I had already experienced the event. Part of its fashionability lay in its unpredictable disc-jockey and part in its exclusiveness, since there were people at the door who were supposed to make sure that only students of King’s were admitted.
The policing of King’s Bop was hardly rigorous — someone at the door would politely ask for your locker number — but surely no one would question the right of the chap in the wheelchair to attend?
This was a reasonable hypothesis. It reached me, though, not as an abstract proposition or social experiment but in the form of an ambush after Hall one Wednesday evening. A little party wanted to make an attempt on King’s Bop, using the wheelchair’s magical powers as a pass-key, or else an enchanted textile, not so much a cloak of invisibility as a small trundling marquee.
I was a good sport about it. I would have screamed bloody murder if I had known I would be carried downstairs by people I hardly knew, but the trauma was well under way before I had any idea. The word ‘cellar’ had not been part of the approach that was made to me.
At the door we were waved through with smiles of embarrassment. The hypothesis was confirmed. The wheelchair belonged everywhere as well as nowhere.
The noise was extreme and made conversation difficult. There’s a limit to how far I can stretch to bring my ear close to someone’s mouth, and if all the bending is done by others then they must feel they’re part of something more like limbo dancing than chat. As for whether there were any rare girls in attendance, I really couldn’t say.
Indoor magnetism
I wasn’t expected to buy drinks since I had made the whole expedition possible, which I took as no more than my due. The beer was from kegs and served in plastic glasses, either to save washing-up or from fear of rowdiness. A glass without a handle or a stem is pretty much useless to me, and I was reduced (if I really wanted to wet my whistle) to having people hold up to my mouth the nasty beer in its nasty plastic glass.
The Mini was always an asset, but it turned out that the wheelchair had an indoor magnetism of its own. It stimulated and intoxified. People too awkward or shy to dance by themselves would grab hold of the wheelchair and push it about in rhythm, swinging me around with sickening force.
There were also people who would prise me out of the wheelchair and hug me to themselves while they danced. It seemed to be their feeling that the main deprivation in a life of restricted mobility was the experience of centrifugal force in raw form. My value to these dance partners may partly have been the low risk of treading on my toes. There was no factor working to reduce the speed and recklessness of our whirling.
I learned to spot the type. When I saw someone approach me with a particular look of glazed joy, I would start reeling off excuses, saying ‘I’m afraid I’ve got a cold,’ or even ‘I’ve eaten a bad mushroom and I’m going to be sick,’ though no threat of mucus, virus, even vomit in the pipeline had a reliably deterrent effect.
After that visit I had refused to consider a return, but now I had an agenda of my own. I volunteered, and though there was obviously something fishy about my change of heart no one worried too much. My fear of Christmas outweighed, just about, my fear of being dropped downstairs in a slapdash re-enactment of the Senate House occupation.
Almost the moment we arrived I was caught up in a piece of musical torture. The disc-jockey put on something which wasn’t even a single but an album track, and it wasn’t a recent release, but it had a stubborn popularity in student circles as a stereo showpiece. People used the song to make sure that their speakers were wired the right way round. It was a track called ‘Industrial-Military-Complex Hex’ from the Steve Miller Band’s album No.5. The song had outlasted the album, which had been controversial when new (in 1969, I think), not because of any musical content but something written in small print inside the gatefold for the sharp-eyed to discover. It was dedicated to President Richard Nixon, a betrayal of hippy ideals only partly excused by the infantile phrasing. We luv you cuz you need it.
‘Industrial-Military-Complex Hex’ starts with a sombre atmosphere rather than a tune as such. Then an electric guitar makes its entrance. The sound is supercharged with reverberation and echo. It’s also strongly directional. This golden noise is flung from left to right of the stereo picture. It’s an acoustic projectile which finds the target and hangs there for a moment, pulsing. Then the pattern repeats with the polarity reversed, the note catapulting back from the right to the left. Two more convulsions of the guitar and the song itself gets under way, murkier and less dramatic, less memorable in every respect.
In those days records were supposed to contain subliminal messages, Satanic commands played backwards — God is dead, Paul is dead, Kill the piggies till the piggies are dead. Thousands of undergraduate hours were spent dragging gramophone needles backwards through the final grooves of ‘A Day In The Life’, to yield everything from ‘We’ll fuck you like supermen’ to ‘The gardener was hellish unmathematical’.
No one ever implicated the Steve Miller Band in this practice, as far as I know, yet the opening of ‘Industrial-Military-Complex Hex’ sent a strong message to a number of people at King’s Bop. The song told them Commandeer John’s wheelchair and propel it at high speed from one side of the stereo image to the other. Grant him the joy of embodying this king among riffs.
If I had known what was coming, I would have put on the wheelchair’s brakes, so it’s a good job I didn’t, because that would have made things worse. We were off.
Be careful of what you wish for — I had wished to ride the Ghost Train, and my wish was coming true in debased form as I was flung about in deafening darkness, all the more alarmed because no conscious attempt was being made to scare me.
After the performance there was an outburst of applause, which wasn’t really for John the human riff, the riff on wheels, though some came my way in the form of rough handshakes and shoulder-pats, but for whoever had abducted me. Nobody seemed to find it strange that I had so little say in my part of the floor show.
The disc-jockey responded to the happy hubbub by encoring the beginning of the song. Apparently I hadn’t been shaken up enough yet.
There was a scuffle behind me, presumably for control of the wheelchair. Everyone wanted a turn. Some beer slopped down my back. The worst part of the ordeal was the instant U-turn required to reposition me for the next guitar entry, and then the next. The wheelchair slewed sideways, as the struggle for control became more heated. I don’t know who won, I only know it wasn’t me. The blast-off to accompany the final guitar note was delayed by several seconds.
Now there was a concerted call for the song to be played a third time, insistent shouts of ‘Again! Again! Once more from the top!’ This time, though, I was spared. I think the disc-jockey must have seen the horror on my face and perhaps even regretted his part in a joyride with the joy taken out. I could hear people grumbling ‘Unfair!’, which seemed a bit much. What was so unfair about giving me a reprieve from being shaken to pieces?
No diamonds at all
Then the disc-jockey soothed the mood of the room by playing a single, and one that was even in the charts at the time. John Lennon’s ‘Happy Xmas (War Is Over)’, that rather tentative anthem. ‘War is over’, yes, but only ‘if you want it’. A man and a woman danced together for a few moments, and then the man said, rather roguishly, ‘May we?’ Meaning, include me in the dance. I said, ‘Why not?’ and then they did. They really did include me. They pushed the wheelchair back and forth between them, but always smoothly, always with consideration for what it was like to be sitting in it. They didn’t seem quite student-y, though I don’t know in what way, exactly. They seemed like a proper couple. Then the man whispered in the woman’s ear, she shrugged and nodded, and then he was asking, ‘So what are you doing for Christmas, little man?’