by Louise Voss
I snorted with derision. “In the van? You must be kidding! We’re renting a car, and we’ll be in a different hotel room, so you’ve got no chance.”
“Oh, goody—a choice of two hotel rooms to screw her in,” said Joe, halfheartedly joining in to wind me up. He’d been as quick as Jus to place his bet, but we all knew that when Justin decided he wanted something, he usually got it. I was beginning to wish I hadn’t raved about Sam’s attributes quite so enthusiastically.
When I burst through the door of the club, Sam was sitting alone at the bar, stirring a swizzle stick around a glass of cranberry juice. Her face lit up when she saw me, and she jumped off her bar stool.
“Sourcil! Ma chérie! I’ve been looking at all these posters with you on them, I can’t believe that you’re so famous!”
She waved an arm at the wall of our tour posters next to her and then hugged me. “My famous friend—who’d have thought it? And look at you, you’re so glamorous, too! You have lost masses of weight.”
“Thanks—well, you look as cool as ever. I have to warn you, the boys are gagging to meet you. Justin will definitely try to get off with you, and so will Joe, if Justin’s not around, so just keep your eyes open and your legs crossed, okay?”
Sam laughed. “I don’t know—Justin looks pretty cute to me.”
“But what about the Nadger?”
“Oh, he’s history. He wanted to know if it was all right for him to go out with other girls, seeing as I was going to be away for such a long time! The cheek of him! He’s just had an ingrowing toenail operated on, too, and he’s got to wear this really horrible sandal thing everywhere. So I thought, Hmm, schoolboy with ingrowing toenail problems, or up-and-coming gorgeous American pop stars? Tough choice, but the Nadger had to go.”
I made a face at her. “Well, I hope that’s not the only reason you’re here, to try and seduce my fellow band members!”
Sam hugged me again. “Of course not, you old tart. God, I’ve missed you so much.”
With trepidation, I introduced Sam to the rest of the band, none of whom seemed to be remotely disappointed by meeting her in person. She was very casual with them, shaking hands and saying “pleased to meet you,” without even raising a blush. I envied her insouciance.
After we’d finished loading in and sound-checking, we parked the van in a nearby lot and went out for something to eat. The boys and Mickey steered us toward a noodle bar on Avenue A, so they could ogle the gorgeous Indonesian waitresses, but at the last minute I whisked Sam off to a pizza place a few doors down. I wanted to have her to myself, for a gossip and a leisurely Hawaiian pizza, without having testosterone dripping like stringy cheese over our plates.
By the time we got back, it was around nine-thirty P.M. The first band, Loud Licks, had finished, and our support band, Kabuo, were setting up. A smattering of people sat at side tables drinking and chatting, and Loud Licks fans were drifting away from the stage toward the bar. They were a local band with quite a healthy fan base, but this didn’t look like a very good turnout for them. I hoped their set had gone okay—the challenge of being first on the bill was still fresh in my mind.
There was no “backstage” as such, which was ludicrous in a venue of that size. Instead Sam and I were directed to a door at the opposite end of the venue to the stage, which led down a narrow flight of stairs and through a passageway with crates and crates of beer stacked on either side, to a tiny boiler room.
This was, laughably, our dressing room. Its ceiling was less than seven feet high and was covered with ancient hissing and banging pipes. The temperature in there must have been ninety-five degrees or more. A door off the back of it led to a small bathroom, into which I disappeared with relief to get ready, dragging Sam with me. The others, with the exception of Joe and Mickey (who were doubtless at the bar trying to meet girls), were all sitting round a small table whose centerpiece was a black plastic basin full of bottles of beer in rapidly melting ice.
Troy, our new tour manager/roadie, was there, as was Dean, our producer. Dean lived in New York and always came to our shows when we were in town. He, Justin, and David were smoking a joint and discussing Joe’s sartorial shortcomings as we emerged from the bathroom and sat down with them.
I glanced at Sam, who was staring open-mouthed at the sight of the enormous joint. I could tell she was shocked, even though she immediately pulled herself together again, not wanting to appear uncool.
