My first day at Saint Martin’s School of Art, I walked out of a life drawing class. It was my first life drawing class. My first class. And the first time I’d sat in a room with a naked body and strangers. We all looked sideways with a glazed, pencil-sharpening, easel-adjusting insouciance as a short, stooped Greek gent in his sixties shuffled from behind a screen in a filthy dressing gown. The robe made his nakedness infinitely worse, somehow intimate, embarrassing, pathetic. It is a convention of life drawing that the models take their clothes off behind the sanctuary of a screen and then redress in a gown before appearing and removing that. There is something liturgical about it, like vestments, also something medical—an examination, a dissection. I expect it was originally to differentiate the modeling from burlesque. The act of undressing is erotic. The step from being naked to being nude . . . from the carnal world to the classical one. Well, that’s the promise. In front of us was a man with a long, sad mustache, a multitude of chins, oily, darkly stubbled, with hair grown to a fecund tilth on his Ithacan uplands. There was barely an inch of him that wasn’t furry. His back was as wiry as a terrier, his chest heathery as a grouse moor, his short legs tropical. I even remember a stubby matted tail. His tight, drooping goat-udder stomach hung over a dark concertinaed penis that crouched like a bald squab in a pubic nest, perched precariously on an immense scrotum like a drop of furry creosote caught in its infinitesimal descent to his knees. Hair is the implacable, unpluckable enemy of life drawing. What we want is to render humanity divine and smooth, linear and sinewy. It is a great art joke to mock poor John Ruskin for being revolted on his wedding night by the pubic hair of his new bride, having virginally imagined that all women were as bald as classical marble. But having sat through a lot of life classes, I have a passing sympathy for him—he confused the erotic with the aesthetic, got his nude mixed up with his naked. It’s easily done.

The Greek took up his position, and our drawing master, an old man with swept-back silver hair, spectacles on a chain, and an effulgent pocket handkerchief, pushed a skeleton hanging on a stand next to him. Art schools still had ossuaries of bones for memento mori. I expect the skeleton had a name. They always give the bones names. “Has anyone seen Percy or Duke?” they’d say. There are a lot of Duke skeletons. We were told to draw the man and the remains of the man so that we should be able to see how the one fitted into the other—Ecce homo. After twenty minutes, I realized that everything I’d confidently thought about art and drawing was a clumsy blunt smudge. I couldn’t even make the body fit in the page. I failed to create one confident or even valiant line and, as always with drawing, an indecisive start simply got worse, more finger-tied. The first mark is invariably the purest—everything after that is a compromise. There is no such thing as a successful drawing. They are always qualified defeats. The Pyrrhic victory is in how close you manage to stay to the promise of the first tick. It is a brutally depressing lesson that has to be learned and accepted all at once, like a slap.

So I found myself in the late-summer sun standing on Charing Cross Road again, wondering what to do with the rest of my patently unfit-for-purpose arty-craft. And there was Mark. “Do you want a drink?” he asked. He was an original-looking man. He wore high-waisted baggy jeans, polished Dr. Martens boots, checked shirt, and denim jacket. I remember this because it was so unexceptional, so ordinary and provincial for art school, but at the same time so considered. He had a thin, pale, bony face, as if mottled parchment had been bloodlessly stretched over a high, knobbly forehead, and a nose like a broken banister. He had a thin mouth with a top lip that might have been prehensile, as if he were part okapi, all finished off with a bower of red hair that was the texture of stable straw, parted in the middle and made rigid by the application of soap. It sat on the top of his head like a jaunty, ruddy costermonger’s boater; he had bright mocking gimlet eyes . . . his whole demeanor was ironic, long before irony became fashionable. Mark appeared to be wearing himself as a costume, like a Brechtian character. He would stare for long moments in shop windows or lavatory mirrors, twiddling his hair and sneering. It was vain, but it was as if he came upon his reflection as a constant surprise. I never knew what it was that Mark actually saw in himself. We walked down the street and he led me to Ward’s Irish House—a cellar under Piccadilly Circus, long gone. It was a meeting place for freshly arrived Irishmen looking for work and lodgings. The barman would say, “Sure, there’s a Kerry man in the corner, ask him.” This was the first place I had Guinness served properly—the glasses would stand on the bar in lines waiting for their heads to settle—and they offered bacon and cabbage that was memorable. On Saint Patrick’s Day, they’d sing the old songs, there would be swaying queues of slick-faced men with huge hands leaning against each other like an Oxfam bookshelf. The tiled toilet would be a melee of staggering Micks pissing up against one another’s legs. It was a brilliant pub.

