Hanif Kureishi - Something to Tell You

“Don’t you like it?” she said. “Perhaps you weren’t stoned enough to relax.”

I’d used LSD in my teens, but found the effects of an acid inferno lasted too long, a horror movie you couldn’t walk out of. I’d had more than enough adventures in my own head. But working on youth programmes, Karen heard of a new, less solipsistic drug being used in New York clubs, called Ecstasy or E. It took us a while to track some down; it was hard to get in London then. We started to hold Ecstasy parties in her flat, where she had a large circular bath. She liked the new pop: Sade, Tina Turner, the Police, Frankie Goes to Hollywood, Eurythmics. I didn’t wake up wanting to hear a new record until later, when Massive Attack released Blue Lines-“you’re the book I have open”-during the first Gulf War.

Nights and nights on E, our pupils spinning in what I considered pure hedonism, with the guilt and anxiety it brought-for which I would compensate with days of heavy study-had me thinking about the uses and difficulties of pleasure, the whole question of jouissance in a person’s life. Ecstasy connected me with others; it made me want to talk, as I disappeared into the dreadful voice of ultimate pleasure, a cheap ticket to the place mystics and psychotics have always headed for.

The music was loud, and the talk facile. Not only that, to prolong the buzz we’d take cocaine, which messed us up. Big new clubs were opening, with huge sound systems, run and owned by public school boys who were turning the “underground” into the Thatcherite market overnight. After a time I realised that Karen had more tolerance for these places than I did. Unlike most of the kids there, Karen wasn’t committed to the project of unwinding and losing the self. She was at work: observing the clothes, the attitude, while going to the bathroom to note down the words being used. She wanted to turn it all into television.

We went to New York for “meetings.” I stood on the roof of the hotel looking out at the glittering city for the first time. We began a frantic round of clubs, bars and the famous Knitting Factory. While I wanted to hunt through the numerous secondhand bookshops on the Upper West Side for obscure psychoanalytic books, she was buying us cocaine and trying to get us invited to parties with what she called “atmosphere.” Londoners, being more cynical and knowing then, were less gullible when it came to celebrity. I began to dislike her; I felt dragged along, like a recalcitrant child, and, back in London, made it clear I didn’t want to live with her.

Karen was becoming tougher, someone you wouldn’t want to work for, as she developed a flair for sacking people. “Had to be done,” she’d say as another loser limped out the door. For Karen, if anyone suffered, it was their own fault; even if you were a persecuted black South African with no human rights, you had somehow brought the badness on yourself. After a while her callousness stopped bothering me because I saw how unbearable it was to her that anyone would hurt anyone else. For her, because it was unbearable it was untrue, and she didn’t have to look at it.

The part of the day we most enjoyed together was breakfast, which we’d have in a Soho café, usually the Patisserie Valerie in Old Compton Street, after picking up the tabloids. The shameless Sun was in its prime-the royal family helpless before it-and the other papers imitated it. We’d read bits out to one another, screaming with laughter at the prose. This was before most people realised that the person who’d have the most influence over our time would be Rupert Murdoch-the author of the celebrity culture we inhabit, and clever enough to avoid it himself.

The newspapers were the first to turn wholeheartedly to trash. It hadn’t yet reached TV, except through youth programming, where Karen and her pals encouraged nonentities to eat maggots-“faggots gobbling maggots: What could be more entertaining?”-or share a bath with eels or-why not?-with animal and human faeces. The next day these newly minted celebs would appear in the newspapers, having spent the night with a soap star. Television was now watching us, rather than the other way round.

The papers would celebrate and then desecrate the new stars. I had never liked the punks, but this kind of anarchistic, republican amorality appealed to me at times-I guess it was the lack of respect for authority, its destructiveness. At the same time it fitted with the liberal economics of Thatcher. Who could not be amused by the fact that the capitalism unleashed by the Conservatives under Thatcher was destroying the very social values the party espoused?

As we ate our croissants and drank a new thing in London, caffe lattes, Karen would fill her notebook with mad ideas for game shows, suitable for breakfast and daytime TV, which had just started. At that time daytime was a huge vacant space, soon to become even more vacant. Programmes were beginning to be made quickly and cheaply; cameras got smaller, and recording tape was of better quality. The contents were cut-price too, since the participants were not movie or even TV stars but “real” people discovered by researchers, who could become enviable just by appearing on TV. To me it sounded like music hall: television versions of the mad variety shows my grandparents used to take Miriam and me to on our holidays. At the end of the pier at the seaside, we’d watch jugglers, knife throwers and fat comedians telling risqué jokes. After, we’d scoff “hot sandwiches in gravy.”

For me all this was an amusement, but for Karen it was a kind of calling, an opportunity that few people realised was there. I guess I realised the extent of her cultural terrorism when I suggested we might go to see a film which happened to be subtitled. “No-never!” she cried. “Not a foreign film you have to read! Are they in slow motion? Can’t you feel yourself ageing?”

When I recommended the theatre or a gallery, it wasn’t that she refused to go; it was not that attending such things made her feet ache-which wouldn’t have surprised me, as she wore stilettos most of the time: even her slippers were four inches from the ground. It was that she considered art to be showing off, empty, worthless, an insult to the public, and if subsidised, a waste of public money. “Tchaikovsky’s Crime and Punishment, Chekhov’s Last Symphony-yuck, fuck, muck!”

As a Thatcherite, she wanted to be rid of it. Here, at “the end of history,” the television ruling class, the old sensitive if not effete Oxbridge mob along with the monarchy and the Church, would be replaced by “the people,” by which she seemed to mean the ignorant and wildly coarse. I wasn’t the only one killing fathers. In the 60s and 70s, there was a cult of it, as patriarchy and the phallus were attacked. And what did we end up with, at the end of that iconoclastic decade? Thatcher: a fate worse than a man.

Now, of course, we live in Thatcher’s psyche if not her anus, in the world she made, of competition, consumerism, celebrity and guilt’s bastard son, charity: bingeing and debt. But then, these views were a novelty.

At least, with Karen, I learned to make no distinction between high and low art. I guess I’d been something of a snob before, wondering whether it was healthy to be so moved by Roy Orbison and Dusty Springfield. But Karen unintentionally showed me the futility of such distinctions.

Not that I could interest Karen much in what I was doing; although she left me alone to study, she considered analysis “unconvincing” as a profession, as though I’d decided to become an astral channeller or soothsayer. I realised this not only when she had difficulty-and showed considerable reluctance, if not embarrassment-in explaining to people what it was I did but also when she decided, without asking me, that I’d be better off as a TV presenter.