Keys of Babylon (23 page)

What we gonna do? I asked Amir on the phone.

You do the gigs, he said. I'll talk to the US embassy. It's just the usual paranoia.

I like Inwood. It's cheap. Two coffees and two English muffins in the Capital restaurant for four dollars. But it's being discovered, just like Williamsburg. Sometimes we walk up to The Cloisters where Sting did that lute concert and look at the jays and those incredible incarnadine cardinals in the bushes. Yeah,
Macbeth
rocks. We call that path our Blue Jay Way. Once we decided to trek all down Broadway. Now that's a hike. Went through Harlem and this gang of black kids were jeering ‘Sugar Hill, Sugar Hill' at us. Thought we were dissing them. But we kept going, past Colombia where Dylan used to serenade the students, and came to the Broadway Dive on 101. We'd walked over one hundred blocks.

End of the road, Amir said. We went in, had Guinness and french fries, put Aretha on the jukebox, and just sang along. Forever, forever, you'll… whatever. Then we took the train back.

So I've begun the tour that Amir had organised. Started yesterday morning. After that call he hasn't rung again, but I have all the contacts. The six gigs are guaranteed. The PA is guaranteed. The amps are there. All I have to do is turn up and tune the Tanglewood.

Normally, Amir would drive. But driving over here is a challenge for me. So I caught a noon Trailways from the Port Authority, reckoning to be in Binghamton by five. The Brandywine Bowl would be just over the road, as would the motel.

What can I say? It's only rock and roll but I like it. Only I don't. What do you see when you hear the word Bowl? That's Bowl with a capital B. I see the Rose Bowl. I even see the Hollywood Bowl. I thought the Brandywine Bowl would be a modest concert arena. But it's not.

It's a bowling alley. Amir had booked me into the café of a bowling alley in the boondocks. Christ, Binghamton has seen better days. Derelict buildings, grey snow. Men in plaid shirts and ball caps. Everything like a bleached-out video. But I survived the Brandywine Bowl.
Hallelujah
, as Leonard Cohen would say. And I spent the fee on a bus ride.

One of my stranger gigs. I did three twenty minute sets, all interspersed with the skittles flying and the bowling balls crashing along the gutters. No, not skittles. Pins. And dorks ordering pizza in the café and just chit chit chattering. Like starlings. I did ‘Days' by
t
he Kinks, which went down well. I sang that once at a crematorium for a friend who OD'd. Twelve of us there in a concrete box in the rain. At the Bowl I also tried out Radiohead's ‘Creep', which was maybe ambitious. I haven't enough chords to make it as weird as it should be, and a bowling alley is no place for a tune like that. That's right. I like slow songs. Sometimes Amir tells me to rock it up but songs are poetry. And I'm not Motorhead.

I sold twelve of my ‘On the Brink' CDs. Afterwards the manager took me out to dinner. Ravioli with a cream sauce. Real all American glop. Earlier on, I'd changed in his office and he saw me in my bra. So he gets protective. Which quickly becomes proprietorial. Doesn't it girls?

I googled you, he said. Was a teensy bit disappointed.

Why? I asked.

Thought there'd be more stuff about you, he said. And your site's down.

But he liked the YouTube songs, ‘Beautiful Dreamer' done extra dreamily, and ‘Island Girl'. No, not the Elton song or the Beach Boys song. My own song. About Barry Island. Redbrink Crescent to be exact. That's where I was brought up. I was always on the brink – well that's what people think is the chorus. My ever plaintive side. Then he bought me a cocktail. It was blue. I'd have preferred a Guinness.

You got nice hair, he said.

I just laughed. No I don't, I said.

I was tired. My mouth felt like I was getting a cold sore. He walked me to my room and put his hand on my elbow. Kind of steering me.

Hey, I laughed, I'm not that ancient. And I locked the door.

Creep. No. Just a kid. A kid doing well at the Brandywine Bowl, and maybe the only person duking it out in Binghamton.

I took a long soak. I could see the telly in the next room and Sons of Anarchy was on, about middle-aged Hells Angels who probably come from this part of the world. Utica, with its Vietnamese triads. Or Albany. But the room's not bad. I've poured all the shower gel into the water and it's like a Hollywood bubble bath. But the site's down. That's grievous.

