Pissing in a River

by Lorrie Sprecher

  I hugged myself. “I put the heat on for a few minutes, but I daren’t start turning it on during the day or my money’s gonna run out. It costs a bomb.” It was only autumn. We huddled over our coffees.

  “Let’s go to the caff,” Nick said. “It’ll at least be warmer there, yeah?”

  We stayed in the café for several hours, drinking multiple pots of tea and eating fried eggs and baked beans on toast. Then we amused ourselves by going in some music shops and trying out expensive equipment. Later we hung out at the British Museum in the Egyptian mummy rooms.

  In the early evening, we went to Melissa’s flat. Nick said she was knackered and a little hungover. She went to have a lie-down, giving me the opportunity to tell Melissa what she’d done. We heard Nick listening to the Ruts on the portable CD player in her room.

  “She what? She came on to you?”

  “To have a place to sleep. She’s been getting pissed and going home with different women every night not to be alone. She said she couldn’t inflict herself on me anymore without offering something. When she said she’d have sex with me if I let her stay, I felt absolutely gutted.”

  “After Jake left, I don’t know, something happened,” Melissa said. “Nick didn’t come round as much. She feels a sort of reticence around me. I don’t know why.”

  “I think she’s a little intimidated by you. Like she doesn’t want to disappoint you or something. Maybe it’s because you’re older. And a doctor.”

  “So what? Do I act in a way that is off-putting? Did I suddenly become a different person now that Jake’s gone? Nick’s thirty-bloody-three. What am I, some historical punk artifact? She doesn’t find you intimidating.”

  “I sing on the street for money,” I reminded her sardonically. “I have no position of authority over anyone.”

  Melissa frowned. “Bollocks. The three of us were best mates. We went to the punk clubs together. Nick spent most nights here. It was like having another sister.”

  “What were you like in the early days?” I asked, imagining her dancing wildly.

  “Visions of tartan skirts, bum-flaps, chains, neckties, fake leather trousers and heavy eye-makeup. And I needed less sleep than I do now.”

  “Do you like being a doctor?”

  “I love being a doctor.” Melissa was a partner in a GP practice in St. John’s Wood.

  “But you’re a cracking artist, too.”

  Melissa had finally shown me some of her paintings: a devastated city smothered in American flags, President Bush eating Iraqi babies like cereal, Regent’s Park in the rain. And she had beautiful sketches of Hampstead Heath and London punks. She blushed. “Well, ta. I’m glad you think so.”

  I heard a whiff of “Dope for Guns” coming from Nick’s room. “The Iran-Contra song,” I said. “What if someone bought an election and nobody cared? I voted for Jimmy Carter from Exeter on an absentee ballot, so I got to share the joy of the American democratic process with the girls in my residence hall. The results weren’t particularly impressive. When they said on the BBC that Reagan had won, I kept thinking I was watching Not the Nine O’Clock News by mistake.” Not the Nine O’Clock News had been my favorite television program, a comedy of fake news reports that mocked Ronald Reagan mercilessly by airing real footage of him falling over and being a complete idiot. I remembered the Ramones’ song “Bonzo Goes to Bitburg” about Reagan’s visit to a SS cemetery released some years later as a British single. All over Europe, he was such a figure of ridicule that my perspective was skewed and I never believed he could actually win the election.

  “What were you reading at university?”

  “English. That’s what I’ve always studied.”

  “Not music?”

  I shook my head. “I just wanted to play it, not study it.”

  After listening to “Dope for Guns” a few times, Nick switched to “Staring at the Rude Boys.”

  “Do you have that split CD?” I asked. “The Ruts and Penetration live on BBC Radio One?” It had been recorded in 1979 at the Paris Theatre in London.

  “It’s only one of my favorite officially released CDs ever.”

  “Mine, too. The only band that could have been right up there with the Clash.”

  “Another overdose tragedy,” Melissa said because lead singer Malcolm Owen had been a heroin addict.

  After “Jah War,” one of the best punk-reggae songs of all time, had played for about the fifteenth time, Melissa wanted to check on Nick.

  “I’ve been known to listen to ‘Jah War’ for five hours plus without stopping,” I volunteered helpfully. “The Radio One version. Once I accidentally fell asleep listening to ‘Maria’ on that new Blondie album.” I followed Melissa down the hall. “When I woke up I felt sick like I’d eaten too many sweets.”

