The Buddha of Suburbia

by Hanif Kureishi

  I went to him and shook his hand. He had no idea what was going on. I said, ‘Terry, I’ll see you.’

  ‘When?’ he asked, concerned.

  ‘When I come back from America.’

  He came to the door with me. He said goodbye, and then he said he was sorry. To be honest, I wouldn’t have minded moving in with him and living in Brixton, but the time for that had probably passed. America was waiting.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  After the opening night in New York we got out of the theatre and were taken in taxis to an apartment building on Central Park South, near the Plaza Hotel. We were on the nine-hundredth floor or something, and one wall was solid glass, and there was a view over the park and to the north of Manhattan. There were servants with silver trays, and a black man played ‘As Time Goes By’ on the piano. I recognized various actors, and was told that agents and journalists and publishers were there too. Carol went from person to person introducing herself. Pyke stood on one spot, just off-centre of the room, where, gladly and graciously, he received unsolicited praise, and no doubt hoped to meet hairdressers from Wisconsin. Being English provincials, and resentfully afraid of capitalist contamination, Tracey, Richard and I skulked in a corner and were nervous. Eleanor enjoyed herself talking to a young film producer with his hair in a pigtail. Looking at her now, after saying only a few words to her for three months, I realized how little I knew her, understood her, liked her. I’d wanted her, but not wanted her. What had I been thinking about all the time I’d been with her? I resolved to talk to her after a few drinks.

  The man who ran the theatre, Dr Bob, was a former academic and critic, an enthusiast for the ‘ethnic arts’. His room in the theatre was full of Peruvian baskets, carved paddles, African drums and paintings. I knew he’d sensed I was looking into the abyss because as we rehearsed for the opening he said, ‘Don’t worry, I’ll fix you up with some decent music,’ as if he knew this was what I required to feel at home.

  Now he sat Tracey and I in two somewhat exposed seats at the front of the room and hushed everyone behind us. They thought there was going to be a speech or announcement. Suddenly three dark-skinned men ran into the room, banging some sort of wooden hook on hand-held drums. Then a black man, wearing bright-pink trousers and naked from the waist up, started to fling himself, his arms outstretched, around the room. Two black women joined him, and fluttered away with their hands. Another man in sparkly trousers flew into the room, and the four of them did a kind of mating dance barely a foot from Tracey and me. And Dr Bob squatted in a corner yelling, ‘Yeah’ and ‘Right on’ as the Haitians danced. It made me feel like a colonial watching the natives perform. At the end there was rapturous applause and Dr Bob made us shake hands with all of them.

  I didn’t see Eleanor again that evening until most of the guests had gone and Eleanor, Richard, Carol and I were sitting around Pyke in a bedroom. Pyke was frisky and laughing. He was in New York with a successful show and was surrounded by admirers. What more could he want? And he was playing one of his favourite games. I could smell the danger. But if I left the room I’d be among strangers. So I stayed and took it, though I didn’t feel up to it.

  ‘Now,’ he said, ‘all of you – if you could fuck any one person in this apartment, who would it be?’ And everyone was laughing, and looking around at each other, and justifying their choices, and trying to be daring and point at one another and say, ‘You, you!’ One glance told Pyke how volatile I was that night, so he excluded me. I nodded and smiled at him and said to Eleanor, ‘Can we go outside to talk for a while?’ but Pyke said, ‘Just a minute, wait a while, I’ve got to read something.’

  ‘Come on,’ I said to Eleanor, but she held my arm. I knew what was going to happen. Pyke was getting out his notebook now. And he started to read out the predictions he’d written down when we first started to rehearse, in that room by the river where we were honest for the sake of the group. God, I was drunk, and I couldn’t see why everyone was being so attentive to Pyke: it was as if Pyke were reading out reviews, not of the play, but of our personalities, clothes, beliefs – of us. Anyway, he read out stuff about Tracey and Carol, but I lay on my back on the floor and didn’t listen; it wasn’t interesting, anyway. ‘Now, Karim,’ he said. ‘You’ll be riveted by this.’

  ‘How do you know?’

  ‘I know.’

  He started to read the stuff about me. The faces around him were looking at me and laughing. Why did they hate me so much? What had I done to them? Why wasn’t I harder? Why did I feel so much?

