I understood perfectly that without her old-school training in fine art Sally would never have become the excellent draftswoman she was. She had churned out nearly five hundred paintings and drawings before she made her first profitable sale at the age of thirty-one. Her style was refined and perfected by that time, and yet still evolving. She had never stopped training: she sketched constantly, taking advice and lessons from other painters and analyzing the work of the great equestrian painters who had gone before or were her contemporary competitors.
For his part, Harry practiced incessantly on his large home organ. It was an old-fashioned console with three keyboard manuals, two ranks of stops, and a full pedalboard, but it was entirely electronic, and he often practiced late into the night wearing earphones. It was as if he became part of the machine; he could play almost any organ music placed before him. His sight-reading was unconscious and perfect. And yet his performances were highly regarded for his ability to bring emotion and new life to the well-known organ classics.
Rain, riding as often as she could, jumping like a champion, wanted to be a writer. She read constantly, but also wrote stories and poems and was soon contributing almost 50 percent of the content of the magazine published monthly by the Harefield Equestrian Centre Harry and Sally used.
I ran against the grain. The paintings I preferred were mainly by untrained artists. The music I liked best tended to be by the renegades of serious music. So I introduced Walter to a lot of wild jazz and primitive folk music as well as some of the less conventional orchestral composers of the period. Walter seemed to lean this way too: he learned harmonica, piano, and guitar without lessons of any kind. His practice was self-indulgent; he played what he wanted to hear, or he tried to play what would most delight him. So he was constantly aspiring to do better, but never thought to have lessons. Harry couldn’t really help Walter musically; his own world was too traditional and conservative. Sally often complimented Walter if she heard him play something she liked, but she too had taken the academic road and wished that Walter would work with a real music teacher rather than hang out with me listening to my old vinyl albums of Fats Waller, Louis Armstrong, Sun Ra, John Fahey, Bert Jansch, Davey Graham, Archie Shepp, and Stockhausen.
We were all surprised, pleasantly, when Walter suddenly took an interest in the neglected garden at the house in Ealing and began to work it, almost intuitively as well as skillfully, into a semblance of order and dignity. It seemed natural then that he should be attracted to nearby Kew Gardens, and to the lectures and tours there, and after his GCSE exams he enrolled as a student at the Royal Agricultural University near Cirencester. Harry’s sister and Walter’s favorite aunt, Harriet, lived in nearby Tetbury, so the location was perfect. Walter studied for two years, and passed his finals with honors.
Then, to Harry and Sally’s chagrin, he joined Crow Williams’s band. Crow was already doing very well at Dingwalls at the time, but he accepted that Walter’s charisma and talent would be a boost. Crow also wanted not to be a front man, and it was he who christened the reoriented band “Walter and His Famous Stand.”
For a time while sharing the Wattses’ home, I became increasingly unhinged. Stopping using heroin isn’t the hardest thing, at least not for me. It’s dealing with the creative itch that is tricky.
As I say, I had explained to the kids the extraordinary things I could see, but now this became an uninvited part of my everyday life. I wanted to be clean, to live with who God made me, as it were. So one day, I can’t really remember exactly when, I committed to getting straight, and it was then that I realized why so many addicts don’t manage to stay clean. It isn’t the misery of withdrawal that propels you to pick up again, it’s the enormous magnitude of what it feels like to be merely a normal human being, passing through a regular day. The bedhead visions that had so irritated Pamela began to flood into everything that I looked at intently. I started to see, in every piece of wood grain, what I took to be the faces of various incarnations of gods, messiahs, and other divine messengers.
This didn’t feel like madness to me. It felt like revelation. I felt as though I were being given clues, signals, and signs that I was on the right track, that I was in contact with a spiritual mechanism that would free my soul. These “found” images were the basis of a new code for me. I was becoming increasingly obsessive as the months passed. Then I diversified, seeing the very same kind of beatific or screaming faces in the pattern on the linoleum on the floor of my GP’s waiting room, in the clouds in the sky, in smoke rising from a fire, or in the ripples in running water.
I would like to try to explain what transpired, how I found my way back to sanity, but it is really, truly, another story. In a way, Walter and Rain, even as the little kids they both were, really did help me. As I say, they listened. I worried that I might have frightened them, planted terrible seeds of fear about what might happen to the human mind given enough stress, trauma, and ginger-fucking-headed-nympho-disloyalty. In my case, after several years I “relapsed,” as addicts call their return to drugs.
Even now, as I write about those times, my anger returns. Those kids helped me. My own story is tightly interwoven with Walter’s.
Let’s just say that after a while, I got well. By the summer of 1995 I was clean. As a result of what I had seen, and suffered, I began to look for the aberrations in art, the distortions, and the nightmares. What I had experienced, and the visions I’d had, would have enriched my life had I been a painter like Munch, or Van Gogh, or Dali. But I am not an artist, and yet I had seen ghosts, and then found a new language in every aspect of nature, which spoke to me of good and evil and all the shades in between. Best of all, soon after, I discovered the Outsiders, the Artistes Bruts, and in the end I felt that it was probably all predestined.
Chapter 3
In the summer of 1996 the time came when I had to speak to Andréevich formally about our business affairs. He, the artist. Me, his dealer. Maud brought him to my apartment, and it quickly became clear that despite her great love for Nik he was starting to irritate and annoy her terribly. He was fidgety and uneasy, but smiling all the time, in a dreamy, unengaged way. He had begun to look so much older than Maud. His long curly hair that she had once described as “golden” now looked dirty. His skin was wizened by the sun; he was still handsome, but looked smaller than I imagined he would be, but that is often how the pop stars of our youth appear when we confront them for the first time face-to-face. They are often smaller or taller, uglier or better looking. Photographs, movies, and television all deceive in different ways. I’d never seen him perform, but knew his records. He was growing old, shrinking into himself. He seemed to be at the absolute center of his own world.
“You like my paintings?” He picked up one of his own charcoal drawings that was now beautifully framed, already sold to a collector who happened also to be a retired rock star (one of Nik’s peers in fact).
“Very much, Nikolai,” I said. “What you saw up in the Lakes was extraordinary, but even if you had simply drawn things you imagined, your work would be stunning.”
“I saw it all right,” he barked, but not aggressively. Rather he almost shouted gleefully. “A huge angel that filled the sky.”
“Yes, dear,” soothed Maud. “There is no question about what you saw.”
“My godson Walter would send his respects, I know.” I wanted to distract them both. “He has all your albums.”