by Wesley Stace
“Well, I’ll go then. It’s the best bet.” Of course, he wouldn’t have fit either.
“Okay. I’ll go. But under protest.”
“Would I steer you wrong?”
“What about those chairs?”
“That wasn’t wrong. That was right. Besides, that was one of the greatest nights of your life. You tell me that wasn’t better than being home in bed.”
I ate a mouthful of caramel popcorn, on the house. “You’re turning me into a criminal.”
“When I met you, you were a criminal. I’m reforming you. Look, are you getting under there or not? Just confirm there’s nothing, I’ll shine a torch, and then we’ll pack it in for the night.”
I sighed; it was utterly ridiculous. He lifted the foot-high curtain and ushered me beyond with a sweep of his hand.
“Life is all just one big Alice in Wonderland sketch to you, isn’t it?” I said.
“Just have a poke around,” he said. His last word. He winked.
I found myself crawling through a collection of dingy flotsam, cigarette butts that commemorated a time when smoking was acceptable, pebbles of chewing gum so fossilized they dug into my elbows; the dust got up my nose, in my eyes. It’s the only time in my life I ever longed for a pith helmet.
“Anything?” asked Blake, squinting through the curtain.
“Yes, yes,” I said as I tunneled forward. “I’ve found the posters; I just didn’t bother to mention it yet.”
“Oh, very good. Well done.” He shone the torch around more haphazardly than was useful.
“Hold on, actually,” I said, feeling myself on a slight downwards slope. The stage in front of the screen was still above me, but not so close to my back; everything was opening up. I got out my torch and turned it on, but as I put it down, it rolled away. I followed its spinning light until it fell a few feet. I crawled forward—I no longer had to slither—and peered where it had fallen. It was casting a little light around a small room, a very little light, but enough.
“Jesus! Blake!” I hissed. “You’ve got to come, no matter how much of a squeeze it is.”
By the time he arrived—and it was a squeeze—I had lowered myself down into the small room with the help of a foot ladder, and turned on the little lamp at the single table where I now sat, trying to look casual, feeling unearthly pleased with myself. I looked up and asked in as suave a manner as I could manage: “Is this what you were looking for?”
His mouth fell open, but nothing came out. Tears filled his eyes. On the table next to me was a circular metal ashtray in which sat half a cigar, extinguished neatly for future enjoyment, a miniature brandy, and a chipped green mug. The room was musty, dusty, but not damp. You could imagine, during cinema hours, a soundscape of all the various movies on all the screens playing at once, as Ernie puffed on his cheroot.
“Are you okay?” I asked. Blake still hadn’t said a word.
“Yeah,” he gulped. “Oh my God!”
He, who had believed in it so much, couldn’t believe it; I, who had hardly believed in it at all, found it all quite natural—of course it was here. And at that moment, I thought: “It’s a serious thing, to be the way Blake is.” Exactly that funny phrase: “it’s a serious thing.”
“Posters?” he asked, looking around the room upside down.
“And more,” I said.
Finally, he lowered himself. There was hardly room for two around the table. Why would there have been? Ernie’s was a party of one. Against the wall, a bookshelf with piles of neatly ordered magazines; resting against one another, the cinema posters, mostly old and folded, some rolled in large tubes. And opposite, a little door more like a coalhole. Blake opened it, peered through, his voice echoing beyond: “The staff toilet! That’s how he got in. Why didn’t we check the staff toilet?” He popped his head back in and exhaled. “Ernie, Ernie, Ernie. The room’s just as he left it.” I nodded. “And there are the posters. And here, by the looks of it . . .” he burst out laughing: “Oh, Ernie. It’s his pornography collection! Men Only!” His eyes filled with tears again. “Ernie’s little kingdom; his private life.” He flicked through the magazines: “Parade, Mayfair: January, February . . . all neatly stacked. And, look, posters, lobby cards. Pick one at random.”
There was one poster on its own at the end, folded neatly in a Perspex envelope: it seemed like it might be something special.
“Jesus Christ!” said Blake. “It’s a Wizard of Oz one-sheet. Be careful!” It had “The Regal” stamped on the back of it.
