The Ned Wood Archive

Beatniks and Politics, Nothing is New

The Strawberry Alarm Clock

Like I say, Bernie’s not a bad guy once you get to know him. First couple of times I met him, he was loud, I guess. Shot his mouth off. Said things that got up my nose. I suppose that was because he was unsure of himself. So was I. And then he had this mass of black hair on and around his head that made you think he was just a little too big. And he had this habit of coming up to you, putting his arm around your shoulder, smiling his gap-toothed smile just a little too close to your face, and trying just a little too hard to be friendly, but actually making you wary of him.

Then as the year went on, and I got to know him, and we both kind of grew up, so my first impressions were overcome. Since the beginning of that summer term I’d spent more and more time with him, so I knew he was OK.

When I first got down to Southampton, which was toward the end of 1975, when all you heard on the radio was Rod Stewart’s Sailing, I was raw, naïve, uncertain, and suspicious. I was stuck out on the other side of town in digs on my own. I let my natural shyness get the better of me and wasted most of the opportunities I had to get to know people. Then, over the first two terms of my second year, when I’d got myself into the halls and hung around with the first years, I started to grow up. I started to meet people. I met some amazing folk, I can tell you, some of whom like Jo, and Helen, and Mary, I really liked. Some of whom I didn’t too much, like Neil, and Mike, and Rod. And, I guess, Bernie. And I started to find out about the world and how it worked. This was mostly from Mary, but that’s another story. And I started to look at myself and think more about how I was acting. And then I remember sitting in the pub at the end of our second year field trip in March, thinking how I was being unfair on myself and unfair on the people I came across. How I should give them a chance and not judge them too quickly. Like Bernie. I had him down as a nutter until I had a really good chat with him.

That was when I came back off the trip. I stayed over in Southampton on account of we only got back there late on the Friday and I’d missed the last train home. Bernie was one of those guys who always seemed to be around the university even out of term. Me – I’d go home most of the holidays, but with Bernie it was like he was determined to put all of that Mom and Dad stuff behind him, make a clean break for once and for all, and just hang around the college, not studying, just living.

I bumped into him the day after we got back when he was hanging out at the Union building. It was mostly closed up that Sat’day, like a shop that doesn’t want any customers. I’d stayed in Glen overnight – I’d paid for OTR – and Glen was deadly dull, but somehow I didn’t feel like getting the first train home that morning, so I’d gone down to see if there was anything to do, which there wasn’t. Bernie had gone everywhere else on campus and had come to the conclusion that if anything was gonna happen, it was gonna happen there. Well it wasn’t happening, but when he saw me walking across the concourse of the students union, he leapt upon me like a bear grabbing a passing salmon and, putting his arm around my shoulder like we were the oldest mates, grilled me about the field trip. Like I say, he was a geologist too; a year behind me, so he wanted to know what he was letting himself in for. So I told him that it wasn’t so much a field trip as a package tour of Hercynian history, being bussed from one tourist spot to the next. Crackington, Tintagel, the Lizard. I tried to jazz it up, as you do when you’re telling what you did on your holidays. I told him about the fun we’d had climbing over rocks and crawling through pubs and pushing the lecturers like Trotter into the sea, and I told how I’d missed the Stranglers in Penzance.

At which point he asked me if I really liked the Stranglers, and I could tell from his voice that he didn’t. But as I’d rather talk about music than rocks (music and football I can talk about all day, rocks I can take or leave) I asked him what he thought of them. He called them pompous misogynists, which I assumed was something bad although I didn’t like to admit I hadn’t got a clue what he meant. So I asked him what he listened to. Now, as I’ve said, he’s got this long curly hair and a fuzzy unkempt beard, so I expected him to say Led
Zeppelin or Pink Floyd, or Yes, or any of those other godawful bands my brother was listening to at the time.

Actually, I had pretty long hair when I came back from that trip. In fact, ever since I’d left home. The sort of length that means ‘I’m not making a statement, I just don’t go to have my hair cut anymore and l don’t have to put up with that petty short hair school discipline.’ And we were both wearing the standard student uniform for the mid seventies of flared jeans and baggy sweaters. You couldn’t judge either of us from our covers.

But when I asked Bernie what he listened too and he said ‘The Ramones’, a friendship was formed. He said that of all the music from all the clubs in all the cities in all the wide and wonderful world, one form was more honest, more truthful, and more fundamentally pure than any other. One music was closer to the one true way. And that music, he said, was the Ramones. Well, again, I didn’t know exactly what he was talking about, but I was inclined to agree with him.

So that was how it stared, that Saturday. I was supposed to be catching the train back, but I didn’t really feel that there was much to go back to. The sort of stuff I did at home was just hang around and listen to a few albums. There wasn’t a game I could go to till the following Saturday, cos I didn’t go to night games back then. Plus, there was someone I was sort of avoiding.

I better explain. Actually, I don’t think I can explain. I didn’t understand what was going on then, so it’s unlikely that I’ll know now. It was one of those things where you like someone but you mess up and you don’t say the right things and they make assumptions and well, I don’t know. So rather than face it and clear it up, what you do is run away. I couldn’t help it you know, my Y chromosome made me do it.

See, at Christmas, I’d met Elsa. Now, at the time, I was carrying a torch for Mary, so I can’t have been that serious. But Elsa was really nice, she was amazing fun to be around, she was clever, she was tall and elegant, and had as much style as anyone in the whole of Mercia. So we went to a couple of parties and hung around together. But then during the term, the letters we sent each other didn’t match up. So the bottom line was I was scared of going back.

