by D. J. Taylor
Michael sat hunched over the chessboard, his forehead creased in concentration. Roxeanne said (it was a Sunday lunch party at someone’s house): ‘The thing I like about Michael is that he’s got a sense of humour. I mean, there I was standing in this gallery looking at some great mess of colouring when this guy comes up and says: “Of course you have to realise that what the surrealists were trying to do was to paint without any effort, and we all know what that leads to.” Now I thought that was really funny, especially as Michael really knows about art. I appreciate every Englishman you come across in a gallery tells you he’s done three years at the Courtauld, but Michael’s stuff … The other day he was showing me these book illustrations he’s done – it’s a project he’s working on and you have to give him the third degree to get him to talk about it. And let me tell you, they’re as good as any of that Aubrey Beardsley thing you guys always go on about …
‘… You mustn’t ever tell him I told you this, but the first time I met him I thought he was gay! Something about the way he speaks. Yeah, I know when English people talk about art it’s as if they were holding an egg in their mouths. Well, I won’t go into details but let me tell you I was one hundred per cent wrong about that! Of course, Michael’s very busy right now, finishing the book and everything. But in the evenings I go round there – he has the cutest little apartment in South Ken. We have supper. A helpmeet? This guy is a grade-A cordon bleu chef, honey, which makes a change from some people I could …
‘… Bobby? Funny you should mention Bobby. I heard about him just the other day. Bobby’s in jail someplace. You didn’t know? Well, it turns out that when Bobby got together with those actor friends of his it wasn’t just cigarettes they used to smoke, no sir. They reckoned when the police raided the place Bobby was staying they found enough dope to keep half of London hired for a week. Nine months for possession with intent to supply. To tell you the truth I used to wonder about it when he was with me. I can remember one time picking up his jacket and watching the papers roll out onto the carpet … You know, I went down to Greenwich with Michael the other day: there was this gallery he wanted to go to. And we ended up in that park, you remember, that godawful park with all the trees and the dogshit. And I suddenly thought about Bobby and, do you know, it was as if it had never happened. Believe me, sugar, it was as if it had never happened at all.’
Looking for Lewis and Clark
Truth to tell, we didn’t even come from Seattle. I know all the music papers used to write us up as part of the Seattle Sound, and maybe we played with Nirvana and Pearl Jam one time – I don’t rightly remember – but you ever hear of a rock band out of Bozeman, Montana? Isn’t nothing there but steers and cowboys in ten-gallon hats. So we figured it might as well be Seattle. Same thing with the country gear. I know they put us in buckskins for the cover of the first album, and Jimmy did that Wrangler ad a while back, but none of us ever been on a horse in our lives. Closest any of us got was Curtis when he worked for a vet one time, out on Vosper Mountain. As for the others, Jimmy now, he went in the meat-packing plant when he was sixteen. Errol was a college kid – you know, processed hair and a windcheater, kind of kid you didn’t see around too often. Me, I just collected my welfare check. So no horses, or cattle neither. And from Bozeman too. Anybody back there get to hear about it and I wouldn’t show up in town in a hurry, no.
Sure, the place has changed. I was back there last year in the Fall and they had a longhair record shop, and Mudhoney were supposed to be playing the local sports hall. Hollywood actors buying vacation homes out by the lake too. Wouldn’t have had that fifteen years ago – now if Jane Fonda had strolled down Main Street when I was a kid and told a few ranchers she planned on reintroducing the wolf, someone would have torched that bungalow down and never thought twice about it. Same thing with fashion. Clothes I’m wearing now – you wouldn’t reckon on people being pissed off by a T-shirt and a pair of K-Mart sneakers and a ponytail: I seen a Warners executive – guy who signed us – in a ponytail. Well you couldn’t have worn that stuff in Bozeman back in ’75. I was in a two-dollar diner one time when a kid came in with an afro and leathers and someone smacked a pool cue over his head. Now they got an AIDS clinic and the congressman don’t know one end of a steer from another, so I reckon the kid won the deal.
