“Yes,” she says, and doesn’t mention it again. I cut to the chase.
“So . . . Dad. How are you and . . . him?”
“Well, as you know, Johanna, things have been changing,” she says, sounding aggrieved.
“Yes,” I say. “Changing. Yes. Changing. I couldn’t help but notice that . . . he’s still here, with me.”
“Hmmm,” she says. Nothing else. She waits for me to say something.
“And, uh, I didn’t . . . know? He was going to stay here?”
“It’s just your dad. Why wouldn’t you want your dad there? He’s helping, isn’t he?”
She knows! She knows about this! This was a plan!
“The thing is . . .”
The thing is, I don’t want him here. I went to the entire trouble of getting a whole other building I could live in so I could finally do what I want, when I want, with who I want, without anyone else being around. Last night I came back from a gig around midnight and turned on the shower, to shower off all the fag smells—in the nineties, everyone smokes at gigs: going to one is like moshing for two hours inside a blazing humidor—and he poked his head out into the hallway, hair all sticking up, and said, “I’ve got the boiler right next to my head, Johanna, and it’s making a racket. You want to save it till morning?”
And I did! I just sprayed myself with Chanel No. 5—John Kite’s Christmas gift to me; which I pretend is his love, in a bottle—in order to be halfway palatable to myself, and went to bed, all rancid.
Nick Kent did not throw himself under all that heroin so that music journalists would live like this.
“This is what families do, Johanna,” my mother says, firmly.
“I literally don’t know a family that has done this,” I reply. “None.”
“Well, that’s a judgment on them, isn’t it?” my mother says, tartly. “It’s good to know we’re better than everyone else.”
I realize now I’ve made a fundamental error—I should have taken a pad and pencil, and spent an hour preplanning this phone call: trying to guess every single thing my mother would say, and preparing for it. I should have been like Bobby Fischer, researching the playing technique of Boris Spassky for months, before ever entering this contest. I’ve been outplayed, in under a minute, and on my phone bill. I am a fool.
“Do you know how . . . long . . . I will have to be better than everyone else?” I ask, knowing these are already the dying throes of a match my mother has won.
“Well, that’s down to how good you are at talking to your father,” my mother says, before lobbing in a few more complaints about the next-door neighbors (“Their garden gives me hay fever”), and ringing off.
After another ten days of living with my father, I did myself the favor of telling him I was off to review The Shamen in Belgium, and I was taking the dog with me.
“You can take dogs on planes?” he asked.
“It’s Belgium,” I replied, airily. He seemed to accept this.
I packed a rucksack, whistled for the dog, and walked to John’s house, in Hampstead.
It was the middle of October, and nearly 70 degrees—one of those warm autumn days where the golden roar of the trees makes you feel like your planet has a sun that’s dying with great aplomb. Really going out gloriously—like an old theatrical legend, descending the staircase, in red taffeta and tiger’s-eye rings, holding a glass of claret, and singing “Non, je ne regrette rien” so sweetly, dying seemed magnificent.
I have three reasons for coming here. The first is, obviously, to get away from my father, as he’s driving me absolutely insane. On the very first day he was here, he came into the front room, said, “And now it’s over to Kelly with the weather!,” lifted his leg, and farted. I wouldn’t have minded, but I was doing a phone interview with Tori Amos at the time, and she was crying about her sexual assault, so it was entirely inappropriate.
The second—a not inconsiderable reason—is to go around John’s flat, reverently picking up and putting down his things; memorizing what books he has on his shelves, so I can read them, too, and have the same memories as him, and sniffing anything that might smell of him: a combination of Rive Gauche, cigarettes, whisky, junk-shop coats, and sex.
This isn’t sinister—although I do appreciate that any sentence that starts with “This isn’t sinister” does, immediately, sound quite sinister. But he’s actually, formally, legally asked me to “keep an eye” on the house, and surely the third job of a house sitter—after watering the plants, and piling up the post—is to keep the house feeling “lived-in,” and homely. And what could make a house feel more lived-in than someone trailing around the house, full of unrequited love, and leaving a faint, greasy aura of adoration on the house owner’s cups, jumpers, books, and records? I’m simply being a good friend.
