Wild Boy by Andy Taylor

Author:Andy Taylor [TAYLOR, ANDY]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: BIO000000
ISBN: 9780446546065
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Published: 2008-09-09T04:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER EIGHT

America . . . and Cracking Up

WHEN you burn the candle at both ends, pretty soon something has to give—and in America it happened during April 1984 at the Four Seasons Hotel in San Francisco. I can’t remember who it was who first called me in the middle of the night to tell me that John Taylor’s hotel room was drenched in blood. What I can vividly recall is the horrific scene that greeted me when I arrived there in the early hours of the morning.

Everywhere, blood.

It was all over the bed. I can remember it on the covers and on the sheets, I can remember it on the wall up by the window, and I can remember it on the floor and all over an antique chair. In fact, one whole side of the room was covered in blood and there was a broken bottle of Stolichnaya vodka on the floor. It had smears of red gloop congealing on its broken edges. John sat on a chair in the corner, whimpering.

I couldn’t get any sense out of him, and it took a second or two for my brain to try and make sense of the scene. I’d been drinking heavily that night and I’d also taken cocaine; so had John. I assumed John had been involved in some sort of argument with a girlfriend. The room was in a state as if there had been an argument. Things had been turned over, but the room wasn’t completely trashed or smashed up. John continued to rock back and forth, crying in pain and clutching at himself.

Then I saw where all the blood was coming from.

The soft underside of his foot was covered in a mass of cuts that seemed to have shards of glass sticking out of them. I assumed that he must have stepped on the broken vodka bottle with the force of his full weight, but I couldn’t tell if all the mess had been caused by his foot spurting or whether or not in his semiconscious state he’d walked around the room with bits of glass embedded in him.

I grabbed the telephone. “Emergency. We need a doctor . . . ,” I said, as the adrenaline in my veins began to sober me up.

I could now see that John was very emotional. He was crying and screaming out in pain, but his eyes looked out of it. I didn’t think he was necessarily aware of what was happening to him. He was breathing deeply, as if that was the only thing keeping him sane. I put my arm around him to try and comfort him, but I could feel panic beginning to rise within myself.

“It’s going to be okay. It’s going to be okay. It’s going to be okay,” I repeated over and over.

I don’t know if I was trying to reassure John or convince myself. I kept thinking, Fuck me, please don’t let him bleed to death.

I could see that he’d suffered a horrible wound.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.