Mark came from Crawley but was tearfully proud of his Irish heritage. The merest mutter of an Easter rebellion or the first note of “The Black Velvet Band” would reduce him to furious-fisted drunken tears. We’d always start with the Guinness and then move on to the ironically named Black and Tan—half Guinness, half bitter. Mark was singular. We became inseparable, comrades, friends. I thought I’d come to art school for a hairy, naked Greek bloke, but actually it turned out I’d come for this odd, driven, demented, manipulative, amoral, clever and funny redhead.

There are obvious crossroads in your life—births, deaths, marriages, emigrations—but there are others, perhaps more compelling, that are hidden, that seem nothing at the time, trip wires that later you realize set off everything that came after. Everything was salted by that unconsidered decision—leaving the life drawing class, meeting Mark, going to Ward’s—was a decisive moment. Like a drop of vermilion in a glass of water, it has colored everything. And now, forty years on, it’s so faint that only I can see the tint.

We walked back to college and the model had gone, the easels and the donkeys stood in the empty studio, with the terrible attempts of rendering a vision of mortality still on them. They looked like sketches made by glove puppets with button eyes and thumbs for brains. There was only one halfway beautiful drawing. The figure emerged from the paper like something floating in water, tentative and ethereal; the Greek kindly—even fondly—modeled. Beside him the grinning skull . . . a danse macabre. Of course it was Mark’s. He had the most limpid and subtle talent, elegant and skillful. The quality of his drawing was utterly unexpected. He treated it all with a bored disdain—I never saw him finish a picture; he would lose interest. Art was never a destination; art school was never the path to being an artist, it was a way out of Crawley. He dropped the pretense of art almost immediately and would nag and wheedle if I looked too intent on wasting a day working. So we roamed Soho. Sat in midday cinemas. Wandered through the openings in Cork Street, necking wine, playing pool in pubs, listening to the dissolute and bitter literary flotsam in drinking clubs. Mark had a homemade culture. In my house, we had the official received raised-brown-hardback version of culture that accepted the chronological canon of socialist middle-class taste. But Mark’s was made up as he went along, from scraps and shards, random reading, an innate serial anarchy. We collected a group of fellow travelers, other art students, their mates, girlfriends, people from shops—occasionally university. The failed and the furious. In that year we became a loose band of perhaps twenty or thirty friends who would crisscross at Friday pubs in Camden and Saturday house parties in Victoria. It was my first bespoke peer group, not chosen by school or neighbors or family, not monitored or audited by grown-ups. It felt vivid and louche and giddy. The first three chords of punk were fighting the feedback and spitting in London pubs—so that’s where we went to drink and buy pills. We had friends who’d play in a sort of glam-rockabilly group. Rockabilly had a now forgotten bouncy crepe-soled moment, drapes and quiffs and complicated heel and toe steps that were remarkably like Scottish country dancing. The band was called Bazooka Joe and the Rhythm Hot Shots. They played a Saint Martin’s party when another feral marauding group hijacked the stage and hammered out a furious howling cacophonous set. I’d like to say we all knew that this was the opening of a Pandora’s box, the start of something stinking and magnificent, but the truth is they cleared the room. We all crowded into the bar around the beer keg, dropped blues and asked who the fuck let the tossers in. Only in retrospect am I able to boast I was at the Sex Pistols’ first gig.

A couple of years later Stuart, the guitarist of Bazooka Joe, called to say he’d started a new group and could I bring along some mates to hear them at the Man in the Moon on King’s Road. Again I’d like to be able to tell you I felt the harmony of pop history being struck, but actually Stuart rolled around on the floor in a leather gimp mask with a zip mouth and licked my tutor’s wife’s nipples through her string vest and I left saying, “If he ever makes a record, I’ll eat it, and anyway Adam and the Ants is a really stupid name for a group.”

