Idolism (16 page)

“What?”

“Do you have a boyfriend?”

Momoko covered her mouth with her hand as she giggled. “No,” she said. “I don’t have boyfriend.”

Then, from one moment to the next, her facial expression changed. She suddenly looked all serious, batted her eyelashes, and asked me, “Would you like be my boyfriend?” Before I could answer, she made a step towards me, opened her mouth and gave me a long, wet kiss, and before it was even over I came in me pants.

Rock’n’roll!

The Gospel According to Ginger – 6

Our first appearance on
Inside Momoko
was probably the most embarrassing thing I have ever done in my entire life. At least that’s what I was thinking as it happened. The whole bickering on camera with Tummy was so incredibly immature, and so was the fact that our lead singer seemed to be too shy to talk in public, and when he finally did talk he wouldn’t shut up.

Great
, I thought,
here we are. A bunch of 17-year-olds that come across like a bunch of seven-year-olds.

I was sure that people all over the country had to be rolling on the floor laughing at us, and that our wonderful career was pretty much over before it had begun. After that first TV appearance, nobody in their right minds would ever want to invite us to appear on television again, and to be honest, that was perfectly fine with me. It had never been our goal to become huge pop stars in the first place. We were making music just for the fun of it, and none of us ever seriously thought about a career in music. So, I was embarrassed about that appearance on
Inside Momoko
, but I wasn’t sad or disappointed or anything, because nobody was going to like us anyway.

I was wrong.

Again.

The response was overwhelming. When I opened my email account the next day I had 1,700 new messages. All fan mail. It was insane. When we met at Underground Zero in the afternoon, that number had risen to 2,400, exactly 24 hours after our appearance on
Inside Momoko
. A hundred emails every hour, and more kept coming in minute after minute. I thought 2,400 emails was an awful lot. But it turned out that there were a lot more fangirls than fanboys out there. Michael had 3,000 emails, Tummy had 2,900, mostly from girls. Julian had 11,000. Of course we didn’t read them all, but the ones we looked at seemed to be 70% from girls and 30% from boys. For some reason that we couldn’t fully understand at the time, Julian had struck a chord with the audience. They all loved his voice, and while most fangirls seemed to think Julian was really cute and most fanboys seemed to think he was really cool, Julian had no idea how to deal with all this. There were only a handful of people in real life that he ever talked with. Now he had thousands of emails from people who said they loved or admired him.

“What am I supposed to do?” he said with helpless desperation in his voice.

“What do you mean, what are you supposed to do?” Tummy replied. “Read as many of them as you like and feel good about yourself. You can’t reply to all of them anyway.”

“But I want to.”

“Good luck with that.” Michael punched a couple of numbers into the calculator app on his mobile. “Even if it takes you only one minute to reply to each email and you do this for eight hours every day this will keep you busy for more than three weeks. By which time you’ll have, at the current rate, 30,000 new emails in your inbox which will take you another eight weeks to reply to. You still want to do this?”

“I don’t know.”

“Trust me,” I said. “You don’t.”

Julian shook his head. “But wouldn’t that be rude?”

We all looked at each other, not knowing what to say. It was the first time Julian had ever expressed concern about the feelings of complete strangers. It was an eerie feeling.

The Gospel According to Michael – 7

Something was happening. Julian was beginning to change. I had known him for more than ten years, and I had grown used to his quirks, his ways of thinking, his shyness, his self-imposed isolation from everything normal. He never talked to people except us, his mum, and his teachers if he had to. Yet now he seemed eager to reply to thousands and thousands of emails sent to him by complete strangers. I was no psychologist, and all I knew about autism was what I’d occasionally read about it or heard on TV, which was not a whole lot. Julian has never been officially diagnosed with autism, or any other kind of mental deficiency. Whenever we called him autistic, we didn’t really mean it. ‘Autist’ was a nickname for Julian when he was being weird, just like ‘Tummy’ was a nickname for our morbidly obese friend. It wasn’t meant to be mean. It was meant to be taking the piss.

