Me and Billy at his Lehmann Maupin opening NYC 2015
I met Wild Billy Childish (William Hamper, Stephen Hamper) in September 1977. We met in the lobby of Medway College of Art, the first day of our Foundation Course and pretty much lived in each others pockets that year up on the hill overlooking Chatham and beyond.
I commuted from Whitstable to Chatham on the train wearing my mother’s green woollen tights and various punk get-ups. Braving a torrent of abuse. Bill was in a band called the Pop Rivets and interviewed Polly Styrene for his fanzine. He knew about Kurt Schwitters and German Expressionism and wood cutting and Celine’s Death On The Instalment Plan. He was very generous with what he knew and I was hungry to learn it.
When we left Medway… after a ten year pause we were friends for pretty much two decades. We collaborated on my performance art posters and I bought art from him when I had the money and he needed it.
I think he sent me every book he ever published, every album he ever pressed… and I have every punk fanzine he produced at Medway. He was a machine. Painting, printing, writing, singing, playing the guitar.
Charismatic bad girls flocked to him.
Billy’s girlfriend whilst at Medway was a beautiful woman called Rachel Waller who, when she was done with Billy, married the Olympian Steve Ovett.
While we were at Medway, Billy and Rachel took me under their wing. He recognised another tormented soul and she wanted a gang. However, he could be unashamedly homophobic and treated women as he saw his dad treat his timid mother, June… not very well.
One night Billy and Rachel took me to dinner at the expensive Windmill Restaurant in Whitstable with some money his dad had given him. They missed the last train home to Chatham from Whitstable and my step father refused to let them crash at the house. I was mortified.
After we left Medway he went to St Martin’s School of Art and I lived in Paris and changed my name. We didn’t really speak until 1990.
I did not know Billy when he was married to Sheila although when I met Sheila recently at the RCA she showed me her Billy brand on her upper arm. The hangman tattoo. He married Sheila when he was still with Tracey Emin which devastated Tracey. He could be a real twat.
Billy’s dad was not a good man. Billy seemed all at once in awe of him and terrified. Billy was brought up in Walderslade, a genteel and affluent neighbourhood on the outskirts of Chatham. His parent’s house was well appointed, decorated with real art and art books.
Bill’s father wore velvet collared coats and his Mother, June was a potter. When I was a teenager I liked visiting Billy’s house because it was so different from mine. I thought to myself, Billy and his brother would never want for anything.
Billy is terminally nostalgic and even when we were kids Billy took teen me to old men’s outfitters in Rochester and made me buy braces and homburg hats and I willingly followed his lead. I was his clueless project and soon I was wearing ripped tweed, argyle and caps. He was without doubt (until I met Fred Hughes) my greatest style influence. He was so sure of everything he said and I believed in him. He was the surest 18 year old I had ever met. I would ever meet.
The time I knew Billy the best was when he was married to Kira and had his son Huddy. June moved to Whitstable from Chatham and I was invited to Sunday lunch every weekend for years. Sometimes it was the only proper food I had. As June roasted a chicken, boiled vegetables and made crumble I sat in her spare bedroom which doubled as Billy’s Sunday studio watching him paint. I lazily listened to him talk about painters and painting and Tracey. Always Tracey. I sat and listened to him talk about politics, his health, Peter Doig (who we both knew) but as Tracey gained traction in her career so Billy became more agitated. The Emin tent with his name appliquéd in it… her painting which he felt Tracey owed him a thank you, but rather than be grateful she described him as… stuck. So he created a movement around Tracey calling him stuck, which is what a narcissist does I suppose.
The truth is, Billy was stuck. Stuck in his ways, enslaved by routine. Intransigent.
He tolerated my theatre success. It didn’t mean anything to him but after I met Joe and bought the Peter Cushing house and started making movies he shared that he found my success deeply concerning.
“I never want to talk about your work and I won’t come and see your movies.”
It was at this time Billy became aware I was friends with Jay Jopling who I met in Edinburgh whilst I was working for Ricky DeMarco. Jay and his YBA circus. Jay often visited the cottage at 13 Island Wall in Whitstable and brought his star acts with him. Billy would ask for an introduction to Jay or a studio visit (as did all of my artist friends) but Jay who represented Tracey Emin at White Cube described Billy as ‘tricky’ and refused to meet him or see his work. I remember exactly where that conversation happened and how I dreaded telling Billy… Jay wasn’t interested.
It was his separation from Kira that showed Billy at his worst. Billy’s new American girl now wife Julie inserted herself into all of our lives and frankly, it didn’t feel very good. I liked Kira. She was firm but kind and I respected her authority.
After Kira left and Julie moved in I tried having lunch with them as usual but I couldn’t just pretend things hadn’t changed so I stopped having Sunday lunch with June, Billy and Julie. I continued buying his work. Things came to a head one Sunday afternoon when he visited the Cushing house with Julie and we got into some verbal argy bargy. I told him I thought the way he treated women was despicable. It was then, and only then, he threatened me with physical violence. Sometimes you see people exactly for who they are. Later that evening he called and apologised for his behaviour but it was too late… I had seen him.
I saw Billy recently at Frieze. He gave me a hug and said he thought he might see me. He told me to call.
I didn’t call.
Then, coincidentally I met Billy and Kira’s son’s Australian girlfriend who works in a gallery along side the RCA. Causing me to meet Huddy as an adult, an artist whose work is very similar in style to his father’s.
The last time I saw June she said,
“I’m 90.”
She died shortly after. I heard from Whitstable locals Billy didn’t visit very often.
All in all what do I feel about Billy now? We will continue to bump into each other. We are in the same orbit. I feel as if I was dumped when I saw the worst of him, but Billy never had the courage to tell me why he gaslights me.
I’m left with the paintings, the books the records and stacks of drawings. The paintings I have? Nobody really wants the old stuff. Billy now paints like he actually wants to sell his work. The early work… jarring colours and equally jarring subject matter now ditched for Doig like forests of silver birch and sunsets.
He painted me a cat. I said, “Can you paint it pink?”
I think he probably sneered… but he painted it anyway.
Over My Dead Body 24/25 RCA Cadaver Bag, Rope, Granite, Knitted Toys and Painted Intervention.
