Memoirs of London - 13

CHAPTER II

TOMMY

13.

Tommy belonged to the old guard of the Italians in London.

He worked illegally and at the same time he perceived the weekly unemployment allowance which officially was due  for being fired from the factory where he had previously worked.

But  according to his personal opinion it  was instead a form of reimbursement of the taxes paid in those years.

 Afterwards, he sentenced, in a society like the English, where a pair of gloves for fox hunting cost a hundred pounds (that he was more or less how much he earned for a selling mirrors for a month in the street ( inclusive of  Saturdays and Sundays) is not surely up  to the proletarians like him make economy.

Moreover  he had to defend himself in some way from the inflation invented by bankers and masters to exploit the working class.

 And since the escalators in London were only in the subway, he defended himself by perceiving that little government aid that, coupled with the variable payroll of the mirrors, allowed him to live quietly.

Tommy (as they called him in London, but his real name was Tommaso) was a bourgeois guy, of those who, in the eyes of the majority, could  never justify their anxiety or their dissatisfaction in the society.

High, long-limbed, and with regular facial features (I admired him and a little envied him for the ease with which he attracted the women’s gaze) Tommy  was endowed with a willing and determined character that, combined with his affectionate and altruistic charisma, instinctively wore you to love him,  well despite some of his contradictions which himself  was unable to explain and  which he did not even realize.

 But the latter thing was a common trait of  the generational movement which I also belonged to.

He had left Rome in the early seventies, when the dream of a more liberal society had already been broken on the barriers of respectability  and bourgeois hypocrisy. So, disappointed by the betrayal of that working class in whose union he, activist of the student movement, had blindly believed; still overwhelmed by that youthful rage that in the ideal years of '68 had released the highest vital energy; shocked, unbelieving, that the bloody boom was just the outbreak of an air bubble rather than the first crunch of the fatal collapse of a weary system, to be cut off at all costs; with the desire to forget and to find the more than ever living animosities of emancipation; driven by the fascinating cultural appeal of the new frontier of the movement, which in the shadow of the Big Ben sought refuge and regeneration in those years where the instances and the search for a new identity of a restless and shaky West seemed to find, if not an answer,  at least a reverberation of hope and ransom in the crises and illusions of Oriental myths, of which the capital of the former British Empire for its past colonial and vocation constituted the ideal and secure outpost; uncertain, helplessly and  confused, he was  passively dragged into London by one of those energetic currents, as mysterious and inexplicable as invisible and uncontrollable that impetuously are capable of dragging the fate of whole peoples and nations.

- "Ciao," I said, getting  behind him from a narrow alley.
- "You bloody scared me," it was his lusty response.

- "Excuse me Tommy! You were so overwhelmed that I could not resist the idea of ​​a joke. How are you?

- "Well, well .... And you? Did you find a job at last?

-"Yes I did! A company for which I have worked in the past has promised me to summon me ..... maybe next week ....! Do you know those machines that turn milk into cream, hang on by souvenir shops along the streets ...? "

- "Ah, yes, I seem to have noticed them, sometimes. Tourists seem to be crazy for them, don’t they?

-" surely they do! But also British seem to like them a lot.
- "Then it is even better! How much  do they pay you? "
- "I  work a 10%, ‘you know?"
- "And how it comes weekly?"
-"I do not know! It depends on the position! There at Oxford Street there would be a lot, but I will not be sure of that! Given my past experience, however, I could also have a good pitch! Ihope well...
- "I have spoken to my boss anyway! I was waiting for you to call me at home ... "
- "Yes, I called you, but you didn’t seem to be there..."
-"Didn’t I?! When did you call? "

He always spoke in a calm, almost indifferent tone, as if his words were the story of other people, not his owns. That day I felt in his voice an unusual emotional thrill.

- "I called a few days ago. Then I knew about the ice creams would take me back and I did not try again…’ you know? I just came to say hello to you! “

He  smiled slightly, seeming to regain his indifferent air as usual.

- "What did your boss say by the way?" I went on.
- "He said the place is available for you"

- "well I'm glad hearing it; thank you. Anyway,  I try in the ice cream now; Later, if they do not give me good wages, I might be asking them .... "

- "As you like! Do not worry, the work here is easy. And then maybe you'll take my place. Here is good enough ... "

- "How are you leaving?"
- "I’m going back to Italy"
- "Do you go on holiday?"

- "No, not on vacation. I'm meditating a more challenging step, a more important choice. Here in London I just broke. Think that yesterday the police broke into the house while there was no one and when I came back I found all my stuff out of the door ... "

-"Do not tell me! Another certainty of London that crumbles .. "

I was genuinely sorry for that news, not just for my friend, but for the fact in itself. I paid five pounds of rent for my furnished room on Caledonian Court Road, but I had always been fascinated by these free-lance communities that in  London were called  squatting houses, because, according to my way of thinking at that time, it was more appropriate to occupy unlived  houses that let them empty and lifeless.

At that time, I only considered the sociological and cultural aspect of the squatting phenomenon without worrying about the economic aspect, especially from the point of view of the owners of the houses .
Anyway, so things were going to happen, even if the situation was  to change seriously very soon.
- "Bloody Hell," Thomas continued, "only last year they would not be allowed to do such a thing! Crushing a squatting! "
- "I heard that they were about to issue a new Squatting Act .... do they have already done it?"
-"No I do not think so. I would have known if they did. The Conservatives are still on  the opposition but  they are getting stronger ... "

Again I noticed in her wards  that unusual emotion.

