Plastic Jesus (4 page)

“Nothing."

Seth couldn't leave him like this. “Come in for a smoke. I've got some great weed."

“I've never had it..."

“Come on."

The smoke eased things, made Seth feel less like a high-priced rent boy and seemed to turn Harold into a less self-conscious version of himself. For half an hour or so, as they talked and laughed, sex was not even in the room. Then it was there again, in the set of Harold's shoulders and the way he could not stop looking at Seth.

“I'd better go,” Harold said.

“What, back to your room? Why?"

“Because I want—something—”

“Didn't it ever occur to you that I might want something too?"

The expression on Harold's face would have been comical were his relief not so real. Seth sat on the edge of the bed. He couldn't pretend that, given his choice of men, he would have picked Harold Loomis. But Harold was smart and kind, even rather handsome in the right light, and Seth had always enjoyed bullying him. If Harold cooperated, which Seth felt sure he would, this could be quite fun.

Curiosity, after all, was what had always moved him forward in the world. And it hadn't done him a wrong turn yet.

* * * *

Peyton didn't exactly disapprove of the relationship between Seth and Harold, but he worried about it. He knew he shouldn't worry, because there was nothing he could do about it, but that was exactly what he didn't like: a situation to do with the band that he couldn't control.

Mark and Dennis didn't care; Peyton had the idea that before meeting Harold they'd barely known what a homosexual was. Who Seth slept with was clearly none of their concern. Peyton was pretty sure no one knew about the affair but the other Kydds, Harold, and himself. Still he could not stop worrying.

When he asked Seth about it, Seth said it was a lot of fun but emotionally it meant nothing to either of them. Peyton knew that wasn't true for Harold, and he believed Seth knew it too. “Harold loves you,” he said. “He's probably loved you since the day he met us."

“Harold's a big boy. He can look out for himself."

“He can look out for
us
. Himself, I'm not so sure of."

Seth just shrugged.

Peyton backed away from the subject, sensing that it made Seth uncomfortable. Perhaps that was good; if Seth was uncomfortable with the affair, he might just let it fizzle out. But then what would Harold do? Peyton worried, and worried some more.

It never once occurred to him that he might be jealous.

* * * *

London in the mid-sixties, Seth decided, made Leyborough look like a gravesite. The really big money hadn't come rolling in yet, the checks with mind-bending numbers of zeroes they would see later, but already they had more than they'd ever seen in their lives. There was enough so that Harold had been able to set them all up in large convenient houses. The others had all bought cars—Peyton had a little Italian roadster that could go 150 miles per hour. The few times Seth tried driving a car, it terrified him greatly and his passengers more so. He rented a limo when it seemed necessary and took taxis the rest of the time.

He loved the bright swirl of Piccadilly Circus with its statue of Eros, the attention he got on Carnaby Street, the hidden perversions of Soho. He would come home with carloads of books, records, clothing, people. Impromptu parties sometimes went on for days. Seth would often disappear upstairs with a girl or boy—one about as often as the other now—returning hours later, ready for more. He felt young and strong and insatiable.

He had ten new guitars, all of them better than the shopworn janglebox he'd gotten for Christmas years ago back in Leyborough. But he kept the old guitar, the one he'd learned to play on, and wasn't surprised that Peyton had kept his old one too. For a certain kind of boy, his first guitar will always be more memorable than his first girl.

He'd slept with Harold a few more times, but his heart wasn't in it. He cared for Harold, and the sex was better than Seth had known it could ever be—Harold knew just where to touch, stroke, suck. It made sense, Seth supposed; a man would know how to handle another man's body. But something wasn't right. He didn't love Harold, but Harold loved him. In fact, Harold loved him almost like a mother. He'd thought he wanted that, but it was simply too weird to continue.

