Confessions of a Taxi Driver, Part 5: All the Young Dudes: 1970's. Sex. Drugs. Rock and Roll. Yeah right...

We all make choices that shape our future selves, some good, some bad. I didn't make any choices. so here is a lightning fast review of my life in the 1970's through mine own, reminiscing, slightly twinkly yet sexy failing eyes...



All the Young Dudes...

    "Speed jive, don't want to stay alive, when your twenty five"

It is 1970. I'm listening to the song Spirit in the Sky, it's coming from a tinny am radio on a Crisp St market stall in Poplar, East London.  I've skived off from secondary school and I'm eating a hollowed out half loaf of bread filled with chips covered in tomato sauce and it cost me 12p from the chip shop.  Robbing bastards.  I am also wearing the thrown away leftovers from a gold bullion robbery.  Long story.  Another time, maybe.  I wonder briefly inbetween mouthfuls of greasy red chips what will become of me, my dreams and my fantastical, impossible fantasies of the future... This cockney boy wants to be a doctor, or a guitarist in a rock and roll band, or probably a villain.

Alas, instead...

I worked in Billingsgate fish market as a casual porter for £3 a morning at thirteen, I killed thousands of lobsters in the boiling house in Pudding Lane.  They scream when they die.  Explaining and believed by my mother why I had to go to school at four in the morning and getting away with it was a stroke of my lying, deceiving genius... I, months later, tear my left arm to pieces with a broken punched bathroom mirror shard in a teen angst ridden and hormone fuelled fit of anger.  I run away from home, nearly pass out on a bus where I lose two pints of blood.  After I'm sown back together I run away for the second time that day, this time from the policeman that had been called to the hospital I fell into.  I sleep rough for weeks on cold, damp cardboard, worked for a stripper in Soho, ate out of bins, got £30 for posing for a gay magazine.  Hassled by vicious gay pimps and cutting one of them with my pocket knife.  I return to the East End and live with a close friend's family and get a job as a packer and allocator in a dress manufacturers for £7 per week above the undercover in Petticoat lane.  I buy my first pint of lager for 28p.  I work by gas lamp every other day during the three day week.  I slept with all the women in a hippy commune I temporarily found myself in and sold the controversial Little Red Schoolbook to students.

I returned home, save the life of my little brother by simply calling an ambulance. Bought green and silver glitter platform boots.  Customised all my clothes with metal studs.  I wore black, red and white Loons, had a thing for multi coloured Tank-tops and original Ben Sherman shirts.  Didn't have a six pack, I counted eight.  Felt up my mate's mum, twice.  Bought cheese cloth shirts from the Kensington flea market. Always smelt of patchouli.  Got drunk with Alvin Lee from the band Ten Years After. He wrote his number on a fag packet and I lost it, he wanted to hear me play.  I told the singer song writer Carol King to get the fuck out of my seat at a Richie Havens gig, he'd opened Woodstock only a few years earlier.  Whilst head banging, I maimed people at a Pink Fairies gig because I had lead weights attached to the ends of my waist length hair.  I saw the band Queen before they were famous.  I nearly got blown up by the IRA three times.  I took LSD for a week, ate no food and just drank cola.  I got floored by three screaming policemen as I somehow managed to walk through a fortified police cordon whilst very drunk as the IRA were blowing up a car outside Selfridges in Oxford St, this will be the fourth and final time the IRA try to kill me.  I wore a kaftan to work.  I wore a long denim coat made of used jeans and a big fluffy white collar.  I wore jeans made of black satin with a laced up fly. I wore lots of make up and shiny nail varnish. I never smoked marijuana, used to eat it instead.  Introduced all my friends to drugs.   I'd chain smoke anything.  Sniffed glue, plaster remover and bus seats.