“I suppose they’re all stolen from the cinema,” I said.
“Well, they’ve never missed them, and we’re certainly not giving them back.”
“Widow’s going to have a nice surprise, I guess.”
“Yeah,” said Blake, as he sat on the floor. He was too tired to explain; besides he rarely explained anything. I put my feet up. “Now we’ve got to get all this out of here.” He tired at the thought. “Give us that brandy,” he said.
“We could leave the pornography.”
“Jack might want it. Add it to his collection.”
There was silence. He sighed.
“What’s the next adventure?” he asked himself, already contemplating future missions. “However are we going to beat this?” His eyes were closed. He was a husk: it was as if adrenaline was all he’d had. He began to recite poetry, reading himself to sleep. He always had a poem or a lyric up his sleeve, and he’d recite willy-nilly, occasionally burst into song, sometimes throw out a “Quack.” If I could condense all our early meetings into one memory, all the gigs we did on our first travels, it would be that moment, that night, and then that early morning, as we sat in Ernie’s time capsule, flushed with our success; Blake started to recite Edward Lear’s “The Jumblies” to himself—I kinda knew it, like you do—and he got to that bit at the end:
And in twenty years they all came back,
In twenty years or more,
And every one said, “How tall they’ve grown!
For they’ve been to the Lakes, and the Torrible Zone,
And the hills of the Chankly Bore!”
And they drank their health, and gave them a feast
Of dumplings made of beautiful yeast;
And every one said, “If we only live,
We too will go to sea in a Sieve,—
To the hills of the Chankly Bore!”
And I thought: “That’s what people will say about him: ‘Well, it seemed a stupid idea, but it was great and I wish I’d thought of it. But I didn’t have the guts.’”
Besides, going to sea in a sieve: isn’t that exactly what we did?
This time I was the one awake, and he was sleepy. He needed a right-hand man, a Tonto, a Robin. I, shortly to be fifteen, was ready for the role, and apparently I’d already passed the audition. He obviously thought of me as a son, and those two things (accomplice, son) go together, right, more or less?
And what I knew then was this: that I’d get in a van with him, go to sea with him, get in a sieve with him, go with him wherever he wanted, to the hills of the Chankly Bore, and that we’d dance by the light of the moon.
And thus began my education, my life as a Wunderkind.
6
“Where’s the money, Clive?”
NO ONE, BY WHICH I MEAN PEOPLE OUTSIDE THE INNER CIRCLE, understood how Mr. Hedges persuaded Norm Bloch, head of WBA, to put his considerable weight behind the move that would catapult the Wunderkinds like Angry Birds over the Atlantic Ocean in their assault upon America. Fraught conference calls? Face-to-face negotiation? A series of complicated push-me-pull-you maneuverings with only one possible conclusion? Of course not.
Norm Bloch: equal parts family viewing, X-rated horror movie, public service announcement, and music history documentary—one of Greg’s sacred characters. His survival instincts—when so many of his species, so long endangered, were teetering on the verge of extinction—were legendary. He worked only by the seat of his pants (his brain too
addled to make plans) and had always been shrewd enough to surround himself with capable business people whose entire purpose was to make him look astute. This left him free to indulge his passions, live out his fantasies, attend award shows and sign new acts that nobody else at the label liked or understood. He was a man of fierce loyalty and equally fierce disloyalty. If you messed with him, which of course we did, he turned in a second. After that, there was no way back.
Nick Hedges, he liked. Hedges never considered himself—nor would have described himself as—either drug dealer or pimp, but this was precisely how Norm saw him. Nick’s quick ascent up the greasy pole had coincided with one of the great weekends of Norm’s life.
