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Pat turned and saw pale, saw gapped front teeth and Superman hair, saw black glasses, Dandy Warhols T-shirt. “Three weeks in America, know what I hate most?” the kid asked. “Your bloody sparts.” He nodded toward the muted Mariners game on the bar TV. “Fact, maybe you can explain something about bess-bowl that I don’t quite get.”
Before Pat could speak, the kid yelled, “Averthing!” and slid into Pat’s booth. “I’m Joe,” he said. “Admit it, Americans suck at every spart you didn’t invent.”
“Actually,” Pat said, “I suck at American sports, too.”
This seemed to amuse and satisfy Joe, and he pointed to Pat’s guitar case, perched next to him in the booth like a bored date. “And do you play that Larrivée?”
“Across the street,” Pat said, “in an hour.”
“Seriously? I’m a bit of a club promoter,” Joe said. “What kind of stuff you play?”
“Failed mostly,” Pat said. “I used to front this band, the Reticents?” No response, and Pat felt pathetic for trying. And how to describe what he did now, which had begun as a talky acoustic set—like that old show Storytellers—but after a year had evolved into a comic-music monologue, Spalding Gray with guitar. “Well,” he told Joe, “I sit on a stool and I sing a little. I tell some fu
And that was how it all started—the whole notion of a UK tour. Like every highlight of Pasquale “Pat” Bender’s grubby little career, it wasn’t even his idea. It was this Joe, who sat midway back in a half-full club, laughing at “Showerpalooza,” Pat’s song about the way jam bands stink; howling at Pat’s riff about his band’s stoned liner notes reading like a Chinese food menu; singing along with the crowd at the chorus on “Why Are Drummers So Ducking Fumb?”
There was something magnetic about this Joe. Any other night, Pat would’ve focused on this little stab at a front table, white panties strobe-flashing beneath her skirt, but he kept hearing Joe’s horselaugh, which was bigger than the kid himself, and by the time Pat pivoted into the dark, confessional part of the show—the drugs and breakups—Joe was deeply affected, removing his glasses and dabbing his eyes to the chorus of Pat’s most heartfelt song, “Lydia.”
It’s an old line: you’re too good for me
Yeah, it’s not you it’s me
But Lydia, baby . . . what if that’s the one true thing
You ever got from me—
Afterward, the kid was crazy with praise. He said it was unlike anything he’d ever seen: fu
Just as Pat figured, “Lydia” had made Joe wistful about some girl he’d never gotten over—and he was compelled to tell the whole story, most of which Pat ignored. No matter how much they laughed during the rest of the show, young men were always moved by that song, and its description of the end of a relationship, Pat endlessly surprised at the way they mistook its cold, bitter refutation of romantic negation (Did I ever even exist/Before your brown eyes) for a love song.
Joe started talking right off about Pat performing in London. It was silly talk at midnight, intriguing at one, plausible at two, and by four thirty—smoking Joe’s weed and listening to old Reticents songs in Pat’s apartment in Northeast Portland (“This is fuck-me brilliant, Pat! How’ve I never heard this?”)—the idea had clicked into a plan: a whole range of Pat’s money-girl-career troubles solved by that simple phrase: UK Tour.
Joe said that London and Edinburgh were perfect for Pat’s edgy, smart musical comedy—a circuit of intimate clubs and comedy festivals farmed by eager booking agents and TV scouts. Five A.M. in Portland was one P.M. in Edinburgh, so Joe stepped outside to make a call and came back giddy: an organizer at the Fringe Festival there remembered the Reticents and said there was an opening for a last-minute fill-in. It was all set. Pat just had to get from Oregon to London and Joe would take care of the rest: lodging, food, transportation, six weeks of guaranteed paid gigs, with the potential for more. Hands were shaken, backs clapped, and by morning Pat was contacting his students and canceling lessons for the month. Pat hadn’t felt so excited since his twenties; here he was, heading back out on the road, some twenty-five years after he started. Of course, old fans were sometimes disappointed to see him now—not just that the old front man of the Reticents was doing musical comedy (ignoring Pat’s fine distinction: he was a comic-musical monologist), but that Pat Bender was even alive, that he hadn’t gone the gorgeous-corpse route. Strange how a musician’s very survival made him suspect—as if all the crazy shit of his heyday had been just a pose. Pat had tried writing a song about this strange feeling—“So Sorry to Be Here,” he called it—but the song got bogged down in that junkie braggadocio and he never performed it.
But now he wondered if there hadn’t been a purpose to all that surviving: the second chance to do something . . . BIG. And yet, as excited as he was, even as he typed e-mails to the few friends he could still ask for money (“amazing opportunity” . . . “break I’ve been waiting for”) Pat couldn’t block out a sobering voice: You’re forty-five, ru
Pat used to imagine such cold-water warnings in the voice of his mother, Dee, who had tried to be an actress in her youth and whose every impulse was to tamp down her son’s ambition with her own disillusionment. Just ask yourself, she’d say when he wanted to join a band or quit a band or kick a guy out of a band or move to New York or leave New York, Is this about the art . . . or is it really about something else?
What a stupid question, he finally said to her. Everything is about something else. The art is about something else! That fucking question is about something else!
But this time it wasn’t his mom’s cautionary voice that Pat heard. It was Lydia—the last time he saw her, a few weeks after their fourth breakup. That day he’d gone to her apartment, apologized yet again, and promised to get sober. For the first time in his life, he told her, he was seeing things clearly; he’d already managed to quit doing almost everything she objected to, and he’d finish the job if that’s what it took to get her back.
Lydia was unlike anyone he’d ever known—smart, fu
That day Lydia stared at him, her eyes wet with regret. She gently took her cap back. Jesus, Pat, she said quietly. Listen to you. You’re like some kind of epiphany addict.
Irish Joe had a buddy in London named Kurtis, a big, bald hip-hop hooligan, and they stayed in the cramped Southwark flat that Kurtis shared with his pale girlfriend, Umi. Pat had never been to London before—had been to Europe only once, in fact, on a high school exchange trip his mom arranged because she wanted him to see Italy. He never made it: a girl in Berlin and a pinch of coke got him sent home early for various violations of tour protocol and human decency. There was always talk of a Japanese tour with the Reticents—so much that it became a band joke, Pat and Be