Blinded By The Stars

It was the afternoon and Jack was only just starting to get out of bed. He awoke stretching and yawning from the mists of his sleep; adjusting his eyes to the light and gradually and eventually he eased himself out from the toasty warm cosiness of his duvet and looked out of the window.

He then imagined to hear the voice of a television interviewer asking him: ‘What was it like where you were brought up?’

Jack disdainfully took note of everything he could see in order to form an answer. On the other side of the rain-drizzled street, submerged under the dark shadows of what seemed to be a permanently pale grey sky, there was a row of red  brick houses all made to have the same style roofs, windows, doors, drainpipes  and gardens like they had been hastily manufactured on a conveyor belt.

‘It was terrible and I hated it.’ Jack whispered to himself.

He tugged down the blinds of his windows, shutting the world out of sight. He then realised that he was only wearing a T-shirt and boxer shorts and could not appear in a television interview like this. So he put on his leather trousers, his favourite T-shirt with the burning skull on it, his leather boots and his leather jacket. And he was now ready for the world to see him on the television and to start the interview from the beginning. He saw the studio as it meshed over his reality.  It looked like the interior of a spaceship so as to give the impression to the audience that they were inside a hub, looking at the future of innovation at the cutting edge of culture. But two plush armchairs made the viewers feel that they had been invited into a relaxed homely atmosphere.

One of these chairs was occupied by a sharply-dressed interviewer, coolly crossing his legs.

‘Tonight on the show…’ he said in a velvet smooth voice ‘…we have an international phenomenon…’

His voice changed to a sonorous pitch to announce a message which could not be mistaken as being anything less than important, ‘…here is…’

If this is going to happen, Jack paused, I need a different name.

‘Jack Green’ sounded too normal for him, too much like the boy next door. It had no excitement or star quality about it. So he went through his list of names written in his notepad; names which he thought sounded far more interesting than Jack Green.

Erza Paul? Steven Turner? Syd Wyatt? Duff Steel? Conroy Wolf? No…Zane Clarke? Butch Cage? Butch Cage sounds too much like a wrestler. Cain Craven?

The voice of the interviewer tested the sound of the name: ‘Here is Cain Craven…’   It certainly has a good ring to it, Jack thought.

It was a name that carried the potential gravitas of a star. A name that would look good on a poster or embossed in a gold font on the front cover of his autobiography…  A book, he was certain, that would be sold out so quickly that bookshops and supermarkets would have to keep re-stocking their shelves in order to quench the restless demands of the public.

The interviewer asked, ‘Can you tell me…Cain Craven…what it was like when you had your first hit?’

Jack welled up in the remembrance of that experience as if he was feeling it all over again, and he looked at himself in the bedroom mirror to see if he was pulling the right expressions. “Oh you know…it changed my life – completely! ’

He tried to look contemplative by stroking the few little wiry hairs that had grown out of his chin. He was attempting to grow a goatee in order to complete the image because he already had the clothes, the long hair and the guitar, but his facial hair was taking longer to grow out evenly than he expected. In his day dreams, of course, he could have everything he ever wanted.

‘Before I was famous I was very…’ he could feel his chest becoming crowded with air as he braced himself to reveal these feelings he found emotionally difficult to express, ‘unpopular…at school. Everybody thought I was ugly …I was called a…grease monkey and…um…pizza face…because I used to have a lot of spots…’

The audience replied with an automatic sigh of empathy which turned Jack red with bashfulness. Jack imagined all the people who had expected him to never achieve anything, watching him now aghast in front of their television sets saying, “I knew ‘im!” 

‘So …’ Jack continued, ‘…to suddenly have all these really…gorgeous women…’

All the women in the audience started laughing nervously, fluttering their eyelashes and coyly playing with a curl of their hair.

‘…looking at me, chasing after me it was really…really…nice!’

The audience laughed. ‘I remember walking through town knowing everyone was looking at me! People came up and were taking my hand and saying, “Oh congratulations! I really like your song!” and people would start singing it, chanting it to me from across the street. And when I first heard I Love You Baby on the radio…it was just…surreal! You know? It was just crazy. I never expected any of that to happen. I just couldn’t believe it!’

Jack thought the last comment did not come across as sounding believable enough so he repeated it again in the mirror like an actor practising his lines.

‘Does it ever get a bit much for you?’ the interviewer asked.

‘Uh…’ Jack carefully picked the right way to make his point without it being misunderstood by his loving fans, ‘…sometimes…’ he nodded.  He then nodded again in the mirror, looking at himself for a second, to see if he looked thoughtful enough and then his eyes darted away in an attempt to not linger too long on the fact that all he was doing was talking to himself, ‘…when I open my curtains and I see a mob of paparazzi hiding in the bushes, taking pictures of me…that…is a bit…much.’

