How to Be Famous Read online

  One minute later, I am locking us both in the toilet. I sit on the edge of the bath, whilst he sits on the toilet.

  “I am uncomfortable with our father being stoned and racist in my front room,” I say, lighting a cigarette, and flicking the ash down the plughole. “This is not why I pay rent.”

  “I want him to stay stoned,” says Krissi, who is already quite stoned. “He was straight all the way down, and kept banging on about how much he hates Mum. I don’t want some hippy being continuingly emotional. Racism is far easier to deal with. Racism won’t make him cry. Have you ever seen him cry?” Krissi asks. “He started just outside Coventry. It’s horrible to watch in a man of that age. His wattle vibrates.” Krissi shudders.

  “Mate,” I say, sympathetically.

  “I know. He also tried to tell me how good Mum is in bed.”

  I put my hands over my ears.

  “Do not pass your trauma on to me, Krissi,” I say, warningly. “My head must be kept free of my parents’ sexuality.”

  “Too traumatized to hear what you’re saying, old friend,” Krissi says. “Gotta share the trauma by making you think about Mum and Dad having sex.”

  “I can’t hear you,” I say, pressing my hands tighter.

  Think about Mum and Dad having sex, Krissi mouths. “I am making you think about that.”

  I throw a towel over Krissi’s head. He leaves it there.

  “This is calming,” he says, reflectively. “I like it. It’s like a cheap sensory deprivation tank.”

  “I don’t want to take Dad to this gig,” I moan. “I hate it when he meets people I know from work. Remember when he met Brett from Suede?”

  I’ve interviewed Brett a few times. When my father met him, at a gig, he greeted him with “Mate, I’d shake your hand—but I’ve just had a wazz, and my hands are pissy ’cos the sink’s bost.” It’s not the kind of vibe I want to project to sexy rock stars.

  “Oh, he won’t be coming to the gig,” the towel said, mysteriously.

  “What?”

  “I top-loaded that joint with skunk weed—he won’t be able to move for a week,” the towel continued.

  And, indeed, when we got back into the front room, Dadda was lying splayed out on the floor, listening to Abbey Road very loudly, and staring at the ceiling.

  “You coming to the gig, Dad?” I said, cautiously.

  “No, no, my love,” he said, rubbing his stomach dreamily. “I’m going to while away the afternoon in my sunshine playroom. Leave your old dadda here, with his dreams.”

  Krissi bent over, to pick up his weed. A hand shot out, with the terrifying power and rapidity of the Terminator, and clamped down onto the bag.

  “Those are my dreams, mate,” Dadda said, in a slightly pained voice. “Leave them here.”

  3

  Walking toward the gig, Krissi explains that he’s got “too stoned,” and needs to “get very drunk,” in order to counteract the weed. We go into a pub and knock back several shots, in a businesslike manner, but the booze—contrary to Krissi’s theory—doesn’t seem to “straighten him out,” but merely—as I predicted—just makes him even more smashed. Still, it’s a happy smashed. He keeps hugging me, which is very un-Krissi-like, and telling me I’m a “dude,” which I graciously accept.

  When we get to the Astoria, there’s a huge queue for the guest list. We stand in line, smoking cigarettes, and are chatting away about Liam Gallagher’s unique walk—“It’s like an aggressive baby, in a nappy”—when Krissi suddenly nudges me in the ribs.

  “Look! Look!”

  Six ahead of us, in the queue, is comedian Jerry Sharp. It’s the nineties, when comedy is “the new rock ’n’ roll,” and Jerry is one of a slew of young, hot comedians telling story-jokes about sex, love, death, and their obsession with The Smiths. His sitcom, Jerry Sharp Will Die Alone, is about his continuing inability to find love in the modern world. Every week, he meets a new girl he falls in love with, who bins him off by the end. It has made a whole generation of teenage girls desperately believe they could be the ones who could make him happy. Obviously, I believe I really could. Who would not be delighted by me?

  “Oh my God,” Krissi says, staring. “I really fancy him. I can’t believe he’s here!”

  Jerry is pale—troubled young man pale—with blond hair, shades, and a leather jacket, despite the heat.

  “He looks like a hot Nazi,” Krissi says, longingly.

