5. The Salinger Opening
Rant insight
Lunchtime, but also always
If you want to know the truth, I’m not sure I have the chops to be writing about myself in the way you might want me to. I’m knackered about it all, and it was a long time ago, and nobody has ever really been interested in anything I have to say on the subject. Even though I’ve slipped myself into all the books I’ve written, you wouldn’t spot the bits that are true, because it’s not my thoughts and ideas, but the unlikely plot points that are actually the bits that are true. No, I’m not mean or narcissistic or misogynist like some of my protagonists have been. No, but I did once become friends with a Russian mobster, and I did once fall in love with a married woman but no I didn’t murder her, and I did once live with an American millionaire alcoholic who was sad and lonely and believed she was paying me the highest and purest of compliments when she looked me in the eye across her breakfast Bloody Mary and told me I reminded her of Holden Caulfield. I told her that was not a compliment. She didn’t take that well, but did decide to not take back her birthday gift to me of a first edition paperback of Catcher in the Rye. That was true. Some of it. But you want to know about that thing that happened. So, you’ll want to know where I’m from and how I got to where I’ve gotten, writing books and TV dramas and on occasion being asked by magazines to write about the state of the nation. What nation is that? Whichever nation I’m asked about. But never Wales. Never the Welsh. Nobody cares and nobody asks and nobody, I’m sure, even realises that’s where I’m from. So, I’m asked about the politics of London, where I live, and the state of the government on occasion and sometimes on immigration and terrorism because I wrote a few TV dramas about bombs and white nationalists. And sometimes I’m asked about America because I live in L.A. as often as I can, and spend some time in New York, and I’m writing a drama for Netflix about a Trump-like figure because I convinced some execs that, like when Sam Mendes won his Oscar for American Beauty and somebody somewhere said he nailed it because sometimes it takes an outsider to look in on a place and nail it. Anyway, I’m not entirely sure I’m nailing the Trump drama, but one chunk of cash is in the bank, and I’m ploughing ahead with it in this life of winging it I’ve managed to sculpt for myself. But that’s not why I’m writing this. The reason I’m writing this is because you wanted to know about what happened, and nobody ever asked about Wales before. Nobody ever asked about my life in my hometown, nobody ever asked about New Port, and nobody ever asked about Aaron Bailey or any of my friends who I left behind when I ran off to London. Where I was born isn’t important to the story. Where I grew up isn’t. Neither is what school was like, my first girlfriend, my first job, the way I bounced from shit to shit. All that matters to this story is the pub I spent most of my twenties in. The people I knew. The stuff that went on. That’s all you need to know. So, here it is. The story you asked for.