The Buddha of Suburbia

by Hanif Kureishi

  My original impression that Charlie had been released by success was wrong, too: there was much about Charlie I wasn’t able to see, because I didn’t want to. Charlie liked to quote Milton’s ‘O dark, dark, dark’; and Charlie was dark, miserable, angry. I soon learned that fame and success in Britain and America meant different things. In Britain it was considered vulgar to parade yourself, whereas in America fame was an absolute value, higher than money. The relatives of the famous were famous – yes, it was hereditary: the children of stars were little stars too. And fame gained you goods that mere money couldn’t obtain. Fame was something that Charlie had desired from the moment he stuck the revered face of Brian Jones to his bedroom wall. But having obtained it, he soon found he couldn’t shut it off when he grew tired of it. He’d sit with me in a restaurant saying nothing for an hour, and then shout, ‘Why are people staring at me when I’m trying to eat my food! That woman with the powder puff on her head, she can fuck off!’ The demands on him were constant. The Fish ensured that Charlie remained in the public eye by appearing on chat shows and at openings and galleries where he had to be funny and iconoclastic. One night I turned up late to a party and there he was, leaning at the bar looking gloomy and fed up, since the hostess demanded that he be photographed with her. Charlie wasn’t beginning to come to terms with it at all: he hadn’t the grace.

  Two things happened that finally made me want to get back to England and out of Charlie’s life. One day when we were coming back from the recording studio, a man came up to us in the street. ‘I’m a journalist,’ he said, with an English accent. He was about forty, with no breath, hair or cheeks to speak of. He stank of booze and looked desperate. ‘You know me, Tony Bell. I worked for the Mirror in London. I have to have an interview. Let’s make a time. I’m good, you know. I can even tell the truth.’

  Charlie strode away. The journalist was wretched and shameless. He ran alongside us, in the road.

  ‘I won’t leave you alone,’ he panted. ‘It’s people like me who put your name about in the first place. I even interviewed your bloody mother.’

  He grasped Charlie’s arm. That was the fatal move. Charlie chopped down on him, but the man held on. Charlie hit him with a playground punch on the side of the head, and the man went down, stunned, on to his knees, waving his arms like someone begging forgiveness. Charlie hadn’t exhausted his anger. He kicked the man in the chest, and when he fell to one side and grabbed at Charlie’s legs Charlie stamped on his hand. The man lived nearby. I had to see him at least once a week on the street, carrying his groceries with his good hand.

  The other reason for my wanting to leave New York was sexual. Charlie liked to experiment. From the time we’d been at school, where we’d discuss which of the menstruating dinner ladies we wanted to perform cunnilingus on (and none of them was under sixty), we wanted to fuck women, as many as possible. And like people who’d been reared in a time of scarcity and rationing, neither of us could forget the longing we’d had for sex, or the difficulty we once had in obtaining it. So we grabbed arbitrarily at the women who offered themselves.

  One morning, as we had bagels and granola and OJs on the rocks in a nearby café, and talked about our crummy school as if it were Eton, Charlie said there were sexual things he’d been thinking about, sexual bents he wanted to try. ‘I’m going for the ultimate experience,’ he said. ‘Maybe you’d be interested in looking in too, eh?’

  ‘If you like.’

  ‘If you like? I’m offering you something, man, and you say if you like. You used to be up for anything.’ He looked at me contemptuously. ‘Your little brown buttocks would happily pump away for hours at any rancid hole, pushing aside toadstools and fungus and –’

  ‘I’m still up for anything.’

  ‘Yeah, but you’re miserable.’

  ‘I don’t know what I’m doing,’ I said.

  ‘Listen.’ He leaned towards me and tapped the table. ‘It’s only by pushing ourselves to the limits that we learn about ourselves. That’s where I’m going, to the edge. Look at Kerouac and all those guys.’

  ‘Yeah, look at them. So what, Charlie?’

  ‘Anyway,’ he said. ‘I’m talking. Let me finish. We’re going the whole way. Tonight.’