Amir's spent a lot of time rebuilding my site, including new pictures. I told him to keep the gypsies. He can't understand that but had to agree. We took that shot in a suq in Amman, when we were finally sick of watching Clinton squirm in his blue suit. There was a couple selling tea out of a silver pot, all dented and blackened. Amir spoke Arabic to them but he said they weren't Palestinian. Gypsies, he supposed. The woman had the moon and stars embroidered on her skirt. The man smiled like a goat. And you know, they spoke some English to me, this couple serving us tea. English in that ancient place.

So speak some of your own language, I said. But they wouldn't. They sort of withdrew then. Amir said their language was the dark language. Only for the clan. A private speech that wasn't Arabic. I suppose I have my own dark language too. But I never got round to learning it.

You know the most Welsh I ever felt? I was about sixteen and me and two friends had a free double period. We left school and went walking in the lanes. It was cold and under the hedgerows were these scarves of frost. Ice in the hoof prints. But roses were flowering too. Haggard but still there. We drifted on, all in our uniforms, me and Jane and Michael.

And we came to Barry Zoo. We'd never been that way before. But there, as usual, was the tiger in his cage, standing on his concrete floor. The tiger that would never look at us. In his shame he couldn't meet our eyes. A tiger in the frost standing on this piss-stained concrete. Surrounded by slaughterhouse bones. We mooched around a bit and went back through the fields. Then a man passed us. In that lonely place. There was no one else about.

Bore da
, the man said.

He startled us.

Bore da
, said Jane.

And then I did too. I spoke the dark language. Or it spoke me.
Bore da
, said the dark language.

Michael just giggled. Wanker, he whispered.

Jane and Michael had an argument and I joined in. Because for the first time in my life, I mean outside the classroom, I had spoken another language. But I was really thinking about the manky tiger. His feet were the colour of those roses in the frost.

I'd already taken the gypsies' pictures on the Sony digital Amir had bought. And it's on the site, this couple squinting through the steam, the woman with a red scarf, the man bareheaded. I still think it's one of my best. I wrote about them, of course. A song called ‘Lost Tribe', and I'm doing it on this tour. Tonight, in fact. At the Blue Tusk.

Good tea, I had said. The woman laughed and looked me up and down, while the man grinned with his big tobacco-coloured teeth. Hey, gyp. Long may you run.

I slept well. And on the dot of ten Mr Manager Man knocked on the door. He was taking me for breakfast, and then to the Greyhound stop which he claimed was not a good place.

Binghamton is sort of depressed, I said, over the Special, which was eggs, bacon, sausage, hashbrowns, orange juice and endless coffee. And me a vegetarian. Yeah, breakfast in America. You can't beat it. Then I told mein host about the UK, to make him feel better.

I was travelling with this band, The Dodgems, in a van on the M62. Say, two years ago. We'd just done the Upper George in Halifax together and the boys were giving me a lift south. But there'd been an accident and we had to leave the motorway and head into Manchester. It was wet and misty and the driver didn't have a clue. So we're amongst these redbrick streets. I was riding shotgun and could feel it getting dodgy. Well moody.

Women in burkhas, old men with their devout beards. Yeah, I pity the poor immigrant. Then it changed. There were groups of boys on the corners. Not Muslims, these boys were white. White as corpses they looked to me. In their Adidas uniforms. Their murder clothes. Then this one street had a sofa in the middle, like a throne, with a black kid sitting on it, his weapons on display around him. Including, I shit you not, a sword.

Around us now were burned-out shops and houses with metal frames over the windows. That country's children were just one vicious sect after another. Real gang land. How it's going to be everywhere when the banks finally collapse.

So what does the driver do? The driver is the drummer, so what can you expect? The driver stops and asks how we get to the M6. Immediately there's a hammering on the sides of the van. Sound of breaking glass.

