It was still with him now, the pendulum of embarrassed recollection and the fear that he was out of control. He thought of being in the studio with the band and it was hard to believe that it had really happened. The walls of the room before him were still in place, but everything was made transient by the blue light from the TV.
He thought of Bruce Byron, all those afternoons of filming him in his tiny apartment, lying in bed in front of what he’d called the “idiot box.” Everyone does it differently. I want to see how you do it. He’d heard that Byron was driving a cab in New York now, every inch of its interior covered with pictures of James Dean and Marlon Brando and stills of his own face from Scorpio Rising. He was still showing up at the screenings, still dressed in biker clothes. The film had somehow become his life: a collage assembled by a total stranger who had included him in it almost by accident. But that was how life in the world could be sometimes. Sometimes you were the stranger, sometimes you were Bruce Byron. Who would have thought that it would happen to him, that at his age, forty-one, the same boy, Bobby, would still be appearing almost nightly in his dreams?
Notice how comfortable they appear in their chains, so loose around their wrists that they could free themselves at any time if they so desired.
He went to bed, but as soon as he had drawn the curtains, the phone rang. On the other end of the line was the kind of sound that comes out of a doll when you pull the string on its back, a recording of a man’s boisterous laughter.
“Hello,” he said.
It was the laugh of a villain in a superhero comic.
“Hello.”
There was no answer. There was the pop and then the sudden staticky boom of a TV. Then whoever it was hung up, the sound of the dial tone as dreamlike and accusatory as the sound of the doll’s toy laughter.
“We’re going on tour,” said Mick. “That’s what Keith is trying to say. This summer we’re going back to America.”
They’d driven out to Brian’s new house, the former residence of A. A. Milne, the children’s writer. Statues of Pooh Bear and Christopher Robin stood in an informal garden beyond the pool. Brian wore a cape that looked more like a tapestry, flowers in a tangled design. One of the things they would remember was that he was completely sober that afternoon.
“It’s nothing surprising,” he said. “I mean, I haven’t been a part of it in a long time.”
Keith blew out a cloud of smoke. “It’s not necessarily a permanent thing,” he said. “It’s just that right now, fuck, you’re in no condition. It’s three months on the road.”
Brian nodded, bowing his head. “Such a serious business,” he said. “I never would have thought it would go like this. Or what I should say, I never thought it would be so much like working at a firm.”
Mick uncrossed his legs. “You’ve been fucking about for the last five years. Been getting paid pretty well while doing it.”
“You always had it in for me. Why is that?”
“The fuck I did, Brian.”
“No, I’m not going to fight with you. I understand that it’s over. I don’t have much interest anymore in being in a rock group.”
Keith stood up, twisting a little, looking down at his boots. “All right, then,” he said. “Well, maybe that’s that.”
“You going to shake my hand?” said Brian.
“Why don’t we leave it?”
Mick leaned forward in his chair. “We’ll have the press release tomorrow. Just a simple statement, nothing big.”
Keith turned. “Come on.”
“What,” said Mick.
“Just cool it.”
Brian stood up. “I’ll be seeing you around. Is that it?”
Keith cocked his head a little to one side. “You know, you pushed me every step of the way. You’re still pushing now.”
There was a crew of workers that summer renovating Brian’s house. They were restoring beams, sanding down floors, rebuilding staircases, glazing windows. It was an unusual job, Brian an unusual client. Any small resentment would have been intensified by the fact that the men doing the work would have been unable to respect him. Sometimes he would be lucid around them, sometimes he would be out of his head. Sometimes he would treat them with a lisping courtesy, and sometimes he would walk by without saying a word, or he would criticize some detail of their work. He was a pop star with a series of Scandinavian models for girlfriends. They were tradesmen who saw a boy in his twenties with a Rolls-Royce in the driveway. They double-billed him for their supplies. Even the caretaker double-ordered groceries and liquor and kept the second batch for himself.
One night there was a party. Brian was swimming, the latest girlfriend was swimming. Everyone had been drinking, taking pills, diving off the low board into the blue-lit pool. The workers were there — they were swimming too, in borrowed trunks. One of them splashed water in Brian’s face. He didn’t retaliate. Perhaps that was the reason it didn’t stop, because he just wiped his eyes and shook his head a few times. Someone dunked him underwater a few minutes later. After that, there was a lot of splashing. The girlfriend turned and saw it from the porch: a thrashing in the water, the swirling blue surface broken at one end. She turned and continued toward the house, looking for cigarettes. When she came back out, they were all standing around the pool except for Brian, who at first looked like just a shadow beneath the surface of the water.
No one ever said what happened. He was a strong swimmer, there were plenty of people there with him. Either they drowned him or they let him drown.
THE HANGED MAN, 1969
IT WAS JULY 5. In the center of London, in Hyde Park, five hundred thousand people were waiting for the band to arrive in his honor. The past year had already been full of vivid catastrophes: the assassinations of Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King, the Soviet invasion of Prague, half a million troops in Vietnam, the Cuyahoga River going up in flames. Now Brian had died, and half a million people were spread out from a large black stage with towers of black scaffolding to make a dense rectangle of tiny flesh-colored blips, mostly faces and hair. They wore the somber, utilitarian clothes of that year: jeans, work boots, leather sandals, sunglasses. They were a peaceful crowd, but there was a familiar playfulness that was missing. It was a warm day and some of the men had taken off their shirts, but there were very few flowers or beads or Indian-style pajamas. They were thoughtful, unsmiling, squinting in the sunlight, shading themselves with sheets of newspaper. There was no visible grass in the park, only people and trees, cut through at the center by the silver water of the Serpentine.
You wanted to be there, but once you saw how many people were there you began to feel a little strange about being a part of something so ambiguous. It was hard to know what to feel — a beautiful day in July, very sunny, the trees in full leaf. It made it worse somehow that Brian had died in such a stupid way. You wondered, were you there to celebrate or to mourn or what? And what were you celebrating or mourning?
No one knew what to make of the set of iron barricades that had been set up about fifteen yards from the stage. It enclosed the press seats and the seats for special guests and friends of the band. Patrolling these barriers was a squad of two dozen young men in studded leather jackets and leather gestapo caps, members of the London chapter of the Hells Angels. Their motorcycles were lined up on the sides of the stage, all the front wheels turned to the same angle. They never stopped scanning the seated crowd, never stopped convening with one another in little groups. The crowd never stopped pretending that they weren’t there.