Black Water

I have a new answer to the question, 'Why do you smoke?', when asked gently and with the slightest intonation of mock incredulity from all sorts of well meaning people.

“So I can meet ex-soldiers in airport waiting rooms” is the new answer.

And in part, it is true. Yes, I am addicted, yes it gives me a perfect excuse to have 5 minutes break from everything else that may or may not be going on at that moment and collect my thoughts (Graeme gets the same effect by going outside and eating a carrot very slowly) and yes, smoking a lazy, fat, filtered rolly after joyous sex makes one feel a peaceful joy so clear and distilled one sometimes feels like buddha himself is sitting smiling on the cherry. But perhaps best of all, when outside pubs or in coach rest stops, or, as I was the other week, in an airport transit lounge with a poky, overpriced cafe for a smoking room and no local currency, smoking is nothing less than a passport for the comradly exchange of knowledge.

Stupidly I didn't notice his 'Blackwater' cap (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nqM4tKPDlR8), just that he had a friendly face and there were no empty tables so I would have to break into the thoughts of one of these single men staring into space. The etiquette of striking up a conversation with sound people during smoke time can be complex. With less wise people (as a rule), they will either talk and talk if given the simplest prompt, or be too shy or suspicious to say anything at all. However, the most interesting people are neither verbose nor lack confidence, but may well be locked in their own thoughts that you have no right to disturb. One must, therefore, probe gently and thoughtfully, leaving enough silence for them to take the initiative if they want, and not asking the same boring questions, beyond the classic opener 'where are you headed?'

Middle to Aging men are the most difficult to crack. I guess they have seen too many egotistical young men ramming about like they are the first generation every to break free of their home town and ready to tell everyone about how extreme their lives are, or ask personal questions without cultivating a fertile bed of trust for them to be answered fully. The first salvo of politeness told that he was living in the Phillipines and on his way to Singapore for a few days. His accent was British, and he dressed like a man who dislikes airs and graces. To me this, and his greying hair but fit body, meant he either worked in the oil industry or used to be in the army.

Silence as we both sucked on our cigarettes and tried not to catch each others' eye, even though we were sat directly across a tiny table as though we were on a date. 'You working down in the Philippines then?'. This, on balance, was unlikely. 'No, I work away.' I hesitate. 'Doing what?' 'Security'. 'Ah, one of them'. I look at him as if I have met men like him before, which I have. Security, in this context, almost certainly means working for a private security company in Iraq, Afghanistan, Nigeria, or another place where western companies are enforcing things down the barrel of a gun, with enough money to bring ex-military men out of retirement.

We sit in silence a while longer. My cigarette is finished and I get up to go, not wanting to show that I was there for anything more than a polite chat whilst doing the necessary business of smoking, but as I leave the smoking cafe I realise that I was so strained at being polite and wandering how to get the bottom of this man I didn't even enjoy the cigarette, and it would be a long time before my next one. So I went back inside and sat down again. It was as if he was waiting for me. 'Want a beer?' he asks.

3 beers and some chain smoking later we have established our bed of trust, first through rugby, then me by laughing at his vaguely xenophobic jokes and using what I know of the army to ask the right and respectful questions, him by implicitly showing he was well aware of the shitty state of the world and who was to blame, namely the capitalist system. He grew up in south shields (Near newcastle, about 150 miles from where I grew up) and had no choice but to go into the army (well, the other choice was to stay in a town slowly but surely collapsing in on itself as the docks and mines closed one after another). He was good at what he did and became a Marine (and justifiably proud of it). When he left the army there was nothing left for him in his home town except his mum; his friends had all left. He could settle somewhere else in England but where? Kent? We both laugh. So he moved to where the living was cheap and easy- south east asia. First Thailand and then, when he married a Philippine lady, the Philippines. He spends 8 months of the year working and his child is in Chinese school because it has 'good discipline'. Does he want his son to join the army? He would hate it if he did- it is a meaningless and hard life he says, being shouted at from when you wake up to when you go to bed by people you consider idiots, and lots of the time just sitting around scratching your arse. And unspoken is the bit about having to kill people you don't know and having them try to kill you. He wants his son to have a profession. Does he want to go back to england? No chance.

