by Nick Hornby
And he goes, Why are you here, sitting on the path? And I tell him that I’d had a row with my fucking mother about some earrings, and he was like, And now you can’t go home? And I said that I could if I wanted to. I could just get on the Northern Line back to Angel and then jump on a bus. But I didn’t want to. And he went, Well, I don’t think you should sit here. Is there anywhere you can go? And then I realized that he thought I had turned into like a nutter, so I stood up quickly, which made him jump, and I gave him a mouthful and walked away.
But then I did think, as opposed to swear mentally. And the first thing I thought was that it would be very easy for me to be a nutter. I’m not saying it would be a piece of piss, living that life – I don’t mean that. I just mean that I had a lot in common with some of the people you see sitting on pavements swearing and rolling cigarettes. Some of them seemed to hate people, and I hated just about everyone. They must have pissed off their friends and family, and I’d pretty much done that. And who knows whether Jen’s a nutter now? Maybe it runs in the genes, although with my dad being a junior Education minister, maybe it’s one of those things that skips a generation.
And I didn’t know where all this thinking was leading to, but I could see suddenly that I was in more trouble than I had thought. I know that sounds stupid, considering I’d thought about killing myself, but that was all just for a laugh, and if I’d jumped it would have been for a laugh, too. What if I had a future on this planet, though? What then? How many people could I piss off, and how many places could I run away from, before I found myself sitting by the river and swearing externally 4 real? Not many more, was the answer.
So the thing to do was to go back – to Starbucks, or home, to somewhere – anywhere that wasn’t forward. If you’re walking somewhere, and you come up against a brick wall, then you have to retrace your steps.
But then I sort of found a way of climbing over the wall. Or I found a little hole in the wall I could crawl through, or whatever. I met this geezer with a really nice dog, and I went and slept with him instead.
JJ
So I just stood there on the sidewalk and told Ed to take a swing at me if it would make him feel any better.
‘I don’t want to hit you unless you hit me,’ he said.
There was a guy selling that homeless magazine standing watching us.
‘Hit him,’ he said to me.
‘You shut the fuck up,’ said Ed.
‘I was only trying to get things started,’ said the homeless guy.
‘You flew across the bloody Atlantic because JJ was in trouble,’ Lizzie said to Ed. ‘And now look at you. One conversation and you want to punch him.’
‘Things have to go the way they have to go,’ said Ed.
‘Is that like “A man’s gotta do what a man’s gotta do”? Because it sounds utterly meaningless to us, I’m afraid,’ said Lizzie. She was leaning against the window of a thrift shop, making out like she was bored, but I knew she wasn’t. She was angry too, but she didn’t want to show it.
‘He’s on my side,’ said Ed. ‘So it doesn’t matter what it sounds like to you. He understands.’
‘No I don’t,’ I said. ‘Lizzie’s right. Why would you come all this way to punch me?’
‘It’s a Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid thing, surely?’ said Lizzie. ‘You want to sleep with each other, but you can’t, because you’re both so straight.’
This really tickled the homeless guy. He laughed like a hyena. ‘Did you ever read Pauline Kael on Butch Cassidy? God, she hated it,’ he said.
Neither Lizzie nor Ed would have had a fucking clue who Pauline Kael was, but I got two or three of her collections. I used to keep them by the toilet, because they’re great for dipping into when you’re on the can. Anyway, hers wasn’t a name I was necessarily expecting to hear from that particular guy at that particular moment. I looked at him.
‘Oh, I know who Pauline Kael is,’ he said. ‘I wasn’t born homeless, you know.’
‘I really, really don’t want to sleep with him,’ said Ed. ‘I really want to punch him. But he has to punch me first.’
‘You see?’ said Lizzie. ‘Homo-erotic, with a bit of sado-masochism thrown in. Just kiss him, and be done with it.’
‘Kiss him,’ the homeless guy said to Ed. ‘Kiss him or punch him. But let’s get something going, for God’s sake.’
Ed’s ears couldn’t have gotten any redder, so I was wondering whether they might just burst into flame and then turn black. At least then I could say that I’d seen something new.
‘You trying to get me killed?’ I said to her.