  “I only listen to Blondie up until the Parallel Lines album,” Melissa whispered.

  I’d seen Blondie in Hollywood on the Parallel Lines tour, and the lead guitar on “One Way Or Another” was orgasmic. I’d almost been hit by a limo as I ran across the road to get a Blondie T-shirt.

  Nick was asleep on top of the bed. Melissa turned off the boom box and covered her with a duvet. She brought a teapot, milk, sugar and my favorite chocolate Digestives to the front room on a tray. She set it on the wood-and-glass coffee table. “I’ll be mother, shall I?”

  “My mother?” I asked, horrified.

  Melissa laughed. “That means I pour out.”

  “Of course it does,” I said wearily, “I forgot.” We sat on the settee near the window. “Once I listened to one side of the first Sex Pistols record for twelve hours straight,” I confessed. “I had the turntable set on ‘repeat.’”

  “Which side?” Melissa asked.

  “The one with ‘Anarchy in the UK’ on it.” I didn’t volunteer the information that I’d been having a complete mental breakdown at the time.

  “What’s that band?” Melissa nodded at my chest. I was wearing a pink-and-black Explosion T-shirt with a picture of a woman whose head was a television set.

  “The Explosion. From Boston. They’re the only new punk band I really like. They model themselves after the Clash. They’re very I-hate-the-American-flag-and-everything-it-stands-for-ish.”

  I had an orange guitar pick from one of their shows. I got it by crawling across the stage when the guitarist named Dave dropped it. That reminded me of the time I saw a friend I hadn’t seen in years and she said, “The last time I saw you, you were crawling across the floor to get closer to Chrissie Hynde.” Man, story of my life, I thought. I remembered kneeling in Chrissie’s sweat after she’d done the same to Iggy Pop’s. I like a lot of romance in my life.

  “I saw them before I left the States.” I sipped my Tetley’s and helped myself to another biscuit. “It was the first punk gig I’d been to in ages, and I had a major identity crisis. It was an all-ages show, and most of the people there were under twenty-one. I used to know all the punks in my town who turned up at local shows. And there I was, granny punk 1977, sitting on the back left corner of the stage watching the boys stage-dive and really resenting it. It used to be me up there. The last time I stage-dove was at a Dead Kennedys concert in 1984. After that, the community center banned punk forever.”

  “A dark time,” Melissa said. “The year the Clash broke up.”

  “When one male adolescent ran across the stage right in front of me and leapt off, I was sorely tempted. But then I thought, am I too old and fat to stage-dive?”

  “Never!”

  “I had a vision of myself thundering across the stage, knocking guitar players and microphone stands out of my way, and heaving myself into the crowd. And having it part like the Red Sea.”

  We started laughing hysterically. “I’m taking you stage-diving,” Melissa gasped.

  “I’ll fucking kill myself,” I protested. “I’ll break
a leg or crack my head open.”

  “That’s okay,” Melissa cried, “I know how to suture!”

  I fell on the floor and rolled on the carpet. I was feeling really close to her then.

  Melissa put an Angelic Upstarts record on her old phonograph. I was really into them lately because of her, and I always remembered when someone introduced me to a good punk band. Like Attila the kebab seller in Manchester who’d got me into Stiff Little Fingers the year I was at Exeter and took a trip north. I’d always thought the Upstarts were a racist, fascist, skinhead band, but the opposite was true. The lead singer Mensi was actually a leader of the Anti-Fascist Action group. His lyrics ridiculed Maggie Thatcher’s oppressive policies, attacked police brutality, and called for social justice. Ultra-right-wing National Front skinheads initially misinterpreted the Upstarts’ leftist songs as supportive of their own cause, and when they found out their mistake, they virulently hated the Upstarts ever after. This created a lot of violence at their shows, and it confused me, seeing them surrounded by all those skinheads—not the cool, right-on skinheads against racism—who’d turned up to cause mayhem. Melissa would never go to see the Upstarts play in person because at their gigs they sometimes used the head of a real slaughtered pig wearing a police hat to symbolize police brutality, and she couldn’t stand any form of cruelty to animals.

