Beautiful Ruins (19 page)

Forty people at the show that night, his first sellout. But no Joe. “I walked around Edinburgh today and decided that the whole of art and architecture is just some dogs pissing on trees,” Pat said. It was early in the show, and he was wandering dangerously off-script. “My whole life . . . I’ve assumed I was supposed to be famous, that I was supposed to be . . .
big
. What is that? Fame.” He leaned over his guitar, looking out on the expectant faces, hoping, along with them, that this was about to get funny. “The whole world is sick . . . we’ve all got this pathetic need to be seen. We’re a bunch of fucking toddlers trying to get attention. And I’m the worst. If life had a theme, you know . . . a philosophy? A motto? Mine would be:
There must be some mistake; I was supposed to be bigger than this.
”

W
here did shit shows come from? Pat had no way of knowing if he suffered more bombs than other performers, but shit shows had always come regularly for him. With the Reticents, the consensus was that they’d put out one great album (
The Reticents
), one good one (
Manna
), and one pretentious, unlistenable mess (
Metronome
). And they had a reputation for being unpredictable live, although this was intentional, or at least unavoidable: with him coked up for a few years there, Benny banging smack, and Casey Millar doing a drummer’s-fifth at gigs, how could they
not
be uneven? But nobody wanted
even
; the whole point was to put some edge back in the thing—no synth dance mixes, no big hair, no fey makeup, no poseur flannel faux angst bullshit. And if the Reticents had never succeeded beyond cult-club status, they also never became slick self-promoting power-ballad-playing pretenders, either. They stayed true, as people used to say, back when staying true meant something.

But even with the Rets, sometimes, he’d just have a shit show. Not because of drugs or fighting or experimenting with feedback; sometimes they just sucked.

And that’s what happened the day he got in a fight with Joe, and the night the reviewer from the
Scotsman
came to see “
Pat Bender: I Can’t Help Meself!
” Pat blew the setup for “Why Are Drummers So Ducking Fumb,” and then tried to get out of it with some lame eighties comic patter about how it’s called scotch in America but just whiskey in Scotland, was scotch tape just . . . tape—people staring at him like,
Yeah, bloody right it’s tape, you simple shit.
And he could barely get through “Lydia,” imagining everyone saw through him, that everyone but him understood the song.

He felt that odd transference, in which an audience—normally rooting for him to be funny and moving, all of us in this together—started to resent his awkwardness. An untested, apparently unfunny bit about the big asses of Scottish girls (
like sacks of haggis, these girls
are—haggis mules, smuggling heart-liver sausage in their pants
) didn’t help. Even his guitar sounded shrill to Pat’s ear.

Next morning, there was still no sign of Joe. The couple putting Pat up left the
Scotsman
outside his door, open to his one-star review. He read to the words “crass,” “rambling,” and “angry,” and put the paper down. That night, eight people came to his show; after that, things went about the way he imagined. Five people the next night. Still no Joe. Mustache stopped by the stage to tell Pat his weekly contract wasn’t being renewed. A ventriloquist would get his theater, his slot, and his boarder’s room. Pat’s manager had been given his check, Mustache said. Pat actually laughed at this, imagining Joe on his way to London with Pat’s five hundred quid.

“So how am I supposed to get home?” Pat asked the man with the mustache.

“To the States?” the guy asked through his nose. “Ehm, I don’t know. Does your guitar float?”

The only good thing Pat had gleaned from his dark period was some knowledge about how to survive on the streets. He’d never done more than a few weeks at a time, but he felt oddly calm about what to do. There were several strata of performers in Edinburgh: big acts, smaller paid pros like Pat, hobby guys, and up-and-comers playing what they called “Free Fringe,” and finally—below that, and just above beggars and pickpockets—a whole range of buskers, street performers: Jamaican dancers in dirty sneakers and ratty dreadlocks, Chilean street bands, magicians carrying five tricks in a backpack, a Gypsy woman playing a strange flute; and that afternoon, on a street in front of a Costa coffeehouse, Pat Bender, ad-libbing funny lines to American classics:
Desperado, you better come to your senses/With a pound ’n’ twenty pences/You ain’t never gettin’ home.

