Idolism

by Marcus Herzig

  I looked at him as he was lying there next to me on a naked mattress on the floor of an Italian jail cell, sleeping peacefully with the shadow of a smug smile on his face, full and self-satisfied like a baby, and suddenly I felt scared, because the longer I looked at him, the less I seemed to recognize him anymore. What had happened to him? What had happened to the silly little boy who couldn’t walk past Buckingham Palace without stopping to watch the Changing of the Guards? I didn’t know anyone who was as fascinated with rituals and pompous ceremonies as Julian was, yet here we were in Rome, having the once in a lifetime chance to witness the dramatic announcement of a new Pope, but in an act of vain self-aggrandizement and conceited self-adulation he got distracted by his own narcissistic self and turned his back because there was a camera pointed at him. Was he so much in love with himself, or was he just in love with the fact that people were in love with him? And did it even make a difference?

  I kept staring at Julian sleeping, smiling, and possibly even dreaming of himself, and I was trying to determine the object of my anger. Was it really Julian whom I was angry at, or was I angry at myself because I couldn’t bring myself to talk with him directly about my doubts and my discomfort? For a moment I was tempted to wake him up and to force him right then and there to look me in the eyes and tell me what the hell he thought he was doing. I wanted to grab him by the shoulders, shake him, scream and shout at him and ask him what the hell was going on behind that pretty face, but I didn’t do it. I couldn’t do it. I was scared of his reaction. I was scared that he would be questioning my loyalty and that he would accuse me of not understanding him. It was my fear of facing that accusation, the accusation that I did suddenly no longer understand my best friend, that left me paralyzed and sleepless that night, not because it was a groundless accusation, but because I was afraid it might be true.

  The Gospel According to Tummy – 12

  That night in jail changed a lot of things, for all of us. I mean, I can only speak for meself, but it was obvious that we were all doing quite a bit of serious thinking. None of us got more than two or three hours of sleep. The rest of the time we were just sitting or standing or walking up and down our cell, thinking. I mean, I suppose the others were thinking too. I know I was. It may surprise people, but even when I’m not doing anything, my brain is always thinking, although I have to admit that most of my thinking is about simple things, like food or sex.

  Oh well, sex. I had spent the night before in bed with the most beautiful woman in the world. And now, barely 24 hours later, I was in jail for crashing the Pope’s welcome party. How much more Rock’n’roll can you get? It was pretty awesome. But it was also pretty scary, and the longer I thought about it, the more scary it got. I had disrupted the Pope’s inauguration live on the Internet, and we’d probably made the evening news as well. Again. Me mum would kill me for insulting her idol. Me dad would kill me too, for continuing to destroy his career as a politician one day at a time. And once they were all done killing me, I’d surely end up in hell.

  I had no idea how long they’d keep us in that jail cell in Rome, but I was pretty sure that I’d have to do a lot more time in solitary confinement in me bedroom when I got home. Me dad was probably already putting iron bars in front of me window. And by the time I got out of me home jail, Momoko would probably already be married and have a bunch of beautiful little babies, and I’d spend the rest of me life on the dole.

  Rock’n’roll.

  We didn’t talk much that night. I mean, what was there to talk about? We committed a minor offence and they locked us up because they couldn’t reach our parents. Things would look different in the morning, and until then nothing any of us could have said would have made our immediate situation any different, so we all kept to ourselves and to our own thoughts.

  Julian, as always, seemed least affected by the whole situation. He spent most of the time jotting down notes in that little notebook he kept carrying around everywhere he went. He was probably turning the events of the day into ideas for new song lyrics. Come to think of it, Julian probably enjoyed spending a night in jail—despite the fact that he didn’t get that single room that he usually insisted on—because it was a new experience for him. Well, being in jail was a new experience for all of us, but Julian was the one most likely to embrace the situation despite its inconvenience and to turn it into something positive and creative. It’s not that Julian enjoyed new situations per se. In fact, he once told us that new and unexpected experiences terrified him. However, he had this amazing talent of transforming his fear into creative energy. Judging from the speed of his scribbling he’d probably have the lyrics for a whole new album done by the end of the night. The question was if we’d ever get to record it.

  The Gospel According to Michael – 11

  In the morning at ridiculous o’clock our cell door opened, and a policeman told us to get up. As we shuffled out of our cell, Ginger and another policeman were already waiting for us in the hallway. Ginger looked grumpy and tired. Well, she didn’t just look it.

  “How are you?” I asked her.

  “What do you think?” she hissed without even looking at me. She was obviously pissed off that she’d had to spend the night all by herself in a jail cell in a foreign country whereas we’d had at least each other to keep us company. Well, it wasn’t our fault that she was a girl, and that Italian procedural rules didn’t provide for cohabitation of male and female detainees.

  “Sorry I asked,” I said.

