by John Niven
I stride briskly across the tarmac, jog up the gangplank – to more effusive hellos from the pilots – and settle into my favoured seat on a Gulfstream G550 – front right window facing forward. A stewardess appears with a silver jug of steaming coffee and plates of fruit, freshly baked croissants, pastries and smoked salmon. Enough to feed the eighteen seats in the jet even though I am the only passenger. The stewardess is blonde, in her late thirties, and a definite DB, although she is good-looking enough to have possibly once been an RB. (The Three Categories of Boiler: Romancing Boilers: singers or actresses or models who have found a certain level of fame. Here you know you are in for the long-haul job, for a fair few dinners and drinks and movies and going to awards ceremonies together and fuck knows what else before you can fair and square get your cock out. Then there are Doable Boilers: aspiring singers, actresses and models on the way up, or very attractive girls working in the industry or a related field – fashion, film, whatever. These are the type you take out for a few drinks, dinner, then at the end of that first date, you get them back to your place where, of course, you get your cock out and it’s all good. Then there are Bogs Boilers – the kind of skanks who hang out on the fringes of any creative industry who are basically a notch above groupie. A Bogs Boiler you can drag into a toilet cubicle and smash her back door in within fifteen minutes of meeting her. As with any class system under late-period capitalism there is some fluidity between the ranks. A Doable Boiler can, with enough success, become a Romancing Boiler. A Bogs Boiler can, with a little maturing and self-respect, become a Doable Boiler. Conversely, a Romancing Boiler, with enough failure and passing years, can fall to become a Doable Boiler. Almost never will a Romancing Boiler suffer a fall so complete as to become a Bogs Boiler. Courtney Love, say, would be a notable exception here.)
I ignore the food as I settle back into the cream leather and light a cigarette. (Again, I think of you, out there in seat 44F, with your two foot of seat space, the remains of a microwaved tray of eyelids and anuses in front of you, the three-hundred-pound housewife with screaming infant to your left, the Somali marathon runner who has come straight from his latest triumph without showering to your right, your every pore screaming for nicotine as you gaze without hope at a ‘No Smoking’ sign that will remain resolutely illuminated even in the event of nuclear war. I feel for you, I truly do.) About that pre-flight anxiety. It never used to bother me, getting on a plane. Weirdly I’ve become more nervous about it in the last few years. It’s two things, I think. Obviously there’s the Russian roulette factor: the more you fly, and I fly a lot, the more bullets you put in the chamber. But it’s also this: I have so much to lose these days. Looking for a distraction, I pick up the inflight magazine (called something like High Flyer or True Player or Just Rape the Poor) and flip through pages of adverts for private islands, walk-in humidors and yachts with helipads, stuff aimed solely at people like me. I stop at a lifestyle feature, the ageing wife of some Hollywood studio boss – she’s very much like a sixty-year-old version of the stewardess on this flight, old now, but surely a hard-gobbling miracle sometime around the late seventies – is giving a tour of her Pacific Palisades home. Accompanying the article is a photograph, clearly taken many years ago, of her cradling her son (now a famous actor, in and out of rehab. Remember: if you have to stop drinking you’re a fucking loser) when he was a baby. I find myself staring at the baby for a long time: the huge limpid pools of his eyes, the softness of his skin almost palpable even in this two-dimensional form. Unsettled for reasons I cannot name, I toss the magazine aside and focus my gaze on a more reassuring sight – the buttocks of the stewardess, bending over in the galley kitchen up ahead as she gets something out of a low cupboard.
Ok, I confess. There’s something I’ve not been telling you. Another reason I’m bothering to do all this …
I had a moment this winter, down in the Caribbean. We were docked in the Tobago Quays for a day or two, fucking around on the deck, when suddenly, a shadow fell over me. I looked up and saw Geffen’s boat, the Rising Sun, coming in to dock beside us, all 453 feet, five floors and eighty-two rooms of it, blocking out the rising sun, looming over us like the Death Star above a Fiat 500. And, in that instant, I realised just how fucking poor I was. You think you’re a player? I might as well have been downing that pint at Luton Airport myself. I tried to repeat the lulling mantra I find calms me in moments of stress – I am Steven Stelfox. I am worth three hundred million dollars – but it wasn’t working.
