Where did shit shows come from? Pat had no way of knowing if he suffered more bombs than other performers, but shit shows had always come regularly for him. With the Reticents, the consensus was that they’d put out one great album （The Reticents）， one good one （Manna）， and one pretentious, unlistenable mess （Metronome）。 And they had a reputation for being unpredictable live, although this was intentional, or at least unavoidable: with him coked up for a few years there, Benny banging smack, and Casey Millar doing a drummer’s-fifth at gigs, how could they not be uneven? But nobody wanted even; the whole point was to put some edge back in the thing—no synth dance mixes, no big hair, no fey makeup, no poseur flannel faux angst bullshit. And if the Reticents had never succeeded beyond cult-club status, they also never became slick self-promoting power-ballad-playing pretenders, either. They stayed true, as people used to say, back when staying true meant something.
But even with the Rets, sometimes, he’d just have a shit show. Not because of drugs or fighting or experimenting with feedback; sometimes they just sucked.
And that’s what happened the day he got in a fight with Joe, and the night the reviewer from the Scotsman came to see “Pat Bender: I Can’t Help Meself!” Pat blew the setup for “Why Are Drummers So Ducking Fumb,” and then tried to get out of it with some lame eighties comic patter about how it’s called scotch in America but just whiskey in Scotland, was scotch tape just . . . tape—people staring at him like, Yeah, bloody right it’s tape, you simple shit. And he could barely get through “Lydia,” imagining everyone saw through him, that everyone but him understood the song.
He felt that odd transference, in which an audience—normally rooting for him to be funny and moving, all of us in this together—started to resent his awkwardness. An untested, apparently unfunny bit about the big asses of Scottish girls （like sacks of haggis, these girls are—haggis mules, smuggling heart-liver sausage in their pants） didn’t help. Even his guitar sounded shrill to Pat’s ear.
Next morning, there was still no sign of Joe. The couple putting Pat up left the Scotsman outside his door, open to his one-star review. He read to the words “crass,” “rambling,” and “angry,” and put the paper down. That night, eight people came to his show; after that, things went about the way he imagined. Five people the next night. Still no Joe. Mustache stopped by the stage to tell Pat his weekly contract wasn’t being renewed. A ventriloquist would get his theater, his slot, and his boarder’s room. Pat’s manager had been given his check, Mustache said. Pat actually laughed at this, imagining Joe on his way to London with Pat’s five hundred quid.
“So how am I supposed to get home?” Pat asked the man with the mustache.
“To the States?” the guy asked through his nose. “Ehm, I don’t know. Does your guitar float?”
The only good thing Pat had gleaned from his dark period was some knowledge about how to survive on the streets. He’d never done more than a few weeks at a time, but he felt oddly calm about what to do. There were several strata of performers in Edinburgh: big acts, smaller paid pros like Pat, hobby guys, and up-and-comers playing what they called “Free Fringe,” and finally—below that, and just above beggars and pickpockets—a whole range of buskers, street performers: Jamaican dancers in dirty sneakers and ratty dreadlocks, Chilean street bands, magicians carrying five tricks in a backpack, a Gypsy woman playing a strange flute; and that afternoon, on a street in front of a Costa coffeehouse, Pat Bender, ad-libbing funny lines to American classics: Desperado, you better come to your senses/With a pound ’n’ twenty pences/You ain’t never gettin’ home.
There were enough American tourists that, before he knew it, he had thirty-five pounds. He bought a half-pint and some fried fish, then went to the train station, but was stunned to find the cheapest last-minute ticket to London was sixty pounds. Minus food, it might take him three days to raise that much.
Beneath the castle was a long, narrow park, the city walls on either side. Pat walked the length of the park, looking for a place to sleep, but after an hour he decided he was too old to sleep outside with the street kids and went into New Town, bought a pint of vodka, and paid a night hotel clerk five pounds to let him sleep in a toilet stall.
Next morning, he returned to the coffeehouse and resumed playing. He was doing the old Rets song “Gravy Boat,” just to prove to himself that he existed, when he looked up to see the girl he’d had sex with against the standpipe in his greenroom. The girl’s eyes widened and she grabbed her friend by the arms. “Hey, that’s him!”