Mark didn’t live anywhere. He sometimes got on the train home to Three Bridges and furiously smoked in the lavatory. Buying tickets for anything—paying for anything—upset his sense of himself. It was a betrayal of some personal anarcho-syndicalism. Mostly he lived on sofas. He was a bad guest. The first thing he’d do in any new house was clean out the bathroom cupboard and the bedside table of any and all prescription drugs. He pissed in any number of linen cupboards, drank and ate gluttonously and without thought. He once chewed a chunk out of someone’s wedding cake the day before the ceremony. He would leave wearing your clothes, your father’s clothes, occasionally your mother’s clothes. He would grow attached to a feather boa or a cerise hat. But then he might also do all the washing up. He was surprisingly diligent at washing up. He was also beguiling and pyrotechnic company. I laughed a three-ring circus with Mark, had steepling conversations that built surreal worlds and populated them with phantasmagoria. I can still hear his voice rising and growing hoarse as the ideas grabbed words from his imprecise baroque vocabulary and tumbled out of his mouth into great mosaics of bawdy prophecy and poetry. But mostly he would simply sleep where he finally fell, and once comatose, he was impossible to wake—doorways, staircases, benches, the backseats of parked cars, mattresses in skips could all be home. There was a party at someone’s parents’ house where Mark decided to plant a tree in the living room. He came in through the French windows like a Terence Rattigan character, pulling a cherry tree in bloom that he’d spent an hour extracting with its root ball. He manhandled it onto a Turkish rug. It stood as surprised as we were. “Bring in the out!” he shouted, as if calling for the freeing of slaves or votes for women, and we pulled up every shrub and flower and shy herbaceous twig and arranged them with a manic diligence across the carpets, chairs and side tables. Pictures grew ivy, sofas became banks where the wildflowers grew, and Mark danced like a punk Puck issuing orders like a nihilist Capability Brown. At another gate-crashed party in Hampstead, he fell asleep on a spare couch in a distant bedroom and woke in the morning to the sound of a soft cough. Looking round he saw through his puffy-slitted pink eyes an intense man in spectacles sitting behind him holding a pad and a fountain pen. It was some time before the psychiatrist understood that Mark really wasn’t his delusional first patient of the day.

What I loved about Mark was what I feared in myself. He had no boundaries. There was no ample sufficiency. He brooked no internal nanny. There was no small voice saying, “This will end in tears.” It was always best to go on. He was—and remains—the only true existentialist I’ve ever known. He lived purely and solely for the life he wanted purely and solely, moment by moment. To be true to his appetites, I never saw him compromise a single selfish desire. If the Tube took too long, he would jump onto the line and walk through the tunnel to the next stop. He stole from everyone and gave away everything he had. He was utterly committed to the now. This unquestioning devotion to desire led to fights, screaming threats, goading mockery. I’ve seen day laborers begging him to shut up and go away so they didn’t have to thump him, but they’d always have to thump him. He couldn’t . . . wouldn’t surrender the moment, and invariably, due to his fucked-up state, he never won, was always beaten—sometimes quite badly. I’d sit with him in Accident & Emergency ward waiting rooms while he cried and ranted and laughed and begged cigarettes to be told he couldn’t smoke and then smoke anyway, doing his little dance, holding a filthy bar towel to the jagged hole in his head. He’d be patched up and argy-bargied out, and then round the corner he’d grin and produce handfuls of bottles and strips of drugs lifted from the tables of sleeping cancer patients. Mark was completely and reliably amoral. As far as I know, he never had an ambition beyond the pursuit of a memorable day. He could so easily have been a boringly good artist. He could have been any number of tedious things—clever, imaginative, personable, even charming. Along the way people would try to save him from himself, to take him on as a project. And for a moment he’d be entranced. But it always ended in betrayal and tears. Mark despised charitable good intentions as a feeble and tepid self-interest. I don’t think he ever had a girlfriend. At some Chelsea party he found an empty room with a bed and engaged in a fumbling, aggravated coupling with an ugly, out-of-it junkie punk. They fornicated on top of everyone else’s coats. People kept coming in to tug at their sleeves and tails, and Mark would hand out furs from under their rutting buttocks, complaining like Joe Orton’s lost-luggage attendant. “You haven’t come across my other glove, have you?” asked an embarrassed Sloane.

