Radio show in T minus two and a half hours. Killing time and trying to write again, the radio show has been draining the creative juices for the past 8 months, but as I’m beginning to get into a groove with that I’m finding my writers eyes again – tiny details and sticking in my memory, turns of phrase bouncing round my mind, and conversation slowly being dominated by rambling stories that go nowhere.
So I’m back where the music is ugly, the walls are black and nobody could give a fuck about your name. Costers is still dark but strangely clear, back before the smoking ban walking downstairs into this underground hole was like walking into a storm cloud that smelt of sweat. But some things never change, the beer is cheap and tastes it, there is still a small cabal of regulars hanging onto the bar like a cold sore and one in every three songs is actually listenable. It ain’t much but its home I guess.
Back when I was a young and earnest Nu-Metal acolyte, sneaking in here under-age I used to look at the collection of Punks, Greebos and Bikers in here as demi-gods, they were sincere, they talked they talk and in my head they lived the life, in a squat somewhere maybe, pouring special brew on to cornflakes and pissing raw anarchy. I know now most were not we was all faking it. Leather and swagger that hid nice flats or decent jobs a respect for their parents and semi decent job. Some of my friends rejected this, actually dropped out, took drugs and got into trouble, the undertow of sleazy glamour nearly pulling me under with them. Speed was my drugs of choice back then and my capacity for it huge, when needles got involved I stopped. I found my line – soon after Speed changed to heroin and someone died.
Someone opposite me is breaking a rule of mine “never play pool against a fat girl”. And as a result he has five balls on the table and she’s getting ready to sink the Black, I can see him standing there leaning on his pool cue thinking “what the fuck just happened?”, between shots she’s ignoring the table entirely and wrestling with her stick thin boyfriend who has a smooth head and too baggy jeans, while our man earnestly tries to catch up.
It’s getting busier in here now. Shop workers after a hard day standing, shoppers after a hard day shopping and poseurs after a hard day getting look at. But in the word of Louis Armstrong “I see friends shaking hands saying how do you do- they’re really saying I love you” the atmosphere in here is less of a public house and more of a canteen of a small factory, people ARE shaking hands, sharing in jokes, and swapping gossip. I’ve visited the toilets, the gents loo’s in Costers are a sight to behold – somehow being sparse and devoid of anything (including a door for the toilet stall) but at the same time be run down and vandalised. While looking round during my draining I looked up to see a ceiling of a couple of stickers and tags – one of them being mine. Seeing it was like a time capsule buried fifteen years ago, it didn’t say anything, it didn’t have to, it triggered a series of memories so clear that I may have added to the ever growing stagnate puddle of piss on the floor.
For a long time I never really had the stomach for Costers, ghosts and bad feeling. People I never wanted to see again and people that wanted to see me for all the wrong reasons. Coming here now is a comforting but foreign like sleeping in a friends unmade bed. Its clientele, despite being dressed like degenerates, thugs and modern pirates, I know are faking it – just like everybody else. I can see the community, the sub-culture, its codes rules and clauses. Not part of, but born of. Not included but never excluded.
