Smoke and Mirrors

VIRUS

There was a computer game, I was given it

one of my friends gave it to me, he was playing it,

he said, it’s brilliant, you should play it,

and I did, and it was.

I copied it off the disk he gave me

for anyone, I wanted everyone to play it.

Everyone should have this much fun.

I sent it upline to bulletin boards

but mainly I got it out to all of my friends.

(Personal contact. That’s the way it was given to me.)

My friends were like me: some were scared of viruses,

someone gave you a game on disk, next week or Friday the 13th

it reformatted your hard disk or corrupted your memory.

But this one never did that. This was dead safe.

Even my friends who didn’t like computers started to play:

as you get better the game gets harder;

maybe you never win but you can get pretty good.

I’m pretty good.

Of course I have to spend a lot of time playing it.

So do my friends. And their friends.

And just the people you meet, you can see them,

walking down the old motorways

or standing in queues, away from their computers,

away from the arcades that sprang up overnight,

but they play it in their heads in the meantime,

combining shapes,

puzzling over contours, putting colors next to colors,

twisting signals to new screen sections,

listening to the music.

Sure, people think about it, but mainly they play it.

My record’s eighteen hours at a stretch.

40,012 points, 3 fanfares.

You play through the tears, the aching wrist, the hunger, after a while

it all goes away.

All of it except the game, I should say.

There’s no room in my mind anymore; no room for other things.

We copied the game, gave it to our friends.

It transcends language, occupies our time,

sometimes I think I’m forgetting things these days.

I wonder what happened to the TV. There used to be TV.

I wonder what will happen when I run out of canned food.

I wonder where all the people went. And then I realize how,

if I’m fast enough, I can put a black square next to a red line,

mirror it and rotate them so they both disappear,

clearing the left block

for a white bubble to rise . . .

(So they both disappear.)

And when the power goes off for good then I

Will play it in my head until I die.

LOOKING FOR THE GIRL

I was nineteen in 1965, in my drainpipe trousers with my hair quietly creeping down toward my collar. Every time you turned on the radio the Beatles were singing Help! and I wanted to be John Lennon with all the girls screaming after me, always ready with a cynical quip. That was the year I bought my first copy of Penthouse from a small tobacconist’s in the King’s Road. I paid my few furtive shillings and went home with it stuffed up my jumper, occasionally glancing down to see if it had burnt a hole in the fabric.

The copy has long since been thrown away, but I’ll always remember it: sedate letters about censorship; a short story by H. E. Bates and an interview with an American novelist I had never heard of; a fashion spread of mohair suits and paisley ties, all to be bought on Carnaby Street. And best of all, there were girls, of course; and best of all the girls, there was Charlotte.

Charlotte was nineteen, too.

All the girls in that long-gone magazine seemed identical with their perfect plastic flesh; not a hair out of place (you could almost smell the lacquer); smiling wholesomely at the camera while their eyes squinted at you through forest-thick eyelashes: white lipstick; white teeth, white br**sts, bikini-bleached. I never gave a thought to the strange positions they had coyly arranged themselves into to avoid showing the slightest curl or shadow of pubic hair—I wouldn’t have known what I was looking at anyway. I had eyes only for their pale bottoms and br**sts, their chaste but inviting come-on glances.

Then I turned the page, and I saw Charlotte. She was different from the others. Charlotte was sex; she wore sexuality like a translucent veil, like a heady perfume.

There were words beside the pictures, and I read them in a daze. “The entrancing Charlotte Reave is nineteen . . . a resurgent individualist and beat poet, contributor to FAB magazine . . .” Phrases stuck to my mind as I pored over the flat pictures: she posed and pouted in a Chelsea flat—the photographer’s, I guessed—and I knew that I needed her.

She was my age. It was fate.

Charlotte.

Charlotte was nineteen.

I bought Penthouse regularly after that, hoping she’d appear again. But she didn’t. Not then.

Six months later my mum found a shoebox under my bed and looked inside it. First she threw a scene, then she threw out all the magazines, finally she threw me out. The next day I got a job and a bedsit in Earl’s Court, without, all things considered, too much trouble.

My job, my first, was at an electrical shop off the Edgware Road. All I could do was change a plug, but in those days people could afford to get an electrician in to do just that. My boss told me I could learn on the job.

I lasted three weeks. My first job was a proper thrill—changing the plug on the bedside light of an English film star, who had achieved fame through his portrayal of laconic Cockney Casanovas. When I got there he was in bed with two honest-to-goodness dolly birds. I changed the plug and left—it was all very proper. I didn’t even catch a glimpse of nipple, let alone get invited to join them.

Three weeks later I got fired and lost my virginity on the same day. It was a posh place in Hampstead, empty apart from the maid, a little dark-haired woman a few years older than me. I got down on my knees to change the plug, and she climbed on a chair next to me to dust off the top of a door. I looked up: under her skirt she was wearing stockings, and suspenders, and, so help me, nothing else. I discovered what happened in the bits the pictures didn’t show you.

So I lost my cherry under a dining room table in Hampstead. You don’t see maidservants anymore. They have gone the way of the bubble car and the dinosaur.

It was afterward that I lost my job. Not even my boss, convinced as he was of my utter incompetence, believed I could have taken three hours to change a plug—and I wasn’t about to tell him that I’d spent two of the hours I’d been gone hiding underneath the dining room table when the master and mistress of the house came home unexpectedly, was I?

I got a succession of short-lived jobs after that: first as a printer, then as a typesetter, before I wound up in a little ad agency above a sandwich shop in Old Compton Street.

I carried on buying Penthouse. Everybody looked like an extra in “The Avengers,” but they looked like that in real life. Articles on Woody Allen and Sappho’s island, Batman and Vietnam, strippers in action wielding whips, fashion and fiction and sex.