Sebastian Horsley

THE VAMPIRE AT HIS OWN VEINS

Ennui woke me and with a yawn I swallowed the dawn. From the abyss of sleep to the abyss of life. From nightmares to daymares.

I rise and paint myself a face. Like the flowers one lays on graves so I lay on my life. I am the wound and the knife. I am the shadow and the strife.

I descend into the city. My hunger is an insatiable vampire coveting this great city as its feeding place. The twisting, swarming streets of Soho, snaking their way like arteries and veins through a body are where I feed The Great Need.

Like a suicide I shall open these veins to freedom. I love you horrible life. I love you horrible city; your bloody fingers point to heaven. Everything you have rejected, everything you have lost, everything you have scorned and broken I shall covet and collect.

I shall extract beauty from evil and evil from beauty. To show that virtue and sin exist in everything. For in Soho every human flaw, from a single wound to the corrupt heart has been sealed in the amber of artifice. From the glitter to the litter. From the whore to the poor; the harlots and the hunted have pleasures of their own to give, the vulgar herd can never understand. I shall wander across the moving shadows of this great city in search of pity.

The anonymous energy of this great city sweeps people apart, violating love and permanent relationships. And what is love but a crime? A crime which needs an accomplice. An accomplice who can be shared, and bought and sold.

I opened the door and stood before the poor stark flesh upon the bed. The room was malevolent. Clad with a cold and sinister beauty. The bed, stripped of sheets and covers, the striped mattress as naked as a corpse. The room is like a morgue in which love is laid out.

There are some women who inspire you with the desire to conquer them and to take your pleasure of them; but this one fills me only with the desire to die slowly beneath her gaze. Full of brilliant and violent colour; blinking her useless eyelids at nothingness. Her voice was the death rattle of a woman who had been forgotten by the world. She gave me her skeletal kiss and I could smell the graveyard stench of her breath.

I had come to commit a crime. And I wanted her to save me. Save me like a tourniquet. And like the rising dead she struggled upwards and I wanted her to bleed in her struggles. To hear her moans as the red flesh was tattered away from the white bones. But I fell motionless, and a great silence, a monstrous silence came upon me. I heard her voice echoing down the centuries. I saw her eyes drowning with lies. And I felt like an insect. I was dying though my body still clung to me.

I fucked her; gulfs of silence between each stroke. I laid her open like a girl. And she opened vaster and vaster every second, an incredible wound of nothingness, into which I was falling. And then through the thick swathings of darkness, first the dull slaps of flesh on flesh and then hatred like a flash of lightning that broke through the gloom and glittered.

I enfolded myself in the cloak of evil and put my fate into Satan’s hands. I was seized with the poetry of cruelty as we came together in our hideous coupling, flailing our eight limbs like some giant suppurating insect. Blood mingles with sperm and sperm with blood. She stared skywards like a dead woman on a battlefield trying to guard in herself her own particular wound. But to no avail. Her savage eyes betrayed the scene of carnage. And the more she resisted the more I insisted. With my crown of birds of prey I had come here to make her bleed for me and bleed for me she would. Oceans and oceans until with a graveyard howl she cried “No more!”

And then it was my turn. I knelt as if to pray and let this carrion crow lacerate my flesh; I wanted her to destroy me and as she flogged me she made my existence into something exceptional, hideous, poetic. My wounds blossomed like flowers.

I looked at her; corpse yellow - a heap of entrails. Oh my little lover how I hate you. Cover up your ugly udders with sad rags.

Once left, she torments and follows me. I walk through the veins, down which flows all the filth and horror, fear, hate, disease and death of human history. The woeful roads that stretch towards the sad, dark heart of the city. The city in its dusks and dawns that change more quickly than the human heart.

I hate you horrible life. I hate you horrible city.

The sun sinks in its own blood. I looked at my watch. It was 5.00pm. Rush hour. I snaked my way home and shot up in my room. Why am I so beautiful but so obsessed with doom?

