Helplessly Hoping

I remember waking up one time to find Alice with a pot of black paint, three chairs and wearing a nice dress, painting the phrase, “You talking to me?” onto the wall. I swear, I was there for fifteen minutes, bewildered as to why she was doing it. And then she walked to the bathroom, muttering this in different tones of voice to herself. I realised that it was three in the afternoon when I’d woken up, so she’d been hanging around the HB Studio with her pretentious friends.

Her friends weren’t that bad. Just, quite a lot of them were serious method actors who, if were playing a pirate, would buy a galleon, learn how to walk with a wooden leg, get themselves a parrot and live out at sea for about a year. Or if say, they were playing a cab driver, would get themselves a taxi and taxi people around New York for seven months. Those were the kind of people she was friends with.

But once I’d looked at the clock and realised that it was three, I got up straight away. I got dressed really quickly, put on a pair of sunglasses and sat cross legged by the window. It was a really fucking sunny day but I had this awful cold. I couldn’t breath through my nose, I had a temperature yet I couldn’t stop shivering, I had a terrible headache and my throat was raw.

It was brilliant timing. Our debut album was being released the day after and we were playing three nights at the Fillmore East. What sucked the most was that my cold was in the developing stages and it’d be over at least two weeks into recruit training.

God, I was not looking forward to that. They were going to cut my hair and then once it’d grown again, I’d have to cut my bangs myself. God damn, once I got to Saigon, first thing I was going to do was buy myself a pair of stylists’ scissors and a mirror. But how was I going to do the basic training with a crazy horrible cold?

Alice came back out of the bathroom still muttering to herself, I turned around and gave her a smile to which she returned. She then wandered over to the record player and flicked through the records, holding up the Tony Bennett LP like a prize. Although she was a massive rock fan, she listened to Tony Bennett almost obsessively. I wasn’t a big fan. I was a Sinatra kid, probably influenced by the time he gave me his cufflink. But I liked this one side of her Tony Bennett live record. Side three was where you wanted to be listening. Blue Velvet, Rags To Riches… adored it. I always made her play the record in the wrong order. She’d have to start it on the wrong side just so I’d stop complaining.

This time was no different. Only I had a cold and the skin around my nostrils was flaking due to the tissue being rubbed against them. I threw the crumpled tissue towards the bin and lit a cigarette, opening the window and blowing the smoke out into the sky. Alice had come and sat next to me, her sunglasses on too. We weren’t being like those pretentious cool kids who wear sunglasses inside, it really was fucking sunny. “Why’ve you painted on the wall?”

She replied after stealing a drag from my cigarette, “So I don’t forget. It helps you practice a tone. Say someone’s confronted you, for example. You might say, ‘You talkin’ to me?!’ and see if you get an answer. But, if someone compliments your hair but you’re unsure if they are complimenting your hair, you might say, ‘You talking to me?’ just to clarify.” She took another drag on my cigarette and then threw it out of the window. “Stella said we’ve never got to forget.”

I nodded absentmindedly and sniffed, pushing up my sunglasses. The clock said that it was half three, “I’ve got to go and meet Mikey, Max and Freddie for ice cream, you coming?” She shook her head and held up a script, shaking it. She’d been preparing for weeks, she knew her lines off by heart, so what was the point? I’d never seen anyone practice so hard in my life. Not kidding, one evening, she spoke in this southern belle accent and I ignored her until she stopped. That was two days before and she woke me up with a bowl of cereal to apologise.

I told that story to Mikey. He interrupted me before I said bowl of cereal and shouted, “BLOWJOB!” at the top of his lungs. Mikey Coughlan was a kid from Boston who’d travelled to New York to ‘find his muse’. He found me and Freddie on the subway instead. He had a guitar and this crazy purple hair which he’d dyed with Kool-Aid. He was two years younger than us, but he could play Misirlou flawlessly, so we started a band. A really good band at that.

Mikey was supposed to be practising the album as hard as he could because his mother and two older brothers were coming down to see the first night. From what he said, she sounded mental. Knitting obsessed, apparently and with a strong Irish accent. She was also a clean freak, so Mikey had essentially spent three weeks cleaning his one room apartment so his mother wouldn’t criticise the way he was living. His apartment had no electricity and the water ran cold. He didn’t even live there; he just kept his shit there and lived with Max.

Freddie spent fifteen minutes deciding what ice cream to buy, so I caught up with Max. He was this quiet kid who always sat at the back of his classes in high school, always had the prettiest girl in school attached to his arm and was seemingly always smoking a cigarette. I don’t know how the hell we became friends because I was this hyper boy with a shaggier hair cut (George Harrison 1966 style) and a big thing for Sharon Tate, which still continued. You could say Max ruined my innocence. He got me smoking pot, drinking alcohol and having sex. Max got me my first girlfriend, Ellie Clarke.

Max didn’t say much ever really. He was like a cooler James Dean. A cooler James Dean with tighter trousers. He hardly ever said anything, except for when he was drunk. I guess they say that opposites attract. In this case, quiet and loud people becoming friends. “Are you looking forward to tomorrow? It’s gonna be awesome, Max, I’m telling you.” I said to him, he just nodded and blew a ribbon of smoke into the air, a small smirk on his face.

Freddie headed back towards the table, smiling with his four ice cream cones and dancing to the Zombies song playing in the background. I guess it was hilarious when he slid on someone’s spilt milkshake and dropped the ice cream cones on his expensive looking polo shirt, but, fucking hell, we’d waited fifteen minutes for those goddamn ice cream cones.

I’d be damned if I wasn’t getting my ice cream…