I Blame Rod Serling
It was Rod Serling that did it. Teri bought me those old Twilight Zones on DVD for Christmas, and I can’t… I find them almost too painful to watch. Because the first time I saw them, I was someone else entirely.
I was eighteen, living away from home for the first time. I’d recently discovered Socialism through Billy Bragg, and thought maybe the world was changeable after all. When I graduated, I was going to work for Greenpeace or CND (I wasn’t even sure if CND had any jobs going, but they must have paid somebody to make all those stickers, even if it was only a pittance). I was going to live in Calcutta or farm with peasants in the Himalayas. I was going to love many women and tap poetry from poverty and expose political hypocrisy, maybe grow my hair into dreads and live on a barge.
We’d sit around and talk it all out, all our plans – me and Ronnie and Timbuk, in that mangy little ground floor flat we rented on the Aberdeen Road. Smoking what we’d got and watching old Twilight Zone repeats late at night, or listening to Peel and wondering why everybody didn’t play these songs, all the time. We were about to take a journey, and I swear we saw the signposts up ahead…
And then, so many years later, this angry, bitter man with cobwebs spreading through what’s left of his quiff slips a DVD into his Blu-Ray, turns on the Plasma Screen TV that cost him the equivalent of two years’ rent on Aberdeen Road, and waits for Rod Serling to take him back. Back to a time before Teri and the kids, before even She-Who-Won’t-Be-Named and the weekend children. To a time before he was paying the mortgage on two separate homes, supporting two separate families, drinking far more than he ought, and coughing up guttery tar from cigarettes he can’t seem to quit even though nowhere will let him smoke them any more. To a time when everything was possibility, when his only worry was getting an essay in on time or whether he’d have enough left at the end of the week to get Jeana Fowlis drunk and in the mood for amour.
If only Rod Serling could take me back. That’s what I’m thinking now, late at night again, after Teri and the kids are in bed – though not even late-at-nights are the way they used to be. I never used to have to notch out my belt to sit comfortably in the armchair or rub cream into my legs to stop them itching or worry that this glass of Glenfiddich really ought to be my last. Ha – Glenfiddich! I’d have spat this bourgeois shit back in the face of anyone who dared serve it me. I’d have…
Sight and sound. Shadow and substance. Things and ideas.
Imagination.
It’s cold, and the street is just getting light, but dawn makes me feel like a vampire these days. Fuck, what did I drink last night? So pissed I couldn’t even get back in the house, I crashed out here on the path instead. God, I hope I didn’t fall and bang my fucking head again. That doctor in casualty, the look on his face, even though I had concussion. Self-inflicted, he had no time for that. If you kids drank a little less and read a few more books… that’s what he was thinking, I know it. But the books are boring, man – and they don’t get you anywhere. Not really. Take Marx – I tried to read fucking Marx, though really I was only doing it for Billy Bragg, maybe to understand what he’s going on about the next time he’s in the NME… bored the arse off me, it really did. Only then Jeana Fowlis saw me reading it and suddenly she wanted to talk to me – six months I’d been trying to get her attention, and all I ever needed was a copy of Das Kapital. But if I’d known that’s all she ever wanted to talk about, that even oiled up on cider she’d rather argue the fucking dialectic than let me put my hand up her top… shit, there’s got to be easier lays, amazing tits or not.
There’s a weight on my chest and for a moment I think it’s just the hangover, or cramp from lying out on the bloody path all night like a tramp – then I realise it’s a cone. Fucking Ronnie or Timbuk must have put it there, which means they stepped over me to get into the house, which means they know I’m out here and just left me to it… I could have caught my fucking death and all they’d do is laugh. Plus, it was Twilight Zone last night, and they know how I hate to miss Twilight Zone. They could at least have woke me up for that. I bet they took Polaroids too. They’ll be all round the refectory this afternoon. Arseholes.
I roll the cone out onto the pavement and try to sit up, but my head feels like a donkey kick. I manage to crawl up onto the step and sit with my back to the door, watching the milkman float down the road. Bastard won’t leave us any till we pay our bill, but I reckon I drank that last night so it’s water with my cornflakes again today… if I can even get in the house. Door’s locked and I don’t know where my keys are. Wouldn’t put it past Timbuk to have taken them from my pocket when he dropped the cone on my chest. If I had the strength, I’d hammer on this door till they let me in. If I could cope with the noise…
God, I can’t wait to get out of this place and make some fucking money. I’m sick of all this worthy bullshit, of pretending like I give a fuck. I want to be rich and old and fat, floating about on a yacht like Simon Le-fucking-Bon and sending my kids away to Private School in the Alps, with a mistress in Soho and whatever the fuck else clichéd bullshit you can think up. I’m sorry, Billy, but we’re Maggie’s bastards now, we have to embrace the world she’s building for us, man. I don’t want squalor – this flat, this flat should be the last time I ever have to live like this. Once I finish this course, I’m gonna fucking make something of myself, man. Find me a woman who thinks Marx is that guy with the bushy moustache and the cigar, who doesn’t give a shit about climbing the summit of man’s knowledge, who doesn’t even want to talk before sex…
I tell you something – if Rod Serling were here right now, that’s what I’d ask him for… Screw your Twilight Zone consequences, Rod – just get me out of here, man. Just get me out of here.
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