Keith

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Keith was smoking in a transporter cafe somewhere. He was doing it by the window. The light was falling on his face and he was having a great time. He had wanted to be Roy Rodgers when he was little, but this was much better. 

I was looking at him admiringly. I was drinking a hot drink, but not too hot mind in case it gives us esophageal cancer. You had to be careful about things like that. Pour a little cold in it if you must, but just don’t die before the ones you love so that you can look after them for as long as possible. 

Keith Richards was smoking a cigarette in a picture in a transporter cafe. He was tired after the night before. Nearly having his clothes ripped to shreds by the screaming girls of the previous place. He was eating bacon and eggs with tomato sauce. The man who had served him hadn’t recognized him. He didn’t really get recognized that often. There was a cup and saucer by the plate and an ash tray. The group he belonged to had been enjoying some success.

He had bought some new clothes that morning in a department store to replace the ones he had ripped to shreds. He had money enough to do so and the old ladies who stood around him whilst he paid noticed about him all the things that made him noticeable at this time. 

His hair was approaching his collar. Did he wear ladies shoes? He carried the clothes out of the store and walked along down the high street in the early morning light. There were some vans making deliveries. He stopped and put the bag on the ground between his legs, removed his cigarettes from the inside pocket of his torn suit jacket, and lit a one.

It was a cool morning and he was making an excellent go of avoiding ordinary employment. He looked across the street and saw his reflection in a department store window. He was in the center of a city somewhere. In the early 1960’s. There were people in houses that had no running water. There were people in palaces. He watched the people walking past in the early morning. The air was cool. The pavements were damp from the cold. He was not cold. He felt comfortable in his shirt.

He drew the smoke into his lungs. Some of the people wore bowler hats. They didn’t hurry. They carried themselves with a detached air of something or other. They disappeared. Some of the people were tortured. They were all children. They either looked like they had a place to be or they didn’t. Some just meandered, but not many of them. He drew further smoke into his lungs.

Debbie: Great, now here's a picture of Charlie Watts

I come a cropper.

I come up the road wearing a mucky jumper.

I woke up on no ships, slept on your sofa 

and felt the rover in me tipping his brass – was not brass - into his boot.

I went up the bus route, and smoked in the night 

I tried to sleep out in,  missed a train (on purpose), 

walked round till the morning, and slept on a bench in the morning, 

cos the night I was scared in - cursing myself I cunt sleep in a ditch.

I come up the road wearing a cracked expression I got coming-to to the rather disappointing realization: aye, you cannot do it now like it did before, like, you cannot do what it did before; these books and magazines, they are filled up with pictures, of men who do not do the things you do - they did not, but it is all do. Muddy Waters did not have a Playstation 2. From which we can easily speculate the rest.

I lived it different than it did - I lived it different.

Though that was happening when it did, I lived it different.

I did not live it absent though. 

I know, in its place, describe the present, oh show me now the present.

I know it cos I felt it. And so what if I took it out of a book and carried it off with a look I had learnt

in a picture - it still happened, just not near to me and I could never get near it, but it still happened.

And for me too an’ all like.