by Tony Parsons
‘Party’s over, you fucking dickhead,’ he shouted in Billy’s befuddled face.
Terry took two steps across the dressing room and shoved the drummer against the wall.
‘Leave him alone, you bastard,’ Terry said, then he was with his friend on the bench, his arm around his skinny shoulders, a cloud of white dust between them.
‘I got to go, Billy,’ Terry said, and he hated to see the look in those eyes, and when he thought about that night years later, when the news of Billy Blitzen’s death had just come through, Terry thought that of all the betrayals of that night, deserting Billy Blitzen in the dressing room of the Western World was the worst.
‘Let’s go, Terry,’ Grace said, and so they did, leaving the Western World with their arms wrapped around each other. There was a strange sound in the air and for a long second Terry couldn’t work out what it was. And then he realised. There was no music. Nobody on stage, the dub all gone. The music had stopped.
Grace expressed no surprise at the car that Terry had parked nearby.
These Americans, he thought. A Ford Capri is nothing to them.
Ray slid out of bed, looking for the bathroom, and everything seemed new.
There was an egg-shaped lamp on a coffee table big enough for ping-pong. Never seen one of those before, thought Ray. There were silver ashtrays as big as dog bowls. That’s new. Gold records in glass frames. Only seen those on the walls of the record labels, never in someone’s home. Long, low furniture still in plastic covers like giant condoms. What’s all that about? A bookshelf with a wooden ladder, believe it or not, the books curiously uniform, their spines unbroken, as though they had been bought by the yard. Well, I’ll be blowed, thought Ray.
And a married woman warm beneath the sheets.
That was the newest thing of all.
There had been girls. There had been lots of girls. Because they liked him – and men too, he knew that, although that had never been his thing. And because he had started young, a fifteen-year-old virgin who only cared about music when White first gave him a gig on The Paper. But there had never been a married woman before, and the thought excited and frightened him.
Where was the manager of one of the biggest bands in the world? Where was her husband tonight? Where was that vibrator-buying bastard? And what would he do to Ray if he found him here?
Ray moved through the house, aware of his nakedness, alert to every noise, but still with the space to be dead impressed. He had never seen such luxury.
He padded across the living room, his bare feet sinking into the shag carpet, and beyond the wall-to-floor windows he could hear the gentle flow of the river.
It was hard to imagine that this was the same river that ran by their office, the timeless river where they smoked their mid-morning spliffs in the shadow of a tower block and the tugs chugged by the sad, dying docks.
This was the suburban Thames, the river that ran past the huge houses of men who had made their money, bought their mansions to store their gold records and their bored, ignored wives. Like the one Ray could smell on half a dozen places of his sticky skin.
She was bossy, Ray thought with a smile. Bossy but nice. ‘Don’t make love to me,’ she had told him, not that impressed by his leisurely technique. ‘Don’t make love to me – fuck me.’
The things she said! But he liked it. He liked her. A lot of the sex he had had felt mechanical. As though the girl you were with could have been doing it with anyone. But Mrs Brown cared. Ray felt like it meant something to her. And he didn’t mind being told what to do. He wanted to learn.
He located the bathroom and spent a while gawping at all the bottles of perfume. How could anyone ever get through all that stuff? And that’s when he heard the noise.
Holding his breath, Ray wrapped a white towel around his waist and stepped outside. A strange, shorthaired cat rubbed against his bare leg and he gasped with fright. Then he heard her call his name.
Back in the bedroom, her mouth wandered across his face as though she could never get enough of it, her hands pulled him down, and they both laughed with delight that they still wanted more, and then they rocked on the waterbed, their skin slick with their exertions, hair in their faces, her long dark hair and his long fair hair mingling. Doing it on a waterbed, Ray thought proudly. That’s new. He couldn’t believe his luck.
Then Ray must have fallen asleep because he found himself coming awake with a start, and knowing he had to go, as much as he hated the idea. Somehow sex with her had convinced him that he could find John Lennon. Sex with her made him feel like he could do anything. And as he pulled on his pants, he thought for the first time how great it would be to live with her.
