Back Up

by Paul Colize

  I liked one of the mechanics a lot. He had a brilliant smile and a body like a catch-wrestler. He laughed all day long, at anything and everything. He was black, and so of course everyone called him Snow White. No one took themselves seriously back then, you could crack a joke without fear of being called a racist or a fascist. He never took offence.

  From time to time, the workshop foreman would come down and call everyone to order, with much hurling of insults and threats.

  I was responsible for preparing the mail orders received each morning from the other Peugeot concessions. Some ran to several pages. I moved up and down the aisles pushing a trolley and loading up the parts ready for mailing.

  No waiting about, no cigarettes, no joking for me. If I managed to complete my orders, I was told to sweep the aisles or put the newly delivered parts in their proper place.

  When my hour of deliverance came, I resurfaced, hungry for light and air. The sun hurt my eyes and the fresh air made my head spin. I would climb aboard my Puch and head for home, exhausted.

  The hierarchy was clearly defined. Stock-boys like me wore grey overalls, the more experienced staff wore blue, and the bosses wore white. The head warehouse-man was a former soldier, a stocky Frenchman with a brusque manner and a southern accent, eager to tell anyone who’d listen that his sons were both brilliant students at university somewhere in France.

  With my tousled hair and unbuttoned overalls, my untucked shirt and meagre work experience, I was the very prototype of everything he detested: a lazy, uneducated, flippant, undisciplined kid, one of the new generation who would take the world to rack and ruin. He had no idea I spent my spare time reading Balzac, Hugo and Zola, or that I could recite entire passages of Racine’s Andromaque by heart.

  He took every opportunity to humiliate me. If one of the other dealers called on the telephone to report a mistake in his order – an incorrect reference number or quantity – he would call me in to the manager’s office, staffed by four women in charge of stock control and accounts. They never greeted me. We belonged to different worlds.

  The military man would give me a harsh dressing-down in front of the ladies, airing his grievances and threatening to end my contract if it ever happened again. Then he would send me back to work.

  I weathered his attacks stoically, inspecting the tips of my shoes while I waited for the diatribe to end. When I shut the door behind me, he would crack a joke to his audience, and everyone would burst out laughing.

  As the weeks went by, I realised my job was not at risk. I was his whipping boy, and essential to his survival.

  I gave half my salary to my father, so I took a second job to ease things along. From half-past seven until eleven at night. I worked in a brasserie on the Chaussée de Waterloo. I was a barman, paid under the counter. I mixed aperitifs, opened bottles, rinsed glasses.

  I kept a list to hand, detailing the contents of the cocktails. I pictured myself in Boris Vian’s novel L’Écume des Jours, in which each note of the piano is assigned a drink, and the resulting mixtures depend on the piece being played. I began tasting each concoction, out of curiosity. Soon, I was sampling the unfinished glasses when they were brought back. I liked the alcohol-induced euphoria. I started drinking.

  The couple who owned the restaurant had two sons and a daughter. The sons were younger. The daughter was my age. She was flirtatious, and liked to hang around me, taking innocent-seeming opportunities to reveal her legs or brush her breasts against my body.

  One evening, after my shift, she asked me to see her home. She claimed a man had been lurking around the house for a few days. Her brothers were already in bed and her parents wouldn’t be back until 1:00a.m.

  Outside her house, she asked if I’d like to come in. I hesitated, so she took me by the hand and led me upstairs to her room. Instinctively, I knelt between her thighs. I didn’t want to make a fool of myself, but she guided me with her voice, her groans, her fingers, then took me inside her.

  She held me against her. She had enjoyed it, but I should shave and buy some condoms. She had taken a risk. The rhythm method wasn’t reliable. I rode home stunned, happy, at peace with humankind.

  At the garage next day, I was called to the manager’s office.

  A dealer was complaining that he hadn’t received a series of parts. The little Frenchman gave me a thorough ticking off. It was my second mistake of the week.

  This time, I held his gaze. When he had finished, I reminded him that to err was human.

