Plastic Jesus (2 page)

At Jonathan's invitation, Peyton folded himself into a big leather chair. He was taller than Jonathan, but in the chair—or perhaps just diminished by his sorrow—he appeared small. “I'm not sure why I wanted to see you, Dr. Pumphrey. I suppose it's because you were the only other person Seth spent much time talking to. He'd lost faith in people. Well, he never had much to begin with, but he'd gotten disillusioned. Said people credited us with changing the world, and so thought they didn't need to do anything for themselves. I'd say, well, we
did
change the world, and he'd say it was true but not true enough. Said a thing like AIDS wouldn't have been allowed to happen if we'd really changed it. Didn't want to see any of our old friends or make any new ones. Said we hadn't needed anyone else when we met, back when it was just us two, and we didn't need anyone now. He said a lot of nonsense, actually. I'm sure you've heard all this already."

“I know a great deal about Seth's recent years,” Jonathan allowed. “I never really knew much about how you met. Other than the public stuff, of course."

“Seth never told you?"

“We hadn't gotten that far yet. Between working through his childhood and dealing with his more recent crises—the heroin addiction, for example —"

“You know how he finally kicked it?"

“Yes.” Jonathan took a pressed linen handkerchief from his breast pocket, touched his lips in an unconscious gesture of distaste, and tucked it neatly away again. “You chartered a plane..."

“A private jet. Very plush, very comfortable. Seth had everything he needed, except the smack. We stopped in Tokyo and the Seychelles for fuel. Twice around the world altogether, till he was clean."

“But it made him very ill?"

“Oh, Christ, yes—wallowing in his own spew and begging me to inject him with smack or cut his throat, he didn't care which. When I couldn't stand it, I'd go up front and work on a song I was writing for him. That turned out to be ‘Without You.'”

It was a slow, beautiful song. Jonathan thought of the lyrics:

Everything you do just leaves me speechless
You're the strongest and most graceful thing I know
You've said I give you melody
But without you I would be Nothing but a lot of show...

He hadn't known Peyton wrote the song for Seth, certainly wouldn't have guessed the circumstances, but it made sense.

“It was just typical Grealy melodrama,” Peyton went on. “Certainly he was hurting, but he was milking it, too. I lived with various Grealy melodramas for twenty-two years. Never saw one I couldn't get through."

There was a long, uncomfortable pause.

“Except this last one,” Peyton said finally. “Seth always said I had a tendency to state the obvious. Musically and otherwise. Said he could see it right from the start."

“I know he could be harsh."

“Oh, most of it rolled right off my back. Seth abused people when he was unsure of himself. He was full of bluster when we first met, and he never lost it."

Full of bluster
. That was exactly how Seth had been, and the phrase undammed something within Jonathan. He thought he'd done his grieving, but apparently he hadn't. He missed his patient; he missed his idol; but most of all he missed the remarkable man he'd been privileged to know for a little while.

“I'd like to know more about how you met,” Jonathan said. It was the only thing he could think of, because he was suddenly afraid he might cry.

“Right, I suppose it might do me some good to talk about it. You'll forgive me if I get, well, emotional."

“I'll forgive you if you'll forgive me."

And Peyton began to tell the story.

iii

A spring night in the late nineteen-fifties, in the blighted green landscape of industrial northern England: Leyborough. The war was nearly twenty years past, but parts of this city still stood in blackened ruins, reminders of fire and death from the sky. Pensioners here still hoarded their tinned goods, and the outskirts had become studded with council estates, warrens where the poor were packed in like the inhabitants of some Calcutta slum.

Seventeen-year-old Seth Grealy, neither rich nor poor, sprawled on his bed plucking idly at the strings of his guitar. His fingers were callused from the learning, his nails splintered with it. His hair was combed carefully back from his forehead, plastered there with enough grease to leave stains on his pillowcase, and he'd grown his sideburns long. If anyone except his grandmother asked him, Seth said the hairstyle was meant to look like a duck's arse. Couldn't talk that way to Gran, could he; she lived a few miles down the road and they seldom saw her, but she paid his and Dad's bills. As soon as Seth was out of school she wanted him to get a job. Sign on at the munitions factory, or maybe one of the big cargo ships that had once been Leyborough's lifeblood. The thought of the sea brought him a vague sick horror. All that endless humping water, no escape.