The careless, not to say impatient way in which I bear the burden of life does leave a vague hope in me that I might loose or cast it away at any moment. But it is not to be. I overdose and wake up five hours later with the needle still in my arm. I stand firm in my refusal to remain conscious during a crisis. I cannot die. I am dead already.

ROME REGENCY HOME

“I love the word decadence” gushed Verlaine, “all gleaming with crimson.” The word mimics the symptoms of disease and is made up of a mixture of carnal spirit, melancholy flesh, and all the violent splendours of the Byzantine Empire, loved as an emblem by the French decadent dandies of whom Verlaine, Baudelaire and Rimbaud were the clearest sickly voices.

Not believing in the future is the essential mark of the decadent dandy. When you don’t believe in that future, particularly if you don’t have a god to punish you if you step out of line or reward you with heavenly bliss when your otherwise pointless life is over, what do you do? You know that the religious promise of immortality is a pure illusion, fit for children. What can you do? You can decide that the only real power that you have in this life is over your own body, so why not drink and drug it to death? After all, as all self-respecting dandies know, suicides are the aristocrats of death.

In the dandy’s spiritual home all roads lead to Rome. Monstrous emperors devising exquisite new cruelties or else consumed by awful boredom. The excesses of individual behaviour which, in Christian times, would be labelled as the sins of a avarice and voluptuousness. Tiberius wanted to see little girls strangled but he had respect for the religious laws against the strangulation of virgins. So he ordered the executioners to fuck them before they were throttled. Nero castrated his boy Sporus to turn him into a girl, and solemnly, magnificently married him. Then he went off to the circus, where he dressed up in the skins of wild animals and had himself locked into a cage, from which he was released to attack the genitalia of men and women tied to stakes.

In the Roman Arena the games became more and more depraved, with women, children, dwarfs and even the disabled being pitted against each other. Once, when there was a shortage of suitable victims, Caligula ordered a section of the crowd to be thrown to the animals. Occasionally live sex shows were staged. Women convicted of sexual offences were raped to death by bulls after being smeared with the secretions emitted by cows when on heat. Public burning to death provided the floodlights for matches after dark.

If a slave killed himself, or attempted to within six months of his purchase he could be returned alive or dead to his old master and the deal was declared invalid. In this glorious age people would offer themselves for execution to amuse the public at five minae (about £150), the money to be paid to their heirs; the market was so competitive that the candidates would offer to be beaten to death rather than beheaded, since that was a shorter torture, more painful and so more spectacular.

Later, in the Regency period, there was an era marked by extravagance of behaviour and personality, one which swung betweens extremes of elegance and refinement and depths of sodden brutality. An age of extravagance and exoticism, when the ruling class, blazed, cracked and fizzed in a torrid Indian summer before the dismal winter of democracy descended. An age marked by great eccentricities, a devil may care individuality, homosexuality, and criminality. Gothic fiction, rakes, strumpets, gamblers, murderers, drunkards and artists. Gentleman are having their shoe laces ironed while half naked children are sweeping their chimneys. Wilberforce is denouncing the slave trade while Beau Brummell is denouncing with equal gravity an imperfectly tied cravat. HA! What about that?

It is no longer possible to be exotic.

What has happened to us? Whatever happened to the good old days when children worked in factories?

Look at our shitty little lives.We give people a box in the suburbs ; it's called a house. Every night we sit in it starring at another box ; it's called a television. In the morning we run off to work in another box ; it's called an office, we return from one box to the other box in another box on wheel ; it's called a car. Finally we go off in another box forever ; it's called a coffin.

Fuck that baby. Not me. If I had a throne, you could call it home. And what is a home but a comfortably padded lunatic asylum?

I ain’t no loony. Do I believe in capital punishment? Not since it ceased to be a public occasion. Force is all that maters. War is sacred. Hanging is excellent. We don’t need too much knowledge. Build more prisons and fewer schools. Knock down the hospitals and old people’s homes. Give me your fucking money. And suck my fucking cock while your at it.