Christ, shouts the singer in the back, just get the hell out. And so we're haring through this maze and I stick ‘Milk and Alcohol' on the CD player. Doctor Feelgood were the best road band ever and Wilko Johnson is still my favourite R&B guitarist. And we're all singing along to the track and laughing and generally pissing ourselves, and I even sang Memphis Minnie's ‘Me and my Chauffeur' for the drummer. Those boys had never heard it before. They thought it was a driving song. Bless their hearts.

What a strange brew on the Greyhound. Old codgers, Chinese girls. All gone to look for America. We were driving past these dismal swamps, and sometimes I could see hunters in orange jackets out in the trees. But people were rare. All around us were these reeds in the wall-eyed ice. I saw a programme about how those reeds are invading the country. I think they're Chinese, and they're tall and pale and everywhere. The reeds that are burying America. Then I glimpsed a hawk on a fence post, hunched like one of those hoodies in the Manchester rain.

About 4 p.m. we swung into a Burger King. I bought a coffee and studied the men at the next table. Six old geezers, all looking eighty plus. And I thought, Jesus Christ, this must be their local pub. They meet here every Tuesday afternoon because there's nowhere else. Polystyrene cups and garbage on telly. They should be around a real fire with glasses of Saranac or tots of bourbon, telling tales of brave Ulysses. But when I listened in, it was all about rheumatism.

And the TV? It's a never-ending epitaph for this country. I did an unkind thing once. Woke up one day and Tom Jones was on
Good Morning America
. Live at 9 a.m. and still belting it out. Christ, I thought. Won't that man ever stop? So I wrote these words as a joke. Called the song ‘Past It' and took the tune from Lennon's ‘Crippled Inside', which I usually jump on my iPod. Slowed it down a shade. Yeah, I slow everything down. First verse was
Used to say about Tom / He was a real sex bomb /But since women's lib / He's been a damp squib
.

I did it in the KGB Club in the East Village. Some people laughed. At the end of the set this guy sidles up.

Liked the Tom Jones thing, he said.

Great, I said.

But I gotta question. What's that damp squid line all about?

Some things don't travel. Language doesn't always travel. They've never heard of a damp squib over here. Killed it as far as I'm concerned. So it's the UK only for that mother.

The Blue Tusk is going to be another nightmare. What was Amir playing at? It's a big bar in downtown Syracuse, boasting about its real ales and rare wines and whiskies. But it's a strange U shape without a proper stage. Not as bad as the Bowl but still a poor venue for someone like me. I need intimacy. Which I'll get in spades, but I mean tolerant intimacy. I know Amir's losing interest in the whole music business. It's film now. That's where the excitement is. Film it yourself, edit it yourself, be in control. Better than the same old songs done for drunks talking trash.

But seeing those old timers made me think of Dad. I'll try to ring him tomorrow. You see, I live with him. With my dad. I'm forty-eight, he's sixty-eight. And he's a heroin addict. When he's up for it he drives a shop rider around Asda. Like a demon. Got banned once and it was on the news. He was flying the skull and crossbones and blasting out ‘I Wanna be Your Dog' by Iggy and the Stooges. He's been on the methadone but now he favours codeine in lemonade.

It was the drugs that made Mum leave. They'd been classic hippies, following the music from school, living in a commune. Mum had money from her parents so anything was possible. But Dad got in too deep. Did acid, then brown. Now he's a victim, a rock-and-roll suicide, who needs a carer. Usually me. He's sixty-eight and he's wasted.

Anyway, when I'm gigging, and it's not as often these days, the council takes over. As to Mum, she met this retired fellah, Brian. He had sold his building business and bought a house in – get this – ‘the most southerly street in Wales', on the coast at Rhoose Point. She lives there most of the time. They've got the Bentley, the golf club membership, the apartment in Marbella whilst me and Dad are in a flat in Topaz Street, Cardiff.

Sometimes we go down to the Millennium Stadium, him on the shop rider, or over to the Roath Cottage or The Canadian. I once did a set in the Cottage, especially for Dad. My ‘Blues for Johnny Owen' always makes him cry.
Never been kissed
,
Johnny. Never been kissed
. And I looked at Dad and his eyes were alive for once. In that shrunken face.
And now you'll never know what it was you missed.