The first time I saw Jimmy wasn’t long after that. All on account of the only job I ever had. They were building the new freeway then out towards Livingston, and taking up the asphalt the old-timers said had been there since Lewis and Clark, and anyone who wanted to shovel tar could get eighty dollars a week for doing it. Evenings after work we used to hitch a ride back into town and fetch up at Mother McKechnie’s. You ever catch the scene in The Blues Brothers where the band gets to play at Bob’s Country Bunker? Well, Mother McKechnie’s was like that, and then some. The ranchers used to drive in fifty miles on Saturday nights to check out the country bands, and if anyone tried to play uptempo or didn’t have a steel guitar they’d throw beer bottles. I seen a waitress lose an eye once on account of that. Jimmy now, he stuck out at Mother McKechnie’s like a Democrat at the state farmer’s convention. Tall, skinny kid in a Fresno biker’s jacket with his hair quiffed like the Fonz in Happy Days – you could see the cowboys bristle up at him every time he walked up to the bar. But somehow no one ever laid a finger on Jimmy. You see, even then he had the reputation of being a mean kid – and that meant something in Bozeman, where if you were sixteen and hadn’t seen the inside of a police truck you were looked on as some kind of degenerate – and everyone knew about the pills and the cop he was supposed to have taken out in a poolhall at Billings the Summer before. I saw him in there one night in Winter ’81 when the Dixie Stealers were playing – four old boys in Roy Rodgers outfits doing close-harmony versions of ‘The Old Rugged Cross’ – and he winked and said, ‘Beats me, but there’s people come seventy miles to hear this shit’ and we kind of laughed, and for once I didn’t feel so bad about working on the freeway or living in Sally Pasricha’s boarding house out on Clearwater Street where you could never open the windows because of the smell from the tanning factory.
We started hanging out together after that, the way kids do when they got shit jobs and no family to speak of. My pa was dead by this time and my ma had gone back to her folks in Minnesota – I was supposed to visit at Thanksgiving, but somehow I never got round to it. When we got famous and the second album had been on the Billboard chart a month I went over there with a convertible and ten thousand dollars in a bank teller’s envelope, but it wasn’t any good – we just sat there staring at each other and watching the kids play on the patio, and then when she did start to talk it was about my aunt Abbie and how she couldn’t wash her hair except on Friday nights. Anyway, we went to concerts sometimes – they had a new 5,000 seater amphitheatre over at Billings by this time – if the major-league bands stopped by on their Western tours. This was ’82, ’83 remember, and all anybody wanted to listen to was Southern boogie – rows of guitars and the PA playing ‘Freebird’ in the intervals. We hitched all the way to Denver once to catch Kiss at the Four Springs Theater, and we wouldn’t have got in unless Jimmy hadn’t finessed his way into the hospitality lounge claiming he was a guy from the fighting company and I was his assistant. Weird thing was that Jimmy didn’t even like all that stuff. He reckoned it was too dumb, too ordinary, just songs about motorcycles and women and beer. ‘Kind of music you have to get out of your head to appreciate,’ he used to say.
Was ’84, ’85 by then. We met up with the others round that time, the way you do. Curtis wandered into a music store one day when we were trying to talk the owner into loaning us a brace of Marshall amplifiers; Errol Jimmy knew from way back. Even then, though, when there were just the four of us, and Curtis was still paying off the credit loan on his drum kit, I could see that things were changing. All of a sudden I’d stopped working for the highways department and hanging out at Sally Pasricha’s, where the whores who lived in the upstairs apartme
nts used to stop you on the stairs and ask for change, and was staying with Jimmy in some beat-up trailer in the park outside of Bozeman. The freeway was nearly finished, and most of the guys who’d built it were back in the line at the welfare office, but Jimmy and me got by somehow. Sometimes we stuck around Errol’s place, where there was a swimpool and a pin-table if you didn’t mind Errol’s mom, who disapproved of us on account of our hair, but mostly we just stayed in the trailer and talked. He was one of those vague, dreamy kids who like lying around smoking and blowing their mouths off: stuff about the old West Coast explorers, about how his grand-daddy had been a cowboy down on the Panhandle. Later on, some music journalist asked me if I could remember any of it, but it wasn’t there any more. Everything else I could tell you about – the inside of the trailer with the pictures of Robert Plant Jimmy razored out of Rolling Stone, Jimmy’s leather jacket with the death’s head pins shining out of the dark – only the words had gone.
