“So to what do I owe the pleasure?” Rhino finally asked.
Felix hadn’t wanted to appear too forward or desperate, even though he was.
“I don’t suppose you would be interested in reforming the band for a gig or two?” he asked sheepishly.
“Oh absolutely!” was Rhino’s most unexpected response.
Felix was a little gobsmacked.
The one person he thought he would struggle to get back in the band, the one person he thought was an unknown commodity was turning out to be the one person who was full of surprises.
“That’s fantastic,” said Felix, getting up to leave and shaking his newfound pal’s hand. “I’ll be in touch with the details.”
Felix figured even if the girls didn’t come round, he and Rhino could always put shuttlecocks down their tennis shorts and pretend they were Wham!
Chapter 6. (Master Tussauds)
Despite his elated if somewhat stupefying joy at having managed to reform at least 50% of the band, it was little more than 24 hours before the big comeback gig. All further calls to Holly were still going unanswered, while Cherry/Chesney had quit his/her job at the contact centre and gone into hiding.
Felix resigns himself to abject failure and is drowning his sorrows in the middle of the afternoon in a quiet, traditional pub.
The only other clientele is an elderly woman practically in a trance, sat knitting cardigans for Kosovan orphans; and an old man who looks like he died several years ago, rigor mortis setting in; covered in dust and cobwebs.
Felix finishes his pint and goes to the bar, beckoning the half asleep barmaid over so he can order another. Whilst she is coming to give him a good creamy head, if not the kind he was accustomed to in his heyday, he starts to daydream…
Suddenly he is on stage - dressed like a complete megastar - right there in the very pub. His hair is big and wild, spiked inches on end and dyed firecracker red.
He has silver and black lightning strikes painted on either side of his eyes and the rest of his outfit completes the look of a true style god: he’s wearing nipple tassels, his bare chest covered in glitter, and with denim jeans so tight they look like they were painted on, then slashed to ribbons by a werewolf.
He is singing his greatest hit like he has never sung it before – as they would say on X Factor, he totally nails it - but no-one even takes an iota of notice.
The elderly woman is still zombified, in a world of her own and the barmaid is still giving good head, this time quite literally to the dead man.
Felix simply cannot take anymore and storms or rather stumbles out of the pub in a raged drunken stupor.
He wanders down the street in a desperate state and passes several strangers, none of whom recognise him or ask for his autograph, mores the pity.
Then he comes to what looks like an old waxwork museum - a bit like a poor man’s Master Tussauds – he assumes where unwanted former celebrity dummies go to die, other than on reality TV.
Paying the £5 entry fee he goes in and encounters the likes of Shakin’ Stevens, Arnold from Diff’rent Strokes and Roland Rat… then he nearly does a double take when he sees our very own sex pot Ms Holly Wood from Tequila Sun!
He drunkenly mumbles, thinking it’s to himself but blurting out loud: “Well that’s just shocking. Where am I?”
He simply can’t take the rejection.
“They’ve probably melted me down into pillar candles. I’m a has been and they probably should have fed me to the lions,” he says feeling sorry for himself.
Has his life really come to this?
He gazes at the Holly waxwork dummy. The resemblance is simply astonishing.
And he rambles on: “Oh but my dear, lovely Holly. The one girl who gets more beautiful with every breath she takes...”
Felix is now on the ground seemingly worshipping at her very feet.
An unimpressed couple bypass him in his drunken stupor and head straight to Des and Daphne from Neighbours.
“The one girl I never truly got over,” Felix continues, fawning all over her. “The only one I ever really loved.”
He stands up again and makes a special announcement.
“I wrote a song about you,” he says and then starts to serenade Holly’s waxwork with the new song he has just written about her:
“When I first saw you, my heart skipped a beat,
I grew seven inches…”
He stops, pauses for thought, looks down and changes the lyric to five and a half.
“…I dropped my shredded wheat.
Her hair was golden (it is, dyed.)
