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The next night twenty-nine people came, including a decent-looking girl in black stretch pants, who stuck around after the show to get stoned with him. Pat banged her against the standpipe in his greenroom closet.
He woke with Joe across from him in a kitchen chair, already dressed, arms crossed. “Ya fooked Umi?”
Disoriented, Pat thought he meant the girl after the show. “You know her?”
“Back in London, ya daft prick! Did you sleep with Umi?”
“Oh. Yeah.” Pat sat up. “Does Kurtis know?”
“Kurtis? She told me! She asked if you’d mentioned her!” Joe tore off his glasses and wiped his eyes. “Do you remember, after you sang ‘Lydia’ in Portland, I said I was in love with my best mate’s girl—Umi. Remember?”
Pat did recall Joe talking about someone, and now that he mentioned it, the name did sound familiar, but he was so excited by the prospect of a UK tour that he hadn’t really been listening.
“Kurtis bunks every bird in the East End—just like the daft prick in your song—and I haven’t told Umi a fookin’ thing about it because Kurt’s me mate. And the first chance you get . . .” His face went from pink to red and his eyes welled. “I love that girl, Pat!”
“Joe, I’m sorry. I had no idea you felt that way.”
“Who did you think I was talking about?” Joe snapped his glasses back on and stalked out of the room.
Pat sat there awhile, feeling genuinely awful. Then he dressed and went out in the packed streets to look for Joe. What had he said, like the daft prick in your song? Jesus, did Joe think that song was some kind of parody? Then he had a horrible thought: Christ . . . was it? Was he?
All afternoon Pat looked for Joe. He even tried the castle, which buzzed with camera-snapping tourists, but no Joe. He wandered back down into New Town, to the top of Calton Hill, a gentle crest covered with incongruent monuments from different periods in Edinburgh’s past. The city’s entire history was an attempt to get a better vantage, a piece of high ground on which to build higher—spires and towers and columns, all of them with narrow spiral staircases to the top—and Pat suddenly saw humanity the same way: it was all this scramble to get higher, to see enemies and lord it over peasants, sure, but maybe more than that—to build something, to leave a trace of yourself, to have people see . . . that you were once up there, onstage. And yet what was the point, really? Those people were gone, nothing left but the crumbling rubble of failures and unknowns.
Forty people at the show that night, his first sellout. But no Joe. “I walked around Edinburgh today and decided that the whole of art and architecture is just some dogs pissing on trees,” Pat said. It was early in the show, and he was wandering dangerously off-script. “My whole life . . . I’ve assumed I was supposed to be famous, that I was supposed to be . . . big. What is that? Fame.” He leaned over his guitar, looking out on the expectant faces, hoping, along with them, that this was about to get fu
Where did shit shows come from? Pat had no way of knowing if he suffered more bombs than other performers, but shit shows had always come regularly for him. With the Reticents, the consensus was that they’d put out one great album (The Reticents), one good one (Ma
But even with the Rets, sometimes, he’d just have a shit show. Not because of drugs or fighting or experimenting with feedback; sometimes they just sucked.
And that’s what happened the day he got in a fight with Joe, and the night the reviewer from the Scotsman came to see “Pat Bender: I Can’t Help Meself!” Pat blew the setup for “Why Are Drummers So Ducking Fumb,” and then tried to get out of it with some lame eighties comic patter about how it’s called scotch in America but just whiskey in Scotland, was scotch tape just . . . tape—people staring at him like, Yeah, bloody right it’s tape, you simple shit. And he could barely get through “Lydia,” imagining everyone saw through him, that everyone but him understood the song.
He felt that odd transference, in which an audience—normally rooting for him to be fu
Next morning, there was still no sign of Joe. The couple putting Pat up left the Scotsman outside his door, open to his one-star review. He read to the words “crass,” “rambling,” and “angry,” and put the paper down. That night, eight people came to his show; after that, things went about the way he imagined. Five people the next night. Still no Joe. Mustache stopped by the stage to tell Pat his weekly contract wasn’t being renewed. A ventriloquist would get his theater, his slot, and his boarder’s room. Pat’s manager had been given his check, Mustache said. Pat actually laughed at this, imagining Joe on his way to London with Pat’s five hundred quid.
“So how am I supposed to get home?” Pat asked the man with the mustache.
“To the States?” the guy asked through his nose. “Ehm, I don’t know. Does your guitar float?”
The only good thing Pat had gleaned from his dark period was some knowledge about how to survive on the streets. He’d never done more than a few weeks at a time, but he felt oddly calm about what to do. There were several strata of performers in Edinburgh: big acts, smaller paid pros like Pat, hobby guys, and up-and-comers playing what they called “Free Fringe,” and finally—below that, and just above beggars and pickpockets—a whole range of buskers, street performers: Jamaican dancers in dirty sneakers and ratty dreadlocks, Chilean street bands, magicians carrying five tricks in a backpack, a Gypsy woman playing a strange flute; and that afternoon, on a street in front of a Costa coffeehouse, Pat Bender, ad-libbing fu
There were enough American tourists that, before he knew it, he had thirty-five pounds. He bought a half-pint and some fried fish, then went to the train station, but was stu
Beneath the castle was a long, narrow park, the city walls on either side. Pat walked the length of the park, looking for a place to sleep, but after an hour he decided he was too old to sleep outside with the street kids and went into New Town, bought a pint of vodka, and paid a night hotel clerk five pounds to let him sleep in a toilet stall.