  So that night at twelve a woman named Frankie came over. I went down to let her in while Charlie hastily put on the Velvet Underground’s first record – it had taken us half an hour to decide on the evening’s music. Frankie had short, cropped hair, a bony white face, and a bad tooth, and she was young, in her early twenties, with a soft rich voice and a sudden laugh. She wore a black shirt and black pants. When I asked her, ‘What do you do?’, I sounded like a drip-dry at one of Eva’s Beckenham evenings so long ago. I discovered that Frankie was a dancer, a performer, a player of the electric cello. At one point she said, ‘Bondage interests me. Pain as play. A deep human love of pain. There is desire for pain, yes?’

  Apparently we would find out if there was desire for pain. I glanced at Charlie, trying to kindle some shared amusement at this, but he sat forward and nodded keenly at her. When he got up I got up too. Frankie took my arm. She was holding Charlie’s hand, too. ‘Maybe you two would like to get into each other, eh?’

  I looked at Charlie, recalling the night in Beckenham I tried to kiss him and he turned his face away. How he wanted me – he let me touch him – but refused to acknowledge it, as if he could remove himself from the act while remaining there. Dad had seen some of this. It was the night, too, that I saw Dad screwing Eva on the lawn, an act which was my introduction to serious betrayal, lying, deceit and heart-following. Tonight Charlie’s face was open, warm; there was no rejection in it, only enthusiasm. He waited for me to speak. I never thought he would look at me like this.

  We went upstairs, where Charlie had prepared the room. It was dark, illuminated only by candles, one on each side of the bed, and three on the bookshelves. For some reason the music was Gregorian chanting. We’d discussed this for hours. He didn’t want anything he could listen to when he was being tortured. Charlie removed his clothes. He was thinner than I’d ever seen him, muscly, taut. Frankie put her head back and he kissed her. I stood there, and then I cleared my throat. ‘Are you both sure you want me here and everything?’

  ‘Why not?’ said Frankie, looking at me over her shoulder. ‘What d’you mean?’

  ‘Are you sure you want spectators at this thing?’

  ‘It’s only sex,’ she said. ‘He’s not having an operation.’

  ‘Oh yes, OK, but – ’

  ‘Sit down, Karim, for God’s sake,’ said Charlie. ‘Stop farting about. You’re not in Beckenham now.’

  ‘I know that.’

  ‘Well then, can’t you stop standing there and looking so English?’

  ‘What d’you mean, English?’

  ‘So shocked, so self-righteous and moral, so loveless and incapable of dancing. They are narrow, the English. It is a Kingdom of Prejudice over there. Don’t be like it!’

  ‘Charlie’s so intense,’ Frankie said.

  ‘I’ll make myself at home, then,’ I said. ‘Don’t mind me.’

  ‘We won’t,’ said Charlie irritably.

  I settled myself into an armchair under the curtained window, the darkest place in the room, where I hoped I’d be forgotten. Frankie stripped to her tattoos and they caressed each other in the orthodox way. She was skinny, Frankie, and it looked rather like going to bed with an umbrella. But I sipped my pina colada, and even as I sweated under the indignity of my situation I considered how rare it was to see another couple’s copulation. How educational it could be! What knowledge of caresses, positions, attitudes, could be gleaned from practical example! I would recommend it to anyone.

  Frankie’s hold-all was beside the bed, and from it she produced four leather bands, which she secured to Charlie’s wrists and ankles. Then she roped him to the broad, heavy bed, before pressing a dark handkerchief into his mouth. After more fumbling in the bag, out came what looked
like a dead bat. It was a leather hood with a zipper in the front of it. Frankie pulled this over Charlie’s head and, on her knees, tied it at the back, pursing her lips in concentration, as if she were sewing on a button. And now it wasn’t Charlie: it was a body with a sack over its head, half of its humanity gone, ready for execution.