From the garment bags earlier used in the revolving moving image installation and referencing my grandmother’s hoarding of torn and bloodied clothes evolved the industrial cadaver bags intended for human remains.
Suspended so we might consider emotional weight, emotional baggage and also the weight of grief. The granite is immovable. I am powerless over the granite blocks. The toys: synapse.
The bag is full of old clothes I can no longer wear but too expensive to throw away.
Blood, Shit and Cum Mixed Media Painted Intervention 2024/25 RCA 1.5m x .5m
1964. M2 Motorway. Torrential rain.
Aunt Evelyn is emigrating to the USA. David, my Step Father, is driving us to Heathrow. The car is an adapted Citroen DS with seven seats he had borrowed from a friend. There are nine of us in the car. Evelyn, her small children Mark and Miranda, me, my two year old brother Stuart, my Mother, David, my Grandmother and Grandfather. 5 adults and 4 children.
David is 24 years old. Driving too fast in the torrential rain, he hits a a sheet of running water and aquaplanes over the central reservation into oncoming traffic. He crashes head on into a dentist travelling south who is immediately killed. I am sitting on my Mother’s lap in the front passenger seat. Upon impact I hit the windscreen, through the glass, out of the warm car, into the cold rain and onto the wet verge.
Silence. My skull smashed. Lying in the grass. Rain on my face. I remember hearing my Mother’s voice.
“I think he’s dead.”
No, I’m not. I thought. I’m not dead. I’m alive.
I remember the ambulance. Sitting opposite my aunt. Her legs were bleeding. There was a lot of blood. Over all of us. My clothes were sticky with blood. I’m wearing tartan trousers. The ambulance was just a van with broken people sitting on benches opposite each other.
We all survived the accident. There were so many of us in the car, packed like sardines. No seatbelts.
I remember telling the nurses at the hospital I didn’t sleep in a cot at home. I slept in a real bed.
I stayed in hospital for 20 weeks. I have no recollection of those months in hospital.
Four years later I am staying with my Grandmother. I am 8 years old. My Grandfather had died of an asthma attack beside her. She set the table before we went to bed. The house always smelled of apples. I liked the room I stayed in when I stayed with her. I can hear her downstairs preparing breakfast.
The wardrobe was assembled from odd elements. A deep shelf hung with a curtain made of orange linen, patterned with black bull reeds. I loved rooting through her old things in the wardrobe.
Past her summer dresses and winter coats, buried deep under the shelf I found opaque garment bags. As I unzipped them I recognised immediately what they were. My dead Grandfather’s tweed suit covered in dried blood and mud. My own tartan trousers from the accident similarly covered in dried blood and mud. In all of the garment bags hidden at the back of the wardrobe were the clothes we were wearing the day we survived the terrible accident on the M2 Motorway.
I told my mother. When I returned, the bags were gone.
The next project I set myself at the RCA was to unpack the secrets of the wardrobe.
A few days after I arrived at the RCA I asked my rather gruff personal tutor if he was at all interested in getting Jay Jopling or Charles Saatchi to chat to the students about the beginning of the YBA movement. The tutor scoffed… these men were irrelevant dinosaurs. The RCA had ‘no interest in commercial galleries’.
Of course I took the dinosaur comment rather personally… I am older than Jay. If they are dinosaurs. I’m certainly a dinosaur. I crept away and had a little cry.
Then I stopped crying. I set about making me… my dinosaur in just about everything I could lay my hands on.
This dinosaur isn’t going extinct any time soon.
The conversation has since been contested by the tutor.
Dino Dildo sketch 24/25 RCA
Dildo Dino 24/25 RCA 274cm Black Nylon Inflatable
Over my Dead Body installation sketch 1.5m x 1m RCA Mixed Media
Dino Sketch 1m x 60cm 24/25 RCA Black Gesso on Paper
Embroidered Dinosaur Wool Blanket, Silk, Painted Interventions, Polythene, Garment Bag 24/25 RCA 65cm x 20cm
Reading Jail 274cm x 274cm 24/25 RCA Oil on Canvas
The first few weeks at the RCA were simultaneously very scary and utterly thrilling. Surrounded by so many new people. Negotiating space and time in an institution when the only institutions I have ever been in long term are hospitals.
The first term was full of exciting promise. I started as I meant to continue. At a pace. I needed to set aside my expectations and start by making sense of the past few years. Firstly, I wanted to address this blog as it has played such an integral part of my creative life.
So, I took important texts from the blog and blew them up to one and half meters by one meter and began either erasing or redacting or enhancing these huge new works on paper.
This research was never really meant for anyone than me but certainly helped make sense of this late term transition from film and words and structure to unstructured mark making. As I mentioned in an earlier blog I spent the previous year working with two young producers on two original screenplays.
One of the scripts I was particularly proud. Both screenplays were a tribute to the highly structured work I had been making these past decades.
Useless Man. Self Portrait 24/25 RCA 1m x 1.5m
Then, through this work, I started looking at my life in AA these past 27 years I had devoted to sobriety. I felt angry with AA. Had it been a monumental waste of time? Am I an alcoholic? I had predicated so many of my most important decisions on my relationship with a cult? I had moved to LA. I had chosen my agent and manager and lawyer… because of AA. Ultimately I felt as if all I had really achieved was a race toward insanity buoyed by other insane alcoholics. Who could be the maddest manman in Madland ? I was a clear winner by far. As soon as I stepped away from the AA competitive madness I was free and consequently so much happier.
I still find myself drawn to crazy addicts and alcoholics. It’s the intensity of the connection, feeding my desire for more… me and my addict.
I set about erasing the 12 steps.
12 Steps Erased (Triptych) 1 24/25 RCA 1m x 1.5m
12 Steps Erased (Triptych) 2 24/25 RCA 1m x 1.5m
12 Steps Erased (Triptych) 3 24/25 RCA 1m x 1.5m
I made a series of works addressing the horrors of the Gaza Genocide inspired by Picasso’s Guernica. Drawn over a blog description of my own decent into hell. The micro and the macro.
Easter 2024 I discovered an itchy, scaly rash on my buttocks and on the back of my legs. A routine trip to both the doctor and the STD clinic (was it Money Pox?) posited I had either Psoriasis or Eczema. Both conditions apparent in my immediate family. It didn’t really occur to me these diagnosis were not consistent and I should really have sought a third opinion.
