The True Story of Butterfish Read Online Free Page B

of the music wasn’t awful and the beer was free. Derek was always the exception to that, coming out of a hot afternoon’s practice wired, the daylight and shoppers and the mall’s benign ambling drunks unready for him. He walked as if the fans were already circling, and the rest of us just couldn’t see them. LSD – lead singer’s disease. It had its hooks in him even then.
    Derek always used disabled toilets because he preferred the extra room. I told him it was for the wheels and he said, ‘Sure, but, you know...’ meaning he had an entitlement that couldn’t be put into words, or didn’t need them. The people with wheels could wait their turn.
    It was Patrick who gave the band its name. ‘I had a friend who went to South Africa,’ he said. We were sitting with a hundred bad band names scrawled across sheets of paper. ‘He ate this fish and it’s called a butterfish because it’s so oily you shit butter after you eat it. Seriously.’
    Websites about fish don’t quite support this assertion, but we liked the name and the job was done. Shitting butter. That was all we needed to know. The decision was made then and there in the Cosmopolitan Café, a minute’s walk down the mall from the traffic I was stuck in now. Ahead I could see that a truck had lost some of its load on the way into Chinatown, and four lanes of vehicles were being painstakingly merged into two.
    Patrick had been a driving force when the band started, so it was no surprise one of his names came through. He had plenty of names rejected too though. He was a great reader, or in fact mis-reader, of The Great Gatsby, and one of the band names he suggested was The Eyes of Dr TJ Eckleburg, from an advertising billboard the narrator regularly passes on his way home from the city to West Egg. His justification was that a band had just called themselves The Boo Radleys, and that name came from another twentieth-century American classic novel, though not one as sharp and wise – by his reckoning – as The Great Gatsby.
    â€˜Moving on...’ Derek said cautiously, after a respectful silence, running his pen down to the next name on the list.
    Try as he might, Patrick was a square peg in a room full of round holes. And he was my brother, and that didn’t make it easy. His main instrument was clarinet – not one we really had much call for – his self-taught guitar playing was always marginal and, in the end, it was up to me to take him aside and point it out.
    â€˜He’s got to go,’ Derek said. ‘Really.’
    I met Patrick at his house. In the car I’d practised what I hoped was a diplomatic way of putting it, but it crumbled into something cowardly and ineffectual. I looked at the floor and talked vaguely about a new direction. I said the rest of us weren’t sure about a few things.
    I paused, and Patrick took my useless pause and said, curtly, ‘Should we wait for your balls to drop before we have this conversation? Look, let me make it easy. I’ve been offered a big job in advertising, and I’m going to take it. There’ll be no time for band meetings, or any of the time-wasting crap that goes on. So tell the others that. Tell them it doesn’t work for me any more.’
    In a life that had been characterised by false starts, accepting that job was a sure and decisive move, and ultimately a successful one. As a comedian, Patrick had been more acerbic than funny (he had always been unable to distinguish between the two). As a model his good looks had proven too straightforward. As a fashion buyer he had lasted a day and a half before realising the prospect of making a decision would paralyse him and any risk would be too much to bear. ‘What if I’m the last person ever to buy low-riders?’ he said. ‘And what if I bought a million pairs?’ Low-riders had years left to run, but he couldn’t have known