She sat up, resting on an elbow, then sunk a little. He smiled at her. It wasn’t easy sitting up on a waterbed.
‘Oh, don’t go,’ she said, her voice husky in the darkness, losing that hardness he had noticed in the Speak. ‘Stay the night. He’s not coming back tonight.’
Ray pulled on his Levi’s. ‘It’s not that. I’ve got to do this interview. Or I’m out.’
Silence for a moment. ‘If you liked me, you’d stay’
He laughed. ‘Of course I like you.’ He got back on the bed so he could see her face. And so she could see his face. ‘I’m mad about you.’ She pouted, looked unconvinced. He got up, pulled on his T-shirt. ‘I’ve been thinking about it – you’re not happy here, are you? It’s a terrific place, but it doesn’t make you happy.’ He worked up the nerve to say it. ‘So maybe we should find somewhere. To live. You and me.’
She laughed at that and he was stung. ‘What we going to do?’ she said, and some of the old hardness crept back. ‘Live with your parents?’
He shrugged. He hadn’t really thought about that part. ‘Get a flat somewhere. A room.’
‘A room? What – like a bedsit?’ She rummaged in the bedside table, then there was the flare of a match and a cigarette’s glow. ‘You really don’t have a clue, do you?’
Ray pulled on his boots. It was true. He didn’t have a job, he didn’t have a flat, and he didn’t have a clue. ‘No, I guess not.’
But the thought gnawed at him – how great it would be to be with her every night. Yes, she was married. But she didn’t love her husband. And he didn’t love her. Anyone who could give you a vibrator for your birthday didn’t have a shred of love in their heart. So what was keeping her here? Just all this…stuff? Was that what happened when you got old? You developed this desperate need for stuff? But he knew she was angry with him for going, and so he said nothing.
He sat on the bed, his bottom swaying on the waterbed as he pulled on his cowboy boots. She sighed, sitting up in bed, her small breasts uncovered, and then there was a faint jingle and the phone was on her lap, and she was dialling a number she knew by heart. And suddenly he was angry with her. For not wanting to live with him. For needing all this fucking stuff. For getting on the phone before he was even out of the bedroom.
‘It’s me,’ she said, and she used that voice she had used with him. Ray watched her, his face a mask. He shut down. That’s what he did. He knew people his age flew off the handle. But not him. He found it easier to show them nothing. ‘No, I don’t – I’m not wearing a watch,’ she laughed into the receiver, her eyes flicking on to Ray’s face and then away. ‘What? Nothing, actually, nothing at all.’ Ray walked to the bedroom door, and he felt her watching him. He wasn’t going to cry in front of her. ‘So why don’t you come over?’ she said. ‘Yes – now.’ Laughter in the dark. ‘Come on – you know you want to…’
Ray watched her from the doorway, touched his hand to his lips and let it fall away, a sad little wave. His fingers were still sticky. He could still taste her.
‘Yeah – no – well,’ she was saying, ‘that’s what you get from the likes of her, I’m afraid.’
Ray let himself out of the house, quietly closing the front door behind him, so he didn’t see the expression on her face change.
‘Listen,’ Mrs B
rown said when she heard that he was gone. ‘Listen – I tell you what – I’ll call you next week, okay? It’s late now. I tell you what. I think I’ll just sleep.’
He stood by the road that led back to London, holding out his thumb for an approaching lorry. It didn’t even slow down.
A police car cruised by, checking him out, the two cops grinning at him – a harmless hippy who missed the last train – before moving on. Then nothing, just the mist on the river, and everyone in their beds, and his eyes scanning the sky for the first light of dawn.
A sports car came by. A yellow Lotus Elan. She threw open the passenger door.
‘I’m not sleepy anyway,’ she said. He’d never seen her looking shy before. He smiled at her, and it felt like his face would ache with the smiling.
She hit the floor and they sped away from the suburbs, and when she had nothing but the open road to the city ahead, she rolled down the window and threw out something stuffed inside a bag from Harlequin Records.
Ray didn’t have to ask. He knew it was the birthday present.
