It was only our literal begging that dissuaded him from going on, in Centerville, Texas, wearing leather jeans out of which he’d painstakingly cut the arse, using Trez’s nail scissors. (Down this part of Texas they hunt wild hogs, for fun.) In a South Carolina burg, an old cove in the bar turned to me looking stern. ‘I mo say this wun time. That’ – he gestured with his head – ‘better nut be a mayun.’
I assured him it wasn’t, that our Fran was a girl.
‘That a fact?’
‘Absolutely.’
‘You KNOW that for a fact?’
‘We’re married,’ I said.
‘Ruther yewn me, son.’
Let me conjure the St Valentine’s Night we spent in Hickman, Kentucky. This attractive part of the world is solid bluegrass country and the punters expected any visiting troupe of semi-Irish musicians to be offering reels and jigs. But that’s not what happened. Fran sashayed on in a heavily sequinned mariachi outfit, with perhaps unwise maracas and knee-length tight pants of the sort worn by bullfighters. ‘Traje de luces,’ they’re called. His flamboyances were met with hooch-cooked silence from what technically must be named the audience. To add to the general sense of the problematic, Trez had bussed back to New York for an inescapable meeting with her NYU supervisor, so we were performing as a trio that night. Something went wrong with the microphones and PA, so that Fran’s falsetto came out as an assemblage of incoherent burblings punctuated by vicious clicks. Also, it was a mistake to do ‘I’m Just A Girl Who Cain’t Say No.’ I said it would be a mistake. And it was.
In the McDonald’s after the gig, we were seated in deep-fried failure, Fran and I, he casting gloomy aspersions out the window at what he insisted on calling the Mrs Shitty River, when a coven of drunken youths began jeering us.
‘You girls British?’
We said nothing.
‘Naw. See, one of em’s Chah-neese.’
They exchanged the usual stupidities, miming what they felt to be oriental ah-so noises, one lout using his fingertips to refashion his eyes. Then their random neural firings continued expressing themselves in language. ‘Hey, ladies? Whyn’t you come over here’n suck on ma milkshake.’
‘We don’t want trouble,’ I ventured, which was the literal truth. But stating it only seemed to goad them. Empty Coke cups were tossed at us. We made the mistake of not leaving. The Human League classic ‘Don’t You Want Me?’ was playing. The answer, one felt, was no.
‘You gurls English with that accent?’
‘Irish.’
‘Say whut?’
‘Give us a break, guys? We’re busy.’
‘Ooooooo,’ the boys brayed, as some boys are wont to do on these occasions, out-camping each other as a means of asserting their straightness, but I didn’t feel like exploring the paradox. By now I was eyeing the exits and wondering how fast we could get to them. Fran looked red and angry as he chewed.
‘Let’s blow,’ I said.
‘I’m finishing my dinner.’
‘They’re gonna mill the fukken shit out of us. Come on.’
‘Let them try.’
‘Mah granddaddy wuz Arish. You pinhead liddle faggots. And if mah granddaddy wuz here, he’d cut off your dick.’
Whereupon Fran turned around and stonily replied: ‘If your granddaddy saw my dick he’d beg to suck it.’
I needn’t describe what ensued. The tinderbox of thwarted imbecility met the spark of Francisco El Loco. Punches got thrown. Jabs and cruel pucks. Handfuls of someone’s supper – a Happy Meal, ironically – were smeared in our infidel faces. Fran’s hours in the boxing ring as a lad proved useful. Also, let’s face it, surprise was on his side. You don’t expect a southpaw in a boob tube. The uppercut he detonated before being stormed by superior numbers was a cruncher. It levitated its recipient, resulting, I would think, in a windfall for the dentist of the town. I gave what little I had in the way of retaliatory gouges and self-defensive head-butts, but ended up on the tiles, someone’s boot on my throat.
In a McDonald’s, plastic chairs are screwed to the floor. Otherwise we would have been brained with them. As it was, a machine – for floor-polishing, I think – was seized from a bewildered Mexican member of staff, its flexes and extensions and heavy-duty hosepipe all put to use as flails. Somehow, in the melee, the wretched thing managed to switch itself on, and I remember its terrible buzzings. Our assailants called us offensive names, indicating that had grandfather not departed to the Ireland in the Sky, he would stick the vacuum-nozzles into several parts of our persons. A wheel came loose, about the size of a table-tennis ball, and one of the affronted set about attempting to stuff it down my gizzard with a calm and appalling seriousness. He got it into my mouth and began forcing closed my jaws. In the long and tragic annals of rock and roll deaths, my passing would be a footnote or a pub-quiz question. Brian Jones died in a swimming pool, Otis Redding in a plane crash, others amped on coke while 69ing a debutante or speeding a Lamborghini off a pier. I would meet my own maker with an omnidirectional rubber wheel jammed down my gullet, abashed, perhaps bummed by a hoover.
