Becoming Marc Almond

When I first became Marc Almond, I wore my hair like black candyfloss, and it was OK because my face was slender and pale as candle wax, and I took to the stage at Leeds Polytechnic and I didn’t get off for another thirty years and the years flew by me like winter birds, and I sang and I sang and I never stopped.

Becoming Marc Almond didn’t at first compromise my everyday life one bit. Attending school remained much the same, although my appearance in a tiger skin waistcoat and my sardonic glance at the teacher who asked me to name the longest river in Africa was judged by some to be far too outré for a provincial comprehensive in the nineteen-eighties. Their displeasure they demonstrated with a series of kicks and blows and a head butt, the homophobe’s kiss.
But I didn’t care: in the heaven of my bedroom, orange peeling, the labels on those tired-out twelve inches. Exhausted they were, from the needle’s diamond caress. Gyp the Blood, Mother Fist, Ruby Red. Tainted Love. All of these and more.

His words infected my life, you see: they were lovers’ legs around my back. I wasn’t Marc Almond for long before the dusty edges of my life cohered: the scroll curled back and became legible.   
There was a shift in my thinking.
Becoming Marc Almond, my sentences now were alliterative, rhythmic (like Surrender to a Stanger, Adored and Explored). My language, like his, was infused with the whiff of Wilde, ensnared by Baudelaire, made Rimbaud’s beau, in Genet’s way, wrenched by Rechy.

I was Marc Almond when, as a teenager, I worked at a local garage, selling petrol to kids in souped-up Chevrolets, kings of the estate, standing on burning cars, teeth clenched, with pool cues grabbed tight in mutton fists. My scrawny muscles glinted like curled wire under my black singlet, and slowly, one by one, tattoos covered my flesh like flowers covering the courtyard of a gaol.

I was Marc Almond, too, wearing my starched white Mr Byrite shirt done up to the neck and tucked into my black-belted jeans, a tribute to the Stories of Johnny CD cover of 1985, when first I slow-danced a girl at a nightclub, and I saw stars in the cheap lights, and the vomit-brocaded floor became a magic carpet flying through the darkest purple Arabian night.

I remained Marc Almond, and one day the sky was as a blood orange squeezed in a fist above the slate grey block which housed the bank where I came to work. As Marc Almond, rather than heating up the gluey chicken soup my new wife had packed in Tupperware for me at lunchtime, instead I summered in Barcelona at a seven-star hotel where I lay low, bludgeoned by acid, my mind a ripped-out circuit board of receptors, each straining to connect with the other.

And in my mind the crimes of pirates in the Surabaya Harbour, and I felt the spray of Hawaiian night on my face, as Rum and Coca Cola played, and somewhere, in a grass skirt, I walked through the inky dark of the sea, and then I reached the heavy oak table, and now I dealt my pack, my hands as clubs hammering down each card, breathing in the nicotine stench of my companions, the whisky miasma of breath, the dusty lines of another’s face you can almost taste.
At the bank, they weren’t amused when I started to return late from lunch.
There was talk of a disciplinary review.

Then times changed, as they will, and now the toreador capes and the recherché aplomb weren’t enough. Nor were the castanets, the dance remixes, the kids TV appearances. What was needed was a hit. But a hit is not like lost keys, flung down the back of a sofa to be reclaimed with grateful hands. A hit is a shooting star glimpsed once, twice in a life, glinting like the edge of a razor in the hand of a thief. This time the stars aligned, reached around and got hold of my heart.

‘You seem so distant,’ my wife said, as she led the way to the boxy new-build, within easy reach of the M25, that we had acquired. ‘Why don’t you do the garden?’
All that long hot summer, a metal box in flames, I was still Marc Almond while I recorded Fantastic Star in New York.  Now, tiny crystals imbibed became gigantic palaces of glass, and the streets, grooved ridges in black vinyl. The city’s topography was a narcotic. At the Port Authority Bus Station I stood alone in my cowboy hat, child of the night, and the Deuce yawned before me, and into that chasm I tumbled. And every neon sign above every porno cinema became a playing card in my hand. The brush of red velvet, thigh against thigh. Buildings were cathedrals of erotic possibility, with quiet heat steaming from the pavements. Office blocks, water towers, the endless facades of the tenement buildings down Avenue B. The fury, the tumult of traffic.

That summer, the vinyl turned continuous on the DJ’s deck, and Donna Summer moaned and a whole new life was born in phials of mischief, that long hot summer. The freak shows of Coney Island, the tired lonely sunlight on splintered wooden piers, with Latino families packing up their towels and heading for home. Then black water between the cobbles on Gansevoort Street, and when it rained, summer lightening on St Christopher’s Pier, and the code, as we hunted, as we hunted.
And always a black skull in my heart.

