Beautiful Ruins

“Why?”

And suddenly he was back at that bullshit intervention: Lydia and his mom across the room (We’re worried, Pat and This has to stop), refusing to meet his eyes. Lydia had known Pat’s mom first, had met her through community theater in Seattle, and unlike most of his girlfriends, whose disappointment was all about the way his behavior affected them, Lydia complained on Pat’s mother’s behalf: how he ignored her for months at a time (until he needed money), how he broke promises to her, how he still hadn’t repaid the money he’d taken. You can’t keep doing this, Lydia would say, it’s killing her—her, in Pat’s mind, really meaning both of them. To make them happy, Pat quit everything but booze and pot, and he and Lydia lurched along for another year, until his mother got sick. In hindsight, though, their relationship was probably done at that intervention, the minute she stood on his mother’s side of the room.

“Where is she now?” Umi asked. “Your mum?”

“Idaho,” Pat said wearily, “in this little town called Sandpoint. She runs a theater group there.” Then, surprising himself: “She has cancer.”

“Oh, I’m sorry.” Umi said that her father had non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma.

Pat could’ve asked for details, as she’d done, but he said, simply, “That’s tough.”

“Just a bit—” Umi stared at the floor. “My brother keeps saying how brave he is. Dad’s so brave. He’s battling so bravely. Bloody misery, actually.”

“Yeah.” Pat felt squirmy. “Well.” He assumed that enough polite post-orgasm conversation had passed, at least it would have in America; he wasn’t sure of the British exchange rate. “Well, I guess . . .” He stood.

She watched him get dressed. “You do this a bit,” she said, not a question.

“I doubt more than anyone else,” Pat said.

She laughed. “That’s what I love about you good-lookin’ blokes. What, me? Have sex?”

If London was an alien city, Edinburgh was another planet.

They took the train, Joe falling asleep the minute it pulled out of King’s Cross, so that Pat could only guess at the things he saw out the window—clothesline neighborhoods, great ruins in the distance, grain fields and clusters of coastal basalt that made him think of the Columbia River Gorge back home.

“Right, then,” Joe said four and a half hours later, sniffing awake and glancing around as they pulled into the Edinburgh station.

They emerged from the station at the bottom of a deep draw—a castle on their left, the stone walls of a Renaissance city on their right. The Fringe Festival was bigger than Pat had expected, every streetlight and pole covered with a flyer for one show or another, the streets swarming with people: tourists, hipsters, middle-aged show-goers, and performers of every imaginable kind—mostly comedians, but actors and musicians, too, acts in singles, pairs, and improv troupes, a whole range of mimes and puppeteers, fire jugglers, unicyclists, magicians, acrobats, and Pat didn’t know what—living statues, guys dressed like suits on hangers, break-dancing twins—a medieval festival gone freak.

At the festival office, an arrogant prick with a mustache and an accent even heavier than Joe’s—all lilting rhythms and rolling Rs—explained that Pat was expected to provide his own marketing and that his stipend would be half what Joe had promised—Joe saying someone named Nicole had ensured the rate—Mustache saying Nicole couldn’t “ensure her own arse”—Joe turning to Pat to say not to worry, he wouldn’t take a commission—Pat surprised that he’d ever pla

Outside, as they walked toward their accommodations, Pat took everything in. The city walls were like a series of cliff faces, the oldest part—the Royal Mile—leading from the castle and curling like a cobblestone stream down a canyon of smoke-stained stone edifices. The bustling noise of the festival stretched in every direction, the grand houses gutted to make way for stages and microphones, the sheer number of desperate performers sinking Pat’s spirits.

Pat and Joe were put up in a boarder’s room below street level, in an older couple’s flat. “Say somefin’ fu

That night, Joe led Pat to his show—up a street, down an alley, through a crowded bar into another alley, to a narrow, high door with an ornate knob in the middle. An uninterested woman with a clipboard led Pat to his greenroom, a closet of standpipes and mops, Joe explaining that crowds often started slowly but built quickly in Edinburgh, that there were dozens of influential reviewers, and once the reviews came in—“You’re a bloody lock for four stars”—the crowds would soon follow. A minute later, the woman with the clipboard a

But Pat had played his share of empty rooms, and he killed in this one, even riffing a new bit before “Lydia”—“She told our friends she discovered me with another woman. Like, what—she’d discovered a cure for polio? She told people she caught me having sex, like she’d apprehended Carlos the Jackal. I mean, you could catch bin Laden if you came home and he was fucking someone in your bed.”

Pat felt the thing he’d noticed before, that even the appreciation of a small crowd could be profound—he loved how British people hung on the first syllable of that word, brilliant, and he stayed up all night with an even-more excited Joe, talking about ways to market the show.

The next day, Joe presented Pat with posters and handbills advertising the show. Across the top was a picture of Pat holding his guitar—under the heading Pat Bender: I Can’t Help Meself! along with the tagline “One of America’s Most Outrageous Comedy Musicians!” and “Four Stars” from something called “The Riot Police.” Pat had seen such flyers for other performers at the festival, but . . . “I Can’t Help Meself”? And this “One of America’s . . .” bullshit? Every act had to put up such handbills, Joe explained. Pat didn’t even like being called a “comedy musician.” He wasn’t some Weird Al novelty act. Writers were allowed to be irreverent and still be serious. And filmmakers. But musicians were expected to be earnest shit-heels—I love you, baby and Peace is the answer. Fuck that!

For the first time, Joe was frustrated by Pat, his pale cheeks going pink. “Look. This is just how it’s done, Pat. You know who the fuckin’ Riot Police are? Me. I gave you the four stars.” He threw a handbill at Pat. “I paid for this whole bloody thing!”

Pat sighed. He knew it was a different world, a different time—bands expected to blog and flog and twit and fuck-knew-what. Hell, Pat didn’t even own a cell phone. Even in the States, no one got away with being a quiet, brooding artist anymore; every musician had to be his own publicist now—bunch of self-promoting twats posting every fart on a computer. A rebel now was some kid who spent all day making YouTube videos of himself putting Legos up his ass.

“Legos in his arse.” Joe laughed. “You should use that.”

That afternoon they went around handing out flyers on the street. At first it was as demeaning and pathetic as Pat had imagined, but he kept looking over at Joe and being humbled by the fevered energy of his young friend—“See the act what’s blown ’em away in the States!”—and so Pat did his best, concentrating on the women. “You should come,” he’d say, turning his eyes on, pressing a handbill into a woman’s hands. “I think you’ll like it.” There were eighteen people at his show that night, including the reviewer from something called The Laugh Track, who gave Pat four stars and—Joe read excitedly—wrote on his blog that “the onetime singer for the old American cult band the Reticents delivers a musical monologue that is truly something different: edgy, honest, fu