I can’t say I actually remember the arrival of Seán with a brace of very heavy-looking local police officers, nightsticks out and sleeves rolled high. But I learned, in the jailhouse, on that haunting night, that Southerners shouldn’t be stereotyped. Our arresters were not pleased with us, and strong language was used, but they saved us a month in traction. Releasing us next morning, they gave us bacon and biscuits, and pointed us to the restroom – ‘You gents might wanna wash up a little.’ We were musicians? Mighty fine. Typa music exactly? Had we heard of the Howlin’ Wolf? Now that was the musician. Six foot four, three hunnerfifty pounds. They drove us in their Black Maria to see the club he’d once gigged at. Mercy, that bigman could moan ‘Smokestack Lightin’. Come up from the town of White Station, Mississippi. His blues went the whole world round.
They posed with us for photos, let us try on their shades, and the captain gave us a piece of sound valedictory advice as he dropped us off at the Greyhound depot. ‘You boys lay off the hot-doggin’, y’heä? So long. Yawl comeback soon.’
FROM FRAN’S FINAL INTERVIEW
See, when you don’t look like none of the other kids in the class – that’s hard when you’re young. They exploit it. They’d be calling us ‘a chink’ or a ‘ching-chong Chinaman’. Kung Fu on the telly was big at the time. They’d be calling you ‘glasshoppa’. Just to taunt you . . . Toys were all made in Hong Kong back then. You’d come in on Monday morning and they’d ask you what toys you made over the weekend, Charlie Chan . . . And your parents, you know, they don’t look like you neither. And the kids know they ain’t your real parents . . . And so then, you get to thinking there’s two ways you can go. And mine was, I’m gonna best you. Every day. Every minute. Have a good long laugh, cock. I’ll best you. You box? I’ll box better. I’ll beat you out the ring. This English you tell me I can’t speak? I’ll speak it better than you. I’ll read every novel in the library, every poem, every play, and I’ll make them mine and screw your head off in the process. Keep calling me a chinkie, keep demeaning yourself. I’ll best you from here to Saigon. Via Dublin. And when you finally come to strangle me, you’re gonna lose out. I’ll die like Oscar Wilde. It’s all good.
Thirteen
THE TOUR WAS gruelling and it lasted nine weeks. By the end, we were tight and buzzed. We’d ventured north as far as the Chicagoan suburbs, back down to Baton Rouge, to many points in between. And we’d learned how to win over a smallish American audience, perhaps the most demanding task in rock and roll. But back in New York, Eric didn’t return our calls. We persisted, but the day came when his assistant told us he was ‘indefinitely unavailable’. That seemed to be that. The rebuff hit us hard. Square One was beckoning horribly.
