The Acid King

by Maggie Abbott

  Barry was reaching for a cigarette and gradually shifting to his feet, becoming more animated as he breathed some enthusiasm into his usual self. He was really happy to hear from his old, make that, former buddy, having no illusions about his low rank of significance in Pete’s life.

  “Better than rock’n’ roll, eh? Howzit going, man?”

  Fortunately Barry was already inhaling nicotine and standing up straight when he heard the next part.

  “Well, guess what, I had a call from our Madeleine just now.”

  “Oh yeah? Bloody Madeleine, surprised she’s still with us, eh?”

  “She was in L.A., doing some sleuthing. She found Mister X.”

  “What d’ya say? She what?”

  “Yeah, The Acid King in person, alive and well and living in L.A.”

  “Jesus. Is that true? Now don’t do this to me if it’s not true, Pete. I managed to forget all that and now you bring it up again. I just feel the rage like it was yesterday. That’s what me shrink tells me, she says I can’t get the rage out of my liver.”

  Pete’s face was expressionless, sphinxlike, as he listened.

  “I thought God was taking care of all that for you, Barry.”

  “God? Oh, not now, mate. I gave that up, too many weirdos, all praying for the rent to fall out of the sky and fill up the gas tank on the way, you know what I mean, it’s please Jesus for everything, utterly useless. Give me Freud, at least I can blame Mister X for my rage. I want to see that man dead every night when I can’t sleep.”

  “How’s your wife?”

  “Carol? She’s a tower of strength, I tell ya. Best day of my life when we got married. She’s in the kitchen right now. Wanna…? …No. So how’s yours?”

  “Hey, don’t ask don’t tell, you know, but I can tell you, Barry, you’ve been a mate since whenever, nobody seems to know who I really am any more, or was. Life’s great when you’ve got the right girl, but I just can’t find her, makes for a fucking boring lonely life with all the wrong ones.”

  “Too bad, man.”

  I finally managed to get rid of the last one, Mrs. Money.”

  “You’re right, it’s boring. Besides, man, this is England, it’s all in the papers anyway. You know where he is?”

  “In L..A. somewhere, she didn’t say.”

  “You don’t know? You didn’t ask her?”

  “Why would I? It’s dead, isn’t it? Just had to share it with you, that’s all. Barry, don’t get worked up. It was seventeen years ago.”

  “So why are you bothering me with it, don’t screw with me mind, Pete. I really don’t need these downer phone calls from you. I still haven’t recovered from the last one.”

  “Can’t think what you’re talking about, Barry.”

  Pete stood there, phone under his chin, arms akimbo, ready to back off, surprised at any kind of friction from old Barry, his loser buddy who always fed Pete’s pride.

  “The time you had the ego-sizzling problem with the tabloid and the false palimony thing and the chick attack you bent my ear with for a couple of hours. I love ya, man, but forget it. Just send me your CD’s.”

  “And another five thousand pounds,” said Pete.

  Barry’s face crumbled, relief and emotion in cahoots, his face creasing up with silent sobs, trying to hold them back.

  “Thanks, Pete, you know I’m not asking for it.”

  “It’s alright. I know,” said Pete. “You never have. With you it’s okay, you’re the only one I can trust not to come on to me about anything. And this Mister X fucker, just forget about him, alright? Sorry I brought it up.”

  “I gotta go, Pete. I can’t talk, please. Sorry I… I’ll write you, okay?”

  Barry put down the phone and dropped into his chair, heaving quietly. “Yeah, you trust me because I’ve got no power over you, I’m a nothing, I can’t hurt you, you callous son of a bitch. I only tell you what you know already. But I’ll take the five and I’ll keep taking it whenever you offer it and I hope you never die, man, because I love you, you asshole.”

  Barry wiped his face with the back of his hand like a kid and recovered the ballsiness that made him a survivor. “Just bloody ’ope it’s not another three years.”

