The Age of Anxiety

by Pete Townshend

  “You want to sleep farther away from me,” I mumbled pathetically, adding something I didn’t mean. “But I want to sleep farther away from you too.”

  “Ha!” exclaimed Pamela. “You think this is a game.”

  “No,” I corrected her. “I do think a bigger bed would be a good idea for us. We’ve been married for a long time now. I know women get bored with their husbands. Maybe even find them irritating. Do I keep you awake?”

  “You don’t snore, if that’s what you mean.” Pamela laughed. “You don’t fart; you don’t say other women’s names in your dreams. Truly, Louis, why do you think I want a bigger bed? So I don’t have to have sex with you? Don’t you think I can fend you off if you come too close to me? You’re such a dope. I’ll always love you, Louis. I want to give you what you need, but something has changed in me. It’s massive, Louis. I wish this hadn’t happened, but it has.”

  It didn’t occur to me to try to process what Pam signaled by her use of the adjective “massive,” but then heroin tends to dull anxiety. I simply hovered between smacked-out insouciance and self-obsessed withdrawal. For Pam it must have been like living with a cuddly sheepdog that occasionally wakes up to chase a mosquito.

  We found a sort of warehouse in Hampshire that sold old French beds, and drove out there to select one that suited us.

  We agreed on a hugely overbuilt and oversize double bed that had a high walnut headboard and footboard. The headboard was richly grained, and in the rather dim light in the corner of the warehouse where the bed had been positioned, it seemed quite attractive. It was when the deliverymen assembled the bed in our sunny bedroom that I noticed something quite strange. The wood grain on one side of the headboard seemed to be more richly incised than on the other. It was as though one side had been persistently polished by some obsessive soul throughout the hundred and fifty years of its life in a grand farmhouse somewhere in France.

  “You know what those marks are, Pam,” I pointed out. “The darker grain is because someone’s head has rested there, night after night, greasy hair—like wax—bringing out the images suggested by the natural whorls in the timber.”

  “Yes, and those smudges are from a man’s head,” said Pamela, grimacing with distaste. “That’s the man’s side of the bed.”

  “My side!” I managed a laugh, but I felt degraded by the exchange, and it didn’t feel fair. I hadn’t stained the damned headboard. I didn’t wear any kind of gel in my hair.

  My side. Smudges. Greasy hair. On my side.

  I was an addict before I met Pam. When she eventually realized I was using the drug regularly, I think she really thought she could change me. In part, her failure to get me clean made my addiction worse. Shame was ladled onto discomfort when I tried to withdraw, and Pam was impatient. She was such a potent woman, so powerful and dominant. Was she a mother figure to me? No, I worshipped her like a goddess and I think that infuriated her. She wanted passionate and hearty sex, companionship, and excitement. At first I think I intrigued her and, stoned as I often was, our languorous and lengthy sex sessions suited her. Then suddenly everything that was good about our marriage was slipping away. I had become a self-obsessed bore. Perhaps I’m being hard on myself. She had her part to play, but listening to me revel in my drug-induced hallucinations must have been infuriating.

  At that moment, in the welling delirium of withdrawal and the feeling of Pamela’s absolute disdain for me, and possibly—at that moment—for all greasy men, the whirls and shapes in the grain took on a psychedelic nature, and a dozen screaming ghostlike faces appeared, like those created by my father’s namesake Edvard Munch. Somehow this image penetrated so deeply into my vulnerable psyche that for several months I became completely obsessed with figuring out who had once leaned his head in that spot on the bed night after night, and what had been in his mind—what nightmares, what visions, what horrors? I remember Rain, poor kid, trying to console me over and over again, promising she would help me somehow.

  By the time I recovered, a week later, Pamela was gone, never to return, never to make any claim on me, never to make any claim on Rain. Pamela simply disappeared. I had no way of tracking her down. Of course my drug use got worse for a while. The hallucinations evolved into full-blown conversations with erotic nymph-like angels and diabolical gargoyles that I could touch and even smell if I wished. I was fearless, and therefore very dangerous to myself and my daughter. Pamela had no idea, I felt sure of that. Walter’s parents, Harry and Sally, helped me greatly in that difficult time. They took Rain in for months on end, and let me stay in their guest room so I could be close to her.

