Rotten Page 3

  Not having a father around early on to discipline us when we were younger presented all kinds of possibilities for Jimmy and me—we tried all of them. From up until age seven, I don’t ever remember going to bed before eleven or twelve o’clock at night. I was up well past when the dot went out on the TV. I would go outside and play. It was different times then. There wasn’t so much violence on the street, no gaggles of psychopathic rapists and pedophile killers. Young kids could get away with a lot more. By the time my youngest brother, Martin, was born, my father began working closer to home.

  Heinz catered dinnertime every night at the Lydon house. Fifty-seven varieties, and I’ve had them all. Open up a can of something. Nobody was into healthy food back then—only whatever was cheap and available. Heinz fed Britain for decades. They must be furious today with this salad generation. But if Heinz could find a way to cram salad into a can, they certainly would. We ate all the soups, baked beans, and the beef stews. At the end of the week we might have a treat with boiled cabbage and bacon, which, done the Irish way, calls for a slow boil all day long until the house absolutely reeks. Eight hours later, it tastes like dirty laundry.

  We drove the car yearly to Ireland. Once on the way back through Wales we were attacked on the motorway. These two big Welsh rugby players, as big as two houses, came after my father. He got out of the car and noticed there were two more guys in the other car sitting in the backseat. As my father walked back to our car, Jimmy, Bobby, and I bravely ran out with our lemonade bottles. We yelled, “C’mon, dad. You’re not scared of them! We’re behind you.”

  We were well behind him!

  Some of my worst memories as a child were of being taken to the cinema to see dreary movies: The Bible. Mary Poppins. Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. I have particularly bad memories of cinema because those were my early experiences. The movie house was a place of torture. Films would go on forever and were deeply childish. I was never childish, never into kids’ things. I didn’t understand how kids could be all sentimental and woozy over rubbish like Mary Poppins.

  I hated starting school. I was frightened of it and didn’t like it at all. It made me very nervous. I had several embarrassing incidents at school. I would shit my pants and be too scared to ask the teacher to leave the class. I’d sit there in a pants load of poo all day long. Irish Catholic schools had very wicked teachers. A lot of them were nuns, and they were particularly vicious and very cruel. They used to love to whack you on the hand with the sharp edge of a ruler. That used to hurt like fuck. I wasn’t into arithmetic as a little kid. I was artistic. I’d draw anything. I loved geometry, but not the math side of it. I liked the penciling. I loved history because I don’t believe any of it. I have a good memory for it, but since I’ve seen my own musical history buggered up so professionally, I really can’t believe anything about anyone else. In twelve years the media changed me into God knows what for their own benefit. So what on earth have they done with Napoleon and the rest? Any kind of history you read is basically the winning side telling you the others were bad.

  Then came the first step that put me on the road to Rotten.

  My mother and father couldn’t wake me up for school one morning. I kept passing out, limp in my mother’s arms. So it was off to the hospital. At first the doctors denied there was anything wrong with me. Such is the National Health. I remember my thoughts all being very weird—drifting, kind of like daydreaming. It was almost like watching a movie. You’re detached from everything, a very strange feeling. There was no drug substitute for the hallucinations I experienced because, heaven knows, over the years I’ve tried. Fucking hell, some of the things I’d see. Astounding. I still can remember them very clearly. Green dragons burning breath of fire—I can still feel the heat burning me. I must have had quite a detailed imagination to allow that to happen in my head. I suppose all kids are frightened of dragons. Lousy TV does that to you.

  You can catch spinal meningitis from rats pissing in the water. I’m not sure how I caught it. It’s a brain disease—which explains a lot—but I was in hospital for a year from age seven to eight. I almost died of meningitis, a condition where the fluid in the spinal column affects the brain. The hallucinations kept occurring, and I couldn’t focus on objects around me. Terrible, terrible headaches. Very hot, swollen. Unable to eat. I was vomiting all the time. Then I would just doze off into a deep sleep. I slipped into a coma. They put me on penicillin, and I was kept in hospital for the year. I was in and out of a coma for six or seven months, with a few more months of rehabilitation.