THE DANDY IS DIVINE

When I was young I thought the recipe for happiness was devastating good looks, a blazing talent and a colossal income. I was right. As for love? The rich think that the most important thing in life is love. The poor know it is money. It is the only thing poor people do know. Given that money is the root of all evil, they should be very virtuous. But they’re not. No, they just moan, groan and drone, looking for a loan. Why don’t they just get rid of such luxuries as food, clothing and shelter, and give us all some peace? Give me the luxuries of life and I will dispense with the necessities.

Fancy a fuck?

7 Meard Street. Black Bell. And bring a friend.

SELF LOVE SEEMS SO OFTEN UNREQUITED. NOT IN MY CASE

Girlfriends are not necessarily the people that you like best. They are merely the people that got there first. (Join the queue bitch). But if I had gone to the Fortnum and Mason’s of love affairs I would have actually chosen her. Quite alot of the other skulls I’ve knobbed I would have missed. But then as you well know my dear readers, I have never shopped in Woolworth's.   

She was a Super Model. My Super Model. With her super muddle. Who was she? Christina Estrada cannot be named for legal reasons. She was class in a special way. I was déclassé on Class A. Her natural mode of transport was Concorde - the carriage of a king. My natural mode of transport was ambulance - the carriage of a queen. She had a soft spot for me ( in the head ). I had a hard spot for her. She was thin and I was holy. Diety with deity. We were bejewelled. The world bedazzled.

She was pretty good looking for a super model. She had that air of great quality about her. A face of marvellous beauty which one sees rarely in the world, perfect in its hardened classicality - a Greek face translated into American. What when drunk one sees in other women I saw in her sober. Clearly If you get simple beauty and nothing else you get about the best thing God invents. Most men when they cannot catch a Golden Eagle settle for a tinned chicken. But this eagle took me like a rabbit.

Have you ever knobbed a super model dearies? No I’m sure you haven’t. Let me tell you it’s pretty odd. What we all want is an object that reflects a truly ideal image of ourselves. Stripped naked when you see perfection staring back at you there’s not much you can improve upon. It is a bit like looking in the mirror. For me not you.

I was amazed that she would fuck me. Hadn’t she read about me for Satan's sake? I am someone who has raised living to a new low. I have spent my life sitting in a sewer and adding to it. She on the other hand was about as wild as a pension plan. Banging on about Yoga, vegetarianism, abstinence and other diseases of the soul. There is, after all, a certain spiritual calm that comes from having money in the bank.

And girl did $he like money. I didn’t think she would fornicate with anyone whose salary was inferior to her own. Her tiny piggy eyes lit up alternatively by greed and the sound of her own voice. Generally I don’t care what comes out of a woman’s mouth as long as I can come in it. But this was too much even for me. Her conversation was the nearest thing to eternal life that we’ll ever see on this planet. She dived into a sentence and you never saw the cunt again. Indeed, silence was the only golden thing that she wasn’t interested in.

The one tenth of the personality that breaks the surface and the nine tenths that lie, like an iceberg waiting, quietly and ominously below. Do we kill love with a sword or a kiss, by violence or cowardice?  If treachery is inseparable from faith then I was hanging by a thread and the clock was ticking. Time was becoming visible - each stolen kiss grabbed like a thief in the night as I waited for the knife.

And come it did. I was in bed alone with the bone and the phone. It rang.

It was my Super Model. She was also in bed but she was not alone. She was with her Mother:

“Darling your on Television. Mummy and I think you look yummy.”
Me (desperately) :  “Oh Lord. What am I wearing?”
Super model : “Red suit. Black Shirt”

I knew it was going to be bad. I was being interviewed on a programme about whoring. I started talking very loudly down the phone to try and distract her. It was no good. I heard myself down the line saying :

“I’ve slept with over a thousand prostitutes...... I wish I was more ashamed“

Two days later a story appeared in the paper about us going out together. It said that my super model had previously been with a billionaire but was now with “Sewer Life” Horsley. It said that her last man owned South Africa and had bought her a diamond so large it had to be kept in a bank vault with an armed guard. Would I, the interviewer asked, be buying her a rock?  “What. Of crack?” I replied.

