I came to Armistead Maupin’s Tales of the City relatively late in life, aged 42, but the resonance was instant. You don’t need to be living in 1970s San Francisco to salute the alchemy of urban life. I grew up amidst beech woodland in Kent, but there’s a limit to the weird and wonderful escapades you can have in a hamlet where everyone knows your parents, siblings and Airedale Terrier. The siren call of London was hard to ignore. In the city you can try everything on for size – and everyone, come to that. Each day of your life can feel like a luridly entertaining B-movie.
The first time I lived in London I spent five months working in Hamleys toyshop, hanging out with resting actors, unpublished writers and drug addicts. An aspiring conjurer who sold “magic drawing boards” took me to a magicians’ restaurant, with a front door concealed behind a bookcase; I still didn’t go to bed with him.
You can tire of the city, but it will not tire of you: it feeds off your stories
After university I shifted between bedsits, cramped flats and the saggy-springed sofa in Private Eye’s Soho office where I then worked as an assistant, using a fake fur coat as a duvet. The four-storey building had a secret subculture. By day, journos laboured on exposures of corruption while comic geniuses worked up jokes for the centre pages. By night, a different crowd took over, unbeknownst to the bigwigs. The counter-culture poet Michael Horovitz used a counterfeit key to enter and photocopy scores of poetry journals, dragging a floral shopping trolley for his swag. And the editor of The Cerealogist, John Michell, laid out his mag at midnight in the company of a warlock from Bedford. Everything I know about crop circles, UFOs and ley lines dates from those days.
In the late 1990s I was walking through Victoria in the small hours with the art director of the Erotic Review when we saw a half-man in a trilby and suit jacket skateboarding towards us. He had no body beyond his torso, but was expertly balanced on the board, propelling himself with his hands. He hailed us like a nineteenth-century bordello frontman: “Good evening young sir, fair madam, you are in peril on these streets. Would you like to visit a residence intended for lovers?” He opened his jacket to show a lining pinned with rainbow-coloured rows of condoms: “five for a tenner”. It felt like we were in a David Lynch film.
Shortly after this episode, I attended a dull arts party with my two Pelling sisters and told them we should chat up the next random stranger as an experiment. When a middle-aged chap came through the door I said, “We’re Three Sisters, escaped from Chekhov and doomed to tragedy. Can you give us joy?” Without missing a beat, he said, “When did you three damsels last drive down the side of the Thames in a convertible, listening to Blondie, before eating at the Oxo Tower and then going back to a penthouse suite in Mayfair for… [dramatic pause] a game of ping pong?” It turned out to be a genuine invitation and a genuine penthouse; we had the night of our lives.
Cities never disappoint. I once struck up a conversation with a man leaning out of his Hampstead village window, who asked me up for tea. I soon learnt he was George Weiss, Peter Cook’s partner-in-crime for spoof calls to LBC and a serial parliamentary candidate for the Raving Loony Monster Rainbow Alliance Party.
Less heartwarming was the time my purse was lifted from my bag in the West End after the Bad Sex in Fiction Awards. I set off in hot pursuit in an absurd party frock and heels, following two suspects down a dark alley between theatres. Only to find myself facing a gang of ten stony-faced Albanians. Following the mantra “when in doubt be extra polite” I beamed and said, “Excuse me, I think one of you gentlemen might have my purse? I’d be delighted if you keep the cash but would be so grateful to have the cards back.” They howled with laughter before one drew out the purse, removed the cash and handed my property back with a gallant flourish. The ceremonial handover was finished with hugs and mwah-mwah kisses for each thief before I walked away. When I told a policeman he was furious, admonishing: “A man was stabbed to death in that alley two days ago.”
But sometimes you feel the city’s guardians – the stone lions and generals on horses – are keeping you from harm. By contrast, walk into a small county pub and the first reaction is suspicious silence, reminiscent of the scene in An American Werewolf in London. Incomers are outsiders for at least the first 25 years. But the city is a melting pot that embraces strangers and delights in carnival. It sweeps in every creed, ethnicity, sexuality and expression of self. You can tire of it, but the city will not tire of you. It craves your life force and feeds off your stories. The true Tales of the City are the people within it.
Rowan Pelling is editor at Perspective and former editor of the Erotic Review