I stood there with one thought.
I need to earn some proper money.
Because three hundred mil is nothing these days. I need to sort this out. Go big or go home.
So I am going on a journey. Jesus Christ, not that kind of ‘journey’. Not the kind of journey the simpering slags, skanks and bumboys think they undertake on the kind of TV programmes you watch. Not the kind of journey that celebrities claim to have been on when they’re flogging their book or their movie or whatever. These kinds of journeys are all lies designed to get you to part with your cash. These kinds of journeys imply that the people involved have learned something. That they have grown in some way.
I will learn nothing.
I will not grow.
I am fully formed.
Come on now.
Come with me.
TWO
Malibu, California. Thursday 19 January, 10.50 p.m.
The party was beginning to wind down.
Lucius propped himself up on his raft of pillows and surveyed the room. Some of his guests were still laughing and chatting in the corner by the picture windows overlooking the five thousand acres of grounds, the Pacific Ocean visible in the distance in the daytime. A few were still engaged with the movie showing on the cinema-sized screen on the wall opposite his bed (an advance screener of Universal’s Despicable Me 3). And three, including Jerry and Connor, were stretched out on his bed, Jerry’s head pleasingly close to Lucius’s hand. Opened bottles of Pinot Noir and Skyy vodka were scattered around the room. He ruffled the straw-blond mop close to him, its texture feeling amazingly thick and lustrous under his touch. Everything felt good, looked good. Man, Dr Ali had really come through tonight. He might have to have another shot of candy … just one more before bed? Before his milk? Maybe that would be too much? Then again – who was anyone to tell him what was too much? He was Lucius Du Pre. The Emperor of Pop. He’d sold over five hundred million albums. He was adored by millions as a living god. He’d agreed to do this fucking comeback tour – at fifty years old! – to make everyone else happy. He could have a little more candy if he wanted, right?
He picked up the phone next to the bed and rang Dr Ali, who lived just ten minutes away, in the Malibu hills, overlooking the PCH1. Lucius wished Ali would take up his offer of a cottage within the Narnia grounds, but the doctor valued his independence. Ali seemed surprised to be getting another call so soon, but he brooked no complaint (he had no cause to on his retainer) and said he’d be right over. Lucius hung up and smiled, picturing the black bag glistening on the passenger seat of the doctor’s Porsche (leased by Lucius of course) making its way towards him. He stretched out and looked at his body – still thin, after all these years. (No surprise, for many years he only ate one small meal every other day.) The skin on his stomach though, that didn’t look good. Mottled, brownish-grey patches. The last operation. He’d have to go back in. Thank God it hadn’t affected his face yet. Though down there, around what his daddy used to call your ‘peanuts’ (‘oh yeah, get my peanuts in there too, get ’em in your mouth’) was starting to look pretty bad. He was surprised some of them didn’t scream.
Talking of screaming, he became aware of a noise, breaking in on his consciousness, rupturing his buzz. Two of his guests were having an argument that seemed to be ending in tears.
‘Hey, Jonah, what’s up?’ Lucius called over to the window bay in his unusually high, piping voice.
‘Nothing,’ Jonah, a relative newcomer, said sulkil
y.
Lucius looked at the Disney clock on the wall. It was getting late.
They’d had a grand afternoon around the ranch, visiting all the artistic garden statues featuring children in various poses, going to his petting zoo, riding on his railroad – on the little steam locomotive named Betsy after his mother. They’d gone on his Ferris wheel, his carousel, the zip wires, the octopus, the roller coaster, the bumper cars and, finally, they’d spent a good hour in the amusement arcade, playing the slots and the video games. But now it was nearly eleven o’clock, and there’d been a fair bit of liquor in the mix once they’d got back here. Not a crazy amount. Just enough Jesus Juice and Holy Spirit to get the party going. Yes, a grand day out. But still, tempers could get frayed around this time of night.
