Free One Train Later: A Memoir by Andy Summers Page A

skyscrapers piercing the New York skyline, girls, women, dolls, chicks-the whole beat scene.
    I get a job in the summer as a deck-chair-ticket collector on Bournemouth Beach and each afternoon wander through the crush of arms, legs, and perspiring foreheads to collect beachgoers' money, which goes to the Bournemouth Corporation. All day for seven pence. I realize that I have power over these poor begotten lumps trapped in striped canvas-I could turn in those who try to get away with not paying. But standing in the sand in a white corporation attendant coat and a heavy leather satchel around my neck, I punch tickets with a headful of riffing horn solos, foreign films, and the breasts of Brigitte Bardot. The red-faced mums with sticky little kids in the sand at their feet barely make it onto my radar.
    "Hey, man, don't just stand there dreaming." A voice from behind penetrates my sun-bleached hallucination. It's Kit, another corporation employee but a guy who is different from the rest of us. He walks about in a cool, detached way, and it's rumored that he is a poet. He doesn't appear to have a home but carries all his worldly possessions in a small backpack. I work up the courage to talk to him one day and he gives me a small grim lecture about being beat, which he says is a state of mind and that to be cool, to be on the outside, is to be hip and the two things-hip and cool-combine to make you a hip outsider, who is cool, the very essence of beat, cool. The hip don't have regular jobs, don't get mortgages, don't buy bungalows, don't buy into this whole crock we call the straight world, man, they just keep moving.
    A 250-pound woman heaves herself out of a deck chair with a struggle, and Kit swiftly slings it on top of the stack he is making. "Burroughs's Naked Lunch-read it," he says, spitting in the sand, stacking another deck chair. The sun sinks behind the pier in a swirl of circling seagulls and I feel a deep sense of insecurity, but I look at Kit and nod in an impassive but knowing way, in fraternity-yeah, brother. This deck-chair thing is just for kicks. But this thing that he's got in spades, I want it too; I desperately hope that playing jazz is cool-it must be, jazz musicians call each other "cats." I am very impressed-how could this guy know all of this? I decide to get a backpack.
    I begin grunting in monosyllables, barely parting my lips to speak, and take to wearing sunglasses inside the house, even when sitting on the end of the bed practicing. "lire your eyes hurting again, dear?" my mum asks anxiously-or so I think, although she is probably smirking behind her hand. "Better pop down to the optician's with you, then." I merely grunt back in her general direction as I struggle with C7b9. I read On the Road and The Dharma Bums. I don't really get them-it's another world-but I take in their aroma and realize that my fellow deck-chair stacker is the personification of Japhy Ryder, Kerouac's protagonist from The Dharma Bums.
    Rebellion is still worth having a go at because it's not yet an over-thecounter item. In a few years the corporate world will suck up everything from the underground and brand it with a logo; coolness will be obtained by drinking sugary caffeinated confections, wearing prewashed jeans and sneakers made by people in the Third World. But on the beach as I hand five pennies' change back from an ice-cream-covered shilling, the underground is being raised into white consciousness by a few poets in the United States such as Kerouac and Ginsberg and Gary Snyder and William S. Burroughs, who take it from black culture, the jazz scene, and Buddhism. I make my way toward the pier, thinking about what I will practice tonight and that I must wear shades at all, times from now on.
    One night I go with Nigel to a club called with a disarming lack of originality the Blue Note. Every Friday night a quintet of ex-London jazz musicians set up and play in a local hotel, and when I hear the quintet roar through a