The Last Living Slut (21 page)

Photographic Insert

Andres Lesauvage

Top Middle: Stuart Steel

Top Right: Gottfried Helnwein – Peinlich (Embarrassing)

Andres Lesauvage

Top Right: Moonshayde Photography

Middle Right: David Squires

Top Right: Ella Studios

Bottom Left: Andres Lesauvage

Background: Ella Studios

Chapter 36

T
he black carpet, stretched taut over the frame of the stairs leading up to the Bierkeller in Bristol, feels like its skin. Years of beer-barrel stench stain the bowels of the building, which is on the same road as my old gym, next to the club that held Arabic nights, where I did my belly dancing.

The walls of the club are big hunks of granite rock, ’70s style. It is successful in being exactly what is says: a beer cellar. please don’t do drugs in our club, a piece of cardboard at the bar says in neat, thumb-thick letters of black. The bar is a wannabe star. It tries so hard.

It was here that I fucked up.

I recognized the signs that I was falling. That familiar honey gush raised my heart right up to my throat like candy sickness when I arrived and saw him backstage for the first time in a few days.

He was surrounded by people, laughing and larking, hips swaying, raven–black tresses gleaming and soft liner blazing his feline, jeweled green eyes, which should have been illegal to display and parade around. His lips were identical to mine—big, with an obscenely perfect cupid’s bow.

When he saw me, he stopped still. “Hey, baby,” he beamed, walking away from the crowd toward me. Right there, in that tight overcrowded backstage room, he hugged and kissed me hot and soft. I knew then that he was going to be
that
person—and my fear was second to none. Wednesday night had been so beautiful; this was dread. My feelings were going to wreck me like a car crash. I should have left the scene right then.

The venue wasn’t full that Sunday night. Instead of brimming and overspilling, it was receding and balding. I watched from the wings as he played, and I couldn’t look at him—the drummer boy. I danced to the music of the night, focusing my gaze on London, Tracii, and Jeremy. I had a kind of rock burlesque look going on, with a baby pink corset, pink bow, trousseau mini-skirt, and thigh-high leather boots. London came over to me in the middle of a song, hugged me, and smothered my face in salty kisses. My carefully scrubbed, mango-buttered skin grew sticky from his dripping man-sweat, and for a deranged moment I panicked that Scot might hate the taste of London on my body.

After the gig, I put Aerosmith on the backstage CD player. The room was packed with bodies, snacks, beer cans, dirty towels, and luggage. Wrecked jackets and leather accessories decorated a uniform-blue sofa stained with white marks. A white fridge in the corner, graffitied with years of band names and lost people, had filled its square belly to bursting with useless lager.

There was a blond girl showing her tits to Tracii and Jeremy. “Fuck off, I’m with the band,” her T-shirt blared. She came to the show with her boyfriend, a wretched-looking bloke who stood outside the room looking on as she straddled Tracii. She got up and walked over to him calmly. “I think I’m gonna stay with the band at their hotel tonight,” she told him matter-of-factly.

“What do you mean?” her boyfriend demanded. “What about me? Are you not going to come home with me tonight?”

“I wanna stay with Tracii tonight. You can go home.”

I had to feel sorry for the poor guy. He looked devastated. “What about us?” he said. “Is this it? After five years, is this it for you?”

“I really wanna stay with the band tonight,” she replied. As he walked off, she turned to me and said, “Didn’t really like him anyway.”

I had never seen the support band, the Red Star Rebels, play. And although they were down-to-earth and heartstoppingly funny guys, I was just dying to be with Scot, who was surrounded by randoms. So I danced to Aerosmith, as I always did when feeling jittery, and let Jeremy take pornographic photos of me. I knew Scot hated that, and I felt bad for acting this way. I just thought all rockers would be devoted to any behavior that was wild and decadent. And I was determined to bury this rapidly intensifying feeling poisoning me. I had to have a cigarette to suppress the feeling—because I loved him. He was brilliant—the worst thing that could happen to me. Backstage was chaos, and he held my hand and my body, and it just was
not
going to happen to me.

I had come to the gig with Ostara, the girl with the angel face and curls of sun-blond hair tumbling down her back whom I’d met at Adler’s Appetite. She had the demeanor of Princess Diana; I’d discovered she was also very bisexual and preferred wild and exotic girls to vanilla. I left her and followed Kekone to the van. The Brides were going back to the hotel, and I needed to ride with them. Thankfully, they weren’t sleeping in a tour bus that night but a hotel room. The tiny bunks may have been concentration camp chic, but they were too tight to play in, and the vibrations when the bus moved shredded my insides like stew.