CARS, MONEY, GIRLS
I really did try to go straight many times. I tried my hand as a self-employed painter and decorator, advertising my services among friends. One evening, a classy-looking woman approached me in a blues and asked if I could decorate her flat. I said, ‘Yes, of course.’ When I turned up to give her a price she said something very strange: ‘It’s a deal, Benjamin, but what I’d like to do is double your price. I will pay you twice as much on one condition: you must agree to decorate in the middle of the night.’ I thought that was strange, but I was keen to make all the money I could, so I agreed.
On my first night I found out why I’d been offered a nocturnal job: she was on the game. In those days many girls worked the streets but this woman worked for herself out of a flat. I’d often hear her with a punter. Most of the time it would be straight sex, but sometimes I’d hear the more theatrical stuff: ‘You naughty boy! Say sorry to Mummy!’ and the sound of some guy’s arse being slapped. One day she was a strict nurse: ‘You haven’t taken your medicine!’ Another day someone would be crying like a baby. ‘You wet your pants, didn’t you?’ Imagine me in the next room, halfway up a ladder with my roller, trying to keep my mind on the job.
It wasn’t only about the painting. I had to be trustworthy and keep my mouth shut. She could rely on me for that. In fact, she was so pleased with my work that she recommended me to other girls. Those girls would recommend me to other girls, and I’d soon created a niche market. It was so niche that I drafted up a business card that read:
Benjamin Zephaniah.
Painter and Decorator to Pickpockets, Hustlers and Concubines.
Discreet and Well-Hung Papering.
Specialist in Late-Night Services.
But they were never printed. Still, it was good work and I was the only one doing it. The girls trusted me with their gear and they were confident that I wouldn’t speak about them or grass them up.
I knew a fair few girls who worked the streets back then. They approached it like career women, determined to do it for a while and then retire. It was very rare that anyone was being pimped, and I didn’t know anyone doing drugs other than smoking a bit of weed. If something went wrong the girls had to have someone in the background, like a minder, but they weren’t pimps like you’d see in American films; it wasn’t Miami. I didn’t know anyone who was being forced by another person to be on the game. These women were pretty tough hustlers in their own right. I lived in places where rooms were operated by these girls and much of the time we’d have a really good laugh. There was always gossip and activity.
It was during this time that I first went to Jamaica. Someone paid for me to fly out and do a little business in the capital, Kingston. I didn’t tell my mum I was going, as there would have been all sorts of questions and demands. I was barely in contact with my family at this time, in any case; I thought them too soft, too well behaved and not very streetwise. Very occasionally I would call my mum from a phone box, just to check in, and if there had been any emergencies I’d have heard about them on the street grapevine, but I was very much a free agent.
In a number of early interviews I told people I’d spent a lot of my youth in Jamaica. That was true enough, but what I hadn’t explained was the reasons why. Let’s just call it underground business. I guess you could say I was in an import and export situation, and I used to visit the country to see my suppliers. Yes, the British and Jamaican authorities would have disapproved of some of the things I got up to in Jamaica, but it was survival, and I was doing my little bit for globalisation long before them. Nuff said.
Although it’s a bit of a cliché to say it, what struck me on arrival was the wall of heat that hit me as soon as I stepped off the plane in Kingston. I’d never felt anything like it in the UK, and I spent some time trying to work out what clothes to wear to stay cool. Although the environment was new to me, at the same time it felt familiar. I was recognising all the places mentioned in records, like Orange Street, the Gun Court and Constant Spring. It was like stepping into a film or a song.
If you look at a lot of reggae album covers from the 1970s, you’ll see photos of the artists hanging out in the street or at record shacks and recording studios with people in their neighbourhoods. Big Youth was always outside his local record shop. Doctor Alimantado would walk down the road looking as he did on the cover of Best Dressed Chicken in Town. I’d barely arrived in Kingston when I saw Gregory Isaacs outside his record shop.
I heard many tales from people whose chair Bob Marley had supposedly sat on, or whose cup he’d drunk from or whose yard he’d played football in. I thought they were being fanciful but, when I checked out their stories, they were true. That’s how it was – it was the thing to be seen with your people. Not like in the UK, where famous musicians would hide away in posh houses with the elite.
I was very aware I was English, though. First couple of days I’d have kids giggling at me in the street saying, ‘Why the man walk so fast?’ When I spoke to them they understood: ‘Ah, you from a Inglan.’ People found it highly amusing when they saw someone moving at what I thought was a normal pace, but seemed comedy-quick to a local.
