by John Niven
After they’d listened to each other lie about how well the other looked, Lance had to listen to Lucius witter on about Jesus for a long time. This was difficult to take – Lucius’s pious talk being somewhat undercut by the image burned in Lance’s mind of his client screaming ‘THE EMPEROR IS COMING!’ – but Lance bore it the same way he bore most things these days: with a lot of vodka, repeatedly refilling his glass from the bottle in the silver ice bucket beside him. Lance didn’t bother trying to interject or cut Lucius off. He just kept drinking and let it run its course. Finally, when he’d run out of steam, Lance began gently, with a long speech about how great Lucius was, how talented, how successful and so on and so on. Finally, he got around to it. ‘But, Lucius? All that said, you know we’ve been having some cash flow issues lately?’
‘Mmmmm …’
‘Well, I think we’re gonna have to cut back the expenses some. I mean, the tour’s gonna help, no question, but if we just –’ Lucius said something, soft and indistinct.
‘What?’ Lance said.
Lucius repeated it with more force. ‘I don’t want to do the tour.’
Lance took this in for a moment. Then he hurled his vodka tumbler across the room, hearing it splinter somewhere far away on the marble floor as he let it all out. ‘YOU AIN’T DOING THE TOUR? YOU AIN’T DOING THE FEKOKTAH TOUR, YOU LITTLE PISCHER?! LEMME TELL YOU SOMETHING – YOU DON’T DO THE TOUR WE’RE OUT TWO HUNDRED MILLION FUCKEN DOLLARS! TWO HUNDRED MILLION WE DON’T FUCKEN HAVE! YOU’RE FINISHED! OVER! KISS GOODBYE TO ALL THIS!’ He gestured around, at the glass ceiling thirty feet above them, the mature trees, the jungly interior. ‘YOU’RE GONNA BE LIVING IN AN APARTMENT IN FUCKEN PASADENA LIKE A FUCKEN SCHMUCK! YOU DON’T DO THE TOUR YOU ARE FUCKED WITH A FUCKEN ELEPHANT DICK AND YOU’RE GONNA BE LOOKING FOR A NEW FUCKEN MANAGER ’CAUSE WE’RE DONE! GOOD LUCK FINDING SOMEONE ELSE WHO’LL DEAL WITH ALL YOUR … YOUR …’ He tailed off, unable to verbalise it, unable to admit to what he knew about Lucius’s ‘problem’. (And even now, outside the windows, a couple of the Hummers were pulling up, disgorging a bunch of pre-teen boys for the afternoon’s tour of the amusement park.)
Lucius looked at his manager, his bottom lip a couple of inches below the top one, his bottom row of perfect teeth visible. Lance looked at the floor. He’d surprised himself. He hadn’t talked to Lucius like this in a long, long time. Since the early nineties, since after Monster landed, since Lucius had inhabited that holy stratosphere of stardom occupied by only a handful in every generation, a rarefied band of humans who had only one thing in common: they never heard the monosyllable ‘no’. For a second Lance thought Lucius was going to go berserk. Fire him? Attack him? Have Marcus or Jay attack him? (Lance could see the two bruisers peering anxiously through the glass at the far end of the conservatory.) Eventually, however, for the second time in an hour, Lucius broke down in tears. ‘I … can’t … do …’ the words coming between the racking sobs, like a child crying, ‘… it … any … more.’
‘Jesus, kid, easy. Come on now …’ Lance moved in, sat down next to Lucius on the overstuffed sofa covered in ostrich hide, and put an arm around his charge. Lance was sixty-two. When he’d met Lucius he’d been thirty-two and Lucius had been nineteen. Calling a fifty-year-old man ‘kid’ still came naturally to him. ‘You can’t do what any more?’
‘All of it. None of it.’ Meaning the singing, the dancing. Everything.
‘Listen, Lucius, kid, you’re fi—’ Lance realised he was about to say the actual age out loud. ‘You’re fine. You’re just not twenty-one any more. Everyone gets that. No one’s expecting this to be like the old days. They just wanna see you. It’s been so long since you were out there. You could get up and stand like a statue and sing the fucken Yellow Pages and they’d still go crazy.’
