After Bathing at Baxters (14 page)

Bobby wasn't there.

Roxeanne said: ‘You know I never did like to bad-mouth people, and I hate talking about Bobby behind his back, but if I ever meet a guy with problems like that again then I'll count myself unlucky. I mean, I didn't know there could be people that jealous. You remember Max. You met him that Fall at my folks' place. I haven't seen him in years but he sometimes calls me up in the evenings, just to talk about old times. He has this associate professor's job at Syracuse now. Well, he called one evening and Bobby picked up the phone. As soon as he heard it was a man's voice he said: “Forget it, she's out.” Just like that. Anyway, I played it cool. I told him: “Honey, you might be a little upset about something but Max is one of my oldest friends and I can't have you talking to him like that,” and he apologised, but it kind of pissed me off all the same …

‘… But between you and me it was the dishonesty I couldn't take, because as you know I have this thing about being honest in a relationship. I mean, when Bobby moved in I said: “Look honey, I want you to treat this place as if it was your own. Don't think you have to ask permission every time you want to take a shower.” But boy, did he take me at my word. Sometimes I thought we were just throwing one big party for Bobby's friends. And then I started missing things. Just little things. You know that bracelet Mom gave me when I got my doctorate accepted? It couldn't have been worth more than a few dollars. I thought I must have just lost it, you know how good I am at losing things. Same thing happened when I started losing bills out of my wallet. Nothing major, just fives and tens, and I thought: Uh huh, you must have spent more last night than you thought. But then finally I reckoned I had to confront Bobby about this: “Look, sugar, I know this is a difficult thing for me to ask but I think you're stealing from me and I have to know why.” And do you know what he did? He started crying. Just lay down on that sofa there and burst into tears, said I'd been so good to him and he felt so ashamed and could I ever forgive him? So I told him: listen, it doesn't matter. You know I'd have given you the money if you'd asked me, just don't ever lie to me. And after that everything was OK for a while …

‘… But it was the stuff about the job that really threw me. All that business about Bobby being an actor and waiting for a break. Well, let me tell you that Bobby had as much chance of being a star as I have of teaching semiotics at Yale. Straight up. I once went to see him in this play at some theatre in, where was it, Lewisham, just in a room over some pub, and you know it was pathetic? Like some kid in a high-school prom, screwing up his lines and looking sort of helpless and upset. What beat me was how seriously he took it. I mean, he really thought he was going to be Scofield or someone. And then finding out that all the stuff about the shoot in the country was just a fake. Just hanging around with the guys in the tape room and hoping that someone was going to give him a job. How can you respect someone who behaves like that?

‘… The sex? Well, when you get to my age, honey, you can take or leave the sex, especially when it's coming courtesy of some gorilla who can't even wait for you to get your breath back. But do you know what really blew it? Do you know what really knocked it on the head? Last week, when I was really tired – you know I had to rewrite that Robbe-Grillet piece for the
Journal of Aesthetics
– well, one night Bobby says: “We'd better get up early tomorrow. I've got something really special to show you, somewhere you have to go if you're seeing London.” So we got up – four, five in the morning, I can't remember, I was so bombed – and took this cab way out through the City. Someplace called Billingsgate guys in white coats and stinking fish lying around in piles. Bobby was really excited. He was sort of
proud
of it, if you know what I mean. He said: “Isn't this great? Right out of Dickens. I bet you never saw anything like this before.” And I said: “Let's get this straight. You're making me lose four hours' sleep just to see a
fish market
? Forget it.” And after that I thought, this is it, this is the end, this is where I quit …'

Michael sat hunched over the chessboard, his forehead creased in concentration. Roxeanne said (it was a Sunday lunch party at someone's house): ‘The thing I like about Michael is that he's got a sense of humour. I mean, there I was standing in this gallery looking at some great mess of colouring when this guy comes up and says: “Of course you have to realise that what the surrealists were trying to do was to paint without any effort, and we all know what
that
leads to.” Now I thought that was really funny, especially as Michael really
knows
about art. I appreciate every Englishman you come across in a gallery tells you he's done three years at the Courtauld, but Michael's stuff … The other day he was showing me these book illustrations he's done – it's a project he's working on and you have to give him the third degree to get him to talk about it. And let me tell you, they're as good as any of that Aubrey Beardsley thing you guys always go on about …

