Waiting for Kate Bush, page 24
He’d decided to become a writer. I’d shown precocity as a writer in my own right. He’d read a biography of his idol, Thomas Wolfe, in which it was revealed that the great man used to make his students agonise over every syllable of what they wrote for him. I was a self-loathing adolescent who wanted only praise, and our little sessions were torture. He also trounced me at chess, for which I seemed to have no aptitude whatever, while my dad stood in the back yard and smoked contentedly while my mother and grandmother discussed the woeful character deficiencies of their every common acquaintance.
I couldn’t wait to be old enough not to have to come to the desert with my family anymore, but was too neurotic to stay on my own even at 15. I felt certain that someone had broken into the house and would leap out of the shadows and slash my throat if I abandoned one room for another. In every phase of life, I felt damned if I did, but no less if I didn’t.
I helped kill my uncle. With my mother’s tacit encouragement, I wrote him a letter vilifying him for having ruined my grandmother’s life. I have every reason to believe it hurt him. Lazy, self-loathing, self-righteous adolescent twerp that I was, I was still as near as he had to a friend. I have much to answer for. Several months later, inconsolable in the face of being unable to get any of his short stories published, he typed a neat, bitter goodbye-and-fuck-off letter with his left hand (his right having been rendered useless in the car crash in which his face was disfigured), took a whole bottleful of his pills, decided he had a few more poison thunderbolts to hurl, and wrote, ever less legibly, with a ballpoint pen until he lost consciousness.
I found out about my uncle’s death one afternoon when I arrived home from school. My sister, around seven at the time, opened the front door with the words, “Marty died.” That, apparently, was all she’d been told. I, every inch the tough guy, demanded, “So?” But a few months later, when I read his last letter, the tough guy, feeling as though his heart were being ripped from his chest, sobbed so hard he thought he’d split open. He accused me of betraying him, as indeed I had. My age wasn’t an excuse. I betray everybody in the end. My grandmother moved back from the desert and I started university and came over to her place to pretend to study.
When I finished university and started my modelling career, I continued to visit, less frequently. I found it difficult to converse with her. I got her to tell me what she could about her early life. She couldn’t tell me much. I’d talk to her about current events. She held Jane Fonda in very low regard because of comments about Zionist thugs. When I pointed out that it had in fact been Vanessa Redgrave who’d decried Zionist thugs, my grandmother said, “Well, I don’t think the other one is any great friend of the Jewish people either.” I had no idea what she was basing this on. She knew virtually nothing of Judaism, but seemed to feel, as my mother would too, that her ethnicity entitled her to a certain amount of paranoia.
My grandmother knew little about actual Judaism, but much about Jewish cuisine. She made delicious gefilte fish, delicious potato knishes, delicious cheese blintzes. When I came to visit, she would always give me a dozen knishes or blintzes wrapped first in tin foil and then in a plastic bag. I could taste the love in them.
She began to fade away, to become hopelessly confused. When she ceased to be able to keep track of the medications she was meant to be taking, my mother got her admitted to a convalescent hospital. I visited her there even though I knew I’d be getting no blintzes to take home, no knishes, and even though conversation with her was more difficult than ever. She wore her empty handbag on her arm whenever she left her room, rather like the Queen. She thought she’d been incarcerated, and asked, “What did I do wrong to get put in here?” If I’d had a heart, it would have been broken. You got old, I thought, and confused.
I moved far away. My mother transferred my grandmother to a different convalescent hospital, one offering greater care in very much less pleasant surroundings. It was the hospital in which I would later allow my father to die. My grandmother lived on and on and on. Her 90th birthday came and went. She ceased to recognise my mother, who told me she’d started to smell.
I saw her one last time, when I came to visit my dad, for whom it must have been deeply heartening to have become a patient in the same halfway house in which his mother-in-law was rotting away. I saw her wandering the halls, looking utterly befuddled. Afraid that she’d smell, and confident she wouldn’t recognise me anyway, I didn’t interrupt her, didn’t say hello, didn’t thank her for the knishes and blintzes.