Her eyes emerald green (they are, probably contact lens.)
To avoid her beauty you would need a vaccine…”
His voice trails off as he exits the museum in a bitter fashion, pushing over a waxwork dummy that vaguely resembles Margaret Thatcher in the process.
At that very moment a man in an old fashioned suit enters from the rear, of the building that is. He passes Felix and walks through the waxwork museum backwards, well not quite literally.
It is of course the owner Wesley Tussauds. His real name was Wesley Bates but when he set the business up, it didn’t have quite the same ring.
He shakes his head when he finds Maggie on the floor, picks her up and unintentionally positions her in a somewhat heated embrace with Leroy from the Kids from Fame.
Then he passes a few other legends in the 80s section, until he comes across Holly Wood, who looks like she actually has a tear in her eye.
And then she blinks.
“Holly it’s time for your break,” says Wesley, tapping her on the shoulder.
It seems being a supermarket checkout operator isn’t Holly’s only talent these days. She’s also working part time as her very own museum waxwork dummy!
Oh and she just heard everything a drunken, emotional Felix had to say!
Chapter 7. (Flashback)
Ouch!
Felix wakes up, his head pounding, and with no recollection of the night before. He’s naked in a bed, but has no idea whose, nor does he recognise the brazen trollop lying next time to him.
Turns out he’s in a cheap bed and breakfast and the ‘lady friend’ with him is Aunt Sally from Worzel Gummidge, well her waxwork dummy anyway.
After a spot of nightclubbing and several shots of Tequila, he went back to Master Tussauds and broke into the museum to steal Holly’s waxwork, only to find she’d gone, so this seemed like the next available choice.
Felix gets out of bed, pulls on his pants - inside out and back to front - gets dressed and goes to check out of the hotel.
While he’s in a taxi on the way home, he gets a text message from Rhino Zagreb, which reads: “Felix, unable to make the gig tonight. Something has come up. Sorry.”
Felix is secretly gutted, but tries not to let onto himself. He also realises that tonight is the big night and he’s going to have to go it alone, whether his agent Max Jacks likes it or not. He’s confident he can win over the crowd. He has to be. And he’s ready to give it one final shot.
When he gets home he strips off and looks at himself standing naked in the mirror. He looks and feels like an abomination. Hair bedraggled, unshaven, pasty white skin and more than just a little out of shape.
He’s also a bit sticky, covered in wax and shudders to think. He’s stressed out to the max (no pun intended) and just needs to relax. He also has his beauty regime to adhere to, starting with a hot soak and an exfoliating mud mask.
While he’s meditating in the tub with a couple of cucumbers on his eyes, he ponders how his life is half over and wasted. He’s nearly fifty, the big half a century. Jack-off jenkies!
It only seems like yesterday that the world was at his feet.
There he was winning the Hottest Male Pop Hunk on the Planet Award at the Smash Hits Poll Winners Party, beating Morten Harket consecutively for the third year in a row.
Holly Wood, the girl everyone wanted, was his.
/> And their new single was selling out in Woolworths all over the country.
What could possibly go wrong?
One night of drunken debauchery later - the first of seemingly many - and his life before him spiralled completely out of control.
Felix had always been bi-curious.
Cherry was depressed and trying to work out her own sexual identity. She’d been born with both reproductive organs and always felt like she was a girl. But her parents had decided they wanted a son and chose to dress her in blue and bring her up as a boy, which just confused her even more.
When she turned 16 she left home and became her true self, her parents disowning her in the process for shaming their social stature.
One night Felix and Holly had an argument. It was the night before the 4th Smash Hits Poll Winners Party and Felix was worried Marti Pellow was going to pip him to the post in the Hot Hunk category. Holly thought Felix was just being pedantic.
So he walked out on her, got crazy drunk and bumped into an equally sozzled Cherry, fresh from an unsuccessful attempt at a reconciliation with her mother following her father’s death.
