The Buddha of Suburbia

by Hanif Kureishi

  ‘Oh yeah, what is it?’

  ‘Start Saturday,’ he said.

  And he gave me a job as Mustn’t Grumble’s occasional roadie. I was still a nothing, but I was in a good position to get at Charlie when the time was right.

  And it was right one evening, at an art college gig where I was helping lug the gear to the van. I’d heard Dad and Eva in the bar analysing the performance as if it were Miles Davis’s farewell appearance. Charlie strolled past me, his arm around a girl who had her tits hanging out, and he said, to make her laugh, ‘Hurry up, Karim, you great girl’s blouse, you friend of Dorothy. Bring my acid to the dressing room and don’t be late.’

  ‘But what’s the hurry?’ I said. ‘You’re not going anywhere – not as a band and not as a person.’

  He looked at me uncertainly, fondling and patting his hair as usual, unsure if I was joking or not. ‘What d’you mean?’

  So: I had him. He’d walked right into it.

  ‘What do I mean?’

  ‘Yeah,’ he said.

  ‘To go somewhere you gotta be talented, Charlie. You got to have it upstairs.’ I tapped my forehead. ‘And on present evidence a backdoor man like you hasn’t got it up there. You’re a looker and everything, a face, I’ll concede that. But your work don’t amaze me, and I need to be amazed. You know me. I need to be fucking staggered. And I’m not fucking staggered. Oh no.’

  He looked at me for a while, thinking. The girl dragged at his arm. At last he said, ‘I don’t know about that. I’m breaking up the band anyway. What you’ve said isn’t relevant.’

  Charlie turned and walked out. The next day he disappeared again. There were no more gigs. Dad and I finished packing his things.

  In bed before I went to sleep I fantasized about London and what I’d do there when the city belonged to me. There was a sound that London had. It was, I’m afraid, people in Hyde Park playing bongos with their hands; there was also the keyboard on the Doors’s ‘Light My Fire’. There were kids dressed in velvet cloaks who lived free lives; there were thousands of black people everywhere, so I wouldn’t feel exposed; there were bookshops with racks of magazines printed without capital letters or the bourgeois disturbance of full stops; there were shops selling all the records you could desire; there were parties where girls and boys you didn’t know took you upstairs and fucked you; there were all the drugs you could use. You see, I didn’t ask much of life; this was the extent of my longing. But at least my goals were clear and I knew what I wanted. I was twenty. I was ready for anything.

  PART TWO

  In the City

  CHAPTER NINE

  The flat in West Kensington was really only three large, formerly elegant rooms, with ceilings so high that I often gaped at the room’s proportions, as if I were in a derelict cathedral. But the ceiling was the most interesting part of the flat. The toilet was up the hall, with a broken window through which the wind whipped directly up your arse. The place had belonged to a Polish woman, who’d lived there as a child and then rented it to students for the past fifteen years. When she died Eva bought it as it was, furniture included. The rooms had ancient crusty mouldings and an iron-handled bell-pull for calling servants from the basement, now inhabited by Thin Lizzy’s road manager, a man who had the misfortune, so Eva informed me, to have hair growing out of his shoulders. The sad walls, from which all colour had faded, were covered by dark cracked mirrors and big sooty paintings which disappeared one by one when we were out, though there were no other signs of burglary. Most puzzling of all was the fact that Eva wasn’t perturbed by their disappearance. ‘Hey, I think another picture’s disappeared, Eva,’ I’d say. ‘Oh yes, space for other things,’ she’d reply. Eventually she admitted to us that Charlie was stealing them to sell and we were not to mention it. ‘At least he has initiative,’ she said. ‘Wasn’t Jean Genet a thief?’

  Within the three large rooms were partitions that made up other, smaller rooms, and the kitchen, which contained the bath. It was like a student flat, a wretched and dirty gaff with lino on the floor and large white dried flowers waving from the marble fireplace. The rooms’ great spaces were interrupted by busted brown furniture. There wasn’t even a bed for me; I slept on the sofa in the front room. Charlie, who also had nowhere to go, sometimes slept on the floor beside me.