‘Why don’t you just get back together?’ said Lizzie. ‘At least you’ve got all that mike-sharing and those great big electric penis substitutes.’
‘Oh, so that’s why you didn’t want him to be in a band,’ said Ed. ‘You were jealous.’
‘Who said I didn’t want him to be in a band?’ Lizzie asked him.
‘Yeah, you got that dead wrong, Ed,’ I said. ‘She wasn’t that deep. She dumped me precisely because I wasn’t in a band. She wasn’t interested in being with me unless I became a rock star and made a shitload of money.’
‘Is that what you think I meant?’ said Lizzie.
I could suddenly see my life being put back together before my eyes. It had all been a terrible misunderstanding, which was now about to be cleared up, with much laughter and many tears. Lizzie never wanted to break up with me. Ed never wanted to break up with me. I’d come out on to the sidewalk to get my ass kicked, and instead, I was going to get everything I ever wanted.
‘There isn’t going to be a fight, is there?’ said the homeless guy sadly.
‘Unless we all beat the shit out of you,’ said Ed.
‘Just let me hear the end of this,’ said the homeless guy. ‘Don’t go back inside. I never get the fucking ending of a story, stuck out here.’
It was going to be a happy ending, I could feel it coming. And it was going to involve all four of us. The first show we played when we got back together, we could dedicate a song to Homeless Guy. Hey – he could maybe even be our road manager. Plus, he could make one of the toasts at the wedding. ‘Everyone should get back with everyone,’ I said, and I meant it. This was my big closing speech. ‘Every band that has ever come apart, every couple… There’s too much unhappiness in the world as it is, without people splitting up every ten seconds.’
Ed looked at me as if I had gone nuts.
‘You’re not serious,’ said Lizzie.
Maybe I’d misjudged the mood and the moment. The world wasn’t ready for my big closing speech.
‘Naaah,’ I said. ‘Well. You know. It’s just… an idea I had. A theory I was working on. I hadn’t ironed out all the kinks in it, yet.’
‘Look at his face,’ said Homeless Guy. ‘Oh, he’s serious, all right.’
‘How does that work with bands that grew out of other bands?’ said Ed. ‘Like, I don’t know. If Nirvana got back together. That would mean the Foo Fighters had to split up. Then they’d be unhappy.’
‘Not all of ’em,’ I pointed out.
‘And what about second marriages? There are loads of happy second marriages.’
‘There’d have been no Clash. ’Cos Joe Strummer would have had to stay in his first band.’
‘And who was your first girlfriend?’
‘Kathy Gorecki!’ said Ed. ‘Ha!’
‘You’d still be with her,’ said Lizzie.
‘Yeah, well.’ I shrugged. ‘She was nice. That wouldn’t have been a bad life.’
‘But she never gave nothin’ up!’ said Ed. ‘You never even got a hand under a bra!’
‘I’m sure I’d have managed by now. We’d have been together fifteen years.’
‘Oh, man,’ said Ed, in the tone of voice that we usually used when Maureen had said something heartbreaking. ‘I can’t punch you.’
We walked down the road a little ways and went to a pub, and Ed bought me a Guinness, and Lizzie b
ought a pack of smokes from the machine and put it down on the table for us to share, and we just sat there, with Ed and Lizzie looking at me as if they were waiting for me to catch my breath.
‘I didn’t realize you felt that bad,’ Ed said after a while.
‘The suicide thing – that wasn’t a clue?’
‘Yeah. I knew you wanted to kill yourself. But I didn’t know you felt so bad that you wanted to patch things up with Lizzie and the band. That’s this whole different level of misery, way beyond suicide.’
Lizzie tried not to laugh, and the effort produced a weird snorting noise, and I took a long pull on my Guinness.
