ROBBIE
2005-08-30 13:53:51 UTC
Following on from Bettina's panagyric, I thought I'd offer this in a 'let's
make up and be friendly' fashion.
Victorious Cupid
by Nick Garrett
Back in those far off, febrile days-I'm talking about back when Ecstasy was
an event in people's lives and they stayed on orange juice for the evening
in honour of it; when the Conservative Party were busy closing hospitals and
cooking up an appetite for New Labour; when it was still novel--if you were
white--to have dreadlocks; when dance music was the counterculture; when
celtic tattoos and cock piercings were talking points; when you didn't go
out till ten pm on the weekend and didn't come back till ten am and had
medicatory half-toots to land one's mental plane; when all the serious
people you knew were on Prozac and digging a new band called Radiohead; when
you went to work stoned and came home stoned and were double stoned at the
weekend and triple stoned at Christmas, and insane at New Year's- yeah, back
then, there was a digging-it little bar on the south side of Croydon; a bar
which was in fact a pub and old pub at that; anyone who had the merest touch
of the avant-garde about them hung there: the spangled tripsters; the
dreadlocks-with-silverfish uni' slummers; the dealers; the sorter-outers;
the art students; the psychos; the musos; the giro-surfers; the tea-leaf
mountebanks; the smackheads with the stolen trainers and the skunk for sale
(yeah, back when skunk was a novelty); the young drunks; the old drunks; the
piss-themselves-standing-up drunks; the-what-are-you-looking-at drunks; the
pull-the-pissoir-off-the-wall drunks; and fifty-seven varieties of goth.
This pub was called something traditional; but we all knew it by the name
Interzone, for obvious reasons.
It was here, one sunny June afternoon, that I met Danny Boast- an event
which changed my life.
In those days there was a habit--you couldn't call it a tradition-- among
the Interzone demi-monde of spending the Saturday lunchtime and afternoon in
the pub, drinking off the excesses of Friday night and swapping the previous
evening's war stories; as well as making plans for the evening while
browsing the bountiful drug market that flourished there under the wise
monkey of a landlord. We quaintly called it Luncheon.
It was my lugubrious friend Mash, who knew everyone through his speed and
pills franchise, that introduced me to Danny. It was a good time to meet
someone like Danny: I was young, and able to service half a dozen hangovers
a week without looking like Toad of Toad Hall.
I was sitting at the bar with a pounding headache, my cigarettes set out;
my tartan trousers on; my dyed hair smelling of conditioner; my leather
jacket on the stool underneath my arse. Mash came walking along from the
toilet with his sleeves rolled up further than usual, the better to show off
a tattoo of a wizard in green ink he'd just had done.
'You wanna meet this bloke over here,' he said; 'he's a fucking riot.'
So we were introduced. Danny was a few years older than me; say twenty-six
or twenty seven, and he looked good- like a pop star: he had just the right
crazy hair, with sensuous red lips and white teeth, just-so cheekbones and a
thirty-inch waist around which sat distressed, perfect fit, flared denims-
he had the lot in fact. Years later I when I saw a reproduction of
Caravaggio's 'Victorious Cupid', I saw something of Danny Boast laughing
back at me.
'Like the trousers,' he said. And we began a conversation. Nobody sitting
around the table could get a word in from then on- we talked quickly; we
made a swift reconnaissance of each other. Without making explicit what was
implicit, we recognised ourselves as being good-looking young men, we
belonged to that genus; the question was, what else were we? For two hours
we laughed and talked: impersonations of well-known people; absurdist
digressions that fused opposing ends of pop culture and had us and those
around us laughing to tears; well-rehearsed performances of famous comedy
moments; rock and roll anecdotes we'd read in the music press. We touched
lightly on art and literature-we clocked each other's references with
approval: in his coat pocket he had a dog-eared copy of Gravity's Rainbow;
in my pocket I had a CD of Exile on Main Street (I never went anywhere
without it in those days- in case I stumbled into a party). During a lull,
when a round of drinks were being bought, he invited me outside for a
spliff.
We stood in an alley and looked good. I said that we should be on the cover
of an LP.
'Come and see my band tomorrow night if you want,' he said casually, in his
piping, classless voice as I dragged on his perfectly rolled joint. He
departed soon after and I was left with Mash and the others, feeling
slightly bereft. Later that night I got off with a gothic Russian girl who
sang Abba songs in Georgian, and who it transpired would accept, but not
perform, fellatio.
*
The next evening I swallowed a sixteenth of hash, played Tutti Frutti by
the MC5 very loudly, then locked my bedsit up and made for the Moonbeam
Club, a crumbling music venue in a decrepit part of the town, where the
dominant economic activity was ethnic cuisine and minicab hire. Mash was
there with a girl he'd met the night before; they were both coming down off
speed and so talked incessantly and looked drawn, with glittering,
tubercular eyes. I drank lager, ate some more hash and enjoyed my buzz.
Danny was marvellous. After two laughable heavy metal bands, he came out
with his band--a drummer and a bassist--and played with verve and energy.
The songs had melody and wit; it seemed he belonged to some other caste of
musician almost, like some sixties demigod; to me he appeared a breed apart
from the petulant metallers and fey singer-songwriters. This was a Bowie;
this was fame-in-waiting. He was no virtuoso guitar player, but he had the
moves and the charisma and the songs, I thought, were classics- English rock
and roll: something not quite definable but know-it-when-you-see-it.