By late January of this year and quite suddenly the painful and desperately itchy rash had spread all over my body and I woke up to specs of dried blood all over the sheets and pillowcases. I tried a little on-line diagnosis of my own and bought some scabies cream just in case. After two weeks the situation had become dire.
A trip to the dermatologist in Canterbury and a helpful doctor friend seemed to point in an altogether more sinister direction. The consultant immediately put me on a very heavy dose of steroids which, may have helped with my skin but my mood plummeted. The pills make me jittery and thirsty, I became snappy and impatient. The steroids catastrophically compromised my already shaky emotional and mental foundation.
I knew I had to get out of the RCA as soon as possible. I had to get out of the studio… as in this highly charged environment I was likely to say the wrong thing or react incorrectly to a bunch of much younger people who understandably could not easily empathise with an old man with a bad diagnosis.
The problem with Steroids (Alex my studio cohort and Anthropologist turned Artist told me) steroids have three emotional outcomes: Glad, Mad or Bad. Mine was decidedly bad and mad. I felt terrible.
After two biopsies things became a little clearer. Still not crystal clear… but much clearer. Although sinister there are two flavours of the same sinister. I will know the (bad or less bad) outcome on Tuesday 22nd April.
I fled to Portugal to be on my own. I’ve been sleeping until Midday every day since I arrived in the Algarve. My skin is healing for the most part, the pustules held back by the steroids.
I am less grumpy because I am totally isolated from other humans.
The spector of my insanity in retreat.
When I was happier I wanted to do a PhD: Artists and Insanity.
An article in the New York Times by Tara Parker-Pope uses the work of Martin Ramirez, an artist with schizophrenia, to ponder the well-worn perception that artistic creativity and mental illness are somehow inevitably linked.
Emotional disorders are not afflictions that sometimes come with built-in creativity. It’s time to kill this stereotype and the stigmatising statements that often come along with it.
We with mental health issues are still not understood when we present for the most part as normal. Like a trans person I seek to pass without being noticed until I am caught chatting to myself or saying things I wonder why… why did I say that?
It became obvious, very quickly… even though I had made my life-long mental health struggles very clear to the RCA administration before I arrived, my concerns were not being passed onto the correct department.
This may have had something to do with a messy transfer of power from the brilliant and enigmatic CAP head of department (now Dean) Chantal Faust to firstly Jordan Baseman then to Dr Harold Offeh.
Crucial information was not communicated. Two long term hospitalisations in psychiatric hospitals, ongoing mental health care, a massive head injury when I was a child. There really wasn’t any kind of support or help from the College.
I suppose, because for the greater part of my life, I manage my condition.
I am used to going as far as I can before the wheels come off but after a couple of incidents (I will write about these at a later date) I begged the student union for help. Help came in the form of a very level headed guy who talked me through what was happening.
When I discussed my health I found the staff in my department prone to infantilisation. They looked at me with fixed, wide eyed grins as if they were placating a baby.
I mean… they are just artists. They are not doctors, they are not therapists. I understand they were just trying their best.
So I wrote to Harold Offeh the head of CAP and told him I desperately needed to get away because I knew I was holding back a dam of emotions that could not afford to break at the college.
If I were epileptic and had a seizure… how would they react? A seizure is very scary for other people. It is confusing. It can be triggering.
That’s what mental illness looks like. It is something I have struggled with all my life. Periodically I can hold my head above the water and get things done then I am dragged deep beneath the waves.
When I fight my way up again gasping for air… things were not as they were.
Malibu Fires RCA 2024/25 Acrylic and chalk on Canvas 2m x 2m
After a few years away from this diary I have decided, with so much going on… to make my thoughts and feelings public once again. I have a great deal to process, most notably the death of my darling Little Dog. The death of my brother Stuart, the destruction of everything in Malibu, the gruelling politics of fear now so widespread and the institution of The Royal College of Art.
So… let’s fire this baby up. See how she rolls.
In September 2024 I began the process of leaving Whitstable for the last time. On so many occasions I had resisted going back. I was living happily in Portugal in a lovely home and mostly enjoying my life post Covid, post near death experience.
The Little Dog was still alive but ailing.
I had visited Whitstable and made arrangements to stay with my dear friend who I found to be in deep trouble. Her late stage Parkinson’s Disease was limiting what she could do and despite her valiant attempts her life was shrinking. I returned to Portugal but she begged me to come help her. Yet again, I couldn’t say no. My alanonic codependency, my desire to fix… to interfere (masquerading as help) got the better of me.
So, I moved back to Whitstable where I took up the relentless task of caring for my friend with Parkinson’s Disease. It was a gruelling and thankless task. As much as I cared about and loved her, I hated the disease. I tried to create a safe and beautiful environment for her but by doing so made my own life very dangerous.
I cooked every meal. I sat beside her. I dabbed at her brow. I drove her, did the gardening, the laundry and unpacked the shopping. I really hoped God was looking down approvingly at this living amends.
However, I knew (apart from a container of possessions) I had no business being in Whitstable. Those I knew, had known all my life, would finish up their days in much the same way they had for half a century.
Return of the Native I am not.
In the past two decades I had lived in so many different towns of varying sizes before I returned to my ailing friend. I had lived In Hollywood, Malibu, Tivoli, NYC, Carmona, Tavira and bought land in Walford, Herefordshire… and each of those places with a varying range of money to play with I met the same kind of people. I met billionaires and paupers. I made 500k. I made nothing.
The same kind of people made themselves apparent in every town, in every city.
There was the return of the native on the hunt for answers, there is always a bent lawyer, a miserable divorcee… In every town there is a heartbreak. The same story. The same closeted sailor. The same rancid coke addict stinking of cheap, over cut drugs on their breath and skin.
In every town.
Every town has a respected few who have no damned reason to be respected, and a few who should be respected but never are. There’s always the blowsy blond who marries the local business man and drives a fancy car. There is the drug dealer and the dreamer and the goody housewife and those who live out their days crippled with debilitating illnesses.
There is a local girl with a head injury who just wants the best for everyone whose coworkers laugh at behind her back.
In every town there are a gang of thugs who get together on a Friday afternoon and eat sea food, drink too much and lie about the value of their jewelry.
The feminist art collective who draw each other badly.
