Hari Kunzru - Gods Without Men

If only Anouk was around.

One day Nicky thought of a lyric:

Oh go to sleep

you’re too much

when you’re awake

It felt like the beginning of something. Noah was hunched over a four-track in a corner of the rehearsal room, chewing on his beard. When Nicky asked him what he thought, he just went hmm .

“What do you mean, ‘hmm’ ?”

“Nothing. It’s just … Well, it kind of lacks bite.”

Nicky had always tried to act as if he could take criticism. The lyric was about a time when he and Anouk had been up for two days, speeding and ordering room service in a hotel in Berlin. Nookie was really tweaking, and he’d been on at Terry to get them some Valium. Despite how it sounded, it was sort of a happy memory.

There was an awkward silence. “OK,” said Noah eventually. “I’ll show you what I mean. I think it needs something more, um, striking .” He walked up to the mike and sang:

Go to sleep

little frog

you’re too much

when we touch

“She’s not a little frog. I don’t think of her as a frog.”

“OK, man. Whatever. She could be, I don’t know, a squirrel.”

“Or a leech,” said Lol bitchily.

Nicky walked out. What else could he do? He stayed away for a couple of days, spent the time drinking with some lads who had a custom-car place in Venice. He reckoned he had Noah’s number. Geezer was third-generation hippie aristocracy. His grandparents ran some Hindu healing center up in Northern California, sort of like the place the Beatles went to. His dad had been a singer-songwriter who’d OD’d after one album. According to Noah, he used to live in a dome out in the desert, just jamming with his band and looking for UFOs. Once he played them the LP, which had a picture of a pyramid on the front and was called The Guide Speaks . It was rubbish. All the stuff which once seemed so amazing about Noah was basically just him being a chip off the old block. Nicky’s old man had given him a lot of solid information about Spurs and cavity-wall insulation. If he’d grown up doing Zen calligraphy and going on horse rides with Leonard Cohen, things might have been different.

He should have knocked it on the head after the night of the hot tub, should have got on a plane. They were over at Noah’s, and despite himself Nicky had managed to get into the swing of things. There was this bird Willow and they were in the hot tub with the bubbles on and he was just beginning to get to a place where Anouk was totally off his mind when Noah bounded up, stark bollock naked, brandishing a pistol. Willow made a little noise in her throat, scrambled out, and ran off to find her clothes.

“Now look what you did.”

“Fuck her, man. You and I need to talk.”

Noah leveled the gun, holding it with both hands like he was on a firing range. “It’s weird how it concentrates the mind. You can feel it, right? The prickly sensation on your forehead? Think: What would it be like if I actually got shot? All that mush spurting out. All my brains.”

“I’m not being funny, mate, but if you don’t put that down I’m going to ram your teeth down your throat.”

“I’m not being funny either, mate . I’m serious. See my serious face? I’m not happy, buddy. I think you and your band might be wasting my time. You might be wasting my fucking life . Do you actually want to make a record, or do you just want to smoke weed and ball chicks in my hot tub?”

“You’re off your nut.”

“Time for answers, Nicky. Clock’s ticking. Seems to me like you don’t have any ideas. Seems like you don’t have any creativity .”

Willow must have told the others, because at that point Earl ran up and wrestled Noah to the ground. Noah was furious, shouting about how he was filled with cosmic pulsating life and Nicky was sucking it out of him, but eventually Earl got the gun off him and persuaded him to go inside and have a lie-down. Terry offered to drive Nicky back to the hotel, but he didn’t want to talk to anyone. He drove himself, so high and freaked out that he was barely able to see the center line.

He rang Anouk. It went straight to voicemail.

That should have been him done, back to Dalston, kebab in hand, pack of Marlboro Lights, six Stellas for a fiver and L.A. just a bad dream fading in the rearview mirror. Turned out the bastards weren’t going to let him off so easy. The next day he got soothing calls from Terry and Earl and the record company and the management in London and a concert promoter in New York who had no business knowing anything about the situation at all. Then a courier arrived with a big cardboard box, supposedly from Noah but most probably from Earl, with a cowboy hat inside wrapped in tissue paper and a note saying Neil Young had been wearing it when he made up “The Needle and the Damage Done” and Nicky ought to have it, as he was the true inheritor of that spirit blah blah blah. Nicky didn’t like to be soft-soaped. Twelve hours in the air and he could be having a pint in The George on the Commercial Road with the rain pissing down outside and some dickhead bending his ear about how Ronaldo wasn’t worth the money. Sheer bliss.

He told Terry he’d had enough and Terry did something he very rarely did, which was to sit him down and say no. Nicky reminded him it wasn’t his job to say no, his job was to say yes. Terry said he knew that, but sometimes what Nicky thought he wanted wasn’t what he actually wanted. The record company needed a record, and if they didn’t get one in L.A., they were going to consider the band in breach of contract. Fuck it, Nicky said. Breach the contract. We’ll go to another record company. Terry sighed. It didn’t work like that. A lot of money had been flushed down the toilet. He asked Nicky to imagine men in little cubicles doing sums. Men in suits. Nicky imagined. He didn’t see Terry’s point. Terry put it another way. If they didn’t make the album, the record company would take all their money. They’d be broke. Nicky asked if he had a choice. Not really, said Terry. Not having a choice was one of Nicky’s pet hates.

He finished his cigarette and ground it into the hot concrete of the studio car park. Make the record or be broke. Or steal Noah’s drugs and his gun, leave town and hope that by the time the others find you, it’ll all be sorted out. There was always a choice, if you knew where to look for it. He got into his car.

Driving was almost the only thing that felt natural in America. It was traditional. It was patriotic . When you accelerated, you could almost hear the crowd cheering you on. The Camaro managed about a hundred yards to the gallon and sounded like a tank invasion. It was a 1970s orange fireball of environmental doom and if he had to spend his globally warmed old age on a raft or trudging through the ruins of Billericay eating dog food, it would have been worth it.

L.A. faded away into a thankless dead landscape. You couldn’t call it desert, really. It was waste ground, the city’s backyard, a dump for all the ugly things it didn’t want to have to look at. Warehouses and processing plants. Pylons, pipelines. Broken things. Junk. There were whole junk towns, San this and San that, fuck all to them except concrete: concrete boxes to live in, concrete lots in front of concrete malls for all the little junk people to go and buy things. He was happy to pass through without stopping, to see those places as blurs by the side of the highway. A water tower, a wall painted with the tiger crest of some high-school sports team. He didn’t care that his phone was ringing every few minutes. He didn’t care the radio had nothing on it but Bible preachers and dinner jazz. The road was white as a bone, the sky was airbrushed blue, and he was on his way to the emptiest square on the map. Nothing mattered except keeping it tight, slotting into a space between speeding cars, peeling off at a junction, swinging round and over and under and back, leaving disaster far behind.