by Tony Parsons
Terry found the bespectacled longhair he was looking for, hawking his gram and half-gram bags from a toilet stall. The dealer. By his side was a hippy chick with a paralysed smile. His burnt-out girlfriend. They all nodded in recognition and Terry forced a smile, slipping into the etiquette of scoring, which mostly meant looking interested while the dealer jabbered about whatever scrap of lunacy was floating around his badly fried brain.
‘Terry – I was just saying – you have to live on a boat, right?’ the dealer said, his bright eyes gleaming behind thick glasses. ‘Because – if you live on a boat – right? – they can’t trace you – you’re not on the electoral, you know, roll call. The register. Registrar. Hmm?’
The dealer cackled at his cunning plan to outwit the authorities. He had been selling his wares out of the lavatories of various music venues for ten years, but suddenly he had this burning need to explain his retirement plans to Terry.
‘And, like, no council tax,’ smiled his dazed-looking girlfriend. ‘No council tax on a, like, boat.’
‘So you save money right there,’ cackled the dealer.
The babble, thought Terry.
The babble and the prattle and the bullshit that a man has to listen to, just to buy some drugs. Terry wanted to be out of there, but the politesse of scoring obliged him to listen to a speech of speed-addled insanity. The dub thundered on, and Terry felt his brain begin to swell.
‘It’s a good idea,’ Terry said, watching Warwick Hunt walk into the toilet. ‘Live on a fishing boat.’
With a flicker of contempt, Terry saw that the A&R man was the only fat person in the Western World – all those expense-account lunches and flying first class to LA, New York and Tokyo. All those perks of the job.
The man who had been responsible for signing some of the biggest bands of the last ten years looked like the brother of someone who was in ELO. He took a fastidious pee at a cracked urinal, zipped up his pressed Levi’s and looked around for some kind of personal-hygiene facilities. Terry smiled grimly. Where did he think he was? The fucking Marquee? In the Western World, all the sinks were smashed and the water had been turned off long ago. Sighing with irritation, Warwick Hunt removed a small silver snuffbox from his short leather Budgie jacket, snapped it open and dipped in the silver spoon that he wore on a chain around his hairy neck.
‘You got to get a fishing boat, man,’ said the dealer. ‘You have to get a bo-bo-boat.’
At moments of great excitement the dealer developed a high-pitched stutter.
‘Makes sense to me,’ Terry said, wondering if every drug salesman inevitably sampled too much of his own stock.
He was distracted. A small adoring crowd had already gathered around Warwick Hunt. Hunt may have been the only man in there with love handles and a mullet and glasses that had smoky lenses, but he had the power to make dreams come true. A girl with a ring through her nose and a nappy worn over ripped black tights was giving him a cassette that Terry knew with total certainty must contain her band’s demos. Warwick Hunt smiled patiently, enjoying himself now he had the world at his feet and the coke up his nose. Nothing has changed, Terry thought. We thought that everything would change, but it’s the same old rock-and-roll showbiz.
‘You don’t – you don’t – you don’t,’ said the dealer, ‘you don’t buy fish that swim in filthy water – do you, hmm?’
Terry nodded emphatically, and he was rewarded with two fat little bags of amphetamine sulphate. At last. Two grams for £24. As the notes his dad had given him slipped into the dealer’s pocket, an image of his father came to Terry’s mind. The old man staggering across a frozen landscape, his legs buckling beneath him, and carrying his only son on his weary back.
Billy Blitzen swaggered in and a jolt of electricity ran through the toilet. He ignored Warwick Hunt, who watched him with an ingratiating grin, then came over to Terry and smiled. Billy had a way of smiling that made you feel like you were the most important person in the world.
‘Hey, man,’ Billy said in his soulful murmur. Then he turned to the dealer, and his voice became brisk and businesslike. ‘I’ll take a G of your good stuff.’
The dealer held up his hands, as if surrendering. He looked embarrassed.
‘As soon as you pay me for the last time,’ he said, his grin so fixed it seemed nailed in place. ‘And the time before that.’ Trying to turn it into a joke now. ‘And the t-t-time before that.’
