Shoplifting at Dracula's, cont'd.
At Edinburgh, like Boswell, we drank
deep and now and then studied hard and even wrote a bit. We were indebted to
politics, especially Scottish Nationalism and old-line Clydeside socialism,
both primarily for romantic reasons—Rob Roy and The Ragged-Trousered Philanthropists—but we were more receptive to
culture and world affairs, so pub talk was relatively elevated when we were
sober, and when we were drunk fights could and did break out over such minutiae
as (say) Adam Smith’s birthplace (Kirkcaldy) or the date of Wat Tyler’s Peasant’s
Revolt (1381) or the typeface used in the first edition of Dorian Grey (Baskerville). Of course, there were also long evenings
of utter tedium stretched to breaking point by lust and poverty and the
relentless call of the barman at closing time (10 p.m. in those Presbyterian
days), but from this safe distance I choose rather to remember the warm muddle
of ardent discussion and the light of youth’s magical fire in our eyes as we
argued, boosted by the prospect of seduction and/or another round paid for by
someone else. Once or twice that someone else was Gordon Brown, then the Rector
of the University, now Prime Minister of Great Britain, a politician to his
toenails, provincial-Presbyterian with a sanctimonious streak, his long lank
hair hanging down to his shoulders; never more than a pint or two for Gordon,
whose focus on his future had to stay laserlike and clear, and whose sole
interest was in rounding up votes.
Others,
more befuddled, with vaguer ambitions, included Bill Thomson, when he was
flush; when he’d cashed his student-grant check, in other words, for Bill was
from Castlemilk, a Glasgow housing estate—to say it was tough would be
superfluous—where “flush” was what you did to the loo, if you were lucky enough
to have an indoor one. No one in Castlemilk had money then, bar the pub owners
and the bookies and the ice-cream van Mafiosi like those depicted in Bill
Forsyth’s film Comfort and Joy. As in
depressed housing “estates” and “projects” worldwide, crime was the traditional
outlet for a young man’s energies; but not for Bill, whom I never thought of as
a young man anyway, just as himself in entirety, ageless, like the romantic
dead. He was a self-taught classical guitarist and scholar of German
literature, and this despite the razzing he got from sullen ex-schoolmates who,
having dropped out of the classroom, were awaiting the final drop-off into
oblivion. And as for Bill, well he was as working-class (or unworking-class) and Marxist as the
best, or worst, of them, but instead of consigning himself to a life of daytime
telly and the dole queue and handouts from uncles in the building trade, he
took his Glaswegian’s gallows humor and love of a laugh through to Edinburgh.
We’d struck up a conversation one day after a tedious lecture in Comparative
Religion, one of a grab-bag of secondary subjects (Scottish Enlightenment
Philosophers; Modern British Politics; Islamic Studies (!); Literature of the
Risorgimento; Belgian Illusionist Poetry; etc.) that dangled from the cross-beams
of our major subjects: German for him because he loved it, French for me for
the same reason, and because it was easy. Our conversation was followed by a
drink, then many more, and it became apparent that I was not your average
ill-read, ill-bred, ill-educated Yank, nor he your average philistine Clydeside
commie, but that on the contrary we were birds of a feather, both devotees of
the one true faith, Art, and both willing martyrs if need be in that cause and
in the corollary lofty cause of Drink, which loosened our tongues and minds so
that great orations and ambitions might pour forth. Much of what actually
poured forth was, of course (when it wasn’t the vomitus of over-indulgence),
the pretentious babble of any half-intelligent, half-pissed twenty-two
year-old, but there was enough that wasn’t. Bill and I and a couple of
like-minded piss artists had long nights of listening to Schubert and Mahler,
and of discussing the Great Pessimists Beckett, Hardy, Maupassant, and Schopenhauer,
and the challenges of life and women and how to afford a BMW without payment or
theft. In short, there was my
university education, not in the university. There, and throughout the city: in
her pubs, down her secretive, vertiginous closes, along the misty banks of the
Water of Leith, and in her streets and squares, where on certain hushed mornings
something marvelous or weird seemed always to be about to happen, or to have
just happened. And there were the city’s crazy shops: the Pakistani sweetshops,
and the odds-and-ends stores, like Mrs. Doubtfire's, and the venerable
bookstores, like James Thin’s, the great emporium on South Bridge, which had
low ceilings, and squeaking floors, and tall windows through which rays of the
episodic sun slanted athwart rotating spirals of dust motes, and tables stacked
high with books. It smelled, of course, of books, and damp, and (I imagined)
the eighteenth century (that 1700s dust; aging bindings aromatic of seasoned
leather; floorboards that first creaked under the buckled shoes of Boswell
& Friends). I never passed Thin’s without going in. Now, when I dream of
commercial success, I see my books towering atop a vast dream-table in a
gilt-hued Thin’s in the land of dreams, which, alas, is the only place to find
the venerable emporium, closed since 2002.
And then there was
Dracula’s, the shoplifter’s paradise.
