“I can’t go home yet, man.”
I was going along to say goodbye, but the tube journey was so fucking long that we ended up talking about something other than which crappy magazine he was going to buy from the bookstall.
“There’s nothing here for you. Go home, get a band together.”
“I got one here.”
“Where?”
“You know. The guys.”
“You think of them as a band? Those losers and fucking perverts we met in Starbucks?”
“I been in a band with losers and perverts before.”
“Weren’t ever no perverts in my band.”
“What about Dollar Bill?”
Dollar Bill was our first bass-player. He was older than the rest of us, and we’d had to unload him after an incident with the high school janitor’s son.
“At least Dollar Bill could fucking play. What can your buddies do?”
“It’s not that kind of band.”
“It’s no kind of band. So, what, this is for ever? You got to hang out with those guys until they die?”
“No, man. Just until everyone’s OK.”
“Until everyone’s OK? That girl is deranged. The guy can never hold his head up in public again. And the old woman has a kid who can hardly fucking breathe. So when are they gonna be OK? You’d be better off hoping they all get worse. Then they can jump off the fucking building, and you can come home. That’s the only happy ending for you.”
“What about you?”
“What the fuck’s any of this got to do with me?”
“What’s your happy ending going to be?”
“What are you talking about?”
“I want to know what kind of happy ending is available to the rest of the population. Tell me what the gap is. “Cos Martin and Maureen and Jess are all fucked, but you… You got a job hooking people up with cable TV. Where you going with that?”
“I’m going where I’m going.”
“Yeah. Tell me where that is.”
“Fuck you, man.”
“I’m just trying to make a point.”
“Yeah. I get it. I got as good a shot at a happy ending as your friends. Thanks. Do you mind if I wait until I get home before I shoot myself? Or you want me to do it here?”
“Hey, I didn’t mean that.”
But I did, I guess. When you get yourself in that place, the place I was in on New Year’s Eve, you think people who aren’t up on the roof are a million miles away, all the way across the ocean, but they’re not. There is no sea. Pretty much all of them are on dry land, in touching distance. I’m not trying to say that’s how close happiness is, if we could only see it, or some bullshit like that. I’m not telling you that suicidal people aren’t so far away from people who can get by; I’m telling you that people who get by aren’t so far away from being suicidal. Maybe I shouldn’t find that as comforting as I do.
We were coming up to the end of our ninety days, and I guess Martin’s suicidologist guy knew what he was talking about. Things had changed. They hadn’t changed very quickly, and they hadn’t changed very dramatically, and maybe we hadn’t even done much to make them change. And in my case anyway, they hadn’t even changed for the better. I could honestly say that my circumstances and prospects would be even less enviable on March 31st than they had been on New Year’s Eve.
“You really going through with this?” Ed asked me when we got to the airport.
“Through with what?”
“I don’t know. Life.”
“I don’t see why not.”
“Really? Shit, man. You must be the only one who doesn’t. I mean, we’d all understand if you jumped. Seriously. No one would think, you know, What a waste. He threw it all away. “Cos what are you throwing away? Nothing at all. There’s no waste involved.”
“Thanks, man.”
“You’re welcome. I just tell it like I see it.”
He was smiling and I was smiling, and we were just talking to each other the way we’ve always talked to each other about anything that’s gone wrong in our lives; it just sounded a little meaner than usual, I guess. Back in the day he’d be telling me that the girl who’d just broken my heart preferred him anyway, or I’d be telling him that the song he’d just spent months working on was a piece of shit, but the stakes were higher now. He was right, though, probably more right than he’d ever been. There would be no waste involved. The trick is to see that you’re still entitled to your three-score years and ten anyway.
Busking isn’t so bad. OK, it’s bad, but it’s not terrible. Well, OK, it’s terrible, but it’s not… I’ll come back and finish that sentence with something both life-affirming and true another time. First day out it felt fucking great, because I hadn’t held a guitar in so long, and second day out was pretty good, too, because the rustiness had gone a little, and I could feel stuff coming back, chords and songs and confidence. After that, I guess it felt like busking, and busking felt better than delivering pizzas.
And people do put money on the blanket. I got about ten pounds for playing “Losing My Religion” to a whole crowd of Spanish kids outside Madame Tussauds, and only a little less from a bunch of Swedes or whatever the next day (’William, It Was Really Nothing”, Tate Modern). If I could only kill this one guy, then busking would be the best job I could hope to find. Or at least, it would be the best job that involved playing guitar on a sidewalk, anyway. This guy calls himself Jerry Lee Pavement, and his thing is that he sets up right next to you, and plays exactly the same song as you, but like two bars later. So I start playing “Losing My Religion”, and he starts playing “Losing My Religion”, and I stop, because it sounds terrible, and then he stops, and then everyone laughs, because it’s so fucking funny ha ha ha, and so you move to a different spot, and he moves right along with you. And it doesn’t matter what song you play, which I have to admit is kind of impressive. I thought I’d throw him off with “Skyway” by the Replacements, which I worked simply to piss him off, and which maybe nineteen people in the world know, but he had it down. Oh, and everyone throws their coins at him, because he’s the genius, obviously, not me. I took a pop at him once, in Leicester Square, and everyone started booing me, because they all love him.
But I guess everyone has someone at work that they don’t get along with. And if you’re short on walking metaphors for the stupidity and futility of your working life—and I appreciate that not everyone is—then you have to admit that Jerry Lee Pavement is pretty hard to beat.
Maureen
We met in the pub opposite Toppers’ House for our Ninetieth Day party. The idea was to have a couple of drinks, go up on to the roof, have a little think about everything and then go off for a curry in the Indian Ocean on Holloway Road. I wasn’t sure about the curry part, but the others said they’d choose something that would agree with me.
I didn’t want to go up on the roof, though.
“Why not?” said Jess.
“Because people kill themselves up there,” I said.
“Der,” said Jess.
“Oh, so you enjoyed it on Valentine’s Day, did you?” Martin asked her.
“No, I didn’t enjoy it, exactly. But, you know.”
“No, I don’t know,” said Martin.
“It’s all part of life, isn’t it?”
“People always say that about unpleasant things. «Oh, this film shows someone getting his eyes pulled out with a corkscrew. But it’s all part of life.» I’ll tell you what else is all part of life: going for a crap. No one ever wants to see that, do they? No one ever puts that in a film. Let’s go and watch people taking a dump this evening.”
“Who’d let us?” said Jess. “People lock the door.”
“But you’d watch if they didn’t.”
“If they didn’t, it would be more a part of life, wouldn’t it? So, yes, I would.”
Martin groaned and rolled his eyes. You’d have thought he’d be much cleverer than Jess, but he never seemed to win an argument with her, and now she’d got him again.