Namedropper (7 page)

“Um, no. I was thinking more of the dead one out of the Bee Gees.”

He stormed off to find some proper teenagers, glaring at me like I was taking the piss. But I wasn't. The Bee Gees are a
big favourite of Manny's. My first sentence was inspired by “Night Fever”: “Turn the record.” I liked The Kindness of Strangers, but, judging by my brush with the
NME
, not for the right reasons. I had to talk to Ray, find out where he'd found this kid, and why he hadn't told me about him.

The lights dimmed. When they came back on, Ray was standing in the middle of the stage dressed in a pair of faded blue jeans with massive turn-ups and a Union Jack T-shirt. I hoped he was being ironic because he looked utterly ridiculous. The crowd was going mental. Girls clutched each other, ripped at their clothes, screamed his name; some even wept. “It's just Ray,” I mouthed, who to, I'm not sure, because there I was in Scotland with no friends. I tried to move through the wall of wailers. So undignified. As they clung to the rails at the front, trying to touch his ankles, I grinned up at him. He couldn't see me. The lights blocked his sight lines. I waved and called his name, but that hardly singled me out from anyone else in the room. My T-shirt was biting me under my armpits and my belt was too tight. Sweaty and frustrated, I decided to wait for him backstage.

I grabbed the
NME
man. “Have you got a backstage pass?”

“Yes, I have.” He looked down his glasses. “Why?”

I tried another tack. “Is Tommy Belucci here?”

“Yes.” Disdainfully, he pointed to Tommy, who was chatting up a girl in a pair of suede hotpants.

I barged between them. “Tommy, can you help me get backstage?”

He didn't say hello, or ask me what I was doing there, say Ray would be thrilled to see me. He put one hand on my
shoulder as if he were about to pull me into a kiss and whispered, “Sorry, babes. If Ray wanted you back there, he'd have put you on the list.”

I was ready to punch him.

The same moron from outside was guarding the door to the dressing room. I dug my T-shirt out from under my armpits, fluffed my hair up, and tried to look sparkly. “Excuse me, I know we've been through this already, but I really am with Ray. I'm here as a surprise. I've come up to see him. I'm staying with him tonight.”

The moron laughed. “In your dreams. Now, if you wait outside after the show, I'll see if I can get an autograph. But if you keep hassling me, you'll have to leave, sweetheart.”

I refused to cry. “How dare you. How dare you? Do you value your job”—I tried not to shout—“
sweetheart
?”

He stared at me in disbelief, then moved as if to hit me. “Out. Out right now.” He began to march me away. I could hear Ray missing the notes. The guard twisted my arm behind my back, and I felt I might pass out. He wasn't trying to get a surreptitious feel of my bum, either, which really upset me. He held me as if I were one of those little dogs that look like rats. Gangs of girls were staring, laughing through frosted lipstick and hairdos that tickled their faces. I closed my eyes, priming myself to hit the cold concrete. When I opened them I saw the little boy from The Kindness of Strangers. He reached up and tapped the bouncer on the shoulder.

“Hey,” he said calmly, “she's with me.” The bouncer loosened his grip.

The boy handed me a backstage pass.

“Oh, she your sister, is she?” he huffed.

“Yes,” said the boy, “and I haven't seen her for two years so I'm very glad I found her before you threw her out.”

I straightened myself. “Thank you.”

The boy nodded. “No problem. I can't stand arguments, especially physical ones.”

I looked at him oddly as I followed him backstage. He had a dressing room the size of a shed. Inside it, the walls were taped with pictures of Marilyn, Vivien, Audrey, and Elizabeth, and candles flickered around them. It was quite a sight.

The boy touched their paper faces proudly. “I always do that before a show. It's a little ritual.”

“I always say good night to them,” I gasped, and then, before I could stop myself, “Are you gay at all?”

The boy blushed. “Oh, no.” He looked up at me through strands of black hair. “But I'd like to be. I think I could be”—he smiled weakly—“if I tried.”

The promoter, huge and red and wearing a Ray Devlin T-shirt, came bursting into the room and started ripping down the pictures.

“No!” cried the boy, throwing his body in front of his girls. “Please, not them.”