There is always the lacklustre husband who returns to the barren ex wife he abandoned (cap in hand) from another who takes all his money but delivers three sons.
There is the 50 year old woman who writes to her boyfriend in prison for five long years but when he gets out he sleeps with her best friend and breaks her heart and her bank.
These dramas, unchanged since Dylan alluded to them from his sleepy Welsh village.
Whitstable. Wealthy married couples (gay and straight) buy terraced houses, hire fancy architects who strip out all non load-bearing walls revealing ‘volumes’ and when they are done… install thick, white plastic plantation blinds, blinding the house from the street.
As Whitstable prospered (because of Oysters not yachting) so the local football team Whitstable Town became the toast of the local league. I had many a moment in those Belmont bleachers, under the rusty gasometer, when I was a kid. Every Saturday.
David Roy my step father played for the town, respected for his scissor tackles and party antics in the bar afterwards.
He always has a bottle of wine in the boot of his car for the ‘ladies’.
After nearly 3 years of devoted service to my friend something in me broke. I was gasping for air. Whitstable became a desert with nothing to drink. I was thirsty for change. Tied to the antics of my sick friend and her sicker family.
I applied to the RCA after my brother Stuart, died. My younger half brother. His death inspired me to get on with things.
A lifeline from heaven… the RCA accepted me and in September 2024 I started an MA in Contemporary Art Practice.
The first thing I did when I arrived and given the opportunity, I cut myself off from David’s name. I took the name I was born with… before David Roy adopted me or even knew my mother or me.
Duncan Paul Spark.
It hasn’t been easy owning that name… Spark. Even though I hate the name Roy and all it means, I am used to it. I am used to that name. My Mother applauded me for changing it.
Then, unexpectedly, my mother had a massive heart attack whilst looking after her grandson. He saved her life. Called the ambulance.
My Mother couldn’t believe her heart had given in. She berated the universe from her hospital bed.
“I’m not fat! Why did it happen to me?”
My Mother, with her boyfriend Martin, watch right wing news channel GB News. They wind themselves up fearing ‘the immigrants’. They have a particular fear of Turkish Barbers and Taxi Drivers who they believe are gifted their barber shops and taxis by the British government.
Then, in January 2024 my younger brother Stuart died. His heart gave up. He was two years younger than me.
Did you know he was jumped in Joy Lane? People… stopped their car, leapt out and the men punched him and the women hit him with their shoes.
Stuart was never the same. Unsurprisingly, he too struggled with his mental health. He was fearful and paranoid but refused to get help. He was sure they were out to get him. Run him down. Ever vigilent he told my mother they followed him, they were waiting for him to make a mistake so they could get him.
Stuart and his family left Whitstable and moved to a semi-rural part of Kent and kept goats.
Stuart didn’t want the doctor or the ambulance to come the night he got sick because he was sure they would come, hiding in the ambulance. It sounds terribly sad. His wife had begged him to call an ambulance but he refused.
A few weeks before Stuart died my Mother was staying with him (unable to be alone in her flat after her first heart attack) watching TV with Stuart’s wife and daughter.
My mother told me this story with the same crumpled face and indignant tone she had when she reminded me in the hospital she wasn’t fat and didn’t deserve a heart attack… she, is as it turns out, is perpetually indignant.
Anyway, they are watching TV and TV Chef Ainsley Harriet is preparing some mince meat. He is kneading the meat and breadcrumbs with his bare hands. My Mother says,
“Look at that, that’s disgusting, his black hands in the meat.”
The family were aghast. They told her she couldn’t say things like that. Even Stuart told her off. What? My Mother could not believe her son wasn’t defending her. He understood what she meant? Didn’t he? Had the world gone mad?
My mother was outraged they had challenged her racism.
Then Stuart died a couple of weeks later. And she said, rather coldly,
“Well, his paranoia got him in the end.”
Twenty or so years ago… and it might have been more. I was in a car with Stuart and he said,
“You know what David did to us. He should have gone to prison.”
“What did he do to you Stuart?” I should have asked. But I did not.
I froze. I stayed silent. It was a terrible betrayal. I betrayed him to keep my own position in the family as the only abused son, the only victim. I was not prepared to share! In fact, Stuart was giving me the opportunity to reach across decades of hurt and share some kind of support… or something. I did not. I stayed silent and we never spoke of it again.
I regret this terribly. I might have been the only person he could have spoken to.
On the order of service for his funeral there was a picture of him on a bench in his garden with his goats.
Goats on his lap. It made me cry but only when I couldn’t be seen.
I wrote two commisioned movies in 2024. One about a nuisence gangster and the other about an estranged brother and sister. I think one of them is getting made. We will see about the other one.
Oh, he’s a late bloomer they say.
In September 2024 at 64 years old I made the last, greatest bloom.
I went to the Royal College of Art to make conceptual art. From September 2024 to March 2025 I was perhaps the happiest person I have ever been. And, save for a few moments with occasional personalities, I kept on top of my resentments and anger and shame. I worked diligently in the school Herzog and De Muron designed and embraced every second of any chance presented to me.
I cast in bronze, I painted, I made sculptures out of body bags. I emroidered and knitted and painted some more.
In 2024 Palestine overwhelmed me. I had to stop looking at dead children in Gaza. I revisited Picasso’s Guernica to make a series of works in response to the horrors of Gaza.
Then, out of the deep dark ocean, two things happened in January 2025 which shook at my foundations.
The Palisades Fire began burning in the Santa Monica Mountains of Los Angeles County on January 7, 2025, and grew monstrous enough to destroy the Pacific Palisades, Topanga, and Malibu.
The fire was fully contained on January 31, after 24 days.
A series of wildfires in Southern California driven by hurricane-force Santa Ana winds, burned 23,448 acres, killed 12 people, and destroyed 6,837 structures, making it the tenth-deadliest and third-most destructive California wildfire on record and the most destructive to occur in the history of the city of Los Angeles.
One of the 6,837 structures burned was the beautiful house on Hume Road, Malibu… along with all of my neighbours homes, burned to ash in the Palisades fire.
As of today I have not really processed this.
I have seen pictures and videos.
I have pictures of the house, the garden, the view and the dog. Everything in those pictures is gone. The view, the furniture and the beautiful garden I spent years and years tending and brush clearing and landscaping and loving and loving and loving.
