by Jess Walter
“Where is she now?” Umi asked. “Your mum?”
“Idaho,” Pat said wearily, “in this little town called Sandpoint. She runs a theater group there.” Then, surprising himself: “She has cancer.”
“Oh, I’m sorry.” Umi said that her father had non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma.
Pat could’ve asked for details, as she’d done, but he said, simply, “That’s tough.”
“Just a bit—” Umi stared at the floor. “My brother keeps saying how brave he is. Dad’s so brave. He’s battling so bravely. Bloody misery, actually.”
“Yeah.” Pat felt squirmy. “Well.” He assumed that enough polite post-orgasm conversation had passed, at least it would have in America; he wasn’t sure of the British exchange rate. “Well, I guess . . .” He stood.
She watched him get dressed. “You do this a bit,” she said, not a question.
“I doubt more than anyone else,” Pat said.
She laughed. “That’s what I love about you good-lookin’ blokes. What, me? Have sex?”
If London was an alien city, Edinburgh was another planet.
They took the train, Joe falling asleep the minute it pulled out of King’s Cross, so that Pat could only guess at the things he saw out the window—clothesline neighborhoods, great ruins in the distance, grain fields and clusters of coastal basalt that made him think of the Columbia River Gorge back home.
“Right, then,” Joe said four and a half hours later, sniffing awake and glancing around as they pulled into the Edinburgh station.
They emerged from the station at the bottom of a deep draw—a castle on their left, the stone walls of a Renaissance city on their right. The Fringe Festival was bigger than Pat had expected, every streetlight and pole covered with a flyer for one show or another, the streets swarming with people: tourists, hipsters, middle-aged show-goers, and performers of every imaginable kind—mostly comedians, but actors and musicians, too, acts in singles, pairs, and improv troupes, a whole range of mimes and puppeteers, fire jugglers, unicyclists, magicians, acrobats, and Pat didn’t know what—living statues, guys dressed like suits on hangers, break-dancing twins—a medieval festival gone freak.
At the festival office, an arrogant prick with a mustache and an accent even heavier than Joe’s—all lilting rhythms and rolling Rs—explained that Pat was expected to provide his own marketing and that his stipend would be half what Joe had promised—Joe saying someone named Nicole had ensured the rate—Mustache saying Nicole couldn’t “ensure her own arse”—Joe turning to Pat to say not to worry, he wouldn’t take a commission—Pat surprised that he’d ever planned to.
Outside, as they walked toward their accommodations, Pat took everything in. The city walls were like a series of cliff faces, the oldest part—the Royal Mile—leading from the castle and curling like a cobblestone stream down a canyon of smoke-stained stone edifices. The bustling noise of the festival stretched in every direction, the grand houses gutted to make way for stages and microphones, the sheer number of desperate performers sinking Pat’s spirits.
Pat and Joe were put up in a boarder’s room below street level, in an older couple’s flat. “Say somefin’ funny!” the cross-eyed husband said when he met Pat.
That night, Joe led Pat to his show—up a street, down an alley, through a crowded bar into another alley, to a narrow, high door with an ornate knob in the middle. An uninterested woman with a clipboard led Pat to his greenroom, a closet of standpipes and mops, Joe explaining that crowds often started slowly but built quickly in Edinburgh, that there were dozens of influential reviewers, and once the reviews came in—“You’re a bloody lock for four stars”—the crowds would soon follow. A minute later, the woman with the clipboard announced him, and Pat came around the corner to a smattering of applause, thinking, What’s less than a smattering? because there were only six people in the room, scattered out among forty folding chairs, three of the six being Joe and the old couple they were staying with.
But Pat had played his share of empty rooms, and he killed in this one, even riffing a new bit before “Lydia”—“She told our friends she discovered me with another woman. Like, what—she’d discovered a cure for polio? She told people she caught me having sex, like she’d apprehended Carlos the Jackal. I mean, you could catch bin Laden if you came home and he was fucking someone in your bed.”