Unlike some I won’t name, I didn’t do heroin. New York was an opiate in itself. The difficulty was that the Pit was getting out of hand. At any moment, this accommodation, about the size of two nor
mal bedrooms, might contain Fran, Seán, me, a visiting Trez, various acquaintances and disciples and deacons and acolytes, an assortment of ruined creatures who were, or thought they were, or wanted to be, our friends, and whoever Fran was pursuing that night. This wouldn’t be a problem if the weather was kind, for one could take to the streets for respite. South of Union Square was still entrancing back then, a quarter with a little vivifying grime beneath its fingernails. To walk the blocks of downtown was a trip and a half, funk pumping from the clubs and salsa from the bars and ragga from the punk boutiques. A gay men’s choir used to rehearse in a coffeehouse on Avenue B and I can never hear Handel’s Messiah without remembering again the fierce joy of their Hallelujah Chorus. Down on Mott in Little Italy you heard Puccini from the pavement trattorias while the last of the mobsters, womanly old men pretending to be mad, muttered the rosaries of Sicily. The fish stalls of Chinatown buzzed with Foochow Radio, an orchestra of spangling, glittering vowels and susurrations of disco-beat boombox. On the corner of West Broadway and Houston a trio of bobbysoxers channelled Motown, finger-snapping, lissom in sloppy Joe sweaters, sha-la-las and shang-a-langs raising whoops from the crowd. By the church of St Mark’s in-the-Bowery, among panhandlers and junkies, a flautist did ‘Purple Haze’. On the sidewalk by CBGBs I saw Lou Reed emerge from a limo, leather-jeaned, sullen, mop of ebon-black curls, horn-rim specs like a literature professor’s, shoulder-padded white jacket reckoned deathly cool at the time. Along the block was Amato Opera, a one-time Mission House now an endearingly grungy little theatre where for three bucks you got Verdi sung live. Sometimes I’d head up to Matt Umanov’s guitar store on Bleecker, a place that opened late, where they were tolerant of browsers. In the Rarities room was the most gorgeous thing I had ever seen: a 1955 two-colour sunburst Fender Stratocaster, signed by Keith Richards. One night, when the store was quiet, they took it down from the wall and let me play. I’ve always found New Yorkers kindly and amenable, undeserving of their reputation for rudeness. Hit a power-chord on that guitar and it grunged like a monster. Flick the switches and pull a solo high up on the neck, bending the strings, just touching the tremolo, and it cooed in sweet-sad soprano. ‘Kid, I’m seein’ a love-connection,’ said the guy behind the counter. ‘Talk to me. I’ll do a good price.’ Alas, the midnight Romeo must go home from his darling. Back I would trudge to the hovel.
We were often very poor. I was twenty and male. You’d think the squalor wouldn’t matter. But it began to. You can only turn your clothes inside-out for re-wearing so many days before pining for bourgeois fripperies like laundromat money. One day, very low, I begged on East Houston. The thought of Jimmy and Alice scalded me with shame. But I couldn’t go on in my filth. If the German girl who helped me outside the subway is reading these words, I want to say, without exaggeration, that you may have saved my life. You’d be my age now. I hope the years were kind. I don’t pray very often, but every time I do, I remember your gentleness and tact.
I was diagnosed with chronic asthma, given a prescription for steroid medication. Some weeks, I couldn’t afford it. Darker memories of that time are rapping on the door, but let’s move this along. The past is the past. It was nobody’s fault but my own.
In the end, it was the twins who sorted us out. Well, really it was Seán, but encouraged by his sister, not that he lacked much courage. I returned one Tuesday morning in April from a long weekend spent I don’t remember where, to find the pair of them attired strangely, in rubber gloves, shorts, Doc Martens and leather aprons, faces glowing with sweat and purpose. The addition of only a fun-fur and a lick of mascara would have made them look like the New York Dolls.
Glancing blearily about the Pit, I saw they’d been busy. The boxes were gone. The ‘kitchen’ had been cleaned. The refrigerator shone like a mother’s accusation. Inside was actual food, things like lettuces and carrots. On the floor were four sleeping bags, in ruthless parallel. The American flag had been laundered. Trez was moving in. There were plants on the windowsill. We were buying a door. We were going to stop drinking. Christ.
Seán explained that a Rubicon was reached during my absence. An overnighter nobody knew had proved highly unpleasant, a scene involving dirty needles and apparent psychosis, eventuating in the flourish of a switchblade. Seán and another had been forced to eject the troublemaker, and while Seán, like many a lad hailing from south of the Thames, was well able to look after himself in any sort of affray, he had a hatred of physical violence. From now on, there would be rules. They would have to be kept. He handed me a piece of paper.
Nobody stays over if we don’t know their name.
Everyone does a share of cleaning and tidying.
You go back to doing music (that’s why you’re here) or bugger off home to Luton.
You water us once in a while. If you don’t, we will die.
Signed – yours truly – the plants.
What I admired was the way he’d smuggled in rule number 3. But I wondered how Fran would take it. He’d been absent from the Pit for a couple of nights, was rumoured to be trysting with a Bolivian tranny who worked in a cabaret near Times Square, and had grown unapproachably surly when confronted with questions, not that we confronted him often. In the end, all he did on returning hollow-eyed from his sweetheart was point out that rule number 1 was ungrammatically expressed. I took it as his way of confirming that he wished the group to resume. So it proved. We got going again.
