Rockoholic (23 page)

I shrug, fumbling for words. I can’t think of a single thing to say. It eventually comes to me. “You’re our hero. We love how you’re like us . . . an outcast. How you don’t fit into the hole you’ve been put into. Like, a square peg.”

“I’m like you?” He smiles. “You’ve met me. You still think I’m like you?”

“Yeah. You talk about it in your lyrics. About being in a world where nobody understands you. About being alone. And we both like art. And books. Stephen King and stuff . . .”

“I’m just a man. I’m not a hero, Jody. My image is engineered. You do know that? I don’t mean to be patronizing or anything but you saw me on that DVD, right? Talking about my parents’ divorce, Dad’s death. Reading books on the bus? You probably went out and bought those books, too, right?”

“Yeah, and I liked them. Well, the Stephen King ones I liked. Mostly. Didn’t really get a lot of the poetry. We’ve got a lot in common. My parents split up as well.”

Jackson laughs. “Yeah? Your dad slept with prostitutes? Gave your mom syphilis? Your mom shoot your dad at point-blank range? That what ended it for your folks? What a coincidence.”

I shake my head. “No. My dad had a gambling addiction. Mum kicked him out and moved us in with Grandad.”

He leans in to me. “My mom kicked
me
out and adopted heroin. Your mom shoot up, too?”

I frown. “No, of course not.”

“Don’t put your life in the hands of a rock-and-roll band, Jody. We’ll throw it all away,” he says, looking pleased with himself, as though he’s just bowed to an audience and gone offstage.
Fuck you, everybody, good night.

I laugh, though I’m not sure why. I’ve heard that before. One of his lyrics perhaps? No, not one of his. It’s Oasis. “You must like some people?”

“Not really. I don’t get close if I can help it. It’s their lack of trustworthiness, I guess.”

The sky outside the top window is completely dark now. The only bedside light I could find him was Halley’s old baby light display shoved in the coat closet, so I crank it up for him. It flashes out its beams of moons and stars all over the garage ceiling and a tinny little “Twinkle, Twinkle” jingle starts up.

He squints up at it, then back at me. “You look disappointed,” he says.

“No, no I’m not,” I say, thinking hard about what to say next, now that he’s upset my apple cart and eaten every one of my apples. “I didn’t really understand you, I suppose.”

“Never meet your heroes, Jody. You’ll always be disappointed.” He looks up at the stars and moons on the ceiling. “They’ll either turn out to be complete monsters or complete bores.”

“My grandad used to say that. ‘The reality will never be as good as the fantasy.’”

“It’s true. A while ago I started getting real bad stage fright, just before we went on, like major throw-ups. Sometimes I’d have to go off in the middle of a set, puke, then come back on and sing. Grohman used to have to push me back on sometimes. It was torture.”

“Didn’t anyone help you?”

“Oh yeah, Grohman helped.” He fumbles around on the floor for a pack of cigarettes, then for the lighter. He doesn’t say another word until he’s lit up and taken a long drag. Half the cigarette turns to ash. “He got me my own personal physician, who’d get me whatever I needed, whatever Grohman thought I needed. But I had to go onstage, I just had to. If I was sick, if I had broken bones, he’d have me full to the brim with painkillers. There was no choice. He had managed this band before that constantly let him down.”

I had read about it in
Lungs
magazine. The band was called Eddie’s Revenge. The lead singer took his own life on their tour bus during the Warped Tour 2006. Danny Ruffio. Twenty-three.

“Grohman wasn’t going to make the same mistake again, I guess. He was the one who got me started on the pills.”

“Grohman did?”

“Yeah. He could see me starting to slide on the whole thing, starting to hate it, so he said it was to give me back my confidence, arrogance. Energy. Excitement. Like when you chug an energy drink, you feel like you could bounce off a wall. One pill has the effect of two energy drinks. And then after a gig, I’ll take a couple of black ones to bring me back down again, like a rock falling out of the sky. By the time we hit Cardiff, the night we met, I was doing five pills a night.”

“Five?”

“Yeah. One wasn’t kicking in at all. Two wasn’t even cutting it. I got hasty.”

“That’s when you went offstage. After the first song, I remember you walking off. I thought you were addicted but you cleaned up, stopped drinking and everything?”

“Yeah, Grohman’s PR guys put that out there to give people hope. He does this whole spin-doctor thing to make it look like I’m just so psyched to be in the band.” He stubs the cigarette out on the wall behind him.