  My mother would visit, but that would be for one hour a day or whatever. One hour in a child’s life is nothing. St. Ann’s Hospital in Highgate was right next to a Catholic church and was lousy with visiting priests. You thought you could get away from all of that.

  “I’m ill, for God’s sake. Keep those vampires away.” Even at such an early age, I never trusted those religious maniacs.

  The hospital ward had about forty beds in it. Very old-fashioned. You see them in the old World War II movies. The metal framed beds. It was all kids of all ages. Nurses would bother you, and every six hours I had to have penicillin injections all over. They were particularly painful. Kids like me were scared of needles, and nurses did fuck all to alleviate that fear.

  They would draw fluid out of my spine, which was bloody painful. I’ll always remember that because it’s curved my spine. I’ve developed a bit of a hunchback. There’re all these idiosyncrasies about me in the Pistols that come from fucking up in a hospital. The stare is because I developed bad eyesight, also as a result of the meningitis. I have to look hard at things to focus in and see what they are, yet I can read very well in the dark. I just can’t stand the brightness. That’s part of the “Lydon stare.” If I could caricature myself, the closest I’ve seen to it would be Laurence Olivier’s Richard III. That’s so funny. I can see bits of me in there. Fucking excellent. What an absolute bastard he was! Beneath his hunched deformity, Shakespeare’s Richard was wicked and psychotic, mixed with a fatally cruel sense of humor.

  When I caught meningitis, the last thing I remember eating was a pork chop the night before I passed out. I’ve stayed away from pork ever since. I heartily recommend meningitis if you want to get something out of your diet—a liberal sprinkling on the top of whatever you shouldn’t be eating. I swear, you’ll never go back.

  When my parents came to the hospital to take me home, I did not recognize them. I was terrified. I couldn’t remember where home was until I walked in the door. Oh, was this one unhappy child. It’s back to the slums. I suppose you start to get devious and invent illness, anything just to get out. Mind you, it was so squalid you didn’t have to invent anything at all. Just being in a place like that would contaminate you.

  There’re still a few pictures of me about when I was small, but I don’t like looking at them. I hated me when I was small. It’s something I want nothing to do with. You look at yourself when you’re young, and you think, Why couldn’t you have been a bloody bit smarter? Of course you can’t. I’m despondent about the early years of my youth. I was terrified by everything, such a little pussy really. I didn’t want to do anything. I always felt ill. I still get permanent headaches and God knows what from the meningitis. I can cope with it a lot better now. Maybe it’s not right to expect that at eight years old you’re not ruling the world.

  When you miss a year in school, you’ve really fucked up, you feel ashamed. Kids are very age conscious. They try very hard to be adultlike, and you have to work double time to catch up. After my illness I went right back into the same age group, but I was very behind because I didn’t understand what they were doing. I had to catch up on my own. I didn’t get much help from the teachers. Not then. It might have changed since, although I’ve yet to see it. The results of what pours out of English schools at the moment is piss and shit.

  After I came out of hospital after the meningitis thing, I never managed to fit back in with the other kids in school. F
rom there on in, I always felt a bit detached. Once I came back to school after twelve months, I didn’t recognize anyone. A year in a comatose state at that age tends to take some of the memory away. My perspective shifted, and I saw myself as apart. Before, I felt very much in it, although I hated it because I was so bloody shy. Slowly but surely I thought about what being shy meant. I thought, For God’s sake, so what if I’m the ugliest thing that walks the planet. Does it matter? Who to? So I gave that notion up, and from there on in things got better.

  It was back to dreary school again and the same old, tired regime. I never had a good time at school ever. I absolutely hated the physical sports. To me that was the hell of it. It was more fun being ill and not taking part in football, rugby, and tennis—all those fucking boring sports. Again it was back to money. Catholic schools made you buy your own supplies, and if you didn’t have the right colors, they wouldn’t let you take part. I didn’t want to take part anyway. I wasn’t athletic. Muscles are something you hire.