And suddenly, just for a moment, I felt good. It helped that I really love cold Guinness; it helped that I really love Ed and Lizzie. Or I used to love them, or kind of love them, or loved and hated them, or whatever. And maybe for the first time in the last few months, I acknowledged something properly, something I knew had been hiding right down in my guts, or at the back of my head – somewhere I could ignore it, anyway. And what I owned up to was this: I had wanted to kill myself not because I hated living, but because I loved it. And the truth of the matter is, I think, that a lot of people who think about killing themselves feel the same way – I think that’s how Maureen and Jess and Martin feel. They love life, but it’s all fucked up for them, and that’s why I met them, and that’s why we’re all still around. We were up on the roof because we couldn’t find a way back into life, and being shut out of it like that… It just fucking destroys you, man. So it’s like an act of despair, not an act of nihilism. It’s a mercy killing, not a murder. I don’t know why it suddenly got to me. Maybe because I was in a pub with people I loved, drinking a Guinness, and I know I said this before, but I fucking love Guinness, like I love pretty much all alcohol – love it as it should be loved, as one of the glories of God’s creation. And we’d had this stupid scene on the street, and even that was kind of cool, because sometimes it’s moments like that, real complicated moments, absorbing moments, that make you realize that even hard times have things in them that make you feel alive. And then there’s music, and girls, and drugs, and homeless people who’ve read Pauline Kael, and wah-wah pedals, and English potato chip flavours, and I haven’t even read Martin Chuzzlewit yet, and… There’s plenty out there.
And I don’t know what difference it made, this sudden flash. It wasn’t like I wanted to, you know, grab life in a passionate embrace and vow never to let it go until it let go of me. In a way, it makes things worse, not better. Once you stop pretending that everything’s shitty and you can’t wait to get out of it, which is the story I’d been telling myself for a while, then it gets more painful, not less. Telling yourself life is shit is like an anaesthetic, and when you stop taking the Advil, then you really can tell how much it hurts, and where, and it’s not like that kind of pain does anyone a whole lot of good.
And it was kind of appropriate that I was with my ex-lover and my ex-brother at the precise moment I realized, because it was the same kind of thing. I loved them, and would always love them. But there was no place where they could fit any more, so I had nowhere to put all the things I felt. I didn’t know what to do with them, and they didn’t know what to do with me, and isn’t that just like life?
‘I never said anything about finishing with you because you weren’t going to be a rock star,’ said Lizzie after a while. ‘You know that really, don’t you?’
I shook my head. I didn’t know, did I? You guys can back me up on that. Not once in this story have I ever owned up to any kind of misunderstanding, deliberate or otherwise. So far as I was concerned, she was dumping me because I was a musical loser.
‘So what did you say, then? Try again. And I’ll listen real hard this time.’
‘It’s not going to make any difference now, because we’ve all moved on, right?’
‘Kind of.’ I wasn’t going to admit to standing still, or going backwards.
‘OK. What I said was, I couldn’t be with you if you weren’t a musician.’
‘It wasn’t such a big deal to you at the time. You don’t even like music that much.’
‘You’re not hearing me, JJ. You’re a musician. It’s not just what you did. It’s who you are. And I’m not saying you’re going to be a successful musician. I don’t even know if you’re a good one. It was just that I could see you’d be no use to anyone if you stopped. And look what happened. You break the band up, and five minutes later you’re standing on the top of a tower-block. You’re stuck with it. And without it you’re dead. Or you might as well be.’
‘So… OK. Nothing to do with being unsuccessful.’
‘God, what do you take me for?’
But I wasn’t talking about her; I was talking about me. I never looked at it that way before. I thought this whole thing had been about my failure, but that wasn’t it. And at that moment I felt like crying my fucking heart out, really. I felt like crying because I knew she was right, and sometimes the truth gets you like that. I felt like crying because I was going to make music again, and I’d missed it so much. And I felt like crying because I knew that making music was never going to make me successful, so Lizzie had just condemned me to another thirty-five years of poverty, rootlessness, despair, no health plan, cold-water motels and bad hamburgers. It’s just that I’d be eating the burgers, not flipping them.
MARTIN
I walked home, turned the phone off and spent the next forty-eight hours with the curtains drawn, drinking, sleeping and watching as many programmes about antiques as I could find. During those forty-eight hours, I would say that I was in grave danger of turning into Marie Prevost, the Hollywood actress who was discovered some time after her death in a state of disrepair, due to her corpse having been partially eaten by her dachshund. That I had no dachshund, or indeed any domestic pet, I can remember being a source of some consolation in those couple of days. I would certainly die alone, and my corpse would certainly be in a state of advanced decay by the time anyone found me, but I would be complete, apart from the bits that had dropped off through natural causes. So that was all right.