So he played hard in the great playground of London, and thought nothing of the pain in Harold's eyes, the new pain that came with Seth's brush-off and never went away. He stayed high on pot all day, realizing that it brought his anger down to a level where he could manage it, where he didn't want to kill somebody every single day of his life. He discovered lysergic acid, and it was good, very good. It showed him that he deserved this crazy, out-of-control fame as much as anyone on earth, that fame and money were ephemeral things one need not feel embarrassed to have, that he was just another plastic Jesus in a plastic world: a phrase that grew into a song he believed was one of his best. He turned the rest of the band on to acid, and the melting colors swirled through their next two albums, turning pop into a different creature, birthing a completely new sound into a world that also seemed increasingly new.

Mark bought an old instrument from the nineteen-twenties, something called a theremin. It was a black box with two antennae sticking out, and you played the thing without touching it—you just moved your hands around the instrument, creating shimmery phantom waves of sound. Seth was delighted to learn that its inventor, Leon Theremin, had at first been persecuted by his native Soviet Union but would later design secret electronics for their government. It was just the sort of contradiction he loved.

He went to a party with Peyton one night, a huge flat in Kings Road, lots of Americans and cocaine. They snorted lines off the cover of their third album and fell about laughing like everyone else. Somebody took a picture that night that they ended up using, along with many others, on the inner sleeve of the next album: arms around each other's shoulders, cheeks pressed together, identical fucked-up grins on their faces.

Later, Seth would remember this time in London with nostalgia: nothing to compete with the time when his mother was alive, but nostalgia nonetheless. He would remember it more precisely as the last time that was really his own, the time before things went insane.

* * * *

Because soon, oh, soon it was all too much. He remembered his grandmother calling something “much of a muchness,” and though she'd probably meant something quite different, that was exactly what it felt like.

The world wasn't just America and London and Amsterdam now; it was Australia, Germany, the Phillipines, Japan, and all were a mass of writhing, screaming little girls. Japan was where it all went wrong for Seth somehow. This might have had something to do with the ten hits of blotter acid he'd smuggled through customs in his rock star bag. The rock star bag seemed to be taken for granted by customs inspectors the world over. It was simply a small bag the rock star carried on his person, and no one ever looked inside it. The very first time they'd gone overseas, Harold had told them, “Do
not
bring anything illegal, but if you must bring something
questionable
, be sure to pack it in your in-flight bag."

From then on, their in-flight bags were known to the Kydds as rock star bags, and all manner of illicit substances traveled back and forth in them. “What have you got in your rock star bag today then, Peyt?” “Oh, nothing much, Dennis, nothing that would get you arrested in Singapore.” Nonetheless, some paranoia impelled Seth to get rid of the ten hits of acid before leaving Japan, and the only acceptable method of doing this was to eat them all at once.

Locked in a small room with black lacquer fixtures and rice paper walls, he began to freak. He started dialing room numbers. Harold was out. So was Peyton. No one else seemed to be in the hotel. His throat tightened painfully; the air swirled with colorful motes. From somewhere far below, he could hear screaming. He crawled into bed and piled all the pillows over his ears, and he could still hear the screaming, shrill and incessant. A vivid hallucination took shape in his mind, a scene from Goya going on seventeen floors down. Someone had built an enormous funeral pyre and the little girls were throwing themselves onto it, twisting in the flames like medieval martyrs, burning and screaming. That was it, that was the symbol. His entire career had been built on the pain of thwarted little girls, and everywhere he went, more girls were begging for it, elbowing each other aside to be the first to die screaming in agony as a demonstration of love for him. In his head, a girl swallowed a box of tacks; her sister drank a gallon of lye. An Australian girl shot herself in the guts. A creative lassie in Scotland tied her four limbs to four strong horses...

And they never stopped screaming.

The door slammed open. The sound brought Seth back to the hotel room. Peyton stood in the doorway, a Japanese schoolgirl dangling from each arm. “Around the world to the sound of screams, eh, Sethy? These two were asking for you—"

The little girls caught sight of Seth, naked on the bed wrapped in a sheet, brains fizzing out his ears, and they both started to scream. And Seth sat up and screamed back at them, screamed and SCREAMED into their avid, empty faces until his throat was raw —

No. There were no Japanese schoolgirls in the room, no girls at all. Peyton was on the bed with him, gathering him up like an armload of laundry. “You didn't take all that blotter, did you? Oh Christ, of course you did. Right, let's just be quiet."

