Deeper Than Dreams (7 page)

Let's not think about tomorrow
, I heard his voice tell Abbey earlier.

Adrian was stalling both of us.

He bolted up the stairs, two at a time. Sighing, I gathered the essentials I'd need for the evening. Mindy's clutch was indeed perfect for a night out with my British hard rocker: a small black leather hard-shell, with tiny grommets detailing a pattern of the Union Jack. But its best feature was the combination clasp and handle, which looked like a set of brass knuckles, perched right on top. They were adorned with large, blingy diamond-like stones, and skulls with glittering rhinestones for eyes. As I slipped my phone and wallet in, I noticed Mindy had left a little gift of emergency lipstick in there for me.

Upstairs, I made one quick sweep of the bedroom to make sure I hadn't forgotten anything. Ah, tissues. With my luck, I'd probably get choked up with tears at some point in the evening to come, and would need a few.

“Luck” reminded me of Abbey and her shell. I plucked it from her pillow and studied it. The thought of Rick plying my daughter with such a present got under my skin and irritated me. Was it—and were the gala tickets—just some consolation prize, mementos to remember his bandmate by when he whisked him off on some twenty-date tour? I nestled it into the tissue before popping it in my purse. I planned to confront Rick about it.

And besides, I could use all the luck I could find.

Chelsea sat at the bottom of the spiral stairs she had not yet learned to climb, mewing hunger. I scooped her up and got her settled in her cage in the library, complete with fresh, dry food and her litter box. She kneaded happily at her little bed with tiny paws as she made herself at home.

I guess I should be doing the same
, I thought, glancing around. I hadn't been in the room of floor-to-ceiling bookcases in a while. Impulsively, or perhaps compulsively, I searched the shelf for the last reading material I had perused, and there it was. On the same shelf, as if it hadn't been touched since.

And maybe it hadn't.

I pulled Alexander Floyd's
Godforsaken
biography out, flicking on a brass table lamp as I passed it, and settled carefully in my dress on one of the brown leather couches.

If I was to see Rick tonight at the gala, I wanted to be a bit more prepared with my secondary sources. Adrian's stories, as intimate as they were in their details, may not have been the most objective, understandably.

“Ach, Kat. Really?” I glanced up to find Adrian hovering in the doorway. “My word isn't good enough for you?”

Everything about Adrian was good enough for me. Handsome didn't even begin to describe how he looked, dressed for
the gala. His tuxedo was all crisp lines, and contoured his lithe body like only a custom-fit could. I loved that he had accented it with tousled locks and a touch of scruff.

“Of course it is. But pictures are worth words as well, no?”

Adrian couldn't suppress his smile. “If we're talking blackmail, some of those pictures are priceless.” He shook out his sleeve and checked his watch. “We've got a half hour to kill. I could think of worse ways to spend it.”

“Or better,” I laughed as he collapsed onto the couch next to me. “But since we are all dressed up with somewhere to go . . .”

***

Our knees became a book rest as I propped it open. “I want to get to know Rick a little better.”

“Well. I knew Rick, pre-Simone,” Adrian said, licking a thumb and pushing past the first few pages. “And then of course, there was the Simone phase itself. But I'm afraid I know about as little as you in terms of post-Simone Rick.”

The band's wantonly public mouthpiece had become intensively private since sequestering his family in Hawaii. Rick had been harder to track down than Adrian, and with good reason. Caregiver to his wife as cancer quickly claimed her, then sole parent to three teen boys, were not exactly roles in keeping with the singer's once infamous persona. Had performing last night been a mindless flick of the switch for Rick? He'd made shifting gears after so many years look effortless.

“I'm curious to know what made you guys tick.”

“Oh, we ticked, all right. Like a bloody time bomb.” Adrian flashed a wry smile. “Luckily, I've got a much longer fuse these days.”

He chuckled to himself as we turned to a fuzzy black-and-white class photo of Rick and Adrian in their Ditcham Park school uniforms.

“Aw, look how cute you guys were!”

“Cute?” Adrian protested. “We weren't aiming for cute. We were two guys aiming for total annihilation of our country through rock and roll.”