Everyone knew Nick was made when he escaped punishment for a promotional stunt that went horribly wrong. I can’t actually name the rock star, because I would surely find myself a victim of murder-by-publicist, but it was Nick’s bright idea for a fan, a “lucky winner,” to meet his idol backstage at a London concert. Nick played chaperone and, unexpectedly, the fan and the star got on famously, and the star, deploying a generosity that far exceeded the modest terms of his original arrangement with the label vis-à-vis the promotion, offered the fan his stash. The lucky winner accepted eagerly, despite his unfamiliarity with rock-star-grade drugs: who wouldn’t want to turn on with his idol? And anyway who would be so uncool as to refuse? Nick left them backstage for a few minutes after the show, returning to find a corpse and a horrified idol. “Iggy Pop”—it wasn’t Iggy Pop, I want to make that very clear. I’d just like you to imagine someone of that stature—didn’t want to have administered a drug overdose to a lucky winner, and besides couldn’t believe that it had taken that small a quantity for the guy to turn blue. The star himself required a far stronger dosage to notice he’d partaken at all. Civilians!
Nick panicked; called Norm. Norm, remembering that wonderful Nick-arranged weekend in London a month before, made further calls; the cleaners were sent in; and everything was tidied away or brushed under the carpet. The widow had no idea where her husband had procured the drugs, let alone that he had such a crippling secret addiction. The fiasco had no repercussions for Nick, who more or less got away with manslaughter, and it was then that people began to pay attention. Hedges’s hold over them was exactly proportional to Norm’s hold over him, and Nick turned provider, enabler. Occasionally, in recognition, Norm did him favors. The Wunderkinds were just such a favor.
The accountants, looking only at incoming and outgoing, the bottom line, brass tacks, saw the Wunderkinds as “Hedges’s Folly.” The British market had not panned out as Nick had hoped, yielding neither a hit single nor any great profit besides tour income, of which the label was not entitled to a percentage. But Britain was only the fifty-first state. The real money was made in the other fifty. Norm acquiesced to Plan B, gave the word, whining at meetings (as though his word wasn’t final, or it was someone else’s idea to which he was reluctantly giving in), and the curtain rose on America, the new theater of war.
Norm met Blake in a London dressing room—I wasn’t there—and asked him how he’d feel about having his songs in a cigarette ad. It was a test, and Blake knew he’d asked this a thousand times of a thousand new bands. He didn’t feel like playing along: “We’re a kids’ band, right? No one’s going to want to put our music in cigarette commercials.”
“Hmm,” snorted Norm. “Coca-Cola, then.”
“Only if we get to do the jingle,” said Blake.
“Good answer,” said Norm, skin crying sweat though the room was perfectly cool. “There’s nothing wrong with liking to teach the world to sing. Let’s have some fun. But think about the name. It’s foreign.” His other two pieces of advice were breathtakingly simple: 1) Get a hot girl in the band and 2) Start the songs with the chorus.
The gigs, though plentiful, were a struggle; even I, passionate convert that I was, could see that. The band was trying to entertain kids by day and adults by night, all with the same material. It was a little ludicrous, and the twins, who lacked investment in the band, writing none of the material, making few of the decisions, walked prior to the American mission. They were bored of the din, sick of kids flicking ice cream at their precious equipment. It didn’t ultimately matter whether or not it was intentional: the amp was still stained. Had the twins known where the band would lead, would they have grinned and borne it? No. They had made a chunk of change and left, as they’d joined, as one. There were no hard feelings. The fact is: things weren’t that much fun before America, although to me it seemed more fun than not from the playpen of the merch booth.
Jack queued for his visa without excitement. Was it better to have a band and no record deal or a record deal and no band? Blake tried to persuade him that a rhythm section was the least of their worries. They’d pick up another and move on. They included me on these conversations, taking my opinion seriously as though I knew anything about it.
Greg’s time had come too. He was trying to effect the ideal exit strategy, but felt it would be disloyal to let them lurch across that ocean rudderless. Time to dust off the passport. Besides, it was a chance to wheel out his astonishing repertoire of anecdotes for people who hadn’t recently heard them, not to mention sport a modest fedora, a Borsalino, that Blake said made him look like Bowie.
I was going to stay at home. They’d be back in a few days. There were gigs on the calendar. Greg asked if I’d advance them; save him the bother. He gave me some sketchy advice on how this might be done. I probably arsed it up, but the gigs would never be played anyway.
