Glimpses

by Lewis Shiner

  An unseen DJ put Pink Floyd’s Atom Heart Mother over the PA. I leaned forward and said, “Look, I couldn’t help overhearing earlier. What was that guy saying about you trying to kill yourself?”

  Her eyes were really very beautiful, alert and intense, despite the strain they showed. “I don’t wish to be rude, but why should you care?”

  “I do care. I care about your pictures, and…I just care, that’s all.”

  “You don’t know me. I’m not a very nice person.”

  They were almost the exact words Lori had said to me. The thought of Lori hurt more than I thought possible.

  “What’s wrong?” Erika asked.

  I shook my head. “Nothing. I was going to say you should let me decide whether you’re nice or not for myself.”

  “I’m looking for heroin, Ray. Junkies are seldom nice people. I was hoping to score from Tony, and failing that, I thought perhaps Marianne might be here.” Tony, I realized, must have been Spanish Tony, Tony Sanchez, purveyor of drugs to the Stones and Marianne Faithfull’s sometime lover.

  “Marianne Faithfull,” I said.

  “Yes, Ray. She’s a junkie too. And a friend. It’s very liberating, in a way, heroin is. You’re just one more junkie. No one cares if you’re a pop star or a photographer or on the dole. We’re all the same.” She stubbed out her cigarette and, in a swift movement, drank off half the rum and coke. “Do you think we could get out of here?”

  “I…I don’t know,” I said.

  “You were waiting for someone, weren’t you?”

  “No, I mean…I was hoping to see Jimi Hendrix. I know he comes here to jam.”

  “Not tonight, love, not that I’ve heard of. Do you know Jimi?”

  “I’ve never met him. I just…feel like I know him.”

  “Yes, he affects people that way, doesn’t he? He’s a wonderful man. A true gentleman in the old-fashioned sense of the word. And a fantastic fuck, of course.”

  I suddenly remembered an interview I’d read. They asked her if she ever slept with any of her glamorous subjects and she replied, “Most of them, actually.” I found that suddenly intimidating.

  She looked at me expectantly, with heavy-lidded eyes. I held up my hands. “I guess I don’t really have any plans, then.” Erika was part of the London inner circle, the hundred or so people who went to the same parties and took the same drugs, set trends and made headlines, joined each other’s bands and fell in and out of each other’s beds. If she couldn’t get me to Hendrix, no one could.

  As I followed her up the stairs I thought, to hell with Lori. She was twenty years and thousands of miles away, in another reality, a reality where she was still with Tom. Why should I be alone? Erika might not have been in the shape she once was, but she was still powerfully sensual, totally desirable.

  I caught up to her and let one hand rest in the small of her back, feeling her heat through the jacket. She smiled at me, amused, I think, that I’d ended up wanting her like everyone else did. As we came out onto Margaret Street I tried to remember what lay in her future. I didn’t know if she’d died at the end of the sixties or simply faded into obscurity. It was an eerie feeling.

  “Do you have someplace?” she asked.

  I wanted to tell her that I was out of my league, playing way over my head. She had to already know that. “I just got here, I don’t even have a hotel yet.”

  “Yes, well. I’m afraid I’m of no fixed abode myself at the moment.” She lifted her hand and a cab squealed to a stop. “I need to run one errand,” she said as we got in, “then we can find you a hotel.” To the driver she said, “Bag O’Nails, please, on Kingly Street.”

  The streets of London looked like they’d been hand-painted in psychedelic colors. There were posters on the walls, exotic clothes, fresh paint on new businesses. The ragged spirit of underground culture had turned into the hard gloss of commercial enterprise, but it was exciting just the same. It was like a big-budget Hollywood movie, with lots of flash and glitter so you don’t notice the lack of soul.

  As the cab pulled up outside the Bag O’Nails, Erika said, “You couldn’t lend a girl a fiver, could you?” I peeled off a five-pound note and she kissed me, unexpectedly, on the cheek. “Wait here,” she said, “I’ll be right back.” She walked slowly, not quite steadily, to the door of the club.

  The cabbie caught my eye in the mirror and grinned. “Nice night, eh, gov’nor?”

