Hari Kunzru - Gods Without Men

Not a good night. Not proud of himself the next morning. Terry gave him a lecture, said the hotel weren’t happy and did he realize how much it cost to keep the police out of it. Nicky told him it was his fault for putting him in a crap room. He ought to have had one with a bigger balcony. The look on Terry’s face. A day or two later he made it up with Anouk, but it was obvious he’d have to get along without her for a while. He sent flowers, wrote lyrics, thought about sending her the lyrics, tore them up.

L.A. was a nightmare. The place was so uptight. Everything seemed to be inappropriate . Sorry, sir, this is a nonsmoking environment. Sorry, sir, we don’t permit English people talking loudly or having a laugh with their mates in our poncey white-painted restaurant. He wanted to walk to the corner shop. He wanted to get on a bus. Valet parking? What was that about? How were you supposed to get home when you were pissed in a city where there was no such thing as a cab? No one could even understand his accent. I’ll have the tuna sandwich. Cheena ? I’m sorry, sir, what is cheena ? One day he was trying to get a glass of water. Water, he said. Water. The stuff that comes out of the tap. The waitress was getting shirty. I don’t understand, she hissed, what is it you require? Noah had to intervene. Water, he said. Wah-dah . They sat around repeating it. Wah-dah , not wor-uh .

He phoned Anouk.

“Drop everything. I’ll tell Terry to put you on the first plane.”

“I can’t. I can’t just ‘drop everything.’ ”

“I need you, babe. It’s serious. I’m not pissing about.”

“I have a job.”

“Fuck’s sake, Nookie, you don’t work in an office. Turn something down for once, eh?”

“Nicky, you decided to go and be out there. You left me, not the other way round. It was your choice.”

“I didn’t leave you.”

“You could have found a studio anywhere. It’s just a room with a lot of stupid black boxes. Not even any windows. What does it matter where you are?”

“You don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“No, of course not. I’m so stupid. I’m just stupid and good for fucking and being on your arm to have your picture taken.”

“That’s not what I meant.”

“You’re a selfish asshole, you know that? A spoilt little boy.”

“So I’m a little boy? Who’s the man, Nookie? Who’s the real man in your life?”

“What?”

“I know you. You’ve got someone. Who is he? Tell the truth, Anouk.”

“You’re being ridiculous. I don’t want to talk to you if you’re going to be like this.”

Click.

He stood in the car park and thought about Anouk and tried to work out if the sick feeling in his gut meant he was in love with her. He wrote love songs, or what passed for them. But what did he actually feel about her? When he wanted something, he hated not being able to have it, that was all. He tried to think of reasons to go back into the studio. A pickup stopped on the corner beside the Mexicans. The driver gestured and some of them climbed on the back. He wondered what would happen if he got on too. Where he’d go. What kind of life he’d lead.

Maybe if he went for a drive. He leaned into Noah’s car and tried the catch on the glove box. Not locked. He flipped it open. No keys inside, but there was a plastic bag full of little brown disks, like crinkly coins. He knew what they were, though he’d never actually taken any. One of Noah’s favorite riffs involved finding your spirit animal and entering the crack between two worlds. Behind the bag of drugs there was something else, wrapped in a cloth. He reached in and picked it up. A handgun. A big blocky gold-plated handgun with ISRAELI MILITARY INDUSTRIES written on the side. The sort of item you’d find in an African military dictator’s Christmas stocking.

It had taken Nicky a while to work out that Noah was a psycho. He was more famous than they were, at least in the States. A few years older, pushing thirty, he made freak-folk albums which sold by the truckload to hipster kids who wanted a little taste of freedom — the light filtering through the redwoods, sitting in a hot tub under the stars — all the stuff Londoners like Nicky fantasized about in their damp basement flats. Noah channeled all that longing into breathy vocals and squeaky guitar strings, overdubbed some crickets in the background and then rinsed the lot in strange electronic quasi-sitar drones which made his songs sound like they’d just been radioed in from Mars. The band thought he’d be the perfect producer.

The first time they hung out was at his house up in the hills. It was exactly what Nicky expected: a sort of deluxe log cabin mummified in ethnic fabrics, with girls lounging around wearing beads and headbands, smoking spliff and looking like designer Red Indians. Noah was high on something that made him trip over his words and jig about irritably on the deck. You Brits don’t know shit, he told them. You Brits still think it’s like, the 1800s and you guys are in charge. Nicky didn’t really give a toss. In a way, it was what they’d hired him for — the Americanness . But Ned was getting aerated and started to argue back. Nicky nudged him and told him not to bother; Noah wasn’t listening anyway. Holding a sarong round his waist with one hand, he was toking on a joint with the other, stabbing it in their general direction while he made an incomprehensible point about destiny and the frontier and Jim Morrison. You want to see something, he said suddenly. You really want to fucking see , man? He took them into a back room, made a performance of undoing locks and bolts and switching on the lights. Around the walls were glass cabinets full of guns. He had pistols, rifles, shotguns, old flintlock things like out of a pirate movie. He had a chrome-plated AK-47 he’d bought off some special-forces guy in a bar.

They shot them off the back porch. Noah had his squaws line up bottles on a wooden bench, like the beautiful assistants in a game show. Don’t you get it? he was yelling. Living free, baby! Living free! Nicky didn’t really understand what living free had to do with blasting the shit out of empty Coronas, but it was a laugh. Eventually the cops turned up, blue and red lights flashing in the street. Earl sorted it out. Earl was Noah’s equivalent of Terry.

After that night Jimmy and Nicky decided Noah was cool. Lol agreed. Lol always agreed if Nicky and Jimmy did. Ned didn’t like him, but then if Ned hadn’t known Jimmy at school and been basically the only drummer in Billericay, he would have still been working at Phones4U, so his opinion didn’t count. Noah became their guide, their guru. They bought clothes and instruments in the places he recommended. They did bongs first thing every morning, because he said they needed to loosen up. Jimmy even tried meditating. In the studio they pissed about with Tibetan temple bowls and rain sticks and Jew’s harps, chanting in darkened rooms, sitting on the floor writing tosh on bits of paper and cutting it up to make word associations. Burroughs did it, Noah told them. He was a pioneer of consciousness. Who’s Burroughs? whispered Lol, squirting glue on the rug. Some cunt off children’s telly? Noah was impressive, but he wasn’t good for the band. As far as Nicky was concerned, pop music ought to be instinctive: You just put your head down, made a noise, then stuck some lyrics over the top. Now here they were, throwing the I Ching to find a rhyme for “baby.” Everything they came up with sounded pretentious. Nicky couldn’t even pick out a tune without second-guessing himself. Jimmy was the same. Whatever else happened, the two of them had always been able to write songs together. Now, because there weren’t any songs, they began to argue. Words were spoken. Nicky moved out of the band house into one of the hotels on Sunset. He worked in his room, Jim in the studio. For a while they only communicated by fax, but neither of them could be arsed to write stuff down so they gave up and starting talking again.