Pat felt the thing he’d noticed before, that even the appreciation of a small crowd could be profound—he loved how British people hung on the first syllable of that word, brilliant, and he stayed up all night with an even-more excited Joe, talking about ways to market the show.
The next day, Joe presented Pat with posters and handbills advertising the show. Across the top was a picture of Pat holding his guitar—under the heading Pat Bender: I Can’t Help Meself! along with the tagline “One of America’s Most Outrageous Comedy Musicians!” and “Four Stars” from something called “The Riot Police.” Pat had seen such flyers for other performers at the festival, but . . . “I Can’t Help Meself”? And this “One of America’s . . .” bullshit? Every act had to put up such handbills, Joe explained. Pat didn’t even like being called a “comedy musician.” He wasn’t some Weird Al novelty act. Writers were allowed to be irreverent and still be serious. And filmmakers. But musicians were expected to be earnest shit-heels—I love you, baby and Peace is the answer. Fuck that!
For the first time, Joe was frustrated by Pat, his pale cheeks going pink. “Look. This is just how it’s done, Pat. You know who the fuckin’ Riot Police are? Me. I gave you the four stars.” He threw a handbill at Pat. “I paid for this whole bloody thing!”
Pat sighed. He knew it was a different world, a different time—bands expected to blog and flog and twit and fuck-knew-what. Hell, Pat didn’t even own a cell phone. Even in the States, no one got away with being a quiet, brooding artist anymore; every musician had to be his own publicist now—bunch of self-promoting twats posting every fart on a computer. A rebel now was some kid who spent all day making YouTube videos of himself putting Legos up his ass.
“Legos in his arse.” Joe laughed. “You should use that.”
That afternoon they went around handing out flyers on the street. At first it was as demeaning and pathetic as Pat had imagined, but he kept looking over at Joe and being humbled by the fevered energy of his young friend—“See the act what’s blown ’em away in the States!”—and so Pat did his best, concentrating on the women. “You should come,” he’d say, turning his eyes on, pressing a handbill into a woman’s hands. “I think you’ll like it.” There were eighteen people at his show that night, including the reviewer from something called The Laugh Track, who gave Pat four stars and—Joe read excitedly—wrote on his blog that “the onetime singer for the old American cult band the Reticents delivers a musical monologue that is truly something different: edgy, honest, funny. He is a genuine comic misanthrope.”
The next night twenty-nine people came, including a decent-looking girl in black stretch pants, who stuck around after the show to get stoned with him. Pat banged her against the standpipe in his greenroom closet.
He woke with Joe across from him in a kitchen chair, already dressed, arms crossed. “Ya fooked Umi?”
Disoriented, Pat thought he meant the girl after the show. “You know her?”
“Back in London, ya daft prick! Did you sleep with Umi?”
“Oh. Yeah.” Pat sat up. “Does Kurtis know?”
“Kurtis? She told me! She asked if you’d mentioned her!” Joe tore off his glasses and wiped his eyes. “Do you remember, after you sang ‘Lydia’ in Portland, I said I was in love with my best mate’s girl—Umi. Remember?”
Pat did recall Joe talking about someone, and now that he mentioned it, the name did sound familiar, but he was so excited by the prospect of a UK tour that he hadn’t really been listening.
“Kurtis bunks every bird in the East End—just like the daft prick in your song—and I haven’t told Umi a fookin’ thing about it because Ku
rt’s me mate. And the first chance you get . . .” His face went from pink to red and his eyes welled. “I love that girl, Pat!”
“Joe, I’m sorry. I had no idea you felt that way.”
“Who did you think I was talking about?” Joe snapped his glasses back on and stalked out of the room.
Pat sat there awhile, feeling genuinely awful. Then he dressed and went out in the packed streets to look for Joe. What had he said, like the daft prick in your song? Jesus, did Joe think that song was some kind of parody? Then he had a horrible thought: Christ . . . was it? Was he?