‘That’s not good enough,’ Lucius said. Strangely, weirdly, given his current life of utter squander and debauchery, somewhere deep inside him, Lucius still wanted to be the best. The guy who could sing and dance and write songs like no other. The idea of getting up there again and not being able to cut it … not for the first time in recent years he started thinking about how easy it would be. That cabinet full of Demerol and Dilaudid. Or convince (or pay) Dr Ali to give him an extra-big shot of milk one night at bedtime. He sometimes felt that, like Jesus, his time on earth was done. He had given the humans all the help he could. Everything would be so beautiful. White.
‘Lucius, help me,’ Lance said. ‘Help me to help you. What is it you want?’
‘I want …’
What did Lucius want? He just wanted to be left alone. He wanted his little playmates and his milk and his candy and that was about it. Why did that have to be so difficult? ‘I want … I just want everything to be beautiful,’ Lucius said as he collapsed, crying again.
Lance cradled him. He sighed and looked out of the windows, down towards the amusement park, where the Ferris wheel was now turning. Lance thought about the only time he had ever tried to confront Lucius about things, a few years back, when he began to grasp the full extent of what was going on at the ‘slumber parties’. The conversation had taken place during a walk around the Narnia grounds, just a few hundred yards from where they were sitting now. ‘Lucius,’ he’d said, ‘you’re going to wind up in a lot of trouble. Why don’t you just stop all this stuff with the young boys?’
Lucius’s reply had been bracing in its simplicity. ‘I don’t want to,’ he’d shrugged. Then he’d wandered off towards his petting zoo.
Lance had watched him go, feeling like he’d at least tried, like he’d done his bit for decency and humanity.
SIX
My apartment, a corner penthouse, is on Doheny, the street that marks the border between West Hollywood and Beverly Hills. The writer Bret Easton Ellis has a place here too. You see him around a bit, in the lobby, in the garage. Proper chunky old bumboy.
I had a house just along the road, on Alpine, back in the noughties, when I was doing the show. Now that I only spend two or three months a year out here it was too much space – when you have vast properties you don’t live in you’re just turning money into problems – and so I downgraded. Although you would feel ‘downgraded’ an utterly inappropriate word if you were to be reclining where I am now, in the original Eames chair by the window in the 1,300-square-foot living room, looking out at the views south, towards downtown LA, and west, towards Santa Monica and the Pacific. I yawn and turn on the lamp next to me. Dusk is falling and far below me lights are starting to twinkle amid the greenery of Beverly Hills. I sip my drink – sparkling water and fresh lime juice – and reread a passage that has caught my eye.
By all accounts Jordan Du Pre was a violent man who would routinely beat his wife and son. There were frequent rumors that his abuse of the young Lucius extended into the sexual. This has never been confirmed by Du Pre himself, although he seemed to allude to it on his infamous 1998 appearance on The Oprah Winfrey Show …
I slip the book back onto the top of the tower of Du Pre biographies on the low table beside me and pick up a sheaf of papers I’ve printed off of the Internet, turning to a page I have marked in yellow highlighter.
None of Du Pre’s superfans comes close in obsession to Abdullah bin Rahman, son of the Sultan of Quatain. Bin Rahman (born 1995) recently paid in excess of 15 million dollars at auction for the Bally dance shoes worn by Du Pre in the video for ‘Sexx Jacking’.
There is the easy way to do this. The obvious way. As Old Joe Stalin said: ‘Where there is a man there is a problem. No man – no problem.’ And then … there might be another way. A two bites at the cherry way. Something that’s never been done before. It’s not without risk, but the potential rewards could be … Off. The. Fucking. Scale.