It was never going to end well. I can’t remember much else about my year at Saint Martin’s, but my friendship with Mark, the momentum of his hedonism, was more than I could keep up with, and I realized I was querulous where he was fearless; I worried about how to get home, would keep back a note for taxis. I was too aware of consequences, I wanted to do things, to be something else, to have stuff . . . and ultimately I wanted to fit in. I was risk-averse. In life, I realized, I would always opt for safety, and it became harder and harder to be with Mark. His consumption of everything—drink, drugs, conflict, flights of fancy—became ever more bizarre and metaphysical, outlandish. He would out–out-of-it the rest of us, he outran his friends; the infuriation with caution or compromise was finally toxic, and I would avoid him. He found other, more committed Berserkers to dance in the firelight with, and finally he stepped into the night umpteen floors above Los Angeles . . . or perhaps he just fell.

There is one episode—a weekend in the spring—when, late at night, drunk, wandering back to a squat, we jumped on the train at Victoria. There used to be an illuminated blue sign with a picture of the moon that promised the night train to Paris and Brussels. We took it. A fantastic rickety slow journey on rail and sea and train again. On the boat, I picked up a beautiful, dark, amused girl and we smoked joints and drank beer on the chilly salty prow and then made giggling clumsy love in an empty couchette grumbling through the creeping gray fields of Picardy. We arrived at the Gare du Nord just after dawn, kissed and said good-bye, and Mark and a couple of mates and I made our way past the street sweepers flushing the gutter to Les Halles, to drink onion soup and cognac. But what I remember most is Mark, like a character out of Dickens rewritten by Camus, dancing and exclaiming through the city and then standing in front of Théodore Géricault’s Raft of the Medusa in a frenzy of excitement, a reverie of empathy, moved by it in a way that my measured and respectful appreciation of big pictures in gold frames could never attain. Géricault painted it when he was only seven years older than we were—madly, hubristically committed to making an emotional masterpiece. He shaved his head, lived a self-denying monastic life, built a replica of the raft, did hundreds of preparatory sketches. The sinking of the Medusa was a contemporary tragedy that had galvanized France with horror and fury. He interviewed survivors, who had been reduced to cannibalism, and having done all that, Géricault locked himself in a morgue with cadavers as models. When the painting was finally hung in the French Academy’s annual salon, because he’d not been able to stand back from it in his small studio, he saw for the first time that the composition was wrong, the double pyramid of its structure was out of kilter; so he repainted it—there and then—surrounded by the Old Guard in their top hats and tails with their waxed mustaches and sniggering mistresses. He was driven uncompromisingly unhinged by art. The picture was greeted with gasps, a frenzy of adoration and disgust. It remains the archetypal work of Romanticism, the tangled heroic rags of bodies, the lost, the dying. I had never seen it in the flesh before this trip . . . it is really monumentally huge . . . overwhelming; it carries two stories—the Medusa’s and Géricault’s. In reproductions in books, you don’t notice, you can’t see, the Argos, the little ship on the horizon that will rescue the survivors. They are to be saved. It changes everything. Seen small on a page, it is a painting of hopeless despair. In life, in larger than life, it is the triumph of life—and Géricault. He would live only another five years; he died of consumption at thirty-two.

On the way back to London, the train was packed. We sat in the corridor with a handful of Bulgarians coming to find work, their pockets full of bottles of plum brandy. A year later a man I knew at college, a dull man, introduced me to his new girlfriend. It was the girl from the boat. We smiled and shook hands.

Recently I was remembering all this, talking to one of that loose group of friends—Jo, who compromised on her life less than most and is now a trance-dance DJ and sells cotton dresses on the beach in Goa. I was trying to remember what happened to all the rest, all those leery Spetsnaz punks. She remembers these things and ran through the litany of names with police-style descriptions: “. . . You know, the one with the wrong name and the laugh like a flat battery . . . The redhead Mohican whose friend caught his cock in one of his millions of zips and had to call the fire brigade and they said it was too small for them to send an engine—well, that was an overdose,” and “. . . AIDS.” Then “. . . suicide . . . hepatitis . . . AIDS . . . suicide . . . fell under a bus . . . sclerosis . . . psychosis . . . disappeared . . .” It was a higher attrition rate than a Pals battalion on the Somme.