  Krissi has never talked to me about who he fancies before. This is a novel and delightful thing.

  “Like Rolf, the evil postboy in The Sound of Music,” he continues.

  “Oh—are you Rolf?” I say, surprised. “I thought you’d be more Captain von Trapp. I’m Captain von Trapp. I would come when he whistled,” I add, longingly.

  Krissi stares a bit more.

  “Would you not do him?” Krissi sighs. “I would.”

  “He’s all right,” I say. “Seven out of ten.”

  We have further chance to observe Jerry Sharp when he gets to the guest-list booth, and announces his name, in a faux-modest way.

  “Jerry Sharp,” he says, in an “I’m pretending it’s a normal name—but, yes, it is a famous name” way.

  The woman on the guest-list booth, however, is having none of it.

  “Sorry, love—you’re not down,” she says.

  Jerry can’t believe this.

  “I’m pretty sure I will be,” he says, with a dangerously self-deprecating smile.

  “Nope,” she says, briskly.

  Jerry pushes his sunglasses onto his head, and points at his face.

  “Does this change anything?” he says, pointing at his face, and smiling in a tightly charming way.

  The woman looks at him.

  “No,” she says. “Do you want to stand to one side, love. So I can serve other people?”

  Furious, Jerry stands to one side, gets out a mobile phone, and starts punching in numbers, sighing heavily.

  He’s still standing there by the time Krissi and I get to the booth. I can feel Krissi vibrating with the joy of standing near Jerry Sharp.

  “Dolly Wilde—it’s plus two, but I’m only using one,” I say.

  She’s just started to tick me off on the guest list when something occurs to me.

  “Er, ’scuse me,” I say, turning to Jerry Sharp. He ignores me. “’Scuse me.”

  He looks up, in a “Fans, please—I’m off duty!” way.

  “Erm, I couldn’t help but hear you’re having problems with the guest list,” I say. “I’ve got a spare plus-one—you can have it, if you’d like? And then I will have done my noble deed for the day. I’m currently on a ‘noble’ tip.”

  Jerry’s expression changes in a second—from tetchy hostility to a fully charming, grateful, and hot reverence.

  “You’re Dolly Wilde, aren’t you?” he says, like he’s just realized I’m actually a human being—and not a farm animal, getting in his way. “From the D&ME? You’re the positive girl. You love everything!”

  He says this in a way that conveys that “loving everything” is an eccentric and foolish position to take—but whilst beaming, hotly, at me, from behind his sunglasses. It’s quite discombobulating.

  “I am one of Jesus’s sunbeams, yes,” I say.

  “Good job I’ve got my shades on, then,” he says, still grinning.

  The woman in the guest-list booth makes an annoyed sound: “Hrmff?”

  “So I’ll give Mr. Jerry Sharp my other guest-list place, then, please,” I say, to her.

  “Well, this is extremely convenient,” Jerry says, with a rakish smile. “I don’t think the Gorgon there is a comedy fan.”

  He gestures to the woman in the booth. She gives him a sour smile.

  I hand him his ticket. There a pause. His hand is still out.

  “Don’t you have an aftershow pass, as well?” he prompts, in a slightly pained way.

  “Of course!” I say, and take the spare pass out of the envelope.

&
nbsp; “See you at the party, cheerful Dolly Wilde! I owe you a pint!” he says, disappearing into the crowd.

  I expect Krissi to say, “He asked for a pass, as well? How presumptuous! How rude!,” which is what I’m thinking—but instead he just says, “So hot,” again, so I change my thoughts, and just think, So hot, like Krissi. I am a woman. I am open to other people’s thoughts. The more the merrier!

  The gig is one of those gigs that’s not so much “a band playing their songs whilst people enjoy them,” and more like “people turning up to vote for a new future.” This is a rock election; a landslide victory; a coronation.

  The sound is ferocious—tight; fierce; like something trying to claw and swagger its way out of a small space.

  Coming from the same kind of place as Oasis—a small, dull estate in a run-down industrial town—I know this feeling: it sounds exactly like getting the bus, uptown with your friends, on a Friday night. Already half-drunk, shouting “Come on!” at each other as the bus bombs past the tiny houses—all lit with the blue of the TV—and accelerates down the dual carriageway, and the orange street-sodium blurs, and you can’t wait to explode into the white lights of a club, and spend the next five hours swaggering around the place like a king or queen of misrule.

