Authors: Peter Robinson
‘Carl, please. No? What is it about, then?’
‘I’m sorry I can’t give you any details right now, but you’ve got nothing to worry about. All I want is information.’
Arvo heard a sound behind him and turned to see a woman leaning against the door frame, one hip cocked. Her blonde hair was tied back in a ponytail, and she wore high cut-off denim shorts and a white shirt knotted under her jutting breasts. Her smooth, ridged belly was nicely tanned. Prime California girl, Arvo thought. The type they write songs about. Like Nyreen.
‘Oh, sorry, honey,’ she said to Buxton. ‘I didn’t realize you had company.’
‘That’s okay. This is Mr Hughes. He’s come to talk about Gary Knox.’
‘Oh.’
‘I hadn’t met Bella then,’ Buxton explained. ‘She never knew Gary.’
Bella didn’t look as if she had even been born then, Arvo thought. But he knew he was being uncharitable; she was probably at least eighteen. She had a dreamy look in her eyes that Arvo was willing to bet wasn’t caused by either alcohol or tobacco.
‘You guys need anything?’ she asked.
‘No, love, we’re fine right now,’ said Buxton.
‘Okay.’ She waved her hands about a bit then chewed on a loose strand of hair. ‘I’ll just . . . you know . . . be . . . then . . .’ She shrugged, turned and walked away with the kind of exaggerated rear motion a man rarely sees in this day and age. Only the flip-flopping of her sandals on the parquet floor spoiled the effect. Arvo noticed Buxton gazing proprietorially after her. He caught Arvo’s eye and stubbed out his cigarette. ‘My wife.’
‘Very nice,’ Arvo said. It seemed the proper response, like the one he had made to the Mercedes and the garden. ‘How long have you been married?’
‘About six months.’ Buxton smiled. ‘I suppose you could say we’re still on our honeymoon.’
‘Congratulations.’ Again Arvo thought of Nyreen. Their honeymoon hadn’t lasted that long. He hadn’t heard from her since the New Year’s Eve phone call Maria had answered. ‘About the tour . . .?’ he prompted.
Buxton shifted in his chair and recrossed his ankles. ‘Oh, yeah, the tour. Well, it was certainly a marathon. I can’t even remember how many gigs we did, but it seemed as if we had to play every hick town in the country. Mostly outdoor stadiums, festivals, that sort of thing. It was one hell of a hot summer, too. I mean, the whole thing was
gruelling,
man. Have you ever had to do anything like that? Spend so much time with the same group of people you practically end up going to the toilet to take a piss together? Well I’ll tell you one thing: it soon makes you a hell of a lot less tolerant of your fellow man.’
‘I heard it really creates strong bonds, too,’ Arvo said. ‘Like soldiers in the trenches, or the jungle.’
‘Were you in Vietnam?’
Arvo shook his head. ‘Nope. Too young.’ And he
had
been too young. Just. He often wondered what he would have done: gone to Vietnam, or headed for Canada. The latter would have been easy enough, seeing as they lived so near the border, and his father had plenty of colleagues at the university who took draft dodgers over in the trunks of their cars. His mother and father were against the war; they would have supported him if he had burned his draft card. What haunted him about it all now was that he would never know; he hadn’t been put to the test, forced to make the choice.
‘Well, quite frankly,’ Buxton went on, ‘let me tell you that bonding stuff’s a right load of old cobblers, man. It’s just a load of patriotic crap. All that being cooped up like that together for a long time does is show you what stupid wankers most people are when you get right down to it.’
‘It does? That’s an interesting point of view.’ Arvo had a feeling that, to Carl Buxton, most of the world consisted of stupid wankers who didn’t recognize or appreciate his genius. ‘I haven’t heard it put quite like that before,’ Arvo went on. ‘How many of you were there?’
Buxton crushed his empty beer can and dropped it on the table. ‘Hard to say. It varied. There were four of us in the band, then there was Gary, the road crew, manager, assorted groupies and hangers on.’ He shrugged.
‘So it really was as crazy as people say?’