The interviewer solemnly nodded his head to show that he understood.

‘Sometimes I do feel like moving away from it all…to some remote island…where no one knows who I am…to get some peace, but I like my job too much to do that…I’m not settled yet…there is a drive within me which needs to keep going…’

The interviewer asked, ‘Are your folks always ringing you?’

‘Umm –’ Jack cleared his throat, preparing himself for the inevitable question about his Father, ‘–my Mum is, yeah…she’s always asking me how I’m doing, where I am…what ‘ave I had to eat for me tea…’

Jack emphasised his accent because he knew Americans were passionate anglophiles and that they would find him even more loveable if he was to appeal to their cosy expectations.

‘And your Dad?’

Jack could sense his Father sitting in front of the television watching this interview and looking straight into him. Jack knew that, if his Father could, he would be holding him up by the scruff of his neck, pressing him up against a wall and threatening to hurt him if he said anything untoward about him. But Jack knew that he would have no fear of his Father anymore if he became this successful. He would have the choice, the power and the money to never have to see him again. So he told the truth:

‘He couldn’t care less.’

The audience gasped in shock and his Father’s hands curled into fists of rage, close to punching and smashing the screen of the television.

His Mother desperately tried to not show any sign of her pleasure in seeing her husband becoming so frustrated by the fact that someone had finally stood up to him,  in the fear that he might inflict his aggression on to her.

‘I’m not watching this anymore!’ his Father grunted. He grabbed on to the remote control and changed the channel. It was still the interview. He clicked the remote again thinking that he had somehow clicked the wrong button. It was still the interview. He looked closely at the remote and saw that he was pressing the right button but when he pushed it again it was still the interview.

‘Why?’ the interviewer asked Jack.

His Father was determined not to hear the answer to this question so he got out of his armchair and pulled the television plug out of the socket. To his horror, the television did not switch off and the interview continued.

‘When I was up in my bedroom, practising my guitar and furiously scribbling down lyrics and ideas, he would just say that I was wasting my time, that I was a dreamer and that I should just get…’ Jack slipped into a gruff voice, ‘…a proper job.’

‘He tried to squat down on your dreams?’ the interviewer croaked out, nearly sobbing.

‘Yeah…’ Jack agreed sadly, finding the description painfully accurate.

The interviewer leaned in comfortingly, proving that he had compassion for Jack. His eyes became pools nearly brimming over with tears, and he said, ‘Well…you don’t need to worry about him any more!’

The audience burst into a long applause that had the power to heal the pain Jack must have gone through having to live with such a strangulating and obstructive presence.

‘And what is your advice to any aspiring musicians?’

‘Don’t listen to your Dad!’

The audience and the interviewer laughed with empathy and admired his ability to find light in a hard situation, but his Father turned puce with enraged embarrassment.

Jack imagined himself suddenly bursting through the front door, making his Father judder round in his armchair to see him standing and staring at him.

His Father shouted, ‘How dare you say that about me when you can’t even –’

‘You see this Dad?’ Jack yelled triumphantly, slamming a briefcase on to the table and dramatically opening it up to reveal stacks of banknotes. ‘I get more money in a day – than you have ever earned in your whole life!’

His Mother stared at the money completely stunned.

‘Look!’ Jack was trying his best to make his Father squirm back into his armchair like a worm under a magnifying glass. He picked up two handfuls of the banknotes and threw them up in the air as if they were nothing but pieces of confetti. ‘This is only one tiny percent of what I earn!’

His Mother went into a joyous frenzy picking up the money and catching it as it fell down around her, whereas his Father looked at them both with a stony face.

‘Who’s the man of the house now?’ Jack screamed fearlessly in his Father’s face.   

‘I am!’ his Father feebly replied.

Jack scoffed and then snarled, ‘You’re just a pathetic old man!’

And then Jack took a sadistic pleasure in watching the piercing stare in his Father’s eyes become faded by the humiliating realisation that his son was right, he was not as strong or as young as he used to be. But instead of accepting this in a dignified manner Jack reduced his Father, who was a six-foot tall, ex-policeman with a black chevron moustache, to burst into tears and run away screaming like a little boy.  

His Mother was on the floor ecstatically laughing and rolling around in all the money and rubbing it all over her skin while breathing out in ecstasy, ‘Thank you…thank you…’

Jack looked away to watch himself on the television.

