I’d look across at Spider on the far side of the stage sometimes. When he wasn’t playing, he held the whistle down by his side and waited with his eyes closed for the moment to play. He used to beat his thigh with his whistle in a fist. He used to snap his knee back and forth, jerking his skinny body, making his head flick. Now, he hardly moved. He became lost and would turn from the microphone in puzzlement at how the song we were playing had got away from him. In the studio too, some songs seemed to be a phantasmagoria into which he would step, full of purpose, only to realise in a couple of minutes that he was lost. He would stop where he was, take the whistle out of his mouth, and would shout out petulantly:
‘Hey!’
Shane’s alcoholism was a more intricate concern. Shane’s condition was somehow innate, intrinsic to the subject matter and imagery in his songs, and consequently more worthy of attention. Shane’s drinking was a more venerable enterprise, a swath cut by the likes of such writers as Brendan Behan and Dylan Thomas, not to mention Faulkner, Chandler, Fitzgerald and O’Neill. Shane’s drinking came with the job. More and more the question on people’s lips was whether Shane wrote so beautifully because of the amount he drank, or despite it.
In comparison to Shane’s alcoholism, Spider’s drinking seemed uncomplicated, and somehow temporary. It seemed to be performed with such irony that it drew us into a conspiracy of denial with him. It was so self-conscious that it distracted him and us from the addiction to which he was already committed. Because he made such a fuss about drinking, I had to assume that he knew what he was doing.
Spider’s need for attention made matters worse. The more he sought it, the more we ignored him. The more we ignored him, the more he seemed to seek our attention. In the end some fucked-up covenant seemed to have been reached. His prating became background noise which we ended up tuning out. We dismissed Spider’s musical contribution to the group. He aided and abetted us by sloping off to the pub when the process of extracting the songs from Shane became too boring for him.
The meeting closed with nothing decided. In a case of the medium obscuring the message, Cait’s blundering artlessness prevented us from hearing what she had to say.
The first gig of our revisit to the United States was in Washington DC. At the hotel, after handing out A4-size itineraries, bound in black with a window in the cover, Frank distributed per diems. Both were such a novelty that I thanked him for the money, forgetting that it was actually ours. The following morning Jem, Andrew, Darryl and I had to go to the bank to get change for the hundred-dollar bills Frank had given us, indignant that the teller should charge for the service, and then to the post office where we sent money and our itineraries home to our families and the girlfriends we had left behind.
Once we were outside, Jem raised his face to the sunlight.
‘It’s beautiful,’ Jem said. The sky was pellucid. The trees seemed to have been scored into the blue of the sky. The new growth on the branches was incandescent. The white-painted eaves in the neighbourhood were blinding.
Otherwise, after that, once the tour started, things were different. On the road, intersection after filthy intersection went by, the paving broken and the grass blackened. In the used car lots, the windscreens were blind with dust, the prices daubed with tennis shoe whitener. Everywhere were boarded-up windows and stores gone out of business.
Outside the window of my and Philip’s room in Philadelphia, day and night, a queue trailed round the corner under an overhang. Men and women in filthy parkas or wrapped in blankets stood against the wall shuffling forward every now and then. One of the runners who plied between the venue and the hotel took a couple of us on a diversion through the African-American area of one of the towns. Couch grass covered mangy front yards and grew from the tops of street signs and in the gutters. Siding hung away from the houses. Stretches of rent chicken-wire clung to rusty poles. Fires made of railway sleepers burned, while men and dogs stood around and people sat on porch steps with their forearms on their knees.
*
During the furlough enforced by Shane’s injury, I had welcomed the respite from Philip’s ritual nightly, and bristly, embrace. During the tour of France I had occasionally managed to avoid it by staying out late or not coming back to the hotel at all or through the fluke of getting the single room. In Washington the ritual had looked like resuming. I held out. In Philadelphia a few minutes after we’d turned the lights out his bed erupted in a turmoil of rustling and thrashing.
‘FUCK!’ he shouted.
‘What the fuck’s the matter with you?’ I said.
‘I can’t sleep!’ he cried.
‘You want to know how to get to sleep?’ I said. ‘You put your fucking head on the pillow and close your fucking eyes.’