  He hunched over the coffee table, splayed his hands and pounded a dramatic drum roll, calling out to the kitchen.

  “Carol, hey Carol!!”

  First he broke the good news to his wife, and checked out the roast, then Barry went to the bathroom for a session. After a while he tossed away the magazine and allowed his mind to wander.

  Back to the time when he first heard someone knocking at the front door of Jeremy’s cottage. They were all lounging peacefully in the drawing room, after a tiring day of dancing and prancing outdoors in psychedelic bliss. Now waiting for a delicious Moroccan feast beginning to beckon from the back kitchen where Jeremy’s houseboy was doing his voodoo. Music was playing, it was Love, he remembered that, and as usual he was riveted by the action on a soundless television screen and how the movements sometimes synchronized with the music, kind of hallucinatory. Like the knocking on the door. He heard it but he thought it was the band.

  Madeleine lay back in Pete’s arms and he was playing with her hair. King Leo had placed himself in a throne-like chair, engaged in filling a hookah pipe. He didn’t look up, just said to Jeremy, “Someone at the door.”

  “Oh, they’re collecting money for the scouts, I expect,” said Jeremy languidly, trying to get up off the big tapestry cushion.

  James was already peering through the window curtain.

  “It’s actually a police constable.”

  “Always collecting, they are. Better give them something I suppose. Tell them I’ll be one second.”

  “And some old geezer. God, my legs feel like water.”

  All the others in the room were examining James and Jeremy as if it were a scene in the school play. The upper class twits doing their best to be polite instead of ignoring the doorbell and staying in the groove.

  Jeremy giggled as he lurched over to the entrance. By the time he got there, James was opening the front door, leaning on it for support and attempting to smile through the gap in a kindly way, while Jeremy offered a ten shilling note to a surprised constable.

  Barry could never say exactly how it happened but the next thing he saw was that the room was full of coppers, including a couple of more senior types with different caps, and one blank looking chap in a raincoat. In his child-like imagination, enhanced by the LSD, Barry cheerfully thought he was still watching telly. Somehow he couldn’t get past P.C. 49 in his little mind. He had the uncanny feeling they were all equally slow at realizing that this in fact was a police raid, and the place was full of drugs, because nobody moved.

  Except King Leo, taking advantage of the eyes of the law totally focused on the three very famous faces staring back at them. He swiftly and furtively got rid of the hookah under the chair, using a subtle move with his foot, and waited there with a newly blank innocent expression on his face.

  That was why Barry was always convinced Leo had set them up. The cops deliberately ignored him, accepted his excuse not to open the telltale little case of drugs. They were either not interested in him because he was a nobody, or they knew exactly who he was and were told to leave him alone. Barry didn’t have to wonder which.

  In that instant the power of the acid caused Barry’s infant state to skim back through past millennia of evolution and he watched himself become a raging primitive. The miracle which stopped him from jumping over to Leo and tearing out his throat like a jackal was the hand of Madeleine on his arm, digging in hard with her nails, restraining and reassuring him with dynamic strength whilst smiling sweetly up to the invaders.

  “Good evening, officers. May I offer you some tea?”

  CHAPTER 10

  Pete’s House, Virginia Water

  Lying flat on his back and talking softly but clearly, Pete appeared to be having a conversation with himself.


  “It was that guy who ruined my life. After the raid we got shat on in the papers and television news. Top of the Pops wouldn’t take our new promo. Of course now it’s a fucking classic, ha ha. We lost our new record deal and got stuck with the old one and a stinking ancient contract we signed when we were still doing pubs. As penniless criminals we had to drop the lawsuit against those middle aged Fagins. We could have broken that contract, but no money, no lawyer.

  “That was after they’d kept us in jail for two days and my best friend Barry was so ashamed and freaked out he had a nervous breakdown and went off his rocker. Not to forget my girlfriend became a junkie, my best mate killed himself and my manager went AWOL. You could never understand how it felt.”

  “I want to understand. Tell me more about how it felt.”