The interviewer turned to the camera and said, ‘The album is called ‘I Love You Baby’ and has gone on to sell three million copies worldwide and has been tipped by critics to be the most important album to be made in this century so far…’ He turned to Jack and smiled, ‘No pressure then…’

Jack smiled and confidently replied ‘No. No pressure.’

‘Jack has sold out arenas all across the world and he is now currently working on a new album…’ the interviewer turned to Jack in amazement, ‘…already?

‘Oh yes…I want to keep making music for my fans.’

There was a woman in the audience wearing a T-shirt with Jack’s face on it – a design Jack had drawn in his notepad – who was holding up a copy of his CD. Jack smiled at her and she became so overwhelmed that she fainted. This caused gasps and shrieks to ripple through the people around her. Unmoved by this situation, because he had seen it happen so many times, Jack got up from the chair – which was actually his bed – picked up his guitar, strode to the stage – the oval shaped-carpet in front of his bedroom mirror – and stood in front of the audience.

‘And now Jack is going to play the title track for us…’

The audience cheered and applauded, for this was the moment they had all been waiting for. The lights around the studio dimmed until there was only one light to be seen. A spotlight shining down on Jack which eclipsed the rest of the band behind him into silhouettes. The cameras closed in on Jack as he begun to preciously strum the guitar. His face started to contort as though the way he was touching the strings was sweetly stinging the wounds of his broken-heart.

Jack was merely imitating some of the photos, posters and glossy magazine cut-outs of rock stars and pop stars which he had collected and stuck over every inch of his bedroom walls.

Sometimes he would kneel on his bed and look up at all these pictures admiringly like a Christian kneels in reverence before a cross. Some of these pictures captured the musicians live on the stage in the raw act of their performance. Sweating and clenching on to a microphone, throwing their hair back like the mane of a lion or hunched over forwards with their mouths wide open; scrunching up their faces into narrow crinkly lines, as they gut-wrenchingly belted out their emotions. Jack thought if everyone could express themselves as honestly as they appeared to do and were able to touch others souls like they did, the world would be a much better place. There were people in the world however who, to Jack, seemed not to have a soul. His Father unfortunately was the closest example of this.  Particularly when he shouted things like: ‘Apply yourself to the realities of life!’ This would upset Jack, when he was playing his guitar, because he wanted to believe that his dreams would come true and that they were worth applying himself to. But his Father did not believe in him. No one understood him apart from the rock stars and pop stars around his bedroom walls.

He would retreat into their company and confide in them so intensely, usually after he had an argument with his Father, that he would imagine them talking back to him. They would inspire him to carry on following his dreams, give him words of advice and also tell him to talk to his Mother.

Like every good Mother she thought her child was special. She had always tried to find the right outlet for him to discover his talent. When he was only six months old she brought him a mini toy grand piano and every time he thumped a sound out of the keys she thought that he was going to be the next Mozart. When he started playing tennis she would bore her neighbours and friends with stories of the various hits, swerves and serves she had seen him make and she would tell them that he was training to qualify for the Wimbledon championships. On his eleventh birthday she gave him a microscope in the hope that he would one day win the Nobel Prize award and become the next Einstein.  All of these hopes that she had invested in were short-lived phases. He got bored of playing the piano, he stopped playing tennis as soon as he lost all the tennis balls and he broke the microscope not long after he received it. His interest in music and playing the guitar however continued to keep her hopes alive because he appeared to pursue an intense level of application with both of them.

‘Jack?’

His Mother’s voice made him jump and it split the gauze of his fantasy apart in an instant.

She cautiously peered round from behind the door and said, ‘Sorry Jack…I didn’t mean to –’ He sprang back on to his bed as if he was rewinding over the embarrassment.

‘Was that you playing?’

‘Yes,’ he said, trying to hide the vexation in his voice.

‘I thought it was one of your records! You’re getting really good you know!’

‘It’s something I really want to do Mum.’

‘That’s good Jack…what song was it you were playing?’

‘It was…one of my own.’

‘One of your own?’ she asked in astonishment, her eyes sparkling.

‘Yes. Would you like to hear it?’

‘Yes please!’

He took a deep breath, closed his eyes and then he started to play...

Discordant strings buzzed and thrashed out. This made her worried that any second now the neighbours would be banging on the wall, telling him to keep the noise down. Then an odd sound came out of his mouth. A quasi-American nasal whining voice singing ‘Yeah, yeah, baby, yeah, yeah’ over the frantic chugging of his strumming. She wanted to tell him that he was being too loud, that his guitar was out of tune and that ‘I love you baby’ and ‘I’m beggin’ you please / I’m down on my knees’ were clichés that even a B-list pop writer would discard. But she could not. She could see how much performing and expressing himself meant to him and this made her fall prey to her conflictions.