As far as Seth was concerned, school couldn't be over soon enough, but he didn't want any fucking job. He wanted a band, and today he thought he had come closer to getting one. He choked up on the neck of the guitar, wondering how someone like Carl Perkins could make the instrument scream, whether he'd ever be able to create such a sound himself, and how in the world little Peyton Masters managed to tune the bloody thing by ear.

They'd met this day, Seth and Peyton, introduced at a mutual friend's house while sagging off school, both carrying 12 British pounds sterling acoustic guitars they'd gotten for Christmas. It was great to meet someone else interested in American rock and roll—Peyton knew all the lyrics to Elvis Presley's “Hound Dog.” Still, Seth hadn't expected this wide-eyed fifteen-year-old to actually know his way around on the guitar. But Peyton sat there with a little smile on his face and played it better than Seth, in fact better than anyone Seth knew personally.

There had been something else, too. Seth had always had a lot of friends, neighborhood boys and mates from school. But there was no best friend, not even a close friend, never really had been. He slept with girls who were willing but had not been truly intimate with any of them. He supposed it had something to do with losing his mum. Freud would think so, the dirty old bastard. Everything always went back to Mummy. But something in the way he and Peyton had communicated so effortlessly today, both in words and through their guitars, made Seth think Peyton was different.

He was probably just going soft. He put down the guitar, picked up a notebook and pen, looked at them for a minute and tossed them back down.

All the surfaces and corners of Seth's narrow bedroom were piled with books, notebooks, sketchbooks, and various scraps of paper. For fourteen of his seventeen years—ever since his mother had taught him to read and write at age three—Seth had lived much of his life on paper. He wrote stories and made drawings for Mum. Made her smile, made her say she was proud.

Later, when she was going through what he and Dad thought was a difficult pregnancy, Seth sat beside her bed and read aloud to her. He was twelve. They'd gotten through most of
Great Expectations
before the doctor discovered that there was no baby growing inside her after all. An operation took place too late; Rosemary Grealy bled to death on the operating table before they had finished removing the fist of malignant flesh from her womb.

Though the door was closed, Seth could still smell the greasy smoke from the pan of chips his dad had burned earlier. Dad was gone now, almost certainly down to the pub, that was if he hadn't toppled into a ditch on the way. Seth smirked at the thought of his father's legs thrashing. No such luck, though. God looks after drunks and fools, and damned if old Oliver Grealy didn't qualify on both counts.

Usually the smell of chips, even his dad's burnt ones, made Seth hungry. Tonight he didn't have room for food. The leftover energy from the meeting turned him restless, wishing to do a hundred things but unable to concentrate on any. He'd gotten Peyton's number and wanted to ring him, but that would make Seth look queer as well as soft. He sometimes wondered if he might be a bit queer; the way he felt when he saw a picture of Elvis or James Dean wasn't the same as when he looked at a beautiful girl, but there was something sexual about it nonetheless. Something raw.

He wasn't queer for Peyton, though. Theirs was a meeting of minds. Minds and guitars: the two things Seth was betting on to get him out of Leyborough and into a real life.

* * * *

Peyton, upon their meeting, did not experience the twinge of sexual confusion that Seth did: his heterosexuality was so unambiguous that he'd never even given it a thought. He was clear-skinned and dark-eyed, girls liked him, and he accepted that with an uncomplicated enjoyment.

He was thrilled, though, for he too had sensed the possibility of a real partnership. He knew other boys at school who listened to American rock and roll, but nobody who knew the flesh and the lonesome bones of it as Seth did. Upon arriving home, he dashed around the house to annoy his parents and sisters, telling them again and again, “I've met a kid who knows more about music than I do, and we're going to have a band!” Even though Seth had said nothing today about forming a band, Peyton repeated this as if it were the gospel truth. As far as he was concerned, it was.

The family had heard plans for Peyton's bands before; they were only surprised at the admission that someone he'd just met knew more than he did. Peyton had always been a good-natured, polite boy, but his sisters often accused him of believing he was smarter than anyone else in Leyborough, and Peyton never denied it.