He smiled fondly at the photo of the starry-eyed best mates. “We had to learn how to play first, though. I found a beat-up acoustic that had belonged to my stepfather and I began to teach myself notes and chords. Rick fancied himself a singer, so he worked on poses and struts when he was not doodling elaborate logos for the name we had chosen:
Diabolus in Musica
.” He used air quotes and a deep voice, laughing at its ostentatious ring. “We had come across the Latin term in our school encyclopedia.” My fingers ghosted his as they skirted down the glossy page of text.

Rick was summoned to spend the holiday with his parents in New York in the summer of 1977, which proved to be a long but evolutionary summer for both lads. Digger spent his break back in Portsmouth, where he could come and go without much hassle from his dad, and get reacquainted with his old friends.

“Good God, look at me and Sam!” Adrian pointed to a full-color photo of an adolescent version of himself and a chubby, grinning blond boy.

Sam Summerisle was a mate of the highest order; not only had he given Digger his nickname long before, he also freely offered up his sister Tess for snogging. Adrian received his first kiss that summer behind the motor mechanics garage where both their fathers worked. Sam, too, was hot to be in a band; his father had put him to work in the auto shop that year earning a few quid a week to save towards an instrument. Digger followed Sam's lead, working under his father at the garage until it was time to return to his mum's to prepare for school. He promised Sam that as soon as Rick returned, they would have Sam up for a proper band meeting.

“So what was Rick up to all summer in New York, while you were back home snogging?” I teased.

“What
didn't
he do? He sent many letters home, for one thing. Shared stories so incredible they were almost not to be believed, but it was New York City, after all. Anything was possible! Catching a Ramones show at CBGBs, seeing Debbie Harry walking down St. Mark's Place wearing pink sunglasses in the rain. Going to the Waverly in Greenwich Village at midnight to see
The Rocky Horror Picture Show
and throwing toast at the screen. Toast!” Adrian dreamily ticked off the list, his mind time-traveling back. I pictured him as a teen, holding these letters, the ink smudging under his hot thumbprints with his burning desire to jump in and live within their pages.

“But it was Rick's final letter home that left me gobsmacked. A single word, written in red on one of those thin, pale blue airmail sheets: ‘
SHAGGED!
'” Adrian hoisted the book up to his lap again. “Ah yes, here's the picture he'd sent home.” I peered at the scan of a bent Polaroid picture, depicting Rick and a black-haired beauty with cavernous blue eyes. “Rick had met a girl; a sixteen-year-old Manhattanite named Simone. Their parents had mutual friends in the same social circles. It was Simone who took him to the East Village, to the movies, to concerts . . . and ultimately to her bedroom on the Upper East Side.” Adrian shifted his weight, and glanced at me. “It was yet another case of the Have and the Have Not. Yet this one bothered me more. I could accept the imbalance of material possession. Yet in affairs of the heart, I was still standing on the outside with my nose pressed against the glass, looking in while Rick was handed tail on a silver platter.”

Adrian turned back to the book with renewed interest, perhaps eager to change the subject. “Anyway, Rick came home soon after, with a 1964 cherry sunburst Gibson that his parents had bought for him in New York. He thrust it onto me so I could have a go, complaining of the blisters on his fingers from trying to play it. And so began my own torrid affair.”

I rested my chin on his shoulder and followed along with his index finger.

Rick was lovesick and brooding over Simone. She had two more years left at Brearley before college, when she hoped her parents would send her abroad and into Rick's waiting arms. He went through a brief black turtleneck and poetry-writing phase, which Digger took the piss out of him for. “He'd ask me how my mate Simon was, and I would call him a cunt and tell him to fuck off!”

“Adrian! That wasn't very nice.”

“It was for his own good! I told him no self-respecting woman was going to date a ‘big girl's blouse,' and he needed to turn his depression into the heaviest music possible. So we vowed to make it our single-minded mission at the expense of everything else.”

Singing the blues helped Rick hone his vocal skills. Once school commenced in the fall, he signed up for voice instruction there to further improve his range. The lads began to write their own songs, but it was evident that they would need more manpower to bring it home.

As promised, Digger invited his childhood mate up. Sam brought two things to the table: a crap copy of a Fender Precision Bass that he had bought for forty quid, and transportation. He and Rick, however, were as different as night and day, and butted heads routinely.

