The Suspense Is Killing Me

by Thomas Gifford

  We drove on to Tangier, and the sights and smells and the desert wind and the sights of camels and robed figures moving like shadows among the palm trees—it all conspired to drag me unwillingly into the past. Twenty years ago, everything had come apart in Tangier and I’d never really dealt with it, though the doctors in Switzerland had pushed and led me as far as they could. I’d dodged and weaved and pretended and denied and lied: I’d been good at all that.

  And many years later when I’d come back to do my own book with Sally Feinman’s encouragement, I’d kept my head down, done a quick once-over so I could say I’d retraced the steps I’d once taken. Now, everything was different. This was serious. I wasn’t in it on my own and Innis wasn’t kidding.

  Heidi didn’t know what to make of my behavior, which would presumably have lumped her with the other nine-tenths of mankind. The remaining tenth were the outright crazies. And I was among them. For two days in Tangier I stayed drunk and wouldn’t leave the room we were sharing. I didn’t want to talk, I didn’t want to make love, I wanted to sit and stare and try to keep the past from drowning me. Boy- and girl-wise it wasn’t much of a romance. Maybe that hand just hadn’t been dealt to Heidi and me.

  She was discovering just how hard it was to make Tangier sit up and pay attention and behave. She was looking into the circumstances of a death and cremation that had taken place twenty years before. Beyond the official records she couldn’t find any evidence to suggest that my brother was somehow still alive. The records were simply that, what they always were—the papering over life’s messy details. The records of the death of Joseph Christian Tripper. She couldn’t find the doctor who had signed the death certificate. She couldn’t find anyone who had had a damn thing to do with any of us. And I kept yelling at her that I couldn’t remember any of it, not a goddamn thing.

  Then on the third day she found Will Sasser.

  I could have killed her.

  Heidi and I ran smack into the breaking point on the morning of the third day.

  While she was asleep I’d kept drinking and gotten well into the heebie-jeebies. In my addled brain I was back in the past and it was god-awful. There’s no point in going into it. But it was bad and I could hear this incredible metronomic banging. My whole body was trembling with the impact, the shock wave of the hammering, but it wouldn’t stop, just kept banging away, and I kept trying to open my eyes but I couldn’t see anything.

  The pounding was no dream. It woke Heidi. I heard a little scream of surprise and felt her pulling at me, pushing me over onto the floor, where I assumed the fetal pozish.

  For some reason I’d been on my hands and knees banging my head against the wall. I’d knocked a hole in the wall and ripped my scalp open, just an average night in Bedlam. I couldn’t see because I was covered with blood. The floor was slick with blood, I was babbling incoherently, trying to sing snatches of “Everything’s Hazy in Tangier.” Lovely. I don’t know what the hell I thought I was doing. I wasn’t human, was sure of that once my attention was brought to what I was trying to do. If I’d wanted to go next door, there were easier ways than through the wall.

  The time for Heidi to get tough had arrived, either that or just say the hell with it and go home. Or strike off on her own.

  She got tough.

  She cleaned me up, told me I was a complete shithead, got a doctor who put twenty-five stitches in the top of my head. She explained to me that it was time to shape up. Or she would finish the job on my head. It sounds simpler than it was, but it worked. The blood and the stitches had a considerable effect on me as well. And so did she. She took care of me and held my hand.

  I finally collapsed and slept for a long time. It was evening when I woke up. She’d been busy all day, talking to Innis, asking questions in Tangier, digging at the rubble piled up on my past. And over dinner she told me she’d found Will Sasser. I groaned.

  “You must remember Will,” she said. “God knows he remembers you.”

  My headache was suddenly much worse.

  She said, “We’re seeing him tomorrow.”

  Will Sasser had grown gray and sallow and his long hair was still drawn back in a sixties ponytail. But now it was gray, like his bushy eyebrows and the long bandito mustache that draped damply down across his mouth. His eyes peered out from bags of wet cement and, honest to God, his long pointy nose was still straddled by a pair of granny glasses. He was probably wearing a Peter Max T-shirt. He squinted at me through the cigarette smoke as if he were trying to place me, figure out just exactly who I was. We sat in the dim hotel bar with big ceiling fans and potted palms and boys in mess jackets. It looked like Hollywood’s idea of Tangier in the forties. I kept thinking Marta Toren should come in out of the heat clutching a purseful of family heirlooms she’d give Richard Conte in exchange for an exit visa.

