Come Dance With Me

by Russell Hoban

  Sid Horstmann was wrong for me but I was with him long enough for him to kill himself. Why did I take up with him? Working together and travelling together made it easier of course and he had had a sort of doomed air that attracted me. Did I think I could save him from whatever he was heading for? I know now that you can’t save anybody. He had a lot of talent and he wrote some good songs but he had black moods and fits of depression that weren’t helped by his drinking. Maybe I helped him over that balcony railing by getting bored with his need for special treatment. It would have been better for both of us if I’d said no the first time he wanted to get a leg over.

  My night with Adam was in 1988. In 1990 Mobile Mortuary were back in Vienna and Sayings of Confucius were our support band again. Adam wasn’t with them. ‘He’s dead,’ they told me. ‘We were in Hamburg setting up for a gig at Onkel Po’s Carnegie Hall and the light rig fell on him.’ So he wasn’t married any more but he wasn’t available. When Django was three I told him about it and some time after that he showed me a drawing of a man. It was done the way little kids draw people, a big head with arms and legs growing out of it. Big smile on the man’s face and he was holding a guitar.

  ‘Who’s that?’ I said.

  Django said, ‘Dad. He played me a song.’

  ‘In a dream?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Do you remember how it went?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Can you hum it?’

  So he hummed ‘Nuages’. He’d heard me play it often and he had a good ear. Django’s coffin was made on Maui by Rudy Ka’uhane, a local craftsman. On the lid he lettered:

  O winds, winds of Waipio,

  In the calabash of Kaleiioku,

  Come from the ipu-makani!

  O wind, the wind of Hilo,

  Come quickly, come with power!

  ‘This is the kite-flying song of the demigod Maui,’ said Rudy. ‘Now the soul of your son flies like a kite and the string is in your hand.’

  When I got to Honolulu my flight home wasn’t due to leave until next morning. In the airport the part of my brain that makes sense of what the eyes see didn’t seem to be working, all the colours weren’t any colour and the shapes wouldn’t stay the same. Hello darkness, I thought, but there wasn’t any proper darkness either. I breathed in the ghosts of long-gone burgers and fries and when I went to the ladies’ the air freshener smelled like Juicy Fruit. I wasn’t hungry but I felt like eating so I had a couple of spring rolls at the Fresh Express cafeteria. There were neon signs in English and Japanese and the spring rolls probably had some flavour but I didn’t know what it was.

  I spent the night at the Mini Hotel Sleep/Shower in the airport. It was like a cell for a monk, very quiet and away from everything. The bedsteads were iron, the blankets were thin and grey like prison blankets, the towels were only a little thicker than the toilet paper, but that monk’s cell of a room kept all the bits of me from flying apart. It held me together until the coffin and I were on the plane. Lying in that narrow iron bed I kept thinking that Django would always be a child, he’d never know what it was to have a woman. Because I had to see humpback whales.

  I did the necessary paperwork to get the coffin on the plane and eventually Django and I took off for home. I had an aisle seat next to a young German couple. She was about six months’ pregnant, a big sturdy girl like the one in the Schiele painting. He was also large, and both of them had blue eyes and fair hair. He put his hand on her belly and they smiled at each other, then at me. I smiled back and said, ‘Viel Gluck’

  ‘Sprechen sie Deutsche said the man.

  ‘No,’ I said, ‘just the odd word.’ I put on my headset and went from one channel to another until I found a male voice with female backing singing:

  I’ll be waiting on the far side bank of Jordan,

  I’ll be waiting, drawing pictures in the sand,

  And when I see you coming I will rise up with a shout,

  And come running through the shallow waters, reaching for your hand.

  I felt tears rolling down my face and saw the young couple watching me and looking concerned. I tapped the headset and said, ‘The music.’ They nodded and smiled, feeling sorry for me. Their child would probably be a large boy with fair hair and blue eyes. All being well, he’d be almost ten now. I imagined him having a kickabout with his father, could hear the sound of the ball being kicked and their laughter. All being well.

  OK, I’m back in the present now. One of the songs we’ll be doing tonight, ‘Birdshit on Your Statue’, was written by Jimmy Wicks soon after we came back from Vienna in 1988:

  Up so high you used to be,

  used to be, used to be —

  Way too high for guys like me,

  Used to be, oh used to be

  Like a statue far above,

  Much too high to ever love

  Guys like me, you used to be.

