“Portland,” said pale Umi upon meeting him, “like the Decemberists.” Pat had experienced the same thing in the nineties when he told New Yorkers he was from Seattle: they’d mutter Nirvana or Pearl Jam, and Pat would grit his teeth and pretend some camaraderie with those ass-smelling latecomer poseur flannel bands. Funny how Portland, Seattle’s goofy little brother, had achieved similar alt-cool coin.
The plan in London was for Pat to open in this basement club, Troupe, where Kurtis worked as a bouncer. Once Pat got to London, though, Joe decided that Edinburgh would be a better place to start, that Pat could refine his show there and use the reviews from the Fringe Festival to build momentum in advance of London. So Pat worked up a shorter, funnier version of the show—a thirty-minute monologue interspersed with six songs. （“Hi, I’m Pat Bender, and if I look familiar it’s because I used to be the singer for one of those bands your pretentious friends talked about to show what obscure musical taste they had. That or we fucked in the bathroom of a club somewhere. Either way, I’m sorry you never heard from me again.”）
He performed the show for Joe and his friends in the flat. He planned to go easy on the darker stuff, and to cut the one serious song, “Lydia,” from this shortened show, but Joe insisted he include it. He said it was the “emotional pivot of the whole bloody thing,” so Pat kept it, and performed it in the flat—Joe once again removing his glasses and wiping his eyes. After the rehearsal, Umi was as enthusiastic as Joe about the show’s prospects. Even quiet, brooding Kurtis admitted it was “quite good.”
The London flat had exposed pipes and old rotting carpet, and for the week they stayed there, Pat never felt at home—certainly not the way Joe did, sitting around all day with Kurtis in their dirty gray boxer briefs, getting high. Joe, it turned out, had been a bit broad in describing himself as a club promoter; he was more of a hanger-on/hash dealer, people occasionally stopping by the flat to buy from him. After a few days with these kids, the twenty-year age difference steepened for Pat: the musical references, the sloppy track suits, the way they slept in and never showered and didn’t seem to notice it was eleven thirty and they were all still in their underwear.
Pat couldn’t sleep more than a few hours at a time, so each morning he cleared out while the others slept. He walked the city, trying to imprint it on his foggy mind—but he was always getting lost on its curving, narrow streets and lanes, with their abruptly changing names, arterials ending in alleys. Pat felt more disoriented each day, not so much by London as by his own inability to absorb it, by his crusty old man’s list of complaints: Why can’t I figure out where I am, or which way to look when crossing a street? Why are the coins so counterintuitive? Are all of the sidewalks this crowded? Why is everything so expensive? Broke, all Pat could do was walk around and look—at free museums, mostly, which gradually overwhelmed him—room after room of paintings at the National Gallery, relics at the British Museum, everything at the Victoria and Albert. He was OD’ing on culture.
Then, on their last day in London, Pat wandered into the Tate Modern, into the vast empty hall, and was floored by the audacity of the art, and the sheer scale of the museum; it was like trying to take in the ocean, or the sky. Maybe it was a lack of sleep, but he felt physically shaken, almost nauseated. Upstairs, he wandered among a collection of surrealist paintings and felt undone by the nervy, opaque genius of their expression: Bacon, Magritte, and especially Picabia, who, according to the gallery notes, had divided the world into two simple categories: failures and unknowns. He was a bug beneath a magnifying glass, the art focused to a blinding hot point on his sleepless skull.
By the time he left the museum, Pat was nearly hyperventilating. Outside was no better. The space-age Millennium Bridge fed like a spoon into the mouth of St. Paul’s Cathedral, London crashing its tones, eras, and genres recklessly, disorienting Pat even more with these massive, fearless juxtapositions: modernist against neoclassic against Tudor against skyscraper.
At the other end of the bridge, Pat came across a little quartet—cello, two violins, electric piano—kids playing Bach over the Thames for change. He sat and listened, trying to catch his breath but awestruck by their casual proficiency, by their simple brilliance. Christ, if street musicians could do that? What was he doing here? He’d always felt insecure about his own musicianship; he could chunk along with anyone on the guitar and be dynamic onstage, but Benny was the real musician. They’d written hundreds of songs together, but standing on the street, listening to these four kids matter-of-factly play the canon, Pat suddenly saw his best songs as ironic trifles, smart-ass commentaries on real music, mere jokes. Jesus, had Pat ever made anything . . . beautiful? The music these kids played was like a centuries-old cathedral; Pat’s lifework had all the lasting power and grace of a trailer. For him, music had always been a pose, a kid’s pissed-off reaction to aesthetic grace; he’d spent his whole life giving beauty the finger. Now he felt empty, shrill—a failure and an unknown. Nothing.