Another thing people found curious was my bedtime routine. I’d make myself a little bed, put my alarm clock beside me, get a drink of water – things that seemed normal to me but which came across as incredibly mannered to the young men I was mixing with, who were more like Ivan from The Harder They Come than I’d ever be. If a Jamaican man wanted to sleep, he would fling himself any which way on a chair or sofa, or even a log, no covers or anything, and snooze away. ‘Jus sleep, man!’
The Rasta culture was huge in JA at that time. It had grown out of an increasing awareness of black history and black cultural identity that looked to Africa as the homeland. The Rasta experience was being broadcast via the lyrics of numerous reggae artists, and was reaching huge audiences. I was looking to Africa via JA, but they were just looking to Africa. I was thinking, If things are this basic here, what’s Africa going to be like? I realised at such times how English I was.
I didn’t have many possessions, money came and went, but the most expensive things I had back in Birmingham were my cars, the best of which was a Triumph GT6 – a great little sports car with amazing coupe styling, but it brought me too many problems. I hadn’t taken a test, so I had no licence and, besides, the red beast had been bought with money raised by ways and means that didn’t involve working nine to five.
The police stopped me – nothing new, as I was always being stopped – and this time I provided enough papers for them to let me go: an MOT certificate, an insurance note, and the car was taxed, but when one of the officers saw that the receipt stated I’d bought the car for cash, he wanted to know where I’d got the money from.
He walked around the car, looking at it admiringly, and then stood in front of me and said: ‘I’m a white man, this is my country, and I work hard to make a living in my country. I’ve worked all my adult life and I can’t afford a car like this. I couldn’t buy this with cash, so I want to know how you can.’
I thought it was ridiculous – they could have easily done me for not having a licence – but there was no law that said I had to show how I got the money to buy the car. I stood my ground, telling them it was none of their business, so they took my car away from me. I was furious but I walked home and the next day I bought another car, one that wasn’t so flashy.
I forgot about the GT6 but I mentioned it to Mum on one of the rare occasions I visited her, and she wouldn’t let it lie. She kept on at the police, demanding they return my car, and when they did it was a wreck. They’d destroyed the interior looking for drugs. Mum wouldn’t let that go either. She demanded they fix it and pay compensation. She battled with them, without any help from me, and to my amazement she won. I got a call from her one day, telling me she had some money for us. We split it fifty-fifty, then I sold the car and the police left me alone – for a while.
During this time, in my late teens, I was living in a suburb called Northfield. It was a nice, mainly white working-class area full of newly built maisonettes and high-rise flats. I had a girlfriend there named Yvonne. She was extra large, extra dark, extraordinary and always smiling. She loved cooking and reminded me of those women we used to see in books about Jamaica – the ones who have their heads wrapped, wear an apron and always carry a basket. She had a young son called Horace, with whom I got on really well. I would try to impress him with my record collection and kung fu moves, and he would try to impress me with his maths, and when we’d both had enough of that we’d gang up and give Yvonne grief. I could say I treated Horace like a son but in reality I treated him like a friend, and I taught him a lot of bad habits.
Yvonne thought she just had two bad kids, but she was amazingly tolerant. Sometimes I would disappear for days and then turn up at her flat and expect my dinner to be on the table. Incredibly, it was. The most she would do is jokingly tell me that it didn’t matter which girl’s bed I’d passed through as long as I came back to her for real food. That woman would do anything for me, and I could never work out why.
Living in Northfield was a lot different from living in Handsworth or Aston. If a crime was committed in north Birmingham, and I knew how the job was done, I could usually tell who’d done it and be able to find him or her within a few hours. To put it simply, Handsworth and Aston had a lot of outlaws; Northfield didn’t. When I told other outlaws that I lived in Northfield, they’d say: ‘Oh, you live uptown.’ It wasn’t really ‘uptown’; it just had a lower crime rate.
Yvonne’s home became a safe house where all my friends could go, any time of the day or night. At any one time I would have at least five girlfriends on the go, and if you’d have asked any of them, ‘Where does Benjamin live?’ they’d have all said, ‘With me.’
In reality I didn’t have a permanent base, but that didn’t seem to matter. I could rest up with one of my many girlfriends or, if I felt like a night off, I could stay at friends’ houses. Living under the radar meant a permanent address was unnecessary. The kind of people I was dealing with didn’t write letters. I never ordered things from catalogues and none of my girlfriends were Avon ladies.