  I’d borrowed a ton of CDs from Melissa: Generation X; the Skids; Slaughter and the Dogs; Sham 69; Chelsea; the Adverts; UK Subs; the Adicts; the Beat; the Redskins; the Damned; the Boomtown Rats; Johnny Moped; the Who; her entire collection of the Real People, including demos, live, and unreleased stuff; Special Duties; H-Block 101 from Australia; everything she had by the Ruts, including demos, Peel Sessions, concerts from Hamburg and Holland in 1980, Amsterdam, Strathclyde and the Marquee in 1979 and the 1978 Deeply Vale Festival. In Apeldoorn and Strathclyde, they were touring with the Damned and did a cover of “Love Song.” Melissa even had a 1978 rehearsal in Bethnal Green.

  I had her listening to the Dils and X from Southern California; M.I.A. from Las Vegas; the Dead Kennedys, Rancid, Romeo Void and the Avengers from San Francisco; Hüsker Dü and the Replacements from Minneapolis; Dag Nasty, Minor Threat, and Bad Brains from Washington, DC, and the first REM album.

  Everything I didn’t have, we found on the Internet. She played me some of her live concert videos, including the Ruts on French television and lots of Rockpalast shows. It was remarkable to see people very early on like the Pretenders, the Clash, the Jam, Patti Smith— everyone I loved. She even had a video of Patti Smith in black sunglasses performing “Hey Joe” and “Horses” on The Old Grey Whistle Test in 1976.

  “It’s late,” Melissa said. “Stay the night. You can check out the sound equipment in Jake’s room.”

  “Really? That would be ace,” I said. “Are you sure it’s no trouble? It has been getting rather parky in my bedsit, and I can’t afford to heat it as much as I’d like.”

  We went upstairs, and Melissa sat on the edge of Jake’s bed while I fiddled with a digital eight-track recorder that had sixty-four virtual tracks. “Do you realize what I could do with this?” I got excited. “I could make my own CDs.” I told Melissa about my original plan to record a CD for RAWA but how I couldn’t afford to pay for studio time. “This has all the digital effects you’d ever need, and you can record, mix, and master on it. Jesus fucking Christ Superstar almighty.”

  Melissa pulled a bed sheet off her sister’s large amplifier.

  “She has a Vox?” I knelt in front of it reverently. “Fuck me, I love these. It’s so Paul Weller and the Jam. I’ve always wanted one.” A beautiful Takamine acoustic guitar leaned in a corner. I was afraid to touch it.

  “Go on,” Melissa said, watching me. “You can play it.”

  “This is such a Nancy Wilson guitar,” I said, stroking its ocher cedar top. “And I have a picture of Kurt playing one. Are you sure it’s alright?”

  “Jake won’t mind. She told me I could do whatever I liked with the stuff in this room. She took everything she wanted with her.”

  “But guitars are so personal. I know what I’m like with my Gibson.”

  “Honestly, it’s alright. She took a bunch of acoustic guitars with her. Mostly Martins, I think.”

  “Oh my God, you’re so adorable the way you know all about guitars,” I said before I could stop myself because I felt really cozy with her. Immediately I was terrified I’d both insulted her and brought up a forbidden subject, my attraction to her, but she just laughed good naturedly. I smiled with relief and knew I was going to pay profoundly later when I tried to sleep. I would go over that line again and again, wondering how I could have said it, wondering what I was going to do about my—what—on Melissa. Was it a crush, infatuation, lust? I knew it was deep, will-shattering, soul-crunching love. Having her sit with me like that, looking soft, sexy, and rumpled in thick blue socks and red jeans, her light hair tousled just above the collar of her red T-shirt, she looked almost accessible. And I couldn’t stand being inside myself feeling the white-hot agony of my longing for her. I didn’t know what to do about it, and I certainly didn’t know how I was going to survive it. If only I could—in my mind I saw myself, bright like a flashbulb had just gone off, reach a hand around behind her head and pull her toward me for a sensual, gentle kiss, and I thought the pain would kill me. It was so severe I was surprised I didn’t literally become unconscious.

  I sat on the bed and held the Takamine in my lap. I clutched its comfortable neck, trying to get my hands to stop shaking. It curved in the palm of my hand just right. I strummed a few chords to get hold of myself and smiled at its rich, warm tone.