  RAMBO: I was an original skinhead when I was twelve in 1969. If you lived in Finsbury Park at that time, everybody at that age in school was a skinhead. We had to wear size six Dr. Martens boots because if you wore your proper size, like a size four, that was Junior Dr. Martens and those looked like kids’ boots. So I had to wear boots two sizes too big. Ben Sherman shirts would start at size fourteen, so I had this fourteen-inch shirt on even though I only had a twelve-inch neck. We used to go Paki bashing, but mostly out of town. We called it “rolling” and used to rob ’em because they didn’t fight back. I didn’t do an awful lot of it, but sometimes they would fight back and then you would have a good little row on your hands.

  In England public school is really private. They call it “public” because it’s open to the public to buy their education. You should see some of the people who come out of those institutions. English public schools tend to turn out little snobs. They’re taught a sense of superiority, which is the kiss of death. They have the privilege of social status, but that doesn’t mean shit in the real world—except in England, where they don’t live in the real world. They’re absolutely screwed up for life, but with this awful sense of superiority based on nothing. Actually, it’s based on torture. They have their own little cliques. The country’s run by them.

  I remember going to mass with my parents when I was young. The smell of the church used to annoy me, and I would always sneeze through the services. Church was a place where women wore hideous hats, and all the Irish laborers in the back rows smelled of sweat. That’s my view of religion. I’ve never had any godlike epiphanies or thought that God had anything to do with this dismal occurrence called life.

  My parents dragged me and my brothers to mass. Our Lady of the Sacred Heart. It was the church connected to the primary school in Eden Grove that I went to from the age of five to eleven. When we moved from Holloway Road to Finsbury Park, my parents didn’t like the new church. The new cathedral in Finsbury Park was one of those modern structures, stripped bare. No gaudy statues. No musty smell. That alienated my parents, so church was out. I guess you could call it an architectural decision.

  When my mum and dad lost interest, it was easy for me and my brothers to express our disinterest, too. I’d vanish on Sunday morning, and that was all there was to it. All my brothers would stay away from the house until we knew there was no more mass. My parents were not religious people. The house was never full of crucifixes and holy water. If anyone liked the gaudiness of the icons and religious symbols, it was me. There’s something vaguely vampirelike, Gothic, and creepy about it—willing yourself to be haunted.

  One priest we knew locally got busted for gun smuggling. He was a pretty boy who fancied himself a gigolo and was always milling around with the soppy housewives. “Hello there, Mrs. [O’Brien]. Can I do anything for you?” Dirty little snob! I was pleased when he got it. I think it happens a lot with Irish priests. They’ll do things like smuggle guns to get in with the boys. This is not a myth, it’s the truth—they are very seriously inclined to that kind of criminal behavior, not so much for political reasoning, but more for appeasing the community and wanting to be one of the lads. “I may be a priest, but I can shoot a gun as good as anyone!” They’re like Jimmy Swaggarts. They preach one thing and live another. They’ll outdrink anybody in a pub, but I’ve never seen a priest pay for a pint of beer. The paddies like getting their priests well pissed and hearing them swear and talk about [Mrs. Brodie’s] knickers.

  Things like gun running usually occur with Irish priests who are going back and forth between England and Ireland. You’d see them running around the Irish centers, collecting for “our friends up North.” My old man would yell back, “I’ve got no friends up North.” You can’t allow yourself to get involved in that crap. Whatever those people are doing up there is not for the reasons they’re pretending. It’s like two mafia gangs punching each other out—UDA/IRA, IRA/UDA. They both run their extortion rackets and plague people to no end. When the British army patrols are gone, they run around houses, put guns to people’s heads, and say, “Donate kindly to our charity—or else!” It’s Al Capone—ville. I have relatives on both sides of the fence. The Northern Ireland problem is a terrible thing, and it’s only the ignorance of the people living outside of it that keeps it going. There’s a vested interest and a political gain involved: keep the Irish squabbling, and things run fantastically for Britain. The British government doesn’t do anything without a reason. They’re stopping the Irish from being industrialized. How’s that for a fantastic theory? As long as the Irish are killing each other, they’re certainly denied their opportunity. Most of the Protestants have Scottish ancestry, which makes them Celts anyway. We’re all part of the same bloody race. You should not take sides. You cannot justify murdering people and parking bombs in pubs and shops. I’ve never seen anything solved by violence. History usually comes back to where it all began; you either learn to assimilate or exterminate, and not just your enemy, but yourself.

