Prologue

Saturday, May 3, 1986

Guest star Tommi Rhymer drapes Paul (PM Post Mortem) Merriweather’s talk show couch in a pose so bonelessly lascivious it doesn’t matter zip he’s fully dressed, looking much the same as ever: hair so red, you kill the color on the TV or his head blurs to a fireball. Just a dirty knockout blow to the theory all men were created equal.

And inane old Merriweather welcomes the ’86 Belshangles tour to the U.S., welcomes Tommi to the show, says he should’ve won Best Actor for Carlini’s Drake and gets a giggle from him (“Rockers turned thespian don’t win statuettes, y’know that, Paul”), flashes the Snake Oil Salesman album at his viewers.

As if there weren’t monster 3-D displays and ten-foot stacks of it in every Tower Records: Initial of each word printed red and glowing, SOS. The band on a wagon like an old-time medicine show, pitching elixir bottles to a crowd of naked, gray, apathetic skeletons, off into the dark on every side. Subtitled Songs About Love and Poverty.

On the back, you see the wraiths who chug their bottles sprout angel robes and ostrich feather wings, and flapping into aerial formations, spiral upward toward the light.

“Tommi, you were telling me before the show why Belshangles didn’t play Live Aid—”

“Well, it’s no lack of feeling for the starving blacks in Africa. But with only so much effective sentiment to give, I’m afraid mine goes more to the poor black yobos looting stores and trashing streets in Brixton—”

“Charity begins at home?”

“—And white ones behaving much the same in Liverpool and Manchester and Birmingham. Y’know, our future Charles III has set up a ‘Commission of Investigation’; he doesn’t look forward to presiding over people whose ranking outdoor sport is doing skin-violence to one another. So far his experts tell him people do these things because they’re criminals, and being incited from abroad.

“Now, I have a somewhat different perspective; I used to steal when I was young—like fourteen—and on the street. I stole food. And clothes when I hadn’t any, and the tools of my trade for the same reason, and not a single foreign power bothered to look me up. I’d like my day in court to tell the Prince about it. Man to man, I’d tell His Highness of some other ways I found for staying alive.”

“But, you were saying, you consider this present Belshangles tour largely as promotion?”

“Three hundred eighty-six years ago, a chap off Shakespeare’s stage, a song-and-dance comic named Will Kempe danced a jig from London to Norwich. A hundred miles on the roads, took him nine days. He did it on a dare. They called it Kempe’s Nine-Days’ Wonder.

“Nobody’s dared me, but I think I can go Will Kempe one better. I think I’ve found a profitable use for poverty and desolation in the streets: I’m going out to dance through it. Anyone who wants can come along behind me. Kids all over Britain are taking pledges for the miles they can stay with Rhymer’s Jig, running, walking, pushing wheelchairs.

“Bit of a downer, going all those miles and ending up in Norwich; being a London boy, I choose to dance it the other way ’round. Friday, September twelve, four weeks after we go off tour, Belshangles will play me off the steps of Norwich City Hall. Ten o’clock in the morning, I head south with bells on.

“We’ll have music every third of a mile—like marching bands passing a reviewer’s box, only here the bands stand still, and I will do the passing by. We’ve got thirty-five flatbed stages that’ll move each night, and all sound gear donated—”

“Are you talking kids’ bands? Garage bands?”

“Some are, but we’ve some big names too. My only demands were that they not have been in Live Aid or the other charity circuses, that they submit original music I can dance to, that they can play an hour set, and that they put their energies into raising pledges from their fans or their districts. Man, we’ve got over three hundred bands, punk, heavy metal, ska, reggae, I’ve got Scottish pipes, you name it.

“Nine days later. Belshangles’ll play me into the City of London, right up to the doors of the Lord Mayor’s Guildhall. And we’ve got every sharp young filmmaker in the U.K. out there, and from the continent and the States, with the best gear donated, taking it all in. Rich man, poor man, beggarman, thief, watching the music come down the land. Your Lucasfilm in California’s pledged the editing.”

“Lucas did get his awards for Drake, didn’t he? The screen editing on the Spanish Armada—”

“Like Harlan got his for the music.”

No Harlan perched beside Tom on the couch tonight, whatever that means. Belshangles’s always been the two of them together. They’ve never given separate interviews. Being the fan I’ve been, I know. But Merriweather doesn’t pick up on that, notice; he’s got lower digs in mind.

