and
went outside.
Pink faces
with a moneyed sag, old school ties, Barbour jackets and various Rugby union
shirts stretched tight over pendulous bellies… burnt out early or maybe just
nothing much to burn in the first place. Not much energy in the faces, not much
curiosity. Queuing in long lines, nowhere to go in this life, just
hang on and humour the children. Let the young enjoy themselves while they can.
Why not?
The grim
reaper comes early in this league… banshees on the lawn at night, screaming out
there beside the little concrete gnomes. Maybe he’s the one who’s screaming.
Bad DT’s and too many snarls at the bridge club. Going down with the stock
market. Oh Jesus, the kid has wrecked the new car, wrapped it around the big
stone pillar at the bottom of the driveway. Broken leg? Popped eye? Fractured
sense of moral immunity? Send him off to Oxbridge, they can cure anything up
there. “Oxbridge? Did you see today’s paper? The dreaming spires are under
siege. Cambridge is swarming with plebs and wogs… I tell you, Colonel, the
world has gone mad, stone mad. Why, they tell me the damn women might get the
vote one day.”
I left
League Freak snapping away in the Paddock bar and went off to place a bet on
the match. May as well turn a profit while I’m here. When I came back he was
staring intently at a group of young men around a table not far away. “Jesus,
look at the corruption in that face!” he whispered. “Look at the madness, the
fear, the greed!” I looked, then quickly turned my back. The face he’d picked
out was the face of an old acquaintance of ours, a school sports star in the
bad old days with a sleek red sportscar from Daddy and a very quick hand, it
was said, with the zip of a 13-year old’s flies. They called him ‘Matthew Robbins’. I wouldn’t have recognized him anywhere
but here, where I should have expected to find him, in the Paddock bar on Derby
Day… fat slanted eyes and a pimp’s smile, blue silk suit and his friends
looking like crooked bank tellers on a binge…
League
Freak wanted to see some genuine Old Farts, but he wasn’t sure what they looked
like. I told him to go back to the private toilets and look for decrepit men in
blazers vomiting in the urinals. “They’ll usually have large brown whisky
stains on the front of their suits,” I said. “But watch the shoes, that’s the
tip-off. Most of them manage to avoid vomiting on their own clothes, but they
never miss their shoes.”
In a box
not far from ours was Sir Herbert Gussett, Chairman And Keeper Of The Great
Seal Of The Honourable Order Of Old Farts.
Not all the 3 billion (statistics © S.Jones) or so Old Farts could make it this
year, but many had kept the faith, and they had gathered for their annual
backslap and pissup at the hospitality suite.
The match was
scheduled for 1300 hours, and as the time approached I suggested to League
Freak that we should probably spend some time in the stands, that boiling sea
of people across the pitch from the clubhouse. He seemed a little nervous about
it, but since none of the awful things I’d warned him about had happened so far
- no lynchings, firestorms or savaage drunken attacks - he shrugged and said,
“Right, let’s do it.”
To get
there we had to pass through many gates, each one a step down in status, then
through a tunnel. Emerging from the tunnel was such a culture shock that it
took us a while to adjust. “God almighty!” League Freak muttered. “This is a… Jesus!” He plunged ahead with his camera,
stepping over bodies, and I followed, trying to take notes.
The
nearest source of the noise was a pack of mutant inbred piglets from the home
counties. League Freak’s left eyelid began to twitch. This was the Big Bad, on
every conceivable level.
Total
chaos, no way to see the match, not even the pitch… nobody cares. Old lushes
arguing about bets; “Hold on there, I’ll handle this” (waving pint of whisky,
fistful of twenties); fat boys riding piggyback. Thousands of pinstripers, a
group singing “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot,” ten stewards guarding the visiting
team’s bus and a huge fat drunk wearing a blue jersey (No.8 on the back)
reeling around with a plastic cup of beer in each hand.
We went
back to the press box to watch the match. When the crowd stood to face the flag
and sing the National Anthem, League Freak faced the crowd and shot film off
frantically. Somewhere up in the boxes a voice screeched, “Turn around, you
hairy freak!” The match itself was only eighty minutes long but seemed much,
much longer. From our seats and using my 12-power monocular, there was no way
to see if anything really happened on the pitch. There was a lot of kicking
going on, and the mob outside seemed incapable of remembering anything beyond
the second line of a gospel song about a chariot.
(Instructions for watching Rugby union without
falling into a coma:
1.
Find
a ½ pint capacity, 10 inch hypo needle (as used for spinal taps and inoculating
bulls).
2.
Fill
with equal parts Rum and Tequila
3.
Shoot
the entire contents straight into the stomach, using the navel as a target
marker.