Adrian tapped an early picture of their trio, making music with a tiny amplifier and big hair. “I was constantly working as peacekeeper between those two. They were my two best mates so it drove me mad that they refused to take a liking to one another.”

“What did they fight about?”

“Cripes, more like what didn't they fight about! They argued over football, television, the name of the band. Sam thought
Diabolus in Musica
was too fancy, too difficult to pronounce. He fixated on another name, Black Leather Fantasy.” Adrian chuckled. “Rick would take the piss out of him, even after we had sold a million albums and were selling out arenas. If Sam got angry about something and threatened to walk out, Rick would have a laugh and ask, ‘You going off to form Black Leather Fantasy, then?' Sam wasn't the brightest bulb. But he was a solid bloke and he really could play. Rick tolerated him mainly because it would be another two years until either of us could drive and it wasn't like Rick's aunt Bootsy could haul our gear in her Karmann Ghia.”

More pictures had been unearthed of the two best friends. Adrian, slight and fair, gold guitar in hand, gesturing toward the pickups on a V-shaped guitar strapped to the tall, lithe body of swarthy Rick. “Crikey, how he could shred on that Flying V! That's how he earned his nickname: Riff.”

The “posh Jew” and the “puny pleb” were routinely bullied. Rick was called a Zionist, simply due to the fact that his father often had business dealings in Israel, and Digger was guilty by association, plus he wore the wrong brand of trainers. They were beginning to see how the world wasn't going to do them any favors. They were going to have to squeeze their own lemonade from the sour lemons life was pitching their way.

End of term came at Christmastime and once again, Rick was whisked off, this time for a skiing holiday in Switzerland. Sam was working two jobs back in Portsmouth, at the garage and unloading freight at the docks. Digger picked up enough hours as his father's apprentice to finally purchase a quality guitar of his own: a Gibson Les Paul Goldtop.

“My favorite. It cost me two hundred pounds, and I still use it to this day. My father thought I was daft to spend that amount of money on a ‘hobby,' and my mum, well. Let's just say that her son's dreams of becoming a musician were not welcome dinner conversation. She wasn't convinced that playing music could provide a living or a pension. So when I told her, over the roast tatties, boiled sweets and Christmas crackers, that I didn't give a toss; I had decided to leave school anyway, she kicked me out of the house to help me on my way.”

“Oh, sweetie. Where did you go?”

Adrian slapped over to a new chapter entitled “The Portsmouth Years.”

“I went back to my dad's. He was a stern taskmaster at work, so for two years I was his whipping boy. But I had a goal; I wanted to be in London by the start of the new decade and playing music full-time. So I kept my eye on that. I bought a small practice amp with my wages, and began taking lessons.”

“And what about Rick?”

“Leaving school was out of the question for him.”

Certain things were just expected of Rick, and academics were nonnegotiable. So he would put in a full day at Ditcham Park, and Sam and Digger would travel up from Portsmouth afterwards to clock in rehearsal time. But it wasn't all schoolwork that occupied Rick's day; he commandeered the pupil payphone to arrange gigs, mostly Bar Mitzvahs and parties where they would play original songs if tolerated and cover songs if requested.

“We weren't picky, we'd jump at any chance to play live. I think we even played at a hen night . . . what do you call them here, a bachelorette party? Yeah, for one of Bootsy's friends.”

“
Diabolus in Musica
at a Bar Mitzvah?”

“Oh, back then we changed our name more often than we changed our pants! We were
Rue Morgue
, like the Poe story . . . then
Howler
. Oh, and
Houston to Delancey—
I think Simone had come up with that, she was always writing letters to Rick with suggestions for improving the band. Trying to make us avant-garde. For a long time we were called
Fetish
. Probably Sam's contribution, can't remember.”

Adrian turned the page. “Ah yes. Cue the lovely Simone. She arrived the fall of that year to study at Queen Mary University. Straight from New York's Upper East Side to London's East End, but that didn't seem to faze her. She fell right in with us. Adam had joined as our drummer, and we had moved to London by then. Rick's parents funded a flat for us, so long as Rick enrolled in University there.”