Stay Greasy Baby

It had been 20 years since I slid down the emergency chute of my Air India flight onto the Los Angeles tarmac into what was to become an adventure I could never have imagined from the dyslexic haze of my Manchester childhood. I liked being illegally legal. I liked living my life on the edge of art. Nothing was an average day as I rose as a stand-up poet and juggled my fake jewellery empire from coast to coast. “Recite another poem.” Lisa Marie Presley asked me. How do you say no to the King of Rock n Roll’s daughter? I lived in excess, making it up as I went along. From Jimmy Hoffa’s son making me a sweet profit, to negotiating for my life with a New York mobster in a Manhattan lane way, to handing back my stolen copy of Howl to Allen Ginsberg. Yet none of that could ever have prepared me for that cold JFK holding cell, nor the fact that two weeks earlier Hollywood was mine, it had taken me years to get to that moment in my life. Stay Greasy Baby is my story, trying to run one step ahead of the madness, wanting to go home but not knowing where home was, yet most of all wanting to create the next poem. Standing behind my mic at the Standard Hotel, Hollywood, I performed nightly surrounded by celebrity, rock stars, pop stars, villains and things. And as Joaquin Phoenix lit the first July the 4th firework, I thought nothing could stop me now. Or so I thought.