We agreed we’d give it three months, six at a push, then we’d hang up our boots if we had to. There were a number of background factors, some of them important. Seán, to buy us new instruments, had gone heavily into debt. To see him prepared to do such a thing was to realise something I knew already: that he wasn’t along for the ride. Also – and I have never spoken publicly of this matter before – there was Trez’s personal situation. I don’t mean her studies, though those were important too. But there was another meter ticking and it wouldn’t be stopped. Seán’s stakes were high. Hers were higher.
She had always been one who said little of her private life. But you certainly knew that she had one. I’ve asked permission before writing of it now, and had it not been granted, I’d be maintaining my silence. Privacies remain, and I want to respect them, but it’s a part of our story, and I’ve been given her agreement to tell it. The fact is that Trez was pregnant.
The situation, if difficult for her and the father, was in the process of being worked out, and that is all I wish to say. Except to add that the Italian-born student with whom Trez fell in love in New York became her husband many years later, in 2006, on their daughter’s twenty-first birthday.
So that’s where we were. Not quite as portrayed in a number of colourful chronicles of the group and our bohemian Manhattan adventure. Trez made it clear that the band’s days were numbered, she’d be returning to England when she was seven months along. We could use the time remaining to do something useful or we could continue pissing ourselves away. Up to us.
Remarkably, we copped a break. A bar called the Moon Under Water opened right there on our block. It was run by a Scot of Italian parentage, Paolo Cafolla, who was a lover of any sort of rootsy music and wanted his place to feature new acts. On his third night in business, we played to maybe sixty customers. We gigged again that weekend, and the following Wednesday. It was the start of a residency we’d end up keeping throughout the most uncomplicatedly happy time we’d ever know as a group, a season of peacefulness and learning.
The Moon had been named for a slightly wistful essay by George Orwell about the perfect pub of his imagination. Paolo’s grubby establishment didn’t look like the Victorian inn of the essay, but it had a particular atmosphere you didn’t find anywhere else in New York, a sense of itself as a club for non-belongers. There was a sign in its window: NO TELEVISION HERE. Pete Hamill and Jerzy Kosinski often stopped by, as did Mike Scott of the Waterboys, the Breton-Welsh singer Katell Keinig, and many other musicians. There’d be actors from the little theatre at 8
0, St Mark’s, with Irish kids working in Manhattan, refugees from recession, and out-of-towners along for the peek. It didn’t have a door policy, or any kind of policy I could see. The only rule was laidback tolerance. This was enforced by the fact that Paolo, a former mercenary in the Congo, so it was whispered, was six foot two and imperially fierce of demeanour. Troublemakers, homophobes and the over-assertive would be told, rather quietly, in chilling Glaswegian, that they’d enjoy themselves better ‘in a fukken sports bar’. Anyone else was welcome. Artists, talkers, punks, neo-beatniks, Rastas who lived in a commune just across the street, hacks from the Village Voice, slum-bunnies, ladyboys, drag-queens, balladeers, even sometimes an older resident of a neighbourhood that had always been edgy, back in the Moon not so much for nostalgia but to see if the East Village still had any night-people and what they might be up to if so. The food was not good. The bathrooms were a challenge. It never stayed open quite as late as Apichart the Thai barman promised you it would. Paolo and Apichart were in fact a couple. What a wonderful place it was.
It’s a bit much to say we became ‘the house band’ at the Moon, a thing I’ve seen written by people who should know better. It wasn’t that kind of establishment. Officially, we played a couple of sets there once or twice a week. But if you happened to be on the premises in civilian capacity and someone else was gigging and invited you up, you’d have your guitar stashed in the kitchens just in case. A home away from home, I guess.
We’d stroll down around five, have some not very good food, drink a beer, set up, start playing. Sometimes just Trez and I, acoustic guitar and bass, while we waited for the lads to arrive. Fran might sing in French or blow a mean blues harmonica. He could wail it like Sugar Blue Whiting. Seán was always late because of a girl. The audience had all the roof-raising enthusiasm of a New York crowd but none of its high expectations. Some nights you took requests for a cover, or tried something new, others you played only songs with a colour in their name, or a day of the week, or a country. Seán made up a dartboard with a song title in every segment. He’d invite a punter he fancied to throw nine darts, and thus we’d shape the set. Touring had been our school, the road our college. But in the Moon we came to master a difficult thing: how to be the Ships mark two. One midnight I peered out through the purple fug of cigarette smoke. There, in a corner, sat Eric.