They left for the west coast two months to the day after the poster haul: August 1989. The idea was that the record would be released on the first Tuesday of the new decade. There was a constant flow of postcards from Blake (all magical: La Brea Tar Pits; Grauman’s Chinese; fifteen of the Hollywood sign, at least), full of newsy detail. I heard it all again from Jack when I eventually joined them.
Even their journey to the hotel from LAX had been surreal: the road went on forever.
It wasn’t like England, where when you got to someone’s street, you were more-or-less at his house. They’d exited the freeway at the appropriate boulevard, but found themselves at number 22002 when they were looking for 1010. Surely some mistake: theirs, compounded by a decision to stay on the boulevard—they must be nearly there after all—instead of merging back onto the freeway.
On eventual arrival, the Sahara Motor Lodge had seemed an oasis of palms and spring water, but this soon revealed itself to be a mirage. The sun beat down relentlessly, the pool was closed, and the air conditioning pummeled you as you walked in. None of them had ever experienced a climate like it—they could deal with blazing heat, they could deal with perishing cold, but they couldn’t deal with both of them competing for their attention simultaneously. From the moment they landed, they were always either overdressed or underdressed—freezing, boiling, sweating, squinting; none of them was prepared to go native, to wear shorts and sandals. Everything went wrong. They tried to walk to the other side of the road, when they should have driven, and to drive to the other side of the hotel, when they should have walked. That first morning, they were eating overly crisp bacon and eggs-any-style, including ones they didn’t know, at the Bob’s Big Boy at 6:30 a.m. By the time they arrived at WBA for the meeting anxiously early, they all wanted to go back to sleep, particularly Jack, who, on his first trip to America, chose to lug around a cumbersome video camera in a shoulder bag.
The women in the conference room were strikingly good-looking; the men either notably handsome or obese. Norm Bloch was nowhere to be seen. He often excused himself from strategy meetings: the damage was done, and he could do more elsewhere. Mr. Hedges was present on a speakerphone from London, his disembodied voice in surround-sound, broadcasting not only from the phone, but also hidden speakers in the table itself.
“Hi! London calling! How’s everyone doing?”
Greg, assuming that he himself was everyone, embarked on an inappro
priately lengthy and irrelevant anecdote. Everyone paid polite attention as iced water chinked its way around the table, puddling mercurially on the highly polished veneer. Jack considered the gold records on the wall; the gaps seemed to invite the contemplation of your own gold record between them. He wanted to get a shot of them, but didn’t want anyone to know he was secretly taping the meeting. He had set his video camera to “record,” but left it in his bag slung off the side of the chair. Greg’s story finally ground to a halt. There was dutiful laughter.
“Nice gold records,” said Jack.
“A lot of them are Platinum, actually,” said Craig at the head of the table.
“Well never mind,” said Greg. “We’ll get you some more gold ones.” Craig smiled slowly.
“Exciting times,” said Nick, as if rubbing his hands. “A tale of two continents! You’ve met everyone there and now they’re going to tell you what they’re going to do. But the most important thing is this: they’ve got some people they want you to meet, some people who can solve some problems, now that the twins have toddled off. Let’s go with the headline. John.”
John had been first to greet them, which made him look hands on, a worker bee. He clapped once, put both thumbs up, and said: “You’re on Simeon’s House next Saturday.” He delivered this news with misplaced confidence. Britain had never heard of Simeon or his house, though it sounded a bit like Sesame Street.
“That’s great news,” said Greg, hoping it was.
“We haven’t got our instruments,” said Jack.
“No worries,” Nick piped in. “You’re in the new world. There’s a Guitar Center in every mall and a member of WBA with a company credit card.”
“We only have two members of a four piece band,” said Jack. Seemed worth pointing out.
“Right,” said Nick from inside the table. “I’m coming to that. Sylvie, tell them about it.”
If you were used to the girls at your local bus stop, Sylvie could persuade you of almost anything. She radiated health; her teeth out-Osmonded the competition; she wore white linen like a nymphet Jesus, her lack of tan lines suggesting that she usually wore less, often, at beaches. Jack, looking on in awe, would have happily heard her tell him that he had contracted a sexually transmitted disease from her. However, even this dusty beach creature could have chosen her words better: the label had “cast” some replacements.