  “Play it some more,” Melissa encouraged.

  I put down the guitar, feeling self-conscious.

  “Maybe sometime you’ll play for me?” Melissa suggested.

  I gazed shyly at my shoes. “I would love to record some songs.” I had brought all the pedals I would normally use for recording with me from the States, my purple Electro-Harmonix Small Clone, orange Boss DS-1 distortion, green Ibanez Turbo-screamer and Digital Delay for those ringing, Mick Jones-like leads. I had a picture of Kurt Cobain’s battered Small Clone, and he’d used the DS-1 for recording Bleach. “Could I even dare ask if your sister left behind a bass?”

  “There’s one in the wardrobe.”

  “No kidding? Oh, wicked. Will you really let me use this stuff?”

  Melissa nodded. “Abso-bloody-lutely.”

  “Cheers, Melissa. I really mean it, mate.”

  “Which guitarists have influenced you the most?”

  “Nancy Wilson, James Honeyman-Scott, Mick Jones, Kurt Cobain and Noel Gallagher,” I said without hesitation. “And there’s nothing like the original Pretenders line-up, with Chrissie Hynde playing aggressive rhythm guitar against James Honeyman-Scott’s blistering, melodic leads and Pete Farndon’s heavy, melodic bass lines.”

  “And you busk all day in front of strangers but you’re afraid to play in front of me?” Melissa asked teasingly.

  “Maybe I’ll decide to care about your opinion,” I said in the same joking manner.

  “I’m feeling moreish,” Melissa said.

  “Sorry?”

  “Moreish. Like you want more of something. Peckish. Hungry.” She went downstairs and brought up the rest of the Digestives. “Have another bicky.”

  We ate biscuits and I crawled around, searching the room. I found a sampler under the bed and a drum machine with touch-sensitive pads. “Tell me more about you and Nick,” I asked. “She doesn’t talk about herself.”

  Melissa crossed one leg over the other, getting more comfortable on the bed. She was wearing a “The Clash: Thinking Man’s Yobs” T-shirt and a bright-red tartan bracelet with shiny silver studs that she liked. “Nick used to go around with a girlfriend called Emilia, whose Irish-Catholic family was not overjoyed to learn she was gay.
Emilia’s got a homophobic brother in London who made her life a misery. Eventually she fucked off back to Belfast. Nick was crushed.”

  “Oh. Gosh.” Of course I’d been in Belfast that day in 1981 when Bobby Sands was elected to parliament from his H-Block, Long Kesh prison cell. I wanted to go back and see his mural on the Falls Road. “How about you?” I asked Melissa.

  “How about me what?”

  “How about you, were you in a relationship? What’s your history?”

  Melissa looked startled. “Well, I guess that was when I was going out with a bloke called Paul. That wasn’t a great time in my life. Let’s change the subject.”

  “How long have you been an artist? Your work’s bloody brilliant.”

  “Donkey’s years. I meant let’s change the subject back to you. Are you single?”

  “I am,” I said eagerly. “And you? Are you and Martin serious?”

  “No.” She stood up, her red drainpipes bagging a little at the knees and ankles. “I’m off to bed. Play around with the sound equipment all you like.”

  I read instruction manuals for the digital eight-track and the sampler until I fell asleep on top of Jake’s unmade bed. I was always doing that at Melissa’s house, falling asleep. I’d have to give up my job as a poster child for insomnia if I wasn’t careful.

  When I awoke, Melissa had already left for work. I didn’t mean to, but I picked up the acoustic guitar and wrote a song about her which I figured I could never sing. It was sweet I thought. But then I told myself to work on a song I could actually use.

  TRACK 22 Strict Time

  Ever since I’d found her in the Vespa Lounge, I’d been sticking close by Nick’s side. Now it was snowing lightly, the fat flakes like white orchids, as I stood with Nick in front of Melissa’s flat. I thought I could hear the snow hiss as it landed. It powdered the shrubbery, making thin twigs look like the first pear blossoms of spring. I’d gone with Nick to the post office to cash her weekly giro, and she’d taken me to the Isle of Whitby, a famous East End pub. It was freezing, but I felt insulated. Melissa answered the door in a maroon dressing gown.