Boyfriend Material(101)
My phone buzzed. It was nice to know Oliver was thinking of me, but it was less nice that he’d apparently decided to think of me through the medium of an old, bald white man.
What the fuck, I texted. I assume this is a dick?
Yes.
Should I have any clue what kind of dick it is?
It’s a political dick.
I liked this better when it was a flirty game instead of an actual general knowledge quiz
I’m sorry. Somehow Oliver could even make text come across as genuinely contrite. It’s Dick Cheney.
How was I ever supposed to get that?
Contextual clues. I said it was political. How many Dicks are there in politics?
To make the obvious joke. Loads
There was a pause. It’s also an I miss you dick.
That’s a very specific flavour of dick
“You’re here,” said Jon Fleming, who was standing over me. “I wasn’t sure you would be.”
Speaking of, I typed, Dad’s here
Reluctantly I put my phone away, and found—as ever—I had nothing to say to him. “Yes. Yes, I’m here.”
“This has changed.” He sounded genuinely peeved about it. “Can I get you anything from the bar?”
I had most of a Monkey’s Butthole left, but my father had abandoned me when I was three and making him say “Monkey’s Butthole” to a stranger might be the only revenge I’d ever get. I showed him the bottle. “I’ll have another of these, thanks.”
Heading to the counter, he scored the latest in a string of small, annoying victories by simply pointing at the drinks he wanted, and somehow making the gesture look dignified and commanding, instead of utterly petty. And then, sporting a second Butthole and a pint of Ajax Napalm, he made his way back to me. Given this was so clearly not what he’d been expecting, and that he was the oldest person in the building by a good thirty years, he looked infuriatingly non-out of place. I think it was the combination of everyone else trying to dress like they’d been rock stars in the seventies and that fucking awful charisma that made the world shape itself to him, not the other way around.
Fuck, it was going to be a long evening.
“You wouldn’t believe”—he settled himself across from me—“that Mark Knopfler used to perform right over there.”
“Oh, I believe it. I just don’t care. Honestly, I’m not even”—okay, this was a lie, but I wanted to piss him off the teeniest bit—“completely sure who he is.”
I’d definitely misjudged it. Not only did he know I was bullshitting him, but he also wasn’t going to let that stop him giving me a long, self-serving rant about the history of the music scene. “When I first met Mark in ’76, he and his brother were both on the dole and thinking about starting a band, so I took them to see Max Merritt and the Meteors here at the Moon. Back then, it was part of what we called the toilet circuit.”
The problem with my dad—well, one of the many problems with my dad—was that when he talked like this, you really wanted to listen. “The what?”
“Bunch of dingy-as-hell venues up and down the country. Pubs, warehouses, that kind of thing. Places you’d play for the beer, and the exposure, and the love of it. It’s where we all got our start in the day. Anyway, I took Mark to see Max Merritt and the Meteors, and what those guys could do with just two acoustic guitars and an electric keyboard… I think that was a real inspiration to him.”
“Let me guess: you also said to him, ‘Wow, it sounds like you’re in dire straits.’”
He smiled. “So you did know who he was.”
“Yeah, all right. I had an idea.”
“Of course, it’s all different now.” He paused meditatively and took a swig of Ajax Napalm. “This actually isn’t bad. Though in my day what you call craft ales we used to call beer.” Another equally meditative pause. “Then the chains took over and the small breweries shut down, and everything was pressurised and standardised. And now we’ve forgotten where we came from, so a bunch of guys in their twenties are trying to sell back to us something we should have never given away in the first place.” A third pause. He was really good at this. “It’s a funny thing, the pendulum of the world.”
“Is that,” I asked, half-sincerely, half not, “what you’re going to call your next album?”
He shrugged. “That depends on your mother. Your mother and the cancer.”
“So, um, what’s up with that? Are you okay?”
“Waiting for tests.”
Oh fuck. For a split second, Jon Fleming just looked like a bald, old man drinking IPA from a fancy bottle. “Look, I’m…sorry about… It must be awful.”
“It’s what it is. And it’s made me think about things I haven’t in a long time.”
A month or so ago I would have said “you mean, like the son you abandoned”? “Like what?” I said instead.
“The past. The future. The music.”
I could almost pretend that I fit into “the past” but it wasn’t much comfort.
“You see, it’s like the beer. When I started out, we were just kids with big ideas playing on borrowed guitars for anyone who’d listen. Rights of Man recorded our first album on a busted-up eight-track in a garage. Then the studios swept in with their bubblegum pop and their bands of plastic children, and all the dirt and the heart went out of the business.”