  “You look a mite better than when I last saw you, man,” Sasser wheezed. He had the vestigial traces of a Southern drawl. He sucked smoke, feeding his emphysema. He’d been a loose-joined kid in his twenties when I’d last encountered him, writing for rock weeklies on the Continent and in England, full of enthusiasm and fervor and rock dreams. Rock was the gospel of the new world and he would be one of its prophets. Rock would show the way and he’d be a traffic cop. Maybe all that was so, but somehow he had missed the last bus. The band had left without him and now he’d been a long time in Tangier. Heidi Dillinger was nursing a Perrier, watching us the way you might eye a couple of dinosaurs lurching about among their memories, searching out the last bite of the last leaf. Except I didn’t have any memories, just the blackness that grabbed me from time to time. We were working our way through Will Sasser’s Tangier memories. Of me and others.

  “I’m not very clear about all that,” I murmured.

  “No, I’m not surprised, man.” He eyed me again, giving me that old hippie stare, real quiet, as if that should convince me there was heavy thinking going on inside. “Jesus, I’d have bet the ranch there was no coming back from where you were, no ladder high enough to get you out—I’ve seen some real bad, real strung-out cases, y’know, but you were as bad as any, man … you were yellow, man, hepatitis, bad needles, liver on the blink, you kept falling down, no sense of balance, you couldn’t keep anything in your stomach, you couldn’t remember where the hell you were, puking and shooting up and drinking two, three quarts a day, you wouldn’t see the sawbones JC got for you … Jesus, man,”—his eyes blinked from behind the folds of solid, heavy bags—“and now here you are, big as life. You’re a fucking miracle. I mean, you were dying, man, last time I saw you …”

  “Let me get this straight,” I said. “Your saying I wasn’t feeling so well the last time we met—is that the essence of it?”

  “Fuckin’ A, man, you were done, well done, y’know what I—”

  “I get your point,” I said. “Well, fortunately I can’t remember how bad it all was. Maybe we could just drop it. It’s JC we’re interested in—”

  “I know, I know,” he said, shaking his head, the ponytail swinging. He wore a blue shirt and a bow tie and a seersucker suit that seemed to be composed largely of cigarette burns. “But you come as quite a shock, Lee. You look so fit … except that head. Hurt your head, did you?”

  “Accident. Fell down.”

  “Some fall,” he said softly. He was drinking a glass of gin with the merest splash of tonic.

  “JC,” Heidi reminded him.

  “Yes, well, JC, that was what I was just thinking about. It was you, Lee, you were the one everybody thought would die. Fact was, we all figured you were going to kill yourself … JC was okay, more or less, sort of burned out, kept saying he couldn’t write anything anymore, didn’t want to perform anymore. Rock Syndrome. That was what was eating him … couldn’t work, couldn’t concentrate … JC was trying to hold everything together at just the time when everything wanted to fly apart. Entropy. He wasn’t sleeping, his voice was shot, said he had some nodes on his vocal cords … but he just didn’t look or
act like a man who was about to die.” He kept giving me long hard stares, curious about how I’d survived while my comparatively healthy brother hadn’t gotten out of Tangier alive. I was beginning to feel I owed him an apology for surviving. “Do you remember me?” he asked quickly.

  “Sure, sure, vaguely.” I tried out my ingratiating smile. “Which is better than I remember most people from those days. Nothing personal. You saw the shape I was in.”

  “You remember the night you set yourself on fire?”

  “Mainly I remember getting hosed down—”

  “That was JC with the hose that night. He saved your life.”

  “Look, my friend, it’s not my fault my brother died. You seem to hold me responsible and you’re beginning to piss me off. I’m sorry I didn’t die in his place, but we’re stuck with it now. We can’t change it, okay? Agreed?”

  “Hey, relax, man, relax. Chill out. It was just a shock seeing you so healthy … I wouldn’t have recognized you.”

  “Good God, I hope not!”

  “Who all was there when JC died?” Heidi was growing impatient with us. She wanted to stick to business.

  “Well, the party seemed to be over, y’know. The way a couple of people leave and it seems like thousands have walked out. Thumper Gordon—”

  “The drummer,” she interjected as if some of us might have forgotten MacDonald “Thumper” Gordon, who co-wrote some of JC’s greatest hits and was just about peerless with the skins.