  Culture is a hokey fraud. We’re near the twenty-first century—who needs it anymore? Culture was something humans held on to because they were afraid of demons and gods. People used it as protection from metaphysics. It’s sad that all culture seems to be about old pots and corny old folk songs. Those things are so removed from real life. Modern man hasn’t accepted that culture moves on. Who needs the trappings? Culture is merely rules, and it goes hand in toe with soppy religious stupidity.

  I was fairly anonymous as a schoolchild. I didn’t start making trouble until much later when I was twelve or thirteen in secondary school. I had had enough of being bullied around. It was absurd. I’m not a fighter, you see. I don’t like violence, so I was an easy target. I enjoyed reading and learning things, but I thought the way they were trying to teach us was stupid and ridiculous. If anything, school was hindering me, and I resented that. I didn’t like the way we were taught English literature, for instance. The teacher would tell us what this or that author meant. I’d be thinking, No. He doesn’t mean that at all. It seemed wrong, and if I dared mention that, I would be labeled a troublemaker. It just escalated from that. If asking questions makes you a troublemaker, then that’s what I became. If anything, the schoolmasters maneuvered me in that direction. Then I could be quite violent about my questioning. I would disrupt lessons as much as possible. I would question everything, particularly in the religious classes. I found them really offensive. They weren’t teaching religion, they were indoctrinating and brainwashing us.

  Ages eleven to thirteen meant changing from primary school to secondary school. Starting secondary school was hell, as the older boys would obviously pick on the new lot. It was a period of victimization for two solid years, until you could find a way of maneuvering around it. I found humor the best way. I certainly couldn’t fight my way out of it. Toward the end of primary school, I got fed up being bullied all the time. That’s when I became a bit of a loner. I found it hard fitting back in. People didn’t reme
mber me. Things changed. Hard, my gosh, I had it hard, but don’t all kids go through that? You’re gangly. You’re insecure. You’re naive, and the older kids know because they’ve been there. So they really give it to you, they really know what hurts. It’s not so much a bash on the nose, it’s much more vindictive than that. It’s what’s said, that peer pressure thing, that tells you, “You don’t fit in.”

  Kids are very conservative at that age. It’s all about being the same, anti-anyone-who-doesn’t-quite-fit-in-the-mold. I’m sure the teachers instigated a great deal of that. Fortunately secondary school wasn’t a formidable time for me. Up until then I was a bit of a church mouse. Fuming inside. An explosion waiting to happen.

  I broke out of the mold at around fourteen, fifteen. That’s when I exploded. I’d had enough. That’s when I’d seen through it all. The teachers were absolutely furious because I’d fight them in such a clever way. It was all about manipulating their anger, annoying them by staring without blinking throughout an entire lesson. That used to drive them crazy. Excellent fun. The other kids in the class—the ones I was playing up to—were very impressed. Suddenly you’re in and you’re on top of it all. From there on in it’s just a giggle.

  Sports and I never saw eye to eye. I would do anything not to attend a single sports class. I’d be ill. I’d be absent. I wouldn’t have the proper uniform, which was a valid excuse since they insisted you have the correct football kit, tennis outfit, or cricket gear. Poverty made that a no-no. It was the perfect excuse.

  “We can’t afford it.”

  “Well, you’ll just have to sit on the bench.”

  “Yippee!”

  Then they got wise to that, so that’s when we organized demonstrations of nonparticipation. I remember the sporting trips. They’d take all the classes to Hackney Marshes, set us up in teams. Three-quarters of us just said no. I was blamed for being the inspiration behind that, which was vaguely true. There I was with the rest of the lazies, all of us having the time of our lives while the rest were running up and down in the sweltering heat. Who’s winning here? It was marvelous when they threatened to cane the lot of us. Fine. We stood up. Thwack-thwack-thwack, the first twenty kids—which included me—and that was it. Even they got bored. The next week they didn’t bother. By the next week the sports department of our school was just a shambles.