At the end of the year, Saint Martin’s decided they had no more use for me. I sat through a grisly interview for the painting school chaired by Freddie Gore, RA (Royal Academician), the third-rate son of the second-rate Spencer Gore. He looked at my sparse and halfhearted portfolio and asked who my favorite painters were—a question that still makes my mind go blank. I plucked Cézanne. “Name all the Cézannes in public collections in London,” he snapped. I stumbled through those I could remember. “Oh really, really?” he harrumphed, like a prefect who’s caught a malingerer cheating. “How can you possibly say you love Cézanne when you don’t even know the best painting in London, the wonderful self-portrait in the Courtauld.” There isn’t a self-portrait in the Courtauld, I replied. I think the picture you mean is a copy of a self-portrait, by Roger Fry. Gore blinked and pursed his lips. Another member of the board whispered, “I think he’s right, Freddie,” and he shuffled his paper and said, “We’ll let you know.” We all already knew. I offer this story not to show off my cleverness but to underline it. This wasn’t the first time I’d suffered from being too clever by half. A peculiarly English defect, and of my many faults the one I have the most difficulty giving up, or even amending, is priggishness. Even as I am being a prig, I can feel a contrary warmth. I realize with a blush that in life’s revels I am cast always to be a Malvolio, however much I’d like to imagine myself as Toby Belch, Aguecheek or Feste. (Incidentally, the character of Malvolio is said to have been based on a Yorkshire magistrate, an MP, Sir Thomas Posthumous Hoby, an austere Low Churchman who sued his neighbors in the Star Chamber for coming into his house, playing cards, drinking, carousing, threatening to ravish his wife and ridiculing Puritans. He won his case but also the odium of his peers and a sort of immortality in Twelfth Night. You can see a carved and painted memorial to Sir Thomas in the parish church at Bisham . . . and while you snigger, I am perfectly aware that this is an inexorably priggish aside. But I simply can’t help myself.)

I got a job in a dirty bookshop on Archer Street in Soho. Public displays of sex were still coy and euphemistic. Soho was poxed with strip clubs and clip joints known most tautologically as “gentlemen’s clubs.” They served nonalcoholic champagne in tiny basements where chubby, pinch-faced girls would palely bulge out of suspenders and totter around juggling their sagging tasseled tits for the disappointment of drunk tourists and questing public schoolboys. This was still the world of the Maltese Mafia, which was said to run all the vice in Soho. You could still get razored there—razor crimes sound so quaintly Victorian. Prostitutes would ask if you wanted company or had “got the time, dearie?” They sat behind lamps draped with red chiffon scarves in tiny rooms that smelled of Floris talc, carbolic, sweat-sour mattresses and damp towels. The sex business was a make-do, hand-cranked cottage industry. A vestige of the ’50s. Its austerity and aesthetic were hopelessly, marvelously out of touch with the moment. The look of the girls, the music they jigged to, the clothes they wore, the men who pimped them, the customers who lusted over them, were all remnants of a faded, shabby, keyhole-frotting Britain. A Britain that in every other facet of life was dead and gone, built over by pop music, fashion, Terence Conran, Sunday papers, Martin Amis, garlic and avocados and the contraceptive pill. Soho’s sex industry was so conservative, nostalgic and prim it should have been looked after by the National Trust. It was more snobbish, timid and badly dressed than the Church of England. A business that was defined not by what it could do, but by what it couldn’t do—the restrictions were what made it so compelling. It was not even the fig leaf of pretense that the sex business was anything more than delayed disappointment; it wasn’t coitus interruptus, it was interruptus coitus. Always a con, a promise that fronted a lie, and in a fundamental lie, probably much closer to being a home truth about most sex lives.

