Sick On You

by Andrew Matheson

  At Watford Magistrates’ Court on Clarendon Road we are treated like diseased sheep, herded and prodded into a small wood-paneled room to stand for an hour. Then we are summoned and escorted by two coppers and Watford’s answer to Ichabod Crane along corridors and upstairs to emerge in the dock. All heads turn to view the scumbag criminals.

  It’s all showbiz really, so I smile and give a slight wave. There is tittering among the assembled. But in the words of the odd yet funny Frankie Howerd, titter ye not. Three policemen in the dock crowd around me and let me know that there will be no more of that.

  Minutes fly by and then a dulcet voice intones, “All rise.” We aren’t sitting so it doesn’t make much difference to us. In walks the judge. He does not look like a barrel of laughs.

  The judge sits at the bench arranging his robes like the train on the wedding dress of a Versailles bride, then, and only then, surveys the court, eventually turning his withering gaze on Lou and me. Without so much as a pretense of impartiality, he twists his thin dry lips into a sneer and slowly shakes his wig in undisguised disgust. He then consults the papers in front of him, containing, as they must, the details of our dastardly deeds.

  The rest is a blur of evidence and witnesses. I can’t stop giggling. I can’t believe the overkill at work here. I look at Lou and he is equally astounded. The arresting officer says his piece. Our slumlord says his. It’s the first time we’ve actually clapped eyes on him, and what a nasty piece of work he seems to be; waving his arms and pointing at Lou (who, in fact, is the actual tenant, M’lud), he resembles a bloated Eydie Gormé.

  The grass remains anonymous, doesn’t testify. I lean toward our trio of coppers and ask, “Hey, why don’t we have a lawyer?” The biggest, nastiest one turns around and says, quietly but pleasantly, “Shut your fucking cakehole.”

  Cakehole shut, M’lud.

  It ends with us being found guilty, what a shock, and sentenced to a fine of £25 each or, as an attractive alternative, a month in jail. We don’t have 25p between us, never mind £25, and our prospects for acquiring it don’t exactly inspire confidence. Yes, M’lud, fine, M’lud, three bags full, M’lud. We will undertake to pay said fine for our crime.

  And exactly what crime might that be, you ask? Breaking and entering? Malicious damage? Trespass? Vandalism? No, the crime committed by Lou Sparks and Andrew Matheson on that fateful night and for which they are duly convicted and sentenced is thus: “Theft of three bottles of Coca-Cola,” entertainingly if ominously expressed as, and I quote, “Permanently depriving the landlord of three bottles of Coca-Cola.”

  They got us on the “entering” but not the “breaking.” Lou picked the lock so cleanly they couldn’t prove anyone actually broke in.

  In addition to the sentence imposed, Lou is required by the court to attend counseling sessions once a week. Why Lou and not me? Am I considered beyond redemption?

  We, and when I say “we” I mean Lou, weasel our way out of having to ante up the twenty-five nicker on the spot and negotiate a £2.50 per week payment scheme each. The word “scheme” figured prominently in our thinking. Thanks to our charming drummer, the authorities set us free once again to menace the streets of Watford.

  Breath in white hissing puffs as Lou and I trudge back to our slum, stopping only for a spot of thievery on the way: tin of beans, tin of salmon, bar of soap in my coat pockets; packet of bacon tucked down my trouser front. Shuffling along Aldenham Road, Lou hits the jackpot when he finds a couple of very long cigarette butts.

  So yeah, that’s our morning. How was yours?

  The next day, walking aimlessly, bored out of our skulls and convinced that life can’t possibly get any worse, we pass a newsagent and stop dead in our tracks. There, on the front page of the newspaper in inch-high letters, it says “Costly Coke.” Underneath the inflammatory headline the article tells in detail the hilarious story of two idiots who broke into a defunct fish ’n’ chip shop in the dead of night for the sole purpose of stealing three bottles of Coca-Cola.

  Then it names the two idiots.

  The only bright spot is that today Stein turns nineteen. Good. Now he knows how it feels to get old.