All afternoon Pat looked for Joe. He even tried the castle, which buzzed with camera-snapping tourists, but no Joe. He wandered back down into New Town, to the top of Calton Hill, a gentle crest covered with incongruent monuments from different periods in Edinburgh’s past. The city’s entire history was an attempt to get a better vantage, a piece of high ground on which to build higher—spires and towers and columns, all of them with narrow spiral staircases to the top—and Pat suddenly saw humanity the same way: it was all this scramble to get higher, to see enemies and lord it over peasants, sure, but maybe more than that—to build something, to leave a trace of yourself, to have people see . . . that you were once up there, onstage. And yet what was the point, really? Those people were gone, nothing left but the crumbling rubble of failures and unknowns.
Forty people at the show that night, his first sellout. But no Joe. “I walked around Edinburgh today and decided that the whole of art and architecture is just some dogs pissing on trees,” Pat said. It was early in the show, and he was wandering dangerously off-script. “My whole life . . . I’ve assumed I was supposed to be famous, that I was supposed to be . . . big. What is that? Fame.” He leaned over his guitar, looking out on the expectant faces, hoping, along with them, that this was about to get funny. “The whole world is sick . . . we’ve all got this pathetic need to be seen. We’re a bunch of fucking toddlers trying to get attention. And I’m the worst. If life had a theme, you know . . . a philosophy? A motto? Mine would be: There must be some mistake; I was supposed to be bigger than this.”
Where did shit shows come from? Pat had no way of knowing if he suffered more bombs than other performers, but shit shows had always come regularly for him. With the Reticents, the consensus was that they’d put out one great album (The Reticents), one good one (Manna), and one pretentious, unlistenable mess (Metronome). And they had a reputation for being unpredictable live, although this was intentional, or at least unavoidable: with him coked up for a few years there, Benny banging smack, and Casey Millar doing a drummer’s-fifth at gigs, how could they not be uneven? But nobody wanted even; the whole point was to put some edge back in the thing—no synth dance mixes, no big hair, no fey makeup, no poseur flannel faux angst bullshit. And if the Reticents had never succeeded beyond cult-club status, they also never became slick self-promoting power-ballad-playing pretenders, either. They stayed true, as people used to say, back when staying true meant something.
But even with the Rets, sometimes, he’d just have a shit show. Not because of drugs or fighting or experimenting with feedback; sometimes they just sucked.
And that’s what happened the day he got in a fight with Joe, and the night the reviewer from the Scotsman came to see “Pat Bender: I Can’t Help Meself!” Pat blew the setup for “Why Are Drummers So Ducking Fumb,” and then tried to get out of it with some lame eighties comic patter about how it’s called scotch in America but just whiskey in Scotland, was scotch tape just . . . tape—people staring at him like, Yeah, bloody right it’s tape, you simple shit. And he could barely get through “Lydia,” imagining everyone saw through him, that everyone but him understood the song.
He felt that odd transference, in which an audience—normally rooting for him to be funny and moving, all of us in this together—started to resent his awkwardness. An untested, apparently unfunny bit about the big asses of Scottish girls (like sacks of haggis, these girls are—haggis mules, smuggling heart-liver sausage in their pants) didn’t help. Even his guitar sounded shrill to Pat’s ear.
Next morning, there was still no sign of Joe. The couple putting Pat up left the Scotsman outside his door, open to his one-star review. He read to the words “crass,” “rambling,” and “angry,” and put the paper down. That night, eight people came to his show; after that, things went about the way he imagined. Five people the next night. Still no Joe. Mustache stopped by the stage to tell Pat his weekly contract wasn’t being renewed. A ventriloquist would get his theater, his slot, and his boarder’s room. Pat’s manager had been given his check, Mustache said. Pat actually laughed at this, imagining Joe on his way to London with Pat’s five hundred quid.
“So how am I supposed to get home?” Pat asked the man with the mustache.
“To the States?” the guy asked through his nose. “Ehm, I don’t know. Does your guitar float?”