  Hardly a thunderbolt of a reply, with hindsight, but as I left the office, I felt the breath of Victory blowing over me.

  When I closed the door behind me, the women did not burst out laughing.

  I had become a man.

  18: FORTY-FIVE MINUTES

  Few people could claim to have seen Jim Ruskin in a bad mood, miserable or annoyed.

  With his long, mousy hair and multi-coloured leather outfits, his collection of medieval rings and a wry grin forever pasted across his cherubic face, Jim Ruskin was Pearl Harbor’s official joker.

  Lively, talkative, with a taste for the good things in life, he delighted in countering the outrageous displays of Steve Parker and Larry Finch. When the situation demanded, he would defuse simmering tensions with a piece of nonsense from his personal repertoire. He would stand on tiptoe, adopt a series of pained expressions, then let out a loud fart, or rattle off jokes in an endless string of foreign accents.

  Once the storm had passed, he would thump his chest with his fists and declare himself Pearl Harbor’s little ray of sunshine. He reckoned that without his enthusing presence and wellplaced words, the visceral in-fighting and tension would threaten the group’s existence.

  Mostly, his antics amused the other members, though they weren’t always to Steve’s taste, especially when Jim hung on his neck or jumped into his arms.

  During their first show in London, Jim had dropped his trousers onstage, turned around and treated the audience to a flash of his backside, painted with a Union Jack. On another occasion, in a Soho club, he had shaken the audience out of what he saw as their unwarranted apathy by unhooking a fire extinguisher and spraying it all around the room.

  Jim Ruskin was the youngest musician in Pearl Harbor, and the most gifted. He was a left-hander with perfect pitch, and the guitar was second nature to him. He practised little, and rehearsed only when forced, but was always note-perfect.

  He was born in Epsom in 1947. His father was an accountant and his mother a secretary. He spent a happy childhood, in comfortable circumstances.

  When he was ten years old, he heard Elvis Presley’s hit ‘Baby, Let’s Play House’. The track’s raw energy left its mark. He went home straightaway and fetched down an old Spanish guitar that was mouldering in the attic. By evening, he was playing a few chords he had picked out by ear.

  After that, he took private lessons from a teacher in the neighbourhood. Jim claimed that within four weeks, he was playing better than his instructor.

  He was so remarkably at ease that a few months later, his parents bought him his first electric guitar, a second-hand Grazzioso, quickly replaced by a new Fender Stratocaster.

  Jim’s melodic guitar countered Steve’s aggressive, raging solos with soaring cadenzas and dynamic riffs inspired by Jimmy Page, a kid from his neighbourhood with whom he had spent hours dissecting solos by masters like Scotty Moor, James Morton or Cliff Gallup.

  On the day after the recording, unlike the others, Jim Ruskin had decided to stay in Berlin.

  He loved the city, its cosmopolitan atmosphere, broad avenues and vivid night life. He loved walking under the trees or sitting on a bench in the Tiergarten, getting into conversation with the first person who came along, or watching the rabbits frolic on the grass.

  Jeans and long hair were frowned upon, but Jim was well-liked by the Berliners he spent time with. He had learned the language, spoke like them, ate and drank like them, boycotted the S-Bahn – the regional rail network operated by the
East Germans – and rejoiced from the bottom of his heart whenever a resident of East Berlin confounded the Volkspolizei and made it over the Wall.

  In the small hours, when Pearl Harbor had finished playing, he would disappear into the night, going from bar to bar before heading for home at first light, to a deep, dreamless sleep.

  Jim was a lover of women. He had met a Berliner, Birgit, and fallen for her easy physicality and unbridled sexual appetite in the space of an evening. Birgit worked at KaDeWe, the huge department store on the Wittenberg Platz that prided itself on selling hundreds of items unobtainable anywhere else.

  Jim would join Birgit late in the afternoon, when she finished work. They would eat at a neighbourhood restaurant, then go back to her apartment. There, they would smoke joints and make love until it was time for the evening set with Pearl Harbor.