  Frankie kissed and licked and sucked him like a lover as she sat on him. I could see him relaxing. I could also see her reaching for a candle and holding it over him, tilting it over his chest until the wax fell and hit him. He jumped and grunted at this, so suddenly that I laughed out loud. That would teach him not to stamp on people’s hands. Then she tipped wax all over him – stomach, thighs, feet, prick. This was where, had it been me with hot wax sizzling on my scrotum, I would have gone through the roof. Charlie obviously had the same impulse: he struggled and rocked the bed, none of which stopped her passing the flame of the candle over his genitals. Charlie had said to me in the afternoon, ‘We must make sure I’m properly secured. I don’t want to escape. What is it Rimbaud said? “I am degrading myself as much as possible. It is a question of reaching the unknown by the derangement of all the senses.” Those French poets have a lot to be responsible for. I’m going the whole way.’

  And all the time, as he voyaged to the unknown, she moved over him with her lips whispering encouragement, ‘Ummmm … that feels good. Hey, you like that, eh? Be positive, be positive. What about this? This is delicious! And what about this, this is really intense, Charlie, I know you’re getting into it, eh?’ she said as she virtually turned his prick into a hotdog. Christ, I thought, what would Eva say if she could see her son and myself right now?

  These ponderings were interrupted by what I could see and Charlie couldn’t. She extracted two wooden pegs from her bag, and as she bit one nipple she trapped the other with the peg, which I noticed had a large and pretty efficient-looking spring on it. She followed this with a peg on the other nipple. ‘Relax, relax,’ she was saying, but a little urgently I thought, as if afraid she’d gone too far. Charlie’s back was arched, and he seemed to be squealing through his ears. But as she spoke he did relax slowly and submit to the pain, which was, after all, exactly what he had wanted. Frankie left him then, as he was, and went away for a few minutes to let him come to terms with desire and self-inflicted suffering. When she returned I was examining my own thoughts. And it was at this moment, as she blew out a candle, lubricated it and forced it up his arse, that I realized I didn’t love Charlie any more. I didn’t care either for or about him. He didn’t interest me at all. I’d moved beyond him, discovering myself through what I rejected. He seemed merely foolish to me.

  I got up. It surprised me to see that Charlie was not only still alive but still hard. I ascertained this by moving around to the side of the bed for a seat in the front stalls, where I squatted to watch her sit on him and fuck him, indicating as she did so that I should remove the pegs from his dugs as he came. I was glad to be of assistance.

  What an excellent evening it was, marred only by Frankie losing one of her contact lenses. ‘Jesus fucking Christ,’ she said, ‘it’s my only pair.’ So Charlie, Frankie and I had to hunt around on the floor on our hands and knees for half an hour. ‘We’ve got to rip up the floorboards,’ said Frankie at last. ‘Is there a wrench in the place?’

  ‘You could use my prick,’ said Charlie.

  He gave her money and got rid of her.

  After this I decided to fly back to London. My agent had rung and said I was up for an important audition. She’d said it was the most important audition of my life, which was obviously a reason for not attending. But it was also the only audition my agent had sent me up for, so I thought I should reward her with an appearance.

  I knew Charlie wouldn’t want me to leave New York, and it took me a couple of days to gather the courage to broach the subject. When I told him, he laughed, as if I had an ulterior motive and really wanted money or something. Immediately he asked me to work full-time for him. ‘I’ve been meaning to ask you for a while,’ he said. ‘We’ll mix business with pleasure. I’ll talk to the Fish about your salary. It’ll be fat. You’ll be a little brown fat-cat. OK, little one?’

  ‘I don’t think so, big one. I’m going to London.’

  ‘What are you talking about? You’re going to London, you say. But I’m going on a world tour. LA, Sydney, Toronto. I want you to be there with me.’

  ‘I want to look for work in London.’

  He became angry. ‘It’s stupid to leave just when things are starting to happen here. You’re a good friend to me. A good assistant. You get things done.’

  ‘Please give me the money to go. I’m asking you to help me out. It’s what I want.’

  ‘What you want, eh?’

  He walked up and down the room, and talked like a professor conducting a seminar with students he’d never met before.