Afterwards, when the main act (a sort of Woolworth's version of Ozric
Tentacles) was on, he came over, shining with sweat.
'What did you think of that?'
'Fucking brilliant, mate.'
He smiled and I said something about the previous acts that made him laugh
uproariously. Then I bought him a drink. He was high on his performance but
keen to talk and we picked up the conversation we'd had the previous day and
continued it till closing time.
Afterwards, waiting for a bus and both drunk, he ate chips with his guitar
case leaning against him.
'I want to get out of this fucking town,' he said.
'So do I,' I said; 'I mean I really do.'
'When I get my record contract,' he chuckled, 'I'm going drive around this
town, spitting at people.'
We both laughed. The bus never came and so we walked along, admiring the
June moon, which was wrapped in a hazy smear of Naples Yellow. Somewhere
along the way he put his arm round me and unzipped his flies.
'Do you want it?' he asked, in such an ordinary, unaffected voice he might
have been offering me a spare sausage from a fried breakfast; 'because
everyone else does.'
I laughed and said I didn't, and I didn't. But I was more than half in love
with Danny Boast.
*
Over the summer we went out a lot and drank a lot. I saw less of Mash.
Danny's girlfriend appeared; she was a beautiful French-looking welfare
state courtesan called Dina, who dressed in leathers and wasn't fond of
washing. I met lots of people and went to even more parties than usual.
Danny played gigs around London and Dina and I always watched from the edge
of the stage, pinged up on coke and vodka. We contemplated the refulgent
midnight stars on acid at barbecues and parties and speculated on creation;
we danced to the buzzcocks down at the Interzone until we fell over; we
spent luminous evenings on the balcony at Danny's flat dreamily discussing
and playing records; a couple of times we shared Dina: rolling around in a
cannabinoid saturnalia while John Coltrane abstracted to beautiful insanity
on the crappy record player in the next room. Danny had it all down pat: we
agreed on everything: politics was bollocks; what we needed was a
revolution- and you never ate anything with a face. It all fitted: 'the
family's where it all goes wrong,' he'd say,' kids should be farmed out to
gay collectives- they're the only ones who know anything about compassion.
Dope should be legalized and the monarchy executed; all wealth divided up by
force and given back to Africa, where we fucking nicked it from.' Apart from
a handful of musicians, western culture was redundant and white men were
mostly 'repressed gays who can't dance and no nothing of style.' I applauded
all this loudly.
I still didn't know much about him or his past. One evening I happened to
ask him what his father did. He frowned.
'Does it matter?'
Come on,' I said sarcastically, 'we're English dontcha know.'
'He's dead,' he answered flatly; 'what does your's do?'
His brown Carravagio eyes glared briefly in reproval.
'I'm sorry,' I said in a hollow voice.
'No worries. What does your old man do?' he asked.
'Works in a factory.'
'Bring on the revolution!' he yelled with a grin.
'These fuckers don't know quality,' he said with his trademark grin a few
weeks later after playing a gig to a somnulent, hash-pacified, sunday
evening audience at the Moonbeam. He had a residency there now and swept
round the place like a pasha who shopped in Carnaby Street. Always
half-drunk and contemptuous off all rules and regulations, people gravitated
to him, dilated and blinking, offering intoxication or conjugation or both;
but he kept us, Dina and me, as his inner circle; even the band didn't get
close- we both felt quietly pleased with this arrangement.
It was without doubt the best summer I'd ever had. As Shakespeare notes,
there's a tide in the affairs of men that must be taken at the flood, and I
knew I was finally on that swell; riding out of the harbour, under a
colourful flag and a glorious sun.
Topping each other's gags, shooting pool in the Interzone, pulling birds
behind Dina's back (she would disappear from time to time and not be seen
for weeks) and staying high for weeks at a time, we knew we were the ne plus
ultra of rock and roll; I got got the sack at work but it didn't stop me; I
blithely signed on and relished more free time to practise the guitar.
'Suburbia,' said Danny as he gunshot-potted a red and watched the white
ball kiss another one in on the recoil, at the Interzone pool table one
afternoon, 'is a mire we must escape. We must dispose ourselves from this
bondage; this roosting place of polyester and nylon; this charnel house of
sensibility; we must escape.'
He came round the pool table, carrying his cue like a light sabre, and went
down on one knee: 'join my band,' he said in the manner of a devout
clergyman.
It was the happiest moment of my life.
*
For me, the first gig at the Moonbeam that autumn--we were headlining-- was
like playing Shea Stadium in 1965; all our friends had turned out; beer
flowed and drugs were distributed; people whooped and yelled righteously
long before we gained the stage. Danny and I stood at the bar laughing
easily at everything, receiving our friends with papal munificence as they
arrived and talking about the A and R man he had lined up.
We were going to be famous and we knew it; everyone knew us and we were hip-
we had the moves; we'd copped the licks: it was all symmetrical now, I could
see it; this was destiny: I thought of myself at eight years' old, grooving
with a wooden tennis racket and strumming the Ward Lock Junior Encyclopaedia
to Ghost Riders in the Sky and knew, knew that this was my destiny.