Do you remember before I bought it? I would drive from Hollywood up Sunset the long way through Bel Air to Malibu and sit in the garden of a house I didn’t even own and look at the Ocean? It was so magical. Watching the hummingbirds dart into the fleshy white cactus flowers.
Malibu Cactus Flower Erased 2024/25 Mixed Media 1.5m x 1m
I could have bought the house in Silver Lake but I didn’t. That house is still standing. Hume Road looks like an atom bomb hit it.
Everything has gone.
That’s enough for now. There’s loads to write about. I’m here for another two weeks. I’ll try and write every day.
I’ve touched on some of the themes I’ll be exploring in more depth these coming weeks. Notably, my time at the RCA, looking after my friend, the death of The Little Dog and my health which seems, at long last, to be defeating me.
A few delightful days in Paris and Barcelona restored my serenity. No more searing heat, the weather more temperate, heavy clouds bursting over us. The rain washing away the last of the red, Andalusian dust. Well dressed men, once again, to look at on the streets. Mary’s spare room, decorated with Honiton lace and embroidered white linen. We walk the length of Parc St Cloud with our dogs wearing gun boots and waxed jackets. The Little Dog is almost fully restored, his eye closes once again, his sagging jowl looks perfectly normal to those who do not know. One evening we helped friends of Mary move house. TV Producer Etienne Alban, recently separated from his wife and kids, moving in with his super cute… yoga instructor girlfriend. Alban and I carried a huge sofa six flights to their huge new attic apartment. After the exercise we enjoyed a wonderful dinner at The Hotel Edgar. Their boudin noir… superb.
The following day I drove from Paris to Chamonix listening to an audio recording of the novel 1984. It is a compellingly joyless book. Because I am a ditz I arrived a day early. So I booked the Hotel Isabelle and slept fitfully thinking about my time in Carmona. More specifically I dreamt about my Carmona host and friend Ana Corbero, the chatelaine of an 11 acre estate called The Pajarita nestled outside the old city walls of Carmona beneath the The Hotel Parador and the Cordoba Gate. I dreamt a huge storm roared as I looked north from Ana’s terrace toward the great plain which was once the sea. I was pointing at something. “Land ahoy!” In the dream the waves returned after a thousand years and swept over the fields of sunflowers. Sea monsters curled out of the petulant waves then crashed into the salty foam.
My time in Carmona with Ana had been stormy, her demeanor quite different from the beautiful girl I chanced upon 35 years ago.
I met Ana Corbero in 1985 or thereabouts introduced by gallerist and curator Celia Lyttleton. Ana was showing a collection of unremarkable paintings at the Albemarle Gallery. Celia introduced her as the daughter of a well-known Spanish sculptor, the girlfriend of a Lord. She was tiny… gamine, scarcely a women. Her queer and marvelous features delicately carved and flocked, her fierce and sparkling black eyes challenging those of us who dared contradict her. She demanded respect. Her flamenco gestures, her delicate collar bones. She was beautiful.
I don’t remember a great deal about the beginning of our friendship other than the first night at the gallery.
Ana had been enjoying a fractious relationship with the absurdly handsome Colin Campbell, 7th Earl Cawdor. I do not remember them visiting me in Whitstable but apparently they did. I do not remember going to Wheelers Oyster Bar and eating crab but apparently we did. I do remember Ana’s invitation to Brooklyn the following summer where I stayed in Colin’s huge apartment, the top floor of an abandoned school he and another had recently bought. It was located just over the Williamsburg Bridge. Brooklyn was very different then. Crack addicts sat on the stoop. The Puerto Rican community had not been replaced by Hasidic Jews and dumb looking hipsters. The sky at night was regularly lit by flaming, abandoned buildings. Some called these arson attacks: Jewish lightning.
The walk into Manhattan over the Williamsburg Bridge felt unnecessary. We stayed close to the apartment. Colin and I had a fairly raucous time. Even then I felt contempt for toffs but they had all the best toys so one tended to accept the invitations whenever they came. It was an eventful trip. I had a brief affair with the artist Paul Benney. I threw a bbq from the roof of Gerard Malanga’s apartment*. We were the only white people at an African-American block party and ended up in a black police captain’s humble house. He looked very uncomfortable. Years later, I understand why. White, english people badly educated about slavery or the history of black people in the USA. We must have seemed very disrespectful.
Ana and Colin’s relationship was passionate and destructive. I blamed Colin for his insensitivity toward Ana. I excused Ana her eccentricities. The last image I have of her at that time: Ana is resting serenely in a nest of pillows, she has written in pen on her forehead one word… SILENCE.
Years passed. Many years. I remembered the word scrawled on her face. Social media reintroduced us. She married Nabil Gholam an arab architect and 18 years ago they had a baby girl. Sadly, their child is badly disabled with a rare genetic disease. Against the odds, the child survives. Ana fought to make her daughter hear and see. She refused to accept the doctor’s bleak prognosis. Ana lived in Beirut during the Israeli bombardment. Breastfeeding on her balcony as the bombs fell. She adopted two more children. A boy and a girl, both Lebanese. The architect became successful. They bought apartments in London, Paris and Seville. When her grandparents who raised her died she bought the Pajarita with a small inheritance. The Pajarita, a modest finca surrounded by acres of scorched, brown earth and rock where the locals dumped their trash. Ana set to transforming this barren place with many gardeners into the paradise she and her family enjoy today.
During the years I suggested to traveling friends I knew to be in Spain… meet Ana. I sent the lazy, derivative Australian furniture designer Charles Wilson who I believed might benefit creatively from a stint in Andalusia. But Charles, another terrible drunk, ended up being thrown out of Xavier Corbero’s house in Barcelona because Ana’s step mother hated him. Charles refused to leave so Ana’s husband threatened him with gypsies (a common, vaguely racist, threat from Nabil) who would break Charles’s legs if he didn’t pack his bag and leave immediately.
I sent Jenna and Stephen Mack’s brother John Jr., son of billionaire Morgan Stanley CEO John Mack. Even though I did not know John Jr. I trusted they would be a great fit. That introduction worked out very well. Now it was my turn to meet Ana. We communicated solely by text message. After the long drive from Nice I called her and, for the first time in 35 years, I heard her voice. The deep and rasping voice of somebody who smokes too many cigarettes or talks too much… or both.
