I stopped at the bottom of the stairs and it was as if time
itself had balled into a fist and screamed down the staircase and punched me. I
have no idea what triggered it but suddenly time was laid out in front of me
like an ugly carpet and I saw all the stains, the beautiful blemishes, and the
realisation that I have nothing to be embarrassed of and nothing to regret. The
bad I have done has been done back to me and in the context of Germany and Russia or in the context of some
tabloid scoop my life has been mine.
I should never have gone on that last Members tour. I was
not in any fit state emotionally, the whole world was collapsing in slow motion
around me and I had no other outlet. No one person was to blame, no I correct
that I was to blame. So I set forth and fell in love: constantly. I had those
groupie moments but what has stayed with me these thirty years since that time
is the pain. The pain of cheating and the pain of falling in love constantly
over and over again, like some repetitive Groundhog Day scenario. I remember
them all even after nearly 25 years of marriage to an amazing woman and a
nagging sense of betrayal to another amazing woman. These women in the USA, in New York,
in LA, in San Francisco, in Toronto and in Fort Lauderdale. And one in Corpus Christi. No shame,
nothing approximating anything like it. More a sense of what was it all about
what was it I was doing and how come my emotions were carved up and spread
around? What the fuck was I doing?
I stand now in the place where I am, happy, with kids and a
family, without parents nearly sixty; Christ how did I get so old? Some, maybe many, could say it I just some
vague longing for the time that was most exciting in my life, like those old
guys you used to meet in the Seventies who would talk endlessly about the war
because it was the only exciting thing that had happened, or even worse those
people who would drone on and on about University because that was the only time they had had
fun as soon after they had got fucked up with me they met their future wife and
they never knew the drunken stupidity of casual sex after nightclubbing in
Berlin in 1976.
Chi-Chi, Paulette, Theresa and Dory. More than names, still
faces, not notches on walls. Parts of my life. Erin
in the Gulf. Moments that stayed with me, nothing left a mark quite the same way
they did. In Fort Lauderdale
I fell in love with someone who wept when I left. I cried in the van, quietly
at the very back, hidden behind my shades. I felt like those early tribes
people on first discovering the perfidious white man who stole parts of their
soul with the camera. Every time I left a part of me remained, forever in aspic.
Stuck in time like some frozen river or posed photograph.
This beautiful sadness doesn’t brush aside the reality I live
in, it never did. Where I am now is where I have always wanted to be, but now,
right now, in the Bourbon hours of the night their faces come back to me. They
were funny, they were fabulous and they loved me for a moment and if I had
lived in that moment I would still be there. These parallel universes that we
all inhabit stay with us and make us human but they also give us super-powers.
They make us immortal because some place else we will always be in that moment.
I miss Fort
Lauderdale and I miss LA. But I love London.
