They say all the nice girls love a sailor, but I was never attracted to any arm of the forces, although I admired those peacoat-wearing, polo-sweatered sailors in the old WWII movies; even Noel Coward looked butch in those blues.
On the other hand, the fisticuffs provoked by the presence of young squaddies in khaki on a Saturday night at the market square in Retford, the Nottinghamshire town where I grew up, were also duly noted. My own “uniforms” at different points in this brief life were never in service of King and country, alas… My first was most certainly the full chorister, its white cassock and crisply pleated neck ruff, which I wore on Sunday mornings while performing in the choir at St Swithun’s Church in East Retford. My choirboy period was mercifully brief and I was saved from the grip of religion by telling my mum that choir practice coincided with important training sessions for the school’s under-14s football team. My parents only attended church for weddings, On the other hand, the fisticuffs provoked by the presence of young squaddies in khaki on a Saturday night at the market square in Retford, the Nottinghamshire town where I grew up, were also duly noted. My own “uniforms” at different points in this brief life were never in service of King and country, alas… My first was most certainly the full chorister, its white cassock and crisply pleated neck ruff, which I wore on Sunday mornings while performing in the choir at St Swithun’s Church in East Retford. My choirboy period was mercifully brief and I was saved from the grip of religion by telling my mum that choir practice coincided with important training sessions for the school’s under-14s football team. My parents only attended church for weddings, but my mum was in heaven when I appeared in cassock and ruff, well-worn cotton garments she lovingly laundered by hand and ironed on the kitchen table on a Sunday morning when what I really wanted to do was read the News of the World and then look up words like “intimate”.
What tickled my old mum’s fancy was envisioning me in the choir stall in fresh cassock and ruff, singing about Jesus walking on green hills “amid those dark Satanic mills”, as our choirmaster Mr. Mason savagely pumped the keys of the church organ, face contorted into a rictus of rage and dismay by our tuneless harmonies.
My dear sister Judy looked enchanting as Florence Nightingale in the classic nurse’s uniform, complete with starched white cap and tasty enamel badges. She was a nurse at England’s second largest psychiatric unit, Rampton, located a mere six miles from our hometown. Her uniform was never an erotic stimulant; indeed, the sight of a nurse distressed me for years after Judy died at 27 of breast cancer, a devastating event which coincided horribly with the stirrings of my own sexuality. It was not until years later, when a girlfriend confronted me one winter evening in a glossy vinyl simulacrum of a nurse’s kit, complete with glowing red cross, that I was able to merge Eros with Thanatos and the multi-sensual aspects of nurses and nursing became vividly apparent. The artist Richard Prince, a shrewd judge of the art world’s manic inclinations, was obviously well aware of these sensual properties, making a series of nurse paintings inspired by pulp magazine covers. He created an insatiable demand, comparable to the Dutch tulip mania of 1634, among serious collectors and professional “flippers” for these nurse-y portraits, described by one critic as “at once seductive and anarchistic, alluring and aloof”. The erotic charge of these paintings was also enhanced by their extraordinary price tags, numbers that make moneygrubbers stiffen on sight, not for the nurses, not for the art, but for their financial potential. Most of Prince’s nurses are now safely stashed in Swiss storage vaults and well-guarded private homes, their comforting yet alluring gaze restricted to paid-up members of the Wealth Is Health crowd. Here my resentment at this state of affairs begins to rise like a HIMARS battery, so let us resume the uniform.
Uniforms were invented to make people conform, to act and think alike. That concept works well for football (soccer, to some, these days) and my second uniform experience involved wearing the same clobber as 10 other adolescents and running around a muddy pitch in sub-zero temperatures. Our hands were blue and our wieners, well, we didn’t yet have wieners. In the photograph of the under-14s on the previous page, my feet are tucked under my chair because I didn’t own a decent pair of football boots, while my white shorts indicate I lacked that part of the official uniform. The school-supplied kit had been handed down since the late 1950s and the two-tone red and green shirts were well-faded, unlike the bright scarlet trim on our forest green school blazers, with our caps supplied by doting parents. Don’t forget the cap. I did frequently forget to wear the cap in the rush to get to school on time, and if seen capless on my bicycle by a nosy prefect or, worse yet, a master, an hourlong detention would follow. But I couldn’t attend detention because I could not afford to miss my after-school job as an errand boy for the local tailor, delivering elegant Moss Bros eveningwear and bespoke tweed suits to the more upscale residents of our town. The accumulated detentions quickly resulted in an announcement at morning assembly that “the following boys should proceed to the headmaster’s office”. There we got our first taste of corporal punishment, four or five strokes to eradicate the previous charges. Each tender arse was badly bruised by the split bamboo, but most kids never mentioned it to their parents and earned credit from their peers for their fortitude under split cane fire. Unless they blubbered afterwards in the cloisters, where a harsh committee of heartless adolescents gathered to praise the brave and condemn the faint of heart.
