SLAGHEAP by HESSE K

The first page of Samuel Delaney’s Heavenly Breakfast, his short memoir of a single winter living in a commune on the Lower East Side of Manhattan between 1967-68, reads

This book is dedicated
to everyone who ever did anything
no matter how sane or crazy whether it worked out or not to give themselves
a better life.

Mum says every time she goes back to the town where I grew up and she grew old – where she spent the best part of twenty years – it gets worse and worse. It was bad enough in the 00’s. Most of the shop fronts are boarded up now, she says, in flaking plywood or those seemingly mandatory, gestural daubs that get streaked across the windows when a place goes belly up. Like they need to block out the failure. Then she hangs up. All the friends who died here; all the friends who didn’t leave. I realise in retrospect how much I resented the mental gymnastics my ex used to perform just to justify her own aspirational class positionality to herself. Lucy Hanley and Cynthia Cruz. All the writhing and back-bending; the semantics. Now she’s a landlord.

Because I was raised by a working class single mum who inherited from her mum a contrary blend of reticent timidity and rebellious tomboy ebullience that was offset by quintessentially feminine good looks and the advent of punk, I was raised to believe that image management as an aspirational project of class was spiritually indefensible and image management in terms of the physical mediation of your gender presentation was largely unconscionable. I latched onto the first and the second stuck in me like a splinter.

Heavenly Breakfast is the name of the book, the band, and the commune in which all of the members of the band – including Delaney – lived. The Breakfast had three rooms: the main room, which included a kitchen, freestanding bath, and toilet, and two smaller rooms used exclusively for recording music and selling weed out of. At any one time there was between ten to fifteen residents of The Breakfast, alongside a revolving cast of friends, visitors, collaborators and strays; their children or friends; their collaborators or strays, etc etc. The Breakfast apparently ‘never had anything close to resembling an organisational meeting’ and, at one point, when quizzed about how much they pay in rent, Delaney can’t decide ‘whether to divide seventy-five dollars a month by ten, twelve or fifteen’. Some passages from this book slip into feeling like scenes from Delaney’s 1975 sci-fi epic Dhalgren – the orgies and group meals, the arguments. Like Times Square Red, Times Square Blue, the world of late sixties and early seventies Manhattan that he describes feels so impossibly distant it might as well be a piece of sci-fi itself: the total permeation of erotics into urban space, the rent. I read these books and think oh – this is what they took from us.

It’s hard for me to say why I left the town I grew up in. I didn’t really think about it at the time. I knew I wanted out, or at least it was expected of me to want to get out, so I guess I made that getting-out my own wanting or expectation. My mum was from south London and she’d got out in her own way, at fourteen: went to Cardiff and sniffed out the burgeoning punk thing. This was in ‘75 I think. I was raised in the mythology of her life: that Billingsley don’t give a fuck gene. It was never about feeling divisible from the people I grew up with. Most of them wanted out, too.

Delaney goes on to say:

Since there was no permanent, externally agreed-on social organisational structure, it’s accurate to say that everything that happens in the commune was because of “your” or “my” whim. But “you” and “I” lived so close that the effect of “your” whim on “me” or “my” whim on “you” was immediately apparent. And

there was no way to avoid responsibility for it. I worked, I ate, I bathed, I shit, I fucked, I went to sleep, and I woke up in the same room with you. There were no rooms you were not in. In that situation, it is impossible for me to allow you to do more work than you’re comfortable doing, as you look around and see what is to be done; as you see what I’m doing; or what she or he is doing; or as you decide what, by whim, you feel like doing. That outraged hostility you experience when you have been socially mistreated, with which you can freeze a whole room of strangers, much less friends, just by walking into it in the right mood, I cannot tolerate when I am sleeping in the same bed you’re balling in, when I’m balling in the same bed she’s sleeping in, when she sits down on a toilet seat he’s just left warm, when he’s leaning against your leg while he eats, when I can feel your back muscles moving against mine while you eat. I do not believe in telepathy.

This is my favourite passage in the book. I love the way he makes the semicolons, the quotation marks, the interchangeable pronouns completely intradependent on one another; you take one phrase out and the whole thing collapses.

I don’t romanticise this kind of life. How could I? It is absolutely unattainable. Or at least, even if it were attainable, haven’t I been marinated too long in the mire of the 21st century? In total individuation? Could I stand the total absence of even the faintest idea of personal space, or of solitude? I want to believe that I could shed it: I’ve shed lots of things. But I think it’s important draw a line here, as Delaney does, between The Commune – which The Breakfast is – and the The Co-operative – which it definitionally isn’t. The Co-operative is more resilient to the manifold violence of the world, and to austerity, in that it can successfully integrate itself into capital, and so is more attainable. I might even be able to live in a cooperative if I wanted; if I could bear to sign up to yet another waiting list – not for a pussy this time but a roof over my head. None of this changes the fact that the conditions for a Commune with a capital C just don’t currently exist in the urban spaces of this country.

I believe in cities as a social formation. I believe in the metropolitan landscape as a stinking, gorgeous and absolutely fucked medley of absolutely cacophonous everything; I believe in staying close to the seat of power and not sequestering yourself from it; I believe in not believing that you can be divisible from it – from power; I believe in not believing that the city is dead and unliveable; or at least I believe that I don’t want to let them win, to cede ground; I believe in durable networks of interrelation because my friends are what keep me alive. What keeps me estrogenized. I grew up in the country and the mythology of the city, of my mum’s London, was all I had. I don’t want to believe that following this mythology made me a class traitor, but I do wonder whether leaving your hometown does something irreparable to your class consciousness. D talks about being the first person to write a book about your hometown that the people you grew up with don’t hate you for. Am I worthy to speak on behalf of my past? Nomatter how sane or crazy? Hilton Als says ‘What is there but other people?’ and he’s right. I can feel your back muscles moving against mine while you eat.