Prince of death or death of a prince? There was me, William Burroughs, Truman Capote, Andy Warhol, Bessie Smith, Garcia Lorca, John Rechy and Bruce Benderson, all of us thinking about death outside the Mineshaft.
The loneliness of the sexual hunter.

Meanwhile, at the bank, a whole new filing system was introduced. Resultant of this arrangement was the need to enter a unique reference number on the occasion of each deposit being received. Due diligence was required on the entry of the reference number, and particular care was expected in high volume transactions.

Now it was autumn, the still languid air kept just awake by an irritant breeze with the coffee shops and the porn stores on Berwick Street opening, and you in your singlet and your hat, remembering the thrilling newness of it all, the infinite possibilities of dirt. A girl approaches you and points to a room lit with a red bulb. You said no, but a pathway was opened, as indelible as biro ink in broken skin.  And the wind whispered past newsstands and sandwich bars and strip clubs, down alleys, a stench of urine and tobacco, and the chance of something holy here: the sex trade, so close to the death trade that God’s got to  have a hand in it somewhere.

And at the office, a new system of checks and balances had been brought into operation, due to wholesale pilfering from the stationary cupboard.
Meanwhile, I, Marc Almond still, a Mamba, in a shiny taxi with warm leather seats drifting languid as mercury through the hourglass city, orange light on slick black pavements.
At my appraisal my boss said ‘It’s not good enough.’ ‘What’s not?’ ‘This. It’s not good enough. Your performance.’

But the fans loved my performances. In Rome I played an epic show, three hours, while the seething sun set behind the amphitheatre, cupping my hands out in front of me to catch their applause. These I held to my face and imbibed, as though breathing in all that splintered love, refracted back at me from their eyes, their hands that clapped, their hearts that beat.
 ‘Are you having an affair?’ my wife asked, as I loaded buckets and spades for the children’s seaside trip into the Volvo. ‘Do you love our kids?’

Walking on the beach, I was back in Southport with its crazy Wurlitzer, the rush of the rollercoaster, the Tarot card reader who frightened you, Las Vegas shining, imprisoned in every grain of sand. The moon filtered through your terrified fingers as you wondered if this would run out, the talent, this thing that marked you out, and took you so far away from here to New York, Marrakech, Madrid, Israel, Moscow, St Petersburg, Amsterdam and Mexico City and everywhere else.
And you think all of this, the fabulous possibility of everything – the bead of fevered sweat on the brow of the homeless man, the grain of truth in the business managers spiel, the fans you bought in the Epyptian souk, the beaded lampshade, your father’s military record, the glitterball in the Leadmill, the plangent sax you heard in Madame Jo Jo’s, the bookstores, the lonely afternoons over coffee in rain-drenched cafes, that weekend you spent in Bath avoiding the press, the time you were robbed in the mountains of Italy after a show, that scene with him that you relived and relived on stage every night so many times – each of these things became distilled by that strange osmosis, that spooky art, and, once transformed into song, were transmitted to a crowd of people you never knew, and then transmitted back to you.
‘Do you want a divorce?’ she asked.

And at the office, at the office, every day, every day, you saw the hands of the clock turn. Those faces that greeted you, your colleagues, rarely unkind, but in each waxy face you saw the candle of life burn lower, every day.

With what sadness you collected the paperclips, filled out your expense forms, and calculated that week’s transactions.

And on the evening of your father’s death, your wife’s tiny hand pressed tight in yours, cold,  you wondered about it all, the piano on If You Go Away, the fiery leaves that cluttered the path to the church, your first-born’s golden smile, the bottomless humanity of Charles Aznavour, the ruby sequined jacket you wore in Warsaw, the minor chords the orchestra played to herald your appearance onstage at Royal Albert Hall, the look of your wife’s face when you first told her you loved her, the prostitutes who lined the streets of El Ravel, the tattoos on his muscular back, the disappointment of your father, the disappointment of your boss, the disappointment of every damned other person you ever met, and the crushing, unendurable sadness of a life lived on this planet among other human beings.

And you wondered how a man from Southport you’d never met had sung everything you’d never thought you wanted to say until he’d sung it and then it became part of the DNA of everything you’d ever known.
And in the office, you’d heard, the late submission of expense forms continued to be an ongoing issue in terms of the proper allocation of man-hour tasks to individual employees.

And after the funeral, when you strained to hear still the final note of the church organ, even though the music had finished half an hour ago, and the other mourners had long since left, you looked at the swollen, tear-stained face of Julia, your wife, no longer puckish in her grief, and you said to her,

‘Come on my love, let’s go home.’


John Lucas is a writer based in South East London. He is a current student on the Birkbeck Creative Writing MA. His articles have been published on GQ.com and a short story ofhis will appear in the forthcoming Birkbeck anthology of new writing, The Mechanic's Institute Review 7. He is working ona novel about sex addiction.