  Dad stood looking at the flat in disgust. Eva hadn’t let him see it before; she just bought it quickly when we sold the house in Beckenham and had to get out. ‘Oh my God,’ Dad groaned, ‘how have we come to live in such filth?’

  He wouldn’t even sit down, in case a spider jumped out of an armchair. Eva had to cover a chair in stapled-together plastic bags before it was hygienic enough for his arse. But Eva was happy. ‘I can really do something with this.’ she kept saying, striding around, as Dad turned pale; and there in the centre of the room she held him and kissed him again and again in case he lost his nerve and faith in her and longed to be with Mum. ‘What d’you think?’ said Dad, turning to me, his other worry. ‘I love it,’ I said, which pleased him. ‘But will it be good for him?’ he asked Eva. Eva said yes. ‘I’ll look after him,’ she added, with a smile.

  The city blew the windows of my brain wide open. But being in a place so bright, fast and brilliant made you vertiginous with possibility: it didn’t necessarily help you grasp those possibilities. I still had no idea what I was going to do. I felt directionless and lost in the crowd. I couldn’t yet see how the city worked, but I began to find out.

  West Kensington itself was made up of rows of five-storey peeling stucco houses broken up into bed-sits that were mostly occupied by foreign students, itinerants and poor people who’d lived there for years. The District line dived into the earth half-way along the Barons Court Road, to which it ran parallel, the trains heading for Charing Cross and then out into the East End, from where Uncle Ted had originally come. Unlike the suburbs, where no one of note – except H. G. Wells – had lived, here you couldn’t get away from VIPs. Gandhi himself once had a room in West Kensington, and the notorious landlord Rachman kept a flat for the young Mandy Rice-Davies in the next street; Christine Keeler came for tea. IRA bombers stayed in tiny rooms and met in Hammersmith pubs, singing ‘Arms for the IRA’ at closing time. Mesrine had had a room by the tube station.

  So this was London at last, and nothing gave me more pleasure than strolling around my new possession all day. London seemed like a house with five thousand rooms, all different; the kick was to work out how they connected, and eventually to walk through all of them. Towards Hammersmith was the river and its pubs, full of hollering middle-class voices; and there were the secluded gardens which fringed the river along Lower Mall and the shaded stroll along the towpath to Barnes. This part of West London seemed like the country to me, with none of the disadvantages, no cows or farmers.

  Nearby was expensive Kensington, where rich ladies shopped, and a walk from that was Earls Court, with its baby-faced male and female whores arguing and shoving each other in the pubs; there were transvesrites and addicts and many disoriented people and con-merchants. There were small hotels smelling of spunk and disinfectant, Australian travel agents, all-night shops run by dwarfish Bengalis, leather bars with fat moustached queens exchanging secret signals outside, and roaming strangers with no money and searching eyes. In Kensington nobody looked at you. In Earls Court everybody did, wondering what they could wrench from you.

  But West Kensington was an area in between, where people stayed before moving up, or remained only because they were stuck. It was quieter, with few shops, not one of them interesting, and restaurants which opened with optimistic flourishes and invitations but where, after a few weeks, you could see the desolate owner standing in the doorway wondering where he’d gone wrong; his eyes told you the area wasn’t going to revive in his lifetime. But Eva ignored all such eyes: this was where she reckoned she could do something. ‘This place is going places,’ she predicted, as we talked sitting around a paraffin heater, the sole source of warmt
h at the time, the top of which was draped with Dad’s drying underpants.

  Around the corner from the flat was a roaring famous bar and house of fights and dope called the Nashville. The front of it had oak beams and curved glass in the shape of a Wurlitzer jukebox. Every night the new groups blew West Kensington into the air.

  As Eva had known, the location of the flat would always be a draw for Charlie, and when he turned up one evening to eat and sleep I said, ‘Let’s go to the Nashville.’