Billy Blitzen’s handsome face clouded with fury.
‘You fucking drug-dealing scuzzball – you talk to me like that in front of my friend?’
There were tears of rage in Billy’s eyes. The dealer raised his hands higher, saying they could possibly come to some arrangement, but it was too late.
‘I’ll tan your queer limey ass!’ Billy thundered.
Terry watched his dapper little friend unbuckle the elaborate cowboy belt that was holding up the trousers of his destroyed Italian suit. The dealer cowered back into the toilet stall, hiding behind his girlfriend, as Billy lashed the belt at thin air.
Terry wrapped his arms around Billy and dragged him away.
The crowd parted for them as Terry pulled his friend from the toilet. It was surprisingly easy. Billy weighed next to nothing, and Terry felt some unnameable grief well up inside him.
He thought – what’s going to happen to us all?
Terry put his arm around Billy and led him to the club’s tiny dressing room. Terry was always shocked at the size of the place. Legends had begun here, but it was just a broom cupboard with a bench on one side, the walls covered from ceiling to floor with posters of countless bands, and a layer of graffiti on top of that. Terry sat Billy down.
The P45s were shuffling around, drinking beer and tuning up for the show. They regarded their leader with supreme indifference.
‘Now are you going to be okay?’ Terry asked.
He had never seen Billy so far gone. His mouth gaped, the lids of those huge brown eyes seemed too heavy to stay open, and in the yellow light of the dressing room the suit was stained and frayed.
‘Just need a little lift,’ Billy Blitzen said.
A tall man with cropped hair stuck his head around the door. ‘Showtime,’ he said.
Suddenly Billy seemed aware of the moment, and his eyes opened wide.
‘Big gig tonight, man. That guy’s here. That guy from the record company.’
Terry stuck his hand in his jacket, palmed one of the bags of sulphate and clutched hands with Billy. He knew that Billy wouldn’t want to share any of this with his backing band. When his friend took a peek at what he had in his hand his face lit up with a smile.
Terry would do a lot for one of those smiles. Because Billy Blitzen had been in a band he loved. And because he had more natural charm than anyone Terry had ever met.
‘My buddy,’ Billy Blitzen said, patting Terry’s face, and Terry felt this strange brew of pride and sorrow.
‘Just go easy on it, okay? His stuff is pretty pure.’
Billy pulled a face. ‘That scuzzball. That fucking scuzzball. Talking to me about money.’
The P45s had strapped on their guitars and were heading out of the dressing room.
‘Just have a good show,’ Terry said, pulling Billy Blitzen to his feet. He watched him strap on his guitar and start to turn into someone else.
‘The shows are all good,’ Billy said. ‘Ain’t they?’
Terry nodded, and laughed, and felt himself fill with feelings that he couldn’t blame on the speed or the three nights.
It was true. The shows were all good. It was always worth watching Billy Blitzen.
You never knew when it would be the last time.
In the shadows at the back of the Western World, Terry climbed on a chair to watch the show.
He took out his remaining gram, untied it and dipped in his key. He had always loved watching Billy Blitzen through the alert reverie of amphetamines. The Dean Martin of rock and roll in front of you, and the man-made euphoria pum
ping through your veins – it was Terry’s idea of happiness.
But as he stared out across the terrified spaces opening up around the Dogs, and he felt the days and nights without rest pressing down on him, it was impossible to feel anything but a kind of exhausted melancholy.
Tonight didn’t feel the same. Tonight everything was falling apart. It had begun with Misty, and he could feel it spreading to every corner of his life. Everything he loved was slipping away from him.
Billy and the P45s filed on stage, plugged in and contemplated the teeming madness before them. Billy’s trousers seemed to be falling down. Terry saw that Billy had neglected to put his cowboy belt back on.
Then Billy was counting them in – one! two! three! four! – and they tore into their signature tune, ‘Shoot Up, Everybody’. Almost immediately things started to go wrong, and Terry thought of the older guys at The Paper, and what they said about seeing Jimi Hendrix at the Isle of Wight, how it was like watching someone you loved dying right in front of your eyes.