I was introduced to my job by an old and devout Jewish man whose family business was the manufacture, importation and distribution of barely titillating magazines for the damnation of the goyim. He took no pleasure or pride in his profession, he began by asking me what a young man like me wanted to work in a shop like this for. By “young man like me,” he meant someone who spoke with a boarding school accent. It didn’t take long to master the rudiments of the job. The small, dark shop was guarded by the traditional plastic-strip curtains that were supposed to both ease entry and prevent identification of those entering. Inside, there were tables and shelves with piles of magazines, most sealed in plastic bags. Their covers promised Swedish nymphos hard at it and boarding school tarts who couldn’t get enough man. There would be pictures of women with elaborately backcombed and lacquered hair and heavy, ungainly breasts. The magazines also tended toward unlikely jewelry—a string of pearls, a tiara—implying class, luxury sluttishness. Stomachs were sucked in, backs arched, pale and soft. This is sex before gyms or diets or fake tans. The punters would spend a long time looking at these bags, trying to imagine their content. Sometimes they’d hold them as if trying to weigh the volume of breast and buttock inside. Then they’d come to the till and purchase one, which I would put in another bag, and I’d hand them their change without looking at them. Eye contact was strictly forbidden in the dirty-mag business. We weren’t selling sincerity or building customer relations; you weren’t asked to come again soon. I did have to surreptitiously watch for shoplifters. The ethics of stealing wank mags is a moot point. Is it a double negative? Do two immoralities make a morality? I had to make sure that no one opened the packets in the shop—they mustn’t see what it was they were buying, because that would spoil the whole business model and the fun of anticipation, which very soon would turn out to be the only fun on offer. The rules about what constituted pornography were absurd and piecemeal and exacting, constructed by people who were embarrassed, confused and fascinated by the whole business of having to make up rules for bum holes and fluids and depilation. You could imagine the committees of seriously committed, socially conscientious censors sitting in offices being presented with reams of tepid filth by sour-faced secretaries holding their noses, forcing themselves to make decisions and have opinions about splayed labia, pierced foreskins and wheelchair access (there is a well-subscribed proclivity for sex with paraplegics and amputees). Their decisions and opinions made mindful of inquisitive children, the weak-minded, the lonely, the imbecilic, obsessive masturbators, the sexually numbed and bereft and those avoiding eye contact. They decided that this or that particular image or exotic suburban discomfort in Slave Market Gang-Bang number three overstepped some glistening scribbling mark. For instance, you weren’t allowed to show erect penises. There was the famous Mull of Kintyre concordat, like the Geneva Conventions. An agreed formula for erections. Nothing elevated higher than the knobbly holiday promontory hanging off the groin of Scotland was allowed to be sold. We couldn’t show or encourage perversion or aberrant behavior; role play was bearable, as long as it wasn’t too Brechtian and didn’t look like you meant it. Rape fantasies were generally acceptable—apparently being neither perverted nor aberrant. Vaginas were photographed with an intense and furious intimacy. Their examination was forensic and interrogatory. Labia were pulled apart, lenses elbowed through things, investigative fingers were plunged . . . searching for what? Contraband? The hidden good stuff? It was as if the vagina itself couldn’t possibly be all there was, there must be something more, something else up there. Some secret members-only club, a better appointed first-class snug, because all the fucking fuss, all the fucking morality and fucking prudery and fucking guilt and weeping, yearning, really couldn’t fucking have been all about this . . . this fucked-ragged hole. It was as embarrassed as anyone.

Occasionally someone would open a packet, peel back and splay its pages in front of everybody in the shop and shout, “Is this all? Is this what I paid five pounds for?” The best customers were the prostitutes who’d come in to restock their waiting rooms. They were loud and drugged and drunk and cackled and gave me cigarettes or took my cigarettes, and were repellent and beguiling in equal measure. The shop stayed open till eleven at night, and Soho at night, after the office drinkers had wandered to the Tube, was a place of solitary, lonely men staving off the demons in the shadows, aching for companionship, angry at what life had withheld from them. I had one sadly regular customer. He never bought anything—he didn’t have any money—he was a sliver of a man, gimlet-eyed with a charming smile. I’d share my supper and smokes with him. He was lonely like everyone else, but his loneliness seemed somehow deeper, more pathetic. His story was that he’d left the army with shellshock and lived on the streets as a drunk beggar, then been rescued by a Christian woman whom he always referred to as “Mrs. Sinclair.” Mrs. Sinclair was a widow who had been left a comfortable fortune. “She was an angel of mercy for me,” he said. “I can never, ever repay her for what she did.” And his eyes would fill with tears. “She took me to a restaurant with tablecloths and everything. I ate a steak. It was called something in French and I drank water from a bottle, because she said I shouldn’t drink alcohol anymore, and I’ve never drunk since. She found me lodgings and I got a job as a porter in a block of flats that she lived in up in Maida Vale. She was the most wonderful woman I ever met. I owe her everything . . . everything. She’s a very religious lady, Mrs. Sinclair, and you know, Adrian, I have a very large unnaturally long penis. It’s the least I can do for her.”

