Excerpts from

How to Rock Like a Rock Star

by
Rex Amadeus


Chapter 1
Humble Beginnings and Some Quality Pseudo-Necro

London is a bloody shithole. I know because I grew up there, mate. It’s every bit as dirty, gritty, drafty, broken down, leaky and fucking drab as you could possibly imagine. Your glass is not half full in England; it’s cracked, dirty, and if half-empty with anything, it’s with flat piss-warm beer. As a Londoner you are confronted early with the deep desire to sink a bullet in your brain, to take yourself out of the misery of the daily grind. But then again… guns are bloody illegal now, aren’t they? Always were. It’s not so much for crime prevention as suicide prevention, I guess. It’s almost like it’s inherited… choices, I mean. As an Englishman you’re born with very few options. Even when it comes to suicide. Stabbing yourself in the eye with a pencil serves no other purpose than to grant you a few concerned visits with the school head bender. And it fucking hurts too.

Anyway…

Shepherd’s Bush, all the way, mate. I went to Goldhawk Grammar and was beaten up every day of my fucking school years. Mum made me play the violin and I think I had it for all of four days before this silver back 4th grade bloke broke it over my head. Harry his name was. Harold Ferris. Back then he was the bane of my existence. The bastard used to wait for me after school with his little gang of sadist fuckheads - Tommy, Ken and George – and then we’d have us an old fashioned game of pin the fist to the donkey’s face. I was always the donkey. Harold went to juve hall when he was 14 and good riddance. I think the Italian in me never forgave him, though. Maybe that is why I bought up his block and evicted his family out into the street once I had the means to do so. Maybe that is also why I hired three big blokes to beat the shit out of him after work every night for three years as he came out of the steel factory after the midnight shift. Then again… maybe it was just the drugs.

Other than that I actually liked school. Me, Eddie Matthews and Derek Riggs were a tightly knit bunch and we musketeered together all throughout school. I was the musician, Derek was the artist and Eddie was the psycho. We used to sit in my room, blasting Black Sabbath, with me scribbling down music of my own, Derek doodling and Eddie looking for mentions of himself in the local newspaper’s crime watch section. Derek always wanted to draw fairies and such, and I told him to start drawing monsters instead. Who cares about fairies? He took me up on it and became quite good actually. After I moved to New York he and Eddie moved to Fulham and shared a flat. Eddie ended up with a horrible disfiguring skin disease and was shot dead during a killing spree on Acacia Avenue. I think Derek is some kind of artist these days. I hope he’s not back to drawing fucking fairies. Maybe I should throw the poor sod a bone and have him make one of my album covers one day? That would be nice of me. We’ll see… I’ll probably forget all about it the second I put this pen down.

Anyway…

I think the violin was what got me hooked on music in the first place. Sure, it’s a little bit homosexual to grind the bow but it developed my ear and I found my first idol: Mozart. What a fucking guy! He was more than a musician! Nevermind the fucking genius parts – he was a rebel – hard to the core. I think I kept playing that violin (taped and glued a hundred times over) just so I could feel some sense of closeness to his greatness. I was never really any good at the violin, quite mediocre to tell you the truth, but once I started playing the guitar all these fantastic sounds came out. I wanted so bad for it to be Mozart, but it was rock’n’roll instead. What are you gonna do? You shut the fuck up and make a career out of it. Or a life. I fell in love with my own playing.

But, as I said, London is a shithole. The working class areas of Shepherd’s Bush and Hammersmith were my stomping grounds. Yeah, you hear about Hammersmith and think of the classic shows at the Odeon and go, “That is cool, man!” but you obviously know nothing about anything. The Odeon may have been the place to play, but the rest of the area was just pure shite. A grey slab of chronic depression and suicide inducing boredom. I honestly think that is why England is the mother of everything that matters in music. Look at it - The Beatles, Led Zeppelin, The Rolling Stones, Black Sabbath, Pink Floyd, The Who, David Bowie and on and on and on… All fighting to get away from the mundane shit life they all lived in Great Old Britain. Notice how none of them wankers stayed in England after they made it? They took the first Glamour Express ride to America that they could get a golden ticket for. British musicians are like those old Soviet athletes in the 70’s and 80’s who defected at the drop of a hat as soon as an opportunity would present itself. They skated well enough to go to a tournament in, say, New York, or something, and then just quietly slipped away in the dark of night. Same thing with us Brits. We struggle to make some really good music (that nobody here would appreciate anyway) and then defect to live the dream somewhere better. England is a star factory, or rather a star orphanage. We’re all dying to get the hell out of there and be adopted by people who will love us and give us all the good shit we deserve. We’re Oliver Twist. We’re the Soviet gymnasts of evil empires past. The ones with the stick and the ribbon. (What the fuck is that all about anyway? Seriously?)

But I’m getting ahead of myself.