Here is a man that I can relate to just as well as a fellow activist, a fellow lefty musician or really anyone. I can respect him more than I do a well-meaning and intelligent woolly liberal, a regimented socialist or even some of the people I spend time with in London. Yet in terms of my world views and my lifestyle we couldn't be more different. Racism, prostitution and killing people- and risking your own life- on behalf of a western government or corporation I cannot condone and never would participate in. I had to laugh at jokes that weren't funny and say things that were only just truthful to keep the his confidence in me and the conversation alive. I wanted him to like me. A lot. In contrast, a lot of people I encounter, likely the majority, I couldn't give a floating shit what they think of me, not because they aren't nice people but because there is no reason to care, they can take me or leave me; I don't need them to validate me.

And this is kind of funny, though I was a bit too drunk to think about it properly on the long flight to vancouver. The SOAS crowd is wonderful, stimulating, loving and I feel superbly lucky to be a part of it, but sometimes when the real love ins happen, when the woolly jumpers are out and the food is delicious and the hugs last minutes and the love is being proclaimed in song and dance, something inside me curdles and a voice in me is shouting 'but what about all the people who can't have this? Who are being beaten down by the system every day and have been numbed and frustrated by a stupyfying mass media and the chasing dog of poverty? Doesn't this all feel a bit …. missing the point?'

And here again is a great moment to go outside and smoke a fag, but the question remains. When I go back to scarborough no-one wants to hear about what I am doing in London. Why would they? I know for sure lots of these guys would think what we do for fun in London is a bit lame and hippyish, whilst I know my friends in London would be uncomfortable, not to mention bored, getting hugely wasted, watching TV and causing trouble in Scarborough.

This has been proven more than once. A friend came down to London around the time of the climate camp in trafalgar square and was going to stay at my house. He is a totally amazing guy with proper northern working class values, one of them being that he speaks honestly and bluntly, and another is that once he starts drinking he likes to get very drunk. He had made it, with his girlfriend, to the 'wave' climate demo, but lost his girlfriend (who showed up at my house the next morning at 4am) and wandered to my house the next afternoon, having spend the night walking the streets of london in the pissing rain and eventually crashing out in one of the spare climate camp tents in traf square.

Nevertheless, it was great to see him, I showed him my Hackney locale and, as I was invited to a 'dinner party' at a friend from SOAS's house I brought him and his girlfriend along, a little nervous that they might not feel quite at home. At first my fears were proved totally wrong, as he talked and talked and people laughed at his jokes and everyone noted how delicious the food was and my other friends, whilst I think a little unsure of what to make of him, were well trained enough in the middle class art of politeness to keep everything running smoothly.

How about this for a way to define the class system in england in 2010 (fuck the 'how many sugars you put in your tea' business): when working class people have alcohol, they all chip in on a given night and then keep drinking it until it is finished. Middle class people, on the other hand, keep alcohol in their house 'in case' it should be drunk and I guess it is the done thing for the host of a dinner party to have more alcohol, and choices of alcohol, than she expects to get drunk.

As my friend, and his girlfriend, and me (partly in solidarity, partly because I began to feel I might need it) drank and drank and finished the wine and moved on to the whisky, an imperceptible change came over the party, a slight tension in the polite voices. He was dominating the conversation, I guess expecting that if someone had something to say they would interrupt him and that would be fine, but no one did, and his stories started to only attract silence to them, rather than laughter. It was time for some external stimulation, and I suggested we take the whisky and go to the canal.

