I’ve just watched Inter v. United at the San Siro and the comedy of lucky saves it truly was. I asked myself, should someone who writes in a distinguished fanzine such as this be permitted to comment on an important match he witnessed via television? The rest of the UWS guerrilla writing team are probably in some ritzy Milano nightclub now, surrounded by a phalanx of armed riot police. And here was I, in my little computer room, tapping away, while Meatballs and Danny Loki swung their hammers (yeah…I know). I bet House of Style was Top Boy in his dead good keks and acceptably labelled jacket. Probably went over in his BM on’t’ ferry wi’t’ lads.
Gorra Love that House of Style, eh? The cunt. He’s been spreading vicious rumours about me living in the middle of nowhere wearing Adidas tracky bottoms (sans Trefoil if you don’t mind!) with my brains allegedly done in from too much acid. All based on a night I spent with him in town two years ago. Rest assured Mr. Style my brain is perfectly fine (sometimes) and there’s plenty to do here on’t’ border of Massachusetts and Connecticut. It’s an interesting study in the geographic economics of marijuana culture, for starters (Ooh shit, drugs again). Headshops are illegal in MA but not in CT. The CT border towns have capitalised on this for generations. The decrepit boulevards of Enfield are littered with ruined 70s-era headshops; cheesily “futuristic” glassy structures with angled walls and bad signs looming out front on once illuminated stands. In between the Jiffy Lubes and Taco Bells a new cohort of headshops is exploding. Most are owned by Massachusetts lads eager to exploit day-trippers from their home state. The whole area is a trip if I’m honest. You can fall out of bed and make money, but not from drugs, of course. From being a forty-three year old bloke who never misses a United game (on telly) with an opportunistic eye. Recently I dismantled a huge wood-fired furnace and dragged it up through the bulkhead of a townhouse in a horrific slumdog neighbourhood. The intention was to sell it and drink the proceeds. Sizzler, Crusher, the Master and Polish Bazyli helped, thank fuck. The thing weighed over 3,000 lbs, a sick tangle of heavy glass gauges, copper pipes, asbestos plates and solid iron. The whole time the guys were supping Twisted Tea and Sierra Nevada pale ales. At eight in the morning. I bet House of Style doesn’t sup owt at daft o’ clock. Probably washing his fucking BMW or ironing his socks at that time on a Saturday. When work ended we retreated to the living room to watch United live. I was wearing one of my three pairs of Equipment bottoms, the black ones. We trashed Bolton at theirs. Mr. Style will be thrilled to hear that Bazyli related some stories to me from Kraków, a grim place where boneheaded thugs hack each other half to death with machetes and spikes on a regular basis. After the match we went on a tour of the local headshops in the Master’s minibus. In no time, Crusher is menacing the poor bastards manning the headshops, asking them if they know such-a-body or thingamajig – all known felons from up in MA. Crusher’s just got out of the Big House following an incident with a remote-controlled plane he built himself. It almost decapitated a local building contractor. The guy wanted the land behind Crusher’s lot for construction. Crusher wanted to build steel sheds on it to house his heavy equipment. The plane went right through the guy’s front window and was completely embedded in a wall. Christ, not even Kezz back in Prestwich ever got that out of control. Though I could be wrong…
I spent many happy times with Kezz, from the age of 5 onward. He was a rare torpedo of a man. Hellbent on never slowing down and leaving a trail of twisted flesh and bone in his wake. He’d have liked Crusher. Kezz died over a year ago now and I think of him every day. I still recall the nights he machined seven shades out of the opposition before the rest of us even got a look in. Then there was the first home game of the ’84-’85 season. Watford at OT. I’d monkeyed out high into the Scoreboard Paddock rafters, only to drop to what I believed would be at least a broken ankle. I landed on Kezz and immediately began to share the cans of Tennents Super with him that I’d secreted in the zipped pockets of my snorkel parka. Another time he appeared at my Lower Broughton flat, completely befuddled from days on the piss, when he’d prowled like a panther among the population. That was the late-80s. I was living in a mock-Georgian bedsit crawling with weirdoes and loose women. My telephone was the public one in the taxi place across the road. I was working for agencies, lying to the landlord about fat cheques due any day. One assignment was at a frozen “kebab” factory. Huge silver vats of shit-coloured slime intersected with ovens and inexplicable mixing apparatus. A gang of Salford kids running riot. Every two minutes someone would burst through the plastic doors on a pump-truck and get splattered with massive gobs of this filth, which reeked of plastic and bad turd. This would result in a five-minute “food” fight (I use the term very loosely). St. Trinians it fuckin’ wasn’t. Red to the bone it certainly was. Kezz used to shake his head at such tales; he couldn’t understand why I lowered myself so. But the torpedo that was Kezz has passed us by and only the craters remain.