We did a series of shit-kicking gigs round the circuit on a vapour trail of
pills and spliffs- Danny had a following by then; we met the A and R man,
who seemed to like us, and at a cut price studio near Streatham we cut a
demo which Danny disappeared to London with. When the payphone outside my
bedsit rang late at night, I'd hurry out and knew who'd be on the other end
of the line.
'You better be ready when the shit goes down,' he'd slur; ''cos will you be
able to handle going to work in a helicopter?'
I'd ask him if he had any news but he would depose this by telling the
location of the next gig and the time of the next rehearsal.
'Might be getting a gig at some festival,' he would say. I would ask him
where he was but he he'd just say 'business' enigmatically, and then deliver
the usual sign off: 'laters.'
I'd heard nothing from him for two or three weeks after a gig in Soho, when
he reappeared at the Interzone during a thunderstorm on a Friday night. He
was smiling in a way I rarely saw; smiling with closed eyes and closed
mouth; serene, beautific, convinced that the universe was unfolding just as
he expected.
'We're going to be signed,' he said; then he whooped. We whooped too. He
explained that the A and R man was delighted with demo and was proposing a
recording and publishing deal.
'We need to celebrate- I've got no money though,' he said, shaking rainwater
off his stylishly ragged clothes.
'You'll have it soon enough,' I said and he grinned, like Carravaggio's
defiantly realistic cherub; 'besides,' I said, 'I've got some dough.'
And so we began a long weekend of booze and braggadocio and borrowed money;
we punched the air, we snogged for laughs; we mimed sword fights in pubs and
screamed down the the phone for our friends to join us. We ticked three
grams of coke off Mash. It seemed that Paradise, or the gates thereof, was
in sight.
*
We celebrated for what seemed like weeks. My confidence went from strength
to strength. We cavorted through the pubs- lines to ping us up; joints to
level off- the usual. We found ourselves telling the story again and again,
subtly bringing it into conversations where subtlety was required, and
rolling it in like a hand-grenade where the moment seemed right. Whenever we
ran out of money, we simply borrowed some more from somewhere. We'd done it
you see. We were about to exit the workaday world- the world of baked beans
and walking to work; the dreary ululations of police cars, boom boxes and
the weary threnody and martial blare of television- we were about to slip
the leash.
Not much happened in December. I got into rent arrears, did a moonlight flit
and moved in at Danny's after Christmas. The record deal wasn't discussed
much and Danny said he was looking for a lawyer to proof the contract. Dina
was in one of her depressions and kept to the bedroom. I stayed in my room
and smoked grass, screwed a variety of women and wrote songs.
One day when I was alone in the flat I got up in the afternoon and found a
well-dressed man of about seventy sitting in the lounge. Taken aback, I
asked him what he wanted.
'What do I want?' he asked imperiously; 'I want to see what I'm getting for
my money; or rather what my son is getting for my money.'
I made him tea and was courteous and he became talkative on the strength of
it. He lived in Oxfordshire in some style (' the minstrels gallery appeared
in Country Life some years ago') and had been a successful stockbroker. He
mentioned Danny's 'music nonsense'. I never told Danny about his visit.
*
One afternoon I heard Danny coming up the stairs and I leapt out of bed,
grabbed my white stratocaster and hurried into the kitchen. Danny was by the
sink.
'Listen to this- I've been working on a riff,' I said, concentrating on the
neck of the guitar. Danny didn't turn round; he was muttering something.
'Danny?' I said, looking up.
He turned quickly and threw a plate against the wall behind me. It smashed
and the slivers hit the back of my head. I jumped with shock. His face was
scowling. I'd never seen him look like that before.
'Can't anyone,' he said in a seething, malicious tone, 'in this fucking dump
tidy their mess up?'
His teeth were clenched together. He swore violently and began a long
diatribe about washing up. He started to lift the dirty plates out of the
sink and smash them on the floor whilst keeping up the diatribe through
clenched teeth about how filthy the flat was. Then he pushed past me with
great force and stormed out of the flat.
*
I didn't know what to think. I went back to the bedroom in a state of
shock- we'd never had a cross word before. I sat down on the edge of the bed
and absently played a blues figure on the guitar. The thing that was hard to
understand was why he was making a fuss about the mess: he never did any
tidying up and I'd never seen the flat in anything other than a mess.
Things remained frosty at the next band rehearshal two days later and I
made mistakes that I didn't usually make. At the end, Danny turned to me and
said: 'you're so crap at everything you do really, aren't you?'
At the flat the atmosphere of festivity had frozen to silent cohabitation.
For a few weeks he went out early and came back late.
One bitterly cold night at the beginning of February he came back at about
nine pm and called me into the sitting room. He poured us glasses of bourbon
and stood in front of the old gas fire. I sat on the threadbare settee. He
threw a fat sheaf of papers at me.
'That's the contract. Signed it this morning.'
'Nice one,' I said, scanning uncompehendingly many pages of closely typed
legalese; 'where do I sign?'
'You don't mate. Look, there's no easy way of saying this, so I'm saying it
straight: you're out. And I want you out of this flat as well. Sorry and all
that.but you've never really been up to snuff and the A and R man-'
'You *what*?' I said.
