Beautiful Ruins

Next morning, he returned to the coffeehouse and resumed playing. He was doing the old Rets song “Gravy Boat,” just to prove to himself that he existed, when he looked up to see the girl he’d had sex with against the standpipe in his greenroom. The girl’s eyes widened and she grabbed her friend by the arms. “Hey, that’s him!”

She turned out to be named Naomi, to be only eighteen, to be vacationing from Manchester, and to be here with her parents, Claude and June, who turned out to be eating in a nearby pub, to be about his age, and to be less than thrilled to meet their daughter’s new friend. Naomi almost cried as she told her parents of Pat’s troubles, how he’d been “ever so nice,” how he’d been ripped off by his manager and stranded here with no way of getting home. Two hours later he was on a train to London, paid for by a father whose true motivation behind helping Pat get out of Scotland was never in doubt.

On the train Pat kept thinking about Edinburgh, about all those desperate entertainers giving out handbills in the streets, about the buskers and spires and churches and castles and cliffs, the scramble to get higher, to be seen, the cycle of creation and rebellion, everyone assuming they were saying something new or doing something new, something profound—when the truth was that it had all been done a million billion times. It was all he’d ever wanted. To be big. To matter.

Yeah, well, he could imagine Lydia saying, you don’t get to.

Kurtis answered the door, iPod earbuds plugged into the holes in his round, dented head. When he saw Pat, his face didn’t change—or at least that’s what struck Pat when Kurtis shoved him back into the hallway and pi

Then he noticed Kurtis was in his underwear; Jesus, these people. Kurtis stood above him, panting. He kicked the guitar case, Pat thinking: Please, not my guitar. “Ya fucking coont,” Kurtis finally said, “ya stupid fucking coont,” and he went back inside. Even the air from the slammed door hurt Pat.

It took a few seconds for Pat to get up, and he did so only because he was worried that Kurtis would come back for the guitar. On the street, people gave him a wide berth, wary of the blood burbling from Pat’s nose. At a pub a block away, Pat got a pint, a bar rag, and some ice, cleaned himself in the bathroom, and watched the door of Kurtis’s flat. But after two hours, he didn’t see anyone: no Joe, no Umi, no Kurtis.

When his beer was gone, Pat pulled the rest of his money from his pocket and laid it on the table: twelve pounds, forty pence. He stared at his sad pile of money until his eyes were bleary and he put his face in his hands and Pat Bender wept. He felt cleansed, somehow, as if he could finally see how this thing he’d identified in Edinburgh—this desperate hunger to get higher—had nearly destroyed him. He felt as if he’d come through some tu

He was done with all that now. He was ready to stop trying to matter; he was ready to simply live.

Pat was shaking as he stepped outside into a cool gust, driven with a resolve that bordered on despair. He slipped into the red phone booth outside the pub. It smelled like piss and was papered with faded handbills from rough strip shows and tra

She answered on the second ring. “Hello?”

But something was wrong. It wasn’t his mother . . . and Pat thought, in horror, It’s too late. She had died. The house had sold. Christ. He’d come around too late—missed saying good-bye to the one person who had ever cared about him.

Pat Bender stood bleeding and weeping alone in a red phone booth on a busy street in south London. “Hello?” the woman said again, her voice more familiar this time, though still not his mother’s. “Is someone there?”

“Hello?” Pat caught his breath, wiped his eyes. “Is . . . Is that—Lydia?”

“Pat?”

“Yeah, it’s me.” He closed his eyes and saw her, ridges of high cheek and those dark bemused eyes beneath her short brown hair, and it felt like a sign. “What are you doing there, Lydia?”

She told him that his mother was undergoing another round of chemo. God—then he wasn’t too late. Pat covered his mouth. A few of them were taking turns helping out, Lydia said: first her sisters—Pat’s wretched aunts Diane and Darlene—and now Lydia, in from Seattle for a few days. Her voice sounded so clear and intelligent; no wonder he had fallen in love with her. She was crystalline. “Where are you, Pat?”

“You won’t believe it,” Pat said. He was in London, of all places. He’d been talked into doing a UK tour by this kid, but he had some trouble, the kid had ripped him off and . . . Pat could sense the quiet from her end.

“No . . . Lydia,” he said, and he laughed—he could imagine how the call must seem from her point of view. How many such calls had she taken from him? And his mom—how many times had she bailed him out? “It’s different this time—” But then he stopped. Different? How? This time . . . what? He looked around the phone booth.

What could he say that he hadn’t said, what higher ground could he possibly scramble to? This time, if I promise to never get high-drunk-cheat-steal, can I please come home? He’d probably said that, too, or would, in a week, or a month, or whenever this thing came back, and it would come back—the need to matter, to be big, to get higher. To get high. And why shouldn’t it come back? What else was there? Failures and unknowns. Then Pat laughed. He laughed because he saw this phone call was just another shit show in a long line of them, like the rest of his shit show life, like the shit show intervention of Lydia and his mom, which he’d hated so much because they didn’t really mean it; they didn’t understand that the whole fucking thing was meaningless unless you were truly prepared to cut the person loose.

This time . . . On the other end of the phone, Lydia misread the laugh. “Oh Pat.” She spoke in little more than a whisper. “What are you on?”

He tried to answer, Nothing, but there was no air to form words. And that’s when Pat heard his mother come into the room behind Lydia, her voice faint and pained, “Who is it, dear?” and Pat realized that in Idaho, it was three in the morning.

At three in the morning, he’d called his dying mother to ask her to bail him out of trouble again. Even at the end of her life, she had to suffer this middle-aged shit show of a son, and Pat thought, Do it, Lydia, just do it, please! “Do it,” he whispered as a tall red bus rumbled past his phone booth, and he held his breath so no more words could escape.

And she did it. Lydia took a deep breath. “It’s no one, Dee,” she said, and she hung up the phone.