‘Yeah. You’ve got to be really together to stay sane through a tour like that. I mean, I’m a professional musician. I’ve been on heavy-duty tours before – been there, man, and bought the T-shirt – and that one was tough even for me. It helps if you’re fit, too, you know. A lot of people don’t realize that. They think we’re all just pill-popping, booze-swilling degenerates. I’ll tell you something for free: Mick wouldn’t still be up there performing the way he does at his age if he didn’t work out, man. No way. Think about it.
‘Anyway, I worked out whenever I got the chance. You know, hotel gyms and pools, weight rooms. But there just wasn’t enough time. Never is. Soundchecks. Rehearsals. Hassles. Too much junk food. Not enough sleep. Then there was all the stress of doing one show, two shows, a night. All the craziness around you. Egos. Tantrums.’ He glanced towards the french doors and lowered his voice. ‘And sometimes there’s a groupie you want to spend the night with, you know. I’m only human. I mean, you just can’t know what that’s like, you can’t possibly imagine it, if you haven’t been there.’ He shook his head slowly in recollection, then grinned. ‘But that was all BB. Before Bella.’
‘Gary was hanging out with Sarah Broughton, then, wasn’t he? Can you tell me anything about her?’
‘Sarah Broughton?’ Buxton frowned. ‘Oh, yeah, that’s right. Threw me for a moment there, man. You mean Sally. Sally Bolton. At least that’s what she called herself then. I see her on television sometimes. Some cop show. She a friend of yours?’
‘No,’ said Arvo. ‘I’m a
real
cop.’ And he smiled to take the sting out of it.
Buxton laughed. ‘Right. Sorry. Reason I was asking is she was just as crazy as he was.’ He looked over his shoulder again to make sure Bella wasn’t around, and whispered, ‘I fucked her myself once. And do you know what? I don’t think she even remembered doing it. Pretty crazy, huh?’
Arvo nodded, wondering if there might be a good reason why getting fucked by Carl Buxton was so unmemorable. ‘Pretty crazy,’ he agreed. ‘What was their relationship like?’
Buxton frowned. ‘Hard to say. They were stoned most of the time. I mean, you can’t really have a relationship if you’re stoned all the time, can you? Your relationship’s with the drugs then, not with another human being. Towards the end, though, they just seemed to kind of drift apart. Know what I mean?’
Arvo nodded. ‘Was there someone else?’
Buxton laughed. It was a harsh, unpleasant sound, something like a bark. ‘There was always someone else for Gary, man. When he could get it up, that is.’
‘What about Sar— Sally?’
‘Nah. She was so spaced out by the time we hit the west coast anyone could just toss her on a mattress and fuck her like she was an inflatable doll or something, and she wouldn’t know the difference. She would give you about as much response, too. It’s funny, I watch her these days, you know, on television, and she looks like she’s got class. I find it hard to believe it’s the same person. She must have got her shit together, man. You’ve got to give her a lot of credit for that.’
Nice of you, you arrogant, self-serving little prick, thought Arvo.
‘Yeah,’ Buxton went on, ‘it’s kind of hard to pull yourself up by the bootstraps when you’re that far down. I know, man. I’ve been there.’ He pointed his thumb at his chest.
Arvo wasn’t in the least bit interested in sifting through the dregs of Buxton’s experience. ‘So things degenerated as the tour progressed?’ he said.
‘You could say that.’
‘Any idea why?’
Buxton lit another Camel and let the first lungful of smoke trickle out before speaking. ‘Gary was a weird motherfucker to start with,’ he announced finally. ‘The drugs just made him weirder, more distant, more reckless. Have you ever seen that movie,
The Doors
?’
‘Uh-huh.’
‘It was like that. You know, walking on ledges of high buildings waving his dick at the night and spouting poetry. Dylan Thomas. Walt Whitman. Allen Ginsberg.’ He shook his head and took another drag on the cigarette. ‘I don’t know what his personal demons were, man, but they sure had him by the short-and-curlies by the time we got out to the coast.’
‘How did Sally react to all this?’
‘I’ve already told you, man. She was a fucking zombie by then. The tour mattress.’
‘She didn’t care that he had other women?’