“Why do you want to see me?” She asks over the phone.
I did not have an easy answer.
There was unfinished business between Ana and me. It was not tangible, it was esoteric. I had no expectations of Ana. I simply wanted to see her face. Without the word SILENCE scrawled on it. We might have met that afternoon, had a coffee and left it at that. I would have driven north. I had no idea what to expect but I was compelled to see her, meet her again. We arranged to meet at the small apartment she rented for guests in Carmona.
“How do you like your new digs?” She said as she got out of her huge silver Mercedes.
“Stay as long as you like.”
I gave her a long hug. Her father, Xavier Corbero, had recently died. I sniffed and she thought I was crying. “I’m not crying,” I said, “I’m sniffing.” Ana was back in my life. Her face was not the same as I remembered when I last saw her. She has hidden herself on social media because, I now understood, she could not bear what age had done to her. Almost immediately she complained how old she was, how raddled. She was embarrassed by her face.
“I’ve turned into a middle-aged Swedish woman.” she said. “I hope you’re not disappointed.”
It was true. Middle aged and middle class. Her face, bloated and pale, almost anemic. Her dry hair, she insisted she wanted to dye gray, streaked with sun bleached golden locks. Her eyes were just as fiery but no longer black. There was something stone dried about her, something suspicious. I slowly recognised who she had become. The reason I felt compelled to see her? The reason why so many years ago she left something indelible in me? It was something I recognized in myself. Within a few hours my suspicions were confirmed. Ana Corbero is an alcoholic of the most desperate kind.
We walked up the small cobbled hill from the apartment to the Casa Curro Montoya… her favorite restaurant. She flamboyantly kisses the owners and lavishes us all with praise. We sat in the hot sun and drank white wine and ate greasy jamon. Immediately, without prompting, she started telling me how her marriage was over. Her husband was a liar, she said, and she didn’t know if she could stay married to him.
“He lies about his father and their relationship. I am married to a stranger.”
I was baffled why this should be reason for divorce but Ana, it turns out, is obsessed with her version of the truth. Under the parasol that dreamy afternoon I found her deeply personal over sharing electrifying. I was being inducted into a tortured world of intrigue and family drama… it felt intoxicating. She contemptuously described her adopted children, how her lazy teen son lied and failed at school. Her pre teen daughter stole and refused to respect her Mother’s authority. I ask about their eldest daughter. “Oh, her.” she mused distantly. A slight smile flickered over her face. “She’s an angel.”
I do not remember driving to the Pajarita that afternoon. I drove to her home so many times the next few weeks. It is a dusty, pot holed road to Ana’s home. Red dust gets into everything, into the car, my mouth, my heart. During my stay the sharp red rocks rip into my tyres… twice. Yet, once behind the sliding metal gates of the Pajarita… decorated with dragons and comic strip birds there is… the illusion of calm. Beyond the painted blue iron gate a forest of pepper trees, oleander and citrus. Terracotta pots filled with herbs and lilies. Vines, dripping with grapes grow over pergolas affording shade, respite from the searing heat. Down an exquisitely cobbled path the simple house reveals itself. There are huge windows covered with traditional Spanish blinds made of esparto… woven reeds. Inside, rooms of various sizes at different levels filled with stuff. Ana’s art covers the walls. Piles of art books and catalogues from Christie’s and Sotheby’s. Broken china knickknacks. Buckets of architectural salvage. Most of it inherited from her grand parents. So much stuff.
Many staff run Ana’s estate and life. Annie the housekeeper and general fixer. Three nurses look after the disabled daughter. There are gardeners and flamenco guitarists, a governess for the adopted daughter and a masseur who comes daily. On occasions Ana would marshal the staff and demand they sing songs of her own composition. They did as they were told.
Annie, a simple local woman and (it became apparent) loathed by the son… was Ana’s most trusted servant. As well as dusting, ironing and making beds Annie, Ana told me, was being groomed to write Ana’s autobiography and mix her paints whenever she started painting again. Annie would also run the restaurant whenever Ana got around to opening it. Annie, forced to kiss us all as per the ‘Andalusian way’.
I refused to kiss Ana’s staff.
“I can’t bear lies or exaggeration.” Ana says. “I am never impatient, I am never angry.”
During the first few days of my stay we find a happy routine. I have practical considerations. I apply for my Spanish residency, open a bank account and get a phone. I take the dogs to the vet in Seville. The vet is quite the most handsome man I ever met. I decide to buy a house in Carmona. They are cheap and plentiful. Ana is incredibly helpful. She introduces me to a lawyer, a realtor and makes every effort to ease me into Spanish life. We find a perfectly preserved 16th Century house near the Cordoba Gate. I need an assistant. She introduces me to Jose, her own assistant for five years but curiously tells me he is not welcome at her home.
“He needs to pull his head out of his ass.”
Why she makes the introduction to Jose is a mystery. And why is he unwelcome at the Pajarita? Jose is a good man. Friendly and helpful. I confide in Jose. I am shocked by the way Ana treats her children, the contempt she has for her husband. I rant at Jose about Ana. She believes she’s always right, she’s never wrong, the interminable interruptions at dinner so conversations between adults become utterly fruitless and frustrating. Ana interrupts with shrill, ill-informed dissent. Blighted with a remarkable lack of insight and self-awareness Ana’s inability to see her part in any dispute caused me much incredulity.
Jose smiles and listens.
“I don’t have a problem, YOU have a problem.” Ana insists.
Three days into my visit Nabil arrives with their son. They are very pleasant but I have already had my mind poisoned against them. Expecting the worse I’m surprised to find her husband kind and considerate, compensating for his wife’s excesses. He is a gentle man and every day works hard to keep his marriage alive. Nabil shows me his watch collection, explaining how he transports his wealth around the world at times of war. In the evening, when she is at her worse, Nabil makes excuses for her rapidly disintegrating behaviour.
Their son is a perfectly ordinary teenage boy. He has a girlfriend, he has thick black hair, he is interested in sport and fashion and making money trading sneakers… we went to the fashion outlet in Seville but it was closed. He was funny and charming. House hunting one morning I paid him to translate for me. He has a keen understanding of people. He could read between the lines. He enjoys his life at boarding school.