The headmaster, unsurprisingly, didn’t recommend me for Oxon. or Cantab., so I applied to less exotic colleges. Accepted by North Western Poly, which later became part of London Metropolitan University, this tattered institution was housed in a decrepit building in Kentish Town and my usual uniform was vintage three-piece suits from Alfred Kemp & Son in Camden Town and a vintage Gladstone bag for my books, leading some clever bleeders to inquire whether I was practising to be a doctor, especially with all them pills bouncing around in my bag along with Swann’s Way and Piers Plowman. A similar pill would cause me to fail my BA French finals, when I became so relaxed during 18th-century French Lit. I gave up on Voltaire and opted for an early pint instead.
My next uniform was assigned to me by Northern Dairies when, having no degree, I applied on a lark to become a milkman and passed the exam with flying colours. Sample question: how much milk in a pint? The other dairymen were all rabid Arsenal fans, and one whiff of my northern accent was enough to ignite their resentment. They didn’t like my long hair and I didn’t like their condescending ignorance. They reminded me of what I was, a football hooligan who had studied a bit of literature on the side while living on handouts from a generous government.
There were problems with the uniform, too, specifically the headgear that distinguished us as purveyors of dairy goods – the white jacket with Northern Dairies inscribed in flowing black script across the back was passable, but the stiff military-style cap didn’t work at all. With my hair tucked under, it gave me a rather alarming appearance, an anarchist posing as a stationmaster. This vaguely authoritarian look did, however, attract the attention of a young American tripping her brains out, to whom I offered sanctuary, a place to hide from the demons swirling around her head as she roamed the streets of Hampstead and Highgate on that bright morning. She stayed for months, gradually recovering her senses, eventually moving back to Los Angeles. I still adore the gal and we’ve kept in touch for the past 40 years.
I moved to New York. Time passed and now I was working as a faux maître’d in a super cool Mexican restaurant on Kenmare Street (so cool that nobody could find the entrance), my uniform a Paul Smith suit and Mary J. Blige T-shirt. A friend of a friend suggested I’d be perfect for the part of El Britannico in a movie that was about to be shot in Mexico City by a young director named Simón Bross. The movie was about anorexia and nuns as far as I could gather, and a nun’s dress code has a similar erotic effect on me to nurses’ uniforms, so despite my lack of fluency in Spanish and acting, I signed up for the movie. Flew down there, remembering when I arrived to check that any cab I entered had door handles on the inside as well as the outside of the vehicle.
Arriving at the shoot in a distant part of the city, I found to my horror that my substantial script was in Spanish. The costume department also furnished me with a handlebar moustache and an admiral’s bicorne hat, which I kept forgetting to wear. In my one big scene the director encouraged me to loudly criticise a young girl’s eating habits while a herd of sheep ran through the vast banquet hall. Could a fan of Buñuel ask for anything more? And yet, I froze at each take and flubbed my lines, even though Senor Bross had finally allowed me to speak in English. The little girl was crying, and I felt bad about that, not realising it was the most authentic part of the scene.
As the make-up artist peeled off my handlebar moustache at the end of the day, I knew in my heart that El Britannico was destined for the cutting room floor, even that Buñuelian wide shot of me standing, Napoleonic, amid a flock of stampeding sheep. So much for acting and anorexic nuns. I’m still hoping the Safdie brothers, despite their growing fame, keep their promise of hiring me for one of their films so that I can continue my affiliation with the Screen Actors’ Guild. Come on Josh, remember that voiceover I did for the miniature museum? I’d ask Jim Jarmusch, but I hardly know him, even though we were photographed together once.
Maybe Keith McNally will stop directing restaurants for a minute and start directing films again and give me that lead role he once promised in his rarely-seen Face of the Deep (1998), which he then gave to Eric Mitchell and as a booby prize cast me as a bartender, but I already was a fucking bartender in my real life so no acting chops required there. Nor costume. I wore my own shirt; it was a white patchwork poplin number from Comme des Garçons, something a real bartender would never wear.
Top image: Max, with his school football team, wearing the white shorts.
Taken from Issue 57 of 10 Men – NEW, DAILY, UNIFORM – out now. Order your copy here.