  Ginger sighed. “I’m just tired, that’s all.”

  “Did you get any sleep at all?”

  “A couple of hours, on and off. You?”

  I shook my head. “Not much. Julian slept like a baby, though.”

  “I hope my dad is here,” Ginger said. “I can’t wait to get home.”

  We were led to the front of the police station where our saviour was standing at the counter, casually chewing gum and signing our release papers.

  “What the hell?” Ginger said. “Where’s my dad?”

  “Morning, guys,” Peter Tholen said without looking up from his paperwork. Instead, he pointed at a row of chairs standing against the wall beneath a message board full of mug shots of Italy’s most wanted criminals. “Have a seat while I finish this.”

  “Where’s my dad?” Ginger asked again, but she didn’t get a reply.

  We sat down and waited. One after another we were called to the counter to receive and sign for the personal items that had been confiscated, our bags and rucksacks, our instruments, our wallets, our mobiles, and my laptop computer. As soon as I had my mobile back in my hands, I immediately switched it on. They could lock me up and deprive me of my freedom to walk around all they wanted, but taking away my gadgets, my ability to communicate with the outside world, was the worst form of torture I could imagine. When I switched my mobile back on, I was immediately overwhelmed by a deluge of emails, text messages, and notifications. I didn’t even know where to start. It took me a couple of minutes to realize what had happened over night while we had been cut off from the rest of the world.

  The White Smoke music video that I had uploaded before the police had taken my phone away had garnered over 800,000 views on YouTube in the first twelve hours, and we had almost half a million new subscribers to our channel. People had been—and still were—bombarding us with messages of support on Twitter where we were currently gaining new followers at a rate of roughly 50 per minute. On top of that, people had been downloading our songs from Amazon, iTunes, and directly from our website. In the twelve hours that we had spent behind bars we had earned over 70,000 pounds! Before taxes. Talk about making money in your sleep. But that’s not all. The late edition of Inside Momoko had set a new ratings record for T-Vox, and her report with exclusive footage of our arrest had been syndicated by every major news programme in Europe. Puerity were headline news on almost every national newspaper back home, outshining even Robert Maddock’s election for Pope, and most of them ran a pi
cture that was a screenshot of the White Smoke video on our YouTube channel, frozen at the exact moment when Mario and Luigi were pouncing on Julian. The video view count in that screenshot read 666, although we later found out that that had been photoshopped. Nice touch, though.

  After finishing his police paperwork, Tholen took us outside where a limousine was waiting for us. Team Momoko was waiting for us, too. Momoko was reporting live as we left the police station and got into our limousine. Tholen closed the car doors behind us, then he walked up to Momoko, put his hand on her arse, kissed her on the cheek and whispered something in her ear. Being inside the car, we obviously couldn’t hear directly what he said to her, but we were all huddled around my mobile and watched the T-Vox live stream, so we did hear it after all.

  “Thanks for the heads up.”

  We later learned that right after our arrest Momoko had called Tholen, who in turn had called all our parents even before the Italian police had, and told them what had happened, and that he was coming down to Rome to take care of the situation. Momoko giggled like a giddy little schoolgirl when he kissed her on the cheek. Then, as Tholen got into the limousine with us and we drove off, she continued her live report, telling her millions of viewers back home—and us—that we were now on our way to the airport and would be expected back in London in a few hours.

  None of us spoke a single word all the way to the airport. We were all tired and just happy to be finally heading home, and we all assumed that Tholen was mighty mad at us as he sat there, staring out of the window through his pimp sunglasses. When we reached the airport, the car drove straight onto the tarmac and stopped right next to Tholen’s private jet with Thorex written in pompous red letters on the side. We got out of the car and onto the plane. Fifteen minutes later we were up in the air, flying north. There were two newspapers on board, The Times and The Sun. Both had that infamous YouTube screenshot on the front page. The Sun had titled Habemus Monk! in four-inch lettering. The Times’ headline read Puerity Perplex Pope.

  “Oh look,” Ginger said laconically, “we’re famous.”

  “You have no idea,” I said, and I finally told the others all about what had happened over night on our website, YouTube, Twitter, and not least of all PayPal. In fact, during our short ride from the police station to the airport alone we had earned another 500 quid.

  “Rock’n’roll!” Tummy said.

  Ginger nodded. “That is quite impressive.”

  “At this rate we should be millionaires by the end of the week,” I said, but none of us seemed to grasp the scope of that just yet.

  We spent the next 90 minutes catching up with what the world had been thinking and saying about us ever since our arrest the night before. It was quite an ambivalent picture. Most of the mainstream media were outraged at the audacious disrespect with which we had ‘wilfully disrupted’ a religious ceremony that had been watched by over a billion people worldwide, although neither the 300,000 people who had been in St Peter’s Square nor the hundreds of millions who had been watching the event live on their TVs had actually noticed much of a disruption until they watched the various news programs later that night. It was a perfect example of how the mainstream mass media, led by MMC print and broadcasting outlets all over the world, distorted facts and deceived the public by manufacturing an alternate reality that had nothing to do with what had actually happened.