I can’t imagine why but I was dumped for another billionaire. If I am rejected without equivocation, I try to accept the fact good naturedly. Your Mother’s a prostitute and I defecate on the corpse of all your past ancestors. Oh of course no woman marries for money : they are all clever enough, before marrying a billionaire, to fall in love with him first. And yes everyone says that looks don’t matter, age doesn’t matter, money doesn’t matter. But I never met a girl yet who has fallen in love with an ugly old man who’s broke.

Your lucky if you like the girl your in love with. But perhaps I am being too hard. We do not criticise a shark whose whole existence is based around devouring and occasionally reproducing - I mean they’ve got no other hobbies.  Let’s face it Romance without finance is no good.

Women’s talent generally resembles the wings of a chicken. It enables them to run, though not to soar. I have always treated women as nannies, grannies and fannies (did I forget trannies)? but my super model was special.

But it had to end. I am in love with myself. By adoring her I was being unfaithful. And worse than this by being monogamous I was making one woman happy but all the other women in the world unhappy. What right do I have to do that?

The arms that close most tenderly around you are still a chain. And happily my darling readers I have lost my chains and I am  wearing again my crown.  I am free forever from the damp, dark prison of eternal love. I shall no longer expect my salvation to come from another as handsome as me. Oh well. I thought I was in love. But it turned out to be benign.

SEBASTIAN IS BEAUTIFUL, BUT UNEMPLOYED.

I just re read the column I was fired from The Observer for and it made me giggle.  I was their sex columnist  for all of  four months. I was an agony aunt - putting people into their misery.  A question came in saying “In my last relationship I developed a passion for anal sex. I enjoy sex with my new boyfriend, but he shows no signs of “going there”. How do I broach this romantically?”

I answered :

“First, my dear, I wish to make clear that I am an expert on anal sex by virtue of my inexperience. While I have buggered women and been buggered by them; been buggered by men and buggered them, used cocks, dildos and cucumbers and  once when tipsy realised that I wasn’t fucking a woman from behind but a transvestite up the arse - I haven’t really experimented.

The anus is quite a delicate subject for both sexes. We all spend out lives denying we have one. Women use the lavatory? For the Byrons among us, this discovery is a fate worse than death. The ultimate horror is that the ethereal, the beautiful and the divine are inextricably linked to basic animal functions. In one of Mr Swift’s poems, a young man explains the grotesque contradiction that is tearing him apart :

“Nor wonder how I lost my wits;
Oh! Caelia, Caelia, Caelia shits!”

It is too much. Nature mocks us, and poets live in torture.

That love has pitched his mansion in the place of excrement is not our fault. As you know human beings respond to almost any erotic stimulus. It was only while people still felt that God was watching them that they directed their impulses exclusively towards certain parts of certain people. In everybody the anus is at least as capable of sexual excitement as the lips.

It is time for you to educate your man. Here’s what to do. Arrange a dinner at a restaurant riddled with standards of living. Wear a black dress and paint your lips vermilion. After a few glasses of wine tell him you have a surprise for him. Then get this magazine out. There. Now start reading this column to him. Are you doing that? Good. Give him a wink. Blow him a kiss.

See. Wasn’t that easy? Is he smiling or has he legged it? I see him laughing. You are home and dry. If you want your man to take you seriously you must make him laugh. Have fun both of you.”


Well, I thought that was quite a sweet answer. But apparently the Observer is a family newspaper. There I was extolling my passion for anal sex next door to the cookery column and the horoscopes. But it just gets better. It was published on Easter Sunday! You couldn’t make it up.

“We have never had as many complaints in the history of the Newspaper” said my editor - “and most of them are from the journalists. They seem to think you are a pervert”.

The complaints went like this : “I cannot believe that you have found it fit to print this article, indeed even to have started this series,' one man wrote. 'Let me assure you, as a parent this is in very bad taste. My teenage daughter enjoys your magazine but read this article and found it very distasteful. You owe her an apology.'