  * * *

  Winter wheedles its way into March, and the band is off to Cliff’s for a swinging weekend. We’ve hired a cheap Ford Transit van plus a cheaper roadie for the gear, and Roger is taking all personnel in his car. He’s dark and snarling, even more than usual, muttering about the paltry amount we kick in for petrol, the tuppence, the 50p’s, the palmful of shillings. He’s got a point but what can we do? Each of us has a stash of cash tucked away in our trousers for future lubrication. Can’t waste it on petrol, can we?

  When the van stops at Eunan’s joint we see he’s got a Vox 100 in tow, cost him fifty-three quid. Stein was with him in the shop when he put it on hire purchase, and he whispers the story to me. Eunan had to give his age and Stein was shocked to hear that the man is twenty-three. Keeping that on the quiet is the boy. If we’d known he was that old we’d never have let him in the band.

  Eunan works at a ladies’ wig factory. Just found that out. I don’t blame him for keeping that quiet, either. I picture him there, shampooing and moisturizing donkey manes and the shorn locks of desperate lower-caste Indian babes, putting curlers in synthetic tresses for grannies and trannies. But twenty-three? This won’t do.

  Stein and I bragged to Chris Andrews about where we’re going, acting like this sort of invitation happens to us all the time. Good for us, he said, and told us to pop by his digs in Hertfordshire on the way to Cliff’s to pick up some spare gear he’s got stored in a garage. He won’t be there but we are to help ourselves. Something we’re good at.

  Hence, after a lengthy search along the labyrinthine hedgerowed country lanes around the ritzier side of Chorleywood, the van and the Zephyr pull up to a garage beside a huge house in Quickley Lane, and in we go. I look at the fabulously big and luxurious house in awe. The man has had two hits as far as I am aware—“Yesterday Man” and “Girl Don’t Come”—and look at this place. I mean, nobody’s heard of Chris Andrews in America but check out his house. There’s coin to be coined in this business.

  We root around in the garage, and it turns out to be an Aladdin’s grave of old equipment. We nab microphone stands, two PA speakers, various plug boards, and a Vox electric organ. The organ is red with chrome, like an Italian motorcycle fitted with eight sets of false teeth.

  Two lager-sodden hours later, the Zephyr and the Transit van pull up a long crunchy gravel drive and stop at the front door of Bongo’s massive Tudor mansion, just outside Bishop’s Stortford. I don’t know anything about the Tudor era except that they were obviously big on dark oak beams and white plaster, and this joint has both in eye-popping abundance. It’s three stories high and as long as a football pitch, set in beautifully sculptured grounds with topiary, shrubberies, and gigantic ancient trees, under which Druids no doubt once frolicked.

  A large curved wooden door swings open on ornate hinges and we are greeted by a woman who is the spitting image of a clean-shaven Jesus. She’s got the center-parted hair and even stands in that iconic “I give up” pose, with the arms slightly held out at the sides, palms up. (You know, that pose Jesus is always depicted in when he’s made of plaster and painted in garish colors and sold in Portugal or Peru?) The woman holds that pose as though she’s saying, “Welcome, and you are?” But it turns out she has been expecting us and leads us inside.

  Wow. What a pad. The cavernous entry hall leads into a vast reception room eight times the size of most clubs we’ve played. It is furnished with antique carpets, brass and pewter bric-a-brac, lace frothery, oil paintings, and uncomfortable-looking ancient chairs and sofas. Horned beasts, boars and stags mostly, poke their heads out of the paneled walls disturbingly, glass eyes ever-watchful, calculating, plotting revenge. Heraldry abounds: tapestries, flags, and banners dangle above.

 
“Cliff’s not here,” we are informed. “We don’t care,” we keep to ourselves. After we unload the gear we are fed a fab feast of roast pork, potatoes, Brussels sprouts, applesauce, and some vegetable we can’t identify and never want to see again. This is followed by cake, ice cream, and coffee.

  Then we are shown to our rooms by the staff, all of whom hover about like hippy automatons, helpful enough but with mirthless half-smiles perpetually smeared across their faces. Up the stairs we go.

  My room is huge, with beamed ceilings and leaded bay windows, deep pile carpet, a bed straight out of a Penthouse photo shoot, and a fireplace that someone has been kind enough to equip with a roaring fire. On the bed is something I’ve never seen before. It’s like a fluffy stuffed sheet. And there are no blankets to go along with it.

