If London was an alien city, Edinburgh was another planet.
They took the train, Joe falling asleep the minute it pulled out of King’s Cross, so that Pat could only guess at the things he saw out the window—clothesline neighborhoods, great ruins in the distance, grain fields and clusters of coastal basalt that made him think of the Columbia River Gorge back home.
“Right, then,” Joe said four and a half hours later, sniffing awake and glancing around as they pulled into the Edinburgh station.
They emerged from the station at the bottom of a deep draw—a castle on their left, the stone walls of a Renaissance city on their right. The Fringe Festival was bigger than Pat had expected, every streetlight and pole covered with a flyer for one show or another, the streets swarming with people: tourists, hipsters, middle-aged show-goers, and performers of every imaginable kind—mostly comedians, but actors and musicians, too, acts in singles, pairs, and improv troupes, a whole range of mimes and puppeteers, fire jugglers, unicyclists, magicians, acrobats, and Pat didn’t know what—living statues, guys dressed like suits on hangers, break-dancing twins—a medieval festival gone freak.
At the festival office, an arrogant prick with a mustache and an accent even heavier than Joe’s—all lilting rhythms and rolling Rs—explained that Pat was expected to provide his own marketing and that his stipend would be half what Joe had promised—Joe saying someone named Nicole had ensured the rate—Mustache saying Nicole couldn’t “ensure her own arse”—Joe turning to Pat to say not to worry, he wouldn’t take a commission—Pat surprised that he’d ever planned to.
Outside, as they walked toward their accommodations, Pat took everything in. The city walls were like a series of cliff faces, the oldest part—the Royal Mile—leading from the castle and curling like a cobblestone stream down a canyon of smoke-stained stone edifices. The bustling noise of the festival stretched in every direction, the grand houses gutted to make way for stages and microphones, the sheer number of desperate performers sinking Pat’s spirits.
Pat and Joe were put up in a boarder’s room below street level, in an older couple’s flat. “Say somefin’ funny!” the cross-eyed husband said when he met Pat.
That night, Joe led Pat to his show—up a street, down an alley, through a crowded bar into another alley, to a narrow, high door with an ornate knob in the middle. An uninterested woman with a clipboard led Pat to his greenroom, a closet of standpipes and mops, Joe explaining that crowds often started slowly but built quickly in Edinburgh, that there were dozens of influential reviewers, and once the reviews came in—“You’re a bloody lock for four stars”—the crowds would soon follow. A minute later, the woman with the clipboard announced him, and Pat came around the corner to a smattering of applause, thinking, What’s less than a smattering? because there were only six people in the room, scattered out among forty folding chairs, three of the six being Joe and the old couple they were staying with.
But Pat had played his share of empty rooms, and he killed in this one, even riffing a new bit before “Lydia”—“She told our friends she discovered me with another woman. Like, what—she’d discovered a cure for polio? She told people she caught me having sex, like she’d apprehended Carlos the Jackal. I mean, you could catch bin Laden if you came home and he was fucking someone in your bed.”
Pat felt the thing he’d noticed before, that even the appreciation of a small crowd could be profound—he loved how British people hung on the first syllable of that word, brilliant, and he stayed up all night with an even-more excited Joe, talking about ways to market the show.
The next day, Joe presented Pat with posters and handbills advertising the show. Across the top was a picture of Pat holding his guitar—under the heading Pat Bender: I Can’t Help Meself! along with the tagline “One of America’s Most Outrageous Comedy Musicians!” and “Four Stars” from something called “The Riot Police.” Pat had seen such flyers for other performers at the festival, but . . . “I Can’t Help Meself”？ And this “One of America’s . . .” bullshit? Every act had to put up such handbills, Joe explained. Pat didn’t even like being called a “comedy musician.” He wasn’t some Weird Al novelty act. Writers were allowed to be irreverent and still be serious. And filmmakers. But musicians were expected to be earnest shit-heels—I love you, baby and Peace is the answer. Fuck that!