Idolism

by Marcus Herzig

  “Julian,” I said, “What are you doing?”

  “I’m going to tell Tholen,” he said and closed the door behind him.

  That was the last we saw of him.

  The Gospel According to Michael – 12

  Shortly after we had landed at La Guardia, Tholen made his way to the back of the aircraft to let us know what was going to happen next.

  “Okay, guys,” he said, “we have to refuel and wait for a new flight crew. It’ll take about half an hour. You guys just stay put. They will take you back to Heathrow right away.”

  “Take us back?” Ginger asked. “What about you then?”

  “We will stay here and honour our media commitments.”

  “We?”

  Tholen nodded. “Julian and I. He decided that he didn’t want to miss this opportunity.”

  “He’s going it alone? He can’t do that!” Ginger looked at me. “Can he do that?”

  I shrugged. “He’s doing it.”

  “Let me talk to him,” Ginger said to Tholen.

  “I’m afraid he doesn’t want to talk to you—to any of you—at the moment. Besides, he’s already left the plane.”

  I looked out of the window just in time to see Julian disappear in a big black limousine with tinted windows.

  “Wow,” Tummy said. “He is pissed off all right.”

  “Yeah well,” Tholen said. “I don’t blame him. You guys let him down big time. Unless you want to change your minds, that is. It’s not too late yet.”

  We looked at each other, but we had made our decision.

  “No,” I said. “We’re going home.”

  “All right then. I’ll call your parents and let them know when they can pick you up from the airport. I’ll see you guys in a couple of weeks. I suggest you sort out whatever issues you have until then. Cheerio.”

  Tholen left. A minute later I saw him get into the limousine where Julian was waiting for him, and they drove off.

  “Can you believe that?” Ginger asked. “I never would have thought he’d do that. I thought he’d come back with us, be sulky for a couple of days and then move on.”

  I shook my head. “I’m not sure if it was entirely his own idea.”

  “You think Tholen talked him into it?”

  “I think Julian didn’t need much talking into,” I said. “You have seen how eager he was to do this. What I’m saying is that going it alone sounds much more like it was Tholen’s idea rather than Julian’s. I mean, let’s face it, Tholen was never really all that interested in us anyway. All he ever cared about was Julian. We were just the entourage. He only signed Puerity as a band rather than just Julian because back then there was no way Julian would have dumped us. Back then! Sounds like it happened years ago. It’s only been a couple of weeks. Anyway, Tholen doesn’t need us. Perhaps if we were a proper band and we actually owned the rights to our music, he wouldn’t let us go so easily. But since all our songs are just copyright-free, rearranged classical pieces we are, from Tholen’s point of view, more or less useless. Nothing can stop him from hiring a bunch of musicians to replace us and do the exact same work that we used to do, and the lyrics are all Julian’s anyway. So yeah, for Tholen, working with Julian as a solo artist is much more attractive than working with Puerity as a band, because from his perspective we don’t contribute anything vital. We only make his life more difficult, because we are more likely to question his plans than Julian is. Julian is a stage whore to the extent that he either doesn’t see how Tholen is using him, or he simply doesn’t care. Julian just wants to be out there and sing and preach. He probably even thinks he is using Tholen, not the other way around.”

  “So is this the end, then?” Tummy asked. “The end of us as a band?”

  “To be fair,” Ginger said, “Tholen did ask us if we had changed our minds. We still could have gone along with it. And he said we’ll talk in a couple of weeks when they’re back home. I don’t think he’s completely given up on us yet.”

  “He only asked us because he knew we’d say no. And in a couple of weeks, when Julian will have been a flaming success in America all on his own, he’ll be able to say, ‘Look, guys, you have seen that I don’t need you at all. I’ll still be happy to work with you, with Puerity as a group, but it has to be completely on my terms.’ We’ll have no leverage at all. All we can do is become his puppets and do whatever he tells us to do. We can either take it or leave it.”

