Walk on the Wild Side - By Karl Edward Wagner Page 0,66
your millions and a house in Kensington, whence sounds of debauchery issued throughout the night.”
“You got it right all along, mate. It was sex, drugs and alcohol that brought about me ruin. We’ll say bloody nothing about scheming managers and crooked recording studios. Now, then. You’ve got the whole soddin’ story.”
“Not very original.” Chase wondered whether he should finish his scrumpi.
“Life is never original,” Nemo observed. The rush of alcohol and nicotine had vastly improved his demeanor. Take away the dirt and shabby clothes, and he might well look like any other dissipated man in his sixties, although that must be about twice his actual age. He was alert enough not to be gauging Chase for prospects of further largess.
“Of course, that’s not truly the reason.”
“Was it a woman?” asked Chase. The scrumpi was making him maudlin.
“Which woman would it have been? Here, drink up, mate. Give us tube fare to Ken High Street, and I’ll show you how it happened.”
At this point Ryan Chase should have put down his unfinished pint, excused himself, and made his way back to his hotel. Instead he drank up, stumbled along to the Holborn tube station, and found himself being bounced about the train beside a decidedly deranged Nemo Skagg. Caught up in the adventure of the moment, Chase told himself that he was on a sort of quest—a quest for truth, for the truth that lies behind the masks of faces.
The carriage shook and swayed as it plummeted through subterranean darkness, yanking to a halt at each jostling platform. Chase dropped onto a seat as the passengers rushed out and swarmed in. Lurid posters faced him from the platform walls. Bodies mashed close about him, crushing closer than the sooty tunnel walls briefly glimpsed in flashes of passing trains and bright bursts of sparks. Faces, looking nowhere, talking in tight bundles, crowded in. Sensory overload.
Nemo’s face leered down. He was clutching a railing. “You all right, mate?”
“Gotta take a piss.”
“Could go for a slash myself. This stop will do.”
So they got off at Notting Hill Gate instead of changing for High Street Kensington; and this was good, because they could walk down Kensington Church Street, which was for a miracle all downhill, toward Kensington High Street. The walk and the fresh air revived Chase from his claustrophobic experience. Bladder relieved, he found himself pausing before the windows of the numerous antique shops that they passed. Hideous Victorian atrocities and baroque horrors from the continent lurked imprisoned behind shop windows. A few paintings beckoned from the farther darkness. Chase was tempted to enter.
But each time Nemo caught at his arm. “You don’t want to look at any of that shit, mate. It’s all just a lot of dead shit. Let’s sink us a pint first.”
By now Chase had resigned himself to having bankrolled a pub crawl. They stopped at The Catherine Wheel, and Chase fetched pints of lager while Nemo Skagg commandeered a bench around the corner on Holland Street. From this relative eddy, they watched the crowd stroll past on Kensington Church Street. Chase smelled the curry and chili from within the pub, wondering how to break this off. He really should eat something.
“I don’t believe you told me your name.” Nemo Skagg was growing measurably more alert, and that seemed to make his condition all the more tragic.
“I’m Ryan Chase.” Chase, who was growing increasingly pissed, no longer regarded the fallen rock star as an object of pity: he now revered him as a crippled hero of the wars in the fast lane.
“Pleased to meet you, Ryan.” Nemo Skagg extended a taloned hand. “Where in the States are you from?”
“Well, I live in Connecticut. I have a studio there.”
“I’d reckoned you for an artist. And clearly not a starving garret sort. What do you do?”
“Portraits, mostly. Gallery work. I get by.” Chase could not fail to notice the other’s empty pint. Sighing, he arose to attend to the matter.
When he returned, Chase said, with some effort at firmness, “Now then. Here we are in Kensington. What is all this leading to?”
“You really are a fan, then?”
The lager inclined Chase toward an effusive and reckless mood. “Needle was the cutting edge of punk rock. Your first album, Excessive Bodily Fluids, set the standard for a generation. Your second album, The Coppery Taste of Blood, remains one of the ten best rock albums ever recorded. When I die, these go into the vault with me.”