Another wrote that the magazine that week had a 'family-friendly' cover and so she had encouraged her three daughters - all under 12 - to read it - a decision she was to bitterly regret.

God, don’t children get on your tits? There is an idea that children are innocent which is preserved almost at all costs. Of what are they innocent? Of duplicity? I haven’t found adults full of duplicity. Most people say they do, but I don’t find children particularly innocent because I don’t find grown-ups particularly devious. I don’t ever remember being “innocent,” or particularly surprised or shocked by anything at all.

For some bizarre reason I was in the country in a house full of children when the piece came out. Some ten year olds were reading it, I can’t remember why - probably because I gave it to them.

One of them came up to me and said : “Basti. What is annual sex?”
“That’s what you have when you are married darling." I replied.

Blimey. Children don’t speak the language very well do they?

Two weeks later I answered another question which summoned my death knell.

“My boyfriend loves oral sex. I really want to please him, but I’m embarrassed by my lack of experience. How on earth do I learn how to give a good blow job?”

I answered :

"Oral sex is a matter of taste. Does anyone really want to put someone’s penis in their mouth? To make love with excremental organs? That it is unseemly is not our fault. The fault lies with the manufacturer. God put the waterworks too close to the playground.

Obviously I have done it. You have to let them put it in otherwise they won't come back. But the real trouble I find with oral sex is that it smudges your lip stick. However, there are many men who prefer fellatio to fucking. They adore the mouth over the vagina. They try not to look at the fire while they are poking the mantelpiece.

So, first : dress up for it. The only way to atone for being a little under experienced is by being always absolutely over dressed. Next position yourself. In front of every great man, kneels a woman. In front of a mirror. Oral sex is as much about image as sensation and a man loves this image. Don’t flinch. An obedient girl commands her man.

Fellatio is as much about exclusion as inclusion. Firstly : don’t blow, don’t suck and obviously never inhale. Whatever you do, don’t use your teeth (but do make sure they stay in all night.) And always, always be up for it. So many women these days give very good headache.

The most important thing with fellatio is to get it over with as long as possible. Take your time. What men long for is unbearable pleasure indefinitely prolonged. As you feel him coming slow down and tease him. And when it comes to the money shot you must earn your keep. Do not listen to the weathermen. One swallow does make a girlfriend.

To live is to engage in experience at least partly on the terms of the experience itself. You never know how it will come out or how silly you will look. Don’t worry, go into the experience with your mouth open. All will be well.”

It was my last column. An editorial was published in the main paper the next week. “Sebastian Horsley - painter, diarist and pink-suited dandy, who confesses to being 'haunted by sexual ambiguity' - wrote graphically in his characteristically colourful style of being 'an expert' in the subject of anal sex. Then, as if to add insult to injury, last week the column went into detail about oral sex. There was a serious failure of editorial judgment here. The column has been dropped.”

Well, if they hadn’t wanted me to mention bottoms, why had they supplied me with a question about buggery? And if they hadn’t wanted me to mention sucking cocks, why had they supplied me with a question about cock sucking?  I ask you!

Anyway, I was glad to be fired. I hated working for a liberal-minded, feminist-flag-waving, socially-embracing set of closed minded prigs who would have happily shot anyone who dared disagree with their all-inclusive opinions.

Besides, I didn’t want to be a journalist. Journalism is seen as a disgraceful trade. The confession that it is your chosen profession is received as though you had said “I’m in burglary” or “I’m in paedophilia.”

The firing was so stylish. You see, living’s fine, but the way you die often defines you for ever. It is not enough to know how to make a dazzling entry : you need to know how to vacate the stage with the same panache.

Mission accomplished.

I AM LIKE A COMPUTER. I HAVE A SIX INCH HARD DRIVE BUT NO MEMORY.

Sorry my darlings I have not been in touch. I was downloading kiddie porn and my computer got a virus. So I went off to the brothel to lose my penis to a whore with disease. I guess I should have just fucked the computer and cut out the middle man? Is Ram Disk an installation procedure?