* * *
Mrs. Cavanaugh confessed to being an avid reader. She’d read the memoirs the month before of an Irish university lecturer who’d been kidnapped in Beirut and then held hostage by Islamic Jihad for nearly four years. It had made her grateful to be able to visit the loo whenever she needed, to be able to eat whatever she pleased off clean plates, to open a window and look out on the street when she liked. “It’s a good thing to savour small mercies,” she said. “And I don’t think you do, Les.” It was the only time she ever called me Les.
Neither of us smoked, so instead of ritually lighting cigarettes after lovemaking, we’d put one of Kate’s CDs in my boombox. (We’d tried having it off to her accompaniment, but found that we kept getting caught up in the music and losing our places.) Mrs. Cavanaugh couldn’t get enough of The Ninth Wave, the song cycle about drowning that had originally been Side 2 of The Hounds Of Love. She said she herself often felt as though drowning – in frustration, in boredom. It hadn’t been her ambition to run a boarding house, but she’d been unable to get the sort of work she wanted. She didn’t like to talk about it. I wondered if she was mindful of her own small mercies.
With considerable trepidation, I asked if she’d look through my catalogues with me and help me pick out a gift for Kate. She wondered why I was sending a gift, since it was well past Kate’s birthday. I’d seen the confusion and concern in enough fellow Katefans’ eyes when I told them how much I spent sending her things. I knew full well that not everyone feels as I do, and tried to change the subject. I admitted to having heretofore sent only a couple of birthday bouquets. I made no mention of the 2,000 emails.
I knew people who would have described us as dating, but outside my bedroom, we saw one another only as boarding house proprietress and guest, and in a way that suited me perfectly. However much I loved our erotic relationship, the part of me that insisted, in spite of my grotesqueness, that I allow myself to be seen only with women Boys Who Could would envy wasn’t so sure the widow Cavanaugh looked right on my arm. She was over 50, and it was no consolation at all that she was less far over it than I. I thought of how, when 45-year-old Hugh M. Hefner first began courting one of his succession of huge-breasted young brunettes, she, aghast, informed him that she’d never been out with anyone older than 24. “Me neither,” he is said to have replied. The part of me that needed other, better men to envy me would never be older than 14.
* * *
After The Dreaming, Kate wasn’t seen for a long while, and the Daily Mail asked its readers to believe that months of being stuck in the recording studio gobbling chocolate and junk food had caused her to balloon up to 18 stone. She moved into the country, or at least to Eltham, south-east of London, next door to bigger brother Jay and his family, and situated her piano so she could watch the clouds rolling up through the valley towards her as she composed. She resumed dancing, coming back into town to help launch Sky, the UK’s first satellite TV channel. By the dawn of 1984, the new studio was ready, and she began work on what nearly everyone but me (I prefer The Red Shoes) and Mr. Halibut downstairs agrees was her best album, The Hounds Of Love, with engineer Haydn Bendall, imported from Abbey Road.
Working at home suited her a treat. If she wanted to discuss something, she could do it around the kitchen table. If she wanted to get away from it all, she could walk her dogs Bonnie and Clyde in the garden. Bendall would later describe her remarkable transformation between control room and vocal booth. In the one, she’d be small and thoughtful. Then she’d step into the other and unleash a big, powerful voice you wouldn’t have dreamed three minutes earlier could come out of her.
Not having to keep her eye on the clock, no longer charged by the hour, she was free to be as obsessive as she liked about implementing her vision, whatever her vision might come to be. Bendall was surprised by how open she was to the ideas of others. Three years and more after The Dreaming, Kate’s fifth album, Hounds Of Love, was finally ready.
After convincing her that there would be lots of resistance at radio stations to the title ‘Deal With God’, EMI persuaded her to rename the album’s opening track ‘Running Up That Hill’. God only knows what she’d have been without them. She appeared on Top Of The Pops for the first time in seven years with much percussive accompaniment, and ‘Running’ got to number three, her biggest success since ‘Wuthering Heights’. At long, long last, she betrayed a wee trace of the diva, bringing her own make-up person, Teena Earnshaw (Catherine’s niece, later to win an Oscar for her work on Titanic, and just joking about Catherine’s niece), rather than using the BBC’s. Kate Bush Diva Shock Horror!