Round the corner on Great Windmill Street was The Nosh Bar, where you could get kosher salt beef on rye bread with sour pickles and lemon tea and Middle European cheesecake, served by incredibly rude old men with grudging demeanors and immaculately Brilliantined hair. There were pictures of boxers and old fight posters on the walls, which were streaked and nicotine-stained. They remembered Solomon’s Gym round the corner, where battalions of Jewish pugs had jabbed and dodged their way out of the Diaspora. Kosher nosh has all but vanished from London now, as refugees have found better things to do than make sandwiches for porn peddlers, prostitutes, toothless cornermen and the hard-faced, long-legged chorus girls from the Windmill Theatre. My bookshop also sold real books, but only dirty ones. Half-crown eighty-page titillators with terrible syncopated descriptions of thrusting nipples, randy manhoods and spent seed. We also stocked anything that had at one time been banned, censored or railed against by Malcolm Muggeridge from the pulpit at the Sunday Express. So along with Secrets of Saint Agatha’s Nymphos, I read The City and the Pillar, Gore Vidal’s novel about a boy coming to terms with gayness. It was controversial in 1948. The fact that it was still being sold as a rude book in a sex shop in the ’70s told you more about Soho and the sex business than about the book. I also read Last Exit to Brooklyn by Hubert Selby, Jr.—a tough, brutal, ugly book that is really a series of cohabiting short stories about the life of the poor in New York in the ’40s and ’50s. It was . . . it is, transcendently brilliant. One of those books that changes everything else you read afterward, and it caught me at exactly the right moment, in the right place—rudderless, drunk, speedy, sitting in a shitty seedy sad sex shop in Soho with no plan, no expectations. It had been prosecuted for obscenity. First privately by a Tory MP, Sir Cyril Black, an extreme Baptist. There was a public prosecution in Marylebone, where Robert Maxwell spoke for the prosecution and Anthony Burgess and Frank Kermode for the defense. The judge insisted on an all-male jury because the book would be too distressing for women. The chaps, obligingly and manfully, found it guilty of obscenity, which was overturned by a man in a wig on appeal. It’s difficult now to imagine, but I have lived through a time when judges could stipulate single-gender juries for the protection of the fainter (sic) sex. Cyril Black’s grandson Andrew Black set up Betfair, the online gambling site, which may have sent the bigoted old censorious Baptist spinning in his grave like a slot machine.

Selby wrote Last Exit because he had pulmonary disease and couldn’t work. He said, “I know the alphabet. Maybe I could be a writer,” which is the punk instruction for literature. He did. Selby was a drunk and a junkie and he got clean and he got sober and he stayed that way. Did it for the rest of his life, even refusing morphine in his final illness. He was one of us who made it all the way to the end. He said that The New York Times wouldn’t review any of his books, but they’d publish his obituary. And they did.