  ‘England’s decrepit. No one believes in anything. Here, it’s money and success. But people are motivated. They do things. England’s a nice place if you’re rich, but otherwise it’s a fucking swamp of prejudice, class confusion, the whole thing. Nothing works over there. And no one works – ’

  ‘Charlie –’

  ‘That’s why I’m definitely not letting you go. If you can make it here, why go anywhere else? What’s the point? You can get anything you want in America. And what do you want? Say what you want!’

  ‘Charlie, I’m asking you – ’

  ‘I can hear you asking me, man! I can hear you pleading! But I must save you.’

  That was that. He sat down and said no more. The next day, when in retaliation I said nothing, Charlie suddenly blurted out, ‘OΚ, OK, if it means so much to you, I’ll buy you a return ticket to London, but you’ve got to promise to come back.’

  I promised. He shook his head at me. ‘You won’t like it, I’m telling you now.’

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  So on Charlie’s money, with a gram of coke as a leaving present and his warning on my mind, I flew back to London. I was glad to be doing it: I missed my parents and Eva. Though I spoke to them on the phone, I wanted to see their faces again. I wanted to argue with Dad. Eva had hinted that significant events were going to take place. ‘What are they?’ I asked her all the time. ‘I can’t tell you unless you’re here,’ she said, teasingly. I had no idea what she was talking about.

  On the flight to London I had a painful toothache, and on my first day in England I arranged to go to the dentist. I walked around Chelsea, happy to be back in London, relieved to rest my eyes on something old again. It was beautiful around Cheyne Walk, those little houses smothered in flowers with blue plaques on the front wall. It was terrific as long as you didn’t have to hear the voices of the people who lived there.

  As the dentist’s nurse led me to the dentist’s chair and I nodded at him in greeting, he said, in a South African accent, ‘Does he speak English?’

  ‘A few words,’ I said.

  I walked around Central London and saw that the town was being ripped apart; the rotten was being replaced by the new, and the new was ugly. The gift of creating beauty had been lost somewhere. The ugliness was in the people, too. Londoners seemed to hate each other.

  I met Terry for a drink while he was rehearsing more episodes of his Sergeant Monty series. He barely had time to see me, what with picketing and demonstrating and supporting various strikes. When we did talk it was about the state of the country.

  ‘You may have noticed, Karim, that England’s had it. It’s coming apart. Resistance has brought it to a standstill. The Government were defeated in the vote last night. There’ll be an election. The chickens are coming home to die. It’s either us or the rise of the Right.’

  Terry had predicted the last forty crises out of twenty, but the bitter, fractured country was in turmoil: there were strikes, marches, wage-claims. ‘We’ve got to seize control,’ he said. ‘The people want strength and a new direction.’ He thought there was going to be a revolution; he cared
about nothing else.

  The next day I talked to the producers and casting people of the soap opera I was being considered for. I had to see them in an office they’d rented for the week in Soho. But I didn’t want to talk to them, even if I’d flown from America to do so. Pyke had taken care with his art or craft – nothing shoddy got on stage; his whole life was tied up with the quality of what he did. But five minutes told me that these were trashy, jumped-up people in fluffy sweaters. They spoke as if they were working on something by Sophocles. Then they asked me to run around the office in an improvisation set in a fish and chip shop – an argument over a piece of cod which led to boiling fat being tipped over someone’s arm – with a couple of hack actors who’d already been cast. They were boring people; I’d be with them for months if I got the job.

  At last I got away. I went back to the Fish’s flat, which I was borrowing, an impersonal but comfortable place a bit like an hotel. I was sitting there, wondering whether I should pack up my things and move permanently to New York to work for Charlie, when the phone rang. My agent said, ‘Good news. They’ve rung to say you’ve got the part.’

  ‘That’s good,’ I said.

  ‘It’s the best,’ she replied.

  But it took two days for the meaning of the offer to sink in. What was it exactly? I was being given a part in a new soap opera which would tangle with the latest contemporary issues: they meant abortions and racist attacks, the stuff that people lived through but that never got on TV. If I accepted the offer I’d play the rebellious student son of an Indian shopkeeper. Millions watched those things. I would have a lot of money. I would be recognized all over the country. My life would change overnight.