We take the whisky and go to the canal, and now the canal air freshens our senses but keeps our intention. He asks 'Now, I wonder if anyone can tell me, we have just had a delicious meal in a beautiful house that, I am speaking honestly, I am jealous of, yet you guys decided to sleep last night in a shitty tent in the middle of trafalgar square, and for what? Can anyone explain this to me?' He meant it as a question, perhaps a goad to a debate, perhaps to air a feeling that everyone sensed he was feeling anyway, but no one answered him. I wish I had had a diplomatic word or two but the whisky was on me like a carebear and all I could do was giggle at the situation. There was a silence that he I think interpreted as everyone (about 5 others, apart from me, he and his girlfriend) turning against him. I giggled a bit more. “Well,” liam said, “now I feel like I want to talk about whats been on telly recently, but I bet none of you even have TVs do you?”. None of us did. It was time to go, and we did.

This is what I am talking about. And if I am really going to analyse it and be honest with myself, I would acknowledge that am in the fortunate (mostly) position of having experienced both a middle class life and a working class life in my formative years. My grandparents lived in a real nice semi-detached house that I lived in 0-5, and then 11-18 I got a scholarship to study at the local private school. The family of my mum are well educated, intelligent and mostly teachers or similar (and lovely). so I knew how to behave like one of that type of person (I hesitate, perhaps too late, to call this middle class). On the other hand, after my grandmas place I lived in a really shitty flat, the rest of which were rented to families who had either just come off the streets, out of drug treatment centres or prison, and it was not an uncommon site for me to come home from school to see fire engines outside the flats, or find used needles and condoms in the garden where I played football, etc. My mum worked 3 jobs, we holidayed in youth hostels not hotels and I learnt the value of money early, working in a chinese takeaway as soon as it was legal for me to do so and learning to deal with racist pissheads who wanted a chicken curry with none of your weird chinese shit. I also played on the streets from a young age and spending time in the houses of these friends was always just like another home (if you have no idea what I mean, think of the feeling that JK Rowling is trying to portray in the Weasleys' house).

An on and on. So from a young age I could see the comfort, contradictions, false politenessess and blindspots of the middle class way of existing, but at the same time knew the the kind of future that many of my 'working class' friends were likely to end up doing- working in a factory, being a waitor or a middle manager, joining the army. This was to me stultifying and meant I would be working my balls off for the man and releasing my frustrations in chemicals and mind numbing media, as some of my friends who are equally as gifted as me are now doing, and anyway it was expected at my school that everyone would go to university. And so I went to university, paid off my overdraft with that glorious job at SOAS, and in a way I have no doubt became co-opted into the middle class way of existing. Indeed, that is openly what the tories had in mind when they created the scholarship, the 'assisted place', that got me to go to private school. Much, in fact, like the Chinese did with their system of civil servant tests (ever wondered where the slang 'Mandarin' for high ranking civil servant comes from?).

So now, sometimes, just sometimes, I feel like I don't really belong in either place. Not in a dramatic 'lets have a walk in the rain and think about it' way, just like sometimes I have too much of one and need some of the other. And certain things in each depress me. And the most depressing thing about it, demonstrated in the story of liam above but something that has happened to me more than a few times, in America as well as England, is that people of the same age, from the same place, who take the same drugs and listen to the same music, cannot communicate with each other in meaningful ways. There is distrust, a feeling of inferiority on both sides and no way to get things started. With exceptions of course, but not enough to mean that we don't go into the next decade with the class system as rigidly in place as it has ever been, except almost self-enforced through culture.

So, and here I write amazed I can bring this ramble to anything approaching a coherent conclusion, that is why it feels so good for me to travel about like this, to have the ability to choose who I talk to, to make the most of the conversation and to understand that a wise man is a wise man, no matter whether he works for blackwater or not, and it is up to me to find a means to bring him on board with the struggle (though, frankly, I wouldn't know where to start).

And yes, I know smoking may kill me, but it is less likely to kill me than going to Afghanistan as a mercenary which, I found out when we were really looking each other in the eye, was where may friend in the Blackwater cap was going. And I only know that because I smoke.