Educating Peter by Tom Cox Read Free Book Online

be liked a lot less for what I did say than what I didn’t. The bacon double cheeseburger didn’t help. I was fourteen again, and all that was missing were the Mr Whippy hairstyle, the Campri ski jacket and the Cathy Dennis poster.
    Was Peter a cool kid? I’d originally assumed not. Now I wasn’t so sure. True, he had disobedient hair, a little acne, a lot of black clothes and a few obvious social problems, but, while those attributes might have lost him a few friends in the adult universe, there was no telling where it put him on the ladder of adolescent popularity. I reminded myself of his age: fourteen, not seventeen. I looked at his clothes: Doc Martens, leather trenchcoat, AC/DC t-shirt, that metal chain thing that I still didn’t understand. Did anyone I’d known at fourteen dress like this out of school hours? Highly unlikely. They probably wouldn’t have wanted to in an era when Patrick Swayze was considered a fashion icon, but that was beside the point. The point was that this was a pretty advanced look for a fourteen-year-old. At least, I supposed it was. I didn’t know for sure.I’d spent most of the last seven years ignoring teenagers, remember?
    Hiking up Crouch Hill back to the car with Peter dragging a few paces behind me, kicking gravel, I told myself to snap out of it. I was a married man with a Ford Focus, life assurance and a perfectly nice group of regular friends. I wasn’t here to impress my teenage companion, or even to become his pal; I was here to give him a lesson in the ways of rock, plain and simple. If we bonded in the process, fine. If we didn’t, my life would not be significantly altered.
    That said, it was going to make for some mighty awkward car journeys.

LET IT TRICKLE
    THE STORY, AS it’s traditionally told, begins with a Daimler pulling into a garage forecourt. Eight or nine young men and women emerge boisterously from the car. One of them asks to use the lavatory. The petrol station’s resident mechanic, who’s come out to see what the commotion is, says no, he won’t allow it. Slowly, the gang break into a chant of ‘We’ll piss anywhere, man!’, as two of the men – one of particularly memorable appearance due to the size of his lips – urinate against the petrol station wall. The group get back in the car and it pulls away with, according to the
Daily Express
, ‘the people inside sticking their hands through the window in a well-known gesture’ (it being 1965, you assume this gesture involves double digits as opposed to the later, somehow less swashbuckling ‘flipped bird’). The police are alerted. Three of the agitators are fined five pounds.
    It’s not, it has to be said, the most scandalous tale of rock and roll hell-raising ever told. Next to, forexample, the story about the Led Zeppelin groupie and the red snapper or Keith Moon driving his Rolls-Royce into a swimming pool, you might even say it was a little on the sissy side. These days, the Shell station on the Romford Road doesn’t have a mechanic, but if it did, you suspect that, were you to piss against his wall, he’d barely look up from his copy of the
News Of The World
, where there would be every chance he’d be reading about celebrities who indulged in far more licentious activities than urinating in public. In place of that original mechanic were a couple of downcast Asian men in their mid-twenties, selling petrol, fags and, just occasionally, disposable cameras from behind the safety of a Plexiglas partition. Their generation would still know of the miscreant with the prominent lips, but less because of his music and more because of the frequent stories in the tabloids about his philandering with Latin women young enough to be his daughter.
    â€˜Sorry to bother you,’ I said to one of them (the men selling petrol, not the Latin women) as I handed over the money for a disposable camera, ‘but you