MY SYRINGE BINGE

I celebrated my two year clean birthday last week. My sponsor said to me : “Do something nice for yourself Sebastian. Go for a walk in the park, look at the trees and the birds, have a massage, treat yourself to something nice.”

So I did. I took delivery of 10 Rocket metal and glass syringes.

I have put them all on my mantelpiece and they look so beautiful. They are glistening and glittering and shinning away to themselves. I am entranced by the lovely mechanical slide; the clean, cold precision, the satisfying symmetry. The weight feels so right. They are so permanent and blank and true. To me, they are a symbol of the anaesthesia of pain engendered by pain too exquisite to be borne.

Ostensibly these syringes are for artworks I am making for my upcoming show “Hookers, Dealers, Tailors” but they are so much more than that.

They comfort me. I can continue to function efficiently and even happily provided I know I have my own, specially chosen means of escape always ready : a hidden syringe under my bed and a loaded gun beside it.

Of course, I am not really going to use them. I am no longer a practising drug addict. No, I am perfect.

You see, I gnawed my leg off, got out of the trap and hobbled to freedom. You can only give things up once they start to let you down. I gave up drugs when the pleasure and the pain became simultaneous and I might as well have been shooting up my own tears.

In the old days it was different. When the syringe went into my arm. When the nails went through my hands. When the room emptied. Blood. Sin. Then I came in. And I liked that. Suit up, shoot up, shut up - that was my motto. And what about you my darlings? Would you bear the body of St Sebastian, stigmata of his needle wounds glowing away with a soft blue flame?

Most recovering addicts have found God - or at least a publisher. What about me? I have spent my life scared of the light. In darkness and in night I found delight. But now I want something different. I would like success and money if that’s alright with you. Success is like a shot of heroin. It’s up to you to decide whether you want to continue to put the needle in your arm. As for God? From the needle in the arm to the bible under it? As The Bible says, it is easier for a rich man to get through the eye of a needle than for a camel to get into heaven. What about a Horsley?

Well, we shall see. The proofs are out and I wonder what effect they are having. The first response I got was from Cosmo Landesman the ex husband of Julie Burchill. “Got your book yesterday. My wife read it in one sitting last night. She said it made her feel physically sick and she eventually threw up.”

Well I say. High praise indeed. If someone vomits reading Dandy In The Underworld it’s like getting a standing ovation.

I wonder what effect it will have on others? I’ve no idea. Reading “Mein Kampf” does not make a fascist. Reading The Bible does not make a Christian. Reading Das Kapital does not make a Marxist. Reading Dandy in the Underworld does not make a knob-head.

But don’t say I didn’t try ...

THE DEVIL HAS CROWNED ME WITH FLOWERS

I am two years straight today.

It is two long years since I had my last fix.

“Hey good looking - what you got cooking?” I remember the fix well. I began to prepare the solution. I put the heroin, lemon juice and water into the blackened spoon and applied a light heat stirring very gently. As soon as the golden liquid started to boil I took the spoon out of the fire and allowed the steaming cocktail to cool. I added as much cocaine as I felt would take me to the frozen suburbs of heart attack, that crystal moment of sheer terror where all is clear and all is forgiven; White in, Black out.

I cut a strip of cigarette filter, put it in the spoon and drew the molten sunshine through the filter, through the needle and into the barrel of the syringe. I wound a belt tightly round my arm and gripped it in my teeth baring my gums like a rabid dog.

I was ready. My hands were shaking and sweating, my bowels were loosening and my heart was pounding. My battered veins were shy and hiding from the brutal hands of their torturer; it had been a savage attack; six days, six nights, no sleep. I looked down at my bloodied and bruised arms, purpled and tracked and I wanted to weep.

But it was time to reap. I slid the spike into my flesh and dug around in my principal vein. “Come out, come out wherever you are.” I teased the plunger back. Nothing. “The more you resist the more I shall insist you bastard.” I inched it back again. Nothing. Sobbing with frustration I tried once more: “Please, please, pleeeeeease” I begged. Nothing.