  But now I see, yes now I see,

  Now I’m noticing that you’

  V’got birdshit on your high statue,

  What a shame, oh what a shame,

  Is it pigeons we should blame?

  Birdshit on your statue,

  What a shame!

  Jimmy’s tune for that song and his slide guitar were very snaky, quite vicious. ‘Did you have a particular statue in mind?’ I asked him.

  ‘Well, you know,’ he said, ‘if the birdshit fits …’

  I just let that lie, I didn’t really want to get into it with him. He’s always wanted to move on me but while he and Tracy were together he couldn’t quite work himself up to it, and now that I’m with Elias he’s having difficulty handling it. He’s been seeing me so much from his point of view that he’s never read my total lack of interest in him other than as a colleague. Come to think of it, did I ever read Sid right and did he read me right? The world is full of emotional dyslexics.

  Elias Newman, does he want to be a new man for himself and can he be it? And is he the right new man for me? I really wouldn’t mind not seeing him for a few days.

  14

  Elias Newman

  24 January 2003. The Mobile Mortuary concert didn’t start until eight o’clock, so it was already dark when I boarded the 295. This bus turns off Lillie Road into Fulham Palace Road on the way to the Hammersmith Apollo. It used to be the Hammersmith Odeon and is now the Carling Hammersmith Apollo. In the phone book it’s found under Carling, not Hammersmith. More and more things are under something they didn’t use to be under. Beer are the snows of yesteryear.

  Once in Fulham Palace Road the 295 unrolled fewer and fewer English shop fronts and more and more multicultural ones. I know that xenophobia dare not speak its name in intellectual circles but I liked it better when the chippies outnumbered the halal. Proceeding grottywise past Charing Cross Hospital and whatever was opposite we arrived by lamplight at the Hammersmith Whatever. Why was I feeling so … negative? I’m not a negative sort of person.

  Even at night the sky was light enough to show the black loom of the Hammersmith Flyover. It was on the right of an inverted triangle of sky, on the left of which stood the other-century red-brick angularity of College Court, complete with a witch’s hat atop its corner.

  The forecourt was crowded with an interesting mix of people and a couple of ticket touts whose hyperactivity made them seem ten or more. As this was January, T-shirts were mostly covered by jackets and coats but the bits I saw intrigued me. VE WA was among a group of dangerous-looking men in biker’s leathers. T IN M appeared more than once in a patently middle-class cluster. There were young women and some not so young, all in black and sporting white faces, black lipstick, black eye makeup and long lank hair. There were young men in Transylvanian couture and a variety of gothic quiffs. In all of these categories there were some of a grandparent persuasion and the whole demographic aggregate milled about by lamplight, waiting for the doors to open. There was the usual crowd buzz but nothing very loud.

  On the front of the Hammersmith Apollo, topped by q
uasi-Cecil B. DeMille general-purpose pillars, was a very horizontal marquee that opposed the verticality of College Court and (due to the laws of perspective) the Hammersmith Flyover. MACCABEE ENTERPRISES & D.O.A. RECORDS PRESENT MOBILE MORTUARY, widely said the front.

  ‘Who the fuck is Maccabee?’ said one of the dangerous-looking men to another.

  ‘Jews,’ said his colleague.

  ‘Not Scotch?’ said Dangerous No. I.

  ‘Maccabee,’ said No. 2, ‘as in four-by-twos.’

  ‘Not Scotch?’ said No. I.

  ‘Yids,’ said No. 2. ‘Non-skids.’

  ‘Fuck,’ said No. I. ‘That’s the fucking last time I vote Labour.’

  ‘I should fucking hope so,’ said No. 2. ‘Remind me to give you some literature. It’ll open your fucking eyes.’

  At length the doors opened and we streamed in past the outer minders to the ticket takers in the lobby. There were several bars, a lot of darkness, two mirror-balls reflecting what light they could, and vendors selling T-shirts blazoned with the soles of two bare feet, with a tag that said MOBILE MORTUARY on the left big toe. Also displayed were miniature body drawers containing individual members of the band, decently shrouded up to the shoulders. There were posters in several designs, CDs and videos. Refreshments were available as well.