She wanted to keep hold of the impulse to supply her child with his every need and to retain his innocence but she also wanted him to learn independence, compromise and self-sufficiency. The latter would mean having to let go of her parental power which was something she did not have the confidence to do nor the strength to accept. So she sat there and unflinchingly endured his performance while holding up a frozen smile and trying not to let it be pulled down into a grimace.

Once he had finished, she pretended that the song was so mesmerising that it had put her into a trance-like state which had neglected her capabilities to think or speak for a few seconds. She then finally had to shake herself out of it by clapping and saying,

‘That’s so good Jack!’

He opened his eyes and was thrilled to see a beaming smile on her face. 

“You could be on the television!’

‘Really?!’  he exclaimed.  

‘Absolutely!’ she strained through her frozen smile.

‘On another note though Jack…’ she said, moving the conversation along, ‘…Evie phoned earlier asking where you were. You used to be such good friends with her.’ She wished that he would socialise more. But despite his Mother trying to talk to him, he could not hear her words because of all the compliments and hopes that seemed to be inflating inside his head. These were making his confidence expand more and more, causing his mind to float away from anything that he considered to be an annoying triviality.

‘Well, Jack, I’ll see you when you come down.’  Before she closed the door she felt the need to look at him with eyes full of pride and say, ‘Really good song Jack.’ A closer observer would have noticed that her encouraging tone had a faint line of apprehension stopping it from sounding fully convincing, but Jack could not detect it. Instead he let the compliments fill his head without question. He trusted that his Mother meant what she meant and nothing else. This unwitting trust in her compliments surged a self-belief in him which made him feel he could go to the open mic night at the local pub which he had been aiming to go to since he had seen the poster advertising it. He then remembered that it was on that evening and he said to himself, ‘I am going to do it!’  

It seems to be the case that when you look forward to something that the hands on the clock move slower as if to teasingly make you wait until you are aching with anticipation. When it was finally time to go to the open mic night the relief from the ache made Jack all the more excited. He ran down the stairs and down the street, valiantly carrying his guitar over his shoulder. As he walked the sullen and dark streets, which were intermittently lit by the light from the lampposts and the headlights of passing cars, he enjoyed thinking that he must have looked like the iconic image of the mysterious wanderer – the poet full of stories of love and loss – a young man with too much on his mind, searching for the truth.

He walked in to the pub and sat down at a table and watched the act on the open mic stage. He dismissed the performance immediately because he believed they were not as good as him, even though deep down he thought differently.

There was a man sitting at the end of the bar nearest to the stage, clasping on to a pint of bitter, whose presence struck a fantastic thought through Jack. He thought that this quiet unassuming man with a bulbous red nose and straggly grey hair combed back over his bald patch, hunched over the bar and wearing an old trench coat was, in fact, an undercover music producer who had been sent out on a talent scouting mission. This, in Jack’s mind, explained the look of misery that hung heavily in the man’s face. It was a look that expressed his despair in his search to try and find a new, home-grown talent but he was now starting to believe that it was a futile search because the more he searched the clearer it became that the kind of talent that used to be around no longer existed. The performances at this open mic night regrettably affirmed this. This made Jack even more determined to perform at his best, for he was sure that he had exactly the right talent to not only lift this music producer out of his hopelessness and restore his faith, but to also become his greatest find.

‘Is there anyone else who would like to come up?’ asked the organiser.

Jack stood up with his guitar.

‘Ok, come up here!’

As Jack took to the stage he called for everyone to give him their attention by tapping the top of the microphone which, when amplified through the sound system, caused a loud knocking sound to echo throughout the room, ring through everyone’s ears and gloriously give him the reaction he wanted. Heads turned away from conversations towards the noise, thinking that a circuit in the sound equipment must have broken. They saw that it was just a chubby, spotty and overly-confident leather-clad youth who had tapped the microphone and was intensely looking back at them with a smug curl in the corner of his lips.

‘Who does he think he is?’ some of them thought, inflamed by his gross arrogance. Jack thought his expression would eminate a power that would captivate them, make them wonder what he was thinking, what he was doing and enthral them to wait for what he was going to do next. 

But most of them had already turned away when they realised the sound was not what they thought it was and were continuing with their conversations.

‘One, two, one, two.’ Jack said professionally, testing the microphone out as though he had been asked to do so from backstage by a sound technician.

‘The next number is three if you’re stuck mate!’ quipped a man who was relishing the chance to mock this amateur musician amongst his table of friends like a group of cats might toy with a mouse.