The promoter crumpled Marilyn, as if she hadn't been crumpled enough in her life. “That,” he spat, “was not a full half-hour set, Mr. Electro Genius. That was ten minutes at most. And it was shite.”

The angry promoter refused to pay him.

The boy didn't answer, but calmly pulled a Stanley knife from his back pocket and scratched a line down his forearm. Blood trickled down his wrist and the promoter backed off, slamming the door behind him. The boy smiled silently, his
mouth curling up at the corners like Salvador Dalí's moustache. Then he walked out of the room, turning at the door to beckon me with him.

He was so thin. I kept coming back to that. When I couldn't focus on anything else, I thought about that. It was my Buddhist chant.

“Do you want to get something to eat?” I heard myself ask.

He shook his head. “But I wouldn't mind a drink.”

In the cab to the Thistle, where Ray's record company was paying for my new friend to stay, he told me he was called Andrew or Drew, that his favourite playwright was Tennessee Williams, and that he was unhappy but felt he might be happier under Soviet Communism, and I told him my life story, starting with the Bambi anecdote. I explained that I was a friend of Ray's and explained what I was doing here and that I had missed my French and Biology exams and was missing my English GCSE on Monday. His eyes lit up. “Oh, the French are the fathers of Situationism!” Like he was saying, “Oh goody, pistachio ice cream!”

In the lobby of the hotel I tried Ray's room once again but he wasn't there, or so the girl on reception said. We went to the bar and Drew spilled a bundle of two-pence pieces on the table to pay. He shrugged his shoulders and said, “Shall we take these upstairs?”

I hoped this didn't mean what I thought it did, but then again, I hoped it did. I went with him, probably a little too easily, but I couldn't help it. I tried not to look at myself in the elevator mirror. I wanted him to think I was the sort of girl who didn't care what she looked like, so assured was she of her beauty. I'd picked it up from Treena.

The TV was the first thing he turned on, before the light switch, as if doing so were a safety precaution. We both felt its effects immediately. His tiny, twisted shoulders loosened and he ran his pale fingers through his feathery jet hair. “Technology is the modern comforter,” he smiled, patting the television. I was glad it was there and I was not completely alone with this coal-eyed stranger. It was a boxy black-and-white 1950s set with a fat dial instead of a slim remote control. It was as comforting and curious to swallow as a Sunday roast after a week of Japanese noodles.

As Drew twisted it into life, the shabby little room softened and hummed, the protruding nails where no pictures hung melted into the walls, and the raggedy carpet became thick. The whirr from the screen even seemed to block out the cold seeping through the window where the frame didn't touch the pane. The room was a winning combination of crashed-out, drunk-in-the-bathtub rock 'n' roll excess and insomniac librarian's tidiness.

The bedside table was littered with bottles of vodka stuffed with ash and cigarette butts. “How long have you been here, Drew?”

His mouth turned down. “Two nights. There wasn't a lot to do.” A pile of Calvin Klein underwear was folded neatly on the bed. Drew looked embarrassed and, scooping them up, started mumbling, “The Jewish people, they excel at everything, even the marketing of knickers.”

“How did you know I was Jewish?” I frowned.

This worries me, this looking-Jewish thing. If you're Asian or black, at least you know where you stand and how others see you, you can be 100 percent sure that you're going to be treated differently, rather than just wondering. And unless you're one of the Jackson family, you can't change your skin colour, so passing for a goy is never an option.

I remember gazing, gobsmacked, at an anti-Semitic circular pushed through our door. I was twelve years old, and off school because
Key Largo
was on BBC2 and our video wasn't working. I heard the metallic snap of the letterbox and hurried to look through Manny's mail to see if there was anything that might contain a present for me. Instead, I discovered a misspelt letter, plastered with references to world domination and hooked noses and gas chambers and soap. On the next page the author (who, having gone to all that trouble, had forgotten to sign it) ranted on about “Ghastly Jewish eyes, crafty, shifty,
Evil!
” alongside photocopied pictures of Robert Maxwell and Leona Helmsley.

That was the bit I went back to again and again, even after Manny confiscated it and threw it in the bin. Could you really tell by the eyes? I spent weeks staring into the mirror, trying to detect any hint of evil inherent in my irises. I spent so long pressed against the glass that I started to see it. “I am evil!” I roared at Manny, triumphant. He doesn't understand that
growing up Jewish in New York is a lot different from doing it in England.