‘Oh!’ he said. He fell silent. There followed a few moments of quiet before I thought I could hear laboured breathing. I lay in my bed and listened. The panting became more and more urgent until it sounded as if someone were going at a cinder with a set of fireplace bellows. I lay in the dark as he fought for breath, my mind veering back and forth from the possibility that it was a ruse.
‘I can’t breathe!’ he cried out into the dark. ‘I’m hyperventilating!’
All I knew about hyperventilation was that it was a symptom of panic attacks and that breathing into a paper bag somehow helped. I found a bag for the disposal of sanitary napkins in the bathroom. Soon, after a few cycles of inflating and emptying it with my hand to his face and my arm round his shoulder, he calmed down. When I finally got to bed, I was exhausted and miserable.
After our gig at the City Gardens in Trenton on the Friday, we drove up to New York. The city was festive. The Puerto Rican Day Parade was in a week. Already, fleets of cars snapping with Puerto Rican flags sped through the streets of SoHo sowing firecrackers behind them as they went. I sought out Heather. She was just as ethereal and lovely as I remembered. I was chuffed to see taped to the wall of her apartment a promotional poster for Jim Beam whiskey, which read: ‘James is back!’
With a grim sheepishness though, she told me that she now had a boyfriend. They had been going out for a few weeks. I went out for a drink with them in the East Village. I went back to my hotel room on my own. For Debsey’s sake I was relieved. For my own I was heartsick.
The day of our gig at the Ritz in New York City, it was over the mundane matter of whether or not we were going to be late for our sound check that my relationship with Philip came to a head. My patience had worn so thin with him that his peremptory injunction to wait before leaving to go down to the gig resulted in a final explosion. I picked up my stuff and slammed the door behind me. I managed to hail a cab before he came out of the hotel.
The only person to talk to about the state I was in with Philip was Frank.
‘Why didn’t you come to me sooner?’ he said. ‘We’ll change the rooming list.’
I laughed at how simple the solution was. Without fuss, Frank put Philip in a room with Andrew. I went to share with P.V.
We left for New Haven in the evening after Argentina beat West Germany in the final of the World Cup. We hung out in a bar waiting for the minibuses to come. Heather came to see me off. She had left her boyfriend somewhere. Bill Rahmy came into the bar to usher us out to the Econoline which was parked out on the street. As Heather and I sat together on a wooden bench at the back of the bar we entered into prolonged kissing, her hand on my arm, my palm against her face. Caving in to Bill Rahmy’s entreaties, I left Heather in the bar and walked across with Spider to where Bill had parked the van.
‘Well,’ Spider said archly, ‘I wonder what Debsey’s going to say when I tell her you’ve been mashing face with a blonde Yank.’
‘What you don’t know can’t hurt you,’ I said. Before I knew it Jem had lunged across and had pinned me up against the side of the van.
‘You make me sick,’ he said. ‘Debsey is your girlfriend. She’s my friend. And Marcia’s too. The what you don’t know stuff makes me sick. Fuckin
g sick. I hope you have the courage to actually tell her what you’ve been doing in New York, though I suppose you won’t.’
Jem stood for a second with his arms stiff at his sides like a bulldog’s and then got into the van. Of all people, Jem’s esteem was the one I valued the most. Bill Rahmy’s huge arm round my shoulder could not assuage the doom I felt.
‘That was beautiful,’ Rahmy said. ‘That was one of the most beautiful things I ever saw.’
For the next few days I found myself listening to the Stones’ ‘Gimme Shelter’ over and over again on my headphones, loud. Such was the state I’d got myself into that the amp tremolo of the guitar tracing the song’s opening chords did nothing but herald ruin, and on an almost mythical scale. The second guitar, the high backing vocals, Charlie Watts’s syncopated drumming together with the rasp of the jawbone seemed hell-bent on turning the sunset into an apocalyptic cremation of my life. In the misery I was in over Heather and Debsey and Jem, when the low doomful piano chord sounded and when Watts smote the two snare drum beats and the cymbal on the downbeat of the next bar, and when the bass-line started up, and when Keith Richards’s cruel blues bent-note swooped down on a menacingly constrained vibrato, it was the sound of the end of the world coming.