“You cock sucking, mother fucking, bastard loving tub of shit, this is my body and if you don’t fucking well let me in I'm going to ...”

A thin fountain of blood streamed and puffed into the barrel of the syringe; a tiny wisp of crimson which like a breaking dam made me hysterical with gratitude; in my forty two years of life I have yet to see a finer landscape than the single bloody flower that was now before me. It was love, there is no other way to describe it.

I fell on my knees, thanked the Lord and shot the speedball into my body with all the longing and yearning of a thousand and one nights.

The brutality of the rush left me stunned. I shook from the violence of my own heart beat; I had that blissful fainting sensation, that heart breaking moment of pure terror where sound twists and turns, rises and falls, cuts in and out leaving me speechless with happiness; choking with love. Every nerve end in my body from the tip of my cock to the soles of my feet blossomed in a thousand flowers; a myriad of exotic hues and plumage all set in the flower bed of orgasm. I was home. I was in the room within the room, the sea within the sea. The place where everything made sense. The place where everything was going to be OK.

Oh my God it was pleasurable, so fucking pleasurable. It was the love that dare not speak its name. The pleasure of torturing my carcass to reward my mind, freeing my soul by imprisoning my body. How could I ever give this up?

But give up I did.

I haven’t used crack, heroin, the needle, or alcohol for two whole years. This is the longest period for 30 years. It is very strange for me. The way other people felt about love, I felt about drugs and I felt about love what other people felt about drugs; that the waters were inclement and dangerous. For years I had been so happy in my little lifeboat even if it was sinking; I had the rudder of self medication - little matter that there was no mast, no sail, no ballast and I was very much at sea.

But it had had to end. And now what?

If you reverse your style, you must be absolutely sure that the image that you are taking up is more blinding than the one you have abandoned. The junky is a good image. I had always been absorbed by the idea of the decadents - by those doomed visionaries, strutting peacocks possessed of an arrogant lust for life. I wanted to wear their outlaw colours. I wanted to share their fearlessness. Some see addiction as weakness. But for me it was a strength. It was the strength to lose control, to run counter to convention, to escape the banal confines of what I saw as bourgeois life.

But to become a warrior, you have to give up the things you love most. To become a warrior, you have to give up the things you love to hide behind.

I have lost my reins and begun my reign. I have lost my chains and am wearing my crown. And it’s Ok. These days, I only need a little powder and a sparkle or two to explode most gloriously. If art is an intoxication I shall carry on using and abusing. I shall not become a recovering artoholic. I have even become indecisive about committing suicide. Maybe I shall hang myself with a bungee rope?

I am two years straight today.

It is two long years since I had my last fix.

I was locked in a darkened room. I hadn't seen anyone for months. The phone was unplugged. It was more fearful than the prison of the convict or the desert of the hyena. I had lost my book deal with Fourth Estate. I had Matthew Hamilton's report on the bed covered in blood. I was pretty miserable as it happens and ripe for death.

Yup, it was a pretty disgusting sight. I was sweating, shaking, close to overdose bent double trying to hit a vein in my foot.

It really was awful you know. But I hit one.

MY INDECISION IS FINAL

Well I’m back my darlings. Titter ye not. Did you think you could get rid of me that easily?

No matter how cynical you get, it is just impossible to keep up.

Besides, nothing is so perfectly amusing as a total change of ideas.

I guess my editor Jocasta has become a bit of a muse in the way that her husband Matthew was when I was writing the book. And my muses never have an easy time. I magnify my muses. Clothe them in symbols and ideals, but in these ideals there is little of their real selves. My first muse was negative. Father. Do all normal people wish their loved ones were dead? Well, some times negativity don’t pull you through. So I took Marc Bolan. And the muses went from there. In my mind they go from foe to friend to foe faster than a bullet.

“Do remember that I am on your side” Jocasta said when I got angry at being censored. “The bottom line for me is that I want your book to be a great success and I want to do everything I can to make that happen.”