I followed Ozzy Osbourne and Tony Iommi from Black Sabbath to a night club and stalked them.  I was blown off the stage I was sitting on by a faulty lighting assembly at a Thin Lizzy gig at the Marquee club, smoking and burnt at the edges, I was put on a stool with Rod Stewart and Keith Moon and got so smashed I can't remember the amazing conversation I must have had.  I owned a silver and yellow Puch moped, parked it somewhere and never went back for it and seeing as I didn't need my red glitter covered bike helmet anymore I deliberately left it hanging on a police motorbike's handlebars.  I got a question correct on a Capital Radio phone in about the Rolling Stones live on air.  Bastards should have sent me a photo signed by the Stones, instead they sent me a 7" record of Kung Fu Fighting by Carl Douglas.  I told Spurs golden boy Martin Chivers he was a fucking gay wanker whilst I was drunk talking in an American accent on a central line tube train.  I made pasting tables for a whole morning, by dinner time became bored and air gunned them to the ceiling, doors and walls of the workshop I was in.  I left the building via the window, thought it best not to go back and ask for my wages.  I was photographed in Kings road with my mates wearing smelly embroidered full length Afghan coats with red braces and Dr Martens high leg steels, skinny shrink to fit Levis and long hair.  We were hybrid skinhead hippies, no one saw THAT fucking fashion statement coming.  I remembered the words to American Pie (long version) by Don McLean and sung it on street corners with my mate Paul. I wore a hundred bangles on each arm. Tattooed myself AND my mates with just a dirty needle and Indian ink, I pierced my own ear with another dirty needle and threaded the cotton through it and covered it in Vaseline, as there wasn't a precedent for men wearing earrings then, I pierced what was to become the "gay" right side...

A couple of years are obscured from me in a hazy half light, but anyhoo, I meet future first wife.  I thought at the time, Punk Rock was a load of old bollox.  I made reproduction furniture and at weekends dressed like Tony Montana before Scarface was ever made.  I ran men's boutiques in Carnaby Street, the West End and throughout London.  I once sold shoes to the Harlem Globe Trotters, they were all seconds, I didn't tell them.  I got married and a year later proudly created my first daughter whom became my prize at the end of the 1970's brown and cream rainbow.  Sadly, I turned into an arsehole fashion buyer and executive twat with a stupid poncy briefcase and a filofax from the end of the seventies right through to the end of the eighties. I am NOT an arsehole now however.


I'm Keith Hehir Lynch aka "@Mr_Taxi_Man" on Twitter, a bit old, still a babe and a cheeky cocky bastard.  I drive a cab and live on the coast and I'm prone to writing large paragraphs of text with bad punctuation and poor sentence construction when the mood takes me because, simply, I fucking can.  I'm still not a doctor or a famous guitarist. You never know, one day...

"All the young dudes, carry the news, boogaloo dudes, carry the news..." Oh! Fuck yeah...

Some of this was written by David Bowie, I thank him for his assistance and title inspiration.  I have only myself to blame for the rest. 





*this article has since been published on Sabotagetimes.com

I Was a Strippers Runner.

It's 1973. There is an oil crisis in the middle east.  The IRA are blowing up anything and everything. Richard Reid the shoe bomber is unfortunately being born and J. R. R. Tolkien has unfortunately just died. There is a secondary banking crisis that causes negative equity in the housing market and the UK has finally admitted to being within 30 miles of the near continent and has joined the European community.  A new value added tax has been stuck to everything and the Conservatives are in power and Sunderland only go and beat Leeds 1-0 in the FA cup final. Sort of sounds a bit familiar doesn't it.

It was during these series of events I trip and fall on a feisty and now angry stripper on a chilly and crisp November afternoon just off Soho Square in the West End of London...

 

After being called something clearly physically impossible to do by myself, I offered to carry her heavy bag as an apology. She accepted and pushed me into the club shouting at me to hurry the fuck up, I pass the big fat Greek doorman and followed her down the red lit stairs. "Look after my bag" I was instructed with a red painted long finger nail pointing within an inch of my eye, she warned me not to move. I sat and didn't move...