He lay with his head in Peyton's lap while Peyton sang him a disjointed sort of lullaby, though they both knew he would not sleep, and gradually the screaming faded away.

“Oh Peyt,” he said. “Oh Peyt. I don't know if I can take it."

Peyton nodded. “It's too much, isn't it? I think this should be our last tour."

“You mean ...?” Seth could not articulate what he thought Peyton might mean.

“I don't mean break up the band, if that's what you thought. But why keep going on these tours? Harold wants us to, but we don't need the money, and we can't hear ourselves onstage anyway. I thought we could sort of retire from touring, stay together in the studio, make records. We don't need to do this any more."

As the truth of what Peyton was saying struck him, Seth felt both incredibly relieved and utterly spent. He buried his face in the pillows. When he could speak again, he said, “That's just what I want to do. Thanks, Peyt."

“Now
there's
something I don't hear often enough from you."

“Harold won't like it, though."

“Harold's not the boss any more."

Harold's
no
t lots of things any more
, Seth thought. But he could not follow the thought to its logical conclusion. Peyton's presence beside him was one friendly and comforting thing in a world that had nearly come apart at the seams tonight. He groped for Peyton's hand, enfolded Peyton's callused fingers in his own, and actually managed to drift into some sort of sleep. His dreams were unnaturally colorful and too disturbing to remember, but when he woke, his friend was still beside him, their hands still intertwined.

vii

Peyton got the news from Dennis late one night. Harold had picked up the wrong bit of rough trade, apparently, at the beginning of a weekend when no one expected to hear from him for at least forty-eight hours. He'd been found in his flat by his cleaning woman, beaten, broken, and beginning to rot. The flat had been stripped of valuables; whatever hadn't been stolen was smashed. Peyton's first thought was of Seth. “Has anyone told him yet?” he asked.

“I don't know. I haven't talked to him. You think he's tripping?"

“He's always tripping,” Peyton said glumly, and hung up the phone. He put his jacket back on and drove to Seth's house. On the way he thought only vaguely of Harold. He'd somehow assumed something like this would happen to Harold one day. He thought of how Harold had wanted them, wanted especially Seth so much, had had Seth but not in any way that mattered. So he'd filled that void with unpredictable trash that had eventually, inevitably killed him.

He let himself into Seth's house with the key he had. They'd always had keys to each other's places, ever since their school days, and never questioned the fact. This new place in Knightsbridge was huge, the floor plan convoluted, and even though he had been there several times he had to wander a bit before he found the main bedroom. If Seth knew that Harold had died, then Seth would be in bed. Seth's response to anything that exercised his emotions had always been to go to bed.

He was there, of course, the long lean shape of him twisted beneath sweaty covers. He was awake, blinking slowly. Peyton sat on the edge of the bed. “Who called you?"

“Mark."

That wasn't so bad; Mark was always rather diffident with Seth, and would have broken it to him gently. But there was no good way for Seth to have gotten this news. He'd be feeling so many things about it, and none of them in harmony with each other: blaming himself, not without some cause, though of course you couldn't really think of it that way, and maybe even relieved because the whole messy business of fucking Harold would be done with, and then blaming himself for this relief ... No, there was really no good side to it at all.

* * * *

Seth knew Peyton was sitting there analyzing Seth's emotional state, gauging his reaction to the news, maybe even wondering how soon they'd be able to get back into the studio, and this calculation made him sick. Yet Peyton was the person he needed right now, more than anyone else in the world. He hadn't thought losing Harold could hurt so much, thought he'd lost the capacity for this kind of pain after his mother's death. His mind was feverish with
What if he
... and
If I only
. He knew he needed Peyton even though it infuriated him to have this need, and he reached for Peyton's hand, aware that his own hand was clammy with sweat and tears but not caring.