“So you don’t enjoy anything about it?”

He looks at me for an endless time. His cheeks dimple and I think he’s going to smile, but he doesn’t. “I enjoy it when I’ve had my pills. I hate being addicted to those things, but those things are the only things that let me do what I do.”

“But you haven’t needed any for the last few days.”

“No?” He actually smiles. I haven’t seen him smile yet in the flesh, since the night of the concert when he handed me back the moon rock. I can see his proper dimples now and I remember why I wanted him so badly. Now he’s smiling at me, without the drugs, without any pretense, and it feels like ten sunrises. He picks up my sketchbook, flicks past pictures of Mac, of my mum, of a bloke in the pub, a woman sitting outside the church smoking a cigarette. Mac in his Riff outfit when he was in the town production of
West Side Story
. “You go to art school?”

“No. I only draw people and stuff.”

He flicks to a sketch I did of Mum falling asleep on the sofa. “You should go to art college.”

My eyebrows rise involuntarily. “Oh yeah. Total Thrillsville. I hated school. If it wasn’t for Mac, I’d never have gone in at all.”

“You talk about Mac a lot,” he says.

“Yeah. He’s . . . great. Mac saved you, do you remember?”

“What?”

“When we were coming back from Cardiff. When you had your hissy fit and threw all your clothes over the bridge. He pulled you back. Talked you down. He was amazing.”

“I don’t recall.”

“I’m not surprised. I’d be pretty embarrassed if I remembered doing that.”

“You’re pretty into Mac, huh?” he says. “It’s good that you’re so close to him. Your boyfriend should be your best friend.” His smile goes dimpled. “Recognize that? That’s one of —”

I cut him off. “Yeah,” I say. “It’s one of your lyrics, from ‘Tortuous.’ ‘Your boyfriend should be your best friend and the song that rocks you to sleep.’ Very clever. But he’s not my boyfriend, he’s just my best friend. Mac’s gay, anyway. He likes musicals and wears mascara and carries hand sanitizer around with him and stuff.”

“I like musicals. I wear mascara, black nail polish. I’m not gay.”

“I know, but —”

“Has he actually ever told you he’s gay?”

I think hard for a minute, raking my hand through the feathers on the floor and wading desperately through my mind to find the moment he told me, the day that changed his life. I think back to the last year of school, all those snide remarks from Luke Mabley and those guffawing trolls who couldn’t handle the fact that some boys didn’t play rugby.

But however much Mabley would rip him, Mac never denied it. He would have denied it if he wasn’t, wouldn’t he? “He cries at the end of movies,” I say, “and that ChildLine commercial.”

“So?” says Jackson.

“And he only hangs out with me really because . . . I don’t know why, really. I always think he could do better for a best friend than me, but for some reason he’s stuck with me. And he used to take ballet when he was little. And he hates sports. And he likes shopping. . . .”

Jackson takes a bite of sausage and then a slug of juice. “Well, he seems to like spending his time with you. And” — he smirks — “look at the features you’ve picked out on these.” He flips through the sketches. “His hands. His smile. His stomach when his shirt rides up . . . you’ve drawn that a few times. What does that say about you?”

I’ve gone furiously red in both cheeks and I pray he can’t see it in the darkness. He turns past portraits of the bridge that I pushed him off, and my sister playing hockey, and the long shot I did of Grandad in his wheelchair, looking out over the top lake at Weston Park. He shows me the page. “That your gramps?”

I nod. “Me and Mac took him and Cree on all these day-trips in his last few weeks. The day I drew him, we were at Weston Park. It’s this stately home, not far from here. He’d fallen asleep beside the top pond. When we’d gone there months before, he was so full of life. He wasn’t in the chair then. He’d gone skinny-dipping in the top pond. Threw his underpants into a tree. We got thrown out. They let us back in again the next time, though, cos they didn’t recognize him. He’d changed. You know, he’d got really thin and stuff.”

“Huh,” he says, lying on the feathers, resting his head on his elbow. “He died recently?”

“Yeah. His funeral was two Tuesdays ago. Everything bad always happens on a Tuesday. My dad left. I got my GCSE results — that’s like the main high school exams here, you can leave school younger than in the States. And Grandad got his test results. All on a Tuesday. The day he died, me and Mac took him out.”

He frowns. “You . . . took him out? Like Tony Soprano? For real?”