- "Where are you living  now?"
- "I have sheltered in the house of friends, in Fulham; They are organized; There is always someone at home and if they all leave, especially in the evening, they leave the lights on. And even the houses on the side are occupied by squatters: families of unemployed workers, poor devils. There they will not dare to break through …"
- "So you're okay, right?"
- "Yeah, maybe it was all there!"

He stared heavily in my eyes as if he were considering the importance or the opportunity to continue talking. I supported her gaze, then I offered one of my cigarettes. He continued after breathing smoke into the sky.

- "But tell me what am  I still doing  here? I'm bursting, ‘you know? I do not even remember what I  came here for and what's worse, sometimes,  I do not even remember who I am! My life, my thoughts, my actions are so different since I live here! Who is the real Thomas, do I ask to myself? It was only yesterday that I fought, albeit naively, to change society and  today I’m living  in a cloud of illusions, in a space which  I don’t even know the course? "

His unusual tone lit up my congenial polemic force and as I could, I tried to face him, also because, although he did not know the course, as he said, I felt I had to continue my journey; moving forward and without turning back.

- "Movement always follows a course, in my opinion! We need  to wait! We are in a moment of stasis; Soon clouds will light up! ...

- "No! Enough it’s  enough!" He  interrupted me abruptly, "I want to go back to earth, I have to tie myself to my past, to my true story! And, by the way,  what movement are you talking about?"

13. to be continued...

Memoirs of London - 12

 Other street traders I knew in London were "the mirrors sellers". Except for a few apart in  some isolated places, the mirrors sellers were mostly located in a narrow net of roads around the famous Carnaby Street, the real commercial hub of London’s tourist and rolling on since the epic of the Beatles.

 A little already decayed, but still a great attraction in the second half of the seventies. All the range of the consumer’s  symbols and the new western mythology, which also might be found in the T-shirts sold as souvenirs in the many stores that occupied the short road, the kingdom of cheap and quick tourist shopping , alltogether with the symbols of London, were reproduced on mirrors of different formed and sold on the street in front of those stores, which also constituted their store and warehouse.

From  Marylin Monroe to Humphrey Bogart; from Gin Beef Heart to Coca Cola; from the stylized liberty models to Union Jack, passing through the Irish beers Scottish whiskey, rock bands and even the Royal Family, everything was reproduced on those colored mirrors, gently framed and sold from a minimum of 99 pence to a maximum of £ 20 depending on their size and from  the buyer's tourist wallet and luggage.

The mirrors sellers of this area were almost all Italians or Spanish people.

Young people who had come  up to London in order to study English  language and know the city.  Or may be escaped from the economic and political climate of reflux and, in any case, all invoked by the great fascination that London's capital of Rock Music still exercised on the young people of that poorer Europe and they sought, together with greater freedom, a job that allowed them to   live in a decent way, relying only on their strength and without weighing on the family. Among the Italians stood the young freak looking , distinguished by the seemingly cluttered appearance .

I called them the minor brothers of the sixty-nine revolutioners. But among the mirrors sellers  of Carnaby Street there was an authentic and remarkable representative of the former young’s revolution whose name was Tommy.

12. to be continued...

Memoirs of London - 7

7.

The "Street's traders" were a microcosm in the West End.  They were all and everywhere: drivers, painters, musicians,  trumps,  preachers, mystics, sandwiches-men, artists, pimps, prostitutes, nobles decayed, clean-washers, interviewers, fake and real pushers, teddy-boys, advertisers, rock-punkers, adepts, dealers  and sellers of any kind and much more than that.

Everyone could meet them in that circular microcosm of twisted alleyways, avenues, secondary streets and main arteries, all mysteriously united as an osmotic network of communicating vessels where the rivers, streams and seas walk in a twofold direction, never stopping. 

A living body whose pulsating heart is the West End.

Inside there is an even more intricate series of streets and alleys that goes under the name of Soho, where pimps and prostitutes (in regular and authorized professional clothes) have their kingdom.

Prostitutes could only indirectly be regarded as "street workers". 

In the English mentality, in fact, a "bitch in the street" is totally inconceivable. In England everything can be done,  talking of sex, supposed  is not known around. Anyone can make anything  but he’s supposed  not to spread it around . This  attitude,  hypocritical and paternalistic,  is for  sure a Victorian legacy that even the liberation movements of the sixties had failed to sweep away.

Whoever works in the street is the pimp. The one who makes as a trait-union towards the paradise of the forbidden, well protected by the strands of the sexy-shops.


These shops, all  opaque windowed,  at the time totally unknown and banned in Italy,  were officially licensed for the sale and rental of hard-core video cassettes and magazines, but in fact, and everyone knew it, they were the venue of infamous business, ideal recipe for itchy and perverted watchers of all kinds, sado-masochistic  represses, provided on the ground floor of prostheses suitable for pleasure and sorrow (whips, vibrators, inflatable dolls and all sexy accessories of paraphernalia you can imagine) and reserved apartments, projection halls, erotic cells with peephole and much more on top floors.

7. to be continued...