Here’s the thing. The cause of my problems is located in my head, if my head is where my personality is located. (Cindy and others would argue that both my personality and the source of my troubles were located below rather than above my waist, but hear me out.) I had been given many opportunities in life, and I had thrown each of them away, one by one, through a series of catastrophically bad decisions, each one of which seemed like a good idea to me – to me and my head – at the time. And yet the only tool I had at my disposal to correct the disastrous course my life seemed to be taking was the very same head that had caused me to fuck up in the first place. What chance did I have?
A couple of weeks after Jess’s Jerry Springer show, I read some notes I’d made during that two-day period. It wouldn’t be true to say that I’d been so drunk I’d forgotten I’d ever made them, and in any case they’d been lying around the flat in plain view. But it was a fortnight before I possessed enough courage to read them, and once I’d done so, I was almost compelled to draw the curtains and reach for the Glenmorangie once again.
The object of the exercise was to analyse, with the only head I have available to me, why I had behaved so absurdly that afternoon, and to list all possible responses to that behaviour. To give my head its due – to be fair to the lad, as sports pundits would say – it was at least capable of recognizing that the behaviour had been absurd. It just wasn’t capable of doing very much about it. Are all heads like this, or is it just mine?
Anyway, on the backs of several unopened envelopes, mostly bills, there was depressingly conclusive evidence of the circularity of human behaviour. ‘WHY HORRIBLE TO NURSE?’ I had written. And then, underneath:
1) ARSEHOLE? HIM? ME?
2) HITTING ON PENNY?
3) GOOD-LOOKING AND YOUNG – PISSED ME OFF?
4) ANNOYED BY PEOPLE.
This last explanation, which may hav
e meant something brilliantly precise when I hit on it, now seemed startlingly candid in its vagueness.
On another envelope, I had scrawled ‘COURSES OF ACTION’ (and please note, by the way, the switch from numbers to letters, a switch presumably meant to indicate the scientific nature of the work):
a) KILL MYSELF?
b) ASK MAUREEN NOT TO USE THAT NURSE ANY MORE
c) DON’T
And ‘C’ stopped there, either because I fell into a stupor at that point, or because ‘Don’t’ was a concise way of expressing a profound solution to all my problems. Think about it: how much better things would be for me if I didn’t, wouldn’t and never had.
Neither envelope inspired much confidence in my powers of cogitation. I could see that they had both been written by the man who had recently wanted to tell a select group of people – a group that included his own young daughters – that all male nurses were effeminate and self-righteous: the word ‘ARSEHOLE’ would surely provide a forensic psychologist with all the evidence required for that deduction. And similarly, the man who had spent some of New Year’s Eve trying to work out whether to jump from the roof of a tower-block was exactly the sort of man who might jot down ‘KILL MYSELF?’ in a Things To Do list. If thinking inside the box were an Olympic sport, I would have won more gold medals than Carl Lewis.
Quite clearly, I needed two heads, two heads being better than one and all that. One would have to be the old one, just because the old one knows people’s names and phone numbers, and which breakfast cereal I prefer, and so on; the second one would be able to observe and interpret the behaviour of the first, in the manner of a television wildlife expert. Asking the head I have now to explain its own thinking is as pointless as dialling your own telephone number on your own telephone: either way, you get an engaged signal. Or your own answer message, if you have that kind of phone system.
It took me an embarrassing amount of time to realize that other people have heads, and that any one of these heads would do a better job of explaining what the purpose of my explosion might have been. This, I supposed, was why people persisted with the whole notion of friends. I seemed to have lost all mine around the time I went to prison, but I knew plenty of people who’d be prepared to tell me what they thought of me. In fact, it seemed that my propensity for letting people down and alienating them would actually serve me in good stead here. Friends and lovers might try to throw a kindly light on the episode, but because I had only ex-friends and ex-lovers, I was ideally placed. I only really knew people who would give it to me with both barrels.