  He looked at me warily and then nodded. He seemed keen enough to go, to investigate the latest bands and see what was happening in music. But there was a heaviness in his response. Later he tried to change his mind by saying to me, ‘Don’t you want to go somewhere quieter than that, where we can talk?’ Charlie had avoided concerts and gigs for months. He was afraid of finding the London bands too good, as if he’d see a young group with such talent and promise that his own brittle hopes and aspirations would be exploded in a terrifying second of illumination and self-knowledge. Myself, I went to the Nashville every night and reckoned that Charlie’s glory in South London was the most he’d ever get. In London the kids looked fabulous; they dressed and walked and talked like little gods. We could have been from Bombay. We’d never catch up.

  Predictably, I had to pay for Charlie. I did it willingly because I still loved his company so much, but I had little money. As property prices in London were moving upwards, Eva’s shrewd plan was to decorate the flat as we had the last house, sell at a profit, and move on. But she was still meditating for hours and waiting for the voice of the flat to inform her of its favoured colour scheme. When word came, Ted and I would obey, and we’d get paid. Until then I was broke and Ted was left at home reminiscing with Mum about the war and trying to stop Jean from drinking.

  Charlie was soon drunk. We were sitting in the small, side bar in the Nashville. I noticed that he was starting to smell. He didn’t change his clothes too often, and when he did he just picked up whatever was around him – Eva’s jumpers, Dad’s waistcoats, and always my shirts, which he borrowed and I never saw again. He’d crash some party, see a better shirt in the closet, change into it, and leave mine behind. I’d started locking my shirts in a desk drawer every night, except that now I’d lost the key with all my Ben Shermans in there.

  I’d been looking forward to telling Charlie how depressed and lonely I’d been since we moved to London. But before I’d managed a single moan, Charlie pre-empted me. ‘I am suicidal,’ he announced grandly, as if he were pregnant. He said he was circling in that round of despair where you don’t care one iota what happens to you or anyone else.

  A famous footballer with a famous perm was sitting next to Charlie listening to this. The Perm was soon taking pity on Charlie, as people tended to, and Charlie was asking him about the pressures of fame as if it were something that concerned him from day to day. ‘What d’you do,’ Charlie said, ‘when the reporters won’t leave you alone? When they’re outside the window every morning?’ ‘It’s all worth it,’ the Perm replied. ‘Sometimes I run out on to the pitch with an erection, I’m so excited.’

  He bought Charlie, but not me, drinks. I wanted to get away from the Perm and talk to Charlie, but Charlie wasn’t going anywhere. Luckily I’d had some speed earlier: when I was on blues I could get through anything. All the same I felt disappointed. Then, just as someone mentioned the band were preparing to go on next door, my luck changed. I saw Charlie suddenly jerk forward and vomit in the footballer’s lap, before collapsing backwards off his stool. The Perm got excited. After all, he did have a pond consisting of Charlie’s last Chinese meal steaming in his crotch. He’d told us earlier that he was planning on taking a woman to Tramp that night. Anyway, the Perm leapt up and booted Charlie a couple of times in the ear with those famous feet until the heavies pulled him away. I managed to heave Charlie into the main bar and prop him up against a wall. He was half unconscious and trying to stop himself crying. He knew what things had come to.

  ‘Take it easy,’ I told him. ‘Keep away from people tonight.’

  ‘I feel better, OK?’

  ‘Good.’

  ‘For the moment.’

  ‘OK.’

  I relaxed and looked around the dark room, at the end of which was a small stage with a drum-kit and mike-stand on it. Maybe I was just a provincial or something, but I began to see that I was among the strangest audience I’d seen in that place. There were the usual long-hairs and burned-out heads hanging at the back in velvet trousers or dirty jeans, patchwork boots and sheepskin coats, discussing bus fares to Fez, Barclay James Harvest and bread. That was the usual clientèle, the stoned inhabitants of local squats and basements.

  But at the front of the place, near the stage, there were about thirty kids in ripped black clothes. And the clothes were full of safety-pins. Their hair was uniformly black, and cut short, seriously short, or if long it was spiky and rigid, sticking up and out and sideways, like a handful of needles, rather than hanging down. A hurricane would not have dislodged those styles. The girls were in rubber and leather and wore skin-tight skirts and holed black stockings, with white face-slap and bright-red lipstick. They snarled and bit people. Accompanying these kids were what appeared to be three extravagant South American transvestites in dresses, rouge and lipstick, one of whom had a used tampon on a piece of string around her neck. Charlie stirred restlessly as he leaned there. He hugged himself in self-pity as we took in this alien race dressed with an abandonment and originality we’d never imagined possible. I began to understand what London meant and what class of outrage we had to deal with. It certainly put us in proportion.