  “Thumper had gone to Berlin,” Sasser said, a long ash dribbling down the front of his coat, “to set up the next big date, the concert that never was. Christ. It would have been something, that one—maybe it was just too big ever to be pulled off. ‘Brandenburg Rock’ it was gonna be called.” He sighed in awe at the idea.

  Heidi looked at me for clarification and I said, “One of JC’s more grandiose schemes. Would have happened, too, if things hadn’t gone bad. They were going to build a model, same scale or, hell, maybe bigger, of the Brandenburg Gate, only on the west side of the Wall. And there was going to be a twenty-four hour concert. Or open-ended maybe. I don’t recall … anyway, it never happened, and besides, the chap is dead.” Heidi had me on iced Coke and I wanted a real drink. It was hell, and Sasser just kept going on, reminding me of everything I didn’t want to remember.

  “So Thumper was gone,” he resumed. “I took him to the airport in Casablanca. He said he was going to talk to JC about giving me the rights to do an inside book devoted solely to the Berlin concert … lost worlds,” he sighed. “It would have been the making of Will Sasser.” He struck a bitter, brooding pose, staring at me again as if I might peel off my face and emerge as someone else entirely.

  “Who else was there?” Heidi prodded, stroking her blond hair away from the corners of her eyes. Her features were so clear, so sharp, so alert to nuance and subtext. I wondered what she was thinking, but there were too many layers to get through. She’d been a child when JC died and we all went slightly crazy.

  “There was Annie DeWinter, of course. She’d just left for London—Tangier hadn’t really agreed with her, her stomach couldn’t handle it … she was sick and tired of the doping and JC and the girls he kept around, it was like a movie, like that movie”—he snapped his fingers at his memory—“Blow-Up, David Hemmings playing the photographer, like what’s his name, David Bailey, the birds always after him, I loved that movie. Anyway, that’s the way it was with JC, birds coming out of the closets wanting to take their pants off for him. The Rock Life. I was going to write a play, The Rock Life, but I stayed mostly in Tangier and never got around to it.”

  “That is the rock life, my friend,” I said. “Things slipping away.”

  “So Annie DeWinter was gone,” Heidi said. “What was the story with JC and her?”

  “Lovers,” Sasser said with a shrug. “She was almost like a wife … but it was rock ’n’ roll, y’know. She put up with JC being a star, she put up with the girls—”

  “And she didn’t go off on her own?” Heidi asked.

  “Oh, you mean with other men? We wondered. But she wasn’t the type. Very classy, very English, veddy veddy discreet. It was tough to get a line on her. And once JC died and all that was over, she just dropped out of sight. Amazing, when you think of it … she was bloody near as famous as he was.” He snapped his fingers for another glass of gin and lit another cigarette, coughed like a jackhammer into his fist. His fingernails were long and chipped and there was a tremor in his hands that the gin had accentuated. The Rock Life playing itself out.

  “So who was actually there?”

  “Well, Lee here, of course, and Clive Taillor, he was the one who was with JC all the time. Valet, driver, confidant—he sort of took your place”—he nodded at me—“when you … when you got sick and weren’t really up to much. Clive stepped in, he was the guy JC could talk to all through the night. He was a real four-in-the-morning kind of guy.”

  “Clive Taillor,” I said, “was the best friend JC ever had. Loyal, honorable, never let him down. Everybody let JC down, one way or another, but not Clive.”

  Heidi looked at me expectantly. “And?”

  I shrugged. “Just a testimonial to Clive, that’s all.”

  “Where is he now?”

  “I didn’t keep up—”

  “Zurich,” Sasser said. “JC deeded the Moon Club in Zurich to him. A few weeks before he died. Almost as if he knew he wasn’t long for this world.”

  “Or maybe he had completed his plan to disappear,” Heidi said. “So … Clive, JC, and Lee, that was it?”

  “Right. And then one night JC woke up dead, as they say. Would have been the devil of a mess if it hadn’t been for Clive Taillor. He took care of things … Lee here collapsed when he heard the news, Clive got him into a private hospital until he had JC cremated—”

  “What was the big hurry?” Heidi asked. “Lots of people have thought that was pretty fishy.”