We took off after that. I mean took off. One day we were hanging out in the pool hall on Bozeman Main Street, the next we were a thousand miles away in some studio Warners owned out in the Arizona desert with a hot-shit producer from Memphis and a sound engineer on five hundred dollars a day. Leastways that’s how it seemed. If I look back there are great parcels of time just gone and vanished, like an old settler’s map of Montana Jimmy had on his wall one time where the edges just fell away into white space. There was stuff in the music papers by now, and Bruce Springsteen turned up at a promo we did someplace out on the West Coast, but even then Jimmy didn’t help. He had this trick about not showing up at business meetings or TV interviews, and then corning out with some asshole excuse about his chest hurt or he’d slept over. Other times he’d sulk round the stage like he wasn’t there, mumble his lines or just stand there looking dumb and letting the crowd take the chorus. Sometimes, weekends mostly when we’d stay at his mother’s place at Belmont – it wasn’t more than a shack bungalow up in the woods, but Jimmy kind of liked it – I’d try and figure him out, figure out the sulks and the missed cues, the way he deliberately came in a split-second off the beat, but it was never any good. ‘If it wasn’t for me you’d still be laying tarmac outside of Bozeman,’ he’d say, as if that was an answer. I could have smacked him for that – I’d done it once, years back, for something he’d said – but somehow I didn’t say anything. Not at his mother’s place, with her fixing the supper out back. She was a tiny old lady with a pinafore and bi-focals, and Jimmy called her ‘ma’am’ like a little kid in a black and white movie.
But all this time it was falling apart. Us and Jimmy, that is. Even when we signed the record deal in a Warners suite at some fancy hotel in NYC, he wasn’t there. Disappeared off to the mountains, people said, but his mom didn’t know and none of the guys in the Bozeman pool halls had seen him in months. When he fetched up in Denver a week later, all he’d say was that he’d been looking for Lewis and Clark – I thought he meant Lois Lane and Clark Kent until Errol figured it was the guys who’d found the Oregon trail. They packed us off on tour after that – I had a feeling one of the record company execs had decided Jimmy was bad news – doing college gigs, East Coast theatres that took four, five thousand kids, which was shit-scaring when you remembered that six months back we’d been playing flophouses in front of thirty people. For a while Jimmy did fine. He had this bad boy image in the press, what with the leather jackets and the biker pins, he had himself photographed with Mickey Rourke like they were buddies, and he said ‘Shit’ on the David Letterman Show, which the record company reckoned was great publicity. But back there on the corner of the stage with my bass guitar – I used to hunker down next to Curtis’s kit so that Jimmy and Errol could take the spotlights – I’d catch sight of him sometimes, staring at the crowd or off into space as if there was only him there, and I’d wonder. We did a live show on MTV the week they put out the first album and he was like a spoiled kid at a party, kicking over the monitors and bad-mouthing the lighting guys, and halfway through the last number he trashed a three-thousand-dollar Telefunken microphone, and that was serious, even at MTV. He’d met Marsha by then, who none of us ever liked – dark-haired girl who worked as a model on the East Coast fashion magazines and had Indian blood, Jimmy said – and Errol, who’d roomed next to them a couple of times, said you couldn’t get through the door on account of the dealers.
He disappeared again in the spring, time we were cutting the second album, off to some Indian reservation in Nebraska where there was a kid drummer he wanted to record on an eight-track. We went ahead and finished all the same, and you can take it from me the voice you hear on ‘Lonesome Dove’ isn’t Jimmy’s, no way. When he got back from Nebraska he gave these interviews saying rock and roll was dead, and he just wanted to play chicken skin stuff from the prairies. No amplification, just country music like his grand-daddy had sung him. We toured Europe that Summer. Frankfurt. Paris. London. I don’t remember the places too well. He waited till the last gig until he walked out on us. In style, too. Half an hour before the soundcheck, when he hadn’t shown, Curtis broke into his room and there were a couple of bolsters twisted up on the mattress to look like a body, with a watermelon from the complimentary fruit selection for a head.