  “So this is it then,” Tummy said. “This is the end. We have a great future behind us.”

  “I understand what you’re saying, Michael,” Ginger said, “but I don’t think this is something we should be talking about right now. Let’s just do what we said we were going to do. Go home. Take a break. Sort things out for ourselves. Everything will fall into place eventually.”

  “Yeah,” I said although I wasn’t convinced.

  Half an hour later a new flight crew arrived on board. They brought us sandwiches and fizzy drinks and a family size bag of crisps for Tummy.

  “Rock’n’roll!”

  The pilot came to us and introduced himself. He told us that the flight back to London would take about hour less than the flight into New York because of the jet stream. That’s when I first started missing Julian. He would have told us all about the Earth’s rotation and gravity and solar radiation, and how they all contributed to the jet stream.

  We didn’t talk much on the flight back home. I guess we were all preoccupied with trying to come to terms with what had happened. I knew I was, and I found it particularly difficult. The moment we took off from La Guardia and headed back home, I felt a strange sensation, and it wasn’t the acceleration of the airplane or the pressure on my ears. I suddenly realized that I couldn’t remember when I had last been separated from Julian for more than just a few hours. Ever since I had first met him in nursery school, he had always been there, every single day. Even the two or three times when I had gone on vacation with my dad, the two weeks at the Costa del Sol, the weekend in Brighton, the trip to France, we had taken Julian with us because he was my best friend, and his mum, apart from her mental problems, only had a minimum wage cleaning job and couldn’t afford to take him anywhere. And now Julian was going to tour the United States for at least two or three weeks, and I was going home without him. It was as if an invisible umbilical cord that had tied us together for almost our entire lives had been cut; or rather: torn.

  I was veering between hating Julian and feeling sorry for myself. How could he let this happen? How could he be so stubborn, so narcissistic? How could he choose a life of shallow fame over his friends, the only friends he had? It occurred to me that Julian was right. I was jealous. I hated that I had to share him with the rest of the world. I hated that the outside world was infringing on our friendship. All those hundreds of thousands of people who adored Julian and who were glued to his lips, they didn’t deserve him. They didn’t even know him, at least not the way I did. They didn’t know that their great big idol had wetted his bed until he was nine years old. They didn’t know that deep down inside the great, charismatic, eloquent Julian Monk who seemed to know everything, who seemed to have a solution to every problem, who didn’t shy back from confronting the leaders of the land, the leaders of the world even, was full of insecurities and self-doubt. Not even Ginger and Tummy knew that. I was the only person in the world that Julian frequently shared his darkest secrets with, his fears and his doubts, his feelings of inferiority and inadequacy, his feeling of being a lost soul wandering aimlessly through a starless night waiting for a dawn that never seemed to come. Nobody knew these things about Julian, not even his mother who was suffering from depression and anxiety herself. He never would have bothered her, worried her, with his own problems. I knew that because he had told me. He had told me everything. Except in the last couple of weeks, ever since we had made national and international headline news, he hadn’t told me much at all anymore. And it wasn’t just because we simply didn’t have the time and ha
rdly ever got to spend time alone anymore. It was almost as if he had put me on hold to give the rest of the world the chance to catch up.

  Yes, he was right. I was jealous. I hated that I had to share my best friend with a million strangers, and the longer I thought about it, the clearer it became to me that I had every reason to be jealous. Jealousy is the fear of losing someone to somebody else, and wasn’t that exactly what had just happened? I had lost Julian to a life of superficial fame and hordes of silly little girls who kept singing our songs without even understanding what they were singing and who kept wearing their school uniforms on weekends because that’s what Julian did. I hated them. I hated them all. I hated Julian and I hated the world. I was sulking like a five-year-old who had lost a game of Snakes and Ladders, and in a sudden impulse of passive-aggressive vengefulness I logged into our PayPal account, the one where all the payments from sales we generated with music downloads from our website still kept pouring in. We had a balance of 251,329.74 pounds, and without even taking the time to think about it I transferred 50,000 pounds each into the private accounts of Julian, Ginger, Tummy, and myself.