At the gigantic launch party for the album, at the London Laserium, the Paul Newman-eyed Del was unmistakably Kate’s date, this after their having been a romantic pair for seven years. Naturally, the tabloids found a way to make them suffer for their new candour, inducing another bassist who’d played on the album to slag Del, or at least pretending that he’d done so.
The first thing that struck me listening to the famous opening track, ‘Running Up That Hill (A Deal With God)’ was that Kate had finally stopped shooting herself in the foot insofar as arrangements were concerned – the loping rhythm that established itself immediately never relented, setting a wonderful precedent for the rest of the songs on what at the time was thought of as Side 1. It was also glorious to hear her singing in a proper adult register, though I, for one, could easily have done without the silly decorative background singing. (I have always believed that the singer wanted God to swap her circumstances with those of the antagonist to whom she was singing, but a major, major music magazine has gone on record as believing that she actually hoped to trade places with God. Behold the annoying ambiguousness of English pronouns! Behold that Kate’s lyrics were nearly as confusing as ever.)
The title track, which evoked the first album’s ‘Oh To Be In Love’ in its wariness of romance, was no less propulsive than ‘Running’, and hugely enjoyable. There were those who imagined the bombastic ‘The Big Sky’, in which she unleashed a couple of wonderful screams of the sort David Lee Roth would spend his career aspiring to in vain, to be an expression of her disdain for EMI’s discomfort with The Dreaming. If so, leave it to Kate to bewail someone’s failure to understand her in a song that defies comprehension. If not, forget I said that.
That she remained as … uncompromising as any pop recording artist extant was made clear by the opening line of ‘Cloudbusting’: “I still dream of Orgonon”. How could anyone who didn’t recognise that as the name of Wilhelm Reich’s laboratory and research centre have been anything but confused? I puzzled then and continue to puzzle to this day at the line “Your son’s coming out” at the end. If she hadn’t been trying for a pun regarding Peter Reich’s sexuality, why not “The sun’s coming out?” In any event, I liked the insistent cellos.
The Ninth Wave suite of songs, about drowning, or a dream of drowning, or something, had moments of remarkable beauty. After ‘I Dream Of Sheep’, half again as gorgeous as even ‘The Man With The Child In His Eyes’, though, it was mostly dauntingly confusing. I have tried many times over the decades to surrender myself to it, and my confusion always slightly exceeds my pleasure. The failure may well be my own, rather than Kate’s.
* * *
I went to another Overeaters meeting. It looked in the early stages as though it wouldn’t be worth the time. Dahlia wasn’t there, and Jez was moaning about his girlfriend moaning that they couldn’t afford to go anywhere very interesting on holiday since his record company had fired him. He didn’t fit in an ordinary coach seat. The only flights on which he could afford two adjoining seats were to places his girlfriend was fed up with. “She says she’d sooner stay home than go to Malaga again,” he said. “Well, I’m bloody sorry, but I happen to like Malaga.” Even Boopsie, normally fascinated by anything anyone said, was yawning.
“What do we think of the Maddox diet?” Crinolyn wondered. Nobody knew what she was talking about. It was apparently the latest fad diet to be embraced by Hollywood stars. It was like the Atkins diet, except it didn’t eliminate just carbohydrates from the diet, but protein as well. You could eat all the fat you liked. Crinolyn understood Geri Halliwell to have lost half a stone in two weeks.
“Just think,” Boopsie said dreamily, “getting to eat as much ice cream or cheese as you like, and washing it down with cream.”
“I think you’ve hit the nail on the head,” Graham the moderator laughed. “I think the idea is that after a couple of days you’d get thoroughly fed up with ice cream, and stop eating it. Which, if that’s all you’re allowed, means that you’d pretty much stop eating, full stop. Of course, how many of us could stick to that for more than a few hours?”
