The final show. We walked offstage and into the dressing room, the yells of the crowd bouncing off the walls like the bloody yelps of spectators at a cockfight. The show was a success. You could hear a hush descend slightly as the audience realized that now that we had vacated the stage Garbage was preparing to make their appearance. Kelly hugged each member of the band in turn.
“Well done, mate,” she told each of us.
There was a twinge of sadness that it was over. It seemed so anticlimactic to go back to my flat after a week of carefree living on a bus. Even being in the little bunk bed above our drummer, Chris, sleeping in a little darkened coffin-space as we drove all night from city to city, seemed much more appealing than another night in my own bed. I opened a beer, took a last look around the dressing room, and said to Chris: “Let’s go check what’s happening in the audience.”
We walked through the back tunnels of Brixton Academy and made our way to the VIP area, which was a room above the audience with TV monitors to show the performance in close-up and a huge glass window looking down on the stage. I looked around. There was Susan, with some girl from the methadone clinic she had obviously started hanging around with. The pair of them looked like they had wandered in from the street. I walked over and said hey.
“Hey,” Susan said, pointing to her friend, “this is Julie.”
“Hi, Julie.”
“Nice show. Well done.”
“Thanks.”
Then the three of us sank into silence for a moment.
“We were just saying,” Julie said, breaking in, “I know a geezer round here called Ahmed who’s had some pretty good gear recently. You want to come over to his place? He’s close by, like.”
“Well, maybe later. I have to speak to people, you know.”
“Oh yeah, right. No worries.”
“D’you want to go now, and we can come back?” Susan asked Julie.
“Well…if you don’t mind. Before it gets too late….”
I felt a flood of relief. I had never felt it before, and as it happened I immediately felt like an asshole, but I suddenly became embarrassed by being seen around Susan. I silently cursed her! She hadn’t even made the effort to clean herself up. Her hair was unwashed and sticking up in clumps on her head. She looked like she had just rolled out of bed so she could head out to score. Although I had managed to downplay my drug dependence to everyone in the band, I realized that as soon as they got a look at Susan they would have to know that something was up. The girl had junkie written all over her. Her face was sunken in, her pupils barely there. She had obviously bathed herself in thick, pungent perfume to cover up her stink rather than subject herself to a shower. Since becoming an addict, I had become something of a stranger to personal hygiene myself, but when I was in close proximity to straight people I at least made the effort to try and wash some of the stench off me. I hurried the pair of them toward the exit and told Susan I would call her to tell her where the after-party would be.
Walking back into the VIP room I saw Dan deep in conversation with a girl. Well, I noticed the girl first. She was olive-skinned and beautiful, with striking cheekbones and full, red lips. She seemed somehow apart from everyone else in the room. It was in the way she stood, the way she dressed. It was as if everyone else in the place were in black and white and she was the only one in color. Suddenly, I felt nervous. It was the kind of nervousness that I hadn’t felt in a long time and it took me by surprise. Dan saw me staring at them and beckoned me over.
He smiled at me broadly as I walked over to them. I stared at her face as I approached. I couldn’t help it. I had never seen anyone like her. She had the most beautiful lips, and perfect, dark eyes. She looked like she was inwardly laughing at me.
“You finally get to meet!” Dan grinned as I walked over and said hello. I didn’t understand.
“Finally?”
“Oh, you remember,” the girl said, and as soon as she opened her mouth to speak I knew. I knew immediately who it was and there was embarrassment for sure, but also a curious kind of sexual thrill that this girl was the one…“I believe you were going to bend me over and stick it into me from behind?”
“I’ll leave you two to get acquainted.” Dan laughed, splitting the scene, leaving us there in the dull light, regarding each other.
We smiled, but surprisingly there was no awkwardness. I did not feel self-conscious in the slightest. In fact, for a reason that I could not immediately fathom, I was brimming over with carefree self-confidence, as if I were eighteen and still vibrating from my first ever line of cocaine.
“I’m sorry for the obscene phone call,” I told her. “I was drunk and feeling mischievous.”
She smiled. “Don’t worry. I’ve heard worse. I’m from New York—you’d have to work hard to shock me.”
The conversation flowed easily. We talked about music, art, and books. We seemed to share all of the same reference points, which was a disconcerting experience. Vanessa was a fascinating girl. She grew up surrounded by the beauty and insanity of New York City, an Ecuadorian punk-rock kid from Queens who cut her teeth on the Lower East Side’s hardcore and punk scenes…sipping Ballantine Ale and skipping homework to catch the Ramones at the Ritz, slam-dancing to the Circle Jerks at CBGB’s Sunday hardcore matinee, before graduating to Disco 2000 and the club kid scene…She eventually split the States altogether to study fashion in London.
As we talked she astounded me with her street smarts and dry humor, and the dizzying amount of scenes that she had been involved in by such a young age. She currently lived in the East End and worked for the fashion designer Vivienne Westwood. I felt the odd sensation that I was talking to some kind of mirror of myself, or a mirror of who I would like to be. At one point I said, “I am on an Egon Schiele kick right now,” not even knowing what it meant, but it made sense to her, and I didn’t feel like a fool.
I realized that maybe the reason that I could talk to her like this, without tripping myself up by being nervous or trying to impress her, was because I could look at the pair of us with a dispassionate eye and say that honestly, I felt that there was no reason why this woman would ever show an interest in me. I was a bad bet. A drug addict. Married. Unemployable. So I laid it out on the table and tried not to hide anything. It was a liberating feeling knowing that I could tell her about myself and not be afraid of rejection, because I was already rejected.
But the strangest thing happened.
She kept talking to me.
She didn’t seem fazed by all of the bad stuff.
And I wondered what she saw when she looked at me.
We were oblivious as Garbage took to the stage and started playing, and the crowd at Brixton Academy began to cheer and surge to the front. It took a while before either of us even noticed the thunderous music blaring into the room. Everything had faded into the background, and we were talking about New York, and I was feeling something in my chest that I hadn’t felt for a long time. I kept asking myself, “Why is she still here? Why is she still talking to me? Why is she interested? What does she see?” because her eyes did not betray any of the things that I had become accustomed to over the past few years: the suspicious look of someone who is watching a heroin addict, the pitying looks from an old friend, the superior glare of the caseworkers and doctors, the pure, terrified need of Susan. No, she was looking at me with something else in her eyes, a look and a feeling that had not been around me for so long that it momentarily felt arcane, alien, foreign.
I glanced over to the huge window that looked down onto the stage for a moment, and I realized for the first time that the band was playing, but more than that I caught a glimpse of myself reflected in the mirror, and what I saw made me jump.
Like some cheap shock effect from a bad horror movie, the reflection of what was going on in the room did not match up with my mind’s perception of what should be there.
There was Vanessa, listening intently to me as I was speaking, looking momentarily confused as the words caught in my throat the moment I realized that she was talking to me.
But it was the me of seven years ago, it’s true, I saw what she was seeing for a moment and it terrified and liberated me, because I looked new.
I was not broken anymore. My eyes were no longer the eyes of someone who had seen the inside of the methadone clinics and the flophouses. My arms, underneath my shirt, I instinctively knew were unscarred and unblemished, the mountain of mangled flesh and calcified veins had somehow been removed by God’s hand, and they were as smooth and untouched and unruined as they were when I first came to London a lifetime ago.
And I stopped talking, struck dumb by this revelation.
Thinking that I was looking over to the band, she said:
“Do you want to go and see them play?”
and I answered “sure” although that was not on my mind at all
and we walked together into the crowd, making our way to the front as the band played on
and for a moment I realized
I was reborn.