This will last long enough - like
an 80-minute Amyl high - plenty of time to look animated while the whole sorry
farce unfolds before your unseeing eyes.)
Thanks to
a few picked locks earlier, we had made some improvements to the day’s
proceedings. People didn’t seem to notice, however, as Bill MacLaren blathered
on, too senile to realise that we had doctored his script.
“Wee, sleeket,
boorin’, Teddy Taylor,
Voice like a potato
peeler.
But he’s really got
the right idea,
What Scotland needs
is General Zia!”
Moments
after the match was over, the crowd surged wildly for the exits, rushing for
cabs and cars. The next day’s papers did
not tell of the violence in the parking lot; people were punched
and trampled, pockets were picked, children lost, focaccia hurled. But we
missed all this, having retired to the press box for a bit of post-game
drinking. By this time we were both half-crazy from too much whisky, fatigue,
culture shock, lack of sleep and general dissolution.
We hung
around the press box long enough to watch a press conference with the winning
captain. I forget who he was or which team won. He claimed his occupation was a
‘chartered accountant’, so he was probably an England player on the
‘jobs-for-the-boys’ scheme. The first to ask a question, Tristram Witchfynder
from ‘The Spectator’, was so excited to speak to this nobody, we thought we’d
missed something. But no. What did you expect?
The rest
of the day blurs into madness. The rest of that night too. And all the next day
and night. I was flying by radar at this point, on some brandy-fuelled trip.
Such horrible things occurred that I can’t bring myself even to think about
them now, much less put them down in print. I was lucky to get out at all
without needing a checkup from the neck up.
League
Freak had helped me rip out the fridge from the Hotel’s minibar and we’d filled
it with coconuts and bottles of vodka. We had forgotten to pack a machete, so
people were treated to the unusual sight of two wild-eyed sweating lunatics
trying to batter open a coconut on the ends of the Toyota’s roof rack. The man
on the scent of a good drink or a good coconut is rarely rational. He is a
beast in heat; a bull moose in rut crashing blindly through the timber in a
fever for something to fuck. Anything! Any flesh and blood creature with a hole
in it. It doesn’t happen often. Only when some kind of full-moon red mist lures
me out to look for something to eat, kill, penetrate or maybe just rip into
bloody shreds for no good reason at all.
One of my
clearest memories of that vicious time is League Freak being attacked by one of
my old friends in the billiard room of the Scrum Half Bar in Whitton that
night. The man had ripped his own shirt open to the waist before deciding that
the Freak was after his wife. No blows were struck, but the emotional effects
were massive. Then, as a sort of final horror, League Freak put his fiendish
camera to work and tried to patch things up by doing a little portrait of the
girl he’d been accused of hustling. That finished us in the Scrum Half Bar.
Sometime
around ten-thirty on Monday morning I was awakened by a scratching sound at my
door. I leaned out of bed and pulled the curtain back just far enough to see
League Freak outside. “What the fuck do you want?” I shouted.
“What about having breakfast?” he
said.
I lunged
out of bed and tried to open the door, but it caught on the night-chain and
banged shut again. I couldn’t cope with the chain! The thing wouldn’t come out
of the track - so I ripped it out of the wall with a vicious jerk on the door.
Freak didn’t blink. “Bad luck,” he muttered.
My
Hangover cure? Don’t let up on the intake and sleep. At all. If you haven’t had
a psychotic incident after 76 hours, you’re rollin’. I had neglected this
important discipline for once, and I was paying for it.
I could
barely see him. My eyes were swollen almost shut and the sudden burst of
sunlight through the door left me stunned and helpless like a sick mole. League
Freak was mumbling about sickness and terrible pain; I fell back on the bed and
tried to focus on him as he moved around the room in a very distracted way for
a few moments, then suddenly darted over to the beer bucket and seized a
stubby. “Christ,” I said. “You’re getting out of control.”
He nodded
and ripped the cap off, taking a long drink. “You know, this is really awful,”
he said finally. “I must get out of this place… “ he shook his head
nervously. “The plane leaves at three-thirty, but I don’t know if I’ll make
it.”
I barely
heard him. My eyes had finally opened enough for me to focus on the mirror
across the room and I was stunned at the shock of recognition. For a confused
instant I thought that League Freak had brought somebody with him - a model for
that one special face we’d been looking for. There he was, by God - a puffy,
drink-ravaged, disease-ridden caricature… like an awful cartoon version of an
old snapshot in some once-proud mother’s family photo album. It was the face
we’d been looking for - and it was, of course, my own. Horrible, horrible…
“Maybe I should sleep a while
longer,” I said. “Why don’t you go on over to the ‘Frying Tonite’ place and eat
something swimming in lard? Then come back and get me around noon. I feel too
near death to hit the streets at this hour.”