  Ling Pai was bent over Pete’s ankle, carefully inserting an acupuncture needle into the skin, to join four others sprouting at different angles, and matching an arrangement on the star’s other foot. She glanced up the long streak of white flesh that was Pete, her lord and master, and patted his thigh gently for reassurance.

  “Go on.”

  “They were just the facts. How I felt was degraded. It was like losing my personality, like the real Pete Stebbings slipped away, my spirit. I managed to do some real play-acting in the slammer. Kept up my manly cockney patter with the guards and the other inmates who kept calling out to us in friendly support. I was one of them, yer working class bloke, yet they didn’t object to my being the fancy rock star, that’s what they wanted.”

  “I ordered up gourmet lunches and dinners on a tray covered with a white cloth, delivered by the local three-star public house. The waiters used to get cheers from the crowds outside the police station. We had our fans, and the press were there, taking pictures.”

  “We made front pages for days, then the headlines started up with ‘Who is Mr. X?’ and ‘Where is Mr. X?’ then ‘Mr. X has left the country.’ There was weeks of this before the trial and being put behind bars. We all went nuts trying to figure it out, discussing it on the phone with all our friends for hours, weeks. Everyone was talking about it. Couldn’t get the fucker off our minds.”

  “Time to calm down and let the needles do their work,” whispered Ling Pai in a soothing voice, like a familiar ritual.

  On her knees she leaned over, laid her palms gently across his eyes for a moment, then stroked his hair. She quickly checked over the positions of all the needles and squeezed his hand.

  “You should rest now. Relax your mind. I’ll be back in a while.”

  Pete didn’t bother to reply. She didn’t expect it. Ling Pai was easy to be around. He sighed and tried a few deep long breaths like she’d taught him, to empty his mind, but there seemed fat chance of this. In his more relaxed state he could remember some of the bad scenes without the depression that used to go with them. That was a good sign.

  It was easier to visualize the turning point out of his years of bad luck and remember events backwards from that. All it took was a freaky young guy from San Diego of all places who worked in a video store and had got himself hooked on Pete’s one and only movie, the sixties underground collector’s item, Indigo Black. In a movie industry declining into a split between overpriced hits and cheap indies, this geek managed to write and direct his first movie and make it a hit, with a Pete Stebbings original song on the soundtrack.

  The song was an unknown track from a long ignored solo album Pete made during his seclusion in Jamaica. In spite of his devastation it had an upbeat lilt and a dance rhythm which had infused his sad solitary exile, helped along with God given ganja.

  Pete’s pursed lips relaxed into a satisfied smile as he remembered the way the tables turned. He got royalties, he got discovered and thrown into the limelight. He was perfect material for the late seventies, when disco was becoming a bore, here was the forgotten lead singer from a fractured band, sacrificed to the gods of war, a hero of a failed revolution. They saw him as a crushed flower child.

  The media didn’t get too much into the very old stories then, it wasn’t time for the downer stuff; it was before the flamboyant television stars began to confess to the tabloids about drugs and incest. Pete confined his media confessions only to flashbacks of a naughty working class boy toying with glamorous sexy upper class girls, their outrageous clothes, make-up and hair. It was enough to keep the journalists busy, and hundreds of photographs came out of the files, setting off a feast of copycat looks, so Pete Stebbings became a new icon, with the character lines on his face a symbol of cool.

  He felt contented with that last thought, and certain that in this world of the frenzied celebrity fan media industry, it would never change, he’d always be up there, legend, lover, star. He let it go finally and began to snore.

  CHAPTER 11

  Saturday

  The next morning Griffin called Ann. It was very early, he couldn’t have slept more than a couple of hours from the state he was in, his voice rough.

  “What did she say, your friend?”

  “You mean about you? Obviously, or you wouldn’t be asking.”

  “Ann, that’s cruel. I’m not like that. Not like other people you know. It’s not all about me. You know that. I thought she was… a remarkable person. Well, she’s a friend of yours. I wondered if she remembered that we met. It was a long time ago.”