By the way, about that sparkling water and lime, you’re probably wondering at this point …
Of course I still drink (if you have to stop drinking you’re a fucking loser), but I don’t drink drink any more. I haven’t taken cocaine since my early thirti
es, around the time the Twin Towers came down. No NA, no programme, no sitting around in church halls having coffee and biscuits with a bunch of crying, whining fucking disgraces. I just stopped. You know why? It’s not player. Go to a party. The people nursing a single beer or a glass of water and out the door at 10 p.m.? I guarantee you they’re in the office at 8 a.m. ruling. What, you think David Geffen was smashing that fourth pint on a Tuesday night? Racking them out in the early hours of Sunday morning with some fucking bass player, talking about how they were going to conquer the world? Fuck that. I see them around now and then, the guys I knew in the nineties. Going into the Groucho. In the lounge at Terminal 5. Coming out of Soho House. The guy who ran some dance label. The guy who was some minor league A&R at Sony. The loser agent. They fall into two categories – the clowns who are still doing the coke and the shots, looking like red-faced walking corpses as they stumble towards that first heart attack at fifty. Or, even worse, the ones who can’t do anything any more. Who exist on yoga, mineral water, Red Bull and fifteen espressos a day. They grin insanely and tap their feet as they talk to you, urgently telling you about how great their fucking kids are, about how long it is since they put a drink to their lips. Who fucking cares, you utter spastic? The only thing you could put to your lips that would raise a flicker of interest in me would be the barrel of a fucking shotgun as you decorate the walls of your toilet gaff in Willesden (that you just managed to buy with the very last of your ill-gotten nineties gains) with the remnants of your ‘brains’. And these are the successful ones. There are the others that you only hear about, the ones who shat the bed so comprehensively, whose lives are so terrible, that they now live in the Lake District, or Scotland, or Somerset or someplace, going for runs and writing a blog or trying to become writers or lawyers or some fucking thing, all the while all of them thinking much the same thing – ‘Why the fuck didn’t I sign more hits and buy a house in W11?’
Tired though I am (not jet-lagged. Only tourists get jet lag), I pick up the phone and dial Trellick.
‘I’ve got an idea. Two in fact.’
‘Thank fuck.’
‘You’re not going to like them.’
‘I think at this point we’re looking at anything,’ he says.
‘Tick-tock, Clarice.’
‘Right, I’ll be over in twenty.’
‘We can order in,’ I say, hanging up.
I call Terry on his encrypted phone. I need to check his availability. If Terry can’t do this then I’m sure he’ll recommend someone, one of his elite band of colleagues (in my experience Terry doesn’t really have peers), but I’m not sure the whole thing’s a goer if Terry’s unavailable. I leave the usual coded message (‘Are you guys still delivering?’) and he calls me back ninety seconds later, from Bogotá. We exchange pleasantries (we haven’t spoken in three years) and, very pleasingly, Terry tells me that he’s just finishing up a job down there and will be free in a couple of days. Terry’s rates are insane but that’s Trellick’s problem. If he doesn’t want to go forward with it, then it’s hello public disgrace, goodbye Unigram, and yours truly flies back to London a million quid up for having taken a gander. It is, as we used to say back in the day, a no-risk disc for me.
I call Urasawa and order sushi. I pick up another Du Pre biography to kill time before Trellick gets here. A thought keeps running around in my head – what if the Enquirer and all those crazy supermarket tabloids were right after Elvis died?
What if, a few months later, it turned out Elvis was still alive?
And what if you were RCA? If you were Colonel Tom Parker?
How might that have gone?
Trellick’s initial reaction is exactly what I expected: ‘Are you out of your fucking mind?’
But, after a couple of hours, the dining table littered with sushi cartons, CNN flickering in the background with the sound down, by the time I’ve gone through the whole thing for a third time, while he’s not quite at the ‘it might just work!’ stage, he’s stopped with the ‘you’re nuts’ stuff and is now asking questions about practicalities.
In my experience, when this happens, you’re getting close to a sale. As the great man said in The Art of the Deal, ‘My style of deal-making is quite simple and straightforward: I aim very high and then I just keep pushing and pushing and pushing to get what I’m after.’
‘It’s just,’ Trellick says, leaning back in his chair, ‘if this goes tits, the fucking blowback …’ Behind him, on CNN, the anchors are almost crying as they analyse the inauguration speech over and over.
I like Trellick, I really do. But he’s a lawyer. If you listened to lawyers you’d never release a single record. I sit forward and help myself to a bite of fifteen-dollar sashimi. ‘Look,’ I say, ‘it might not even be doable. I’ll need a few days just to try and put the principal elements together.’
‘And then we have to sell it to Du Pre.’
‘I think that’ll be the easy part. Don’t you get it? He’s begging for something like this. Screaming for it.’