'C'mon,' he said squatting down, like, it suddenly struck me, an old time
policeman talking to a lost child, 'you must have known what was in the
wind. You're looker and a rocker mate, but it just wasn't working with my
band. You've had a go on the merry-go-round though- and that's more than
most people get.'
Although I was shocked I was acutely aware of something in his voice;
something quite apart from the obvious condescension; some little pitch in
tone that told me he was enjoying this. I suddenly realised I was also close
to tears.
He stood up and looked out of the window at the hundreds of tiny glowing
windows in the distance.
'You see,' he said; 'those suckers down there-'
'What, the ones you're fighting the revolution for?'
He turned and raised an eyebrow. 'Yes, if you want to put it like that.
Those suckers down there never get a ride on the merry-go-round, they don't
even get a sniff; they're too busy buying trainers on credit cards- or
nicking them.'
'What are you going to spend your money on, then?'
He looked around, 'a decent place to live- and by the way, you owe me some
rent.'
'I'll send it to Oxfordshire.'
'Who told you about that?' he asked with a sort of indignant giggle. ' Did
that bitch in there?' he said moving towards their bedroom door and
bellowing the last words of the sentence.
'Leave her alone,' I said. This led to a series of typical verbal
provocations which ended with us snarling in each other's faces.
'You're a cunt,' I said flatly and predictably, though it was enough to
start the fight. He hit me and I hit him and we fell to the dusty carpet
hitting, swiping and kicking at each other viciously: the television was
knocked over; ashtrays, glasses smashed; empty wine bottles rolled. Even
though it was painful and desperate and I felt murderous rage, it was also a
relief, like a sort of hate fuck; but funny with it: we were trying to
headbutt each other whilst rolling around.
The bedroom door opened and Dina came out; I could see she wasn't alarmed-
she looked as if she'd come in to watch a bit of television. She sat on the
end of the settee and lit a cigarette. Suddenly we broke apart and Danny
managed to get to his feet and began to kick me in the head and ribs; I was
shouting at the top of my voice and threw the bottle of bourbon at him-it
missed and bounced off the wall unbroken Then I rolled into a ball.
Eventually the kicking stopped. We were both panting. Danny picked the
contract up and walked out the flat. I uncurled and lay on the floor staring
at the ceiling, suddenly aware that my nose was bleeding heavily and that
rain was falling heavily against the windows.
'Pour me a drink, Dina,' I said, rolling my tongue around my throbbing jaw,
checking for broken teeth.
'Poor boy,' she said as she picked up the bottle and poured some bourbon
into a dirty glass before handing it to me; 'I should have said something I
suppose. But why should I intervene in his little love affairs? If you love
Danny, you have to take the kicking sooner or later.' At this she lifted up
the baggy shirt she was wearing to reveal storm clouds of ugly bruises
underneath her breasts. 'You have to take the kicking,' she repeated. She
shrugged and rolled her eyes in a continental way she had, then lit another
cigarette. 'It's been coming a while for you. I knew a bad time was coming.
They come and go- he was bad last summer: I went and stayed at home for a
while and another time in hospital-' she pulled the sleeve up on both her
arms, revealing huge red scars '-he poured a kettle of boiling water over
it.'
I sipped at the bourbon but choked on it.
*
Several winters passed. I'd moved up to a tatty area near Brixton, where
Mash had invested his drug profits in renting a house and growing skunk in
the loft. I worked in a lowly position for the Ministry of Agriculture,
filling out forms. I'd turned thirty and given up on drinking in the
Interzone and never went to the Moonbeam from year's end to year's end. I'd
filled out a bit and grown an extensive beard and now spent a lot of
evenings reading and puffing in the box room Mash was sub-letting me. Very
occasionally I heard things about Danny: that he'd made the album for the
record company; that indifferent reviews of it and some gigs his band had
played had appeared in the NME; that he was taking heroin. Someone they
thought they'd seen him drunk and busking at Piccadilly Underground Station;
someone else said he'd died in Prague after falling out of a window.
Some nights I'd go to the pub on the corner- an old fashioned,
toby-jug-of-Churchill type place where the lights through the windows look
welcoming and you could usually read the evening paper in peace. As I was
going in the door of the corner shop for a newspaper one evening at dusk,
Danny was coming out. We collided. Our eyes met but he didn't recognise me,
or didn't seem to recognise me. He gave me a sour glance and swore--he was
obviously very drunk and in those seconds we viewed each other I took in
that incredible face one last time: he was still like a Caravaggio painting,
but not Victorious Cupid; no, he was now like the Milanese master's
self-portait as Bacchus: startled and startling; green; enervated, with blue
veins and bloodless lips. He looked at me briefly with blank hostility,
swore once again and clutched the six-pack of lager closer to his chest. I
stood back to let him pass and he walked unsteadily out, murmuring an insult
in a West Indian accent, then got into the passenger seat of a car which was
playing dance music at top volume and which immediately sped off with the
obligatory squeal of tires.
I walked out and watched the car disappear up Croydon Road. Then went back
in the shop and bought a newspaper. The old lady behind the counter sucked
at her false teeth and said: 'he didn't look at all well, did he?'
'No,' I answered and went to the pub, where I reflected that if we had
recognised each other, and had spoken, then I would have invited him to the
pub for a drink, and would have laughed--or hoped to laugh--as we used to.