Be it as it may, something didn’t seem right about Julian’s sudden interest in what other people were thinking. Before this whole thing started, Julian had never expressed any interest whatsoever in our website or our YouTube channel or any of these things. Now he was asking me multiple times every day how many people had watched our videos on YouTube and how many people had accessed our website or downloaded one of our songs on iTunes. Every day these numbers grew bigger and bigger, and every day Julian became more and more gleeful about our new fame. And it was contagious. It was impossible not to get drawn into this. Tummy, Ginger, and I, we were all intrigued by Julian’s metamorphosis. He kept talking about new ideas for songs, something he had never done before. He had always written his lyrics alone in his room in absolute quietness. Now he kept throwing ideas at us, getting all excited about them, and discarding them again before we even had a chance to say anything. We were drawn in by Julian’s excitement and enthusiasm. We had never seen him like that, and we enjoyed it quite a bit. It was beautiful in a way, and we didn’t want it to end.

A couple of days after our first appearance on
Inside Momoko
, Peter Tholen came to visit us at my place. He had rung us up right after the show and said he wanted to talk business with us. What can I say, we were suspended from school and we didn’t have anything else to do, so we said sure, whatever, come on over. I guess we were also kind of flattered. If the biggest music producer in the world calls you and asks you for an appointment, you just don’t say no.

So anyway, he came to Underground Zero and we talked. Well, he did most of the talking. He kept rambling about how great our music was, and what a great stage presence Julian had, and how much he liked all of us, and how ever since the video from the school anniversary had gone viral, dozens of people had called him because they had seen him in the video and they thought he was our manager and how he was getting sick tired of telling them that he wasn’t.

“Cut to the chase,” he said. “I think that’s a really good idea. I want to manage you.”

That was quite a bombshell, and none of us really knew what to say. Ginger was the first to regain her composure.

“No offense, but we’re doing pretty well at managing ourselves.” She looked around. “I think?”

I looked at her and nodded. I looked at Tummy who was busy punching keys on his mobile. Then I looked at Julian. Julian sat there with his chin on his hands and his elbows on his knees, and he was staring at his feet.

“I agree with Ginger,” I finally said. “We have our website and our YouTube channel and we sell our songs on iTunes, and we’re really doing very well.”

Tholen smiled. “I know. I’ve been looking at your Internet presence, and you’re doing very well indeed. But if you want to sell CDs and play concerts and build a decent career as musicians, you’re going to have to do a hell of a lot better. And you can’t do that on your own. If you want to concentrate on your music, you will need someone who will take care of the business side of it. Believe me, guys, I’ve been watching you very closely, and I think you’ve got great potential. For all I know you could be as big as Justin Bieber or Lady Gaga, but what you need is a good manager.”

“So,” Julian said with his innocent face, “do you know a good manager?”

“I
am
a manager,” he said.

“Yes, but are you any good?”

Ginger and I burst out laughing, not so much because of Julian’s question but because of the perplexed look on Tholen’s face.

“I have sold over 500 million records worldwide.”

Julian shrugged his shoulders and looked at me. “Is that good?”

“Pretty good,” I assured him.

Ginger wasn’t convinced. “I’m not sure if we really want to be as big as Justin Bieber or Lady Gaga, to be honest. I mean, we’re just a bunch of kids. We have to go back to school after the summer holidays. For me Puerity has always been about fun and hanging out with my friends. We never thought of it as the start of a music career.”

“Well,” Tholen said, “it’s not like I’m asking you to sign a 20-year contract. Of course your band should be all about fun for you, and of course I understand that you don’t see your future as major stars for the rest of your lives. But just stop and think for a moment. This is an opportunity that could completely change your lives. You can still regard it as no more than a hobby, that’s perfectly fine, but I’m here telling you that if you take this chance and you do reasonably well for a year or two, and I have no reason to believe that you wouldn’t, then you could be coming out of school with enough money in your pockets to pay for the best education the world has to offer. A good education can be very expensive. Why not pay for it by doing something you enjoy and you’re good at?”