I find him in his room trying to write. Ana has asked him to imagine a fifty year life plan. He looks helpless. An absurd request the teenager knows he must fulfill. When, after several weeks, the 50 year plan arrives Ana is outraged. Why does the plan does not include Spain and by inference… her? Why should it? Ask a boy to map out the next fifty years is abuse enough. But this was just one of many abuses, her plan to punish him for not appreciating how lucky he was that she had taken the time and money to adopt him. He could never be grateful enough. She confided that she planned to take him out of the boarding school he loved and punish him for his lack of sensitivity by sending him to his paternal grandfather… who Ana hated. Nabil, when we are on our own, desperately whispers an appeal to me,
“Please help me, can you make her see sense?”
It was no use, Ana is always hell-bent on revenge, riven by some resentment for some poor sap. Ana reminded both her children how lucky they were to have her as their adopted mother. These scenes pulled straight out of the movie Mommy Dearest. But Joan Crawford, bless her tortured soul, was a saint in comparison.
We drive to Seville for lunch with John Mack Jr. who mocks Ana’s constant, inebriated interruptions. John Mack Jr has his own demons but I wanted to hear everything he had to say. I had been very close with his brother Stephen and worked with his sister Jenna. Both relationships had come to nothing. Of course John claims he knows nothing of his sister’s appalling arrogance… he is his father’s son. He knew everything. He had his own brush with addiction, a failed marriage and traumas only the son of a billionaire would understand. Stephen Mack told me once their father would say of his enemies, “I’ll make them hurt.” His father wasn’t called ‘Mack the Knife’ for no reason. Jenna was very eager for me to meet her parents but I knew it would turn out badly, getting dragged along to events I had no reason to be at. I met Mack senior, who one couldn’t help respecting, several times. I had dinner with Jenna and her father at The Mercer Hotel and again at a High Line charity event. Jenna, Stephen and John’s parents are a great team, they donate millions to charity, they delight in taking pictures of couples in the street who don’t have selfie sticks.
I knew my father was the same as John Mack. Cruel and kind in equal measure.
When I said goodbye to John Mack Jr. after lunch (he cycled off into the hot, congested Seville streets) I knew I would never meet him or any member of his family ever again.
As I grow closer to my assistant Jose it becomes apparent that he doesn’t merely dislike Ana, he hates her. He hates her with a shocking vengeance. It is painful for him to carry such hate in his heart. He warns me to think carefully about staying in Carmona, he cautions if I buy a house in Carmona I will end up hating Ana. He warns me people very close to Ana hate her. The owners of the restaurant hate her, he warns she has fallen out with everyone who lives in Carmona, accusing them of crimes and disappointments, their relationships blighted with unrealistic expectations.
Jose describes Ana’s tantrums, how she would regularly reduce him to tears with her demands and mendacity. His impersonation of her clawing at her own face demanding she wanted what she wanted… NOW! Nothing would placate her. He tried helping her but failed. He still finds it hard to forgive himself for walking away. Walking away from the children he loved and cared for.
I took the adopted girl to meet Jose. They hadn’t seen each other for years. They cried and hugged. We wandered the streets of Carmona until midnight. Jose kept thanking me for bringing her to see him. We ate ice cream and sat in the forum. When we returned to the Pajarita Ana looks quizzically at me. Taking the child to meet Jose could be construed as an act of betrayal. I apologize for bringing her home so late.
The following day Ana is screaming at her children, “Why don’t you bring your friends to the Pajarita?” It is obvious why… to those of us who are the children of abusive parents. There’s shame and fear around alcoholism and the unpredictability of an alcoholic parent. Neither child want their friends to meet Ana. Neither want to explain her behaviour. I saw the fear in their eyes when Ana looked as if she was going to lose her temper. The night she couldn’t make the ancient iPod work and began blaming her daughter. The panicking child wrestled with the iPod, willing it to work. Finally she managed to make it play and disaster was averted. I’m sure the little girl didn’t want to be reminded once more why she should be grateful Ana adopted her and how easily she could be sent back to the children’s home.
The daughter dances, she entertains Ana’s guests with gymnastics, endless cartwheels and overtly sexual dance moves she learns from TV shows like Glee. Playing the same track over and over. I was asked to judge endless dance routines. She was desperate to impress. Yet, however hard the child tries to please… it is never good enough.
“Hold your hands like this” Ana demands. “No! Not like that… like this.” Ana lunges beside her daughter and demonstrates what she wants to see. Ana demands we all dance. I dance for a moment then I sit down and watch the scene unfold. The dance with her daughter becomes violent, twirling the child around until finally it is no longer a dance but a fight… Ana body slams the girl onto the floor. The child is crying and Ana falls badly into the television. She mocks the child for crying, mocks her use of a hearing aid. She swears at the child and accuses her of making sexual advances to Nabil. Once, in the pool, Ana tore off the child’s bathing costume, tossing it out of the pool. Ana is laughing like a maniac, the child is pleading. I throw the costume back into the pool. Then I walk away, saving the kid the embarrassment of being seen naked. Jose, when I tell him… is not surprised. There were times when he wanted to report her to the police for child abuse. The following day Ana wonders why her back hurts so badly. I remind her but she doesn’t remember the fight. She has no recollection. How much of the time is she blacked out?
“Time for drinkypoos?” She says.
Like an infirmed english aristocrat the pronouncement comes when Nabil is at home… otherwise she’s opening bottles all day. She’s already stoned long before she starts drinking. I learned not to go near the house until she is drunk or stoned enough not to be a total bitch. Waiting for an invitation to join her. If I stayed at the Pajarita I would slip away before she woke up. When her interest in me cooled her morning emails and text messages were filled with vile insults and personal attacks. By then I was employing every technique Alanon afforded me. Let go with love, they say. Every day I let her go… with love. Soon I would have to let go of her forever.
The night Nabil left for London and Beirut I was sitting by the pool with Ana enjoying a rare, balmy evening. We spent a lot of time talking about her future, her work, galleries and retrospectives. I was convinced she was capable of making the huge changes in her life necessary for her to be recognised as an important artist. We talked about male artists who were commanding huge sums in galleries and at auction. We discussed how women artists have been impoverished by men. After meeting her disabled daughter my understanding of her work swelled. The cute sculptures of girls looking heavenward meant something. Ana has spent years working out her feelings toward her disabled daughter using her art, especially her sculpture. Her work, like so many women… unlike the work of so many men, has never been contextualized. The story is never told. “Your work is beyond the vagina.” I said. She laughed. Ana is not easily complimented. So, we concentrate on her potential. I liked mulling over future possibilities with her.