  I nodded and looked away. He didn’t have to recognize Erika specifically to know she was special. She was what everybody else aspired to, and it showed in the way she dressed and talked and moved. I didn’t think she’d be back. It was only a question of how long I was obligated to wait for her.

  “What time is it?” I asked the driver.

  “Half eleven, sir.”

  I reset my watch. Almost midnight, and people thronged the sidewalks. Street vendors sold everything from homemade clothes and jewelry to underground papers like IT and Frendz. Tourists and older Londoners stared at the parade of finery. If Jimi and Erika were the royalty, the kids were their subjects, brightly dressed, hung with chains and medallions, eyes darting nervously ahead, voices slightly too loud, too high-pitched.

  There was a rattle at the door and Erika climbed in next to me, smiling. “Everything is now wonderful,” she said.

  I had the driver take us through Soho to the Russell Hotel. It was the only place I could think of. I quickly lost my sense of direction and when we turned one corner I saw the ruins of a building overgrown with weeds and grass. Erika caught my stare.

  “It’s a bomb site. You Yanks are always so surprised. You should see Germany. Most of them here are gone now. It’s only the forgotten places like Soho where you still find them. They give everything such a Wasteland quality, don’t you think?”

  Erika waited discreetly in the lobby while I checked in. I wanted to put Erika’s name next to mine on the registration card to make it seem more real. It was only when I handed the card back that the date on it hit home: 15/9/70. I had only Wednesday and Thursday to make contact with Jimi and get my message across. Then I turned and saw Erika and knew I’d have to risk it.

  By the time we got to our floor, Erika was chewing her lower lip and rubbing at her cuticles. She left one newly lighted cigarette in the ashtray of the lift while she lit another. As soon as I got the door open she pushed ahead of me and shut herself in the bathroom.

  The room was much the same as the one I had in 1989. The wallpaper was a little more drab and the bed was slightly larger, a bit bigger than a twin bed in the States. There was only the one, plus a chest of drawers, a desk, and a bentwood chair. I pulled the bedspread down and stacked the pillows against the headboard. I kicked off my shoes and lay down, knowing Erika was using my bathroom to shoot up. She was famous and powerful and spoiled, and there was nothing I could do to stop her.

  On the other hand, I was also pretty sure that my cooperation would be rewarded with her body. It had been two months since Mexico and Lori, two months since a woman had touched me with kindness in her hands. I felt withered and dry.

  After a while I heard the bath run. She was in there for a long time, and took a long time to dry off afterward. My mind veered back and forth between thoughts of her damp nakedness and wondering what she thought of me, expected of me.

  She came out with her hair wrapped in one towel and her body in another. The towel around her body left cleavage at the top and impossibly long thighs at the bottom. She wobbled slightly as she walked. She lay down next to me and kissed me lightly on the lips. Her eyelids seemed too heavy to stay open on their own.

  She rested her head lightly on my chest and said, “Thank you. I’d been without a decent bath for a while.” Her voice was both sleepy and coy. “I don’t know how I could ever repay you.” She rolled slightly away from me, onto her back, and somehow the towel around her body came undone. I was acutely conscious of the overhead light, the brightness of the room. I could see one breast, large and sof
t, the skin white as milk. I turned her face toward me and kissed her, to see what it would be like. Her mouth was soft and she kissed me with impersonal intensity. It felt good, sensual and sweet, and at the same time I was disconnected from it. I was concerned about how narrow the bed was, whether she could actually feel any sexual desire behind the heroin, that this was Erika Hanover, for Christ’s sake, of the royal Hanover line, who had slept with Hendrix and Jagger and God knew who else. And that I was here in bed with her when I should have been trying to find Jimi.

  She pulled the towel loose from her hair. I pushed the other towel aside as well and kissed her nipples while she ran her hands lazily through my hair. “Mmmmmm,” she said. “That’s lovely.”

  I took my clothes off and lay down again. I was still not erect. I kissed her some more and ran my hands over the soft, warm skin of her body but it didn’t help. She touched me and saw the situation and tried to massage some life into me. “Is everything all right?” she asked after a while.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “It feels wonderful. It’s just not, I don’t know. Not happening.”