Back home he wrote us this letter that some of the music papers printed, about Indian music and not being on the same wavelength. Every time a band breaks up you get a letter. I hardly noticed. Curtis, Errol and me were auditioning for another singer, but it was pretty clear by then that we weren’t going to find one, and that the record company wouldn’t care if we did. But I still kept hearing about Jimmy. Marsha had quit by then and was dating some Hollywood actor, but he got a solo deal someplace. I even went to see him on his first tour – the hall was half-empty and he got mad every time somebody shouted for one of the old songs. Then when he disappeared the last time it didn’t even register: Curtis and me were too busy picking up our careers, building the studio and guesting on that Soundgarden album. But I read the stories in the papers. They found him out on the Bozeman trail, head down in some dried-up creek with a backpack and a couple of empty water carriers: dead a month, the medical guys reckoned, and never did find Lewis and Clark. But a month or so later I was back in Bozeman, looking around the old places – Sally Pasricha was dead and the pool hall was closed down – and I hitched up to Belmont and the woods and the old bungalow. There was no one around – his mother had gone off someplace on the East Coast, people said, and the roof had fallen in over the dime store linoleum – but I stood there for a long time staring down at the freeway stretched out in the distance like an old black snake, remembering how I’d met him and the times we’d had, and thinking that it was kind of sad and kind of unnecessary, like the way the whores asked for change on Sally Pasricha’s staircase or the tumbleweeds blew in over the old river bed with no one to stop them or care which way they fell.
Saturday Night at the Jenks Motel
Joe sits heavily in front of the big oblong dressing mirror – a gift from Ella’s folks, he remembers, fifteen years back – tying the tie that Ella gave him that morning. Ten dollars it cost, Ella said, out of an L. L. Bean catalogue, which Joe privately thinks is extortion, and Joe hasn’t worn a tie in five, six, years, not since he gave up the insurance salesman’s job and they moved up here to Missouri, but here he is, anyhow, sitting on the end of the bed fixing this weird, multi-coloured noose under the collar of his white shirt. Kind of thing that goes down well with the customers, Ella thinks, a guy wearing a tie, and Ella knows about these things, Joe reckons. He fixes it some more, flapping the end over his fingers and letting it loll down over the mound of his stomach. Beyond the mirror is a gap in the winceyette curtain where Joe can see the neon sign that says Jenks Motel, Bar and Grill, Children Welcome moving backwards and forwards in the wind. One of these nights, Joe knows, the sign will slam down and shatter on the forecourt, but somehow he never has time to fix it. In the distance he can hear the sound of the cars out on the fr
eeway and the noise of the police sirens doing speed patrols over by Jackson Gap – Saturday night sounds. Saturday nights make Joe nervous, have done ever since a couple of years ago when the local Hell’s Angels chapter tried to check in and hold a party. Wasn’t anything you could call trouble – two extinguishers broke and a busted window – but the memory still makes Joe uneasy. He sits staring at his face in the mirror, at the tie and the fisting sign, not seeing them, or anything.
In the kitchen, Ella daydreams. About the past, mostly: staying with her grandparents in Kentucky when she was a kid, but there are other flashes – wondering if they would get the motel registered in the state leisure and amenities guide, wondering what she would say if Billie-Sue, who hadn’t called in six months, was there on the phone, and how the conversation would go. There is a big pile of food on the slab in front of her – steaks and gammon slices and huge Florida tomatoes – that will need cooking, and Ella gazes at it awhile before thinking that she’ll get Larry to do it when he comes in, which isn’t fair on Larry, who has eight rooms to clean and the kitchen floor to swab down, but then who else in Missouri is paying five an hour for the sort of work Larry wants? Remembering Larry’s money sets Ella thinking about trade and she peeks through the kitchen door into the lobby where there are still six keys hanging on the wood and six empty hooks. Still, she reckons, it’s a Saturday night with the summer coming and ten to one some teenage kid wanting to ball his girlfriend will feel like stopping here and paying thirty dollars to do it. And then the daydream whistles up again and Ella stops worrying about Joe and howcome he doesn’t talk to her anymore and Billie-Sue and howcome she never phones and is back in Kentucky on a spring morning with her grandpa pointing out over the bluegrass and saying that you could always tell where a jackrabbit was hiding because eventually, never mind how long it took, the ears would twitch.