They went back to Felix’s for a nightcap and the next thing they knew Holly walked in on them playing Naked Twister.
To make matters worse Cherry was wearing a microphone strapped to her crotch and helping Felix find his g spot.
Holly stormed out, half in repulse, half heartbroken, closely followed by a sobbing, sobering Felix, but she would not let him make amends, nor accept his excuse or the concept of ‘accidental cheating’.
His blatant mistake not only created bad karma for the band but also set Holly on a mission to self- destruction of her very own.
She sold an expose of the travesty to the News of the World, outing Cherry as a hermaphrodite in the process.
This caused Cherry to completely lose the plot and in a fit of temper she attacked Holly on an episode of Top of the Pops mid-song, attempting to strangle her on live TV!
Charges were dropped due to lack of evidence. I think the only video recording - on Beta Max - mysteriously disappeared. But the resulting restraining order made it difficult for the band to continue.
The girls and the illusive Rhino (who had pretty much kept out of all the drama) quickly disappeared into obscurity, while Felix’s futile attempt at a solo career in the early 90s was ridiculed by a music press that had clearly not forgiven him either:
“A collection of songs so muted, they should be.” Smash Hits.
“Lyrically dire and piss poor humdrum from pop’s blatant spectacle.” Number One magazine.
“If anyone buys this record, society is doomed and hellfire will surely rain down on earth.” Record Mirror.
270 people did and it didn’t, but Felix’s career was effectively over anyway… and then someone pressed the FFWD button to present day.
That’s what happens in life. One minute you’re 20 something and feeling immortal, the next you’re 40+ and everything’s stiff other than the one thing you want to be.
Felix wiped the mud mask off his face along with plenty of self-remorse and observed himself in the mirror, now suddenly looking a gazillion dollars.
He brushed his teeth and they glistened. He had a new steely determination about himself to succeed. No more wallowing in his own self-pity and mire.
Tonight was his big chance to hit the big time again and he was going to do everything in his power to ensure that happened.
Chapter 8. (Stage Fright)
Felix had butterflies and his confidence was waning. The vigour he’d channelled to propel him to the venue was in decline and he was starting to doubt himself again. The crowd at Rainbow nightclub were expecting a Tequila Sun reunion and his agent Max Jacks would be less than pleased if Felix hadn’t lied that the band had gotten back together. Good job Max was out of the country, tanning his jelly wobblers in sunny Spain.
Felix peered out from behind the red velvet curtain. The room was filling up in eager expectation. The crowd looked scary, but then they usually do. There were the obsessed fans (the no lifers as Felix called them) stood at the front in their home made Tequila Sun t shirts. Very creative but also very scary.
Felix wasn’t sure which ones scared him the most, the fans stood on their own or those who had blackmailed their half disinterested partners to come along. How some of them managed to get/retain a partner in the first place, Felix had no idea. He figured the disinterested had been blackmailed to be with the crazy ones to start with, which just made them even scarier.
Then there were the casuals. The middle of the hall crowd who either didn’t have anything better to do or were tricked into entering by the pushy ticket touts. They looked even more bored and Felix always thought only boring people got bored. Furthermore boring people scared Felix as well.
And don’t even get him started on the drunken creatures. We know, we know. Drunken creatures scare Felix too.
He was beginning to wonder what he was doing there, why he was even putting himself through this shit again. He always got stage fright, but the buzz he felt getting past it was like autoerotic asphyxiation.
As long as no-one in the audience had tomatoes or rotten eggs or rope, he would be fine, he thought.
He’d already checked to make sure all alcohol was being served in plastic glasses. Oh and that vodka was being watered down, to tame ‘the creatures’.
He took some deep breaths and tried to go over the lyrics to some of the set he was going to be singing. It was only going to be a short show to reintroduce him to the scary GBP and he’d chosen Tequila Sun’s three biggest hits, the new song he had written especially for his comeback and a cover of a current day pop hit, just in case old wasn’t completely gold.
