Once I touched Chrissie Hynde’s boot with my right forefinger. The last time I’d seen the Pretenders, it had been at a really small venue. As I clung to the stage, Chrissie kicked her leg up right over my head. She danced. She told meat eaters they would get what they deserved. I was in reach of her and sublimely happy. I never wanted to impinge on Chrissie Hynde’s personal space. I remembered an article I’d read in a music paper once about Chrissie Hynde kicking out the windows of a police car with the quotation, “I don’t like to be touched.” Very gently, so she wouldn’t notice, I touched the toe of her boot.
I was telling Melissa about it. “It was blue fake suede and very soft. I can still feel it in my mind whenever I want to. I can make love to you with this finger,” I said slyly, and Melissa blushed. “Chrissie Hynde once wrote me a letter, you know.”
“Chrissie Hynde wrote you a letter?”
“Yes, when I lived outside DC. She was in town for a PETA benefit at the Willard, a fancy hotel near the White House. I like the name because the film Willard is about rats. I tried to sneak in. I’d taken a photo of the Firestone Tire factory in Akron, Ohio, where Chrissie Hynde is from when I went there on a pilgrimage and put it in an envelope with a note about how her album packed! was released on May 21, 1990, the same day I was arrested at the big ACT UP demonstration at the National Institutes of Health. While I was waiting in the holding cell all day, I thought about how much I wanted to get that album. How I was in here, stuck in that cell, and it was out there, in the record shops. How knowing that made me feel peace of mind.”
“When did you get out?”
“Later that evening.”
“So you were released on the same day,” Melissa said.
“What do you mean?”
“You were released the same day the Pretenders album was released. You had the same release date.”
I smiled because I’d never thought of that. “I do consider it our album. All the PETA people were dressed in tuxedos and evening gowns. I was wearing an ACT UP T-shirt and decided if anyone asked I’d say it stood for the Animal Coalition To Unleash Pets. Chrissie Hynde was already inside, and I couldn’t get in. But the security guard, Joe Turner, let me speak to a PETA representative. I gave him the envelope and asked him to give it to Chrissie Hynde, but I didn’t think he would.
“About three months later, a blue envelope fell through the mail slot in my front door with a London postmark. I didn’t know anyone in London at the time, and I couldn’t make out the name ‘Hynde’ scrawled on the back. It smelled good. Like the perfume of chilly London air. It was a three-page, handwritten letter from Chrissie Hynde. She had written:
I’m glad to hear you’ve enjoyed the music and that it’s been cheering you up since 1979—It’s been bumming me out since 1979!! (Not really.)
Thank you for the “lovely” picture of Firestone Rubber Co. The place just ain’t what it used to be—it’s not blue collar any more . . . I’m afraid you must be a misguided youth to make a pilgrimage to Akron for any reason, let alone because of me, but I’ll try to take it as a compliment & leave it at that.
“And she’d signed it, ‘love Chrissie.’ I could have swooned.”
I remembered when my best mates and I had driven back to Exeter from Plymouth. We’d stopped at a motorway café for a cup of tea, and we bunged all our 20p coins into the jukebox. The new Pretenders single “Message of Love” had just come out, and we punched in the buttons to make it play repeatedly. We danced to it and the other patrons left after it came on for about the twentieth time. That memory made me feel warm and safe.
Thinking about Chrissie Hynde and PETA reminded me of the pet rat I’d had after graduate school, how she used to jump on my head to wake me up and take showers with me. I showed Melissa my favorite photograph of her sitting on my red Stratocaster, looking into the camera with a soulful expression.
Melissa said, “You can see her soul pouring out through her eyes. Like there’s so much of it, it won’t all fit inside. Do you want another pet rat? Why didn’t you say? We can get you one.”
“I’m not ready.”
“There’s some wicked graffiti I’ve got to show you.” Melissa threw my denim jacket at me. It had badges from my Exeter days on the front: “The Clash” against a graphic of blue policemen, “Gays Against Nazis,” “How Dare You Presume that I’m a Heterosexual?” and a black-and-white one of Chrissie Hynde’s head.
I wrapped my green-and-white Exeter scarf around my neck. “Graffiti?”
Melissa put on a green anorak. “There’s a graffiti artist called Banksy—he works mostly in South Bank and the East End—who has loads of rat art.”
“No,” I said. “Not rat graffiti?”
Melissa took my hand as we walked to her car in the brief, cold sunshine.
We got into Melissa’s dark-green MG and motored across the bridge to South London, the Zombies blasting on the car stereo. Melissa found a stenciled picture of rats putting up a flag and taking over the city. “I’m not sure it’s meant to be complimentary, but I thought you’d enjoy it.” She took me through the East End. On Brick Lane, “No War” was the caption, in red, for a picture of a rat holding an umbrella to protect herself from a falling bomb. Then Melissa showed me something spectacular on an overpass above Old Street in Shoreditch. A row of riot police with yellow smiley faces stretched all the way across the red-painted metal bridge with the caption, “Wrong War.” Under the arches, posters lined the walls as we sped alongside the black taxis that reminded me of water bugs.
I put on Jefferson Airplane’s “Somebody to Love.” It started raining, and everything had a metallic, silver glint. I asked Melissa if we could just drive around for a while.
When we got home, I sat in the front room near the window idly watching the rain and playing “She’s So High” by Blur on my unplugged Gibson while Melissa caught up on some reading. She sat in the back room, which doubled as her study, with the current issue of the BMJ, a medical journal of evidence-based medicine. She’d explained the difference between evidence-based and experience-based medicine to me and shown me a site on the Internet she used called “BestBETs,” Best Evidence Topics. I liked to listen to her talk about medicine. I thought it was dead cool and sexy. “That’s why I went to medical school,” Melissa had said when I’d told her that.
I had finished my CD of songs about Afghanistan for RAWA and mailed it to Pakistan. Now I was working on an antiwar CD. The phone rang as I was plucking out “(Don’t Fear) the Reaper” by Blue Oyster Cult. It was Nick. She was excited about the demo CD I’d given her with some rough versions of a few new songs. She said she was going to play it for the women at Gingerbeer to see if she could get me a gig playing on the Battersea Barge for Gingerbeer’s monthly Lyrical Lounge. I started panicking immediately. “You’re my new manager,” I said.
When Nick arrived, she asked, “Where’s Melissa?” She hung up her wet coat and scarf.
“She’s in the back reading doctor stuff,” I said. “Come over.”
Nick pulled a folded piece of paper from her pocket. “I made a list of pubs and other places that do open mics.”
“But I don’t have a band,” I protested.
“Solo,” she said firmly. “I’ll go with you everywhere you play.”
Later the three of us watched news on the telly. “There’s something to be proud of,” I said as the BBC reported the Americans had bombed a children’s hospital in Iraq. “That’s something you won’t hear on the American news. There’s a media blackout on reporting anything critical of our wars. You might as well be in North Korea reading about how the Great Leader invented the toaster.”