  The miniature Christabel startled me; that I was intimate with a woman who was replicated in this way was unsettling. I looked around me, doing a memory rewind to check that I had come to this by steps that were impulsive but not incomprehensible; all of those steps had been taken because of my belief in a connection that was there before we met and that connection had brought me to the Hammersmith Apollo tonight.

  Jackets were more open now and I noted a fair number that said NOT IN MY NAME and WAR IS NOT THE ANSWER. Also present, along with the dangerous men, were a substantial number of enthusiasts whose haircuts suggested that they thought war was the answer. The VE WA T-shirt I’d seen before now revealed itself as GIVE WAR A CHANCE. I was made aware, not for the first time, that I was not fully engaged with the world. Certainly I didn’t think war with Iraq was a good idea but I’d come here tonight to see and hear Mobile Mortuary and I wasn’t expecting David Dimbleby and a discussion on the international situation.

  Looking up from where I stood I saw that the lobby was at the bottom of a kind of atrium at the top of which were several tiers of pinkness below the pink ceiling. The stairs on my left offered CIRCLE and LICENSED BAR. Before going up I asked one of the ticket takers if there was a support band.

  ‘Fathoms,’ he said.

  ‘Deep?’

  ‘No idea. Next!’

  I went up the stairs, gave the licensed bar a miss, and went directly to my seat in the first row of the circle.

  I had a good view of the stage where there was no action as yet. The only light was from some art deco ceiling fixtures. The audience murmured, coughed, and shifted in their seats for quite a long time. I had no one to murmur to until the middle-aged man on my left took off his jacket and revealed a T-shirt that said ANAPAESTS FOR PEACE. When he saw me reading it he smiled and said, ‘De-de-dum?’

  ‘I don’t think so,’ I said.

  ‘Iambic is the martial metre,’ he said: ‘“The king with half the East at heel is marched from lands of morning …”’

  ”’Beware the Jabberwock, my son The jaws that bite, the claws that catch!…”’ said the young man on my right, one of the dangerous types I had noticed earlier. He took off his leather jacket and aimed GIVE WAR A CHANCE at the anapaest man who shook his head but said nothing.

  After a while there were green and blue-green lights on the stage and a projection of water patterns on a screen. The lighting was dim and I couldn’t be sure how many performers constituted Fathoms. They were so close together that they became a single unit from which radiated tentacles of blue light. Their music was very low-frequency and was felt as much as heard, grinding its way up from the bottom of the sea. Their song or chant or whatever was something growled and gutturalised almost below the hearing threshold. The refrain seemed to be, ‘Nnvsnu tsrungh, nnvsnu nngh, nnvsnu rrndu ts’irnh ts’irnh ts’irnh nngrh.’

  This was repeated over and over until it filled my mind and I began to feel very deep, very dark, with billions of tons of water bearing down on me. I must have fallen asleep and missed their other numbers, because what I saw next were green, blue, and purple lights playing over clouds of mist rising from the stage. Under a blaze of white light a wall of body drawers appeared, the lighting became a great deal more so, the body drawers slid out and the band emerged from them. There was a blast of many decibels from which Jimmy Wicks separated himself to address the audience. ‘Hi!’ he said.

  ‘Hi!’ said the crowd with whoops and whistles.

  ‘This is a time,’ said Jimmy, ‘when it’s hard to know what it is and what it isn’t. So we’re going to open with a song for this time: “Did It Wasn’t?”.’ The band went into the intro and Christabel picked up the microphone and sang:

  Did it wasn’t, did it was?

  Did we walking in the wasn’t,

  did we strolling in the park?

  Did we wasn’t in the isn’t,

  did we dancing in the dark?

  Did it always, did it never have to

  did it was for ever?

  Did it will or did it won’t,

  did it do or did it don’t?

  Did it ever come out straight?

  Did it always was too late?

  Am I fuzzy, is there fuzz?

  Did it wasn’t, did it was?