I drank heavily. After gigs, I drank pint glasses of the cocktail one of us had invented from tequila and grapefruit juice, topped off with champagne, and which Jem had called the Time Wharf. Striking away the remaining pillars that held up my relationship with Debsey, instead of going back to the hotel, I went home with whoever would take me. After our show in New Haven, predictably enamoured of American cars and the highway, girls and booze, but full of Time Wharfs, I made the girl who picked me up give me the wheel and drive her back to her place in the woods. Her car – not the Oldsmobile Delta 88 or Buick Skylark I wanted it to be, but a Toyota Corona – veered across the lanes. My companion reached over to steer it between the lane markings.
In Montreal, I found myself with a Canadienne française who took me down to her place near the St Lawrence River. She kept horses and fed me strawberries on the bed in the spare room until we ended up eating them out of one another’s mouths.
Canada’s sallow landscape – mile on mile of sere grass and bleached fence-posts – drifted by as we followed the St Lawrence Seaway to Toronto and back into the United States.
On our way to Cleveland, we stopped at a liquor store. I bought some grapefruit juice and miniatures of Gusano Rojo mezcal. A curled bug the colour of old paper floated in each bottle. Before long we all had pockets and bags full. We continued on our way, skirting Lake Erie and through Buffalo.
Shane appeared from the back of the bus.
‘You supposed to eat the worm?’ he said.
‘Yes,’ Jem said.
In a while Shane returned. He stood in the doorway. His eyes swam in an attempt to focus. His head tilted this way and that, as if the lashings tying something down in it had come loose.
‘Got any more?’ he said.
‘You’ve had enough,’ I said.
‘Cunt,’ he replied.
There was a nautical theme to the bar we set up in that afternoon. A galleon with rigging and mast pitched in the middle of the room. In place of the deck was the front-of-house mixing desk. The gig we played was atrocious, interrupted by vomiting and mezcal-induced vertigo and memory loss. Philip was incapable of standing. A chair had to be found for him. Spider became entangled in a stook of microphone stands by the side of the stage. Shane filled a bucket with puke.
‘Jem’s fault!’ Shane said afterwards. ‘He told me to eat the worm!’
‘If Jem told you to eat your own shit, would you?’ Spider said. Shane looked at Spider, surprised.
‘Yes!’ he said.
*
Outside the window of the hotel room in Los Angeles stood an immense, cut-out hoarding of Arnold Schwarzenegger as the T-800 Series cyborg in Terminator. His frowning visage was clawed open on the right side to reveal his hyperalloy endoskeleton. A penetrating red eye stared into the room. Beyond him a lattice of streetlights receded, twinkling in horrific perspective. Whatever preconceptions I had about Los Angeles – as a palm-fronded playground for lovely-looking people – were swept away. The scale of the city behind the Austrian bodybuilder did me in.
On our way to Hollywood from the airport, P.V. had pointed out a place called Barney’s Beanery. Moments later we pulled up outside the Hyatt on Sunset. As was the custom, we had agreed to meet in the lobby in half an hour, to eat. As was the custom too, when I walked out of the lift, the soap-coloured lobby was empty – except for Shane, who was wandering about, seemingly lost.
‘You eating?’ I said.
‘Yeah,’ he said.
We waited a while for the others. In the end, exasperated and hungry, I suggested we just go to Barney’s Beanery ahead of everyone else.
‘You know where it is?’ he said. I didn’t but I reckoned it wouldn’t be too difficult to find.
‘Let’s get a taxi,’ he said.
‘Let’s walk,’ I said.
‘Walk?’ he said. He clawed his face at the idea. ‘This is fucking Los Angeles! No one fucking walks!’
My northern upbringing wouldn’t permit the wastefulness of getting a taxi to a place I knew was walkable.
‘I’m not getting a taxi,’ I said. ‘It’s just round the corner.’
‘Where round the corner?’
‘I don’t fucking know,’ I said. ‘Round the fucking corner. I saw it from the bus. We’ll ask someone.’
I was shocked that he consented to come out onto Sunset Boulevard.
For a city of fifteen million there were surprisingly few people about. The boulevard was awash with orange light. Cars went up and down the street, their tyres slapping on the joins in the concrete road surface. We walked a couple of hundred yards along the pavement. A black guy appeared on the street.