  Late in the morning on Monday, March the twentieth, 1967, Jim was woken by someone hammering on the door of the apartment he shared with the other members of Pearl Harbor, a minuscule three-roomed affair on the seventh floor of a dilapidated building in Zehlendorf, in the American sector.

  Through the door, the shop-keeper from the ground floor told him someone was waiting to talk to him urgently, on the telephone.

  Jim was half awake, with a burning pain in his skull. Blearyeyed and befuddled, he didn’t realise his three friends had left. He was alone in his bedroom.

  He shouted that someone would come down, and went back to sleep. When he emerged later that afternoon, the exasperated shop-keeper told Jim that eight urgent calls had come through, and that he was not the group’s messaging service.

  Jim took the list of numbers, dialled the first and got through to Larry’s aunt. She told him about Larry’s death, in Majorca.

  Shocked at the news, he called none of the other numbers, convinced they were all close relatives of Larry, anxious to tell him what had happened.

  Stunned, unsure what to do, he wandered down the avenue, entered a bar, drank two coffees, then continued along the boulevard and plunged into the U-Bahn.

  As his thoughts cleared, he grasped the full ramifications of the news. Larry’s death meant the end of Pearl Harbor, the end of their Berlin contract and the end of his relationship with Birgit.

  For a moment, he thought of contacting the others to get their reaction to the news and with it, perhaps, a shred of hope, but he had no idea how or where to contact them. Steve was on the loose somewhere in Hamburg, and Paul had left for Ireland.

  His mind a blank, he wandered the passageways of the U-Bahn and headed for a platform, though he had no idea which destination it served.

  When the German police questioned the train driver early that same evening, the man said the accident had occurred at peak rush-hour.

  Like every evening, hundreds of people were standing on the platform when the train came in to the station. The driver had spotted a movement in the crowd, and a man had flung himself under the train. He had slammed on the brakes straightaway. But despite the relatively slow speed, he had been unable to stop in time. The man’s body had tumbled under the engine and been dragged along for a few metres. His shrieks had sparked a wave of panic on the platform, and many people had run out of the station.

  One passenger had tried to help him, but the man’s lower half had been caught in the wheels and his legs were partly crushed by the metal cogs. The man was conscious but in acute pain and unable to speak.

  The emergency services had arrived just a few minutes later. Faced with the gravity of the situation, they had called a specialist team to get the man off the track.

  At the scene, the team were pessimistic as to the length of time required. The man was losing blood fast: the doctors tried to operate in situ, but were forced to abandon the attempt.

  Despite all their efforts, the emergency team were unable to extricate the man from his metal cage.

  Jim Ruskin lay dying for forty-five minutes.

  19: LIKE A CHILD

  In October, the Cuban missile crisis broke. The Russians had installed missile silos on the island of Cuba, within easy striking distance of the US mainland.

  Hour by hour, the TV and radio commentators reported the escalating tension in increasingly hysterical tones.

  Day-to-day activity was on hold. Shops were emptied of their goods. People were preparing for war and stocking up on provisions. There was no sugar, rice, flour or tinned food. The crisis overshadowed everything. Everyone gave vent to their uncertainties and predictions, which were mostly catastrophic. One thing seemed certain: we were all going to die.

  My father cancelled his business trips so he could wait for the apocalypse in the bosom of his family. His old fears had proved right: we were on the brink of war. He spent his evenings sunk in an armchair, moaning in front of the television. No one could speak to him, talk or make the slightest noise in the room.

  When the television channels went off for the night, he would turn on the radio, and sit with his ear to it, tuning in to one station after another until late into the night.

  The crisis lasted for two weeks. Two weeks during which the world stood poised for nuclear war.

  When Krushchev relented, my father seemed more forlorn than reassured. He quickly predicted that this was only a temporary reprieve: the Russians would never lose face as easily as all that, and they were certainly planning more of their twisted tricks.

  Things had reached crisis point in the world of rock, too. The record shop lady’s words were proving true.

