|
I farted and flung back the warm cocoon of bedding. My watch showed that it was as good as midday; I put the 'phone back on the hook, padded across the nylon shag-pile to the bathroom, "sanitised for my comfort and protection," and de-sanitised it. While I rinsed the lenses of my glasses under the warm tap, the face in the mirror returned a wince that might have begun as a smile.
Outside the sky was as dim and unreal as a Sun editorial. Fine rain blew against the pane and down in the streets, car lights were sucked into the black sheen.
The weather and lack of sleep combined to help me start the day feeling sour and critical and glum. I checked the tour itinerary: "NO SHOW TODAY: DEP 13.45PM: DRIVE TO DENVER: 850 MILES."
Downstairs at least half of our "party" was in the coffee-shop.
A few businessmen were dotted about: as neat as a cemetery lawn with creases as straight as a column of printed zeroes. From our tables floated a series of low moans and fragments of conversation, punctuated now and then by the clatter of cutlery dropped from lifeless fingers.
"... yeah, I think I caught it off that one in Minneapolis, you know..."
"Aw, not her! You'd screw a snake if I held its head down for you."
I still felt tired. After getting back to the hotel after last night's gig, I spent a couple of hours in the bar babbling into the mike of someone's cassette recorder, mainly with the intention of impressing his girlfriend. (No doubt the contents of this tape would be regurgitated for my embarrassment at some suitably piquant moment.) Most of the night I'd laid in bed reading, being kept awake by the yowls and yelps and whinnies from the room next door, until the noise had eventually died away along with the supplies of booze and nonsense powder. 1 didn't want to go and join them: the sound of people determined to Have a Good Time is both a melancholy and a savage sound.
As I left the hotel I walked into the dampness; the air was soft and humid, almost drugged. The warm rain splashed against my face. Skirting a building site was a long, neat hoarding that hadn't yet been up long enough to be aerosoled with tribal claims. Somehow, today, the buildings had lost their power to oppress; like the hoarding, they too might be gigantic sheets of board propped from behind like a Dodge City movie set. I walked further leaving the surge of the city faint behind me, past shops selling cheap furniture, cheap luggage and cheap jewellery; I thought about stuffing my cash down inside my sock. Here and there I passed empty lots between buildings where weeds grew up through chunks of old foundation concrete and scraps of rusting metal sheets and wire. A radio blared distorted dance music from a basement somewhere.
Having no idea where I was, or how to get back to the hotel, I hailed a cab. Without any kind of preamble the driver craned his head to the right and spoke out of the corner of his mouth.
"I once drove Frank Sinatra." He waited for me to be suitably impressed.
I managed an 'Mmm.'
"Yeah, really! But not in this cab of course," he continued. "See, I useta work for the limo company... Well, I only drove him round for one morning though." He awaited my response.
"Mmm."
"Yea. Would you believe it! He had me replaced for sneezing in the goddam car."
"Why's that," I said, "because he was a hypochondriac?"
"Nah... because he was a dick-head."
As we were pulling up in front of the hotel the driver intimated something further.
"I remember," he said, "when the Terminal Hotel useta have four attendants in white jacketsta to work the elevators. The place was so immaculate you coulda eaten your dinner off the floor in the lobby."
"That's funny," I thought. Only last night the drummer had left his dinner on the floor in the lobby. I recall it now, it lay there like a Seurat painting, a pointillistic pattern of puke. This was but one flourish in a bender of epic proportions. Last week he had advised himself to have no more than three drinks a day. Yesterday the three drinks he'd limited himself to were Pernod, vodka and bourbon. An earlier episode of this adventure in alcohol found him with the romantic notion of sleeping out in the grounds of the hotel, with only the stars as a blanket and his imagination as a mattress. The next morning, the automatic lawn sprinklers had been on a full five minutes before he'd come round. The memory of his appearance that morning... What was it the cab driver was saying about four men in white coats?
Nobody else was in the lobby. I looked at my watch and it was — of course! — Happy Hour. I went to the bar. Well, if this was Happy Hour... I was reminded of the bad joke about the pub on the moon — it went out of business — no atmosphere. This was only the twenty-seventh bar I'd seen on this tour that had been done out to look like a "Captain's Cabin" — the only bit of authenticity being a load of old rope; still it rang the changes with "Don Juan's Cantina" and "Squitters." The singer sat engrossed between his headphones while reading a biography — Miles Davis in each ear and Jerry Lee Lewis in each eyeball, or was it the other way round? — his gin and tonic placed next to a bottle of Perrier water. The drummer already as well-oiled as a sheik, had, as a bet with the keyboard player, lined up ready to drink along the bar, as many differently-coloured drinks as they could think of: blue curacao, green chartreuse, a tequila sunset crimson with grenadine, another drink yellow with Pernod, vodka green with lime, then a strawberry daquiri — an international exotica of excess.
At the far end of the bar a middle-aged couple watched uneasily. She was two stone underweight and wore so much make-up that it probably had to be hauled to her face by block and tackle; there was a bright red stripe behind which extensive bridgework had yet to be paid for, but which served to tell her where to dispatch her vodkatini and processed Olive. He was a visual cacophony of checks with a tie as wide as tent flap. They were the type of American, who thought that "natural" meant a flavour of yogurt. It was at about the halfway point in the deadly line of cocktails that the drummer spotted them and homed in. The drummer wore a silver silk jacket that was stained and wrinkled beyond belief by spilt drinks and adventures past. He reminded me of Lord Nelson in Trafalgar Square: long, thin and covered in shit — though according to him he wasn't that tall, and that in fact compared to the size of his genitals he was quite short. His complexion had taken on a kind of reptilian glaze and the couple were cringing behind false smiles, their heads turned to one side to avoid the full withering blast of his drink charged breath. The mood was beginning to get distinctly darker. The man was being harangued into an arm-wrestling contest...