  They were both expert riders and because Walter had taken against horses as a child for some reason, they jumped at the chance to teach Rain to ride. It took her mind off my particular troubles that were of course really no worse than her own, and she adored their two horses. I often wondered then at how well Rain handled being without a mother. I remember Walter and Rain, barely twelve years old, both sitting in tense rapture as I described some of the peculiar things I was seeing in my head. Rain stopped trying to convince me she could help me back to sanity when she saw that Walter—who she worshipped—thought that what I was talking about was really very cool.

  “Artists maybe see things differently to you and me.” I was sitting with them both before a blazing log fire, hot chocolate for them, cognac for me on top of a heroin and cocaine speedball. “Or perhaps the difference is that they try to let us share what they see by transforming it into drawings, music, or story. I wish I could be an artist. What I often see and hear when I’m not feeling all that great is as interesting and enthralling as what I feel when I’m joyful and happy.”

  I wished I could tell them about the nymphs and gargoyles.

  “When we feel pain, we know we are human, that we are alive. For me physical pain is not always something to be numbed, but what I do need to dampen down is what goes on in my head. I need to be able to see and hear it clearly, to have some distance, to be able to express it.”

  The kids wanted to know exactly what it was I could hear and see. I didn’t want to frighten them, but I wanted to explain myself, why I was the way I was.

  “You’re old enough to know about drugs. I bet the older kids at school are experimenting. But the chemicals in our own bodies and brain are far more powerful. If I stop for a moment and look intensely at something—like the flames and smoke in the fire there—my mind can go either way. Like now I see nude women dancing. Nothing naughty, it’s like a ballet. But now they turn into writhing golden snakes. Now the smoke looks like heavy fabric, and the embers hide a glowing animal beneath. Something like a whale, on fire.

  “What an artist can do is take such images and turn them into something tangible. When one of my clients, the painters or sculptors that I represent, shows me their work, they know I appreciate that there isn’t always a clear logic behind what they do. They might simply be trying to tap into what normal people might call madness.”

  Harry and Sally Watts were part of the same set as Pam and me. We were arty-farty types who tolerated each other’s eccentricities and self-indulgences, and could often be overheard saying to one another things like: Your work ethic is what makes you who you are, or If you hadn’t been a junkie you wouldn’t be able to appreciate the kind of artists you work with. We were all overly liberal and I think Harry and Sally thought my addiction was a kind of badge of honor. But we all made money, enough to live a decent and comfortable life. Harry and Sally lived with Walter on a pleasant road that ran along the quiet side of Ealing Common. Unusually, their large Edwardian house had never been divided into flats, and they enjoyed a huge rambling garden as well as the three guest bedrooms on the second floor that had rarely been used until my arrival with Rain. We were never made to feel we were in the way. I’m not a bad cook, so I was able to contribute to the running of the house, shopping, and making many evening meals. Harry was often working in the evening, performing at concerts, sometimes awa
y for days at a time. Sally seemed to genuinely enjoy my company, rather than merely tolerate it. She was a very successful painter of modern equestrian scenes, and of racing events and famous meetings like the Grand National. The fact that I dealt in art gave us some common ground.

  Harry and Sally kept their horses at a large establishment in Harefield, a greenbelt village in Middlesex, about thirty-five minutes’ drive from Ealing. Harefield’s compact main street boasted a few antique shops and a post office, and the village was surrounded by fairly flat woodland and fields perfect for hacking and jumping. Rain quickly became an eager horsewoman, despite Walter’s reluctance to get involved. Harry and Sally were regarded as experts, and although they didn’t compete, they were keen on attending all the gymkhanas and dressage events in the area. Without the passion for horses and riding, that fire, that explosive exhaustion that his mother in particular felt after a gallop, Walter would never have been born. She told me that it was only after a gallop that she and Harry could make love.