  Two minutes later Ginger looked at me with eyes as big as saucers and held up her mobile. “Oi, sulky boy,” she said. “What’s this?”

  “What?” I asked, pretending not to know what she was talking about.

  “You just sent me 50,000 quid.”

  “Oh, that. That’s your share of our earnings so far. Don’t spend it all at once, and remember to pay your taxes.”

  Tummy immediately checked his own account. “Blimey,” he said when he saw the money.

  Ginger kept staring at me, but she didn’t say anything or ask any more questions. She knew. It was all too obvious. She had called me ‘sulky boy’. She knew that the money was a signal, the clumsy way of a pathetic, helpless kid to say, ‘Here, take your bloody money, be happy with it and leave me alone!’ She also knew that this signal was aimed at Julian, not at her or Tummy. Tummy didn’t say anything either. He just sat there slouched in his seat looking miserable, probably thinking that this was the end of Puerity after all.

  I didn’t even care anymore. I was too busy pitying myself.

  The Gospel According to Tummy – 14

  It wasn’t until after take-off from Paris that Tholen told us what we’d already figured out by ourselves. He was taking us to America where he had booked us on the Today Show and the Tonight Show and about a dozen other shows. Because apparently there was no better way to get us out of the UK media spotlight than putting us in the U.S. media spotlight, because in the UK nobody ever pays any attention to what happens in the U.S. or something. It was probably the stupidest idea he’d ever had. And we didn’t like it.

  Ginger didn’t like it because she felt like she was being kidnapped and held hostage. She said that if Tholen had asked her, ‘Would you like to go to America and appear on some of the biggest TV shows in the world?’ she probably would have said yes. But being just put on a plane and taken there without her consent was kidnapping and a violation of her human rights, and it was objectifying women, and she demanded to talk to her dad right away who was a lawyer and would sue the crap out of Tholen’s arse. Her words, not mine.

  Michael didn’t like the idea either. But unlike Ginger he wouldn’t even have liked it if Tholen had asked him pretty pretty please with a cherry on top. He thought that the former land of the free had lost all its credibility in the fight against terror by de facto stripping not only its citizens but every person on Earth off their civil liberties, and that the U.S. had turned into the kingdom of evil. As a future revolutionary there was no way that Michael would give the enemy his fingerprints, as was the required procedure upon entering the kingdom of evil, and he thought he reserved the right to one day overthrow all imperialist governments, starting with the government of the United States, and until then he would like to keep a low profile for tactical reasons, thank you very much.

  He also thought I didn’t know these things, but I did.

  I didn’t like the idea either, albeit for less rational reasons. You can accuse me of thinking with me dick instead of me brain, but how many more times do I have to say it? I was a 17-year-old who was in a secret sexual relationship with one of the hottest chicks on the planet, and I wasn’t going to give that up or even just put it on hold for the two or three weeks our trip around the U.S. would have taken. Two or three weeks in the real world were an eternity in the life of a teenager. Momoko was expecting me in London, I was on me way to New York, and I had no idea when we’d be able to see each other again. Maybe in three weeks when we got back home. Maybe in three days if she decided to follow us to America. Either way, it was more of a wait than I was prepared to handle. I wanted to go back home now.