He shook
his head. “No… no… I think I’ll go back upstairs and work on those photos for a
while.” He leaned down to fetch two more bottles from the beer bucket. “I tried
to work earlier,” he said, “but my hands kept trembling… It’s terrible,
terrible.”
“You’ve got to stop this drinking
and smoking,” I said.
He nodded.
“I know. This is no good, no good at all. But for some reason it makes me feel
better… I’m up to three lighters a day now. Is that excessive?”
“Not for long,” I said. “You’ll
probably collapse into some kind of hysterical DT’s tomorrow - probably just
about the time you get off the plane. They’ll zip you up in a straightjacket
and drag you down to the basement, then beat you on the kidneys with big sticks
until you straighten out.”
He
shrugged and wandered out, pulling the door shut behind him. I went back to bed
for another hour or so, and later - after the daily fruit juice run to the 7-11
- we had our last meal at ‘Frying Tonite’; a fine lunch of pastry and
mechanically recovered offal, fried in heavy grease. We read the papers - loads
of column inches about the Rugby union with very little to say except the
desperate need to fill space and make the event look important. I was cheered,
however, with the article detailing the squalid death of Jamie Oliver.
By this
time League Freak wouldn’t order coffee; he kept asking for more water. “It’s
the only thing they have that’s fit for human consumption,” he explained. Then,
with an hour or so to kill before he had to catch the plane, we spread his
photos out on the table and pondered them for a while, wondering if he’d caught
the proper spirit of the thing… but we couldn’t make up our minds. His hands
were shaking so badly that he had trouble holding the paper, and my vision was
so blurred that I could barely see what he’d got. “Shit,” I said. “We both look worse than anything you’ve
taken here.”
He smiled.
“You know - I’ve been thinking about that,” he said. “We came down here to see
this terrible scene: people all pissed out of their minds and vomiting on
themselves and all that… and now, you know what? It’s us… “
Huge
Toyota Ballbuster blowing through traffic… “Uh, Doctor Futtocks? Are you
steering this thing or are you, like, using The Force?” I snapped out of my
rêverie. The green fields had given way to a pedestrianised shopping precinct
and we were scattering shoppers. “Cazart! No matter - you can’t make an
omelette without breaking eggs. And these eggs are being broken for a worthy
cause.”
“The Rugby League Omelette?”
queried my companion mischievously.
“Le Freak, c’est cheeky!
Don’t spook the Dream” I capitalised the word. “There are always casualties,
and there will be more the nearer we get to our deadline with TotalRugbyLeague.com.”
Then
League Freak accidentally let off the remaining canister of Mace. Smart. Real
smart, especially when your driver is maxing out a vehicle that steers slower
than a Campese sidestep.
Maced at 120 mph: a hot and
sudden agony that feels like a 40lb sewer rat gnawing on your uvula. The mouth
goes slack like the sun-rotted lips of a dead walrus, the bile wells up in the
throat and drools viscously between clenched teeth, down onto the chin and
chest in long, wet, foul-smelling stains.
When the brain is at last able to
articulate some dim and desperate emergency message to the medulla and you can
finally take a breath between the mindless retches of pain and terror that
erupt from the chemically choked throat in long blasts of noise and reddish
sputum, you finally hear a voice that you recognise as yours rasping “Ye Gods!
I can’t SEE THE ROAD!”
A
Radio 5 presenter was gushing about the match we just watched. I was driving,
ignoring my passenger, now nearly naked after taking off most of his clothing,
which he held out the window, trying to wind-wash the Mace out of it. His eyes
were bright red and his face and chest was soaked with the beer he’d been using
to rinse the awful chemical off his flesh. The front of his trousers was soaked
with vomit; his body racked with fits of coughing and wild chocking sobs.
I
rammed the big car through traffic and into a spot in front of the airport
terminal, then I reached over to open the door on the passenger’s side and
shoved the Australian out, snarling: “Bug off, you worthless convict! You
twisted pigfucker! If I weren’t sick I’d kick your ass all the way to Woop Woop
- you scumsucking convict geek. Maace is too good for you… We can do without
your kind in London.” Crazed laughter to indicate that I’m joking doesn’t seem
to register with the Freak, any more than the abuse.
“I gotta go now, Doctor F.” said
League Freak. “If I get back on the next flight, me and some other blokes are
going up to Bondi for a weekend of Tunnel and Dakka.”
It would
have been rude to detain him any longer, so farewells were said and hands
shaken.