So, it didn’t take much to get me to stay. Bernie said to grab some lunch, maybe take a walk through the common, then go back to his place and, hey, crash on the floor if I wanted.

So we went into Portswood and ate some really bad chips, then went down to these old record shops that he knew and I saw a couple of old albums that I should have got, but didn’t for some reason. You know how it is when you’re not really sure, so you hesitate to pay what they’re asking. Then three or four years later you see the same old junk for five times the price. I did that so many times back then, when I was a poor student. There was one day when I saw all four Scott Walker albums at a fiver each. This was before I’d heard his stuff, just heard about him. I bought the first, thinking I could go back and get the rest if I liked it. And when I did go back, they’d gone. I’ve never seen any of those albums for less than thirty quid since. So now when I see something, I buy it first and ask questions later.

Bernie didn’t get anything either, in fact he turned his nose up at everything on account of it being more than a year old. He asked one guy if he had anything by the Rubettes. Then he asked if the guy had ‘Tell Him’ by Hello or anything by Smokie. When the bloke actually found an old Smokie 45, Bernie shouted ‘I’ll never buy anything from this shop again’ and stormed out. Jeez, I was embarrassed. I mean, I’ve got that single.

I edged toward the door trying not to look at the geezer behind the counter, but then I noticed he was laughing. It turns out Bernie does this to him all the time. He tries to see how many really naff platters the guy is selling.

Outside, Bernie told me he was looking for the New York Dolls. They were another one of those bands you hear about, but never get played on the radio. And you never meet anyone with any albums or anything, so you can’t borrow them.

Anyway, we were just using up time; gradually walking back to the place he was staying at over the river in Bitterne. Staying at a mates house because the hall was closed for the hols.

Remembering what he’d said about the Ramones, I asked him “What on
earth is all of this crap about the one true way, Bernie?” and that got him talking
about Buddhism.

See, Bernie knows a lot about stuff. He’s far more broad-minded than I am. Actually, that’s bullshit. Bernie thought he knew a lot about stuff and he had a habit of saying things loud so if you didn’t know all that much, like I didn’t, then you assume that Bernie knows more that you. Plus on occasions he spreads himself a bit too thin. I just didn’t know at the time, because in most areas, he was a step or two in front of me. All of this one true way stuff was under-developed, a bit black and white. He’d tell me he was a Buddhist, but he didn’t say why.

“What’s a Buddhist, Bernie?”

“A Buddhist’s someone who meditates Riff. Have you ever done it? Try it. Come back and we’ll do some tonight. See, once you meditate, you find your own true way.”

“Stop going in circles”

“Well, it’s hard to tell you without doing it. That’s why there are no good Buddhism books. You’ve got to feel it. When you meditate, you look inside yourself and find your own inner peace.” I looked at him. His thick mass of hair. His ugly broken teeth. His worn clothes, scruffier even than the average student wears. I thought about saying something like no-one in their right mind would want to look inside of him, but he started up again about meditation.

But what he didn’t say was that when you meditate, what you find is your own true inner self, peaceful or otherwise, and Buddhism is learning to be at peace with whatever it is you find. Your inner self is made of so many different shades and hues from so many different sources and influences that some are going to be attractive and some are going to be disagreeable, unpalatable even, but you have to come to terms with them all and love them all as parts of yourself. And that’s the easy part. The hard part comes when you meet someone. You have to love all the bits of them too. Good and Bad.

Actually, I don’t know which is easier. I’ve seen so many people who can love others, but can’t love themselves. They just can’t come to terms with the demons they find inside themselves. Which is something I find hard to handle, you know. Sometimes I can accept their failings but they can’t. What’s even worse is when they aren’t even failings. What do you say to someone who says ‘I hate myself because I’m too fat’? Or too thin. Or too tall. Or too short. Or too sentimental. Or too kind. Or not kind enough? I wish I knew.

“You know what karma is?” Bernie was saying. “Karma is another thing you have with Buddhism. See, I believe in karma. If you do something good, you get to see the benefit sooner or later. And likewise if you do something bad, you suffer for it sooner or later.”

But he didn’t say that the very act of doing was part of the reward or part of the punishment in itself. He didn’t say that carrying the action with you inside through your subsequent life was another part. That if you had the guilt or the satisfaction, that was part of the karma coming back to you. You don’t need to be reincarnated to get karma; the returns are much quicker.

And then he told me what he thought the point was. I mean, the point of life. He told me he was looking for Nirvana, the ultimate state of enlightenment for any Buddhist. All of which was quite cute, because it sounded like something off one of my old Cat Stevens albums.

But Bernie didn’t say that in order to reach Nirvana, you have to break out of the endless cycle of delusion. The cycle of thinking you need things, thinking you hate things, thinking you’ve got to be one step ahead of everyone else. He didn’t say that Nirvana is possible here in this life if you can just break away from the mundane dogeatdog rat race we’re all in and just say ‘No’. That even by just saying ‘No’ once in a while to greed and hypocrisy and heartlessness you can elevate yourself toward Nirvana, put yourself on a higher plane and, deep inside, deep in your inner self, feel the warmth of true happiness.

He didn’t say anything really. That’s because he didn’t know. Neither of us knew anything back then. We still don’t.