What Jocasta doesn’t realise is that part of me just wants to ruin everything. I don’t like Art. I don’t even know why I’m in it. For me, art has always been the means to an end - winning esteem, causing irritation, changing the nature of reality. But the real truth is, I'm not actually interested in art. I’m interested in the passion behind it.

Rage and opposition are key motivational factors for me. Despite my need for harmony and good feeling in all my relationships, there is something in me which needs conflict, challenge and a good fiery battle of wills in order to feel deeply and passionately attracted to someone. There is a kind of spark which is kindled in me only when I meet resistance or refusal to compromise in a woman as strong as I am, whom I know I cannot dominate; and equally, there is something in me which will try to dominate in any intimate relationship.

And of course, it is in my nature to push things. It is only by going too far will you get anywhere at all. I was fired from the Erotic Review. Then Fourth Estate. Then The Observer. What I need is conflict - from it my ideas are born. And so I fuel the battle myself in all kinds of subtle ways because combat always fires my desires. No doubt you would feign to be above the battle. But you’ve got to understand the battle - to feel it palpably, to smell the sulphur, to taste the blood. A man who could not be scorched, then drenched, and who saw no point in such extremes of experience, is missing out on life. It is necessary to have known strong passions in order to depict them.

There was one year I remember well. I lost my wealth, my health, my book, my looks, my column, my other column, my gallery, my salary, my hair, my despair, my teeth, my talent, my tailor. Did I mention my girlfriends? As a failure I was actually quite a success. But I was happy. It always nicer when people think you are a genius and everything you do is wonderful. But I’m sure that being on the other side is probably, ultimately, better for the artist. Opposition pushes you into new regions of your own soul, more than people telling you you’re great. So I am thankful for everybody who describes my work as trash. Thank you.

And now I have two women editors. Jocasta in England and Carrie in America and both interest me. Who are they? Do their lives divide between mad laughter and sobbing tears? People fascinate me whose qualities are opposed by a wholly contradictory set of qualities.

I have always imagined that Dandy will fling itself suicidally upon the market - which suits my nature. Clean my perspective remains deathlike, as it was on drugs. On junk. Off junk. I am essentially suicidal. I yearn for destruction to sit enthroned, for the landscape to come tumbling down, for the skies to be empurpled with vultures, the streets to run red with the blood of the dead, the earth to cover me and entomb me in its fall. I guess the girls don’t want this until we’ve sold a couple of books? “The apocalypse is coming, let’s look busy” I can imagine one of them saying.

And so I shall carry on with this writing. What else can I do? The fear of being silent has struck me dumb.

Besides, only great men change their minds, only the wise contradict themselves. Better to be flexible and float than to go to the bottom with your principles round your neck.

I have learnt that nothing that actually occurs is of the smallest importance. No siree. Nothing matters very much, and few things matter at all.

The odd problem about censorship is small fry really given that this time two years ago I was almost dead. And now? I am jaunty and murderous. I bob up irrepressibly from every disaster, as unkillable as hope. I am unkillable precisely because I am without hope. I have a beady eye for destructiveness and my pessimism is unwavering.

And self destruction always has meaning. The fist shaken at Heaven! The defiance of the state! But in a Godless, pointless world, how could even death have any real meaning? I raised my fist and lightening struck it. Thank you J. xxx

I WAS SO BRIEF I HAVE ALREADY FINISHED

Well my darlings, you will be delighted to know that as of today, this Blog is no more.

My publishers have decided that the content is too disgusting.

No doubt, these same people would have passed on American Psycho.

Or how about The Tropic of Cancer?

Naked Lunch anyone?

I am a writer.

Sometimes it excites me to write about violence towards the things that I love.

Big deal.

They won’t let me be a writer.

They simply do not realise that there is no such thing as moral or immoral. There is only witty or boring. Readable or unreadable.

Political correctness is merely censorship under another name.

The only censorship which is permissible is one of quality.

But now at least I know I am great.

You see, for a man to be great opinion must be divided on that score.

And when the critics are divided the artist is at one.

And me? Well darlings, as a writer I am in the top one.

Good Day.