‘My name is Cain Craven’ Jack announced, trying to engrain the name into the minds of the audience through the din of conversations ‘…and I am going to play you some music tonight!’

A few people cheered but Jack, still not satisfied that he was eliciting the correct response, had to resort to more extravagant means. He took hold of the neck of the microphone stand, leaned in and shouted, ‘Is everybody feelin’ alright?’ as if he was performing in front of a stadium of millions of people. They would all have replied by cheering and punching the air with their fists.  But instead he looked out on to a small, dingy room, only half full of people whose reactions to him were so minimal that he might as well have been invisible. He did not let this affect his poise because he realised that he should have expected this type of reaction as no one understood his radical genius yet.

Jack looked straight at his ‘music producer’ at the bar and said ‘Watch this…’ like a marksman confidently taking the challenge of shooting a target. The man did not take any notice but Jack was sure he would not miss the opportunity to come over to him after the applause and shrieks of glee from the audience, to give him a business card and the promise of being taken to his office, in a white limousine, to sign a recording contract. Where the music producer would swivel round in a leather chair while smoking a cigar and say, ‘We need talent like you kid...You’re gonna be a big star!’

Jack could see the music producer sitting on a balcony which looked out on to a sun- soaked beach lined with palm trees, while being interviewed in a documentary about the career of Cain Craven, saying, ‘It all started when…on an off chance I went and sat in a pub on an open mic night to see if there was any home-grown talent…I saw loads and loads of people. People that at best you could say they were ‘ok’ but most of them were just…terrible…wannabies. The only person I ever saw who had a natural gift was Cain Craven. Thank goodness whatever it was that made me go in that night because Cain…in a sense…saved my life.’

Jack’s fantasy was interrupted by the man at the table shouting out ‘Get on with it then!’ which made everyone snigger. This caused a pang of annoyance to rise up through Jack because it made him think of the way his Father and all the people who expected him to never achieve anything would laugh at him – he was not going to let any one laugh at him ever again. He reminded himself what his Mother had told him and then he closed his eyes, immersed himself in his concentration and started to play…

 

He believed that this performance was a monumental moment, taking the deep consciousness of the audience through a profoundly emotional journey; lighting a way through the darkness of their shared anguish with the unique skill of his guitar playing and lyrical prowess.

When he finished there was no applause but just the sound of people talking amongst themselves.  He opened his eyes to make sure that he was not imagining this and saw that no one was even looking at him and that the old man at the bar was no longer there. The organiser of the open mic night came quickly up to Jack, grabbed the microphone and said, ‘Right that’s it for tonight folks!’  He started packing away all the sound equipment, and the standard music from the jukebox came on loud.

Jack waited for at least a ‘Thank you’ a ‘That was great!’ or a ‘Well done!’ but nothing came. Jack’s moment under the spotlight had passed.

Each of these seconds after his performance were like hands pulling him down and pushing pins through his confidence, gradually deflating him to a state of shame which he had to embarrassingly drag away, out of the pub.

‘Jack!’ A voice called out. It was Evie - but instead of acknowledging her he kept on walking. All he wanted to do was go home, to be left alone, to try and forget what he had done. But she ran up to him.

‘Jack?’

He stopped and wearily his eyes moved up from looking down at the ground to look up at her.

‘Did you…?’

‘Yes.’ She replied back quickly, saving him from the pain of having to explain himself.

‘How…bad was it?’ he asked hesitantly. He expected her reaction to be like a harsh blast of criticism but her voice was soft and caring.  

‘Jack…what made you want to try and be …a rock-pop star?’

Every reason he had ever thought of had become lost in pretentiousness apart from one pure reason.

‘Because…I want to be liked...’

‘But Jack…’

‘– and respected.’

‘You are liked! You’re Jack! You’re funny, you’re kind…you’re lovely–’

‘I don’t want to be ‘lovely’’ he replied back in a mockingly gushy tone, dismissing the word ‘lovely’ to only have inane and sickly sweet connotations. ‘I want to be enigmatic, interesting, edgy and thought-provoking like –’

‘You should not want to be like anyone else Jack because…you can’t be…we can only be who we are. I respect you…people in the music world will not necessarily respect you…’

She was not expecting an answer from him but hoping that he was taking what she was saying into consideration. ‘What are you trying to reach? Because I think you are trying to reach too high…do what you’re good at...’

Jack sighed.  ‘Maybe you’re right.  It was just a bit of escapism I suppose.’

She smiled up at him.  ‘Yeah…well…we could all do with a bit of that at times!  I’m starving – shall we go and get some fish and chips?’

He smiled at her.  He was hungry too.  ‘Good idea.’  They started to walk.