The only good thing Pat had gleaned from his dark period was some knowledge about how to survive on the streets. He’d never done more than a few weeks at a time, but he felt oddly calm about what to do. There were several strata of performers in Edinburgh: big acts, smaller paid pros like Pat, hobby guys, and up-and-comers playing what they called “Free Fringe,” and finally—below that, and just above beggars and pickpockets—a whole range of buskers, street performers: Jamaican dancers in dirty sneakers and ratty dreadlocks, Chilean street bands, magicians carrying five tricks in a backpack, a Gypsy woman playing a strange flute; and that afternoon, on a street in front of a Costa coffeehouse, Pat Bender, ad-libbing funny lines to American classics: Desperado, you better come to your senses/With a pound ’n’ twenty pences/You ain’t never gettin’ home.
There were enough American tourists that, before he knew it, he had thirty-five pounds. He bought a half-pint and some fried fish, then went to the train station, but was stunned to find the cheapest last-minute ticket to London was sixty pounds. Minus food, it might take him three days to raise that much.
Beneath the castle was a long, narrow park, the city walls on either side. Pat walked the length of the park, looking for a place to sleep, but after an hour he decided he was too old to sleep outside with the street kids and went into New Town, bought a pint of vodka, and paid a night hotel clerk five pounds to let him sleep in a toilet stall.
Next morning, he returned to the coffeehouse and resumed playing. He was doing the old Rets song “Gravy Boat,” just to prove to himself that he existed, when he looked up to see the girl he’d had sex with against the standpipe in his greenroom. The girl’s eyes widened and she grabbed her friend by the arms. “Hey, that’s him!”
She turned out to be named Naomi, to be only eighteen, to be vacationing from Manchester, and to be here with her parents, Claude and June, who turned out to be eating in a nearby pub, to be about his age, and to be less than thrilled to meet their daughter’s new friend. Naomi almost cried as she told her parents of Pat’s troubles, how he’d been “ever so nice,” how he’d been ripped off by his manager and stranded here with no way of getting home. Two hours later he was on a train to London, paid for by a father whose true motivation behind helping Pat get out of Scotland was never in doubt.
On the train Pat kept thinking about Edinburgh, about all those desperate entertainers giving out handbills in the streets, about the buskers and spires and churches and castles and cliffs, the scramble to get higher, to be seen, the cycle of creation and rebellion, everyone assuming they were saying something new or doing something new, something profound—when the truth was that it had all been done a million billion times. It was all he’d ever wanted. To be big. To matter.
Yeah, well, he could imagine Lydia saying, you don’t get to.
Kurtis answered the door, iPod earbuds plugged into the holes in his round, dented head. When he saw Pat, his face didn’t change—or at least that’s what struck Pat when Kurtis shoved him back into the hallway and pinned him against the wall. Pat dropped his pack and guitar and—“Wait�
�” Kurtis’s forearm smashed into Pat’s neck, cutting off his breath, a knee coming up into Pat’s groin. Bouncer tricks, Pat recognized, until a wide fist mashed his face and knocked even that thought from his head, and Pat slid off the wall to the ground. From the floor he tried to find his breath, got his hand to his bloodied face, and managed to look between Kurtis’s legs for Umi or Joe; but the apartment behind Kurtis seemed not only empty . . . but trashed. He imagined the blowout that must have done it, Joe bursting in, all the shit between the three of them finally coming out, Joe telling a stricken Umi that he loved her. He liked imagining Joe and Umi on a train somewhere, the tickets paid for with Pat’s five hundred pounds.
Then he noticed Kurtis was in his underwear; Jesus, these people. Kurtis stood above him, panting. He kicked the guitar case, Pat thinking: Please, not my guitar. “Ya fucking coont,” Kurtis finally said, “ya stupid fucking coont,” and he went back inside. Even the air from the slammed door hurt Pat.
It took a few seconds for Pat to get up, and he did so only because he was worried that Kurtis would come back for the guitar. On the street, people gave him a wide berth, wary of the blood burbling from Pat’s nose. At a pub a block away, Pat got a pint, a bar rag, and some ice, cleaned himself in the bathroom, and watched the door of Kurtis’s flat. But after two hours, he didn’t see anyone: no Joe, no Umi, no Kurtis.