  ‘Karim is obviously looking for someone to fuck. Either a boy or a girl: he doesn’t mind, and that’s all right. But he’d prefer a girl, because she will mother him. Therefore he’s appraising all the crumpet in the group. Tracey is too spiky for him, too needy; Carol too ambitious; and Louise not his physical type. It’ll be Eleanor. He thinks she’s sweet, but she’s not blown away by him. Anyway, she’s still fucked-up over Gene, and feels responsible for his death. I’ll have a word with her, tell her to take care of Karim, maybe get her to feed him, give him a bit of confidence. My prediction is that Eleanor will fuck him, it’ll basically be a mercy fuck, but he’ll fall hard for her and she’ll be too kind to tell him the truth about anything. It will end in tears.’

  I went into the other room. I wished I was in London; I just wanted to be away from all these people. I rang Charlie, who was living in New York, but he wasn’t there. I’d spoken to him several times on the phone but not seen him as yet. Then Eleanor had her arm round me and she was holding me. I kept saying, ‘Let’s go, let’s go somewhere, and we can be together.’ She was looking at me pityingly and saying, no, no, she had to tell the truth, she’d be spending the night with Pyke, she wanted to know him as deeply as she could. ‘That won’t take a whole night,’ I said. I saw Pyke coming out of the bedroom surrounded by the others, and I went to destroy him. But I didn’t get a clean punch in. There was a tangle; I threw myself about; arms and legs were everywhere. But whose were they? I was in a frenzy, kicking and scratching and screaming. I wanted to chuck a chair through the glass window, because I wanted to be on the street watching it come through the window in slow motion. Then I seemed to be in a kind of box. I was staring up at polished wood and I couldn’t move. I was pinned down. Almost certainly I was dead, thank God. I heard an American voice say, ‘These English are animals. Their whole culture has fallen through the floor.’

  Well, the cabs in New York City had these bullet-proof partitions to stop you killing the driver, and they had slidy seats, and I was practically on the floor. Thank God Charlie was with me. He had his arms around my chest and kept me from the floor. He refused to let me stop at a topless bar. What I did see were the Haitians walking down the street. I wound down the window, ordered the driver to slow down and shouted at them; ‘Hey, guys, where are you going?’

  ‘Stop it, Karim,’ Charlie said gently.

  ‘Come on, guys!’ I yelled. ‘Let’s go somewhere! Let’s enjoy America!’

  Charlie told the driver to get going. But at least he was good-humoured and pleased to see me, even if, when we got out of the cab, I did want to lie down on the pavement and go to sleep.

  Charlie had been at the show that night, but after the play he went out to dinner with a record producer and came on late to the party. On finding me passed out under the piano and surrounded by angry actors, he took me home. Tracey later told me she’d been loosening my shirt when she looked up and saw Charlie moving towards her. He was so beautiful, she said, that she burst into tears.

  I woke up with a blanket around me in a lovely, bright room, not large, but with sofas, numerous old armchairs, an open fireplace, and a kitchen through the open partition doors. On the walls were framed posters for art exhibitions. There were books: it was a classy place, not the usual rock-star’s hang-out. But then, I couldn’t consider Charlie a rock-star. It didn’t seem of his essence, but a temporary, borrowed persona.

  I vomited three or four ti
mes before going upstairs to Charlie with coffee, and jam on toast. He was alone in bed. When I woke him there wasn’t his usual snarl. He sat up smiling and kissed me. He said a lot of things I didn’t believe were coming from his mouth.

  ‘Welcome to New York. I know you feel like shit, but we’re going to have fun like you’ve never known it. What a great city this is! Just think, we’ve been in the wrong place all these years. Now just go over there and put on that Lightnin’ Hopkins record. Let’s start off as we intend to go on!’

  Charlie and I spent the day together walking around the Village, and had a milkshake thick with Italian ice-cream. A girl recognized him and came over to leave a note on the table. ‘Thank you for giving your genius to the world,’ she wrote. Her phone-number was on the bottom. Charlie nodded at her across the café. I’d forgotten how intimidating it was walking around with him. People recognized him everywhere, yet his hair was covered by a black woolly hat and he wore blue cotton overalls and workmen’s boots.