(C)GARRETT 05
make up and be friendly' fashion.
Victorious Cupid
by Nick Garrett
Back in those far off, febrile days-I'm talking about back when Ecstasy was
an event in people's lives and they stayed on orange juice for the evening
in honour of it; when the Conservative Party were busy closing hospitals and
cooking up an appetite for New Labour; when it was still novel--if you were
white--to have dreadlocks; when dance music was the counterculture; when
celtic tattoos and cock piercings were talking points; when you didn't go
out till ten pm on the weekend and didn't come back till ten am and had
medicatory half-toots to land one's mental plane; when all the serious
people you knew were on Prozac and digging a new band called Radiohead; when
you went to work stoned and came home stoned and were double stoned at the
weekend and triple stoned at Christmas, and insane at New Year's- yeah, back
then, there was a digging-it little bar on the south side of Croydon; a bar
which was in fact a pub and old pub at that; anyone who had the merest touch
of the avant-garde about them hung there: the spangled tripsters; the
dreadlocks-with-silverfish uni' slummers; the dealers; the sorter-outers;
the art students; the psychos; the musos; the giro-surfers; the tea-leaf
mountebanks; the smackheads with the stolen trainers and the skunk for sale
(yeah, back when skunk was a novelty); the young drunks; the old drunks; the
piss-themselves-standing-up drunks; the-what-are-you-looking-at drunks; the
pull-the-pissoir-off-the-wall drunks; and fifty-seven varieties of goth.
This pub was called something traditional; but we all knew it by the name
Interzone, for obvious reasons.
It was here, one sunny June afternoon, that I met Danny Boast- an event
which changed my life.
In those days there was a habit--you couldn't call it a tradition-- among
the Interzone demi-monde of spending the Saturday lunchtime and afternoon in
the pub, drinking off the excesses of Friday night and swapping the previous
evening's war stories; as well as making plans for the evening while
browsing the bountiful drug market that flourished there under the wise
monkey of a landlord. We quaintly called it Luncheon.
It was my lugubrious friend Mash, who knew everyone through his speed and
pills franchise, that introduced me to Danny. It was a good time to meet
someone like Danny: I was young, and able to service half a dozen hangovers
a week without looking like Toad of Toad Hall.
I was sitting at the bar with a pounding headache, my cigarettes set out;
my tartan trousers on; my dyed hair smelling of conditioner; my leather
jacket on the stool underneath my arse. Mash came walking along from the
toilet with his sleeves rolled up further than usual, the better to show off
a tattoo of a wizard in green ink he'd just had done.
'You wanna meet this bloke over here,' he said; 'he's a fucking riot.'
So we were introduced. Danny was a few years older than me; say twenty-six
or twenty seven, and he looked good- like a pop star: he had just the right
crazy hair, with sensuous red lips and white teeth, just-so cheekbones and a
thirty-inch waist around which sat distressed, perfect fit, flared denims-
he had the lot in fact. Years later I when I saw a reproduction of
Caravaggio's 'Victorious Cupid', I saw something of Danny Boast laughing
back at me.
'Like the trousers,' he said. And we began a conversation. Nobody sitting
around the table could get a word in from then on- we talked quickly; we
made a swift reconnaissance of each other. Without making explicit what was
implicit, we recognised ourselves as being good-looking young men, we
belonged to that genus; the question was, what else were we? For two hours
we laughed and talked: impersonations of well-known people; absurdist
digressions that fused opposing ends of pop culture and had us and those
around us laughing to tears; well-rehearsed performances of famous comedy
moments; rock and roll anecdotes we'd read in the music press. We touched
lightly on art and literature-we clocked each other's references with
approval: in his coat pocket he had a dog-eared copy of Gravity's Rainbow;
in my pocket I had a CD of Exile on Main Street (I never went anywhere
without it in those days- in case I stumbled into a party). During a lull,
when a round of drinks were being bought, he invited me outside for a
spliff.
We stood in an alley and looked good. I said that we should be on the cover
of an LP.
'Come and see my band tomorrow night if you want,' he said casually, in his
piping, classless voice as I dragged on his perfectly rolled joint. He
departed soon after and I was left with Mash and the others, feeling
slightly bereft. Later that night I got off with a gothic Russian girl who
sang Abba songs in Georgian, and who it transpired would accept, but not
perform, fellatio.
*
The next evening I swallowed a sixteenth of hash, played Tutti Frutti by
the MC5 very loudly, then locked my bedsit up and made for the Moonbeam
Club, a crumbling music venue in a decrepit part of the town, where the
dominant economic activity was ethnic cuisine and minicab hire. Mash was
there with a girl he'd met the night before; they were both coming down off
speed and so talked incessantly and looked drawn, with glittering,
tubercular eyes. I drank lager, ate some more hash and enjoyed my buzz.
Danny was marvellous. After two laughable heavy metal bands, he came out
with his band--a drummer and a bassist--and played with verve and energy.
The songs had melody and wit; it seemed he belonged to some other caste of
musician almost, like some sixties demigod; to me he appeared a breed apart
from the petulant metallers and fey singer-songwriters. This was a Bowie;
this was fame-in-waiting. He was no virtuoso guitar player, but he had the
moves and the charisma and the songs, I thought, were classics- English rock
and roll: something not quite definable but know-it-when-you-see-it.