Terry’s bedsit wasn’t much.
A mattress shoved up against a crumbling bay window where the rain came in, a two-bar electric heater and records everywhere, and on the wall the classic poster of Enter the Dragon, Bruce Lee naked to the waist, holding up his Nanchuks, everything about him perfect, even the claw marks on his face and torso.
The roadie upstairs was playing Motorhead at top volume – something he always did when his girlfriend went home to her mother. The carpet was stained with the memory of a hundred residents. There was a pile of white towelling bathrobes in one corner that said Glasgow Hilton, Newcastle Holiday Inn and Leeds Dragonara. And Misty’s stuff scattered around – the dresses, the piles of photographic books, the rolls of film and contact sheets, her change of boots. A room untouched by domesticity.
But Grace was a rock and roller. She had worn her torn stockings on the Lower East Side, and given a middle finger to the Bowery bums who had something to say. She was used to squalor. He pulled her skirt up around her waist, their tongues wrestling, his desperate hands wanting to be everywhere at once.
‘You got the stuff?’ she said.
He nodded, found his mirror with the razor blade and pulled out his stash. Grace sat on the bed, crossing her legs, and he had to tear his eyes away to concentrate on chopping out the lines. His heart thumped with anticipation. Terry was minutes away from the fuck of a lifetime. Grace lay back on the bed. The razor blade frantically chopped out the four lines of sulphate.
The nice thing about the room was that you couldn’t see it very well. It was lit by a bare, dusty 40-watt bulb, the fiery glow of the electric heater, and the fairy lights that Misty had strung around the bedstead when she moved in and never taken down. It was only a £6-a-week hovel in Crouch End, rented from a Greek landlord who told Terry that he was moving to Melbourne because England was finished, but those fairy lights made it feel special – like home. Or maybe that was just because Misty had put them up.
Terry found a red-and-white plastic straw and did two of the lines on the mirror. Then Grace was sitting up, reaching for the mirror and Terry crushed his mouth against her mouth and went down the hall to throw some cold water in his face.
He was excited and nervous, wanting it to go well, wondering about Grace’s boyfriend, the singer in her band. Did they sneak around behind each other’s backs? Did they have some kind of arrangement? Terry was discovering that there were more shadows between men and women than he had ever imagined. And would she be his girlfriend after tonight? That would show Misty, that would show them all – Grace Fury as his girlfriend. She was the one they all wanted, and the drumbeat in his chest told him that he was about to have her. He threw water on his face and smiled at himself in the bathroom mirror, ready for the one he would never forget.
She was waiting for him when he went back to the room. She was in the pose that was designed to inflame him, the position that he would have favoured, if there had been any choice in the matter. On the edge of the bed, her clothes off, her legs crossed, leaning back.
But the thing that made Terry’s blood freeze was that she was shooting up.
Grace had not hoovered the white lines up her nose as he had expected. She had produced her works – the needle, the belt tied tight around her upper arm – and as he came into the room to see his fantasy made flesh, his dream girl was searching for a vein, then finding it, and gasping – panting – with pleasure at the act of penetration, the spike entering her vein, the cooked-up speed quickly finding her bloodstream.
In a daze, Terry declined the mumbled invitation to join her shooting up, to share the dripping needle, as if he was refusing an extra ginger nut at tea, and he watched her writhing with pleasure – arching her back, closing her eyes, exhaling with a kind of euphoric disbelief – and he knew it was far more pleasure than he could ever give her.
He didn’t really want anything after that – not the drugs, not the girl, and certainly not any part of the act before him. Needles scared the shit out of him. But he was young and it was too late to stop and he had always wanted to get the girl that everyone wanted.
So he tore his clothes off and fell upon her on that lumpy mattress in that leaky bedsit, more in desperation than enthusiasm, her thin white body still and doped beneath him, her needle sharing their bed and glinting in the Christmas lights, almost festive.
PART THREE:
1977 - LOVERS OF TODAY
Chapter Twelve
The night was almost over.
