Devil Music - Chapter 3 (continued)
I was shocked. It was one thing to risk
being caught out by the law, quite another to risk being found
out by your parents. But that's what I liked about Frank: he
really didn't give a stuff. Not about things like that. He just
ran free - from school, from work, from parents and
girlfriends. Even from me. Nothing seemed to touch Frank. Just
the music…
I envied him. Apart from anything else, I
had never known anyone with such a large record collection. He
reckoned he'd bought every Top 10 single there had been since
he was 12, and judging by the piles and piles of old records in
his room, I believed him. Now he had started buying LPs and he
already had over a hundred. All the Beatles, which he claimed
he now hated, all the Dylans, which he would recite lines from
endlessly, loads of blues and soul, and loads of bonkers stuff
like Cilla Black, Russ Conway, Tommy Steele… really
strange gear. He even had some classical, that's how utterly
bloody bonkers he was. I wasn't sure he even liked half of it;
he just enjoyed the looks on people's faces when he suddenly
put 'Teddy Bears Picnic' by Pinky and Perky on, followed by
bloody Beethoven or something.
The first time he offered me a joint, I
didn't know what to do. I knew I couldn't turn it down, but I
wasn't ready. He just sprang it on me. Like another daft record
he'd picked up at Shepherd's Bush market.
“What does it do?” I asked,
apprehensively.
“Do?” he repeated. “What
do you think it does? It gets you high, man!”
Frank was the first person I knew who
actually called people 'man'. He was the first person I knew
who said a lot of things. That's why he was always getting
beaten up, I think. For saying things other people didn't.
Even so, I wasn't sure I liked the sound
of this. “What, like I'll think I can fly, you mean? Like
that, you mean?”
He looked at me incredulously, then smiled
the same triumphant smile he reserved for playing a Dylan song
he knew you'd never heard before.
“My god! You're a bloody virgin,
aren't you?” It was the biggest insult he could fling.
“I am not a bloody
virgin!”
“You bloody well are! A bloody great
big bloody virgin! You've never done this before, have
you?” He looked at me. “Well?”
“No.”
“Right, well it's about time you
did. About time you lost your bloody virginity,” he said,
throwing the last word at me like another blackened knife.
I sat there enthralled as he stuck the
cigarette papers together, expertly peeled open an Embassy and
scooped out the tobacco. I was worried but sort of excited,
too. We were entering the forbidden zone, a place I had
lingered on the threshold of for long enough to know I would
have to make my move eventually. Now, it seemed, that time had
come. But which way would I go - in or out? Up or down?
When he produced the dope itself my eyes
nearly fell out my head. He kept it in an old football sock at
the back of the wardrobe in his bedroom. It looked like a small
black lump of earth wrapped in sweetie paper.
“Here, smell it,” he said,
holding it up to my nose.
I sniffed. It smelled like perfumed shit.
“It smells like perfumed
shit,” I said.
“Yeah. That's how you know it's
fresh.”
“Fresh?”
“Yeah… good.”
I wasn't sure if that was good or not.
“Strong,” he said.
“Takes your head off…”
Oh, god…
I had read about drugs. There was one
bloke in the paper who thought he could fly and jumped out the
window and died. Frank's bedroom was upstairs and I was worried
what would happen if I thought I could fly and tried to jump
out the window. Would Frank save me? Or would he think he could
fly, too, and we'd both end up dead in his mum's back garden?
“What if we die?” I blurted,
then wished I already had.
But instead of taking the mickey he just
carried on rolling the joint.
“We're all gonna die one day,”
he said, like this was a film or something.
I sat there cross-legged on the floor,
wondering what to say next, as I often did at Frank's, but
nothing good came. He finished rolling the joint, then lit it.
He took a couple of hungry puffs, inhaled deeply, then offered
it to me. I took it. It felt like a lit firework in my hand. I
held it away from me and looked. The smoke streamed off it much
worse than from a normal cigarette and the smell was something
rotten. It seemed to fill the whole room. The smell of
danger…
“Go on then,” he said.
“You're wasting it!”
I put the lit joint to my lips and gave it
a little suck, then quickly blew the smoke back out again.
“Mongoloid,” he said,
snatching it back off me. “Not like that, like
this…” He put it in his mouth and took four or five
really deep tugs, then held it all down inside for a really
long time. Then he let go and a big grey cloud of smoke came
jetting out of his face like steam from a ship's funnel.