“Dino Carlini—now we’ve mentioned Drake—was practically black-listed in the ’fifties for films with homosexual themes—back when ‘gay’ wasn’t ‘in’—I suppose everyone looked for it in Drake: such a womanless piece, except for that larky royal seduction—”

“Elizabeth did dine alone with Drake onboard his ship. That bit was history.”

“But did she chase him around the furniture? Was Drake a gay hero in Carlini’s mind?”

Tommi ducks his head, makes his eyes go twice as big and pale under the red forelock and the dark red lashes. “Wasn’t cast in bed, if that’s what you’re after.”

“Oh no! Not at all; I wasn’t suggesting—”

“Old Dino was gay when gay spelled revolution. The terrorist’s his man now, the citizen who declares a private war and drags his nation into it, goes from outlaw to hero, never changing course—”

“That’s how Carlini pictured Drake?”

“It’s how he was. As for the dinner with Her Majesty: which sets a common man higher? Being offered intimacy with the powerful, or once it’s offered, being enough his own creature to say no?”

“Which do you think?”

“Well, I know what Dino thinks.”

“But Rhymer’s Jig, Tommi: where does that film go?”

“A first-run theater movie to begin, then video. MTV will get their separate bits. And all the proceeds, the pledge monies—my share of this tour as well—will go to set up the ‘Rhymer Foundation,’ like a nonprofit think tank aimed at re-transforming the U.K.’s involuntary leisure class into the working people they once were.”

“I think Carlini’s given you a few ideas.”

“I may have given him a few.”

“Do you have any contact with Prince Charles?”

“I’ve been ‘presented,’ for all that’s worth. There’s friends of his are friends of mine. I go to parties where he goes.” (He gives it the scandalous, shy grin and flaming blush.) “The Princess asked me for a dance last Christmas.”

“But not the Prince?”

(Still grinning,) “Hasn’t come to that yet.”

“Aren’t you concerned that the Prince, or the palace anyway—someone might be offended?”

“He knows a proper crowd-pleaser when he sees one; his family’s been in show business longer than mine. Well, fancy how he must feel—a figurehead useless as tits on a boar—at the small end of our national absurdity, with millions of unemployed poor at the other, and in between, this great unresponsive, dumb, bureaucratic—”

“Where do you place yourself in that society?”

“Nowhere. That’s the point. My parents died and the schools gave up on me. I’ve been out ever since.”

“Not to change the subject: rock musicians are in some odium in the U.S. now; Senate wives etc. lobbying for industry control of lyrics on Satanism, incest, suicide, masturbation—I know young Turks have a way of becoming elder statesmen, but Belshangles was the shock rock of the day not so long ago. Did you ever write a song about masturbation?”

With a look of dense slow-dawning wonder (Tom can play the cockney clown like nobody else), “What, you mean doin’ it to myself?”

“Well, I suppose that’s the usual uh—”

“Doin’ it to myself?”

There a nervous network cued a deodorant commercial, leaving every family paper in the U.S. to print the rest:

“Y’know, I’ve always made a point of writin’ personal stuff: one changes some things naturally (so’s not to get sued), but apart from that, I write what I know. I would take lyrics of that sort to show an author suffering from a certain lack of congenial company. No, I’d be mortified.

“Or did you mean, doin’ it to others?”

Wednesday, June 12, 1986

As motto to my senior picture, my last yearbook at Paly High, I put “Ut videam.” The yearbook guys said, “Uh, what?”

“It’s a quote,” I said. “It means—”

“Sorry, no quotes. You know, copyright.”

“C’mon, you guys! It’s from the Latin Vulgate Bible! Who do you think is gonna sue, Saint Jerome?”

The blind man on the roadside said it: when they told him the noise he could hear was Jesus going by, he left off begging and began to yell, “Have Mercy on me!” And everybody tried to shut him up. Except, of course, Jesus, who came and asked, “What do you want from me?” The blind guy said, “That I may see!” (Ut videam) And then it goes, “—his eyes were opened, and he saw men like trees walking.”

I would give anything there is, anything, to see men like trees walking. Dirty-clean like trees are. Rain- and wind-battered like trees are, on deep simple roots nothing can touch. And in defiance of all, still growing—not just up, but upright. Damn fool romantic nonsense, probably; then I always did get sex confounded with religion.

Anyhow,“Ut videam” made the yearbook. In English it would’ve sounded snotty and pietistic, worse yet, born again. In Latin it was merely arcane. I could relate to that; I didn’t give a shit if nobody understood but me. And, being odd enough, I got away with it.