  And I was getting sick and tired of it.

  The Gospel According to Tummy – 13

  On the way from the city to the airport Tholen hadn’t spoken a single word. But as soon as we were airborne he started giving us that huge lecture on respect and responsibility, on music and the media, on politics and patriotism and parents, and on hard work and having fun and holy matrimony, and it was the most boring speech I’d ever heard in me entire life. It also was the longest monologue I’d ever heard. It lasted all the way from Rome to our destination, which wasn’t London because it turned out we had just been kidnapped. We didn’t even realize it until shortly before landing when we looked out the window, and where we expected to see Big Ben there was the Eiffel Tower.

  “What the hell are we doing in Paris?” Ginger asked.

  “Refuel,” Tholen said before the phone call he was making went through.

  “Piers! How are you? … That’s great … Yes, we’re on our way … Yes, all of them … Paris. We just flew in from Rome and we need to refuel … Yes … Yes, tomorrow night ... Yes, the whole show ... Yes, it’s gonna be great ... Yes. You too, Piersy. Looking forward to seeing you ... Bye.”

  Ginger looked at Tholen. “Who was that?”

  “That was Piers”, Tholen said.

  “Piers who?” Ginger kept asking, but Tholen had already made another call.

  “Oprah, darling, how are you?”

  Ginger fell back into her seat. “Oh my fucking god.”

  As we were landing in Paris, I sent Momoko a text message to let her know that I’d be back home soon. I tried calling her, but her phone was turned off, which probably meant that she was on a plane herself on her way back to London, so I just told her to call me as soon as she could. It turned out that it would take a whole lot longer than I expected, because this morning the surprises kept coming at a rate of one every five minutes or so.

  Ginger kept asking Tholen where we were going, but she didn’t get through to him because he was on the phone. Like, all the time.

  In hindsight it’s easy to see that these phone calls were kind of suspicious, as he kept talking to people he addressed as Jay, Dave, Piers, Anderson, and Oprah. All this time he was making plans about our future engagements; plans that we knew nothing about. It wasn’t until after we had taken off from Paris that he finally told us.

  “So when will be in London?” Ginger asked him. “I want to call my dad and tell him to pick me up from the airport.”

  “We’re not going to London,” Tholen said without looking up from his mobile.

  We all looked at each other, except Julian who kept frantically scribbling down new song lyrics the way he had done all the way from Rome to Paris.

  “What are you talking about?” Ginger’s voice became slightly aggravated. “Where are we going?”

  “The States.”

  “America? What the hell are you taking us to America for? We want to go home! This is kidnapping! You can’t take us to America against our will! You better tell the pilot to turn this bloody plane around and take us to London right now or I’ll call my dad and tell him to sue the shit out of your fat ass, mister!”

  “Shut up, will you?” Tholen looked at her without a smile, without any visible sign of empathy or emotion. “Your dad knows where you are and he knows where you’re going. All your parents do. So just calm down and relax, okay? Everything is going to be fine.”

  “You told our parents that you’re taking us to America?” I asked. “When were you going to tell us?”

  “Look,” he said and put his phone on the little table in front of him. “Do you guys have any idea what you’ve done in the last few days? Do you have any idea what kind of mess you have created? The whole world is in turmoil because of you. Not just the UK, not just Europe, the whole bloody world! The bloody Prime Minister calls me three times a day to shout at me and to tell me to shut you down. Stock markets all over Europe are plummeting because of the political and diplomatic mess you’ve made. Bankers are calling for your arrest. Bishops are praying for your demise. The Queen is not amused, and, quite frankly, neither am I, because I have to deal with the fallout of all this shit. Trust me, the last place in the world you want to be right now is England, because the moment you touch down at Heathrow, the media will tear you apart and feed you to the dogs. Well, they’re already tearing you apart, but if you descended into that hell hole that you created for yourself, you’d be in real physical danger. I’ve talked to all your parents and we agreed that it would be best to stay overseas for a while.”

  “That’s right,” Michael said with a wr
y smile. “Let’s ruin one country at a time.”

  Tholen gave him a stern look. “That’s not funny, Michael.”

  Michael shrugged. “Wasn’t meant to be.”

  “You are a bloody public relations nightmare, and I just need you to shut up, grow up, and let me do my fucking job and handle this! Okay? Okay!”

  “Rock’n’roll!” I said, and Tholen shot me an angry look.

  “So what’s the big plan?” Ginger asked. “Take us on a two week vacation to Disneyland and wait until the media back home have lost interest?”