“No, God no. We took him out for the day, on one of our day-trips, me, Mac, and Cree. He wanted to ‘do young people things’ to cheer himself up. His skin was all yellowy and he was so thin. There was a fair on just outside Bristol so we took him there. He wasn’t allowed on the rides. I could see him way down below us in his chair. Cree was asleep on his lap. We tore through the sky on the roller coaster. He looked so sad. He had this toy monkey I’d won, Velcroed at the paws around his neck, and my bag of cotton candy on his head to make him look like he had hair.”

Jackson frowns.

“Because of the chemo,” I add.

“I know,” he says, like that’s not what he was frowning about. Jackson’s just looking at me. I think he’s going to say something else, but he doesn’t.

“I remember we were walking past the fountains opposite the Hippodrome and Mac did this dance. He’d just been to a costume fitting for
Rocky Horror
and he was so buzzing. He did this routine to show Grandad and got absolutely soaked in the fountains. ‘Don’t Dream It, Be It’ were the lyrics. He was doing all these thrusts and kicking the water and he took off this old woman’s scarf and he was rubbing it between his legs and Cree was getting soaked as well and trying to copy him. It was so funny. People clapped at the end. I’ve never seen Grandad laugh so much. It looked like it was hurting him to laugh. He and Mac got on great.” Jackson’s eyebrows rise, then go down again, but he doesn’t say anything, so I carry on.

“We went to see the Banksy exhibit at the museum. The queue outside was endless. Grandad pretended to have Tourette’s and started flailing about in his chair and swearing so they’d let us in quicker. Grandad liked graffiti. ‘Why would you rather see a boring gray wall when someone can put so many colors onto it?’ he’d say.”

“What an anarchist,” says Jackson. “He sounds cool.”

“He was. He wanted to go and get a Frappuccino, so me and Mac took him to Starbucks at the top of Park Street, this big steep hill with cool boutiques and cafés down both sides. I couldn’t get the wheelchair up the step of the shop so I waited outside on the pavement and Mac took Cree in to change her and get the drinks. Grandad was just looking ahead. Mac came back with the tray and I reached to take my drink, and in that second, Grandad put his hand on mine and whispered, ‘
Don’t Dream It, Be It
.’”

Jackson looks sheepish, blurring into nervous. “And then he . . . fell asleep?”

“No. He pulled the brake off and sped down the hill. I watched him do it. Zooming across side streets, weaving in and out of pedestrians. I heard him yelling all the way down, but it wasn’t a frightened yell. It was happy. Like me and Mac on the roller coaster. When we finally got to the bottom of the hill, it was all over. He’d smashed straight through the window of this sex shop and he was covered in . . . frilly knickers and stuff. It was horrible. Local papers had a field day.”

“Jeez,” says Jackson.

I nod. “He’d tried it a couple of weeks before when we’d taken him to Longleat safari park. Tried to throw himself out of Mum’s car as we were driving through the lions.”

“Hope I die before I get old,” says Jackson with a smile.

“Huh?”

Jackson starts laughing really badly.

“What’s so funny?” I ask, really not seeing the joke. I look behind me, thinking maybe something’s happened that I can’t see. I touch my head, thinking maybe something’s on it I don’t know about. “My grandad dies and you think it’s funny?” I feel the raging sting come into my eyes. This is absolutely the final straw. I’m about to get to my feet and sling his miserable body right out the door when he rolls back onto his side to look at me.

“Your gramps was a
legend
,” he says. “Don’t you see what he did? He was dying, a terrible, undignified death, and there was nothing you or he or anyone could do to prevent that.”

A tear drops from my eye. “Yeah, I know.” I’m trying desperately to wipe my tears away before he sees but they keep dropping and dropping and I can’t wipe them away fast enough. And then I’m hoping he
does
see so that he’ll reach out and hug me and be all warm.

“You’d had a great day, a day doing all this fun, happy stuff that he could only watch from afar,” he continues. “Your grandad knew his time was coming and he didn’t just accept it, he beat death to it. He wanted
his
turn on the roller coaster. He’d probably been planning to do that all day. Got the trajectory of his chair just right, heading straight for a sex shop. Legend.”

I hadn’t thought about it like that before. I’d just thought how it was so like Grandad to do something like that. Something stupid, mindless, something so totally shocking and unexpected of an old man. Something people would talk about and laugh about.