Finally, he went to his room and sat up late with his guitar, teaching himself a whole new chord that night. He knew he was good, but he had to get a lot better: for Seth, for the band. Seth only wanted out of Leyborough; he'd said as much. Peyton wanted everything.

* * * *

The following week, Seth reckoned enough time had gone by that he could ring Peyton without looking soft or queer. They met at Peyton's house the next day. Peyton answered the door holding his guitar. Seth's own was strapped across his back. It would not be quite proper to say they went to Peyton's bedroom like a pair of newly-weds approaching their honeymoon chamber, for they did not even know they were married yet. Later, though, they would both make the comparison.

They felt their way through a number of songs they both knew, just getting each other's rhythm: “Hound Dog,” “Maybellene,” “Twenty Flight Rock.” Then Seth played one he'd written himself. The words were mostly a lot of nonsense, but the tune, he thought, had a certain snarl to it.

“That's really good,” said Peyton. “You know, though, I think the chorus could be a little tighter—"

“It's not supposed to be
tight
."

Peyton just smiled and started strumming again, a tune Seth didn't recognize at first. Then he realized it was the one he'd just played, run through Peyton's filter. Later, the same thing would drive him to rage, but this first time he felt only fascination. To have someone—another musician—play his music back to him with a twist was weirdly intoxicating.

“Huh,” said Seth by way of acknowledgment. “Not bad. Written anything yourself?"

“Oh, yeah, lots of stuff. Listen to this.” He began another song in a chord Seth didn't even know. The lyrics weren't any better than Seth's, but it was beginning to dawn on Seth that this kid couldn't just play guitar, he could sing too. And their voices sounded good together. Maybe they could figure out some kind of harmony thing, something like the black girl groups did.

They played for hours, until their fingertips were reddened and grooved, until their throats were hoarse. Then they agreed to do it again the next day. When Seth had gone, Peyton sat at the old upright piano in his parents' parlor and played one last song, not a rock tune but one that summed up his feelings perfectly: “It's Almost Like Being in Love."

iv

There was a musical revolution afoot in Leyborough in 1961. The problem was, Harold Loomis was the only man who knew it existed.

He'd seen the band play two weeks ago at a club called Blaggers, a filthy back room full of teenagers drunk on cheap ale and nascent rock and roll. They had heard the music of Elvis Presley, Chuck Berry, Little Richard; it made them feel isolated, hemmed in by the sea and the times. Now they were hearing similar music on their own soil, played by boys they'd grown up with. The atmosphere in the club was simmering, truculent yet elated, and most definitely drenched in hormones. Harold had listened to half the set and gone home early. But he knew the band was something special.

Apparently they'd been playing together for about a year. Harold heard of them through a friend, who in turn had heard of them from some piece of rough trade he'd picked up in Yardley Park. “They're fuckin' brilliant,” the boy had supposedly said. “Every kid I know is talkin' about them. If they was to put out a record, it'd sell a hundred fuckin' copies."

The idea of selling a hundred copies did not impress Harold—he had worked in his father's record store for years—but the idea that the youth of Leyborough was talking about this band interested him tremendously. He was twenty-seven, but he tried to keep up with the kids' taste in order to stock the store, and English music had been out of vogue for some time now. They wanted American rock and roll music. If a hometown band had captivated them, Harold wanted to know about it.

Most likely, he'd expected, they would simply be copying the American stuff. But they weren't. They had obviously been influenced by it, probably would not have existed without it, but they already had their own voice. The singer and lead guitarist, Seth Grealy, was a twenty-one-year-old firebrand: long and lean, with hair the color of rust and sly Satanic eyes. The second guitarist, Peyton Masters, was nineteen but looked closer to sixteen; with his fuck-me eyes and angelic harmonies, he could have been the schoolboy in a dirty old man's fantasies. (
Not
his own fantasies, Harold reminded himself; his interest in these boys was entirely professional). The rhythm section were nothing special, apparently a couple of Grealy's ne'er-do-well friends, but no matter. That was only one of the many things with which Harold could assist them.