For the first time, Joe was frustrated by Pat, his pale cheeks going pink. “Look. This is just how it’s done, Pat. You know who the fuckin’ Riot Police are? Me. I gave you the four stars.” He threw a handbill at Pat. “I paid for this whole bloody thing!”
Pat sighed. He knew it was a different world, a different time—bands expected to blog and flog and twit and fuck-knew-what. Hell, Pat didn’t even own a cell phone. Even in the States, no one got away with being a quiet, brooding artist anymore; every musician had to be his own publicist now—bunch of self-promoting twats posting every fart on a computer. A rebel now was some kid who spent all day making YouTube videos of himself putting Legos up his ass.
“Legos in his arse.” Joe laughed. “You should use that.”
That afternoon they went around handing out flyers on the street. At first it was as demeaning and pathetic as Pat had imagined, but he kept looking over at Joe and being humbled by the fevered energy of his young friend—“See the act what’s blown ’em away in the States!”—and so Pat did his best, concentrating on the women. “You should come,” he’d say, turning his eyes on, pressing a handbill into a woman’s hands. “I think you’ll like it.” There were eighteen people at his show that night, including the reviewer from something called The Laugh Track, who gave Pat four stars and—Joe read excitedly—wrote on his blog that “the onetime singer for the old American cult band the Reticents delivers a musical monologue that is truly something different: edgy, honest, funny. He is a genuine comic misanthrope.”
The next night twenty-nine people came, including a decent-looking girl in black stretch pants, who stuck around after the show to get stoned with him. Pat banged her against the standpipe in his greenroom closet.
He woke with Joe across from him in a kitchen chair, already dressed, arms crossed. “Ya fooked Umi?”
Disoriented, Pat thought he meant the girl after the show. “You know her?”
“Back in London, ya daft prick! Did you sleep with Umi?”
“Oh. Yeah.” Pat sat up. “Does Kurtis know?”
“Kurtis? She told me! She asked if you’d mentioned her!” Joe tore off his glasses and wiped his eyes. “Do you remember, after you sang ‘Lydia’ in Portland, I said I was in love with my best mate’s girl—Umi. Remember?”
Pat did recall Joe talking about someone, and now that he mentioned it, the name did sound familiar, but he was so excited by the prospect of a UK tour that he hadn’t really been listening.
“Kurtis bunks every bird in the East End—just like the daft prick in your song—and I haven’t told Umi a fookin’ thing about it because Kurt’s me mate. And the first chance you get . . .” His face went from pink to red and his eyes welled. “I love that girl, Pat!”
“Joe, I’m sorry. I had no idea you felt that way.”
“Who did you think I was talking about?” Joe snapped his glasses back on and stalked out of the room.
Pat sat there awhile, feeling genuinely awful. Then he dressed and went out in the packed streets to look for Joe. What had he said, like the daft prick in your song? Jesus, did Joe think that song was some kind of parody? Then he had a horrible thought: Christ . . . was it? Was he?
All afternoon Pat looked for Joe. He even tried the castle, which buzzed with camera-snapping tourists, but no Joe. He wandered back down into New Town, to the top of Calton Hill, a gentle crest covered with incongruent monuments from different periods in Edinburgh’s past. The city’s entire history was an attempt to get a better vantage, a piece of high ground on which to build higher—spires and towers and columns, all of them with narrow spiral staircases to the top—and Pat suddenly saw humanity the same way: it was all this scramble to get higher, to see enemies and lord it over peasants, sure, but maybe more than that—to build something, to leave a trace of yourself, to have people see . . . that you were once up there, onstage. And yet what was the point, really? Those people were gone, nothing left but the crumbling rubble of failures and unknowns.
Forty people at the show that night, his first sellout. But no Joe. “I walked around Edinburgh today and decided that the whole of art and architecture is just some dogs pissing on trees,” Pat said. It was early in the show, and he was wandering dangerously off-script. “My whole life . . . I’ve assumed I was supposed to be famous, that I was supposed to be . . . big. What is that? Fame.” He leaned over his guitar, looking out on the expectant faces, hoping, along with them, that this was about to get funny. “The whole world is sick . . . we’ve all got this pathetic need to be seen. We’re a bunch of fucking toddlers trying to get attention. And I’m the worst. If life had a theme, you know . . . a philosophy? A motto? Mine would be: There must be some mistake; I was supposed to be bigger than this.”