Chinaski

by Frances Vick

  The words hung heavily. Peter felt Carl shudder and Chris automatically handed him another beer. Peter touched the scab on his eyebrow, made it throb, and felt vindicated.

  “She’s OK. She’s just made a fool of herself. She’s embarrassed. She should be.”

  Chris Harris snickered and clapped Alexander on the shoulder. “Girls and tours, Al. Girls and tours shouldn’t mix. Never. You know.”

  But Alexander’s face remained grim and his eyes were soft and melancholy. “She has no place. So she says she will go home, now. She will not stop being sad, I think. It is sad that she is alone, now.”

  That put a dampener on things. The bar girls looked less certain about Peter and John and began speaking together rapidly in their own language while they cleaned the bar. Carl looked absently at his bitten fingers, while Chris tried to keep things going with tales of journalistic derring do, but the moment was lost. They all grew silent, wondering how they could each leave without being the first to go.

  Carl was the first. He went to find Lydia, but nobody went with him and afterwards no-one wanted to ask what they’d talked about. He didn’t come back until everyone else was asleep. By the time they were packing the van in the morning, hungover and trembling, Lydia was standing stiffly by Alexander’s ancient VW. Alexander quietly opened the door for her, took her rucksack and placed it on the back seat, and then they were gone.

  In the van, they all waited for Carl to speak, and when he didn’t, they did it for him. Girls and tours, tours and girls, it never works. You’re only as strong as your weakest link. She’ll be OK. She’d survive a nuclear strike. Who needs a beer? Groans. Eventual capitulation. I’ll have one. Sudden Celtic Frost followed by a sudden silence. Dougie offered to change the tape. After half an hour, it was as if nothing bad had happened.

  The rest of the tour, Peter remembered only through a few sharp images. Chris Harris dropping lager bottles full of piss out of the back of the van as they travelled at high speed, watching them smash on the road like tiny rain drops. Dougie having a shit in a bit of scrub land only to find that it was right beside the train tracks. A commuter train was held up on the tracks for 15 minutes, and none of the passengers had anything better to do than wanly watch Dougie try to hide what he was doing. Learning to use a soldering iron. John’s bass stolen in Hannover and then returned, oddly greasy, in Stuttgart. A fat promoter calling the woman he just slept with ‘empty’, refusing to let her eat before she went home.

  They all swapped clothes. They all stank. They were all tanned and all dirty. They read nothing but road signs and menus. The faces, buildings, gigs blurred together. Sleeplessness made everything dreamlike; they felt as if they’d been on the road since birth, a cult-like family. Chris Harris took his leave, but promised to show them a good time when they hit France. Then Dougie left them.

  He didn’t like France. He couldn’t score, and he didn’t know where the venues were. The streets were too narrow, the whole place was full of collaborating Nazi scum and the girls were up their own arse. In Lyon he refused to help them unload the van, and sat in the venue getting hammered. They let him sleep it off in the dressing room but when they came off stage they found that he’d smashed all the mirrors, drunk the rider and disappeared. A panicked phone call to Deep Focus provided them with a series of louche interim drivers who preferred the radio to tapes and showed no interest in the games that had become the gristly thread holding them together. Without the games, the word-play, the sense of a force to push against and be cowed by – without Dougie – they were stunned, bereft. They arrived in Paris almost catatonic, with a plan to meet up with Chris for the last two gigs before going back home. Home! It was an ancient, alien place by now. Chris had big news for them, he said.

  Chris was holed up in a vast barn of a place in the Bastille. Two enormous attics had been knocked together and fitted out like an adolescent’s playground. Blow-up sex dolls lounged nonchalantly around the dinner table, arcade games lined the walls. A rank smell drifted out of the open toilet door, and the kitchen walls were covered in artfully defaced pornography. Peter, John and Carl, traipsing up the stairs exhausted, saw the massive TV, the bean bags, and immediately settled in to watch a dubbed episode of Knight Rider. Carl fell asleep with his head on Peter’s shoulder, and Peter happily allowed it to go numb, rather than disturb him. The apartment was a French A&R man’s model girlfriend’s brother’s flat, and Chris had the run of it, apparently indefinitely.

