Friday, 11 September 2015

Remarkable People I Have Known: Rock Star

This marks one of the stupidest things I ever did in my life.  Taking a drug addicted failed rock musician with AIDS to London to be questioned by Scotland Yard about the murder of his ex-boyfriend while letting him extort from me thousands of dollars.  Remember what I said about me being a sucker for sad souls with tragic tails of endless woe?

I had encountered him in the past on occasion and we stopped and talked a bit.  We seemed to hit it off.  Late one evening at around 11:30 I saw him on Granville Street downtown, just ahead of me.  I called him and we walked together.  He appeared to be very distraught and mentioned he was grieving the death of a member of his band.  We went to a pub together where we talked a bit more.  He got very drunk and it was late.  He invited me back to his apartment.  The buses had already stopped running (I was living in Richmond then) so I accepted his offer of a place to sleep for the night.  He did make a move on me so I moved away to the couch, then I disappeared in the morning.  Unfortunately I was stupid enough to leave him a note with my phone number on it.  I really didn't expect that he would call.

We began to hang out and he was such a mess that I stayed with him for a couple of weeks basically looking after him, seeing that he was eating okay, walking his dog.  I got swallowed into this fetid toxic whirlpool of squalor, moral decay and failed charisma.  I did not do anything that compromised any of my values, Christian or otherwise, but I still allowed this miserable sociopath take ownership of me and lie about his need for financial assistance in order to extort drug money from me while weeping without ceasing about having AIDS and the murder of his ex-lover.  I was enjoying the largess of an inheritance from my recently deceased mother and he was eating into it like a swarm of bedbugs vacationing in a nudist fat farm.

He was British, had recently lived in London and received news of the brutal murder of his ex-lover.  Then came a letter from Scotland Yard asking him to travel there to answer a few questions.  I was already planning to go to London, perhaps to try to settle there.  On my invitation he joined me.

In London we shared a hotel room which he strew with his personal effects.  Then he brought back a Parisian man with a nasty attitude to smoke dope and hopefully have sex with him in our room.  I effectively vetoed it and kicked the asshole out.  Then he brought in another pathetic soul and again I had to get rid of both of them.  I was happy to have the room to myself.  I generally tried to otherwise avoid him since all he wanted to do was get drunk in pubs, use drugs and pick up men.  We did make it Scotland Yard and while he was questioned there (in Highgate) I took a walk in the overgrown cemetery that contains the grave of Karl Marx.

We went to Edinburgh together where I lost him.  He wanted more money, I said no and that was the last I saw of him.  I do not know what happened to him but my craving for rock star glamour was very much cured thanks to one failed rock star in post-Thatcher London in the summer of 1991.

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