‘What would you need?’
‘For now? Just give me the jet for seventy-two hours. And I’ll need to meet with the Murphys and this lawyer of theirs. Art whatever. Right away, like tomorrow.’
‘And tell them what?’
‘That we’re paying them. It’s just going to take a while. Buy us a couple of weeks. We’ll need to give them a deposit. Cash. Say a mil. And I’ll need it tomorrow too.’
He whistles through his teeth.
‘Listen, James, if it looks like we can’t follow through on plan A for whatever reason then we fall back on plan B. My guy could do that in his sleep. And you’ll only be out the mil. Maybe not even that depending on how it goes. If all this comes off it’s nothing compared to what you’ll make on back catalogue.’
He’s thinking. He’s really thinking. ‘It’s just,’ he says, ‘the amount of bullshit we’ll have to spin. The scale of the fucking lies, the amount of balls you’ll have to keep in the air …’ I say nothing while he talks, I just keep my eyes fixed on the TV screen behind Trellick: a rerun of this afternoon’s inauguration speech, Trump’s face, filling the screen, gigantic and mad, his white panda eyes screaming out from the orange panstick, thumb and index finger of his right hand doing that ‘O’ thing where it looks like he’s wanking the cock of a tiny invisible air spirit. ‘Fuck it,’ Trellick says finally. ‘See if you can line it up. Take the jet. Watch the expenses.’ He smiles at this reference to our old life, when expenses used to mean drinks and dinner for some indie band, not … this. ‘What will we tell Schitzbaul?’ he asks, getting up.
‘A bit. Not the whole thing, obvs. But we’ll need him onside for at least the first part of it. I’ll meet him tomorrow, after I see this pair of cunts …’ I hold up the file Schitzbaul’s PI has prepared on the Murphys.
‘Thanks, Steven. I appreciate all this.’
‘Hey, what are friends for?’ I say before continuing, ‘Well, friendship aside, there is something we need to talk about …’
‘I thought there might be.’
I outline what my fee will be on this.
I will take no cash upfront. It is all in the form of back end. Inevitably, Trellick baulks. We look each other in the eye. ‘Don’t be stupid,’ I say. ‘If it doesn’t work you’re out nothing. If it does, we’re all getting crazy rich.’ I hold his gaze a moment longer. He blinks first.
‘OK,’ he says, extending his hand.
We shake on it.
‘Oh, by the way,’ I say as he slips his jacket on, ‘how’s it going on your Norwegian Dance Crew deal? The one what’s-her-name –’
‘Chrissy.’
‘– Chrissy’s chasing.’
‘Fucking hell,’ he grins. ‘You’ll never guess who the manager is.’
‘Who?’
‘Remember old Danny Rent?’
‘Fuck me.’
‘Indeed. See you tomorrow.’
Trellick lets himself out and I wander onto the te
rrace. Pitch dark now, after midnight, red tail lights all along Santa Monica Boulevard, heading west. I am very tired.
Danny Rent, like all two-bob managers, the proverbial bad penny. We had great success together twenty years back with a girl band, a cobbled-together Spice Girls knock-off called Songbirds. (I have intermittently monitored the decline of its four members with great pleasure over the last two decades. They’re all in their late thirties now, two of them constantly in and out of rehab, one of them nearly got lynched by her fellow contestants a few years ago on I’m a Barely Remembered D Lister Please Shoot Me in the Fucking Head, the other one married that footballer who turned out to be an enthusiastic and talented wife-beater – forever turning up with a face like a tenderised steak in the kind of magazines monstrous housewives pick up when they’re paying for their frozen chips and fizzy drinks. Hi, girls, I hope you enjoyed your trip around the fair.) Danny pops up every five years or so, signs a band to a major label for a ton of money and then disappears into his hole until the next one comes along. I put a note on my phone to give him a call. I lean on the railing and look west, along that line of tail lights, towards Santa Monica and, somewhere in the blackness north of it, Malibu, where Lucius Du Pre will now be doing whatever it is he does instead of sleeping. I yawn and dial the mobile number Lance gave me for Bridget Murphy.
SEVEN
‘We’re getting the fucking money!’