“He’s gotta lose that hair,” said Dean. “Does he think he’s in a glam rock band or what? Not that that’s any excuse, he just needs to get over it. And as for that hideous black and tan suede bomber jacket thing … Dave, have a word with him, will you?”
David looked down over his shades at him. “No way, Dean, that is absolutely not my department. You talk to him, you’re the producer.”
“Like it has anything to do with me? … Ah, here’s Helena and Sam. You’re the women, you do it.”
“Don’t be so sexist,” I said. “And anyway, I don’t think Joe’s hair is all that bad.”
“Actually, I think it’s quite attractive,” said Sam demurely, fluttering her eyelashes at David and Justin. Justin looked horrified at the thought that Joe might be a rival.
I never realized Sam could be such a flirt.
In between his turn at puffs of the joint, Justin was chewing the skin around his fingernails, chewing and picking at it until three of his fingers had sudden bright spots of crimson welling on them.
“Oh, for God’s sake, Jus,” I said, noticing. “We’re on in half an hour. Stop it.”
Sam handed him a Kleenex, which he wove around his fingers and held clamped in his fist, and they exchanged a smoldering gaze.
I caught the look and began to feel kind of at sea. I didn’t know whether I should warn Sam off Justin or not. But my dilemma was temporarily forgotten as I started to get a familiar cramping in my stomach, heralding my pre-show need for the toilet, and I had to focus all my energy into not giving in to it. Once I started I couldn’t stop, but I knew if I just held out till I was onstage, then the feeling would pass. Besides, there was no way I was going to disappear back into that not-very-private bathroom with the others sniggering outside.
Joe came back into the room, in a bad mood because Mickey was copping off with Ringside’s press assistant.
“Give me a hit,” he said, grabbing the joint from Justin and inhaling deeply.
“You look nice tonight,” Justin remarked to me sweetly, transferring his bloody tissue to the other hand so he could suck his fingers instead. “That color suits you.”
I was pleased. I had on a new purple silk shirt with a long black skirt and a purple and black drifty shawl over the top, and I felt hot, in more than just temperature terms. It occurred to me with amusement how many teenage girls would give their eyeteeth to have Justin say that to them. We had a joke among ourselves: “What’s thirty yards long, has no pubes, and goes, ‘Aaaah!’?” The answer being, of course, the front row of a Blue Idea concert. Maybe it wouldn’t be such a bad thing for him and Sam to have a fling. It would be a great story for her to take home.
Being in that sweltering room became like a Zen thing after the first few minutes. It was unbearable, but pleasant at the same time. You just had to rise above it. The pipes occasionally spat out a trickle of steaming hot water, and we nervously estimated their age and contemplated the consequences should one of them actually burst. On the wall by my head were scrawled the words, “Thanks for everything to Mary, Michael and Michael from us in Duran Duran,” with the autographs of Simon Le Bon and Nick Rhodes underneath. Sam was impressed.
“Duran Duran! I love that band. I can’t imagine them all holed up in this little sweatbox, too—I bet they weren’t too pleased.”
Justin said loftily, “Oh, well, Duran Duran aren’t very big over here. We’re way better known.”
Dean and Troy shook their heads in disbelief.
“Music, that’s what we need,” Joe announced, pull
ing a tape out of his sports bag and sticking it into our worn-out portable cassette player.
David, Justin, and I groaned. We were sick to the back teeth of all the tapes we’d taken on tour with us, and I didn’t think I could stand listening to Billy Idol one more time.
“No, no, guys, listen,” Joe said proudly. “I’ve got a new one, specially for the Brits among us!” He pushed the Play button, and the tape clicked on in the middle of a song.
Sam recognized the album first.
“Oh, brilliant! The Jam—All Mod Cons. But that’s hardly new!”
Joe and Justin exchanged admiring looks. A girl with long legs and big breasts who knew about music? Even better.
“I meant new to us. Listen, darling, they’re playing our tune,” Joe hammed to Sam, pursing his lips and pretending to strum along. “God, I wish we’d had real Mods over here. They’re so damn cool.”
“I don’t know this song,” I said. “What is it?”
Justin reached over and cranked the volume up to the top, and the harsh chords of “To Be Someone” filled up the room. It seemed to suck out what little oxygen there was left, and made us all sweat even more.