  I’d had no idea he was so famous in America. You’d turn a corner, and there was his face tacked to some demolition-site wall or on an illuminated hoarding. Charlie had done a tour of arenas and Stadiums with his new band. He showed me the videos, but refused to sit in the room while I watched them. I could see why. On stage he wore black leather, silver buckles, chains and chokers, and by the end of the performance he was bare-chested, thin and white like Jagger, flinging his spidery figure like a malevolent basketball player across stages as wide as aircraft hangars. He appealed to the people who had the most disposable income, gays and young people, especially girls, and his album, Kill For DaDa, was still in the charts, months after it had been released.

  But the menace was gone. The ferocity was already a travesty, and the music, of little distinction in itself, had lost its drama and attack when transported from England with its unemployment, strikes and class antagonism. What impressed me was that Charlie knew this. The music’s feeble, OK? I’m no Bowie, don’t think I don’t know that. But ‘I’ve got ideas between my ears. I can do good work in the future, Karim. This country gives me such optimism. People here believe you can do stuff. They don’t bring you down all the time, like in England.’

  So now he was renting this three-floor apartment in a brownstone on East 10th Street while he wrote the songs for his next album and learned the saxophone. In the morning, while snooping around, I’d noticed an empty and separate apartment at the top of the house. As I stood there with my coat on, ready to walk to the theatre and sad to leave him – he seemed so generous and charmed to be with me – I said; ‘Charlie, me and the whole cast, we’re all living in this big apartment. And I can’t bear to see Eleanor every day. It breaks my heart.’

  Charlie didn’t hesitate. ‘I’d be ’appy to ’ave you ’ere. Move in tonight.’

  ‘Great. Thanks, man.’

  I walked down the street, laughing, amused that here in America Charlie had acquired this cockney accent when my first memory of him at school was that he’d cried after being mocked by the stinking gypsy kids for talking so posh. Certainly, I’d never heard anyone talk like that before. Now he was going in for cockney rhyming slang, too. ‘I’m just off for a pony,’ he’d say. Pony and trap – crap. Or he was going to wear his winter whistle. Whistle and flute – suit. He was selling Englishness, and getting a lot of money for it.

  A few days later I moved in with him. During most of the day Charlie was around the house, giving interviews to journalists from all over the world, being photographed, trying on clothes, and reading. Sometimes there’d be young Californian girls lying around the place listening to Nick Lowe, Ian Dury and especially Elvis Costello. I spoke to these girls only when spoken to, since I found their combination of beauty, experience, vacuity and cruelty harrowing.

  But there were three or four smart serious New York women, publishers, film critics, professors at Columbia, Sufis who did whirling dances and so on, whom he listened to for hours before he slept with them, later getting up to make urgent notes on their conversation, which he would then repeat to other people in the next few days. ‘They’re educating me, man,’ he said about these besotted women, with whom he discussed international politics, South American literature, dance, and the ability of alcohol to induce mystical states. In New York he wasn’t ashamed of his ignorance: he wanted to learn; he wanted to stop lying and bluffing.

  As I wandered about the flat and heard him learning about Le Corbusier, I could see that fame, success and wealth really agreed with him. He was less anxious, bitter and moody than I’d ever known him. Now that he was elevated, he no longer looked up and envied. He could set aside ambition and become human. He was going to act in a film and then a stage play. He met prominent people; he travelled to learn. Life was glorious.

  ‘Let me tell you something, Karim,’ he said at breakfast, which was when we talked, his present girlfriend being in bed. ‘There was a day when I fell in love for the first time. I knew this was the big one. I was staying in a house in Santa Monica after doing some gigs in LA and San Francisco.’ (What magical names these were to me.) ‘The house had five terraces on the side of a steep, lush hill. I’d been for a swim in this pool, from which a flunkey had recently fished all leaves with a net. I was drying myself and talking on the phone to Eva in West Kensington. The wife of a famous actor whose house it was came out to me and handed me the keys to her motorcycle. A Harley. It was then I knew I loved money. Money and everything it could buy. I never wanted to be without money again because it could buy me a life like this every day.’