  After his nap, Carl asked to use the phone, and spent an hour or so in a locked bedroom, muttering, sometimes giggling softly. John got stoned watching Columbo, and Peter took a bath, feeling bashful because Chris Harris sat on the toilet lid, smoking his shitty-smelling cigarettes and chatting to him the whole time. He was talking about The Industry, his hands forming quotation marks on the first and last syllables. The Industry, he explained, was full of sluts and vampires, it was filled to the brim with pretenders, company men and sycophants.

  “In this world, Peter, there are precious few people with the wit and the grace to swim against the tide of shit and not choke to death or become a part of it. Chinaski – you guys – you’ve done it. You guys have it, and if I see it, others will too. It’s axiomatic.” He rubbed some ash into his trousers and gave a wolfish smile. “Where we lead, others will follow. Some of us are made to follow – most. You guys, others,” – an elegant, dismissive wave at himself – “are meant to lead, in whatever capacity we can. That’s what women don’t understand, what she, what’s her face, Lydia, didn’t understand, is that we don’t belong to them. We belong to ourselves. We don’t have family, we don’t need all that saccharine stuff. We’re a lot more primitive, but, Peter, what comes from the primitive but all the good shit? The roots eh? All the fucking, all the music, rock and fucking roll, eh? It’s the primitive that keeps us alive. I mean, what do you think of this place? What do you think of this flat?”

  Peter said it was very nice. Chris looked at him with patient pity. “It’s a shit hole Peter, just like anywhere else. The difference is, the only difference is, is that it doesn’t think it is. It thinks,” – again came the finger quotation marks – “it thinks that it’s unusual, or intimidating, or cool or whatever. But. What it is. Is. Shit. It’s all been designed so it doesn’t look like it, but if you scratch and sniff it, it’s shit.”

  Peter didn’t say anything because he knew he’d be wrong. He really wanted to wash his balls, and he shifted miserably in the cooling water while Chris shook out a little coke onto a copy of The Face and rubbed it on his ulcerated gums. “And that’s why I think you guys have it. Have. It. Because you seem blissfully unaware of artifice. You haven’t been designed. It’s all been organic.”

  Peter thought of Carl’s lost years, being trained in Dom Marshall’s lair in How To Be A Star. He thought about the different ways Carl treated different people. He thought about this sudden, hallucinatory success. It didn’t seem organic, it seemed like it was a combination of talent, construction, and dizzying luck. He told Chris as much but was immediately dismissed.

  “Oh I think you misunderstand me. You think you’ve constructed yourselves, we all do. You think you’re in control of it, but I’m here to tell you you’re not. Some people are born to lead. If they had any control over it, then they’d probably say no. It’s a lot of hassle, leading. A lot. But. Some people have no choice.”

  Peter had heard something like this before...from whom? Something with the same creepy message at heart, but put in a different way.

  “So we’re here to save music?”

  Chris was sitting glazed eyed and Peter had to repeat himself. Chris blinked. “What Oh no! God no. Carl’s here to save music. You’re just the rock on which to build his church. Oh, I like that! That’s very neat.” He chuckled and abruptly stood up. The Face fell onto the dirty floor. “There’s no towels, but there is some brandy.” When he left, he left the door open.

  14

  Chris had set up a whole iti
nerary of activities for them. Mostly photo shoots, and one impromptu gig at fashion school, where they would be met by someone from Rolling Stone. The band now existed in some hinterland where Deep Focus was a world away, in which Chris Harris appeared to have taken over their career.

  There were parties in the flat, each one leaking into the next with barely any difference between them; even the people looked the same, said the same things, made the same vehement points in the same range of accents. During these parties, Carl was quiveringly alert. He knew how to laugh in the right places, how to softly insinuate, how to show just enough displeasure to force others into silence. He’d been much the same in school, but fascinating provincial adolescents is relatively simple. Here he was out of his natural element, and that’s what made it so impressive. Peter felt pride, really, a glowing pride in Carl. One of our own! One of us, sitting at the centre of this whirlwind. On the sidelines, Peter saw the hundreds of unfolding narratives that the mere fact of Carl created and shut down, and felt nothing but admiration. Nobody could begrudge the attention Carl got, he was made for it. He made people hungry.