  “Nothing fishy,” Sasser said, wheezing. “Taillor didn’t want it to turn into some festival of ghouls gathering in Tangier for some god-awful funeral orgy. By the time the news got out, JC was already scattered over the desert. It was all over. Thumper and Annie, they didn’t even have time to get back to Tangier.” He snapped his fingers. “Just like that, JC was a memory. A legend.”

  “Just like clockwork,” Heidi said, catching my eye. I was fed up.

  “Jesus, my brother died! Taillor acted out of love and respect and friendship. Rest in peace, for God’s sake. He was devoted to JC. It’s not some big mystery.”

  Sasser was determined to finish his recollections. “Lee here … maybe the day after the cremation Taillor had him wrapped up and sent him off to the Feldstein Clinic outside of Geneva—”

  “He didn’t send me,” I said. “He hand-delivered me. That’s the kind of guy Taillor was.”

  He went on. “I heard Annie DeWinter had a nervous breakdown. Disappeared for a while there. Could have been a rumor, I have no way of knowing, do I? Thumper Gordon went off to Japan with his millions, then he was supposed to be in Martinique buying a hotel, then he was supposed to have bought a castle in Scotland …” He sighed, sucking by turns at the cigarette and the gin. “And JC and The Traveling Executioner’s Band was a part of rock history. The … End.”

  I was feeling somewhat more like a human being. Heidi and I lay in bed with the hotel windows open to the cool night. We’d made love and I’d slept for a while and when I woke I realized I’d been dreaming about Annie DeWinter. You never forgot a woman like Annie DeWinter. In her own way she’d been as famous twenty years ago as JC. She was one of the great photographic models of the sixties, one of the symbols girls tried to look like. There were millions of little pretend Annies running around in those days wishing they were so tall and gangly and had such long legs and long straight hair and eyes as big and dark as ink bottles. She wore headbands and vests and skirts that didn’t even reach halfway down her thighs. Her mouth was immensely wide, full of
huge white teeth, and she wore that shiny pale pink lipstick and had long tan fingers and almost no chest. She was perfect for the times, an icon. She had arrived on the scene, the daughter of a London solicitor, at the age of eighteen in 1965. She had met JC Tripper in 1967 and had been with him off and on for two years when he died. I often wondered if such icons as they were ever really got to know one another, ever really fell in love, or if, as I suspected, it was more a meeting and mingling of two immense public images. Did they ever get past their public personae? Was it always a battle for the mirror, a struggle to look the parts they had played and finally become? Was it the ordeal of being all the time the couple the public wanted them to be?

  When JC died it was as if Annie DeWinter had gone with him. Her huge contract with the cosmetics manufacturer was voided by her. She chose to disappear from the pages of Vogue. There were no answers to the movie offers. There were rumors that she lived in the south of France on a farm, or in the Cotswolds, or on an island somewhere. Then there weren’t even the rumors anymore. I never saw her again. But neither did I ever get her out of my mind. I suppose I loved her. She was, however, part of the past I’d had to reject in order to survive.

  Still, I woke up next to Heidi Dillinger in Tangier twenty years later and I was thinking about Annie DeWinter, the smell of her shampoo, the way she tapped her fingertips on her lips as she listened to you, the way she’d been one of the first to start collecting Egon Schiele’s paintings. I woke up thinking about her face and seeing it before me. And in my mind she was wearing a pair of earrings I’d once given her. She loved them, made them one of her trademarks, partly, I’m sure, because I got them from a gum-ball machine.

  We were having breakfast and Heidi was making notes and going on about how the doctor who had signed JC’s death certificate had died ten years ago. She was saying that the way things were in Tangier when JC died, “just about anything could have happened. They could have cremated a camel driver who died of old age. They could have cremated the camel, nobody would have paid any attention. They might not have cremated anybody at all. Think about it, Lee,” she insisted. “You were completely wasted, you don’t remember anything. Will Sasser was just a journalist, and from the looks of him now I’d bet he was stoned for about a decade at the very least. It was just Clive Taillor and JC … JC felt used up, couldn’t write, he was worn out, wanted a new life. Maybe he was tired of Annie DeWinter. And no offense, but he must have been pretty fed up with the state you were in. So he decided it was time to get out while he could—he might never have the chance again. He had more money than he could count, he set Taillor up with the Moon Club in Zurich, he packed you off to the clinic with Taillor to make sure you got there. And he was free. He and Taillor had probably concocted a perfect plan—and it has been perfect, the world thinks he’s dead …”