  When she had only begun the song there were cigarette lighters flaring in the audience and some attempt from the crowd at a backing vocal at varying distances from the beat, rather like the way I used to sing in Music class in elementary school when I followed the lead of the girl in front of me who could read music. I couldn’t. I had no trouble with ‘A Spanish Cavalier’ and ‘Juanita’ and other schoolroom standards in Morning Exercises but in Music class Miss Schwer was constantly breaking new ground with notes that had to be read. I digress.

  The cigarette-lighter bearers were peaceful enough but at this point some of the militant haircuts exposed more GIVE WAR A CHANCE T-shirts; pushing and shoving took place as scuffles broke out. Security people and cooler haircuts quickly prevailed and Christabel finished the song uninterrupted.

  The next number was ‘Birdshit on Your Statue’. Christabel and the band were only a few bars into this when the middle-aged and bespectacled anapaest devotee next to me rose to his feet and shouted, ‘Hear that, Blair! ‘You beware!’ Not surprisingly, this aroused a young haircut to his left whose T-shirt flashed, PEACE IS A 4-LETTER WORD.

  ‘You watch it, you bleeding-heart pacifist!’ he said.

  ‘You want war? said the bleeding heart, and kicked him in the shin with a non-prosodic foot. These two now squared off as various T-shirts became active elsewhere while the music was making the ground shake and the lights rotated their colours over the stage. The anapaestic chap turned out to be something of a milling cove, and in a short time had tapped the haircut’s claret. Once more into the breach!’ said the elderly one, lapsing into iambic in his excitement.

  ‘Have you got a handkerchief?’ I said to the young orthographer.

  ‘Bloody hell,’ he said, and produced one that had seen long service.

  ‘Hold it to your nose and tilt your head back,’ I said. ‘I don’t think we need to call an ambulance.’

  ‘That old bloke is a ringer,’ he said. ‘He come here looking for a fight.’

  ‘Politics not uncommonly leads to bloodshed,’ I said. ‘If you can’t stand the heat you should get out of the Hammersmith Apollo.’

  ‘You some kind of bleeding heart too?’ he said.

  ‘Probably. I’ll have to think about it.’

  While we were having this dialogue Christabel and the band finished ‘Birdshit’ to much applause and many cigarette lighters and launched into ‘No More World
’:

  When I dialled the speaking clock

  I got something of a shock —

  it said, ‘When you hear the pips

  would you kindly read my lips

  because the time will be exactly

  no more world …

  This of course provoked further confrontations among the T-shirts but a silence swallowed up the band and the audience as a great weariness overcame me and I sank deep, deep into a blueness that grew darker as I sank. Above me I saw naked Christabel sinking with me deep, deep, deep into the dark. Yes, I thought, it’s quiet here, quiet is good.

  Then I was back in the Hammersmith Apollo and the noise. I wasn’t sure I could stand up but I did, waving both arms while the people behind told me to sit down but I was unable to catch Christabel’s eye so I left without further attempts at communication. I made my way past the souvenirs without buying a Mobile Mortuary T-shirt and got out into the air where I just stood breathing in the carbon monoxide for a few moments. What was that all about? I asked myself. What was that with the blueness and the dark? I’m a doctor, for God’s sake, I don’t take drugs and I don’t hallucinate or go into altered states. On the other hand, maybe I’m unable to metabolise the blueness and the dark. But where were they coming from?

  I went to the Fulham Palace Road hoping for a taxi but there were none. Shortly a 295 bus appeared and I boarded it. The upper deck was crowded but I was able to rest one buttock next to a fat man who was enjoying a burger and fries out of a styrofoam container. I’ll probably see you in my clinic one of these days, I thought. The smell of the grease, the sounds of his eating and the oppression of his bulk soon became too much for me as the lights and colours and names and words on shop fronts blurred past. I got off at Dawes Road and walked the rest of the way home, not bothering to hail the several cabs that passed me. The T-shirts and voices of the audience were still with me and all of the opinions expressed, of whatever persuasion, seemed to me reasonable protests against a world that had gone ugly. War or no war didn’t make that much difference — the world was tired and ugly and would grow more tired and more ugly as time went on. And more and more people would turn to greasy burgers and fries, Cokes and candy bars and ice cream and come to my clinic in various stages of hyperglycaemia, obesity and cardiovascular distress.