  In this upper-middle-class world, caught between town and country, art, music, and the meadow, Harry and Sally managed to make this a relatively happy time for Rain and me. One distinction in parenting protocol that arose awkwardly in our time at the Watts household was that Walter and I seemed rather to follow our noses in our chosen pursuits, while Harry, Sally, and Rain believed that intense and long practice sessions were what led to success.

  I understood perfectly that without her old-school training in fine art Sally would never have become the excellent draftswoman she was. She had churned out nearly five hundred paintings and drawings before she made her first profitable sale at the age of thirty-one. Her style was refined and perfected by that time, and yet still evolving. She had never stopped training: she sketched constantly, taking advice and lessons from other painters and analyzing the work of the great equestrian painters who had gone before or were her contemporary competitors.

  For his part, Harry practiced incessantly on his large home organ. It was an old-fashioned console with three keyboard manuals, two ranks of stops, and a full pedalboard, but it was entirely electronic, and he often practiced late into the night wearing earphones. It was as if he became part of the machine; he could play almost any organ music placed before him. His sight-reading was unconscious and perfect. And yet his performances were highly regarded for his ability to bring emotion and new life to the well-known organ classics.

  Rain, riding as often as she could, jumping like a champion, wanted to be a writer. She read constantly, but also wrote stories and poems and was soon contributing almost 50 percent of the content of the magazine published monthly by the Harefield Equestrian Centre Harry and Sally used.

  I ran against the grain. The paintings I preferred were mainly by untrained artists. The music I liked best tended to be by the renegades of serious music. So I introduced Walter to a lot of wild jazz and primitive folk music as well as some of the less conventional orchestral composers of the period. Walter seemed to lean this way too: he learned harmonica, piano, and guitar without lessons of any kind. His practice was self-indulgent; he played what he wanted to hear, or he tried to play what would most delight him. So he was constantly aspiring to do better, but never thought to have lessons. Harry couldn’t really help Walter musically; his own world was too traditional and conservative. Sally often complimented Walter if she heard him play something she liked, but she too had taken the academic road and wished that Walter would work with a real music teacher rather than hang out with me listening to my old vinyl albums of Fats Waller, Louis Armstrong, Sun Ra, John Fahey, Bert Jansch, Davey Graham, Archie Shepp, and Stockhausen.

  We were all surprised, pleasantly, when Walter suddenly took an interest in the neglected garden at the house in Ealing and began to work it, almost intuitively as well as skillfully, into a semblance of order and dignity. It seemed natural then that he should be attracted to nearby Kew Gardens, and to the lectures and tours there, and after his GCSE exams he enrolled as a student at the Royal Agricultural University near Cirencester. Harry’s sister and Walter’s favorite aunt, Harriet, lived in nearby Tetbury, so the location was perfect. Walter studied for two years, and passed his finals with honors.

  Then, to Harry and Sally’s chagrin, he joined Crow Williams’s band. Crow was already doing very well at Dingwalls at the time, but he accepted that Walter’s charisma and talent would be a boost. Crow also wanted not to be a front man, and it was he who christened the reoriented band “Walter and His Famous Stand.”

  For a time while sharing the Wattses’ home, I became increasingly unhinged. Stopping using heroin isn’t the hardest thing, at least not for me. It’s dealing with the creative itch that is tricky.

  As I say, I had explained to the kids the extraordinary things I could see, but now this became an uninvited part of my everyday life. I wanted to be clean, to live with who God made me, as it were. So one day, I can’t really remember exactly when, I committed to getting straight, and it was then that I realized why so many addicts don’t manage to stay clean. It isn’t the misery of withdrawal that propels you to pick up again, it’s the enormous magnitude of what it feels like to be merely a normal human being, passing through a regular day. The bedhead visions that had so irritated Pamela began to flood into everything that I looked at intently. I started to see, in every piece of wood grain, what I took to be the faces of various incarnations of gods, messiahs, and other divine messengers.