Another reason I didn't move was because I was in the second row of a smoky and dark, sparsely attended strip club watching a brightly lit stripper do what strippers do.  As I haven't seen many naked woman in the flesh, this became an instant highlight of the last four days.


My next surprise was Cathy.  A brunette, pale skinned and curvy, full lips with the reddest of lipstick, was now wearing a blonde afro wig and on stage taking her clothes off to the now iconic song "Walk on the wild side" by Lou reed.  That song still stops me in my tracks at whatever I'm doing. I still remember her perfectly arched back and fine arse moving and gyrating to it.


I felt compelled to make myself useful for the privilege of watching her unbelievably perfect bottom and picked up the knickers and basque thrown to the side near the front of the small stage and I put them in her bag.  Within minutes Cathy the stripper now minus the wig, was marching towards me on the way out of the door, grabbed the bag I was holding and sped off past me, I followed her out willing my hard on to go away.


She watched me collect her outfit and gave me fifty pence, thanked me and rushed off.  I ran after her and asked were she was off to next.  she was already speed walking to another strip club 100 yards up the street, one of about fifteen or so she would perform in rotation most nights.


So the deal was done. Cathy often called me a cheeky little bastard, but I got £2 a night from her and in turn saved her money buying new outfits because either the top or the bottoms on most of them were nicked during a performance by the other girls or snatched away by paying punters wanting souvenirs. I was a goal keeper of knickers, the comedic fighter of old men to rescue a bra.  I even ending up on my arse on one occasion with two old men fighting it out over her black satin knickers, I say "Old" anyone over thirty at my nearly fifteen years of life would have been old to me.  One fight even stopped the show and Cathy and three other strippers on the stage were wetting themselves laughing at the tug of war I was having with her now stretched and torn frillies.

I'd like to think she regales her exploits to her grown up children today.  Maybe, she tells the tale of a young man who she once paid to pick up her knickers. Maybe, she has never ever told a living soul of her life as a stripper. Maybe...


Why was seeing naked women the highlight of those last four days when I fell over Cathy? Apart from the bleedin' heterosexual obvious, I was going "Home" every night to my bits of cardboard I stashed away to sleep in.  I was homeless.  A runaway.  I slept with one eye and a two inch penknife open in my oft shivering young fist.

The £2 a night deal with Cathy kept me fed on a breakfast, lunch and dinner from Wimpy's and bought me a warmer coat, she probably saved my life from the heroin oblivion that I was offered by gay pimps and some of my fellow street sleepers. In fact she never knew I slept on a cardboard mattress near Centre Point underneath the warm air ducts that kept me in a constant state of damp...

Less than ten years later I was running some of the more exclusive menswear boutiques of the day in the west end of London. I was dressing a multitude of major and minor celebrities, minor royalty and had Esq printed on my business cards.  Everyday I passed some of the doorways and strip clubs I slept and frequented on my way to work.  My own shop doorway had its homeless sleepers, I kicked them out and got rid of their cardboard, I didn't give them a second thought.  Ever.


During my time as a perfectly dressed, groomed and manicured twat I even masked my cockney accent with something more agreeable for my clientèle.  Now of course, I am full of eternal contrition and until now I have never really told of it in any great detail.  I have had some amazing careers in my life, adapting and reinventing myself as required, I think those days on the streets and now my life as a Taxi Driver and budding writer are as close to the real me as I'm ever likely to get.  I am also aware that I'm only ever a pound away from being homeless.  Indeed, we all are....

And I often wonder If Cathy still has a fit arse...



Update! This has since been published in The Observer on Sunday Magazine Broad sheet pull out special on Soho in the West End of London. (May 2015) it also had up to 7000 likes on their online version including The Guardian site.

NB: This is an expanded upon narrative from a previous piece I did called "Mirror In The Bathroom..." It can be found on your right in the popular posts section (eighth down) it goes into more detail about my time as a runaway and homeless teenager.

Thanks for reading. 



This has been published on the Sabotagetimes.com.