Afterwards, when the main act (a sort of Woolworth's version of Ozric
Tentacles) was on, he came over, shining with sweat.
'What did you think of that?'
'Fucking brilliant, mate.'
He smiled and I said something about the previous acts that made him laugh
uproariously. Then I bought him a drink. He was high on his performance but
keen to talk and we picked up the conversation we'd had the previous day and
continued it till closing time.
Afterwards, waiting for a bus and both drunk, he ate chips with his guitar
case leaning against him.
'I want to get out of this fucking town,' he said.
'So do I,' I said; 'I mean I really do.'
'When I get my record contract,' he chuckled, 'I'm going drive around this
town, spitting at people.'
We both laughed. The bus never came and so we walked along, admiring the
June moon, which was wrapped in a hazy smear of Naples Yellow. Somewhere
along the way he put his arm round me and unzipped his flies.
'Do you want it?' he asked, in such an ordinary, unaffected voice he might
have been offering me a spare sausage from a fried breakfast; 'because
everyone else does.'
I laughed and said I didn't, and I didn't. But I was more than half in love
with Danny Boast.
*
Over the summer we went out a lot and drank a lot. I saw less of Mash.
Danny's girlfriend appeared; she was a beautiful French-looking welfare
state courtesan called Dina, who dressed in leathers and wasn't fond of
washing. I met lots of people and went to even more parties than usual.
Danny played gigs around London and Dina and I always watched from the edge
of the stage, pinged up on coke and vodka. We contemplated the refulgent
midnight stars on acid at barbecues and parties and speculated on creation;
we danced to the buzzcocks down at the Interzone until we fell over; we
spent luminous evenings on the balcony at Danny's flat dreamily discussing
and playing records; a couple of times we shared Dina: rolling around in a
cannabinoid saturnalia while John Coltrane abstracted to beautiful insanity
on the crappy record player in the next room. Danny had it all down pat: we
agreed on everything: politics was bollocks; what we needed was a
revolution- and you never ate anything with a face. It all fitted: 'the
family's where it all goes wrong,' he'd say,' kids should be farmed out to
gay collectives- they're the only ones who know anything about compassion.
Dope should be legalized and the monarchy executed; all wealth divided up by
force and given back to Africa, where we fucking nicked it from.' Apart from
a handful of musicians, western culture was redundant and white men were
mostly 'repressed gays who can't dance and no nothing of style.' I applauded
all this loudly.
I still didn't know much about him or his past. One evening I happened to
ask him what his father did. He frowned.
'Does it matter?'
Come on,' I said sarcastically, 'we're English dontcha know.'
'He's dead,' he answered flatly; 'what does your's do?'
His brown Carravagio eyes glared briefly in reproval.
'I'm sorry,' I said in a hollow voice.
'No worries. What does your old man do?' he asked.
'Works in a factory.'
'Bring on the revolution!' he yelled with a grin.
'These fuckers don't know quality,' he said with his trademark grin a few
weeks later after playing a gig to a somnulent, hash-pacified, sunday
evening audience at the Moonbeam. He had a residency there now and swept
round the place like a pasha who shopped in Carnaby Street. Always
half-drunk and contemptuous off all rules and regulations, people gravitated
to him, dilated and blinking, offering intoxication or conjugation or both;
but he kept us, Dina and me, as his inner circle; even the band didn't get
close- we both felt quietly pleased with this arrangement.
It was without doubt the best summer I'd ever had. As Shakespeare notes,
there's a tide in the affairs of men that must be taken at the flood, and I
knew I was finally on that swell; riding out of the harbour, under a
colourful flag and a glorious sun.
Topping each other's gags, shooting pool in the Interzone, pulling birds
behind Dina's back (she would disappear from time to time and not be seen
for weeks) and staying high for weeks at a time, we knew we were the ne plus
ultra of rock and roll; I got got the sack at work but it didn't stop me; I
blithely signed on and relished more free time to practise the guitar.
'Suburbia,' said Danny as he gunshot-potted a red and watched the white
ball kiss another one in on the recoil, at the Interzone pool table one
afternoon, 'is a mire we must escape. We must dispose ourselves from this
bondage; this roosting place of polyester and nylon; this charnel house of
sensibility; we must escape.'
He came round the pool table, carrying his cue like a light sabre, and went
down on one knee: 'join my band,' he said in the manner of a devout
clergyman.
It was the happiest moment of my life.
*
For me, the first gig at the Moonbeam that autumn--we were headlining-- was
like playing Shea Stadium in 1965; all our friends had turned out; beer
flowed and drugs were distributed; people whooped and yelled righteously
long before we gained the stage. Danny and I stood at the bar laughing
easily at everything, receiving our friends with papal munificence as they
arrived and talking about the A and R man he had lined up.
We were going to be famous and we knew it; everyone knew us and we were hip-
we had the moves; we'd copped the licks: it was all symmetrical now, I could
see it; this was destiny: I thought of myself at eight years' old, grooving
with a wooden tennis racket and strumming the Ward Lock Junior Encyclopaedia
to Ghost Riders in the Sky and knew, knew that this was my destiny.