His outfit was flamboyant but modern and he certainly looked the part. He checked his arse out again in the mirror just to make sure he still had it. Not his arse, but the sex appeal. He thought so anyway.
“5 minutes to show time,” the drag queen compere Ms Ruby Slippers shouted as she played another crap song from the 90s you only hear in gay bars. Some Irish girl band rubbish with a French chorus, but Felix couldn’t remember their name. He was too busy thinking about how much the drag queen scared him as well.
But there was no going back now, he thought, knocking back a tray of shots and snorting a line of coke for a bit of Dutch courage.
Felix imagined how his whole life could change from this point on. He could take back the life he had always wanted. He could be a star again. He could make it big in America and buy a mansion on the Hollywood hills with an infinity pool overlooking Beverly Hills and DTLA.
He could hobnob with the true elite, the rich and famous; people of his own class and stature; and would only have to deal with such middle class riff raff in the crowd on nights such as this.
No more getting the bus and sitting next to a fat kid eating a pasty. He’d have his own Lamborghini and drive through puddles drowning said pasty eating fat kids at bus stops, as his payback to society.
Not that you get puddles in LA, but he’d make special trips back to England just for that, he thought.
He’d have holiday homes everywhere, just in case he got bored with the 24-7 Californian sunshine; a chalet in the Swiss Alps for when he wanted to be snowed in; a cabin by an Italian lake; Felix closed his eyes and he was already there.
He could feel the warmth of the Mediterranean sun shining down on his face and the crisp, fresh mountainous air tasted delizioso.
He put his hands in his pockets and they were stuffed with cash and credit cards. He was absolutely loaded. The more he emptied them, the more came out, like seemingly endless pockets of gold.
Birds tweeted and grass hoppers hopped. The sound of the water rippling in the light breeze was so serene and enchanting, Felix never felt more relaxed in his entire life.
When he opened his eyes again he was suddenly on stage, in front of about 200 screaming, scary, common people… and he took one final deep brea
th before his backing track started and he launched into his opening song, one of Tequila Sun’s most famous pop hits.
The trolleyed trolls at the front lapped it up, staring into his eyes with such deep penetration he felt like he was being mind-fucked into oblivion.
Even so, so far so good, he thought.
But then he heard a small chant start quietly from further aback:
“We want Holly!
We want Holly!”
Felix tried to ignore it and started his second song, the self-penned ‘Supermarket Checkout Operator’.
This probably wasn’t the best decision he’d ever made - choosing a new song when the crowd was already growing restless - but he’d already set the backing track order and it was too late to change it now.
In-between lines Felix could hear more chants for Holly – getting louder - as well as “Old is Gold!” He even swore he heard someone asking for Cherry Fontaine.
“This is it,” he thought, as the crowd started to boo and hiss, and he waited for the first rotten egg or hand grenade to be thrown.
Chapter 9. (Old is Gold)
The audience continued to snarl like a jackal baying at the moon. They started throwing small objects at Felix as he fumbled his way through the second song in his 5-song set list.
There were no rotten fruit, but when a used tampon almost hit him in the eye, he was just about ready to ninja kick all the common pasty-eating bastards to kingdom come.
Instead he finished the second verse and launched straight into the chorus, only this time he heard a backing vocal:
“Supermarket Checkout Operator,
Please be my sexual navigator,
Check me through, I’ll be good for you,
Supermarket Checkout Operator.”
He turned around to see Rhino Zagreb walking onto the stage, pushing a shopping trolley containing Cherry Fontaine; and they were both singing along.
The audience’s boos turned to cheers and the raptures - along with Felix’s smile - only intensified when Holly Wood joined them, looking so hot Felix could swear there was smoke coming off of her.
Holly, Rhino and Cherry swayed beside Felix as he sang the middle eight:
“I still go there for my bi-daily fix,
Overstocking on Baked Beans and Weetabix,
But I know I’ll never forget just how I really feel,