He sat back with a superior look on his
face. “Look at you!” he snorted. “You should
see your face!”
I reached over and grabbed the joint back
off him. I still had no intention of actually smoking it, I
just wanted to show him. I took a couple of good, deep drags
and held the smoke in my mouth. But before I could blow it out
again I hiccupped and began to gulp uncontrollably. The smoke
flew into my lungs. I felt like I was going to be sick, and for
a split second I saw the vomit gushing out of the top of my
head like a fountain…
Then… it stopped. The smoke somehow
left me and everything went back to normal. Or a version of
normal. Just me and Frank, sitting there watching the other for
signs.
“Congratulations,” he said.
“You are no longer a bloody virgin. How does it
feel?”
Without waiting for a reply, he got up and
put a record on. Dylan. 'My Back Pages'. Predictable. It had
that line in it he always sang along to: the one about 'the
lies that life is black and white'.
The truth was, I didn't feel any different
at all. I wasn't all spazzed out or anything and I definitely
didn't think I could fly. I didn't think anything much at all
and I began to wonder if smoking the dope was like when he made
you listen to a classical record: just something he pretended
to get something out of, just to see if you'd be mad enough to
fall for it and join in.
I began to wonder about a lot of things
all at once. Frank rolled another joint and this time I managed
to hold it down without too much fuss. It hurt my throat but it
was worth it: I had gone up in Frank's estimation, and he left
me alone at last and went on about all the other mongs and
masturbators we knew.
There were more joints and more records
but still nothing happened. I stopped worrying about it and
started getting into the music. Really getting into it. I
searched out Booker T's 'Bootleg' and put that on. It was a
real fave I must have played hundreds of times, but I had never
heard it quite like that before. It just sort of
shimmered out of the record player and began to float around my
head; a flood of sound and colour drenching my mind in deep
pools of almost sickly pleasure. When it had finished, I wanted
to put it on again but Frank wouldn't let me. Frank could be a
mong, too, sometimes…
Time passed, lots of time, then suddenly I
was aware that it was dark and that the music had stopped and
that Frank was asleep on the floor. I wondered if I had been
asleep too because I felt now like I had just woken up… I
was hungry, starving, I could have eaten a horse… a
pantomime horse… whatever that meant. But I didn't know
what to do about it. Any of it. I just sat there in the dark
waiting for Frank to wake up or for something else to happen.
More than anything, I needed a drink.
Badly. My throat felt like it had been set fire to. A drink
and… oh god… a bacon sandwich! God, yes! I'd have
murdered for one of those right then! Murdered you with my bare
hands, I would…
The ringing of the phone finally wakes me
again but for a moment I am lost, unsure of my chart position.
Then it all comes flooding back like an ocean of
shit…
The phone sounds like it's been ringing
forever. I know how to read the ringing of a phone and this one
has a decidedly ominous tone to it. I give it the finger.
“Eat shit and die!” But it refuses to stop, like it
knows I'm there, and I realise I'm going to have to deal with
it. Shit…
I swing my legs out of bed and see what
that feels like. Try standing… OK, OK. Then totter over
to the phone with my eyes still closed. It stops as I get to
it. Fuck's sake…
Too late now, I'm up. I limp over to the
window, draw back the curtains and take a squint outside. The
shock sends me staggering backwards, my arms raised in front of
my face like a vampire shielding from the light.
I collapse back onto the bed, temporarily
blinded. Still daylight then, I think. Something, I suppose. I
wait for my eyes to clear then check my watch: nearly six.
Shit, shit, shit, shit, shit…
I force myself to stand again and put one
foot in front of the other. I manage to get to the phone
without breaking anything that isn't already broken and dial my
direct line at the office.
Fee picks up. Good old Fee.
“It's me…”
“Joe! Where the hell are you? I've
been trying to ring you! Felix is going absolutely
apeshit!”
“All right, all right… Look,
is he still there?”
“Yes, he's in a meeting with Peter
Grant, he wants to get the Heroes on the next Zeppelin
tour.”
“No way,” I say, appalled.
“They'll get eaten alive…”
“Yes, well, maybe you should tell
him that,” she huffs. “If you ever get here.
Wait… Are you still at home?”
“Christ…”
“I don't believe you!”
“Listen, I'm on my way in,
OK?”
“Where have I heard that
before?”
“Leave it out, Fee.”
An immense involuntary yawn issues from my
body like the demented cry of a man falling off a cliff.