David jumped up out of his chair. “It’s about fame!” he shouted over the music.
Justin leaped up, too. “And money, and chicks! It’s our fucking song!”
Joe joined them, and they all began to play air guitar, stoned and exhilarated. Sam and I watched and laughed as Justin, Joe, David, Troy, and Dean bellowed out whichever of the words they could remember.
“ ‘No more swimming in a guitar-shaped pool!’” yodeled Joe.
“ ‘No more reporters at my beck and call!’ ” retorted Dean.
“ ‘AND DIDN’T WE HAVE A NICE TIME! AND WASN’T IT SUCH A FIIIII-NE TIME! TO BE SOMEONE MUST BE A WONDERFUL THI-IN-ING.’ ”
I looked at Sam’s face, shiny with sweat and delight. No wonder they all wanted to sleep with her, I thought. She’s even more gorgeous in the flesh than I’d made her out to be.
This thought made me wonder, for a split second, if maybe I was a lesbian. After all, I loved Sam more than anyone else in the world. But then I imagined myself kissing her, tongues and everything, and felt so queasy that I knew I couldn’t be.
The track finished and Sam spoke up. “Well, I hate to be a killjoy, but are you sure you want to make that your song? It’s about has-beens—it’s all in the past. ‘No more taxis, now we have to walk’?”
The boys looked sheepish. They obviously hadn’t ever thought about the lyrics that closely.
Sam and I rolled our eyes at this apparently prevalent male shortcoming. “ ‘Pulling muscles off a shelf,’ ” we chorused, and fell about laughing.
“What?” said David, looking askance at us.
“Nothing,” I said. “Don’t guys ever listen to the words of a record properly, or are you all too hung up on who engineered it, what studio it was recorded in, and what sort of strings they used on their guitars?”
“Sure we do,” said Dean hotly. “It just depends how much of a fan you are, that’s all. The more attention you pay to the lyrics, the more you like the band.”
“Well, then, how come none of you realized what that Jam song is really about?” Sam asked.
“We kind of knew!” Justin said defensively. “We just mean that it can be our song in forty years’ time, don’t we, guys? When we’ve spent all our millions on gambling and loose women.”
The others nodded gravely and Justin went into the bathroom, as if to indicate that the discussion was closed. Dean rolled another joint and lit up, and we continued to listen to the album at a lower volume.
A young black-haired girl in a miniskirt appeared in the doorway, looked us up and down, and disappeared again in disgust, not realizing how unlucky the timing of her Justin-hunt was. She obviously thought the rest of us looked too frumpy and stoned to be worth her attention.
Even though the press was all over us as the latest “big thing,” the teen magazines were still capitalizing on Justin’s “dream boat” looks, which meant that the rest of us hadn’t really got a look-in yet (the promo shot for our first album featured Jus in prominent and sharp focus, with David, Joe, and I lurking blurrily in the background). I was secretly happy with this state of affairs and was dreading the inevitable individual interviews and photo shoots that I knew would be imminent once the press ran out of ways to describe Justin’s eyelashes.
“Want to come upstairs for a bit of fresh air, Sammy?” I asked. She nodded, and we headed out of the room, away from The Jam and the fog of sweat and spliff.
A welcome blast of air-conditioned air struck us when I opened the door back into the now-packed club, so we stood there for a while, flapping the collars of our shirts and turning our hot faces up to catch the artificial breeze.
Once we’d cooled down a bit, we managed to find a tiny space at the bar, where we stood nose-to-nose in the crush, drinking water from plastic cups and trying to catch up on almost three years’ worth of gossip.
Fifteen minutes later Joe came to find me, carrying my bass. “Come on, we’re up.”
With a nervous swallow of the rest of my icy water, and a quick hug to Sam, I turned and followed Joe through the crowd to the stage. Across the room I noticed that Justin and David were making better progress. Justin was holding his guitar in front of him like a battering ram, separating the ranks like a hot knife through butter. People were cheering, and reaching out to touch him as he passed. I had a shiver of recognition that this was just the start of it, and that very soon there was no way we would be able to push through a crowd like this without getting torn to pieces. It was a sobering thought, but once we climbed the steps at the side of the stage and took our places, it didn’t matter anymore.