We need to know if you really can tell, if you can always tell by our eyes and nose and table manners, before some mad skinhead at Finsbury Park station points it out to us: “Oi, big nose! Oi, yiddo!” It happened to my friend Rachel when she was coming back from a party. She's never even been to a synagogue, not once.

It's easy to enjoy being Jewish if you look like Natalie Portman. But what if you look like Harvey Weinstein? Then you can't always get away with it.

I stared at this beautiful bird-boned boy and wondered if he was being anti-Semitic and wondered, most of all: “How did you know?”

“I could tell. You look it. But also, I heard you were. Ray told me all about you. I was telling him about my idea for a Marlon Brando concept album, with each track representing a different film, and he said I should meet his friend Viva, who knows all about every film ever.”

Now, any other time, hearing that Ray had said something nice about me would have pricked my interest, but the gossip just bounced past me. I watched it come to rest by the door. I kept an eye on it for the rest of the evening, but I couldn't be bothered to go and pick it up. “Every film ever?” I chuckled. “Not true. I have a Paul Verhoeven gap.”

Drew looked disappointed, then, turning the volume on the TV off, exclaimed, “Well, who needs him? He's hardly Billy Wilder, is he?”

“No,” I answered slowly, as it hit me just how odd this boy was, “he's an entirely different director.”

“I know.” He blushed.

“I know you know,” and I laughed, pulling a face that was supposed to say “Duh!” but still be pretty. I realised immediately what he was. The boy was a Jew-fancier. I'd never met one so young. How quaint.

Jew-fanciers are gentiles who choose to surround themselves with Jews—befriend them, marry them—and to immerse themselves in Jewish culture. Some go as far as to convert—the sight of Sammy Davis Jr. and his Swedish actress wife, May Britt, lighting the Shabat candles was apparently a sight to behold. Of course, Liz not only married two and converted, but to this day, she practically injects herself with Jewishness.

A white who thinks he is black is called a Cream Nigga. A gentile who thinks he is Jewish is a Me Too Jew. Being a proper Me Too Jew takes more dedication than that imparted by Treena, Tommy Belucci, and all those terrible mod boys who genuinely think they are black merely because they have an exhaustive Motown collection.

With Me Too Jews, the explanation is usually that they just enjoy being different, and take great pride in being outsiders. It's weird. They go on and on about Jews, but they never want to be tailors, violin makers, or Holocaust survivors. They always want to be Arthur Miller.

As he tidied, sweeping up the ash from the case of an Iggy Pop CD, Drew suddenly started burbling again, as if he had been briefly under water, talking away, and, afloat again, was ready to resume his babble.

“Now, everyone knows about Marx and Freud and Einstein, but it's amazing to think you also invented jeans. Levi
Strauss. And boxing, as we know it, was pioneered by Daniel Mendoza. Chocolate, even—the Hershey family.”

“They're not Jewish. They should be, but they weren't.”

“Not even Barbara?”

“I don't think so.”

“Oh.” He sat down on the bed, as if faint from shock. I tried to think of something nice to say.

“Well, you know Liz Taylor converted when she married Mike Todd, and had a proper Jewish wedding with Eddie Fisher.”

He smiled, wanly. This was a dumb conversation to be having. If Manny'd been there, he'd have been rolling his eyes.

As soon as I thought it, Drew got up and announced, like a ventriloquist's puppet, “You call your uncle whilst I'm in the shower.” His timing didn't surprise me because Manny has taught me to believe in telepathy and the power of the mind. ESP is perfectly believable because it is conducted human to human, like a cheaper and more immediate e-mail system.

Manny says everything else is bullshit, especially tarot, because the future isn't fixed. Ghosts come to us at our beds at night, rouse us from our sleep, because all they are is a dream. I sometimes feel someone sitting on my chest and clasping my throat in the middle of the night, but Manny explained that it's just me, holding my breath. Ghosts are a get-out to cover up how powerful our minds and bodies really are. It's less frightening to think that there is a great big bloody phantom trying to choke us than that the stress of everyday living has got to us so much that we choose to hold our breath in the night. That's what he says, anyway.