  She touched my cheek. “Was it something I did? Is there something you want me to do?”

  “No, nothing like that.”

  “Then don’t worry about it,” she said. “I’m pretty stoned anyway. Can you turn out the light?”

  I got up to turn out the light. I couldn’t believe it. I’d actually wound up in bed with Erika Hanover, one of the most desired women of the decade, and I couldn’t get it up. I grabbed the useless piece of meat between my legs and choked it. Bastard, I thought. Useless bastard.

  When I got back in bed I thought at first that Erika had nodded off. Instead, in a very slow, dreamy voice she said, “It’s so difficult, the whole sex thing, isn’t it? I mean, it’s got so it’s simply expected. Whether you actually fancy someone or not, one still feels as though one ought to. From gratitude or politeness or perhaps just on principle.”

  “Do you even want to?” I asked her. “I mean, when you’re…”

  “On heroin? Oh yes, it’s a very sensual drug, heroin is. Not sexual perhaps, but sensual. Everything feels so good.” In the faint light from the window I watched her stroke the pillow in a slow, rhythmic motion. Her voice seemed to come from nowhere, the words distinct, soft and very, very slow. “The truth? I don’t suppose I really care if I actually pull someone or not. It’s so lovely to lie quietly afterward…”

  She was quiet for long enough that I thought once again she’d nodded out. Then she said, “It feels so good. I hate to waste it in sleep. Do you mind talking?”

  “No.”

  “Are you afraid of death?”

  “I don’t know. I guess so.” I thought about swimming into the abyss. Afterward, in my room, I’d been terrified. “What brought that up?”

  “Heroin is like a little taste of death for me. So peaceful. But men are so afraid of death. It’s not like that for women, I don’t think. Why should that be?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Her sentences had become simple and short, with long pauses in between. “I think maybe life is such a struggle for women. So much blood and pain. Death is a release from all that. Did you know Marianne actually died? In Australia, last year. She was so upset over Mick. She took a hundred and fifty Tuinal. She had the most amazing vision. She saw Brian there, Brian Jones. He’d only been dead a few days. She told me about it. She was walking along this plain. There was no wind or heat or shade. Just this rocky, vast plain. Like something out of the Inferno. Suddenly Brian was there. He was so pleased to see her. He’d been so frightened and lonely. The first thing he asked her for was a Valium.

  “They started to walk together, just talking. She knew somehow they were on an adventure. The walk took days. They talked about life and death and God. They took a lot of comfort in each other. And then they came to this vast chasm. Brian said, ‘I have to go now. Thanks for coming with me.’ And he went over the edge. Marianne says she stood there for years. Then she heard voices, calling her back. She found herself in this place like an airport. It was a place where you wait. And then she said her name must have been called. Because she woke up.

  “She’d been unconscious for six days. Can you imagine? It sounds like heaven. To sleep like that. When she got out of hospital she went traveling around Australia. All over the country. And she came to this place that was just like the one in her dream. It’s called Piggery, in Byron Bay. I wrote down the name. It’s along a beach, by the sea. Marianne said it looked like the moon. It was like the place in her dream, and she’d never been there before.

  “There’s so much we’ll never understand, isn’t there? So many things we can never explain away. I believe that, don’t you?”

  “Yes,” I said. “I do.”

  I shifted around, got more comfortable. I could smell the soap on her skin and I felt the first tentative prickling of renewed desire. “Erika?” I said. She was asleep.

  I lay there for a long time, my face hot with shame and frustration. It had happened a few times before, most notably on my first sexual experience, with Annette Shipley from my high school drama club. She’d been to bed with a lot of guys that I knew, but she’d always stopped short of actual sex with me. “You’re different,” she would say. “I love you.” Then one summer afternoon I came over to her mother’s apartment to swim. Her mother was gone and Annette took me to bed. She was very businesslike. I guess I’d expected romance. I’d never touched an entirely naked woman before and I didn’t really know what I was supposed to do or say. Like Erika said, it was the sixties, we were liberated, it was something you did.

  We tried for a while and then she smiled and went into the kitchen for a Coke. I remember the radio in the kitchen was tuned to the classical station. I was ready then, but it was too late, my mother was due to pick me up. I saw Annette again a couple of times that summer and she never gave me another chance.

