Appointments With the Dream Fairy: A Memoir by David Evans

Author:David Evans
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Tusitala Press
Published: 2014-03-15T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter Twenty-One

THE CAT’S CRADLE

When I started working for Barry, he was perfectly aware of my ambitions to become a writer. Understandably, he was entirely dis-interested. Perhaps, believing that it is frequently better to be cruel to be kind, he told me in no uncertain terms that my future would not be in writing but that some day I might make someone an okay lover ... Whoops!

My perspectives thus adjusted, I didn’t really mind. It was so very nice to use his discouragement as an excuse to leave me free to put my own creative drive into the really important things of life which, in no particular order, appeared to be having an extremely good time going to bars and restaurants and staying up very late as often as possible doing unspeakable things with other boys.

So slaked, my creative withdrawal was a doddle. I just let other people, like Steve, fulfill my creative urges. Basking in the reflected glory of the eminently superior and more successful efforts of the creative talent which surrounded me, I felt I didn’t have to bother with being creative myself. It was creative enough listening to the trials and tribulations of these great ones and, as far as one could help by being sympathetic and appreciative of their every effort.

It’s called arse-licking. Brown-nosing. I am the yes-man, yes. I am the yes-man ... Yes! Endless listening. Bernice Rubens says it’s what makes a writer. If so, working with actors and musicians is a serious qualification for the Booker Prize.

After a year or so, even I could tell that life was getting better for all of us when Barry forgave me the ironing and the valet parts of my job spec and, needing an assistant’s services fairly constantly, allowed me instead to take his laundry to the dry cleaners a little way down the street. I hung up my iron once and for all and never looked back. We employed the first of a string of office gophers. This one was was ginger and chirpy, from South London. His name was Graham Briley. He could see nothing in Cat Stevens whatsoever but wanted instead nothing more than to be David Bowie who had just stuck his amazing Ziggy face over the parapet of the RCA building on the corner of Curzon Street next to MI5. Our next was Simon Fryer who was tall and lithe and had hair that looked like a spaniel’s and whose ambition was to become a roadie.

Most people didn’t ask for much out of rock ‘n’ roll. Just to be there.

For a while, Barry seemed jollier and happier than he had ever been. The realisation that Steve’s career had taken off first of all in America came hard on the heels of that first low-key appearance which Steve and Alun Davies made at Doug Weston’s Troubadour on Santa Monica Boulevard in West Hollywood, L.A. The implications of such a career launch took longer to be revealed back here at home. Steve’s so-called career, until the Troubadour watershed, had been fairly parochial.

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