I’d had no idea he was so famous in America. You’d turn a corner, and there was his face tacked to some demolition-site wall or on an illuminated hoarding. Charlie had done a tour of arenas and Stadiums with his new band. He showed me the videos, but refused to sit in the room while I watched them. I could see why. On stage he wore black leather, silver buckles, chains and chokers, and by the end of the performance he was bare-chested, thin and white like Jagger, flinging his spidery figure like a malevolent basketball player across stages as wide as aircraft hangars. He appealed to the people who had the most disposable income, gays and young people, especially girls, and his album, Kill For DaDa, was still in the charts, months after it had been released.
But the menace was gone. The ferocity was already a travesty, and the music, of little distinction in itself, had lost its drama and attack when transported from England with its unemployment, strikes and class antagonism. What impressed me was that Charlie knew this. The music’s feeble, OK? I’m no Bowie, don’t think I don’t know that. But ‘I’ve got ideas between my ears. I can do good work in the future, Karim. This country gives me such optimism. People here believe you can do stuff. They don’t bring you down all the time, like in England.’
So now he was renting this three-floor apartment in a brownstone on East 10th Street while he wrote the songs for his next album and learned the saxophone. In the morning, while snooping around, I’d noticed an empty and separate apartment at the top of the house. As I stood there with my coat on, ready to walk to the theatre and sad to leave him – he seemed so generous and charmed to be with me – I said; ‘Charlie, me and the whole cast, we’re all living in this big apartment. And I can’t bear to see Eleanor every day. It breaks my heart.’
Charlie didn’t hesitate. ‘I’d be ’appy to ’ave you ’ere. Move in tonight.’
‘Great. Thanks, man.’
I walked down the street, laughing, amused that here in America Charlie had acquired this cockney accent when my first memory of him at school was that he’d cried after being mocked by the stinking gypsy kids for talking so posh. Certainly, I’d never heard anyone talk like that before. Now he was going in for cockney rhyming slang, too. ‘I’m just off for a pony,’ he’d say. Pony and trap – crap. Or he was going to wear his winter whistle. Whistle and flute – suit. He was selling Englishness, and getting a lot of money for it.
A few days later I moved in with him. During most of the day Charlie was around the house, giving interviews to journalists from all over the world, being photographed, trying on clothes, and reading. Sometimes there’d be young Californian girls lying around the place listening to Nick Lowe, Ian Dury and especially Elvis Costello. I spoke to these girls only when spoken to, since I found their combination of beauty, experience, vacuity and cruelty harrowing.
But there were three or four smart serious New York women, publishers, film critics, professors at Columbia, Sufis who did whirling dances and so on, whom he listened to for hours before he slept with them, later getting up to make urgent notes on their conversation, which he would then repeat to other people in the next few days. ‘They’re educating me, man,’ he said about these besotted women, with whom he discussed international politics, South American literature, dance, and the ability of alcohol to induce mystical states. In New York he wasn’t ashamed of his ignorance: he wanted to learn; he wanted to stop lying and bluffing.
As I wandered about the flat and heard him learning about Le Corbusier, I could see that fame, success and wealth really agreed with him. He was less anxious, bitter and moody than I’d ever known him. Now that he was elevated, he no longer looked up and envied. He could set aside ambition and become human. He was going to act in a film and then a stage play. He met prominent people; he travelled to learn. Life was glorious.
‘Let me tell you something, Karim,’ he said at breakfast, which was when we talked, his present girlfriend being in bed. ‘There was a day when I fell in love for the first time. I knew this was the big one. I was staying in a house in Santa Monica after doing some gigs in LA and San Francisco.’ (What magical names these were to me.) ‘The house had five terraces on the side of a steep, lush hill. I’d been for a swim in this pool, from which a flunkey had recently fished all leaves with a net. I was drying myself and talking on the phone to Eva in West Kensington. The wife of a famous actor whose house it was came out to me and handed me the keys to her motorcycle. A Harley. It was then I knew I loved money. Money and everything it could buy. I never wanted to be without money again because it could buy me a life like this every day.’
‘Time and money are the best, Charlie. But if you’re not careful they’ll fertilize weirdness, indulgence, greed. Money can cut the cord between you and ordinary living. There you are, looking down on the world, thinking you understand it, that you’re just like them, when you’ve got no idea, none at all. Because at the centre of people’s lives are worries about money and how to deal with work.’
‘I enjoy these conversations,’ he said. ‘They make me think. Thank God, I’m not indulgent myself.’
Charlie was fit. Every day at eleven a taxi took him to Central Park, where he ran for an hour; then he went to the gym for another hour. For days at a time he ate only peculiar things like pulses, bean-shoots and tofu, and I had to scoff hamburgers on the stoop in the snow because, as he said, ‘I won’t have the animal within these walls.’ Every Thursday night his drug-dealer would call by. This was more of the civilization he’d espied in Santa Monica, Charlie figured. Especially the way this ex-NYU film student came by with his Pandora’s Box and threw it open on top of Charlie’s MOMA catalogue. Charlie would lick a finger and point to this amount of grass, that amount of coke, a few uppers, some downers and some smack for us to snort.
The play didn’t last long in New York, a month only, because Eleanor had to start shooting a small part in the big film she’d landed. The play wasn’t doing sufficient business for us to cast another actress in Eleanor’s role; and anyway, Pyke had gone off to San Francisco to teach.
When the others went back to London I ripped up my ticket and stayed in New York. There was nothing for me to do in London, and my aimlessness would be eyeballed by my father, who would use it as evidence that I should have become a doctor; or, at least, that I should visit a doctor. In New York I could be a walking stagnancy without restraint.
I liked walking around the city, going to restaurants with Charlie, doing his shopping (I bought him cars and property), answering the phone and sitting around with British musicians who were passing through. We were two English boys in America, the land where the music came from, with Mick Jagger, John Lennon and Johnny Rotten living round the corner. This was the dream come true.
All the same, my depression and self-hatred, my desire to mutilate myself with broken bottles, and numbness and crying fits, my inability to get out of bed for days and days, the feeling of the world moving in to crush me, went on and on. But I knew I wouldn’t go mad, even if that release, that letting-go, was a freedom I desired. I was waiting for myself to heal.
I began to wonder why I was so strong – what it was that held me together. I thought it was that I’d inherited from Dad a strong survival instinct. Dad had always felt superior to the British: this was the legacy of his Indian childhood – political anger turning into scorn and contempt. For him in India the British were ridiculous, stiff, unconfident, rule-bound. And he’d made me feel that we couldn’t allow ourselves the shame of failure in front of these people. You couldn’t let the ex-colonialists see you on your knees, for that was where they expected you to be. They were exhausted now; their Empire was gone; their day was done and it was our turn. I didn’t want Dad to see me like this, because he wouldn’t be able to understand why I’d made such a mess of things when the conditions had been good, the time so opportune, for advancement.