Buxton waved his cigarette in the air. ‘Women, men, it didn’t matter to Gary then. Maybe even children and small, furry animals, too, who knows? By the time we got to LA, we’d picked up so many hangers-on it was like London Zoo.’
‘What kind of people were they?’
‘What kind of people were they? I’ll tell you what kind of people they were. They were psychos, schizos, zombies, freaks, paranoids, pseuds, drunks, junkies, crazies of all descriptions. By the time we hit Fresno, we had two Napoleons and at least three Jesus Christs hanging around the fringes. Maybe I exaggerate a little, man, but you get my point? Gary attracted them. Shit, he even went out and picked them up off the streets and brought them back to the hotel and the concerts. Winos, street people. He was on a Jack Kerouac kick about the holiness of bums.’
‘Why?’
‘Who knows why? Because he was crazy himself and he felt right at home in their company. I don’t know.’
Arvo was beginning to feel overwhelmed. He had suspected that things had been chaotic on the tour, but not this bad. ‘Look, I’m kind of interested in the cast of characters,’ he said. ‘Could you describe some of them a bit for me? Maybe even give me a couple of names to follow up. Was there anyone in particular, anyone who really stands out in your memory, maybe as being a little creepy. Or someone who might even
appear
normal enough but still gave you an odd feeling?’
Buxton frowned for a moment, opened his mouth, closed it again, frowned, then leaned over and stubbed out his cig-arette. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘now that you mention it, you know, there
was
one guy in particular.’ Arvo sipped his iced tea and watched a little Oregon junco with its hangman’s hood and dapper grey breast flitting between the branches of a jacaranda tree.
‘This bloke was really strange,’ Buxton went on. ‘He gave me the willies, man. I know I told you there was a lot of craziness around the tour, but most of it wasn’t
serious
craziness. I mean, a guy who thinks he’s Jesus is crazy, sure, but he’s also pretty harmless. But the bloke I’m talking about was different.’ Buxton shook his head slowly. ‘Scary.’
A breeze ruffled the rose bushes. A starling hopped over the lawn looking for crumbs. The music had stopped, and it was quiet in the garden apart from the birds and the hiss of a distant sprinkler. Occasionally Arvo heard a car passing or a siren in the distance.
‘Where did you meet this guy?’ he asked.
‘Frisco. We had three concerts there in four days. The second night, a group of us went out on the town. I’d had a couple of drinks in the hotel bar, the others had done a few lines of coke, and we were in a mood for some fun. It was one of those nights when everything seemed fine. One of the good nights. Do you know what I mean?’
Arvo nodded. ‘Go on.’
‘We went to North Beach because Gary had this thing about the Beats. Like I said, he used to quote poetry when he was really flying. So he had this idea he had to go to City Lights Bookstore and meet Lawrence Ferlinghetti. Apparently this is the geezer who owns the place. He’s a poet and he’s been around for years.
‘As it turned out, this Ferlinghetti wasn’t there – which is probably just as well, because we were getting a few funny looks by then – so we cruised some of the strip bars and topless joints around Columbus and Broadway. We had a few more drinks, then we ended up back in this bar called Vesuvio’s, where the Beats used to hang out, so Gary told us, right next to the bookshop. Needless to say, Gary really liked it and managed to calm down enough not to get us all thrown out. And then we met
him
.
‘He was with a group of about three or four others. I can’t remember all the details clearly because by this time I’d had a few beers myself. He’s medium height, about five-eight, pretty muscular but nothing special – I mean, not like Schwarzenegger or anything – tattoos on his arms, likes to dress in black, and he has a dyed blond brush-cut and these really piercing light blue eyes.’
‘Do you remember anything about the tattoos?’
‘I don’t know much about tattooing. It’s just one of those things I never got into. But they looked quite intricate, you know, really professional. I think there was an eagle, or some kind of bird of prey, on one arm, and the other was a red flower, maybe a rose.’
‘Any names on them?’
‘No. Not that I recall.’
‘What was his name?’
‘Mitch.’
‘His second name?’
‘Dunno. It never came up.’
‘Know where he lived?’
‘No, but someone said he used to work in one of the North Beach strip-joints as a bouncer and he’d just got fired. I don’t know which joint.’
‘Okay. Go on with your story.’