“If Geri bleedin’ Halliwell can do it,” Crinolyn demanded, “why can’t we?”
“Geri Halliwell can do it because she’s a glamorous celebrity,” Graham theorised. “She’s always got something going. It’s easy not to eat when you’re rushing from photo shoot to magazine interview to party to ship christening.”
“What ship has Geri ever christened?” Crinolyn demanded. “You’re just talking rubbish now. You’re just making it up as you go along.”
Then Dahlia turned up, looking this week as though on her way to work as an investment banker, that smart, that conservative. As usual, all else was shoved aside while she told us about her week, during which her weight had remained stable and she’d gone out with a Renault dealer from Surbiton who’d confessed he hadn’t dated a woman weighing less than 15 stone in his entire adulthood. Dahlia wasn’t so sure that anything would come of it. She’d told him she’d see him again on Wednesday night, but was seriously considering cancelling. He was fit enough, she supposed, but not very funny. She was one of those who considered a sparkling sense of humour not less indispensable than a taut little bum.
All of which had Crinolyn, who was probably grateful if she saw her husband sober two days in seven, rolling her eyes in disgust.
But she wasn’t the only one not enjoying listening to Dahlia. Neither was her still-nameless sidekick, whose folded arms and glower suggested a level of disgruntlement far beyond Crinolyn’s. Dahlia might have been a self-infatuated boor, but not entirely oblivious to what was going on around her. She interrupted her description of what she and the Renault dealer had ordered at dinner to ask her sidekick what was the matter.
I felt her pain. From the age of 15 until the time the girl who’d become my first girlfriend agreed to go out with me, I was myself a sidekick. Daring to imagine that one of their admirers might notice me, I insinuated myself into the entourages of a succession of good-looking, athletic, confident classmates – hating both myself for having done so and them for having things I hadn’t, and perhaps never would have. But I didn’t come to be perceived as attractive by association. The most that ever happened was that a girl would ask me, almost invariably without addressing me by name, to convey some important message to my more desirable friend. In junior high school, this was nearly enough, as being spoken to extracurricularly by a pretty girl in any circumstances was profoundly thrilling. So this, I used to marvel, is how it feels to be normal!
I wasn’t much of a sycophant in my heart. Watching those on the periphery of whose entourages I clung playing football on Friday nights, I wished fervently they’d commit some horrific catastrophic blunder, or, alternatively, be injured. Of course, the one without the other wouldn’t have been of much use. Girls seemed to find boys who’d suffered painful injuries while fighting for the glory of the school fantastically sexy.
Justice may be blind, but poetic justice is a myth. At my 20th year class reunion, I should have found that the better-looking classmates whose favour I once grovelled to curry were fat and bald and divorced and alcoholic, stuck in jobs they hated, unable to understand their children, who hated them, while I was slim and successful, with a Michelle Pfeiffer lookalike on my arm. Poetic justice is a myth perpetrated by the same people, I suspect, who brought us religion, and used for the same purpose – to keep the have-nots from lynching the haves, or at least torching their Lexuses. The boys whose favour I’d curried all seemed reasonably content, and had lost none of their winning confidence, while I have hardly known a month’s contentment in this life, and am grotesquely obese.
Looking through my yearbooks after the event, it occurred to me that I was in most cases actually better-looking than they were at the time, and in all cases substantially cleverer, funnier, and more creative. It’s all about confidence, innit?
Behold my cravenness. I feel nearly as ashamed of insinuating myself into the entourages of better-looking classmates as I do for having failed to greet my grandmother the last time I saw her.
20
Ordinary Little Me
“THE matter?” Dahlia’s sidekick pretended to wonder. “You want to know what’s the matter? Nothing at all. Not a thing. Just because I thought I could count on you, and found out otherwise this week, well, that doesn’t mean anything’s the matter. Just because I was a bloody fool to imagine we were really mates, a big – very big! –starlike you and ordinary little me from Neasden.”
