Gods Without Men (3 page)

One hot night he was sitting outside, dozing after his usual dinner of canned franks and beans. In the distance a coyote was whining, and the sound penetrated his sleep. He opened his eyes and stretched, thinking about going down into the bunker to get a cigarette. That was when
he saw it: a bright point of light hanging low over the horizon. The sky was hazy, loaded with dust whipped up by a couple of days of high winds, and it took a few moments before he was sure of what he was seeing. As he watched, dry-mouthed, the object got larger, approaching at incredible speed. There was no roar of engines, no sound at all. As it came toward him, he saw it was disk-shaped, featureless but for a ring of iridescent lights round the rim, like gemstones or feline eyes. His body began to tingle with electrical charge, the hairs on his bare arms standing upright. The huge oval hovered overhead, hanging above the rocks as if surveying the ground. Then it descended, stately and imperial, landing in front of him without raising the slightest eddy of sand from the desert floor. It was, he thought, the most beautiful thing he’d ever seen.

Once it had landed, the craft began to pulse—that was the only way he could put it—glowing pale green, then modulating through purple and rose, a gentle throb like a heartbeat. He couldn’t suppress a gasp as a door opened in the hull and a ramp unfolded, like the tendril of a tropical plant. In the threshold stood two human figures, one male, the other voluptuously female. Their blond hair was agitated by some ethereal wind, though the night air was close and still. Their skin was so pale as to be almost translucent, and in each of their noble faces was set a pair of remarkable gray eyes, animated with profound compassion and intelligence. The pair were dressed in simple white robes, belted at the waist with bright metallic chains. They smiled at him, and he was bathed in a sensation of all-encompassing benevolence.
Come
, said a voice—not out loud but silently, in the depths of his mind. It was rich and sonorous. It resonated through him like a prayer.
Come inside. We have something to show you
. At last, he thought. Smiling, he stepped forward into the light.

Oh baby oh what you want went down to the crossroads got down on my mojo black cat whatever. In Nicky’s opinion, the whole Americana thing had gone beyond a joke. He watched the lads sprawled on the big leather studio sofas. Lol in his trucker cap. Jimmy trying to play slide on his shiny new National, making gravelly noises in his throat like he was some old bluesman instead of a skinny Essex electrician’s son with a smack habit. You’re all wankers, he told them. Uh huh unh unh, went Jimmy. Ned was on the phone to his accountant. No one looked up. Fuck it, he thought. Fuck this and fuck them.

Out in the car park the sun beat down out of a boring blue L.A. sky. Nicky smoked a fag and watched the Mexicans hanging about on the corner, same as every day. According to the engineer they were waiting for someone to come past in a lorry and give them a job. Gardening. Carrying stuff on a building site. What a life. Think about it, he’d said to Lol. One roll of the dice and it could have been us, know what I mean? Not me, went Lol. I’m too tall to be a Mexican.

What happened? Three years ago they’d been running round Camden, blagging into shows, doing crap speed in the bogs at the Good Mixer. Not a care in the world.

And now look.

Of course most people would sell their grandmothers to be in a band like theirs. If you get the big tap on the shoulder, hit singles and telly and that, then start moaning about how it’s not all it’s cracked up to be, you shouldn’t be surprised if you get treated like a mental case. You’re living the dream, right? So shut up. He’d learned pretty quickly to keep certain
things to himself. Smile and talk bollocks to journalists. Don’t tell them you lie awake at night wondering why you aren’t more happy. Klonopin, Ambien, Percocet, Xanax. He ought not to point the finger at Jimmy. His own bathroom was like a chemist’s shop.

He was leaning on Noah’s car, a lovely old Merc convertible sprayed with multicolored hippie swirls. You could tell which one was the studio by the cars. All the buildings on the block looked the same: big gray bunkers with metal doors. Only one had this collection of motors outside. There was his own orange Camaro, rented back when they first arrived and he was excited by America; Jimmy’s Porsche, skewed across two spaces, big scratch down the passenger side where he’d scraped it against a pillar in a parking garage. Jimmy couldn’t drive for shit, even when he wasn’t twisted. Nicky wasn’t a hundred percent sure he still had a license.

So what was he going to do? Go back in and be a good boy and try and write songs with the bunch of cunts who used to be his mates? He couldn’t picture it, couldn’t see the point. Oh there were millions of points, of course, about two and a half million ones for him alone if you counted straight-up advance money, before you got into all the crooked record-company arithmetic and everything vanished again. They were supposed to be in L.A. making their West Coast record, the one with Sunset Strip and Laurel Canyon good vibes sprinkled over it like fairy dust. Instead, in three months, all they’d done was bicker and buy stuff and get wasted in bars full of people who looked as if they’d just been unwrapped from their packaging, all shiny and expensive, like audio equipment. People who came with curls of foam and polythene bags and cable ties.