We did a series of shit-kicking gigs round the circuit on a vapour trail of
pills and spliffs- Danny had a following by then; we met the A and R man,
who seemed to like us, and at a cut price studio near Streatham we cut a
demo which Danny disappeared to London with. When the payphone outside my
bedsit rang late at night, I'd hurry out and knew who'd be on the other end
of the line.
'You better be ready when the shit goes down,' he'd slur; ''cos will you be
able to handle going to work in a helicopter?'
I'd ask him if he had any news but he would depose this by telling the
location of the next gig and the time of the next rehearsal.
'Might be getting a gig at some festival,' he would say. I would ask him
where he was but he he'd just say 'business' enigmatically, and then deliver
the usual sign off: 'laters.'
I'd heard nothing from him for two or three weeks after a gig in Soho, when
he reappeared at the Interzone during a thunderstorm on a Friday night. He
was smiling in a way I rarely saw; smiling with closed eyes and closed
mouth; serene, beautific, convinced that the universe was unfolding just as
he expected.
'We're going to be signed,' he said; then he whooped. We whooped too. He
explained that the A and R man was delighted with demo and was proposing a
recording and publishing deal.
'We need to celebrate- I've got no money though,' he said, shaking rainwater
off his stylishly ragged clothes.
'You'll have it soon enough,' I said and he grinned, like Carravaggio's
defiantly realistic cherub; 'besides,' I said, 'I've got some dough.'
And so we began a long weekend of booze and braggadocio and borrowed money;
we punched the air, we snogged for laughs; we mimed sword fights in pubs and
screamed down the the phone for our friends to join us. We ticked three
grams of coke off Mash. It seemed that Paradise, or the gates thereof, was
in sight.
*
We celebrated for what seemed like weeks. My confidence went from strength
to strength. We cavorted through the pubs- lines to ping us up; joints to
level off- the usual. We found ourselves telling the story again and again,
subtly bringing it into conversations where subtlety was required, and
rolling it in like a hand-grenade where the moment seemed right. Whenever we
ran out of money, we simply borrowed some more from somewhere. We'd done it
you see. We were about to exit the workaday world- the world of baked beans
and walking to work; the dreary ululations of police cars, boom boxes and
the weary threnody and martial blare of television- we were about to slip
the leash.
Not much happened in December. I got into rent arrears, did a moonlight flit
and moved in at Danny's after Christmas. The record deal wasn't discussed
much and Danny said he was looking for a lawyer to proof the contract. Dina
was in one of her depressions and kept to the bedroom. I stayed in my room
and smoked grass, screwed a variety of women and wrote songs.
One day when I was alone in the flat I got up in the afternoon and found a
well-dressed man of about seventy sitting in the lounge. Taken aback, I
asked him what he wanted.
'What do I want?' he asked imperiously; 'I want to see what I'm getting for
my money; or rather what my son is getting for my money.'
I made him tea and was courteous and he became talkative on the strength of
it. He lived in Oxfordshire in some style (' the minstrels gallery appeared
in Country Life some years ago') and had been a successful stockbroker. He
mentioned Danny's 'music nonsense'. I never told Danny about his visit.
*
One afternoon I heard Danny coming up the stairs and I leapt out of bed,
grabbed my white stratocaster and hurried into the kitchen. Danny was by the
sink.
'Listen to this- I've been working on a riff,' I said, concentrating on the
neck of the guitar. Danny didn't turn round; he was muttering something.
'Danny?' I said, looking up.
He turned quickly and threw a plate against the wall behind me. It smashed
and the slivers hit the back of my head. I jumped with shock. His face was
scowling. I'd never seen him look like that before.
'Can't anyone,' he said in a seething, malicious tone, 'in this fucking dump
tidy their mess up?'
His teeth were clenched together. He swore violently and began a long
diatribe about washing up. He started to lift the dirty plates out of the
sink and smash them on the floor whilst keeping up the diatribe through
clenched teeth about how filthy the flat was. Then he pushed past me with
great force and stormed out of the flat.
*
I didn't know what to think. I went back to the bedroom in a state of
shock- we'd never had a cross word before. I sat down on the edge of the bed
and absently played a blues figure on the guitar. The thing that was hard to
understand was why he was making a fuss about the mess: he never did any
tidying up and I'd never seen the flat in anything other than a mess.
Things remained frosty at the next band rehearshal two days later and I
made mistakes that I didn't usually make. At the end, Danny turned to me and
said: 'you're so crap at everything you do really, aren't you?'
At the flat the atmosphere of festivity had frozen to silent cohabitation.
For a few weeks he went out early and came back late.
One bitterly cold night at the beginning of February he came back at about
nine pm and called me into the sitting room. He poured us glasses of bourbon
and stood in front of the old gas fire. I sat on the threadbare settee. He
threw a fat sheaf of papers at me.
'That's the contract. Signed it this morning.'
'Nice one,' I said, scanning uncompehendingly many pages of closely typed
legalese; 'where do I sign?'
'You don't mate. Look, there's no easy way of saying this, so I'm saying it
straight: you're out. And I want you out of this flat as well. Sorry and all
that.but you've never really been up to snuff and the A and R man-'
'You *what*?' I said.