  There’s something inside me that gets confused, that loses track of who this other person is here in bed with me, that is suddenly naked and afraid, that feels her expectations more strongly than desire. Sometimes all I need is to hear the other person’s voice to get my perspective, to feel connected again.

  I wanted to wake Erika up and talk to her, or maybe try again. Jim Morrison was inside me, telling me to prove my manhood. Brian Wilson told me to be cool. I touched Erika’s cheek and saw she was deep into her drugged sleep. It had all gone wrong. I remembered the party when I felt so lost and Brian found me outside. I felt more lost right then, with nobody even to look for me.

  For a second, on the edge of sleep, I saw the road I’d been on since my father died. Morrison first, the starting place, the selfish sensual being inside all the men I know. Then there was Brian, the child, generous and playful, not strong enough to make it on his own. Then Jimi, who tried so hard to put it all together, the flesh and the spirit, only he’s weak and struggling too. So where does that leave me?

  I slept badly. I woke up tired and still hating myself at ten in the morning, to find Erika gathering up her clothes. She looked at me oddly so I said, “Ray. Ray Shackleford. I met you at the Speakeasy—”

  “Don’t be silly. Of course I remember you.” I wasn’t at all sure that she did. She was wearing panties and nothing else, untangling her T-shirt. She made a face at the way it smelled. I was of course stiff as a baseball bat but I didn’t see a chance to make up for the night before.

  Erika said, “You told me you wanted to meet Hendrix, but you never said why.”

  “He’s in danger. I can’t tell you how I know. If I could talk to him, I could warn him. It’s literally life and death.”

  She sat in the bentwood chair, jeans forgotten in her hands. “What sort of danger? Is this some CIA plot? King and the Kennedys and now Jimi?”

  “No, it’s…you remember talking about Marianne last night, and you said there are all these things we’ll never understand? This is one of them. There’s this accid
ent waiting to happen, and I think I can save Jimi from it.”

  I felt like she wanted to believe me. “You understand that I have to be careful. Jimi is one of God’s innocents. He has no discrimination with people, and he’s so vulnerable. Right now he’s being devoured by all these negative forces around him, negative people. He doesn’t need another person who simply wants something from him.”

  “It’s the other way around. I want to help him.”

  “I seem to remember your saying something like that to me yesterday. It would be nice to think that in some other life you could perhaps help me. You seem a very kind person. I would love to photograph you, but—” She made a vague gesture with her free hand. “I seem to have misplaced all of my cameras. Sad, really. I don’t even know if I could do it anymore. One needs a certain hunger, and I seem to have misplaced that as well.”

  “You don’t take any pictures at all?”

  “I haven’t for almost a year. But don’t let’s go on about me.” She pulled her jeans on, suddenly very brisk. “We were talking of Jimi. There’s still hope for Jimi, after all.” She got into her shoes, picked up her jacket, and stopped by the door. “Every human will hit moments of absolute truth. I should like to think I’ve done it a time or two, maybe the picture with the butterflies. Jimi is so special because he has trained and refined himself to do this more than anyone I’ve ever known. There’s really nothing else for him, you see, but this struggle to break through the wall, to get to this truth.”

  She opened the door, then turned back. “Eric Burdon’s playing Ronnie Scott’s club tonight, in Frith Street. I expect Jimi will be there. Come late, perhaps one or two. If he’s there, I’ll introduce you.”

  “Wait. Can’t you stay—”

  “No, love, I must go.” She blew me a kiss from the doorway. “I’ll see you tonight.”

  I went back to sleep and dreamed again about my father. It’s night and I’m sitting in the yard on a wooden table, reading Rolling Stone. My father is sitting next to me and he keeps rocking the table with his foot. I swat at him with the magazine, very playfully, and he picks up a big chunk of concrete and playfully begins to bash me with it. I ask him twice to stop but he seems to think it’s all a joke. I lose my temper and attack him, trying to pinch his nose shut to suffocate him. When that doesn’t work I put a pillow over his face and try to smother him. That’s when my mother comes out and tells us it’s time for dinner.