Gods Without Men Read Online Free PDF

See my serious face? I’m not happy, buddy. I think you and your band might be wasting my time. You might be wasting my fucking
life
. Do you actually want to make a record, or do you just want to smoke weed and ball chicks in my hot tub?”
    “You’re off your nut.”
    “Time for answers, Nicky. Clock’s ticking. Seems to me like you don’t have any ideas. Seems like you don’t have any
creativity
.”
    Willow must have told the others, because at that point Earl ran up and wrestled Noah to the ground. Noah was furious, shouting about how he was filled with cosmic pulsating life and Nicky was sucking it out of him, but eventually Earl got the gun off him and persuaded him to go inside and have a lie-down. Terry offered to drive Nicky back to the hotel, but he didn’t want to talk to anyone. He drove himself, so high and freaked out that he was barely able to see the center line.
    He rang Anouk. It went straight to voicemail.
    That should have been him done, back to Dalston, kebab in hand, pack of Marlboro Lights, six Stellas for a fiver and L.A. just a bad dream fading in the rearview mirror. Turned out the bastards weren’t going to let him off so easy. The next day he got soothing calls from Terry and Earl and the record company and the management in London and a concert promoter in New York who had no business knowing anything about the situation at all. Then a courier arrived with a big cardboard box, supposedly from Noah but most probably from Earl, with a cowboy hat inside wrapped in tissue paper and a note saying Neil Young had been wearing it when he made up “The Needle and the Damage Done” and Nicky ought to have it, as he was the true inheritor of that spirit blah blah blah. Nicky didn’t like to be soft-soaped. Twelve hours in the air and he could be having a pint in The George on the CommercialRoad with the rain pissing down outside and some dickhead bending his ear about how Ronaldo wasn’t worth the money. Sheer bliss.
    He told Terry he’d had enough and Terry did something he very rarely did, which was to sit him down and say no. Nicky reminded him it wasn’t his job to say no, his job was to say yes. Terry said he knew that, but sometimes what Nicky thought he wanted wasn’t what he actually wanted. The record company needed a record, and if they didn’t get one in L.A., they were going to consider the band in breach of contract. Fuck it, Nicky said. Breach the contract. We’ll go to another record company. Terry sighed. It didn’t work like that. A lot of money had been flushed down the toilet. He asked Nicky to imagine men in little cubicles doing sums. Men in suits. Nicky imagined. He didn’t see Terry’s point. Terry put it another way. If they didn’t make the album, the record company would take all their money. They’d be broke. Nicky asked if he had a choice. Not really, said Terry. Not having a choice was one of Nicky’s pet hates.
    He finished his cigarette and ground it into the hot concrete of the studio car park. Make the record or be broke. Or steal Noah’s drugs and his gun, leave town and hope that by the time the others find you, it’ll all be sorted out. There was always a choice, if you knew where to look for it. He got into his car.
    Driving was almost the only thing that felt natural in America. It was traditional. It was
patriotic
. When you accelerated, you could almost hear the crowd cheering you on. The Camaro managed about a hundred yards to the gallon and sounded like a tank invasion. It was a 1970s orange fireball of environmental doom and if he had to spend his globally warmed old age on a raft or trudging through the ruins of Billericay eating dog food, it would have been worth it.
    L.A. faded away into a thankless dead landscape. You couldn’t call it desert, really. It was waste ground, the city’s backyard, a dump for all the ugly things it didn’t want to have to look at. Warehouses and processing plants. Pylons, pipelines. Broken things. Junk.