'C'mon,' he said squatting down, like, it suddenly struck me, an old time
policeman talking to a lost child, 'you must have known what was in the
wind. You're looker and a rocker mate, but it just wasn't working with my
band. You've had a go on the merry-go-round though- and that's more than
most people get.'
Although I was shocked I was acutely aware of something in his voice;
something quite apart from the obvious condescension; some little pitch in
tone that told me he was enjoying this. I suddenly realised I was also close
to tears.
He stood up and looked out of the window at the hundreds of tiny glowing
windows in the distance.
'You see,' he said; 'those suckers down there-'
'What, the ones you're fighting the revolution for?'
He turned and raised an eyebrow. 'Yes, if you want to put it like that.
Those suckers down there never get a ride on the merry-go-round, they don't
even get a sniff; they're too busy buying trainers on credit cards- or
nicking them.'
'What are you going to spend your money on, then?'
He looked around, 'a decent place to live- and by the way, you owe me some
rent.'
'I'll send it to Oxfordshire.'
'Who told you about that?' he asked with a sort of indignant giggle. ' Did
that bitch in there?' he said moving towards their bedroom door and
bellowing the last words of the sentence.
'Leave her alone,' I said. This led to a series of typical verbal
provocations which ended with us snarling in each other's faces.
'You're a cunt,' I said flatly and predictably, though it was enough to
start the fight. He hit me and I hit him and we fell to the dusty carpet
hitting, swiping and kicking at each other viciously: the television was
knocked over; ashtrays, glasses smashed; empty wine bottles rolled. Even
though it was painful and desperate and I felt murderous rage, it was also a
relief, like a sort of hate fuck; but funny with it: we were trying to
headbutt each other whilst rolling around.
The bedroom door opened and Dina came out; I could see she wasn't alarmed-
she looked as if she'd come in to watch a bit of television. She sat on the
end of the settee and lit a cigarette. Suddenly we broke apart and Danny
managed to get to his feet and began to kick me in the head and ribs; I was
shouting at the top of my voice and threw the bottle of bourbon at him-it
missed and bounced off the wall unbroken Then I rolled into a ball.
Eventually the kicking stopped. We were both panting. Danny picked the
contract up and walked out the flat. I uncurled and lay on the floor staring
at the ceiling, suddenly aware that my nose was bleeding heavily and that
rain was falling heavily against the windows.
'Pour me a drink, Dina,' I said, rolling my tongue around my throbbing jaw,
checking for broken teeth.
'Poor boy,' she said as she picked up the bottle and poured some bourbon
into a dirty glass before handing it to me; 'I should have said something I
suppose. But why should I intervene in his little love affairs? If you love
Danny, you have to take the kicking sooner or later.' At this she lifted up
the baggy shirt she was wearing to reveal storm clouds of ugly bruises
underneath her breasts. 'You have to take the kicking,' she repeated. She
shrugged and rolled her eyes in a continental way she had, then lit another
cigarette. 'It's been coming a while for you. I knew a bad time was coming.
They come and go- he was bad last summer: I went and stayed at home for a
while and another time in hospital-' she pulled the sleeve up on both her
arms, revealing huge red scars '-he poured a kettle of boiling water over
it.'
I sipped at the bourbon but choked on it.
*
Several winters passed. I'd moved up to a tatty area near Brixton, where
Mash had invested his drug profits in renting a house and growing skunk in
the loft. I worked in a lowly position for the Ministry of Agriculture,
filling out forms. I'd turned thirty and given up on drinking in the
Interzone and never went to the Moonbeam from year's end to year's end. I'd
filled out a bit and grown an extensive beard and now spent a lot of
evenings reading and puffing in the box room Mash was sub-letting me. Very
occasionally I heard things about Danny: that he'd made the album for the
record company; that indifferent reviews of it and some gigs his band had
played had appeared in the NME; that he was taking heroin. Someone they
thought they'd seen him drunk and busking at Piccadilly Underground Station;
someone else said he'd died in Prague after falling out of a window.
Some nights I'd go to the pub on the corner- an old fashioned,
toby-jug-of-Churchill type place where the lights through the windows look
welcoming and you could usually read the evening paper in peace. As I was
going in the door of the corner shop for a newspaper one evening at dusk,
Danny was coming out. We collided. Our eyes met but he didn't recognise me,
or didn't seem to recognise me. He gave me a sour glance and swore--he was
obviously very drunk and in those seconds we viewed each other I took in
that incredible face one last time: he was still like a Caravaggio painting,
but not Victorious Cupid; no, he was now like the Milanese master's
self-portait as Bacchus: startled and startling; green; enervated, with blue
veins and bloodless lips. He looked at me briefly with blank hostility,
swore once again and clutched the six-pack of lager closer to his chest. I
stood back to let him pass and he walked unsteadily out, murmuring an insult
in a West Indian accent, then got into the passenger seat of a car which was
playing dance music at top volume and which immediately sped off with the
obligatory squeal of tires.
I walked out and watched the car disappear up Croydon Road. Then went back
in the shop and bought a newspaper. The old lady behind the counter sucked
at her false teeth and said: 'he didn't look at all well, did he?'
'No,' I answered and went to the pub, where I reflected that if we had
recognised each other, and had spoken, then I would have invited him to the
pub for a drink, and would have laughed--or hoped to laugh--as we used to.
(C)GARRETT 05