  Krissi—in his drunken, euphoric state—is both amused by, and immersed in, the man-ness of it all.

  “We’re the LADS!” he roars, grabbing me, and jumping up and down to “Shakermaker.”

  During “Live Forever,” he cries—but then, everyone does.

  “Oh my God—you haven’t cried since Harriet Vale refused to go out with Lord Peter Wimsey in the Dorothy L. Sayers mysteries!” I shout into his ear.

  “Shut up!” he roars back. “We’re gonna live forever!”

  It’s nice to see him so in touch with his feelings. Well, Liam’s feelings.

  When the gig ends—Liam staring at the audience, blankly, as “I Am the Walrus” spirals to its conclusion—the sweaty shuffle for the aftershow party begins, everyone sticking on their passes, and saying “That was amazing!,” whilst everyone else replies “What? Sorry—I’ve gone totally deaf.”

  “We going to the aftershow?” Krissi wobbles slightly, under the impact of so much booze.

  “But they’re collections of the worst people on God’s Earth, herded into a mosh pit of cuntery, all blahing on about how brilliant they are,” I tell him.

  “Who said that?”

  I’m so happy he asked.

  “You,” I reply. “Last time I took you to one. You were not gracious.”

  “But, Johanna,” Krissi says, looking deadly serious, “I done it with a doctor, on a helicopter.”

  At the aftershow, upstairs, in the amazingly named Keith Moon Bar, I bump into a couple of people I know, and Krissi disappears.

  When I find him, an hour later, he’s standing by a window, looking both triumphant, and slightly furtive.

  “What are you doing?” I ask.

  “It’s a free bar!” he says, triumphantly. “FREE! I asked them what the most expensive drink was, and then asked for ‘a trayful.’”

  He stands back, to reveal that the windowsill has fourteen glasses of booze on it, arranged in neat rows.

  “What’s that?” I ask.

  “Double brandy and orange—three pounds twenty each,” he says, proudly. “I am a honeybee—and I have gathered my nectar,” he says, owlishly—taking one, and knocking it back. “I have laid in provisions. We are ready . . . for the winter.”

  We’ve only drunk three alcoholic pods of our honeycomb when a voice next to us says, “Is this a shop? A booze shop? Are you selling it to fund the Guides?”

  We turn around—and Jerry Sharp is standing next to us, looking amused.

  “Well hello, Plus One,” I say.

  “Hello, Jesus’s sunbeam. I was going to buy you that thank-you pint—but it seems you are several steps ahead of me,” Jerry says, amusedly, gesturing to our booze shelf.

  “Would you like some of our provisions?” Krissi asks—offering him a glass. I’ve never seen Krissi’s “fancying face” in action before. It’s amazing—like rainbows are coming out of his eyes.

  “What is it?” Jerry asks, politely.

  “It’s three pounds twenty—yet free,” Krissi says, proudly.

  Jerry takes one.

  “What did you make of that, then?” he asks—gesturing to the recently vacated stage.

  I’m just about to reply when Krissi—who has just lit a fag, and taken a drag—says, very quietly, “Oh, dear,” and does a small bit of sick into his glass.

  “It’s okay!” he says, nobly—and then does a bit more.

  “Is that how you filled the glasses in the first place?” Jerry asks, looking into his.

  Krissi starts laughing—and then clamps his hand over his mouth. He’s gone pale green, and is sweating profusely. I go to put an arm around him, as the first part of some manner of alcoholic triage—but he pushes me away, urgently.

  “Whitey. Home. Now,” he says, and starts walking away.

  “Our coats are in the cloakroom!” I shout after him, fumbling around for my rucksack. “We have to get our coats!”

  “Can’t,” Krissi says, briskly—breaking into a rapid trot, and reeling down the stairs.

  I fish my cloakroom ticket out of my pocket. “Oh God, look at the queue,” I say. There must be fifty people in it, waiting. The Astoria coat queue is legendary. It would be easier to queue for the last chopper out of Nam.