Especially when your average guest was aged twelve.
The Emperor would soon have to start making decisions. He looked at the two mops of hair on the bed close to him. Jerry and Connor. Connor had been his ‘special’ friend for the last few years, the one who would be invited to stay overnight when the other guests were being corralled down the hallway, to be collected by parents, or driven back to their homes in LA by Marcus or Jay in the customised Hummer. Connor was beautiful. But Connor was nearly fourteen now. He was starting to get a little bit … hairy. His voice was deepening. And – there was no getting away from this – he’d been putting on a few pounds recently. Those bags of cookies and tubs of Ben & Jerry’s late at night, while they watched movies, until the milk kicked in and Lucius could finally sleep. More recently Connor had been given to tantrums and outbursts too. Ah, the teenage years. It must be hard, Lucius thought. (Lucius hadn’t really had any. By the time he was twelve he was on the road. Holiday Inns and soundchecks. Concrete arenas and tour buses. Airline food and interviews. And his father. Always his father. Saying it hadn’t been good enough. That he’d missed a vocal cue. Fluffed a dance step. Not sucked hard enough. There had always been something. His belt buckle whipping down through the rented light of some hotel room.)
Whereas Jerry. Jerry was just about to turn twelve. The ideal age. He was so sweet and innocent. But not too innocent. The ideal combination. Yes, Lucius decided. It would be Jerry tonight. The heart wants what it wants.
He thumbed one of the speed dials on the phone and got Marcus. He whispered as he used his code word. ‘Platypus. Jerry.’
‘S’cuse me, guys. Nature calls,’ Lucius said, slipping off the huge bed and heading down the small, narrow corridor that connected his ‘entertaining’ bedroom from his ‘sleeping’ bedroom. This second bedroom he was entering was much smaller – around twenty feet by fifteen – than the enormous one he had just left, which was on the proportions of a grand drawing room at Versailles. He went into the little bathroom off this bedroom and rummaged through the pharmacy of pills in the medicine cabinet: as well as the harder stuff doled out by Dr Ali – the Percodan, Demerol and Dilaudid – Lucius was on a bewildering regime of mood-stabilising drugs: Xanax, Klonopin, Ativan, Serax and Librium. They had also experimented with beta blockers like Inderal and Tenormin and more exotic antidepressants like Norpramin, Elavil, Sinequan and Desyrel. The pills, sometimes dozens of them, were brought to Lucius in a champagne glass every morning and he washed them down with a beaker of orange juice. They helped to still the voices in his head. The voices that sometimes told him odd things. He sat on the toilet and popped a Valium to hold him over until Ali got here, crunching it as he played with himself and read the Bible.
‘Platypus, Jerry’ meant that the following would now be happening. Marcus and Jay would come into the master bedroom and tell the kids the party was over, but that they’d all be back out real soon. Some of them would ask where Lucius was and they’d be told he had to attend to some important business. The kids would be walked out to the waiting cars, except for Jerry, who would be taken aside and told – breathlessly, excitedly – that Lucius had asked if he’d like to sleep over for the night and Jerry’s parents would be informed. (No one ever said no. No one.) It was the perfect arrangement – one that prevented Lucius from having to deal with the single thing he hated most in life: confrontation. He hated confrontation. He just wanted everything to be beautiful.
Being constantly surrounded by beauty did not come without its attendant costs. In order to keep Narnia running to Lucius’s satisfaction, the estate required the following: thirty gardeners, a staff of fourteen who maintained and ran the twenty-four/seven amusement park (Lucius never knew when the urge for a visit might take him), and an eight-man security team, including Marcus and Jay, his praetorian guard. Within the 13,000-square-foot main house there was a team of four cooks on constant rotation. There was his butler Teddy and four permanent cleaning staff. His drivers.