I have to admit that Tholen was making a compelling argument. I also have to admit that since this whole thing had started, I’d become increasingly annoyed with maintaining our website and having my inbox flooded with thousands of emails every day. So maybe this wasn’t such a bad idea after all. But still, this all went so fast.

“Do we have to make a decision right away?” I asked.

“No, of course not,” Tholen replied. “Take your time and think it over.”

Tummy sighed. “I’m going to have to ask me parents about it anyway.”

“Me too.” Ginger nodded. “And we’re going to have to talk about it among ourselves, I guess.”

“Of course.” Tholen got up, took four business cards out of his pocket and handed one to each of us. “Think about it, sleep over it, talk to your parents about it. And once you’ve made a decision, just give me a call.”

And then he left. We were sitting there, and again none of us knew what to say. I guess each of us was thinking about what Tholen had said and how all this might affect our future. It was Julian who finally broke the silence.

“Okay, let’s do this.”

The Gospel According to Ginger – 7

And that was that. Julian wanted to sign up with Tholen, and that pretty much ended all discussions. If Julian said he wanted to do it, it meant he would do it, either with or without us. Tholen had no interest in Puerity anyway, that much was clear. He wanted Julian, and if it meant he’d have to sign up three of his friends or a 50-piece orchestra, he didn’t care. And to be fair, nobody really needed Michael, Tummy, or me in this deal. We were just three people who knew how to play their instruments reasonably well. We didn’t compose any of our songs because we were just recycling old material with expired copyright, and it was Julian who wrote all of our lyrics. Nobody needed us. Tholen could have just replaced us with three professional musicians or built up Julian as a solo artist. So our choice was simply that between doing it and earning a bit of extra cash by recording a CD, playing concerts and appearing on TV, or standing back and watching Julian do it all by himself.

Which, by the way, was something that Michael never would have done. We had no idea at the time what kind of shark pond this whole business really was, but it was obviously not a good idea to leave Julian all by himself at this point. Both Michael and I didn’t really trust Tholen, which is why we would have declined his offer if this had been only about us. But it wasn’t about us, obviously, it was about Julian, and it would have been irresponsible to turn our backs on him. After all, Julian wasn’t just another normal guy. Let’s face it, he was a retard. Sorry, I probably shouldn’t call him that, and I wouldn’t if it weren’t for the fact that he liked calling himself a retard sometimes. And in a way he was. On a normal day Julian displayed all the regular mental and emotional features of your average seven-year-old, and I mean that in the best way possible. He had that childlike open-mindedness, that sense of awe and excitement when there were new things to discover, and that beautiful creativity, unabashed and uncensored by convention. To an outsider it may have seemed childish and indeed retarded, but if you knew him it was a beautiful thing to see, because it was what made him special, and I knew for sure that this was something that Michael, Tummy, and I really envied him for. Being special without giving half a damn what anybody else was thinking. But it also made him vulnerable and left him without any defence against the sharks out there. We just couldn’t leave him alone. We were his friends, his only friends. So we signed that stupid contract. Convincing our parents turned out easier than we had thought. Their main argument was our education and our future, but the idea that one successful CD might earn us enough to pay for all our university fees shut them up pretty quickly.

The problems with Tholen started about five seconds after we had signed the contract. Suddenly he came up with all sorts of crazy ideas, like composing new songs for us instead of just rearranging classical pieces. He also wanted to give us a complete makeover and a whole new image. He presented us with a set of new outfits, things that a 50-year-old fart like him thought were ‘hip’. They were the worst outfits I have ever seen in my entire life, and I do watch T-Vox, which means I’ve seen some pretty awful stuff. For me he had purple satin jacket that had feathers growing out of its breast pocket. Feathers! I was looking like a prostitute walking
Sesame Street
.