Fancy

Creeping along with story. I WILL finish by xmas. 2 years for a first draft. Not easy this writing malarkey!

 
 Jer , unlike Steve and Brooksie , had stayed closer to home. He was less interested in the travel aspect of being in a band as he had already visited a lot of the places with his parents during his childhood, a fact he didn’t freely volunteer. It wasn’t that he tried to affect a working class persona, more that he felt slightly ashamed of his privileged background and didn’t feel comfortable advertising it. Berlin was a favourite destination of his parents having met there on separate post university inter-railing trips and he had wandered its streets and museums numerous times on their periodic returns. His parents also shared a passion for cinema, the less viewed and more obscure the better. Though not Disney deprived, his childhood had also included the darker visions of Jan Svankmeyer and the strange and varied offerings from Film Boards of Canada. His dad also had a particular interest in low budget horror from the 50’s; Roger Corman, Amicus Compendium films , lesser known Hammer horror outings and Jer had fond memories of watching these together, despite the slightly disapproving looks from his mother. He still loved horror and was a regular at all nighters at the Scala at Kings Cross though he found the recent video nasties a bit too strong for his taste preferring to be chilled not sickened. Therefore he was delighted to meet Stefan who he noticed at breakfast clutching a VHS copy of Basketcase, a personal favourite of his. The story featuring a sharp toothed homicidal twin carried around in a basket by his brother from whom he had been surgically removed at birth was ludicrous, but that was the appeal as well as the wit, invention, ideas and passion entailed in the whole low budget enterprise .Entering  Jorgs room Jer was delighted to spot on some makeshift shelving titles by Russ Meyer (Faster Pussycat kill kill, Ed Wood (Plan 9 from outer space), Herschell Gordon Lewis (Blood Feast) and a box set of Mondo films (exploitation shock documentaries from the 60’s usually focusing on sensational scenes and topics which now seemed more quaint than disturbing).
In the corner of the room was a beautiful old Fender Telecaster , a sunburst finish wonderfully worn by use. Jer received his first guitar at xmas. He still remembered the sheer joy, and the almost reverential care he took of it, polishing, tuning, sketching , sometimes just gazing at it with a kind of love where time lost its meaning. One day at a rehearsal for his school band ( a few mates playing Status Quo covers) it fell off a chair, smashing a corner of its ceramic coat. The pain was intense. It was ironic then that one of the bands party pieces now was to saw a guitar in half (usually a cheap one found in a second hand exchange) whilst connected to a distortion pedal. It made a sound like a dying devil.
Jer held the telecaster with gentle care and turned it multiple ways admiring every new angle. Jorg looked and nodded. They both understood. When Jer told Jorg there was a cinema in London that specialized in playing these kind of films , sometimes 3 or 4 in a row overnight (Scala) and a street where you could look and play with lots of old Telecasters (Denmark Street)  Jorg immediately determined to go. Until then they fashioned their own all nighter writing music together and watching a bootleg copy of Robocop2 (not yet released) and both Abominable Dr Phibes films.
Later stoned looking out of the window he thought “dead people are like stars, lifeless but their light shines on”. He scribbled the idea down in his notebook. He would check it later when he was straight, his last idea when he was stoned was “wouldn’t it be good if everyone was nice to each other”.