  “Your boyfriend looks like he needs to get home,” Jerry says, taking a calm sip. “Let him go. Have these”—he looks at the shelf—“twelve drinks with me, and wait for the queue to die down. It’s the only sensible thing to do. It’s what the Guides would recommend.”

  “He’s not my boyfriend. He’s my brother,” I say. “I don’t have a boyfriend.”

  “Well, then,” Jerry says, eyes lighting up. “Let’s drink to . . . waiting for coats with unattached girls!”

  We clink glasses.

  Twenty minutes later, Jerry and I are smoking fags, and I’ve asked him what his favorite albums are at the moment—because the rules are that the nonfamous person asks the famous person questions. The nonfamous person is in charge of effortful Conversation Admin—they must lay on the schedule for the more well-known. And the conversation should be about, of course, the famous person. That’s just a given.

  We’ve mutually enthused about Julian Cope—“Oh my word, ‘Safesurfer’!”—and Jerry’s tried to tell me I should like Slint, which I am resistant to, as, to me, they sound like people who are deliberately making horrible music that will make their mums sad.

  “The album’s called Spiderland,” I say. “Spiderland would be the worst possible place you could find up the Faraway Tree.”

  And Jerry laughs! I’ve made a famous comedian laugh!

  I am still high on the laugh when Jerry starts to explain to me that—despite my loving them—I should actually hate R.E.M. now, as, “They’ve sold out, now they’re on Warner’s. We’ve lost them.”

  “But four million people bought Green, and twelve million people bought Out of Time. So quite a lot of people have found them,” I say. I am proud of having remembered these statistics. I saw them on The Chart Show. They were the first “fact caption” on the video to “Shiny Happy People.” The second was “Michael Stipe once ate fifteen packets of crisps.” I love the fact captions on The Chart Show.

  However, Jerry dismisses all this with a wave of his hand.

  “They’re for sad fat mums in Oklahoma now,” he says, as if this is a bad thing.

  Personally, I thought making music for sad fat mums in Oklahoma sounded like a lovely thing to do. I mean, they are a hard audience to write for! They only have the time and money for one album a year. If it’s yours, you must be good.

  I started trying to explain this to Jerry, but he shook his head, and said, “Let’s talk about someone good. Afghan Whigs’ Gentlemen. The Bible of how lov
e, and sex, are dirty and dangerous—if you’re doing them right.”

  He lit my cigarette, and gave me an intense stare.

  “Although one of Jesus’s little sunbeams, hanging with the fat sad mums in Oklahoma, would probably disagree.”

  Ah, if I could go back and talk to me then, I would say, “Johanna! Never trust a man who says sex and love are dirty and dangerous! Never go along with it—because to nod is to check the ‘I agree to terms and conditions’ box of the man who is telling you he is dirty and dangerous. He’s telling you, right up front, what his world is like. He’s showing you the contract.”

  But I am nineteen, alone in a big city, excited to be talking to the edgy comedian, and there is a huge body of evidence to suggest he is right. Half the songs I love. Half the books I love. Last year’s terrible affair with Tony Rich at D&ME, where he tried to inveigle me into a threesome. It does, surely, mark you out as dangerously innocent and jejune to argue against all this—to still claim, despite everything you’ve so far experienced, that love and sex can be . . . lovely? Jerry wants to talk to a sassy, fast-talking, streetwise broad. And so—she will appear. That’s what this situation requires.

  “The best nights are the ones that leave teeth marks on your soul,” I say in my best dark manner.

  This is the right manner: Jerry lights up.

  “Show me your teeth, tiger,” he says. And because I’ve already started doing what he asks me to, I do. I bare my teeth.

  “Shall we get another drink?”

  Twenty minutes later, when we get in a cab to Jerry’s house—his hands all over my back—I’m thinking three things.

  One: I haven’t had sex for ages—almost two months—and it makes me feel kind of hungry, but in my knickers. Like my vagina is Audrey II in Little Shop of Horrors, shouting “FEED ME.”

  Two: even though I don’t really fancy this comedian, Krissi will love the story of me having sex with him. I am going to go and make a Sex Anecdote! I am going to do this—for Krissi!

  And three: as always, I wish—wish like children wish for snow—that this man I was kissing was John Kite. But he is still not available to me. So this is one of the things I will do, while I wait for him.