  I sit on the velvet seat that wraps around one of the bay windows and look out at the beautiful grounds and the lovely rolling landscape beyond. This is perfect and clean and Christmas-card picturesque. It does one’s noggin the world of good. I could sit here, undisturbed, for hours. Of course, there’s an immediate knock on the door. It is Stein with a grin, two beers, and a guitar in tow to play me this song idea he’s been telling me about. It’s always business with this guy.

  First, we yap it up about this fantastic planet we’ve landed on. When I show him my weird bedding he explains that it’s a duvet and that until he came to England he’d never slept in a bed without one. He and Sonja walked into the London Street bedsit and found only folded sheets and blankets. They stood baffled, not knowing what to do with them. “Duvet” sounds French. It is fluffy and inviting, like Sacha Distel. The continentals may not be able to rock, but they sure can make a bed.

  Stein plays his idea for me, strumming his usual oddball chords in his usual unpredictable key and singing his nonsensical words. The song is pretty good, though. It’s got something. A tad slow, perhaps, but it seems to me that it will fit with this idea I have for a song about a girl who inherits some cash.

  We mess around with the chords for twenty minutes or so, debating this and that, taping it for me to work on later, then we go and round up the troops for a night out in beautiful downtown Bishop’s Stortford.

  Into Roger’s Zephyr and off we go to investigate all that this burg has to offer. It’s a wee postcard village with three pubs at the most. The first one we come to does nicely, and there we stay, pouring liquid down our throats and spouting the word “Cliff” at every possible opportunity until closing time. Three barmaids take the bait, so it’s into the Zephyr and off to the house on the hill.

  Back at Cliff’s, the tartlets—Giggle, Wiggle, and Jiggle—squeal with delight as we smuggle them through the curved wooden doors and smack their bums on the way up the stairs to our rooms. Wine is guzzled. Hashish is smoked. Shenanigans ensue.

  Two hours later and, alas, it turns out the glass slipper fits none, so it is time for the ladies to go home. Giggle and Wiggle stubbornly refuse to leave, and Jiggle, the cuter but nastier one, is running from room to room in naughty underwear (as though she were naturally anticipating a saucy encounter at the end of her shift), opening and slamming doors like she’s in one of Peter Sellers’s dopier films, screaming, “Where is that bastard?”

  Cheerful Roger is dispatched to quell the uproar and chauffeur the ladies back to wherever it is they live. Such fun were the lasses having in our company that they have to be wrestled into the car, or so I am later informed. Finally, the Zephyr sets off down the driveway, with the ladies safely inside yelling loud, vulgar sentiments out the open windows into the pastoral silence of the Hertfordshire night.

  I join the other three in Lou’s room, where there is a bottle of cognac Cliff had inadvertently left in a locked liquor cabinet and a massive plate of snacks from the fridge.

  The four of us laugh it up for an hour or so, drinking, eating, inhaling hashish glowing orange on a pin, and throwing newspapers into the fireplace for the sheer conflagration of it all.

  Occasionally we think, Where the fuck’s Roger? Then we drink, sniff, and laugh for another hour or so before—out of the blue—there comes a loud, ominous, bring-out-your-dead thump, thump on the door.

  The fun, fun, fun slams to a halt as though Daddy just took the T-Bird away. The other three turn and look at me. I say, “Relax.” I think it’s probably Hairy Magdalene from downstairs, complete with a mild reprimand and a tray of cocoa, so I unwind myself from the floor and answer the door. I’m ready for some Christian approbation served with warm milk, but instead there stands our man Roger. And not just the common-or-garden Fender Jazz Roger we all know and love, but a darker, somehow more sinister Roger.

  He’s still got his wounded, maltreated, vicious-basset-hound look, but now it comes complete with strange black streaks like commando camouflage scraped across his cheeks, a throbbing soon-to-be-black eye, assorted scratches, and a general sartorial dishevelment. His formerly fabulous tablecloth-check jacket is askew, hanging ripped off his right shoulder, and the left lapel dangles, torn from the collar, like a dead dog’s tongue—a fashionably wide, yellow-and-black check tongue with a buttonhole, but nonetheless.

  Even better, Roger has a steering wheel—the steering wheel from the fabulous nausea-green Zephyr—in his hand, down by his side like a suitcase. He looks as though things have gone slightly awry.

  I react in a welcoming, kindly manner: “Hey, pal, this ain’t a fancy dress party,” and slam the door in his face.

