Plastic Jesus Read Online Free PDF

Seth knew it too. “Harold loves you,” he said. “He's probably loved you since the day he met us."
    â€œHarold's a big boy. He can look out for himself."
    â€œHe can look out for us . Himself, I'm not so sure of."
    Seth just shrugged.
    Peyton backed away from the subject, sensing that it made Seth uncomfortable. Perhaps that was good; if Seth was uncomfortable with the affair, he might just let it fizzle out. But then what would Harold do? Peyton worried, and worried some more.
    It never once occurred to him that he might be jealous.

    * * * *

    London in the mid-sixties, Seth decided, made Leyborough look like a gravesite. The really big money hadn't come rolling in yet, the checks with mind-bending numbers of zeroes they would see later, but already they had more than they'd ever seen in their lives. There was enough so that Harold had been able to set them all up in large convenient houses. The others had all bought cars—Peyton had a little Italian roadster that could go 150 miles per hour. The few times Seth tried driving a car, it terrified him greatly and his passengers more so. He rented a limo when it seemed necessary and took taxis the rest of the time.
    He loved the bright swirl of Piccadilly Circus with its statue of Eros, the attention he got on Carnaby Street, the hidden perversions of Soho. He would come home with carloads of books, records, clothing, people. Impromptu parties sometimes went on for days. Seth would often disappear upstairs with a girl or boy—one about as often as the other now—returning hours later, ready for more. He felt young and strong and insatiable.
    He had ten new guitars, all of them better than the shopworn janglebox he'd gotten for Christmas years ago back in Leyborough. But he kept the old guitar, the one he'd learned to play on, and wasn't surprised that Peyton had kept his old one too. For a certain kind of boy, his first guitar will always be more memorable than his first girl.
    He'd slept with Harold a few more times, but his heart wasn't in it. He cared for Harold, and the sex was better than Seth had known it could ever be—Harold knew just where to touch, stroke, suck. It made sense, Seth supposed; a man would know how to handle another man's body. But something wasn't right. He didn't love Harold, but Harold loved him. In fact, Harold loved him almost like a mother. He'd thought he wanted that, but it was simply too weird to continue.
    So he played hard in the great playground of London, and thought nothing of the pain in Harold's eyes, the new pain that came with Seth's brush-off and never went away. He stayed high on pot all day, realizing that it brought his anger down to a level where he could manage it, where he didn't want to kill somebody every single day of his life. He discovered lysergic acid, and it was good, very good. It showed him that he deserved this crazy, out-of-control fame as much as anyone on earth, that fame and money were ephemeral things one need not feel embarrassed to have, that he was just another plastic Jesus in a plastic world: a phrase that grew into a song he believed was one of his best. He turned the rest of the band on to acid, and the melting colors swirled through their next two albums, turning pop into a different creature, birthing a completely new sound into a world that also seemed increasingly new.
    Mark bought an old instrument from the nineteen-twenties, something called a theremin. It was a black box with two antennae sticking out, and you played the thing without touching it—you just moved your hands around the instrument, creating shimmery phantom waves of sound. Seth was delighted to learn that its inventor, Leon Theremin, had at first been persecuted by his native Soviet Union but would later design secret electronics for their government. It was just the sort of contradiction he loved.
    He went to a party with Peyton one night, a huge flat in Kings Road, lots of Americans and cocaine.