The third is the biggest: to begin a new career. Having now resigned from the D&ME, I must move fast. My £200 overdraft limit is purely theoretical, and the unopened letters on the doormat are looking evermore unpleasant. I must now, quickly, be amazing. For cash.
Obviously, “be amazing” has broadly been my own, self-imposed remit for the last two years—but I’ve decided I need to do something specifically, pointedly, targetedly amazing now. Something big. I need to go up a level—because that is what John has done, and you always judge what is normal, or possible, in your own life by the lives of your peers. You want to stay on a vaguely even pegging with them—or else get left behind. That’s what all the artistic movements are, really: a group of people, all egging each other on. Going, “Blimey. I didn’t know you could get away with painting a melted clock. I now see I could totally paint an apple wearing a bowler hat. I’m on it. Let’s all be the Surrealists!”
So—my plan. I’ve been thinking about John being famous, and how I’ve spent two years, now, observing the general serried ranks of the en-famed. I’ve noticed that fame appears to be a metaphysical world laid onto the corporeal world, in which all the rules are different, and which makes the famous the same, but not the same as everyone else. And what seems the most extraordinary thing, is that I’ve never read anything about this process. We all know about fame, and yet we do not: no one has ever written a simple guide to how you get famous, why you would get famous, the practical day-to-day consequences of belonging to this other category—a celebrity—and, most importantly, how simultaneously heartbreaking, yet funny, it is. Famous people are treated like gods—but gods that must regularly hide in cupboards, to escape fans. They are deities that must appear on childrens’ TV shows, talking to puppets, or else pose on magazine covers, pretending a banana is a phone. At any one time, a thousand people could be in the pub, discussing why they hate a celebrity; whilst another thousand shake, or cry, just thinking about them. If you invented modern fame from scratch, now, and told people what it would consist of, they would think you were crackers.
But here we are now, at the end of the twentieth century, with thousands of famous people in the world, going around, famousing, and no one is picking it apart, and boggling at it, or trying to work out how it works. There is no fame dictionary, encyclopedia, or Haynes Manual. And I think the person who could write those things could be . . . me.
And the killer thing about this idea, which I already love, is that it would, tangentially, be about John. He has entered the world of fame, and what I will write will be by way of letters to him, in his loneliness and confusion—making him feel as if he has someone on his side, making sense of things. I will Paul his Corinthians. I’ll Jiminy his Pinocchio. I’ll be his candle on the water, like in Pete’s Dragon. This is how I’m going to court him. I’m going to be a Fame Doctor.
In this world, by and large, men don’t love girls for what they do. They just love them because they’re gentle, and beautiful.
Well, I am going to have to reinvent falling in love. I am not going to get John by being gentle, and beautiful—because I am not. Instead, I am going to win him through endeavor: I am going to invent the thing of
“girls winning boys.” I am going to write a series of pieces so funny, insightful, wise, and somehow hot that he will fall in love with me—just as his songs made me fall in love with him. This, now, is an art battle. He is my prose victim. I am going to use my talent to prove I am old enough, and wise enough to be with him. Suzanne might believe that art is all about revenge, but I believe art is about making someone fall in love with you. This is the big difference between us.
I sit at John’s kitchen table, the dog curled up at my feet, take out my most treasured possession—my laptop; a whole month’s wages, but it’s the computer Douglas Adams uses, so I was compelled to buy it—light a cigarette, and start writing what is basically a letter to John, wherever he is. A cheerful missive, full of silent messages that only he will pick up on.
10
Ten Things I Have Noticed in Two Years of Interacting with Famous People
by Dolly Wilde
Since 1992, I have been meeting famous people. On average, I would say I meet two or three famouses a week. Some, I’m interviewing them—a surreal hour in a hotel, where you ask questions they don’t want to answer, and you often get more excited about using their bathroom and seeing what products they have scattered on the sideboard (acne cream! and Valium! interesting!) than anything you bring back on your tape.