I loved Soho. Its louche, weary, dog-eared smutty brilliance. The pubs full of bitter, drunk nearly-wases—men with ancient tweed jackets that were too lazy to leave them and yellow fingers, who smelled of Gitanes and whiskey at ten in the morning. Men with everything behind them, for whom a lacerating envy and a general livid malevolence were the sour elixir of life. They had once all been promising novelists championed by Hugh MacDiarmid or John Braine, they’d come down from the grit of the north to take London by the throat and now chased reviewing jobs for New Statesman (known as “The Staggers” because of its constant funding crises) or as freelance subs on late-night shifts on the tabloids. Men who’d once had poems published in Encounter and been included in anthologies of New Voices from a Young Albion. The Soho pubs—The Coach, The French, The Intrepid Fox, The Blue Posts, Muriel’s—were all blistered with them. They made failure a marvelous lifelong calling, polished their doggerel stories of disappointment till they shone with a lacerating brilliance; and the women were perched at bars like ailing marabou storks, cadging gins and pulling the filters off Benson & Hedges . . . fillies who had once played opposite Roger Livesey, who’d been the mistresses of plutocrats and publishers, who had been whisked off to Brighton in bull-nosed Morrises. Women who had been free and vaunted and famous for their beauty and their wit and their fun, who had run from the fearful postwar probity of suburban housewifery to be modern and liberated, who had handed over their youth and their enthusiasm, their talent and their bodies to difficult men as if they were mere bagatelles. Men who’d lied slicker than they, and moved on, faster than they, and had left them here, washed up in Soho. The great anecdotal reef of lies that had been sucked dry, killed by promises and the dreadful amusing cruelty of drunken bravery. I was desperate to be part of it all. But you have to try something to fail. Doing nothing—reading in a dirty bookshop—isn’t something you can fail at. Soho was the pantheon of cataclysmic collapse, and I hadn’t earned my place in it yet. So I decided to go back to art school and sent my portfolio to the Slade. Much to my—and everyone else’s—surprise, I got an interview. This time there was no board, just Professor Gowing, the newly appointed head of the school.

Lawrence was a singular man, an art historian. He had a distinctly patrician air about him, although he was a draper’s son and largely self-educated. He had been at best a dull painter of the Euston Road School, producing mundane but closely observed life studies and studiously unflattering portraits and some landscapes that made everything look like a bomb site. I’m told he wrote a brilliant book on Vermeer, but far and away his most striking attribute was his prodigious, gorgeous ugliness. He was histrionically hideous. Mythologically misshapen, large and uncoordinated. He resembled an evil fairy’s unsuccessful attempt to turn a gargoyle into a frog. He also had a wholly inappropriate penchant for wearing leather, and if that were not enough, he boasted the most severe and overwhelming stammer I’ve ever heard. I suffered a stutter as a child, I know how embarrassing and self-conscious it makes you. Gowing’s was like a comic seizure. The word or syllable would jam like a bone in the back of his throat. He’d contort and shake his head trying to dislodge it, glottal gasps and exclamations would emerge, and then silence—just the terrible, fat, pendulous head straining like a choking mastiff. His cheeks wobbling, the long puce and shiny bottom lip hanging, the numerous chins shaking, he would cup his hand under his strange jaw as his eyes blinked and bulged and long streamers of viscous spit would be propelled from his silently ululating mouth to be deftly caught and replaced in the frothing maw. Finally, in an explosion of saliva and pent-up breath, the word would be expelled like a gobbet of fat. Talking, for Gowing, was a continuous series of self-administered Heimlich maneuvers, yet this was a man who’d chosen to surround himself with the greatest evocations of beauty, elegance and eloquence and to make his life’s work explaining them. He could have hidden away in the storeroom of the draper’s shop; instead, supremely unaware or unconcerned by his Caliban-like entrance to every room, he was an inspired and inspiring lecturer whose basic art history course that we all had to do was one of the most invigorating, humane views of the marathon of Western art that I’ve ever heard. He had a particularly clear eye about the nature and the process of being an artist. The collision of the vision and the imagination with the real and the practical and the dexterous. The difficult and frustrating conjunction of hand and eye. Though his lectures could go on a long time, and he did quite often dribble into the slide carousel, making the Virgin’s face buckle and squirm like an early disco effect, he was a quite remarkable man, both for what he saw and understood and for what he chose not to see or comprehend.

We had a brief chat about drawing and he said, “Well, Adrian, most of this is terribly derivative and underworked. I see you’re lazy and facile, so, all in all, we’ve decided to phu-phu-poh-arrarr-ttttt!!!!!! . . . t-TAKE YOU on and teach you something.”

Art schools had just gone from offering a diploma in art and design to giving out degrees. The Slade, being part of University College, came under the national stipulation that to sit any BA course, a student must have achieved at least two A Levels, which of course I hadn’t. But colleges that taught art or performance could claim a dispensation to set aside the academic requirement in cases of exceptional talent, which was how Gowing got me into the Slade. I’m eternally grateful to him and I continue to be a disappointment . . . stubbornly, remedially lazy and facile.