  My idols had botched their entry into the 1960s. Buddy Holly and Eddie Cochran had gone to heaven, taking Ritchie Valens with them (which was reason to be cheerful, at least; ‘La Bamba’ was one of the worst things I had ever heard).

  Little Richard had found mysticism, Chuck Berry was in prison for taking a fourteen-year-old girl across a state line in the US, and Jerry Lee Lewis was in disgrace after marrying a girl of thirteen. Even if I had wanted to, there was no way I would transfer my loyalties to Elvis, who was cosying up to a very young girlfriend himself and had gone to Hollywood to concentrate on his film career.

  A few months earlier, an ex-chicken plucker called Chubby Checker had started a new craze, the Twist. It was short lived, but for a while the whole world shook its ass to ‘Let’s Twist Again’.

  In this downbeat climate, my brother came home with a new 45 rpm single: an unexpected shaft of sunlight breaking through the clouds after a storm. It was early November. He winked at me, showed me the record and said it was going to ‘do some damage’.

  I had my doubts. At first, I thought he was teasing. Our musical tastes diverged. He had a liking for chanson and inane French variety artists like Marcel ‘the Mexican’ Amont or Richard Anthony, a lugubrious balladeer.

  I glanced at the sleeve. The A side was a song called ‘Love Me Do’. The group were four complete unknowns calling themselves the Beatles. The photograph showed four pensive types posing like a set of quadruplets, two sitting on chairs and two standing. They all wore the same mouse-grey suits and identical haircuts, long and brushed forward into their eyes. The style reminded me of the circular mop my mother used for the kitchen floor.

  I put the disc on the turntable, positioned the needle and the angels came down from heaven.

  It was rock, for sure, but rock like nothing any of the others played. It was melodic, energetic, and its simplicity bordered on genius. With its haunting harmonica and close vocal harmonies, the song’s amazing, fresh quality left me speechless with admiration. The guys were plainly enjoying themselves tremendously, and their sense of fun was infectious indeed.

  The B side was every bit as convincing. I listened to the whole record several times over, eager for the key to its magic.

  Another time, I listened closely to the drumming. The drummer was called Ringo Starr. His playing was understated, lacking any great originality, but effective. No flourishes, but an implacable, catchy beat. Later, someone told me that it wasn’t Ringo, but Pete Best, on drums
when the single was recorded.

  Later, in London, I met a drummer called Andy White, who confided that he was the one playing on ‘Love Me Do’. Ringo Starr had just replaced Pete Best, but the Beatles’ producer didn’t like his drumming. Andy was a session drummer. To defuse the row, he took over the drums for the final session. He never got a penny from sales of the record, and had to buy his own copy when it was released.

  I knew nothing of all this that day, and wouldn’t have cared. The rock’n’roll of my childhood had aged beyond recognition and the Beatles were there to dust things down. Pop was born, and I celebrated with one of the greatest hangovers of my life.

  In mid-December, shortly before the Christmas holidays, the girls’ school near our home organised its annual fête, to be followed by an evening dance – an unmissable opportunity for the young males of the neighbourhood. A band had been hired. They were called The Drivers, and devoted themselves to playing cover versions of hits by The Shadows.

  Like everyone else, I had bought a copy of ‘Apache’, when it came out. I could see The Shadows had talent, especially the guitarists, but I couldn’t agree with their label as ‘Europe’s foremost rock band’. Their compositions were mostly instrumental, mechanically executed, cold and unemotional. I found their playing pedantic and academic. I hated their ridiculous stage act, the way they all turned to one side and lifted a foot with military precision. When they weren’t performing on their own account, they backed a singer called Cliff Richard, a smart, polite young man, but too limp for my taste.

  The Drivers were amateur musicians of my age, who didn’t take themselves too seriously. One of the guitarists, the lead, was a talented musician, but poorly supported by the rest of the group. The bass player was a spotty beanpole, plainly out of his depth, and the second guitarist, who sported a huge pair of black-framed glasses with no lenses, the better to resemble his idol, mostly stood with his back to the audience, to hide his hesitant playing.