Other times, I’m just seeing famouses in the pub, or at parties—living in London means you are surrounded by famouses. They are like sheep, in Wales—just part of the ecology. This week alone, I saw Alan Bennett chaining his bicycle up outside Marks & Spencer, Graham from Blur banging a defunct hand dryer in the toilets of the Good Mixer, and Men Behaving Badly star Neil Morrissey standing in the rain outside an estate agent’s window, smoking a fag and looking at a studio flat for sale in Belsize Park.
I hereby offer up all that I have noticed about famouses, in the last two years.
Famous people don’t have coats. No coats! Here’s how the Hot Young Star from EastEnders explained it to me: “You get into a car to go to the premiere, so you don’t need a coat. Then you do the red carpet, where a coat would obscure your outfit. And then you go into the venue, where you don’t need a coat. At the end of the evening, another car drives you home. We don’t wear coats. We wear cars.” Famous people don’t have coats. Don’t buy them a duffel for Christmas. It won’t get much use.
Famous people are very short. Even the big action heroes. Arnold Schwarzenegger is actually 4'10". In person, he looks like a child made out of cricket balls. Walking into an A-list party, you will feel like some mad, spade-handed giant, apt to knock over tiny, famous Oompa Loompas. Most big premieres could be held in a playhouse, or shoebox. How many famous people can you fit in a Mini? Over a million. That’s not even a joke. It’s a fact.
Famous people know all the other famous people. They might not have met them—but they all know each other. On entering a party, or gathering, and spotting another Famous they have no previous encounters with, they do “The Nod,” which means, “I, A Famous, acknowledge you, another A Famous. We currently live in a shared reality different to that of everyone else in the room.” Don’t, as a non-Famous, try to “The Nod” A Famous. They will un-Nod you, jerking their head upward, and away, like a horse rejecting a snaffle: “Take your The Nod back.” Only a Nod-er can become a Nod-ee.
Despite being short, as discussed in (1), Famouses have huge heads. HUGE. This is not a metaphor—they genuinely have bigger heads. Often, on meeting A Famous, one has to repress an initial exclamation of “My God, you look just like Frank Sidebottom!” I have long pondered why this might be. I’ve decided it’s because we live in a predominantly visual age—TV, movies, photo shoots—and natural selection genetically favors those with large, expressive heads, and bodies that generally don’t “get in the way.” If you, as a proud parent, have just given birth to a child that looks like an Easter Island statue, then congratulations! There’s every chance that, in twenty-two years’ time, they will be on the cover of a magazine!
Famouses don’t use names. They dispensed with them years ago. “Babe,” “Man,” “Darling,” “Dude,” “Boss” . . . they address everyone they know by some universal descriptor. This is because they meet so many people, remembering names became impossible some years ago. If A Famous had to draw the Earth, in space, it would have an arrow pointing at it, with “7b babes live here.” The only exception to this is when they refer to other Famouses, whom they invariably reference by their first names: “Bob,” “Joni,” “Bruce.” This is confusing for you, and when you listen back to your interview, you hear yourself going, “Do you mean . . . Forsyth?” and them replying, “No—Springsteen.” To which you say, “Oh yeah—that does make more sense. Because Bruce Forsyth did not record Nebraska. I knew that.”
If you make a joke, they won’t laugh. Ever. They merely reply, “That’s funny,” sometimes wonderingly, sometimes firmly. But never laughingly. This is particularly true of Americans. Comedians might reply, “Good bit,” briskly. But none of them ever laugh. Don’t bother trying to be funny. They don’t have time for it. Their minds are elsewhere. Laughing at your joke would take up valuable time, plus upset the power balance.
They’re all “working on a really exciting project!” they can’t talk to you about yet. For the first two years, I presumed this was because of the parlous nature of creative collaborations, an unwillingness to put the cart before the horses, contractual wrangles, etc. Then, one night, I got a famous actor very drunk, and asked him again what his secret project was. “I’m getting a roof garden! It’s going to be covered in jasmine! It’s going to be amazing!”