  ‘What is this shit?’ Charlie said. He was dismissive, but he was slightly breathless too; there was awe in his voice.

  ‘Be cool, Charlie,’ I said, continuing to examine the audience.

  ‘Be cool? I’m fucked. I just got kicked in the balls by a footballer.’

  ‘He’s a famous footballer.’

  ‘And look at the stage,’ Charlie said. ‘What rubbish is this? Why have you brought me out for this?’

  ‘D’you wanna go, then?’

  ‘Yes. All this is making me feel sick.’

  ‘OK,’ I said. ‘Lean on my shoulder and we’ll get you out of here. I don’t like the look of it either. It’s too weird.’

  ‘Yeah, much too weird.’

  ‘It’s too much.’

  ‘Yeah.’

  But before we could move the band shambled on, young kids in clothes similar to the audience. The fans suddenly started to bounce up and down. As they pumped into the air and threw themselves sideways they screamed and spat at the band until the singer, a skinny little kid with carroty hair, dripped with saliva. He seemed to expect this, and merely abused the audience back, spitting at them, skidding over on to his arse once, and drinking and slouching around the stage as if he were in his living room. His purpose was not to be charismatic; he would be himself in whatever mundane way it took. The little kid wanted to be an anti-star, and I couldn’t take my eyes off him. It must have been worse for Charlie.

  ‘He’s an idiot,’ Charlie said.

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘And I bet they can’t play either. Look at those instruments. Where did they get them, a jumble sale?’

  ‘Right,’ I said.

  ‘Unprofessional,’ he said.

  When the shambolic group finally started up, the music was thrashed out. It was more aggressive than anything I’d heard since early Who. This was no peace and love; here were no drum solos or effeminate synthesizers. Not a squeeze of anything ‘progressive’ or ‘experimental’ came from these pallid, vicious little council estate kids with hedgehog hair, howling about anarchy and hatred. No song lasted more than three minutes, and after each the carrot-haired kid cursed us to death. He seemed to be yelling directly at Charlie and me. I could feel Charlie getting tense beside me. I knew London was killing us as I heard, ‘Fuck off, all you smelly old hippies! You fucking slags! Y
ou ugly fart-breaths! Fuck off to hell!’ he shouted at us.

  I didn’t look at Charlie again, until the end. As the lights came up I saw he was standing up straight and alert, with cubes of dried vomit decorating his cheeks.

  ‘Let’s go,’ I said.

  We were numb; we didn’t want to speak for fear of returning to our banal selves again. The wild kids bundled out. Charlie and I elbowed our way through the crowd. Then he stopped.

  ‘What is it, Charlie?’

  ‘I’ve got to get backstage and talk to those guys.’

  I snorted. ‘Why would they want to talk to you?’

  I thought he’d hit me; but he took it well.

  ‘Yeah, there’s no reason why they should like me,’ he said. ‘If I saw me coming into the dressing room I’d have myself kicked out.’

  We walked around West Kensington eating saveloy and chips drenched in vinegar and saturated with salt. People gathered in groups outside the burger place; others went to buy cigarettes from the Indian shop on the corner and then stood at the bus stop. In the pubs the bar staff put the chairs upside down on the tables and shouted, ‘Hurry up now, please, thank you.’ Outside the pub people argued about where to go next. The city at night intimidated me: the piss-heads, bums, derelicts and dealers shouted and looked for fights. Police vans cruised, and sometimes the law leapt out on to the street to grab kids by the hair and smash their heads against walls. The wrecked kids pissed into doorways.

  Charlie was excited. ‘That’s it, that’s it,’ he said as we strolled. ‘That’s fucking it.’ His voice was squeaky with rapture. ‘The sixties have been given notice tonight. Those kids we saw have assassinated all hope. They’re the fucking future.’