A full-time staff of this size did not come cheap at the best of times. And, given Lucius’s idea of what constituted ‘the best of times’, there were also regular, considerable ‘thank you’ payments to be made on top of the salaries. Payments his lawyers (and those lawyers also added up) took to be necessary for keeping everyone happy, harmonious, loyal and – above all – quiet about what went on at Narnia. Add it all up, whistles and bells, and you soon understood how it cost Lucius a little over two million dollars a month to live the way he wanted to live. (Lucius of course could no more have told you this figure than he could have embarked on a conversation about politics or Renaissance art. He just wanted whatever he wanted whenever he wanted it. But even Lucius could dimly see that the way he liked to live was somehow linked to the fact that he was having to do these dreaded comeback shows.) And how did he live, one of the bestselling recording artists of all time, a man with a record-breaking fifteen Grammys, a man rich beyond imagining? With the insomnia, the sleeping through the afternoon, rarely out of his pyjamas, the watching movies all night, the eating ice cream and never leaving the estate, sometimes not leaving his bedroom for days on end …
From a distance, to the impartial observer, Lucius’s lifestyle resembled nothing more than a study in terminal depression.
He looked up from Revelation (‘Yet you have a few people in Sardis who have not soiled their clothes. They will walk with me, dressed in white, for they are worthy’) as he heard the squelch of the alarm sound and saw the red light above the sink flashing. He’d had sensor pads implanted in the floor of the corridor that led to his private chambers. They let you know when someone was fifty yards away. Even at a brisk pace it took someone the best part of a minute to cover fifty metres. A minute was long enough to, you know …
Lucius sat and read the Bible some more and thought about white. White. It could be so beautiful, for the shows. Everyone, all the backing singers, the musicians, robed in white, walking with him, for they were worthy. There were other things in Revelation that made Lucius anxious (‘the cowardly, the unbelieving, the vile, the murderers, the sexually immoral, those who practise magic arts, the idolaters and all liars – they will be consigned to the fiery lake of burning sulphur’– he didn’t like the sound of that one bit) but this, this could be so … beautiful. His favourite word. He’d talk to Lance about it in the morning. Lance Schitzbaul. His manager. The man who dealt with all the confrontation Lucius spent his life avoiding.
After a moment of contemplation (about the only thing he did on the toilet these days, his bowels having been almost completely seized up by the daily, colossal doses of uppers and downers) he got up and looked at himself in the mirror. That skin, around his ears, was it reddish? Peeling? Revealing pale skin beneath the lustrous brown?
Lucius, they’d told him since he could walk, walked like a black man. He danced like a black man. He sang like a black man. Unfortunately, and to his never-ending rage, he’d been born white. The last two decades had seen a series of costly, ambitious and, in some cases, strongly ill-advised operations to correct this situation. He’d experimented with skin dyes and injections. With pigmentation drugs, creams and elixirs. Ten years ago he’d travelled to Japan for a procedure that had result
ed in him looking like a Hiroshima victim who’d been spattered with brown paint and had left him unable to go out in public for six months. Right now Lucius looked about the best he ever did – like a white man who has spent months alternating between hundred-degree direct sunshine (he loved the heat, he always felt cold) and a tanning bed. Which is to say, just the right side of crazy. To Lucius the movie Soul Man was a tragedy far sadder than anything wrought by Shakespeare.
There was a gentle knock at the bedroom door. Lucius tiptoed out of the bathroom and opened it. There stood little Jerry, already in a pair of the guest pyjamas (Disney ones of course – Lucius bought them by the crate) and clutching his toothbrush. ‘Jerry!’ Lucius said. ‘You gonna stay over? Wanna watch another movie?’
‘Yeah!’ Jerry said. ‘Can we have ice cream again?’
‘You bet! Look …’ Lucius gestured to his bed, where a tub of Caramel Chew Chew and two spoons was already on the nightstand. An advance screener of Smurfs: The Lost Village (admittedly a movie too young for Jerry’s tastes, but exactly right for Lucius’s) was already paused on the TV. ‘Go on and scoot into bed. I’ll be right back.’
Lucius went off down the hall back to the entertaining bedroom, which had already been straightened up by the staff. He took a seat by the window and, presently, heard the squelch of the approach alarm and then the soft knock at the door.