  The lads convulse in laughter at this brilliant witticism, rolling around on the floor until the door swings open and in walks Roger, face glowering, oblivious to the hilarity.

  Turns out the drive was a bit of an ordeal, what with the girls swearing, crying, and yelling, and the one directly behind in the backseat swatting his head with her handbag at regular intervals. Also, as geography would have it, the girls lived at various locales nowhere near each other, which meant that, while the volume decreased as each disembarked, there were still many miles to drive around unfamiliar winding lanes before he was finally rid of the lot of them.

  Roger, by now frazzled and of course teeth-grindingly resentful, put his foot down to get back to Funville as soon as possible and, screeching around the umpteenth unlit country corner, the Zephyr shot off the road through a hedge, glanced off a tree, and came to rest in a field of potatoes.

  Through the smoke and oil and steam, and the incongruous aroma of roast spuds, Roger tried to maneuver the car back onto the road, but the steering wheel felt strangely slack and unresponsive. His befuddled brain finally deduced that it was because it wasn’t attached to anything.

  So there he sat, cursing our existence and plotting dark, bass-player-type revenge until a friendly local drove up and offered assistance. His car was towed to a garage, closed, of course, and he and his steering wheel got a taxi back to Bongo’s.

  This all puts something of a dampener on our little party so, soon enough, after a few poorly received commiserations, we all head off to our snug duvets.

  Goodnight, all.

  * * *

  Next morning, at breakfast, with four throbbing skulls, one fingernail-ravaged back, and one puffy black eye between us, we are forced to listen to a lecture on morality. The peeved and pious stand arms folded, with faces wearing stern but pleading expressions, as they admonish us about the bacchanal they apparently overheard the previous evening and can recall in the most minute detail.

  We sit silently, trying not to laugh, mindful that we don’t want to get kicked out and give up our duvets and fine food just yet.

  The lead inquisitor walks up and down before us, droning on about Christian behavior being generally incompatible with girls screaming, running in hallways, and refrigerator looting, as I try to indicate to him, with meaningful sideways eye movement, that I think Lou is the main culprit.

  The guy gets the message and directs the remainder of his lecture at Lou. Afterward,
Lou, on a smarm-and-charm offensive, pledges that we have seen the error of our ways, we are truly repentant, and that the outrage will not be repeated. Amen.

  On that cheery note we are off to a full day’s rehearsal, to be interrupted, presumably, only by a delicious lunch. Roger comes into the main room having delivered the steering wheel to the garage and finding out that, along with the various dents and scrapes, the car’s track rod is kaput. From the look of him, that same diagnosis could apply to Roger.

  Sullenly, he plugs in his bass and begins to tune. His mood is dark and comes complete with a cartoon cloud hanging menacingly over his head. In his mind all the aggravation of the last few weeks—forget that, the last few months—has come to a head. He’s had it. His demeanor says eloquently: life just can’t get any worse.

  This, of course, would be the precise moment Eunan picks to walk backward in high heels, trip over a coil of wires, and crash his scrawny Irish body into a speaker cabinet. The cabinet flies backward, sending airborne the heavy Hiwatt amp that was perched on top, which flies for only a millisecond before it plummets downward and lands like an intercontinental ballistic missile in a splintery, twanging crunch on Roger’s acoustic guitar. Even to the eye of a non-musician, the guitar is obviously, completely, not to say comically, destroyed. The guitar Roger loves and has owned for years is now a V-shaped, Picasso tangle of broken wood and snapped strings.

  The rest of us freeze, unable to look at one another, desperately trying not to giggle, trying to think of the most unfunny things known to man, like Labrador retriever puppies run over by trucks or children with dreadful afflictions or Benny Hill. Anything, just so we can save the raucous laughter for later. Roger slowly turns around and surveys the scene with his one working eye. Calmly, eerily so, he takes off his bass guitar, puts it carefully down, and walks over to the crime scene.

  He sighs, bends down, and lifts the Hiwatt amp out of the middle of the mess and places it to one side. Then, shaking his head, he picks up his crushed, mangled guitar—basically two sections of exotic firewood with wires attached—holds it in his hands, and stares at it in dead, reverent silence. Nobody makes a sound. No words seem appropriate.