  “She didn’t say anything. We didn’t have time, but knowing Madeleine she would have said something if it was important.”

  “Important?”

  “I think she just wrote it off, you know, whether or not she met you. She’s still sensitive about all the years she was out there on drugs, doesn’t like to talk about it, she remembers very little from those bad times.”

  “So? You’re not even curious?”

  He knew her. Ann felt sharp currents warning her to hold back and lie.

  “Not really, Griffin. If you like I’ll grill her next time we talk on the phone. She’s gone now, caught the mid-day direct to London.”

  “So let’s forget it then. There’s my other line. Next time.”

  He was gone. What a relief, thought Ann, hoping his paranoia was on idle right now, at least on the subject of Madeleine and their past, she’d done her best. It would be perfect to forget this whole incident happened, but she couldn’t. She decided to do some research at the library, order all the books that covered the bust and do some prying of her own.

  It was fascinating to her, almost two years of knowing and loving this man, and his secret turned out to be something that bound them more than he realized. He seemed to have no idea that these people were friends of hers too, nor her connection to Tarquin, if he even remembered him. Maybe because he wasn’t at the weekend party. Her first real boyfriend, Tarquin, The Veils’ upper class amateur press agent, who took the sickening bust of his dearest friends like a personal attack on his integrity, and lost everything, starting with her and ending with his own fragile life in a little sports car on the M1.

  CHAPTER 12

  Pete’s House, Virginia Water – Sunday

  Tony and his mother were in the kitchen as usual, having a sandwich lunch. The household budget made sure that these were first class sandwiches. Mum was just finishing with slicing the succulent whole ham on a bone. The Dijon mustard was standing by, with crisp lettuce and sliced home grown tomatoes on their separate plates. Tony was taking a healthy great bite out of his sandwich when Ling Pai slid quietly into the kitchen and sat down on a bar stool next to him.

  “Can I talk to you, Tony?”

  Tony nodded slowly, with a slight raising of the eyebrows and a quick glance at his mother, indicating with skilled practice that she should move out of earshot. He took his time to finish carefully munching on the delicious filling, knowing Ling Pai would politely wait until he had actually voiced his concurrence.

  “Well it would be somewhat out of character, Miss Lotus Blossom, but talk away, do,” said Tony after he had finally consumed the bite and flicked
his tongue around inside his mouth to catch the good bits. There was no question where he had learned this technique of casual control.

  “That man, Mister X. Pete wants him offed.”

  “Eh? Watch your mouth, girl. Where did you learn language like that?”

  “I listen to him all day.”

  “Is that what he said? In those words?”

  “No. He said it’s what he used to want years ago. But he said something else. He said, ‘Will no-one rid me of this son of a bitch?’”

  “Ah, now that sounds like the current Pete Stebbings, a well-read man, seen the right movies, and all that. So when did this occur?”

  “It was yesterday, after that Lady Madeleine phoned and he talked to the man who was in the band.”

  “Barry? And you’ve been sitting on it all this time? To turn a phrase.”

  “He’s been brooding ever since. Very unsettled. He was worse today.”

  “Can’t say I hadn’t noticed that myself. Well, thanks for bringing it to my attention.”

  Ling Pai and Tony sat there quietly for a minute, before she slid off the stool and started to leave.

  Mum looked over from the fridge.

  “Want a sandwich, dear? You look famished.”

  Ling Pai smiled no, and waved as she left the kitchen.

  “Poor thing, she’s too thin, never eats.”

  “Mum, she’s built tiny, she’s Asian, strong as a bull, solid as a rock, and very ambitious.”

  “I feel sorry for her. She works so hard to please him.”

  “It’s a career she’s chosen, Mum. None of our business.”

  “I agree with that, so be sure she doesn’t make trouble.”

  Tony nodded and stayed deep in his thoughts for a while.

  “Now you’re brooding, just like him.”