  Carl was weighed up like gold. People watched him, and watched others watching him, guessing who he was watching. Sitting cross-legged on that table, girls draped over him (one of them’s a model, a proper model!), one nervous, jittery knee moving up and down, up and down, while someone kisses the back of his neck. Charging up onto the roof, his guitar on the longest lead, determined to play during a lightning storm. As he washed his skinny frame in the shower without the curtain, he could be seen through the half frosted glass. His fingers twitched in the morning, sending his pills skittering across the floor. When bored, his heavy head drooped, but sometimes he would give that taut smile reserved for the favourite, the loved one, the carer, spreading wide across his face and so many thought about it privately as they tried to sleep. Carl, never alone, was snatched at by so many, assessed, pieces of him stored away, stitched together into something nearly whole.

  Chris Harris was at his elbow at all times, whispering, nodding, to emphasise. He weeded out the strident, opinionated girls, the ones that were too tall, and hustled them off to Peter, who was ill at ease, and made them so, or John, who took it where he could. He allowed the smaller, dove-like creatures with little English and soft, compliant limbs to stick with Carl. They drifted about decoratively and were seamlessly replaced from one party to the next. But none of this stopped Carl from calling Lydia, like clockwork, every evening at 7, for that whole first week in Paris. He would disappear into the big bedroom, firmly shut the door, and conduct his maddeningly quiet conversations in privacy. After the phone call he would quietly unlatch the door and lie down on the bed, perfectly still with his eyes on the ceiling. One by one, Peter, Chris and John would tiptoe in, not allude to the phone call at all, and begin tempting him with fresh new parties. And so it went on. Until Carl got sick.

  The two gigs in Paris went well, and they were given two more. The last, in a desanctified chapel in Pigalle, was filled with A&R men from major labels. Sullen students were paid to slink up the aisles with trays of sweetened vodka. Candles hovered on the choir stalls, along the worn stone steps of the pulpit, at the feet of Christ. The seated audience, unconsciously affected by the fact of being in a church, whispered and murmured together, and their cigarette smoke looked, but didn’t smell, like incense. The band waited backstage in the vestry with a skittish Chris Harris.

  Carl, subdued all day, had violet rings under his eyes, and his hands shook. Since morning, he’d been tonguing his bottom lip and over the hours an angry red crescent had formed, raw and painful to look at. He was tired. He was just tired, he said. The sound check was peculiar – all those echoes – and Carl, from some dimly remembered Catholic past, had trouble keeping his back to the Cross. There was no support band – this was a showcase, not a real gig – and the artifice made them all quail a little. And Carl’s hands shook, his head bobbed and that red sore grew bigger.

  Chris Harris wore ironic tweed and spoke perfect French. He arranged for food, which Carl didn’t touch, and moved amongst the crowd with his face fixed in a smile and a mouth filled with ashy compliments. He advised Chinaski to come on late, to have a few beers, to relax. In retrospect Peter wondered if that didn’t have something to do with what came later.

  By 10 the vodka had become more plentiful, and the noise less reverent. The doors had been ostentatiously locked, and the wave of expectant applause that hit the band when they came on stage was overwhelming. For all it was an altar, and not a stage at all, it was still a bigger space than they were used to working in. Usually Carl had to watch that he didn’t hit John with the arm of his guitar, and John had fallen into the drum kit more than once just by taking a step backwards, but here they had space to roam, and it was intimidating. The guitar monitors were hulking, satanic looking things, next to the broken effigy of the virgin, and the outline of the altar itself could still be seen through the black backdrop strung from the ceiling. Chinaski felt, and looked, as if they’d been dropped there by some particularly fiendish God, to confuse the natural order of things. Or at least that’s what Chris Harris wrote in his review.

  It all started normally. Peter found that he was able to ignore the surroundings after a while, and it became just another gig. The lack of movement from the audience was a bit off-putting – they stayed in their seats, signalling for more vodka – but the applause was appreciative, long, and apparently genuine. About halfway through, though, things changed.