From the window of the editor’s office, Terry could see the sky above the old dying docks streaking with light. Somewhere a tug made its mournful sound. Twenty-one storeys below, beyond the hermetically sealed, suicide-proof windows, he could see the river black and glittering, most of the city still sleeping, but already there were the lights of the first cars on the Embankment.
Not long now.
Terry went back to his office and did a line of speed at his desk. He liked being in White’s office, but he didn’t want to take drugs in there. It would have felt disrespectful. He rocked in his swivel chair, staring at the images on their three walls. High up on his own wall, Norman Mailer’s battered face caught Terry’s eye.
He had heard this story about Mailer on the eve of his last wedding, and it had stuck with him. Mailer was depressed about walking down the aisle the next day. His future wife asked him what was wrong, and Mailer said that he had never wanted this – marriage, monogamy, fusing his life with one other life. All Mailer had ever wanted was to be a free man in Paris. And his future wife said – now look, Norman. If you were a free man in Paris you would eventually meet one special girl and end up exactly where you are today. And Norman Mailer saw that this was true. And so did Terry. In those brief moments of freedom that came your way, you were always looking for a way to not be free, to belong totally to someone. You went looking for new worlds, and then you found them in just one face. Terry found Misty. Now he had lost her, and now he was free again.
He did another line, and then he got up and wandered through the dark empty rooms of the office, and he was soon rummaging around in the filing cabinets, thumbing through photo files and bound back issues, soaking up the incredible history of the place. Jimmy Savile says ‘Hi there’ to all readers of The Music Paper and wishes one and all a Merry Xmas and a great 1968 – ‘See you in The People every Sunday, guys ‘n’ girls.’
It was like being locked in a museum after hours, he thought. During the day The Paper was a constant round of work, play and music, of spats, spliffs, and strange new sounds blaring from the review room. Kevin White and the older guys shouting for the dummy. A constant procession of faces old and new – freelancers, musicians, PRs – looking for feature work or publicity, who were often willing to settle for free drugs or lunch or a gig doing 300 words on the Vibrators at Dingwalls.
During the day maybe you would walk into someone’s office and there would be Joan Jett
sitting on a desk, batting her eyelashes and asking you for a light. Or maybe a couple of writers would be arguing about the merits of a record that came out years ago – on Terry’s first day, he had seen two of the older guys almost come to slaps about Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. Or maybe some female freelancer and one of the older guys would be having a quick joint, cuddle or debate about the new Steely Dan record in the stationery cupboard. That was the day. But at night everyone was gone. Well, almost everyone.
Terry looked in the window of the review room. Skip Jones was still in there, writing in his agonised, left-handed longhand, surrounded by that strange garden, the small forest of forgotten cigarettes resting on their filter tips, the cones of ash long and wilting but curiously undisturbed. Terry tapped lightly on the glass. Skip looked up, smiled shyly, nodded.
‘Terry Warboys, wild,’ he said, dog tired now, the night nearly gone, and with hours of writing behind him.
Terry came into the review room. Shy too. Skip Jones still meant so much to him. Because, because – Skip was just the best there had ever been.
‘Not going home, Skip?’
Skip shook his head, looking at a point somewhere above Terry’s shoulder. It occurred to Terry that Skip had no place to go tonight.
‘Might as well stick around,’ Skip said. ‘It’s going to be a busy day.’
Terry nodded. ‘Because of Elvis, right? I guess White will want some sort of special for the new issue.’ He was shocked to see how pale-faced and frail Skip seemed. But then again, Terry knew he probably didn’t look too rosy-cheeked and hearty himself. ‘You going to write something about Elvis, Skip?’
Skip shrugged. ‘Maybe. Might write something about the early days at Sun. Sam Phillips and the boy in the red shirt who wanted to record a song for Mama. “Good Rocking Tonight” and dreams of being a truck driver. All that.’ Skip smiled at a point above Terry’s shoulder. ‘Not sure I want to be part of the whole, uh, canonisation process. Not sure it’s right. We haven’t had a good word to say about Elvis since he went into the army. Now we’re going to turn him into – I don’t know what – Lenin’s preserved corpse in Red Square or something. Know what I mean?’