There were enough American tourists that, before he knew it, he had thirty-five pounds. He bought a half-pint and some fried fish, then went to the train station, but was stunned to find the cheapest last-minute ticket to London was sixty pounds. Minus food, it might take him three days to raise that much.

Beneath the castle was a long, narrow park, the city walls on either side. Pat walked the length of the park, looking for a place to sleep, but after an hour he decided he was too old to sleep outside with the street kids and went into New Town, bought a pint of vodka, and paid a night hotel clerk five pounds to let him sleep in a toilet stall.

Next morning, he returned to the coffeehouse and resumed playing. He was doing the old Rets song “Gravy Boat,” just to prove to himself that he existed, when he looked up to see the girl he’d had sex with against the standpipe in his greenroom. The girl’s eyes widened and she grabbed her friend by the arms. “Hey, that’s him!”

She turned out to be named Naomi, to be only eighteen, to be vacationing from Manchester, and to be here with her parents, Claude and June, who turned out to be eating in a nearby pub, to be about his age, and to be less than thrilled to meet their daughter’s new friend. Naomi almost cried as she told her parents of Pat’s troubles, how he’d been “ever so nice,” how he’d been ripped off by his manager and stranded here with no way of getting home. Two hours later he was on a train to London, paid for by a father whose true motivation behind helping Pat get out of Scotland was never in doubt.

On the train Pat kept thinking about Edinburgh, about all those desperate entertainers giving out handbills in the streets, about the buskers and spires and churches and castles and cliffs, the scramble to get higher, to be seen, the cycle of creation and rebellion, everyone assuming they were saying something new or doing something new, something profound—when the truth was that it had all been done a million billion times. It was all he’d ever wanted.
To be
big
.
To matter
.

Yeah, well,
he could imagine Lydia saying,
you don’t get to.

K
urtis answered the door, iPod earbuds plugged into the holes in his round, dented head. When he saw Pat, his face didn’t change—or at least that’s what struck Pat when Kurtis shoved him back into the hallway and pinned him against the wall. Pat dropped his pack and guitar and—“Wait—” Kurtis’s forearm smashed into Pat’s neck, cutting off his breath, a knee coming up into Pat’s groin. Bouncer tricks, Pat recognized, until a wide fist mashed his face and knocked even that thought from his head, and Pat slid off the wall to the ground. From the floor he tried to find his breath, got his hand to his bloodied face, and managed to look between Kurtis’s legs for Umi or Joe; but the apartment behind Kurtis seemed not only empty . . . but trashed. He imagined the blowout that must have done it, Joe bursting in, all the shit between the three of them finally coming out, Joe telling a stricken Umi that he loved her. He liked imagining Joe and Umi on a train somewhere, the tickets paid for with Pat’s five hundred pounds.

Then he noticed Kurtis was in his underwear;
Jesus, these people.
Kurtis stood above him, panting. He kicked the guitar case, Pat thinking: Please, not my guitar. “Ya fucking
coont
,” Kurtis finally said, “ya stupid fucking
coont
,” and he went back inside. Even the air from the slammed door hurt Pat.

It took a few seconds for Pat to get up, and he did so only because he was worried that Kurtis would come back for the guitar. On the street, people gave him a wide berth, wary of the blood burbling from Pat’s nose. At a pub a block away, Pat got a pint, a bar rag, and some ice, cleaned himself in the bathroom, and watched the door of Kurtis’s flat. But after two hours, he didn’t see anyone: no Joe, no Umi, no Kurtis.