‘… You mustn't ever tell him I told you this, but the first time I met him I thought he was gay! Something about the way he speaks. Yeah, I know when English people talk about art it's as if they were holding an egg in their mouths. Well, I won't go into details but let me tell you I was one hundred per cent wrong about that! Of course, Michael's very busy right now, finishing the book and everything. But in the evenings I go round there – he has the cutest little apartment in South Ken. We have supper. A helpmeet? This guy is a grade-A
cordon bleu
chef, honey, which makes a change from some people I could …

‘… Bobby? Funny you should mention Bobby. I heard about him just the other day. Bobby's in jail someplace. You didn't know? Well, it turns out that when Bobby got together with those actor friends of his it wasn't just cigarettes they used to smoke, no sir. They reckoned when the police raided the place Bobby was staying they found enough dope to keep half of London hired for a week. Nine months for possession with intent to supply. To tell you the truth I used to wonder about it when he was with me. I can remember one time picking up his jacket and watching the papers roll out onto the carpet … You know, I went down to Greenwich with Michael the other day: there was this gallery he wanted to go to. And we ended up in that park, you remember, that godawful park with all the trees and the dogshit. And I suddenly thought about Bobby and, do you know, it was as if it had never happened. Believe me, sugar, it was as if it had never happened at all.'

Looking for Lewis and Clark

Truth to tell, we didn't even come from Seattle. I know all the music papers used to write us up as part of the Seattle Sound, and maybe we played with Nirvana and Pearl Jam one time – I don't rightly remember – but you ever hear of a rock band out of Bozeman, Montana? Isn't nothing there but steers and cowboys in ten-gallon hats. So we figured it might as well be Seattle. Same thing with the country gear. I know they put us in buckskins for the cover of the first album, and Jimmy did that Wrangler ad a while back, but none of us ever been on a horse in our lives. Closest any of us got was Curtis when he worked for a vet one time, out on Vosper Mountain. As for the others, Jimmy now, he went in the meat-packing plant when he was sixteen. Errol was a college kid – you know, processed hair and a windcheater, kind of kid you didn't see around too often. Me, I just collected my welfare check. So no horses, or cattle neither. And from Bozeman too. Anybody back there get to hear about it and I wouldn't show up in town in a hurry, no.

Sure, the place has changed. I was back there last year in the Fall and they had a longhair record shop, and Mudhoney were supposed to be playing the local sports hall. Hollywood actors buying vacation homes out by the lake too. Wouldn't have had that fifteen years ago – now if Jane Fonda had strolled down Main Street when I was a kid and told a few ranchers she planned on reintroducing the wolf, someone would have torched that bungalow down and never thought twice about it. Same thing with fashion. Clothes I'm wearing now – you wouldn't reckon on people being pissed off by a T-shirt and a pair of K-Mart sneakers and a ponytail: I seen a Warners executive – guy who signed us – in a ponytail. Well you couldn't have worn that stuff in Bozeman back in '75. I was in a two-dollar diner one time when a kid came in with an afro and leathers and someone smacked a pool cue over his head. Now they got an AIDS clinic and the congressman don't know one end of a steer from another, so I reckon the kid won the deal.

The first time I saw Jimmy wasn't long after that. All on account of the only job I ever had. They were building the new freeway then out towards Livingston, and taking up the asphalt the old-timers said had been there since Lewis and Clark, and anyone who wanted to shovel tar could get eighty dollars a week for doing it. Evenings after work we used to hitch a ride back into town and fetch up at Mother McKechnie's. You ever catch the scene in
The Blues Brothers
where the band gets to play at Bob's Country Bunker? Well, Mother McKechnie's was like that, and then some. The ranchers used to drive in fifty miles on Saturday nights to check out the country bands, and if anyone tried to play uptempo or didn't have a steel guitar they'd throw beer bottles. I seen a waitress lose an eye once on account of that. Jimmy now, he stuck out at Mother McKechnie's like a Democrat at the state farmer's convention. Tall, skinny kid in a Fresno biker's jacket with his hair quiffed like the Fonz in
Happy Days
– you could see the cowboys bristle up at him every time he walked up to the bar. But somehow no one ever laid a finger on Jimmy. You see, even then he had the reputation of being a mean kid – and that meant something in Bozeman, where if you were sixteen and hadn't seen the inside of a police truck you were looked on as some kind of degenerate – and everyone knew about the pills and the cop he was supposed to have taken out in a poolhall at Billings the Summer before. I saw him in there one night in Winter '81 when the Dixie Stealers were playing – four old boys in Roy Rodgers outfits doing close-harmony versions of ‘The Old Rugged Cross' – and he winked and said, ‘Beats me, but there's people come seventy miles to hear this shit' and we kind of laughed, and for once I didn't feel so bad about working on the freeway or living in Sally Pasricha's boarding house out on Clearwater Street where you could never open the windows because of the smell from the tanning factory.

