All is True: The Naked Girl in the Treehouse

Deceiving and Loving as Keith and Brian

BY MARK HOWELL

KONK LIFE STAFF WRITER

Chapter 8

 

The crash by the blonde in the convertible seemed undeniably to be the American disaster as the two of us gaped bug-eyed into the merciless maw of the modern motorway.

That topless car, its wild-haired driver, the deafening blast of a horn on the engine of that train churning across the endless prairie on a track that hugged the highway, a brand-new blacktop that sent her swerve of surprise into an accelerated roll-over of death.

We never did see her body by the time the ambulance arrived. We’d roared out of there at the first wail of the police sirens with no idea what else to do.

So Kansas became a dark spark in our otherwise electrifyingly bright masquerade as two of the Rolling Stones in our journey across the States. Eight times we were offered invitations we could not refuse to perform our ever-improving repertoire of Beatles songs to good people convinced by our sign on the car that we were Keith Richards and Brian Jones of the Rolling Stones (whose songs were in fact largely unheard and unknown in the U.S. at the time). David Carpenter, my tousle-haired companion from Birmingham, was Keith on guitar, while I, Thom One, a baggy-eyed tenor from Cheltenham Spa, was Brian Jones.

The thing is, Brian actually was from Cheltenham and I gained a lot of authenticity, now enhanced by the wreck we’d witnessed on the highway, from telling our innocent audiences the true tale of a pre-Stones Brian conning a car salesman into test-driving a Jaguar E-Type he’d neither the intention nor the money to buy and then swerving it into a shop front on Landsdowne Crescent. And David was authentic as Keith due to his incautious peeing in public places, a lazy-ass practice often seen outside of bars in Birmingham and favored by those Londoner Stones as well.

Following each of our impromptu renditions as up-and-coming, not to say world-famous rock stars, the girls would gather around the two of us and press ever closer, often running their hands through our, unkempt, un-greased, un-crew-cut hair — unseen west of the Mississippi — so that the tightest two people in the scrum turned out to be, at the final squeeze, David and me.

This would all lead later to long, cigarette-fueled debates in the car as we pondered what the hell we were really up to. “We’re deceiving them,” declared David, the pragmatic one. “But they love it,” I said, the spiritual one.

We’d stare blankly at each other after these exchanges, whomever was driving, and end up laughing, helplessly, deeply and long.

It was the 1960s already. We had to do what we had to do.

There was one thing, however, that I personally could not settle in my head. Back in Gloucestershire, England, half a world away, was my girl Mary, missing me, or so she said, while she also lurked in my cranium, way back in my mind. I missed her madly and told David so, at the risk of hearing one more time that such pining was unmanly and exposed my lack of sexual experience.

“Ever seen her naked?” he’d taunt, summoning up uncontrollable images, partly divine but mostly, bafflingly, profane.

Later at night, taking alternative turns with the front and back seats, we’d settle in for the deepest sleep, induced by romantic pop hits on the radio.

Then I would truly pine for the Mary that I hardly knew and I would wonder, too, whether I might be haunting her as well.

Next Week: Cheyenne and Laramie!

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