  Carl began moving strangely. It began with the odd flurries of violence he’d displayed before – smashing at the pedals, whipping the neck of his guitar viciously from side to side, sudden leaps in the air – but somewhere along the line the posturing became apparently genuine rage, almost ridiculous at first, unsexy, inelegant. One of his guitar strings broke, then another, but rather than breaking to restring, he carried on playing, flaying his fingertips and knuckles, thin blood staining and soaking his clothes. By the middle of the set he was gore-streaked and howling. Peter and John became, separately, anxious, and peered into the vestry for Chris Harris but couldn’t see him. The lights, set low and blinding, isolated them from each other, so that they were forced to carry on playing in a bubble of glare and increasing worry. The monitors were shit, so it was difficult to hear how far from the path Carl had strayed – if he was even playing the same song as them anymore. The noise of his by now three-stringed guitar was hideous, and Peter strained his neck, desperate to catch John’s eye, needing a sign. He stopped playing when he thought he ought to, according to the hints he was getting from the monitors, and he appeared to have got the timing right, because he heard the expected whine of feedback from Carl’s guitar and felt relief. The applause rolled over them, and he discerned little breaks in the blinding light – figures standing up, moving about. There must have been a lot of them because the alternating dark/light dark/light had a strobe effect.

  “Chris says to stop,” shouted John.

  “What? Why?”

  “Just says to stop.”

  Peter stood up. Feedback was still whining and twining itself about the pews and rafters, and as he followed the noise, he came across Carl’s smashed guitar abandoned in the central aisle, like a motorbike after a hellish accident. Tripping over the guitar lead, he was caught by a gaggle of A&R men in buttoned up coats, sporting huge smiles. One of them hauled him up by the elbow, while another clapped him on the back.

  “Great gig! Great gig!” and Peter, dazed, smiled back. He had no fucking idea what had happened, and scanned the mass of satisfied faces, looking for clues. There was a trail of clothes, and now he noticed dark smears on the sides of the front pews, some no bigger than raindrops, some like sinister skid marks, all leading in the direction of the vestry. Drops of blood, little splatters in a shower, and a shoe print where someone had kicked the door open.

  Peter was the last to arrive. There was so much blood. Carl was half naked and covered in
it. It matted his hair and pooled in the hollow of his collar bones. John stood next to him, mute and confused, while Chris Harris dabbed at the superficial wounds, smiling and chatting, and Carl sat catatonically in an upright chair, his hands placidly on his knees, the blood caking around his knuckles, saying nothing at all.

  “What happened?” Peter’s voice was hoarse.

  Chris looked up, grinned, “You just gave the show of your life is what happened. Seriously. If you wanted a major deal, I could open the door right now and get you one, like that –” he clicked his fingers, but they were too tacky with blood. He clapped instead, “Like that. That was the show of the fucking decade as far as I’m concerned.” And he lit a cigarette, gave one to Carl. Peter crouched down in front of his friend.

  “Carl, are you OK?” Nothing. “Carl, mate, are you OK? What the fuck happened?”

  A shaky hand put the cigarette to his frozen lips, and Carl inhaled and exhaled through a smile that was made all the more ghastly by the blood that stained his teeth.

  “He tore rock and roll a new one, that’s what happened. In a few minutes we’ll go to the after party and they’ll be on you like the proverbial flies, just watch.” Chris scrubbed at Carl’s face with a scrap of toilet paper. “But not if you go out there looking like fucking Carrie. There’s got to be somewhere to wash here – priests have to shower don’t they? Look, have a wash in the basin at the back and take my shirt until we can get you changed. We can be fashionably late to our own party, I’m sure.”

  He fussed about Carl, pinching him to get him out of the chair, arranging a taxi, hustling him out of the chapel in the most public way possible. Carl’s hunched figure in the button-down shirt was immediately swamped by the crowd, and Peter and John, separated from them, had to force their way out of the door, just in time to see Carl being pushed into a waiting car and Chris Harris issuing instructions to an expectant knot of people. Chris gave Peter a thumbs up.