  And Julian? Oh well, Julian. He loved the idea. For him the choice was to go back home and hide from the cameras, as Tholen would have told him to do, or go to America and get in front of every camera he could find. It wasn’t much of a contest between the two. Julian had been on an adrenaline high for weeks now, and he didn’t want it to end. He’d become a junkie, and he was ready to kill in order to get what he needed. He was ready to kill Puerity, but not by himself. Oh no, Julian was a smart kid, so he let us kill it for him. We were all pretty pissed off at him, because he didn’t even seem to want to listen to our opinions, our reasons why we didn’t want to go to America. It had never been easy for him to empathise with other people, but until now he had at least always tried. But now he wasn’t even trying anymore. He was completely lost in his own world, and there was no way for us to get through to him. And that’s when we gave up on him. Or rather, Michael and Ginger gave up on him, and I just went with the majority opinion as always. I don’t want to make any excuses for meself. Of course I could have tried harder to convince the other two to stay the course. Julian would have deserved it. He always stood up for me, and the least I could have done was to stand up for him when two of his friends suddenly turned their back on him. But there was nothing I could say or do that would have changed Michael’s or Ginger’s mind, so what was the point of joining Julian for his grand tour of America? I was just the bloody bassist. In the past few weeks it had become evident that the media didn’t give a shit about Puerity. Puerity didn’t boost TV ratings, Julian did. The only reason Ginger, Michael, and I were on TV was because we were part of the package. In every box of assorted chocolates there are pieces that everybody likes and there are pieces that nobody likes. Ginger, Michael, and I were the coffee mocha pralines in Puerity. Nobody wanted us, at least nobody in the media. The fandom was a different story of course. Each of us had their own set of fans, and that was fine. But in America we weren’t going to play for fans. We were going to play for the media, and since all the media only cared about Julian, there really wasn’t any point in us being there.

  Besides, there was one media person who actually did care about me, but she was back home in the UK, and I wanted to be with her. And that’s why I went home back with Ginger and Michael. We didn’t even go through immigrations when we arrived at La Guardia, so technically we never even set foot on American soil. Tholen just gave us a new flight crew and a couple of sandwiches and off we went.

  The flight back to Heathrow was very different from the flight to JFK. Nobody talked. We were all busy thinking about the impact the decision we had made would have, and I can only speak for meself here, but I think we were slowly coming to terms with the fact that the life we had grown used to in the last couple of weeks was over and would never be the same again. I was wondering whether we’d really done the right thing, and by the time we arrived at Heathrow I was pretty sure that we hadn’t. I thought I was going back to be with Momoko, but it wasn’t Momoko who was picking me up at the airport. It was me mum. And she was pretty pissed off. I hadn’t seen her in two or three weeks, and even though she may not have been the best mum in the world, she was still me mum. I smiled and wanted to hug her when I saw her standing there, it was just a natu
ral reflex. But me mum didn’t seem to have a similar reflex. She didn’t smile when she saw me. She didn’t hug me or say hello or ask me how I’d been.

  “Get in the bloody car!”

  That’s all she said.

  The ride home from the airport took about 40 minutes, and they were the longest 40 minutes of me life. Mum still didn’t talk to me, and she didn’t even turn on the radio. It was a deadly silence interrupted only by her frequent cursing at other drivers.

  “So how’s dad?” I asked her at one point.

  “You’ve ruined his career, how do you think he is?” was her reply, filled with the usual invocation of guilt that me mum’s religion—and, in fact, her whole life—was based on. I didn’t bother to pursue this conversation any further. Nothing had changed, and nothing ever would.

  Except for the fact that I didn’t really care anymore.

  I had always, me whole life, tried to be a good boy. I had always tried to please me mum. But nothing I had ever done had been quite good enough for her, and nothing ever would. I was only 17, but maybe it was finally time to grow up and live me own life, independent of me family. I wanted to call Momoko, but if I took out me mobile now, I’d probably have it taken away, so I decided to wait until I was back home in me room. It was a smart decision. It was a grown up decision. It made me feel proud and chuffed, because at that moment I knew that I would not let meself be bullied by me own family any longer. Fuck them, I thought. Fuck them all. They didn’t want me, and I didn’t need them. So for the rest of the ride I just sat there in the back of the car, smiling because I had finally grown up, and it felt great.

  The Gospel According to Michael – 13

  It was late in the evening when we arrived back at Heathrow. There was no limousine to pick us up, so we had to walk a hundred metres across the tarmac to the terminal.