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Chapter 119
The Dealer Boots


As was the way of all good flâneurs, we were loafing around one afternoon, listening to a bit of Francoise Hardy, chatting about this and that. For some reason, we got to laughing about the then current trend for hip hop kids to go around stealing badges off the front of Mercedes or Volkswagen cars, and wearing them round their necks like the Beastie Boys, together with a back-to-front baseball cap or something equally ludicrous.

Who were we to laugh though? If I remember rightly at the time we had collectively acquired a look that was based on a second hand car salesman type of thing. All sheepskin coats, paisley Tootal scarves, and dealer boots. Refracted flash. Dealer boots? Fantastic. They are still around. They are still invincible. Elasticated sides. Stitching on the front. As ugly or as handsome as anything. Apart from illustrating how daft we must have looked, I mention dealer boots because in a strange kind of way they are a link between the Beastie Boys’ badges of honour and our crowd.

Our part of the world was changing. There had always been a considerable chasm between poverty and plenty. And we knew which side we were on. But the chasm was changing. The rich were different now. And we didn’t like them. The old toffs were bad enough. But you knew where you were with them. You might not like where you were, but things were clear cut. Now we were wary of the very new and very expensive cars parked down the golf club. We were suspicious about the origins of some of the money that was going towards ugly extensions on grand old houses. This was not jealousy or snobbery. We weren’t prudes. We were hardly in a position to take too much of a stance on the moral high ground. No, this was about dirty money.

I should explain. We lived in a certain way. Because we chose to. We didn’t have much money. It would have come handy if we’d had more collateral. But it wasn’t a big issue. So what we had we spent shrewdly. We had our priorities. Records, books, clothes. Live shows we could usually blag our way into, but there were train and bus fares. So we didn’t go out drinking. We didn’t really do alcohol. We didn’t like people who drank a lot. We didn’t like the effect alcohol had on people. We didn’t like the peer pressure on people to drink. Drugs, similarly. We just were not interested. If people wanted to get involved, then fine. That was up to them. We knew people who did get involved. We knew people who were messed up. And we hated the fact some people were making money out of it.

So some of the nouveau riches who were moving out our way, with their expensive cars, perma-tanned trophy wives, deadly dogs, and intricate alarm systems. Well, the word was, that some of these wheeling and dealing wide boys were caught up in all sorts of shady business operations, which way down the line were causing untold misery to families. We didn’t like that. We knew all the old gangster lore. We could smile with the best of them at protection rackets, honour among thieves, flash suits and fancy girlfriends, but not this. It wasn’t right, but there wasn’t a lot we could do about it.

Which is why our conversation about the hip hop kids pinching badges off the front of flash motors took a strange detour. For it suddenly dawned on us that the very vehicles the local herberts were prising the prized insignia from were likely to belong to the merchants in misery. After all they were odds on to be the ones with the vulgar taste. Suddenly we were with the kids. It was no wonder the local constabulary were not exactly hot footing it around the area to solve these heinous crimes. It might however also explain why a few of the local badge wearing b-boys had been dealt with decidedly severely by some vigilantes in expensive sports wear. Funny that.

Well, for once, we decided that it was time to come out in support of the kids. It was time to be down with the b-boys. Although it could be a bit tricky. The Quiet One’s kid brother had connections. But it wasn’t quite the done thing to ask for the lowdown on pinching VW badges or whatever. No, we had to use our imaginations. And it was crude, according to our code, to commit a crime on our own doorstep. So something a bit different was called for. And anyway all those alarms, all those gates, all those guard dogs, well they made things messy. We needed to look further afield.

It just so happened that around then The Quiet One had acquired a vintage Lambretta, which he’d taken to tootling around on, chugging around Kentish villages and dreaming he was in Tuscany with some lovely Italian lass holding him tight around the chest while the cool breeze ruffled their hair. Well, the lad always did have a lively imagination. In pursuit of his dream, bless him, you’d often find him with his head buried in a copy of Scootering magazine, or peering up at the chassis of his lovely Lambretta. Yeah, looking decidedly bewildered too, for he was never the most technologically clued-up of characters. And I think the purists among the scootering fraternity would have had forty fits over the liberties The Quiet One took to get his machine up and running.

Anyway, it was The Quiet One that pointed out that if you headed out into the green and pleasant Kent countryside a little ways on a Sunday lunchtime, well you would see a nice gathering of our targets screaming out for a visit. For apparently the wheelers and dealers were in the habit of whiling away the remaining hours of a weekend having a Sunday roast and all the trimmings in the convivial atmosphere of a hostelry away from the hoi polloi. And there if you were out Keston or Chelsfield way you’d see all their gleaming motors lined up, ready and waiting, and untended. Interesting.

Just in case we were in any doubt The Quiet One had borrowed one of The Fair One’s cameras and put together a nice little portfolio of pics of pot bellied oafs in golfing casuals and their extraordinary matching missus and car combinations. Matching in the sense of absurd upholstery and unnecessary accessories. So, we were convinced. Here was the perfect opportunity to do a little wanton mischief and cause a bit of grief. And we could make a day of it too.

In the end it was a bit like that schoolboy reworking of the carol. Two on a bus; one in a car; one on a scooter rubbing his hooter, trying not to catch a cold. We thought it would make more sense if we travelled separately. Less conspicuous we figured. So there was me and The Fair One on a series of buses, The Redhead in his ma’s car, and The Quiet One on his cherished scooter. The rendezvous was in a churchyard down the road from our chosen pub, where in honour of the day of rest we had a quick chorus of Say A Little Prayer, scaring the living daylights out of an old dear placing flowers on an old grave. Bit unfortunate really because we were aiming not to be noticed, but hey ho. We were dressed for rambling, with the notable exception that the pockets of our rucksacks and duffels had more interesting things in than the usual ordnance survey maps and thermos flasks. As an affectionate nod to one of our favourite books, George Melly’s Revolt Into Style, with that great Peter Blake cover, we each were carrying pretty little screwdrivers, with which we aimed to do some damage.

I’m not sure if I’m particularly proud of this, but we used the screwdrivers to scratch our calling card, so to speak, into the body work of the dealers’ boots. Aha, has the penny just dropped? Anyway, we etched T.O.O.E as quickly as we could. Two doing the scratching and two keeping watch. I’ve got to be honest I was scared out of my wits. These were not nice people we were messing with. But fortune smiled on us. There was of course the risk we were damaging some poor hard working soul’s pride and joy, but to our minds the personalised number plates were a giveaway and indubitably an offence to our finely tuned aesthetic sensibilities. We hated unnecessary flash, and it deserved punishment of some sort. Well, that’s how we justified our actions.

Once we’d done what we needed to do, we naturally did not stick around to watch events unfold. We instead headed off into nearby woods, following some particularly pretty paths, and quite getting into the nature thing. We should do this more often, we said. And so we did, making the appropriate detour to a pub on our way to refresh our senses in our own special way. And from what we heard on the grapevine, our actions really did upset the wheelers and dealers. So much so that they headed further out into the country on a Sunday, where there were less lowlife, or so they thought. Well, takes one to know one and all that, I suppose. We just closed the chapter by posting an anonymous as possible postcard to those very unpleasant people, simply signed The Outside of Everything, with T.O.O.E in brackets. Brave eh?

© 2008 John Carney
Illustration © 2008 Alistair Fitchett