Three fucking months. Break America? Other way round, mate. At first him and Jimmy thought all they had to do was drive up and down and absorb it and they’d suddenly channel the Byrds or someone and make good music. They drove up and down. They made crap—worse—crap that didn’t even sound like them. They’d have been better off in London, even with all the bullshit—Jimmy’s dealer hanging about, Anouk, the tabloids. In L.A. Nicky felt like a tourist. What was he going
to do, write a song about palm trees? About lawn sprinklers? Bikram yoga? He told Jim he was homesick, but Jim didn’t want to know, went on about the nights back in Dalston when they’d got high, playing Gram Parsons and banging on to one another about cosmic American music. He was just beginning to get into the scene, he said. He wanted to shag actresses and go to parties in big glass houses where you could see the lights down in the valley. All Nicky really wanted was a kebab.

Sometimes he got wasted and went to bed with someone. He wasn’t exactly chuffed with himself, but at the end of the day, Anouk only had herself to blame. He wouldn’t have done it if she’d been around. He’d told her to come over, but there was a job in Moscow. Then another one, a TV ad in Phuket. The next time it was Paris fashion week. It was always fucking fashion week.

Don’t whine, she told him. She didn’t like it when he whined.

Nicky had a rule:
Never get sentimental about birds
. After all, half the world’s gash, at the end of the day. But Anouk was different. She didn’t fall for his act. In her funny, bored way, she saw right through him. He hated putting the phone down on her, but you had to play the game. Never let them get the upper hand.

After the fashion-week conversation, he did what he always seemed to do nowadays when he had a problem—worked through the minibar. First vodkas, then gins, whiskies, then whatever was left. He watched bad telly and looked at YouTube. He could feel himself spiraling into the dark place. Her voice had sounded so flat. Who was she with, over there in Paris? Most of the blokes in fashion were queer, which, if you were going out with a model, was a mercy, but there were always more than enough straight ones sniffing about. Photographers, for a start. Lecherous bastards all. And those fifty-year-old rich geezers you only seemed to see at fashion parties, the ones with orange tans and a thing for teenagers. Sick industry, when you came to think about it.

Not a good night. Not proud of himself the next morning. Terry gave him a lecture, said the hotel weren’t happy and did he realize how much it cost to keep the police out of it. Nicky told him it was his fault for putting him in a crap room. He ought to have had one with a bigger
balcony. The look on Terry’s face. A day or two later he made it up with Anouk, but it was obvious he’d have to get along without her for a while. He sent flowers, wrote lyrics, thought about sending her the lyrics, tore them up.

L.A. was a nightmare. The place was so uptight. Everything seemed to be
inappropriate
. Sorry, sir, this is a nonsmoking environment. Sorry, sir, we don’t permit English people talking loudly or having a laugh with their mates in our poncey white-painted restaurant. He wanted to walk to the corner shop. He wanted to get on a bus. Valet parking? What was that about? How were you supposed to get home when you were pissed in a city where there was no such thing as a cab? No one could even understand his accent. I’ll have the tuna sandwich.
Cheena
? I’m sorry, sir, what is
cheena
? One day he was trying to get a glass of water. Water, he said. Water. The stuff that comes out of the tap. The waitress was getting shirty. I don’t understand, she hissed, what is it you require? Noah had to intervene. Water, he said.
Wah-dah
. They sat around repeating it.
Wah-dah
, not
wor-uh
.

He phoned Anouk.

“Drop everything. I’ll tell Terry to put you on the first plane.”

“I can’t. I can’t just ‘drop everything.’ ”

“I need you, babe. It’s serious. I’m not pissing about.”

“I have a job.”

“Fuck’s sake, Nookie, you don’t work in an office. Turn something down for once, eh?”

“Nicky, you decided to go and be out there. You left me, not the other way round. It was your choice.”

“I didn’t leave you.”

“You could have found a studio anywhere. It’s just a room with a lot of stupid black boxes. Not even any windows. What does it matter where you are?”

“You don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“No, of course not. I’m so stupid. I’m just stupid and good for fucking and being on your arm to have your picture taken.”

“That’s not what I meant.”

“You’re a selfish asshole, you know that? A spoilt little boy.”

“So I’m a little boy? Who’s the man, Nookie? Who’s the real man in your life?”

“What?”

“I know you. You’ve got someone. Who is he? Tell the truth, Anouk.”

“You’re being ridiculous. I don’t want to talk to you if you’re going to be like this.”

Click.