Without warning she rolled toward me and laid her head on my chest.
She said, “I find you overwhelmingly attractive. I want to grow old with you.”
At that very moment I knew our friendship was over. I shifted in my seat. If I rebuffed Ana I risked her unconscionable wrath. She repeated the words.
“I want to grow old with you.”
Finally, I affected my most affable self and said,”Oh, silly… what would Nabil say?”
She lifted her head. She was not going to be fobbed off with that.
“I don’t put my head on anyone’s chest.” She began, her voice becoming defensive. She continued speaking but I could not hear her… I was in a blind panic. I knew it was over, at that moment I knew my time around Ana had come to an end.
The following days she called me names by text (fat and old) and generally took time to insult and belittle me. She denounced me as a traitor to the Pajarita. I found myself drifting to the house knowing full well what reception I would receive. She warned me, I was no longer ‘drama free’ I was accused of bringing stress and ‘baggage’ into her life. Thankfully, her friend Alfonso and his daughter arrived. Perhaps he would grow old with her? I slipped out of the pre arranged parties to which I was tacitly expected to attend. I had no interest in being around her. It was over. Soon I was packing up the car and headed north. My time in Carmona but not Spain… had come to an end.
Ana Corbero signs all her emails or text messages with ‘Luv and Light A xxx’. It is ironic because she has a dark soul. A monster for whom no cage will ever be built… unless of course she embraces sobriety and thereby solves her chronic addiction to resentment.
*Recently I bumped into Gerard Malanga, frail and limping, in a small French cafe on Warren Street in Hudson, New York and apologised for my drunken indiscretion all those years ago. Although furious at the time he sweetly claimed not to remember the incident.
The heat is overwhelming. A blanket of scorching air thrown over the city. The dogs wilt, I pretend it’s just like Malibu but… it’s not. Southern Spain. I’m driving to Nice this week, then on to Paris and Chamonix to pick up my stuff. I managed to leave things all over the place. Ditching supurflous stuff along the way. Lightening the load. Occasionally I look at Dude and wonder if I should ditch him… poor crippled Dude. His back legs giving in, he wants to catch up but he just can’t. I can’t. I can’t leave him behind.
At 5am, I took my coffee cup and the Little Dog. We sat quietly looking out at the wide open plain, great fields of sunflowers, traffic snaking here and there. Sitting outside the Cordoba Gate. What dramas happened here? Who was allowed in and who was kept out? The two large fortified towers flanking a Roman arch were built around the 1st century A.D., with Renaissance and Neoclassical renovations. It was designed to protect and reflect the great wealth Carmona enjoyed for hundreds of years.
A man arrives with his chestnut gelding. As the horse drinks from the stone trough he drenches the beast with a plastic bucket. How welcome that trough must have been to those who arrived (for hundreds of years) on horseback over this arid plain. Waiting for the great doors to swing open, waiting outside the Cordoba gate, waiting to be let in or not.
I am going to stay the weekend in Italy with Rachel. Near Pisa. She has a donkey and two beloved cats. At night Carmona is over run with scavenging cats. Hundreds of them, like rats in New York. They are too confident to be scared by me or the Little Dog even though he makes an occasional and pathetic attempt at charging them. Their backs arch, they hiss and show their claws. He stops a couple of feet away and makes his strange whimper.
Last night my friend Jose and I explored the ancient part of the city. At 10.30 it was still very hot. Then suddenly the wind comes from Cadiz, from the ocean… 60 miles away. You can taste the salt. We turn a corner and the welcome breeze fills our shirts and closes our eyes.
We were chronicling abandoned houses, with or with out se vende signs written on them. Taking note of the location of each. “Everything is for sale in Spain.” The realtor says. There are palaces and broken shacks, old towers and ancient islamic, crenelated walls formerly part of the old city fortification that crash into very ordinary houses and quite by accident these medieval battlements, parapets and mouldings are consumed and preserved.
Everything in Spain is for sale. They see me coming: the friend of the rich celebrity. The price of everything jumps $40k. They show me the same houses they showed other friends two years ago. Unlocking ancient doors, we wander through huge homes once occupied by many families. There are slim balconies, stone steps leading to terraces looking down on secret courtyards. There is pigeon shit and kittens mewing in every room in every house we saw. Abandoned lives: a simple chair, a faience pot, a richly embroidered matador’s jacket hanging on the wall. Left behind, like my luggage in Paris and Chamonix.
Jose asks me why I want to live in Carmona. They asked me about Tivoli and Malibu before. Why does anyone want to live anywhere? I don’t know. I could live anywhere and nowhere. I am transient. I am free of possession or need for possessions. I go where I am safe. It is safe here. I lived in so much fear in the USA. Fear of being caught without my papers. Fear of the state. I was not rich or powerful enough not to live in fear.
We wake at 4.30am. We siesta after lunch. The streets fill, the shops and bars open after 9pm. During the day Dude will not leave my friend, he hides under their garden furniture. I keep the dogs out of the heat as much as I can. The Little Dog is gradually (slowly) recovering from his facial paralysis. He’s still very droopy but he’s coping. He’s doing the best he can. I’m doing the best I can. I am covered with sweat and dust. My nose is crusty, my eyes exhausted. I am recovering my optimism.
Since leaving the USA I am not plagued with ideas of death, with dark thoughts, with hopelessness. I am not hurting myself by investing in old traumas. Not here. I don’t want to die. Not where there has been so much life for hundreds of thousands of years. I am a smear soon to be forgotten. My unpopular views on social media but dust. It’s incumbent on me to stay alive. To rejoice. America makes a man vulnerable. It destroys ones trust in humanity. I came to loathe so many people in the USA but I hated gay white men more than any other. They are vile and crude. They espouse ideas of love and acceptance but practiced hate and exclusivity.
Today we are having lunch in Seville with Spanish gays. I am excited. The gay men I meet here are so generous. They touch my shoulder, they embrace me warmly. At first I shrank from their kindness. I learned not to trust white gay men. But, I’ve warmed to them here. They understand. They understand what horrors I endured in the USA.