‘I’ll ask him,’ I said to Shane.
‘You don’t ask anyone in Los Angeles anything!’ he cried. ‘It’s Los Angeles! No one’s from here!’
I asked the guy where Barney’s Beanery was. He shrugged and walked on. On both sides of the street the pavement was empty.
‘See?’ Shane said triumphantly. ‘I’m going back to the fucking hotel.’
He turned round and started to walk back.
‘Fuck,’ I said.
Back in the lobby there was a guy in a cheap suit with a plastic name tag on the lapel.
‘Ask him,’ he said.
‘Why don’t you ask him?’ I said.
‘You’re the one who wants to know where this fucking place is,’ he said. ‘I want to get a taxi. I don’t need to know where it is.’ I walked up to the fake marble desk.
‘Do you know where Barney’s Beanery is?’ I asked him. He blew air through his lips, shrugged and lifted up his arms.
‘Get a taxi,’ he said.
I sat in the taxi fuming at Shane’s victory. The cab plunged down a street opposite the hotel. At the bottom of the hill the brakes whined. The driver turned the corner and pulled up under a green-striped awning.
I sat in silence with Shane at an excessively varnished table in the back of Barney’s Beanery, unsure if either of us was the winner.
*
During the day before our gig at the Palace, we traipsed miles in the stultifying heat hoping to come across a neighbourhood, high street or a centre of activity. The scale of the city under the beating sunlight seemed to defy the covering of distance by foot at all. Spooked, we ended up lounging around the pool up on the roof and, between cooling swims, puzzled about how the city worked.
The Palace on Vine Street was a Mission-style playhouse. The entryway dripped with ornamental stucco. Inside, everything was painted black, the gloom punctuated only by brass railings and strips of white tape on the edges of the stair treads. The bouncers wore black too. They were immense men, pyknic and broad-chested. They had hams for arms which were unable to rest flat against their s
ides because of the accretion of musculature. Each had a white-wall haircut and a black 4-Cell Maglite in a holster. Once I had become familiar enough with the guy on the door between the dressing rooms and the stage, I had a go at slapping him on the back as I passed through the door, as if earthing voltage. His shoulder was hard as concrete.
What need there was for a phalanx of such gorillas in the theatre, I couldn’t see. The audience in Los Angeles, though appreciative, was subdued.
‘Pot-smoking surfers,’ Spider said.
*
At the beginning of August 1985, Alex Cox had organised a concert with Costello, Joe Strummer and us, at the Fridge in Brixton in support of the Sandinista National Liberation Front in Nicaragua.
On the strength of the success of the gig, Eric Fellner, the producer of Sid and Nancy, came up with the idea of organising a tour of Nicaragua, with the same line-up, in support of the beleaguered Sandinistas. Fellner’s plan was to subsidise it by means of a video deal. All parties had apparently agreed to what would have been a month-long commitment. In the end, Fellner hadn’t been able to find a company to fund the tour and the project fell through.
Instead, Cox’s next project was to make an homage to Sergio Leone, with the same principals as the Brixton gig and the failed tour, along with a good proportion of the cast of Sid and Nancy. It was to be filmed in Andalucía, where Leone had made A Fistful of Dollars, For a Few Dollars More and The Good, the Bad and the Ugly. A script had been written. Eric Fellner was the producer. Finances had been settled. A start date had been set. It was to be called Straight to Hell, after the Clash’s song.
After our show at the Palace and before we went home, Cox convened a meeting of the cast and crew in one of the conference rooms at the Hyatt hotel. The only actors I had come across had been those in my father’s amateur dramatic circle – men dressed in tweeds with dewlaps under their eyes, women in polyester twinsets and a handbag hanging on a forearm. The table opposite us in the conference room filled with the most exotic creatures: a beautiful flame-haired woman with slender shoulders and a figure that was simultaneously girlish and voluptuous; a black guy with a face as mournful as a bloodhound’s and an eyebrow cocked in perpetual quizzicality; a short man with a vaguely clerical face but with a beard which belonged to a mountaineer; an exquisite young girl, tawny, with hair of jet, whose shining half-bite alluringly prevented her mouth from closing. They were Hollywood actors. The fact that I did not recognise any of them did not dim their lustre.
Here Comes Everybody Page 23