The cheering intensified as Justin struck up the intro chords of the first number, and from that point the set flashed past, seemingly in seconds. The four of us were in harmony, literally, emotionally, almost spiritually. I felt the strange blissful connection with the others, the same as I got when I used to go to church—a feeling of true belonging.
When I was onstage, I never focused on my surroundings too closely. Small details caught my attention for a second and then flitted away again: the way Justin’s ears got pink and transparent when backlit by a red stage light, the way the girl in the front row recoiled in pain when her boyfriend shouted too loudly into her ear, how silly Joe’s guitar-playing stance was—he always put his feet in Fourth Position in ballet.
I tried never to look right into the audience’s faces when I was singing. Justin stared hard at them, trying to intimidate them, but I found that very off-putting. Instead I became an expert at the sweeping glance that roved over thousands of eyebrows, foreheads, and hairlines, but never directly into the eyes.
I also loved to chart the progress of one individual through the crowd. I would pick someone distinctive—usually a tall man with a punk hairdo or a hat—and glance discreetly over at him every now and again to see if he’d moved or not. Almost always he would end up in an entirely different spot from where he started. Sometimes he pushed his way to the front, elbowing and ducking and weaving, eliciting scowls from those who’d been waiting patiently for hours to get that close. More often, though, the person was just borne sideways, organically carried across by the ebb and flow of moving bodies packed together. That night, though, I just kept my eyes on Sam, and the Cheshire cat grin of pride splitting her face told me that I’d finally made it.
The show went really, really well. When we finally left the stage, glowing with triumph, I grabbed Sam’s hand and heaved her through the crowd with me to the exit, wanting her to share the moment. I could see Mickey and Willy at the side, grinning maniacally at each other. Then they, too, started shoving toward the back, paralleling our own progress but getting there much faster (they didn’t have the congratulatory slaps on the shoulder or attempted kisses and hugs to deal with en route).
Unable to bear the sweatbox any longe
r, we all went out to a nearby bar to celebrate the successful night. Mr. Wallberger (Rob, finally, to his face) had arrived in time to catch the last few numbers, and obliged us by putting his much-vaunted credit card behind the bar so the drinks could flow freely. Besides us four, along with Sam, Mickey, Willy, Troy, Rob, and Dean, there was a small crowd in attendance that included several Ringside promotions people; our product manager, Tom; a couple of journalists and radio program directors; Aunt Sandi and her latest boyfriend; and a few of the boys’ old school friends who had driven up from Freehold for the show.
Sam, predictably, snogged Justin in a corner, and then crashed out from jet lag and excitement. Mickey carried on what he’d started with the press assistant, and David got off with a young Chinese fan. Only Joe and I failed to score—but I didn’t care, since I hadn’t been trying. My spirits, like my knickers, remained undampened. It was a great impromptu party, and I felt on top of the world, successful, happy, replete.
I danced over to Joe, standing hopefully by the door of the ladies’ restroom. “ ‘To be someone must be a wonderful thing,’ ” I sang joyfully in his ear.
He grinned and clinked his beer bottle against mine in a triumphant toast. “It’s a damn wonderful thing, baby!” he crowed back at me.
MARY ELLEN APPLEBAUM
IT WAS EIGHT-THIRTY A.M. I’D BEEN WRITING FOR TWO SOLID DAYS, including since three o’clock that morning, and I was exhausted. I was starved for fresh air, my limbs felt numb, my back was stiff from being hunched over my computer (not only was I writing new stuff, but I’d also been transcribing the notebooks I filled in hospital), and my eye was red, watery, and aching. Above all, I was furiously angry.
Rather irrationally, the object of my rage was my eighteen-year-old self. I remembered, with crystal clarity, the elation fizzing up inside me after that New York show with Sam: Joe and I clinking bottles and congratulating ourselves. That night, in that sweaty venue, I had it all, and didn’t realize. I was beautiful, and didn’t notice; healthy, and didn’t appreciate it; talented, and took it for granted.