  This didn’t feel like madness to me. It felt like revelation. I felt as though I were being given clues, signals, and signs that I was on the right track, that I was in contact with a spiritual mechanism that would free my soul. These “found” images were the basis of a new code for me. I was becoming increasingly obsessive as the months passed. Then I diversified, seeing the very same kind of beatific or screaming faces in the pattern on the linoleum on the floor of my GP’s waiting room, in the clouds in the sky, in smoke rising from a fire, or in the ripples in running water.

  I would like to try to explain what transpired, how I found my way back to sanity, but it is really, truly, another story. In a way, Walter and Rain, even as the little kids they both were, really did help me. As I say, they listened. I worried that I might have frightened them, planted terrible seeds of fear about what might happen to the human mind given enough stress, trauma, and ginger-fucking-headed-nympho-disloyalty. In my case, after several years I “relapsed,” as addicts call their return to drugs.

  Even now, as I write about those times, my anger returns. Those kids helped me. My own story is tightly interwoven with Walter’s.

  Let’s just say that after a while, I got well. By the summer of 1995 I was clean. As a result of what I had seen, and suffered, I began to look for the aberrations in art, the distortions, and the nightmares. What I had experienced, and the visions I’d had, would have enriched my life had I been a painter like Munch, or Van Gogh, or Dali. But I am not an artist, and yet I had seen ghosts, and then found a new language in every aspect of nature, which spoke to me of good and evil and all the shades in between. Best of all, soon after, I discovered the Outsiders, the Artistes Bruts, and in the end I felt that it was probably all predestined.

  Chapter 3

  In the summer of 1996 the time came when I had to speak to Andréevich formally about our business affairs. He, the artist. Me, his dealer. Maud brought him to my apartment, and it quickly became clear that despite her great love for Nik he was starting to irritate and annoy her terribly. He was fidgety and uneasy, but smiling all the time, in a dreamy, unengaged way. He had begun to look so much older than Maud. His long curly hair that she had once described as “golden” now looked dirty. His skin was wizened by the sun; he was still handsome, but looked smaller than I imagined he would be, but that is often how the pop stars of our youth appear when we confront them for the first time face-to-face. They are often smaller or taller, uglier or better looking. Photographs, movies, and television all deceive in different ways. I’d
never seen him perform, but knew his records. He was growing old, shrinking into himself. He seemed to be at the absolute center of his own world.

  “You like my paintings?” He picked up one of his own charcoal drawings that was now beautifully framed, already sold to a collector who happened also to be a retired rock star (one of Nik’s peers in fact).

  “Very much, Nikolai,” I said. “What you saw up in the Lakes was extraordinary, but even if you had simply drawn things you imagined, your work would be stunning.”

  “I saw it all right,” he barked, but not aggressively. Rather he almost shouted gleefully. “A huge angel that filled the sky.”

  “Yes, dear,” soothed Maud. “There is no question about what you saw.”

  “My godson Walter would send his respects, I know.” I wanted to distract them both. “He has all your albums.”

  “Our first album sold forty-five thousand copies in the first six months, but in ten years it had sold close to one million: nine hundred and seventy-seven thousand, six hundred and forty-nine copies.”

  “Amazing that you can remember!”

  “Our second was much more successful. We sold two million, seven hundred thousand—”

  Maud interrupted him: “Please, Nikolai…”

  “You can’t stop me now,” he shouted. His head was high in the air, rocking from side to side. Indeed, she could not stop him, and he listed the precise sales of every one of the twelve albums his band released prior to his appearance in John Boyd’s film. It took nearly ten minutes.

  “Last,” he said, coming to the end, “was the album we called Hero Ground Zero which contained the song ‘Hero Ground Zero’ that was written for John Boyd’s film, in which I appeared as Nikolai Andréevich. That sold quite poorly because I had left the band before the filming and we didn’t tour. Just eight hundred and fifty-two thousand copies—it’s the only one I don’t have precise figures for.”