He stood in the car park and thought about Anouk and tried to work out if the sick feeling in his gut meant he was in love with her. He wrote love songs, or what passed for them. But what did he actually feel about her? When he wanted something, he hated not being able to have it, that was all. He tried to think of reasons to go back into the studio. A pickup stopped on the corner beside the Mexicans. The driver gestured and some of them climbed on the back. He wondered what would happen if he got on too. Where he’d go. What kind of life he’d lead.

Maybe if he went for a drive. He leaned into Noah’s car and tried the catch on the glove box. Not locked. He flipped it open. No keys inside, but there was a plastic bag full of little brown disks, like crinkly coins. He knew what they were, though he’d never actually taken any. One of Noah’s favorite riffs involved finding your spirit animal and entering the crack between two worlds. Behind the bag of drugs there was something else, wrapped in a cloth. He reached in and picked it up. A handgun. A big blocky
gold-plated
handgun with
ISRAELI MILITARY INDUSTRIES
written on the side. The sort of item you’d find in an African military dictator’s Christmas stocking.

It had taken Nicky a while to work out that Noah was a psycho. He was more famous than they were, at least in the States. A few years older, pushing thirty, he made freak-folk albums which sold by the truckload to hipster kids who wanted a little taste of freedom—the light filtering through the redwoods, sitting in a hot tub under the stars—all the stuff Londoners like Nicky fantasized about in their damp basement flats. Noah channeled all that longing into breathy vocals and squeaky guitar strings, overdubbed some crickets in the background and then rinsed the lot in strange electronic quasi-sitar drones which made his songs
sound like they’d just been radioed in from Mars. The band thought he’d be the perfect producer.

The first time they hung out was at his house up in the hills. It was exactly what Nicky expected: a sort of deluxe log cabin mummified in ethnic fabrics, with girls lounging around wearing beads and headbands, smoking spliff and looking like designer Red Indians. Noah was high on something that made him trip over his words and jig about irritably on the deck. You Brits don’t know shit, he told them. You Brits still think it’s like, the 1800s and you guys are in charge. Nicky didn’t really give a toss. In a way, it was what they’d hired him for—the
Americanness
. But Ned was getting aerated and started to argue back. Nicky nudged him and told him not to bother; Noah wasn’t listening anyway. Holding a sarong round his waist with one hand, he was toking on a joint with the other, stabbing it in their general direction while he made an incomprehensible point about destiny and the frontier and Jim Morrison. You want to see something, he said suddenly. You really want to fucking
see
, man? He took them into a back room, made a performance of undoing locks and bolts and switching on the lights. Around the walls were glass cabinets full of guns. He had pistols, rifles, shotguns, old flintlock things like out of a pirate movie. He had a chrome-plated AK-47 he’d bought off some special-forces guy in a bar.

They shot them off the back porch. Noah had his squaws line up bottles on a wooden bench, like the beautiful assistants in a game show. Don’t you get it? he was yelling. Living free, baby! Living free! Nicky didn’t really understand what living free had to do with blasting the shit out of empty Coronas, but it was a laugh. Eventually the cops turned up, blue and red lights flashing in the street. Earl sorted it out. Earl was Noah’s equivalent of Terry.

After that night Jimmy and Nicky decided Noah was cool. Lol agreed. Lol always agreed if Nicky and Jimmy did. Ned didn’t like him, but then if Ned hadn’t known Jimmy at school and been basically the only drummer in Billericay, he would have still been working at Phones4U, so his opinion didn’t count. Noah became their guide, their guru. They bought clothes and instruments in the places he recommended. They did bongs first thing every morning, because he said they needed to
loosen up. Jimmy even tried meditating. In the studio they pissed about with Tibetan temple bowls and rain sticks and Jew’s harps, chanting in darkened rooms, sitting on the floor writing tosh on bits of paper and cutting it up to make word associations. Burroughs did it, Noah told them. He was a pioneer of consciousness. Who’s Burroughs? whispered Lol, squirting glue on the rug. Some cunt off children’s telly? Noah was impressive, but he wasn’t good for the band. As far as Nicky was concerned, pop music ought to be instinctive: You just put your head down, made a noise, then stuck some lyrics over the top. Now here they were, throwing the I Ching to find a rhyme for “baby.” Everything they came up with sounded pretentious. Nicky couldn’t even pick out a tune without second-guessing himself. Jimmy was the same. Whatever else happened, the two of them had always been able to write songs together. Now, because there weren’t any songs, they began to argue. Words were spoken. Nicky moved out of the band house into one of the hotels on Sunset. He worked in his room, Jim in the studio. For a while they only communicated by fax, but neither of them could be arsed to write stuff down so they gave up and starting talking again.