"Hansh acrossh the water!" said the drummer. The man muttered something about intelligence.
"Intelligensh!" retorted the drummer. "Intelligensh ish what would get you out of the deshert alive if your car broke down." Then suddenly he was seized by the impulse to demonstrate to them the famous British sense of humour. He removed the lower half of the man's, admittedly revolting tie, with two or three inept slashes of his Swiss Army penknife — cutting his own fingers in the process and bleeding on to the man's shirt. An argument broke out. The drummer did the proper thing and offered to make good the damage by drinking champagne from the woman's shoe which he had by now removed. The nearest beer was commandeered and most of it had gone over his jacket before he realised that the shoe he was pouring it into was open-toed. It was only after several $20 bills had been handed over from the tour manager's float that the couple were appeased.
In the lobby the singer was with a person pretending not to be a journalist.
"What do you do to get away from your music?" he asked.
"Don't want to get away from it," the singer replied curtly.
Our manager appeared and without even pausing at the sign in his mind that read "Last Exit Before Rant," launched into the writer. The manager who was of the build tactfully called "stocky," had both of his fists raised up in front of his chest as he used knuckles to poke the offending scribe. He shuffled urgently from foot to foot dissipating vast amounts of energy in a volatile flood of insults, like a corgi attempting to walk on its hind legs. The writer fled threatening legal redress. I steeled myself, and walked over; the manager grabbed me by the lapels and told Me that he didn't like my shoes. Thank goodness he was having a mellow day. Normally he would have grabbed both lapels and stamped on my feet.
"What did that bloke want then?" I said.
The manager replied as dictating a telegram: "Scurrilous bastard. Told him to piss off. All the same. Only want their preconceptions confirmed. Don't want to actually think. Get on the bus..." His words trailed away with him as he stalked over to the reception desk where he'd left the tour manager sorting out a tricky little matter to do with what had happened at four this morning when the keyboard player had returned from his nocturnal meanderings. The latter had turned the key that opened the motorised gates of the hotel car park, and as they slid back, he drove the rented Cadillac into the parking lot. Once inside he saw that every space had been taken and began to reverse out. At that precise moment the gates began to close and he was was halfway back out when the gates banged shut against the side of the car denting it just enough for it to need two new doors. The electric motor that worked the gates burnt out and the gates jammed. The car was freed some hours later.
This was the beginning of an 850-mile bus ride. It was six o'clock already; we probably wouldn't reach Colorado until at least four tomorrow morning. Legally, driving at the 55 mph speed limit, it would have taken 17 or 18 hours, with stops, but the driver had instructions to keep his foot down with the understanding that all necessary fines and bribes would be taken care of. It was the only practical way for us to travel, bearing in mind that a loaded Silver Eagle bus travelling at 90 mph takes nearly a mile to come to a complete halt.
The bus itself was like a tasteless version of the Royal Train, packed with three sets of video and stereo equipment, an electric piano, bunks, fridge, microwave, and detailed with the kind of fussy, mock-Spanish embellishments that pass for elegance in this neck of the woods. There were four bunks in the back section: upper left and right, and lower left and right. The lower ones were simply sofas; the upper two folded down from the roof on large hinges and were held in place with steel retaining pins. These pins were, of course, always getting mislaid or lost and so the upper bunks would sway and bang around. The room was carpeted in phoney Eastern rugs with fringes and tassles so that it both looked and sounded like the proverbial knocking-shop. After a long trip, or a long night, it would be full of slumbering, sweating people, sprawled supine in varying degrees of catatonia. For this reason the back had been christened "Jonestown."
Opposite me the singer looked sourly over the top of his glasses, a horrible, grating rattle coming from the earphones he was wearing — not loud, just quiet enough to be really irritating. His forehead was leaking sweat which ran into two fierce, vertical creases in between his eyebrows. I imagined I could still see in him the precocious and intelligent child who would always kick around an idea, rather than a football, and who got easily annoyed at being given new games that were quickly learnt and had to be played again and again. Now he was writing in a black notebook, which he did almost continually. Whether he was exorcising thoughts, or whether thoughts were exercising themselves at his expense was impossible to tell: I say that because I'd always had great difficulty in telling the difference between the brain working and the mind wandering. Either way, it's damn near impossible to stop.
The keyboard player was wearing a T-shirt which bore the motto: "Kill 'em all and let God sort it out". He did things like this only of course to wind people up. If you took the bait his face would turn into the very picture of gratification and he would find another tack. These changes of mood were often so quick and so dramatic that he'd been given, not one, but several nicknames. Reginald Maudlin and Lionel Blair were just two.
Just before we were about to hit the open road, we pulled over into a huge parking area and filed out towards a supermarket the size of a small town. A pick-up truck drove in a large arc across the parking lot and came to a halt in front of the entrance. A bumper sticker on the front end read simply: "A Smith & Wesson beats 4 Aces" — this wasn't "Save the Whale" country! Two cowboys got out; when they saw us they looked as if they wished we were all holding a hand of four aces. It made you feel about as welcome as a fart in a two-man submarine. Still, of all the useless laws we live under, one of the first we can give up is the one that says that we should worry over what people's opinion of us is. I wandered the supermarket aisles lost in a labyrinth of oversize fruit, frozen lasagne and generic-label dog food, following a
| 
