We all love our mothers to different degrees and if any pedant were to quote that famous Philip Larkin poem This Be the Verse about ‘mum and dad’ at me, my response would be “Do you like hospital food?” because don’t say nothing bad about my mum, mate. I was the last of Norah’s large brood, number 12, so I got extra-special attention, which has probably not helped me to fully adjust to adulthood, even at this late stage.
Norah with some of the family’s many pets
I grew up in a loving if chaotic household, a council house full of kids, dogs and cats, a duck and a jackdaw in the yard, and the occasional live lamb or piglet that my brother Rodney brought home from his job at the local slaughterhouse, to be bottle-fed by mum in case she didn’t have enough to do. How she clothed, fed, cooked and cleaned house for so many children while my dad sat quietly reading the Yorkshire Evening Post is still a source of bafflement to me. No margarine ever crossed our threshold. We always had fresh Danish butter to slather on her home baked bread, fresh meat (her pork chops were divine) and Finnan haddock as a special treat from the Saturday market. She was always cheerful, a trickster who loved a good prank.
When I was small she took me everywhere on her shopping trips. Before one outing to the Co-op store she asked to borrow my pet grass snake. I gave her the snake in its jar and off we went. Outside the shop, mum took out the snake and placed it around her neck, then went in to be greeted by the shopgirls. She called them over to admire her new necklace, which sent them screaming into the back room when her ‘jewellery’ began to slither around. We laughed in glee at their girly panic. Mum’s pet crow would fly to her shoulder each time she was out in the yard, though it avoided the rest of the family. The bird’s malicious trick of pulling out the clothes pegs as mum hung up the washing amused her even when the clean linen fell into the dirt. The crow occasionally visited another house in the neighbourhood, flying into the bedroom of a boy my age, who lay terrified while the bird sat silent at the end of his bed. One day the lad’s mum came around to say that some jewellery was missing and the crow was a prime suspect. My mother was quite haughty in her dismissal of this allegation until a few weeks later, when I discovered the crow’s stash of shiny objects on top of the washhouse, including the missing jewellery belonging to our neighbour. Mum had to eat crow and apologise.
Max with his mother, Norah
As I got older she indulged my interest in books (there were none in the house) by buying me a tea chest full of encyclopaedias at a local auction. She also let me decorate the walls of my bedroom (my dad never knew) with quotes from Blake and Coleridge and Bob Dylan, enhanced by magazine photos of exotic creatures like Donyale Luna, Chrissie Shrimpton and Marianne Faithfull in male drag, so strangely stimulating to my eager adolescent mind.
By 18 I had managed to extract myself from the superglue of motherly love after secretly and successfully applying to college. Suddenly I was living in London with grant money in my pocket and poems forming in my unformed brain. I had already pledged myself to sex and drugs and poetry. Paraphrasing some biblical advice about wives – “To write well, lastingly well, one must leave father and mother and cleave unto the Muse” – I cleaved hard unto the Muse, indeed searched endlessly for the cleft of the Muse, that elusive gate of heaven. I scraped a BA degree, which was meaningless for most forms of employment, squandered more government money on a short course at the London College of Printing and, finally, found my way to my true home, New York City.
Max Blagg threw himself into bad behaviour after his mother died in 1979
I knew my mum would be upset if she discovered that I had moved even further away from my hometown, where she patiently awaited her prodigal’s return. I sent her letters to a friend in London, who mailed them to mum from NW5 so she would think I was still dossing about in the Smoke rather than living largely as a bartender in New York. I wrote to her constantly and gradually revealed my new location, which she accepted with a sigh I could almost hear 3,500 miles away.