  ‘Time and money are the best, Charlie. But if you’re not careful they’ll fertilize weirdness, indulgence, greed. Money can cut the cord between you and ordinary living. There you are, looking down on the world, thinking you understand it, that you’re just like them, when you’ve got no idea, none at all. Because at the centre of people’s lives are worries about money and how to deal with work.’

  ‘I enjoy these conversations,’ he said. ‘They make me think. Thank God, I’m not indulgent myself.’

  Charlie was fit. Every day at eleven a taxi took him to Central Park, where he ran for an hour; then he went to the gym for another hour. For days at a time he ate only peculiar things like pulses, bean-shoots and tofu, and I had to scoff hamburgers on the stoop in the snow because, as he said, ‘I won’t have the animal within these walls.’ Every Thursday night his drug-dealer would call by. This was more of the civilization he’d espied in Santa Monica, Charlie figured. Especially the way this ex-NYU film student came by with his Pandora’s Box and threw it open on top of Charlie’s MOMA catalogue. Charlie would lick a finger and point to this amount of grass, that amount of coke, a few uppers, some downers and some smack for us to snort.

  The play didn’t last long in New York, a month only, because Eleanor had to start shooting a small part in the big film she’d landed. The play wasn’t doing sufficient business for us to cast another actress in Eleanor’s role; and anyway, Pyke had gone off to San Francisco to teach.

  When the others went back to London I ripped up my ticket and stayed in New York. There was nothing for me to do in London, and my aimlessness would be eyeballed by my father, who would use it as evidence that I should have become a doctor; or, at least, that I should visit a doctor. In New York I could be a walking stagnancy without restraint.

  I liked walking around the city, going to restaurants with Charlie, doing his shopping (I bought him cars and property), answering the phone and sitting around with British musicians who were passing through. We were two English boys in America, the land where the music came from, with Mick Jagger, John Lennon and Johnny Rotten living round the corner. This was the dream come true.

  All the same, my depression and self-hatred, my desire to mutilate myself with broken bottles, and numbness and crying fits, my inability to get out of bed for days and days, the feeling of the world moving in to crush me, went on and on. But I knew I wouldn’t go mad, even if that release, that letting
-go, was a freedom I desired. I was waiting for myself to heal.

  I began to wonder why I was so strong – what it was that held me together. I thought it was that I’d inherited from Dad a strong survival instinct. Dad had always felt superior to the British: this was the legacy of his Indian childhood – political anger turning into scorn and contempt. For him in India the British were ridiculous, stiff, unconfident, rule-bound. And he’d made me feel that we couldn’t allow ourselves the shame of failure in front of these people. You couldn’t let the ex-colonialists see you on your knees, for that was where they expected you to be. They were exhausted now; their Empire was gone; their day was done and it was our turn. I didn’t want Dad to see me like this, because he wouldn’t be able to understand why I’d made such a mess of things when the conditions had been good, the time so opportune, for advancement.

  Charlie gave me money when I needed it, and he encouraged me to stay in New York. But after six months I told him it was time to go. I was afraid he found me a burden, a nuisance, a parasite, though he’d never complained. But now he was insistent and paternal. ‘Karim, you stay here with me where you belong. There’s a lotta bastards out there. You got everything you need, haven’t you?’

  ‘Sure I have.’

  ‘What’s your problem, then?’

  ‘None,’ I said. ‘It’s just that I –’

  ‘That’s fine. Let ‘s go shopping for clothes, OK?’

  He didn’t want me to leave. It was eerie, our growing dependency on each other. He liked having me there as a witness, I suspected. With other people he was restrained, enigmatic, laconic; he had the magazine virtues and wore jeans well. But he liked to tell me everything in the old schoolboy way. With me, he could be dazzled by the people he met, the places he was invited, the gifts that were thrown at him. It was I, Karim, who saw him stepping into the stretch-limo; it was I who saw him sitting in the Russian Tea Room with movie-stars, famous writers and film producers. It was I who saw him going upstairs with women, in debate with intellectuals, and being photographed for Italian Vogue. And only I could appreciate how far he’d come from his original state in Beckenham. It was as if, without me there to celebrate it all, Charlie’s progress had little meaning. In other words, I was a full-length mirror, but a mirror that could remember.