Read Online Deeper Than Dreams by Jessica Topper - Free Book Online Page B

sister Tess for snogging. Adrian received his first kiss that summer behind the motor mechanics garage where both their fathers worked. Sam, too, was hot to be in a band; his father had put him to work in the auto shop that year earning a few quid a week to save towards an instrument. Digger followed Sam’s lead, working under his father at the garage until it was time to return to his mum’s to prepare for school. He promised Sam that as soon as Rick returned, they would have Sam up for a proper band meeting.
    â€œSo what was Rick up to all summer in New York, while you were back home snogging?” I teased.
    â€œWhat
didn’t
he do? He sent many letters home, for one thing. Shared stories so incredible they were almost not to be believed, but it was New York City, after all. Anything was possible! Catching a Ramones show at CBGBs, seeing Debbie Harry walking down St. Mark’s Place wearing pink sunglasses in the rain. Going to the Waverly in Greenwich Village at midnight to see
The Rocky Horror Picture Show
and throwing toast at the screen. Toast!” Adrian dreamily ticked off the list, his mind time-traveling back. I pictured him as a teen, holding these letters, the ink smudging under his hot thumbprints with his burning desire to jump in and live within their pages.
    â€œBut it was Rick’s final letter home that left me gobsmacked. A single word, written in red on one of those thin, pale blue airmail sheets: ‘
SHAGGED!
’” Adrian hoisted the book up to his lap again. “Ah yes, here’s the picture he’d sent home.” I peered at the scan of a bent Polaroid picture, depicting Rick and a black-haired beauty with cavernous blue eyes. “Rick had met a girl; a sixteen-year-old Manhattanite named Simone. Their parents had mutual friends in the same social circles. It was Simone who took him to the East Village, to the movies, to concerts . . . and ultimately to her bedroom on the Upper East Side.” Adrian shifted his weight, and glanced at me. “It was yet another case of the Have and the Have Not. Yet this one bothered me more. I could accept the imbalance of material possession. Yet in affairs of the heart, I was still standing on the outside with my nose pressed against the glass, looking in while Rick was handed tail on a silver platter.”
    Adrian turned back to the book with renewed interest, perhaps eager to change the subject. “Anyway, Rick came home soon after, with a 1964 cherry sunburst Gibson that his parents had bought for him in New York. He thrust it onto me so I could have a go, complaining of the blisters on his fingers from trying to play it. And so began my own torrid affair.”
    I rested my chin on his shoulder and followed along with his index finger.
    Rick was lovesick and brooding over Simone. She had two more years left at Brearley before college, when she hoped her parents would send her abroad and into Rick’s waiting arms. He went through a brief black turtleneck and poetry-writing phase, which Digger took the piss out of him for. “He’d ask me how my mate Simon was, and I would call him a cunt and tell him to fuck off!”
    â€œAdrian! That wasn’t very nice.”
    â€œIt was for his own good! I told him no self-respecting woman was going to date a ‘big girl’s blouse,’ and he needed to turn his depression into the heaviest music possible. So we vowed to make it our single-minded mission at the expense of everything else.”
    Singing the blues helped Rick hone his vocal skills. Once school commenced in the fall, he signed up for voice instruction there to further improve his range. The lads began to write their own songs, but it was evident that they would need more manpower to bring it home.
    As promised, Digger invited his childhood mate up. Sam brought two things to the table: a crap copy of a Fender Precision Bass that he had bought for forty quid, and transportation.