Billy forgot the words to ‘Shoot Up, Everybody’, and filled the gaps with obscenities about the Dogs who were spitting their beer at him. Then he mimed jamming a syringe into his arm and somehow the gesture suddenly seemed pathetic instead of thrilling.
Under the stark stage light, Billy Blitzen’s face no longer seemed rakishly handsome. Even in the heat of the club near closing time, Terry felt a chill run down his spine. Billy looked like he belonged in a morgue.
And Terry remembered something that his dad had told him about the real Dean Martin – how it was all an act. Dino just pretended to be loaded on stage because he knew Mr and Mrs Suburbia lapped it up, just as their grandchildren loved seeing Billy Blitzen play at rock-and-roll suicide. But Dean Martin was always in control and it wasn’t like that with Billy Blitzen.
This was the real thing, and Terry felt like a ghoul for watching it.
He saw Billy attempt to duck walk, trip over a cable and almost fall flat on his face. And he had to look away. Everything was collapsing. But the P45s, those wizened old musos, were holding it down, slashing out those shoplifted Eddie Cochran riffs, and the crowd was going out of its collective box.
Even the spaces around the Dagenham Dogs seemed to have closed up. Terry looked back at the stage. Maybe it would be enough for Warwick Hunt and his team of rock-and-roll bean counters.
You never knew, Terry thought. Even when bands were good, you never knew. You never knew if it was all going to melt away, and they were going to have to find real jobs, or if you would one day see them walking through Soho, unsmiling and proud, all new clothes, thinking about getting their teeth done, veterans of the Top of the Pops green room, treating the record company advance like spending money they would never have to return.
And even as he watched Billy Blitzen struggling to remember the words of songs he had played a thousand times, and even as Billy fought to keep his balance, Terry believed that there was still a possibility that his friend could survive this night, and pull himself together, and record an album that went triple platinum. As he led the P45s through a ferocious rendition of ‘Summertime Blues’, Terry thought that maybe it wasn’t too late for Billy Blitzen after all. Then why did Terry still feel so bad? Because something had spoiled.
He bleakly watched the crowd going mental in front of the stage, raining spit and beer down on his friend, and it felt like a private party had been thrown open to the public and they didn’t know how to behave. The days of walking in off the street and paying seventy-five pence to see an unsigned band who would turn out to be the Clash, or the Jam, or the Buzzcocks were passing. Billy Blitzen, he could see, had peaked with the Lost Boys. Peaked when he was nineteen years old.
Terry caught sight of Grace Fury across the crowded floor, imperious and unsmiling among the mayhem. She had her back to the stage, trying to move through the bouncing mob, and she looked up at Terry and smiled with what seemed like real pleasure. A friendly face, he thought. He knew how good that felt.
Then she suddenly turned angrily on a leering Dagenham Dog who had decided to stick his tongue in her ear. Terry saw with a shudder that it was Junior, the wolfish grin on his face out of kilter with his three-teardrop tattoo. It looked like a tribal scar under the lights. Grace lifted a contemptuous middle finger. Junior and the Dogs howled with delight. Terry looked back at the stage where Billy had stopped the music and was lecturing the crowd about spitting.
‘Stop gobbing you motherfucking wankers,’ he slurred, and Terry felt a pang of affection. Nobody mixed up New York and London swear words quite like Billy Blitzen.
‘Where’s the girlfriend?’ said a voice level with Terry’s groin. He looked down at Grace Fury. You could tell why men were crazy for her. Even in this madhouse she looked like sex in a tartan miniskirt.
‘There’s no more girlfriend,’ Terry said.
There was something about Grace that he had always liked – he didn’t feel the need to be cocky with her. Maybe because he thought he would never have a chance with her. Maybe because he thought that she was way out of his league. She was famous.
She held up her hands and he helped her climb on to the chair. They stood facing each other, still holding hands. Like kids in Happy Days, he thought.
‘Went off with Dag, didn’t she?’ Grace said, and he looked over her shoulder at the stage, his face burning with humiliation.
Grace shook her head.