If you unexpectedly get on with A Famous—an interview that turns into a drinking session, which turns into hailing a cab, then dancing, then ending back at their house, being confessional until 2:00 a.m.—you will go back, and write a piece about how you’ve found one of the few, real, unaffected, normal, grounded famous people. Someone who is a shining exemplar to all the rest; the watermark by which “remaining true to yourself” should be judged, in future. Two weeks later, the tabloids will be full of how this celebrity has just entered rehab, after realizing their drinking is out of control, and they are in the throes of a nervous breakdown. “Oh,” you think. “That’s why they were being fun. They were insane.” Then you realize that how they acted on that night is how you act all the time. “Am I insane, too?” you wonder. “Do I need to go into rehab?” To which the answer is, “No. Because you’re too poor to afford it. You must just do what Blanche from Coronation Street suggested, in the event of a nervous breakdown: stay at home, get drunk, and bite down on a shoe.”
They’re all terrified. Something happened in their childhood, or adolescence, that they’re running from—that made them want to not be normal anymore; to defy fate; to supersede gravity—and they fear that, any minute, they’ll run out of road, and be dumped back where they came from. When they lie down at night, they remember their tiny childhood beds—the sweat, the mildew, the fear—and the feeling of being trapped in a small town, and they can’t sleep. They know if they have to return there, it will be an admission of failure; they rejected and betrayed their families, and their hometowns, but now have to return, broken, with their tails between their legs. A former Famous. A failed Famous. Sad Icarus in the pub, aging, paunchy, bitter, and covered in wax. That is why they work, and work, and work.
Almost every time you meet A Famous, you walk away feeling sorry for them. You did not expect this. But you find you are not a jealous Salieri. You are relieved their life is not yours. You are glad you are not A Famous.
I read it through, when I finish it. I feel like I have written a letter to John that will both amuse him, and make him see I understand what his life is like now. I press save, treat myself to five minutes of looking at all of John’s mugs, and trying to work out which one is his favorite—I think it’s the biggest one: that seems very “him”—kiss the mug, and take the dog for a walk on the Heath.
11
“Why do you want to work for The Face?” the editor asks me.
It’s a month later, and I’ve sent The Face my “What I’ve Learned About Famouses” piece, plus two other pieces, entitled, “In Defense of the Groupie: Why It’s Actually Quite Sensible to Want to Fuck Famous People” and “Why I Would Not Like to Be Famous.” These are the first three columns for what I hope will be a regular, monthly slot in the magazine. I have formulated a full plan, for the next part of my life, and am now dedicated to carrying it out. In order to get my new career, I have simply copied the tactics of a fellow, working-class writer, Keith Waterhouse, author of Billy Liar. I once read that, when he was a teenage journalist, he decided which newspaper he wanted to work for, and sent them a column, every day, in the post, with a covering note, that read, “This is what I would have filed for you today, if I worked for you.” After six days, and six columns, they gave him the job.
As I can think of no better role model than Keith Waterhouse, this is what I have done, too. Except I’ve only written three columns, because I am more impatient than Keith Waterhouse. He was sixteen when he carried out his plan. I’m eighteen. Time’s running out.
The editor is looking at the columns now, printed out, in his hands.
“Why do I want to work for The Face?” I repeat, leaning on his desk, casually. “Well, I’ll level with you.”
I’ve decided that, today, I am going to be channeling Brunhilde Esterhazy—the sexually confident, upfront lady cabdriver from On the Town. The one who keeps trying to get Frank Sinatra, as a sailor, into bed. She gets things done.
“I’m eighteen. I’m too old to work for D&ME anymore.”
He is surprised—he laughs. It’s a good laugh.
“Also, I slept with someone there, which was an error. Then I noticed how sexist they were, which was a bummer. On top of the error and the bummer, they slagged off a friend of mine, and so I had to resign in a spectacular manner. Ordinarily, one would then simply live off one’s parents for a while, but it currently costs me fifty quid every time I speak to my mother, and my father appears to be in the eye of some mental storm, and has just moved in with me in order to smoke weed, and breed spiders. As you can see, these are all excellent motivators to seek employment at the best magazine in the world.”