Then my mum died. It was January 1980, a cold, unforgiving New York winter. I opened the letter whose handwritten address vaguely resembled my mum’s script and began to read. My sister Susan was writing to tell me that mum had died quite suddenly on December 22 and the family hadn’t wanted to upset me with this bad news at Christmas. How thoughtful of them not to spoil my holiday. I stared out of the back window. Snow was falling on the Twin Towers. My friend C was staying with me at the time, kicking a habit that had suddenly gotten too big for her to handle, so the mood in the house was already dark. I wanted to tell her the news but I couldn’t bring myself to say the words, “My mum is dead.” I went for a walk down by the river and let that razor-sharp wind enfold me in its icy grip, hoping to alleviate the grief that was choking me. As the initial shock subsided, I began to realise that mum’s departure from the planet had set me free; there was no longer anyone I loved enough to rein in my own behaviour for fear of hurting them. The gates of the palace of bad behaviour were torn off their hinges. I could go as close to the edge as I dared without going over and finding myself in jail, or the psych ward at Bellevue Hospital, or actually dead, wandering in the bardo, knocking on heaven’s door. This impetuous transformation coincided with a period of violent events and unnatural disasters that seemed to harmonise with my reckless behaviour.
So many coke-fuelled nights looking for more than a kiss; here we are at AM/PM on Murray Street, and the first thing I see is our friend Florent in a headlock. He still manages to give us his mile-wide smile as he sees us coming up the stairs. I release him from his assailant’s grip with a savage, Nobby Stiles-type kick to the shins and the bully howls at the foul just as my companion Billy G puts his foot in the guy’s back and launches him down the stairs, another misdemeanour that might have become a felony. Soon after that brief encounter another friend lost a testicle while drunkenly trying to gain entrance to the same nightclub from which we had liberated Florent – we visited the damaged lad in Bellevue, our legs tightly crossed as we gazed in horror at his exposed scrotum, which had swelled to the size of a football. The victim, loaded on morphine, was cheerfully calculating the size of the massive cash settlement he would surely receive for being deprived of a bollock. (He never got a penny, but his injury, strangely enough, made him an object of desire to certain adventurous young women.)
Max Blagg threw himself into bad behaviour after his mother died in 1979
The hits kept coming. At the Hellfire, a suddenly cool hetero sex club on Ninth Avenue, which I had recommended to my ex wife for its wacky entertainment value, her new boyfriend, a man I cordially detested, lost his eye in the first minutes of their visit, struck by an unknown assailant who then disappeared into the crowd. Eyeballs, testicles, everything seemed unstable, under attack and looming over all as the new ‘gay cancer’ was just beginning. Perfectly healthy young men (and a few women) were suddenly stricken with this eadly infection leaping uncontrollably from one young body to the next. Soon all the downtown hospitals had special Aids isolation wards, and when Cookie M contracted the disease and joined her husband Vittorio at Mother Cabrini on 16th Street, they threw a huge party in their hospital room, where sex and drugs and morbid celebration prevailed as they lay dying. Gathering bruises, a strange time to be alive indeed.
The drugs kept coming and we kept on inhaling them. There was a large batch of mescaline that tasted and smelled like powdered chocolate and put you in a marvellous, if occasionally cantankerous, mood. I had several mad nights on this concoction with my fellow cosmonaut, the artist Juan Sanchez Juarez, until one voyage that had begun so promisingly quickly deteriorated as it took a sudden leap into a level of craziness that’s still shameful to relate. We were on our way to our local bar when, while crossing Canal Street, we saw a dog get hit and killed by a car.
Witnessed while tripping, the event seemed quite mundane. At the bar, an obnoxious fellow was trying to pick up Juan’s girlfriend. I decided the man needed dog for dessert so I went back to Canal Street, retrieved the dog and dropped it at the man’s feet, much to the consternation of the bar crowd, especially the bartender, who knew me well. When I grasped the fact that the barman really was offended, that in fact the whole bar was offended, I removed the dog from the premises, left it at a secure location and wandered up the street to another bar where I knew the manager, who advised me to wash my hands and go home at once.
On my journey I was waylaid by a group of angry people, led by the owner of the dog bar, a tough little fellow of Arabic descent, who had until that night been very fond of me, but was now threatening to cut me with one or both of the butcher knives he was brandishing. Since everything seemed deeply unreal, I didn’t take his threats seriously, laughed at his murderous suggestions and wandered off homeward, miraculously unscathed. In the morning, the phone kept ringing and none of the callers were in the least bit sympathetic; many were, in fact, horrified and/or disgusted. I was disgusted. I love dogs. I quit the debauchery that day and began to slowly regain my senses. Or so I’m told.
Taken from 10 Men Issue 62 – BIRTHDAY, EVOLVE, TRANSFORMATION – out on newsstands now. Order your copy here.