‘Misty – fucking Misty – she really makes me laugh. Goody-two-shoes in her white frocks. Miss-butter-wouldn’t-melt. Then she does that to you,’ Grace said, turning around so she could watch Billy throwing beer at the crowd. She pitched forward and Terry caught her, slipping his hands around her waist.
He left them there, like a pillion rider on a motorbike, and he felt himself getting hard. Her waist was nothing, his hands almost encircled it. Her skirt was the shortest he had ever seen. And he admired her – she was a tough girl from New York City who dared to walk through the Dagenham Dogs dressed like that.
‘What do you think?’ she said.
Terry was lost for words.
He felt Grace’s palm rubbing the front of his trousers. ‘About Billy, I mean,’ she laughed. ‘Has he blown it?’
She took her hand away. Terry took another breath.
‘The guy’s still watching,’ he said, indicating the mullet-head of Warwick Hunt that clung to the perimeters of the crowd. ‘Billy’s smashed out of his box, but maybe he’s doing enough.’
She half-turned her head. A hand on his face. He liked the way she touched him. Just a touch and it got him bone hard.
‘You scored, didn’t you?’ she said, and he nodded. Her eyes half closed. Grace was a girl who loved her drugs.
‘Then let’s get out of here,’ she said.
He watched Warwick Hunt turn away, having seen enough, and he knew there would be no happy ending for Billy Blitzen.
‘There’s too many outsiders,’ Grace said, facing the stage again but reaching around to give his buttocks a friendly squeeze. ‘If I’d wanted beer-swilling jerk-offs, I’d have stayed in New Jersey.’
The band abruptly stopped. Billy was angrily pointing at someone in the audience, screaming at them to stop throwing things. It was a perfect cue for glasses, cans and chairs to rain down on stage.
Billy picked up a pint glass resting on an amp and threw it with all his remaining strength into the crowd. Terry watched it sail through the air and strike Warwick Hunt on the side of the head. He collapsed in a shower of blood and broken glass. The cans and bottles rained down like arrows at Agincourt. Billy Blitzen and the P45s fled the stage.
‘Yeah, let’s go,’ Terry said. ‘This is so fucked.’
They were meant to be breaking down the barriers between performers and the audience. They were meant to be different to other generations.
And it was true in the early days – there had been a kind of wanton democracy about the Western World. But rebellion had become the excuse to act li
ke a cretin. He used to love this place. Now what he had loved was gone. He wanted to get away, and he wanted to take this incredible girl with him.
He jumped down off the chair. She jumped down after him and fell into his arms, the red slash of her lips on his mouth, and he was hungry for her, but then she was pulling away, laughing, saying, ‘Take it easy, tiger.’
He took her hand and she followed him, smiling, looking sexy and coy all at once, and he thought about Misty in somebody’s room, he thought about Sally and the chance he had missed, but here he was going home with the girl of the moment, here he was about to make love to one of those women that men fantasised about, and Terry felt like the world would be made good again once he had this woman in his bed.
But first he had to see his friend.
Billy was slumped in the dressing room, his nose buried deep in the bag of speed. He came up looking like Frosty the Snowman. The P45s were bruised and angry and arguing with the manager about money.
Billy was beyond caring. He licked the white powder from his lips and chin.
‘My man,’ he laughed, seeing Terry, then his eyes were rolling back into his head and he began tearing at his suit, his shirt, his skinny tie. Suddenly his clothes seemed to be suffocating him. ‘My London mate.’
‘Jesus Christ,’ Grace said, looking away.
And Terry saw that it was always going to be this way. Billy Blitzen had that New York thing, and if you meant it – that New York thing – if you truly meant it, then you didn’t sign with Warwick Hunt and go off to record an album with Phil Spector in Nassau.
If you meant it, if you really meant it, then you destroyed yourself. You died, Terry thought, and a great sob rose up inside him.
All those Billy Blitzen songs that they had loved at the Western World – Terry saw now that they were all suicide notes, and it broke his heart.
‘Got to do one more set…maybe you review…fuck that Warwick Hunt…then we party.’
One of the P45s, the drummer who had throttled Brainiac earlier that night, light years ago, abruptly turned on his leader. Terry could see that beyond the dye job and the zippy clothes, he was really old.