Flesh Guitar by Geoff Nicholson

doses of Bliss? It was a devastating idea.
    The next night Jenny Slade and Jed Rhodes did a duo set at a working man’s club in Dagenham. It was not one of the great gigs. The audience was restless and halfway through the set a handful of drunks cut up nasty and started heckling and booing. Jed and Jenny smiled and lapped it up. Booing had never sounded so good.

KURT NEVER SLEEPS
    â€˜Hey Kurt, where are you goingwith that gun in your hand?’ Jenny Slade asks brightly.
    Kurt spins round. Kurt, a dishwater-blond in a lumberjack shirt, mascara’d eyes blinking at the vision. He’d thought he was alone in the room, alone with a head full of storming emotions, a suitcase full of pharmaceuticals and a few choice weapons.
    â€˜I ain’t going nowhere,’ he says.
    â€˜Well, that’s a blessing,’ says Jenny. ‘And how the hell are you?’
    Stopping to pose, to let his words carry their full cargo, Kurt says, ‘I’ve hurt myself and I want to die.’
    Jenny chuckles politely. ‘That’s my Kurt, ever the master of irony.’
    We are in the apartment above the garage of Kurt and Courtney’s Madrona home, up in the eaves in a long thin room, triangular in section, one wall mostly glass. The place is a mess. Jenny wonders why he doesn’t employ a house cleaner, spread some of that money around, create a little trickle down.
    The books and the CDs and the video tapes have all been carelessly cast aside. Who would have thoughtKurt was such a big reader? Bukowski and Burroughs and Beckett and Burgess. Burgess? Anthony Burgess? Yep – he’s one of Kurt’s main men. The dog-ears and the split spines testify to Kurt’s attention. But then everything has a well-used look around here: wine stains on the rugs, a cigarette stubbed out on the scratch plate of a vintage Fender Jag. Only the weapons and drugs get treated with any respect.
    Kurt’s guns include a Taurus revolver, a Baretta semiautomatic, a Colt rifle, a Remington twenty-gauge shotgun. His drugs of choice are heroin and Valium; a narcotic cuddle, oblivion with fluffy edges.
    â€˜All this loading up on guns and drugs,’ Jenny says. ‘Tell me about it, Kurt. Do you think it’s clever? Do you think it’s funny?’
    â€˜Well, it makes
me
laugh.’
    He turns his back on her and shambles his way over to a desk by the window. There’s a writing pad and a few pens set out. The page is filled by a red scrawl, an earlier draft. Kurt picks up a pen, holds it poised in his left hand, then gradually changes his grip till he’s holding it not like a pen but a dagger. He slowly stabs the page a few times, making a row of deliberate, calculated gouges. Then he just sits there, blank as a sheet of listing paper, Mr Catatonia.
    Jenny lets a few minutes pass before she says, ‘Hey Kurt, here I am, entertain me.’
    Kurt doesn’t smile so she says, ‘What are you trying to write anyway? Another chart-topping hit? Another teenage angst-ridden smasheroo?’
    â€˜A suicide note if you must know.’
    â€˜Cool,’ she says, and then, having mulled the matterover, adds, ‘It’s funny the way we need rock stars to die on us every now and then, isn’t it? Like it wakes us up a little. It purifies the tribe, something like that.
    â€˜Of course it probably wouldn’t happen if you were English. The English really don’t have that martyr tradition, not for rock stars anyway. They have a tendency, not necessarily a very attractive one, to keep on living, unless of course they’re John Lennon and they meet someone like Mark Whatsisname.’
    â€˜Yeah, well I’m not English, OK?’
    â€˜Fine.’
    â€˜And I’m going to do it just as soon as I finish this damn letter.’
    â€˜We could be here all night,’ Jenny says, but not loud enough for him to hear. ‘I don’t suppose anything I say will make any