* * * * * *
We patrolled Enfield in the bus. A plain dildo-like glass pipe was passed from man to man as our vehicle crunched through the filthy snow of New England. The Master had haggled the terrified bastards down to almost nothing for a two hundred dollar pipe shot through with coloured tendrils like a superball. This was no time for mellowing out on the Northern Lights; we were tokin’ on AK47, the crème de la crème. Grown last summer by the Master who, funnily enough, owned a couple of rifles (and a couple of acres) bearing the very same moniker. We had an appointment to keep at a den of testosterone-fuelled iniquity called Maximum Capacity Sports Bar. The event? Midget Wrestling (Google it, smart-arse). MC don’t have bouncers; they pay the local police to post four armed officers on the weekend and even more if the midgets are in town. The midgets bring crowds and crowds mean money for Master and the boys. MC is an evil place. The front carpark was pulsing with comedic malevolence. Latino gang-bangers from Springfield in baggy jeans. Metallic peroxide bimbos in silver hot-pants stepping across the ice on heels. Construction workers getting smashed after work, and unemployed landscapers blowing their savings. Crusher walked through the lot like it wasn’t there and the Master wasn’t far behind him.
To be fair, “Midget Wrestling” is a lie. Only one of the four little people going at it was actually a midget. The rest were dwarves. “Dwarf Wrestling” just doesn’t have the same ring to it, though. Kezz would have loved the dwarves and the midget and I wished he could have been there. I knew I had plenty coming to me from the furnace I’d taken out of that hovel so I went all out. Scored some Eve (MDEA) off Jamie the Wannabe Wiseguy and dropped three at once. That ethyl group attached to the nitrogen adjacent to the benzene ring takes the empathy down a notch but it’s a bastard to bring off if pharma is your thing. I know I’ve struggled with it myself. I was soon bopping about in my House of Style-sneerable Stockholms and Adidas tracky bottoms. Partying like it was nineteen-eighty one. Jamie stayed well clear of us; Crusher and he have some outstanding issues regarding snow tyres and remote-ignition starters. Jamie’s connected but Crusher is a mountain of a man and barred for life from getting in the ring with the midgets; he doesn’t know his own strength. The “midgets” soon appeared, dressed in tiny leotards to accentuate their tight bodies. Launching themselves off the ropes, somersaulting and drop-kicking one another spectacularly. Then they brought in the Budweiser bottles and staple-guns. Stapling beer mats to each others’ heads and smashing bottles on same, real blood pouring. The crowd was frothing with perverse glee. When Crusher jumped in that other time, a midget grabbed his balls and he smashed the little guy over the neck with a corner stool. Instant lifetime ban. But even the cops were afraid to move on Crusher and he knocked out the AK like you read about. Soon fights were breaking out everywhere and I wondered what the United fans were doing at home after the Bolton match.
Which brings me back to tonight. Here, watching the match on telly while everyone was there in the San Siro. Mulling, mullered, over that House of Style and his lies; see, it wasn’t a pair of Adidas Equipment trackies I wore the night I went out with him in town. It was actually a pair of cords I’d borrowed off my dad that were three inches too short. Infinitely more of a sin than the sans Trefoil horrors I would’ve thought. But what do I know? Maybe short cords are less of a sensation than wrong labels among the middle-aged casuals of Manchester? But hear this, House of Style: I will be at OT for the Liverpool match and FULLY KITTED OUT from the premium outlets of Clinton Crossing, Connecticut. I shall gleam like the nose-cone of a heart-breaking spacecraft, squeaking and mincing as if aloft on the erect prong of my spite. Be up for it on the forecourt House, ‘cos I’m spending some dollars at that Crossing gaff. If you want me to pick you summat up, let me know and I’ll hand off the bag. KnowhatImean?