We started hanging out together after that, the way kids do when they got shit jobs and no family to speak of. My pa was dead by this time and my ma had gone back to her folks in Minnesota – I was supposed to visit at Thanksgiving, but somehow I never got round to it. When we got famous and the second album had been on the Billboard chart a month I went over there with a convertible and ten thousand dollars in a bank teller's envelope, but it wasn't any good – we just sat there staring at each other and watching the kids play on the patio, and then when she did start to talk it was about my aunt Abbie and how she couldn't wash her hair except on Friday nights. Anyway, we went to concerts sometimes – they had a new 5,000 seater amphitheatre over at Billings by this time – if the major-league bands stopped by on their Western tours. This was '82, '83 remember, and all anybody wanted to listen to was Southern boogie – rows of guitars and the PA playing ‘Freebird' in the intervals. We hitched all the way to Denver once to catch Kiss at the Four Springs Theater, and we wouldn't have got in unless Jimmy hadn't finessed his way into the hospitality lounge claiming he was a guy from the fighting company and I was his assistant. Weird thing was that Jimmy didn't even like all that stuff. He reckoned it was too dumb, too ordinary, just songs about motorcycles and women and beer. ‘Kind of music you have to get out of your head to appreciate,' he used to say.

Was '84, '85 by then. We met up with the others round that time, the way you do. Curtis wandered into a music store one day when we were trying to talk the owner into loaning us a brace of Marshall amplifiers; Errol Jimmy knew from way back. Even then, though, when there were just the four of us, and Curtis was still paying off the credit loan on his drum kit, I could see that things were changing. All of a sudden I'd stopped working for the highways department and hanging out at Sally Pasricha's, where the whores who lived in the upstairs apartments used to stop you on the stairs and ask for change, and was staying with Jimmy in some beat-up trailer in the park outside of Bozeman. The freeway was nearly finished, and most of the guys who'd built it were back in the line at the welfare office, but Jimmy and me got by somehow. Sometimes we stuck around Errol's place, where there was a swimpool and a pin-table if you didn't mind Errol's mom, who disapproved of us on account of our hair, but mostly we just stayed in the trailer and talked. He was one of those vague, dreamy kids who like lying around smoking and blowing their mouths off: stuff about the old West Coast explorers, about how his grand-daddy had been a cowboy down on the Panhandle. Later on, some music journalist asked me if I could remember any of it, but it wasn't there any more. Everything else I could tell you about – the inside of the trailer with the pictures of Robert Plant Jimmy razored out of
Rolling Stone
, Jimmy's leather jacket with the death's head pins shining out of the dark – only the words had gone.

We took off after that. I mean
took off
. One day we were hanging out in the pool hall on Bozeman Main Street, the next we were a thousand miles away in some studio Warners owned out in the Arizona desert with a hot-shit producer from Memphis and a sound engineer on five hundred dollars a day. Leastways that's how it seemed. If I look back there are great parcels of time just gone and vanished, like an old settler's map of Montana Jimmy had on his wall one time where the edges just fell away into white space. There was stuff in the music papers by now, and Bruce Springsteen turned up at a promo we did someplace out on the West Coast, but even then Jimmy didn't help. He had this trick about not showing up at business meetings or TV interviews, and then corning out with some asshole excuse about his chest hurt or he'd slept over. Other times he'd sulk round the stage like he wasn't there, mumble his lines or just stand there looking dumb and letting the crowd take the chorus. Sometimes, weekends mostly when we'd stay at his mother's place at Belmont – it wasn't more than a shack bungalow up in the woods, but Jimmy kind of liked it – I'd try and figure him out, figure out the sulks and the missed cues, the way he deliberately came in a split-second off the beat, but it was never any good. ‘If it wasn't for me you'd still be laying tarmac outside of Bozeman,' he'd say, as if that was an answer. I could have smacked him for that – I'd done it once, years back, for something he'd said – but somehow I didn't say anything. Not at his mother's place, with her fixing the supper out back. She was a tiny old lady with a pinafore and bi-focals, and Jimmy called her ‘ma'am' like a little kid in a black and white movie.