When his beer was gone, Pat pulled the rest of his money from his pocket and laid it on the table: twelve pounds, forty pence. He stared at his sad pile of money until his eyes were bleary and he put his face in his hands and Pat Bender wept. He felt cleansed, somehow, as if he could finally see how this thing he’d identified in Edinburgh—this desperate hunger to get higher—had nearly destroyed him. He felt as if he’d come through some tunnel, made a final passage through the darkness, to the other side.

He was done with all that now. He was ready to stop trying to
matter
; he was ready to simply
live
.

Pat was shaking as he stepped outside into a cool gust, driven with a resolve that bordered on despair. He slipped into the red phone booth outside the pub. It smelled like piss and was papered with faded handbills from rough strip shows and tranny escort services. “Sandpoint, Idaho . . . USA,” he told the operator, voice cracking, and he worried that he’d forgotten the number, but as soon as he said the area code—208—it came to him. Four pounds, fifty pence, the operator said, almost half his money, but Pat knew that this could not be a collect call. Not this time. He put the money in.

She answered on the second ring. “Hello?”

But something was wrong. It wasn’t his mother . . . and Pat thought, in horror, It’s too late. She had died. The house had sold. Christ. He’d come around too late—missed saying good-bye to the one person who had ever cared about him.

Pat Bender stood bleeding and weeping alone in a red phone booth on a busy street in south London. “Hello?” the woman said again, her voice more familiar this time, though still not his mother’s. “Is someone there?”

“Hello?” Pat caught his breath, wiped his eyes. “Is . . . Is that—
Lydia
?”

“Pat?”

“Yeah, it’s me.” He closed his eyes and saw her, ridges of high cheek and those dark bemused eyes beneath her short brown hair, and it felt like a sign. “What are you doing there, Lydia?”

She told him that his mother was undergoing another round of chemo. God—then he wasn’t too late. Pat covered his mouth. A few of them were taking turns helping out, Lydia said: first her sisters—Pat’s wretched aunts Diane and Darlene—and now Lydia, in from Seattle for a few days. Her voice sounded so clear and intelligent; no wonder he had fallen in love with her. She was crystalline. “Where
are
you, Pat?”

“You won’t believe it,” Pat said. He was in London, of all places. He’d been talked into doing a UK tour by this kid, but he had some trouble, the kid had ripped him off and . . . Pat could sense the quiet from her end.

“No . . . Lydia,” he said, and he laughed—he could imagine how the call must seem from her point of view. How many such calls had she taken from him? And his mom—how many times had she bailed him out? “It’s different this time—” But then he stopped. Different? How? This time . . . what? He looked around the phone booth.

What could he say that he hadn’t said, what higher ground could he possibly scramble to?
This time, if I promise to never get
high-drunk-cheat-steal, can I please come home?
He’d probably said that, too, or would, in a week, or a month, or whenever this thing came back, and it
would
come back—the need to
matter
, to be big, to get higher.
To get high.
And why shouldn’t it come back? What else was there? Failures and unknowns. Then Pat laughed. He laughed because he saw this phone call was just another shit show in a long line of them, like the rest of his shit show life, like the shit show intervention of Lydia and his mom, which he’d hated so much because
they didn’t really mean it
; they didn’t understand that the whole fucking thing was meaningless unless you were truly prepared to cut the person loose.

This time . . .
On the other end of the phone, Lydia misread the laugh. “Oh Pat.” She spoke in little more than a whisper. “What are you on?”

He tried to answer,
Nothing,
but there was no air to form words. And that’s when Pat heard his mother come into the room behind Lydia, her voice faint and pained, “Who is it, dear?” and Pat realized that in Idaho, it was three in the morning.

At three in the morning, he’d called his dying mother to ask her to bail him out of trouble again. Even at the end of her life, she had to suffer this middle-aged shit show of a son, and Pat thought, Do it, Lydia, just do it, please! “Do it,” he whispered as a tall red bus rumbled past his phone booth, and he held his breath so no more words could escape.