Shepherd’s Bush…

Trod all up and down those shoddy streets all through my youth, paying my dues in the local pubs with tossin’ wankers throwing darts and kidney pie at us as we performed the best of Hendrix, Zeppelin or Steppenwolf. If we were lucky the quids we earned for the gig paid for the beer tab at the end of the night. We were incredibly unsuccessful. You have to understand… back then everybody was in a fucking band and they were all pretty good. Even if you weren’t any good you could still get a gig at the local pub. Your audience was usually made up of two tired bar maids, a grim plumber, and a team of fat balding amateur soccer players who had just lost a game and wanted to bash in your skull. It was divine, mate. Nothing says rock’n’roll like playing “Black Dog” to a cross-eyed spade prostitute while your bass player is using his bass to fend off two poofters who want to rape him in the bathroom.

Good times.

Not really. They were shit times.

Everything changed with the funeral of my father, God bless his shriveled heart. He was one of those grim plumbers who would bash in people’s skulls after a few beers, so I can’t say the world lost a genius, but he was well liked in the community and there would be a lot of people at the church. I never went to church. My dad didn’t believe in it, he felt it was a waste of time and that resting on a Sunday was for Communists or Nazis – he could never remember which one was the enemy. He worked all the time, even on Sundays, but of course once he was dead the memorial was on a Sunday in our local church. My mum was totally out of it and it was up to me, the 17 year old rocker, to organize things. I pretty much left it to my mum’s best friend, Shannon, and worried about what to wear instead. We were poor people. Dirt poor. Broke-ass-shit-house-rat-poor. I didn’t have a scrap of clothing that fit me to wear to the funeral. The only suit we had in the house was the one dad was being buried in and it already clothed his stiff body in the morgue. What the hell was I to do?

At the time I was dating this girl, Hannah. I didn’t fancy her that much, but I spent a lot of time with her because I wanted to bone her mom. Her mom looked and moved like a porn star. She couldn’t have been more than 30-something and she always dressed in really sexy clothes. Everybody always said she had been a personal prostitute to some rich bloke before she married Hannah’s father, the undertaker. I would go over for tea and biscuits and take every opportunity to help Hannah’s mom in the kitchen, accidentally rubbing up against her when I passed her. Then she would unbutton her blouse and lean down real deep over me when she served the tea later, giving me this really deep look with her brown eyes that sent tingles down my balls. No bra either. I would always have such a boner in Hannah’s house. Then we would go up to her room after her parents went to sleep and I would fuck the shit out of her, thinking about her mom.

Anyway…

My dad’s funeral was on a Sunday, and it was now Saturday night. I still had no suit and no money to get one but I had a plan… Hannah lived right next to the funeral parlor and that was why I went to her the night before my old man was put in the ground. Her mom was particularly flirtatious on this night, squeezing my arm, giving me her condolences with her sexy whiskey breath. At one time she even put her hand directly on my crotch and looked me deep in the eyes. It was a welcome distraction from what I was about to do. As soon as everybody had fallen asleep, I snuck downstairs and took the keys to the funeral parlor off its hook in the front room, silently walked around the back outside to the back door of the parlor, and helped myself inside. The place was creepy as hell and kinda damp. I got cold feet a couple of times and almost left, but I had to follow through. There it was… the coffin with my dad in it. Plain old birch with no fancies on it – we couldn’t afford anything else. It hadn’t been nailed shut yet – I guess Hannah’s dad had been putting the finishing touches on things – so I just removed the lid. He looked so peaceful and… dead. He was by far the deadest fucking thing I had seen to that point. Unlike America, we don’t have those barbaric wakes where we stare our dead beloveds in their empty faces one last time. This stiff was just to be put directly into the ground. But he was still wearing that fine suit.

Undressing my dead old dad proved to be quite bothersome. The fact that it wasn’t open in the back was a blessing since I could use it for the next day without stitching it, but also a damn pain in the arse as it was close to impossible to wiggle him out of the damn thing. He was twice as heavy dead as alive and I struggled for what seemed ages. In the end I just turned the coffin over and spilled him onto a nearby table to work with him in an easier fashion.

It fit me like a glove. Sure, it smelled a little of death and formaldehyde, but that could be fixed with some Old Spice aftershave, right?

I don’t know if it was because I had been making a racket getting the suit off or whether Hannah’s mom had been spying on me all along, but just as I turned to put my dad back in his coffin I heard her voice behind me:

“Oh, my… Don’t you look handsome in that suit, Rex!” She entered the room, dressed in her black negligee and high heels. Her brown hair was flowing behind her like a mantel. She was smoking a cigarette and she looked absolutely gorgeous. Like a bloody succubus out of a bloody erotic fairytale. “So, what are you doing here, my handsome young lad?” she asked and smiled seductively.

I was both mortified to be found out and thrilled beyond total blood-loss to be alone with her like that. As she glided towards me I could feel myself reacting to her scent and to her looks. I was hard as a fucking hot iron poker and I wanted to poke her more than I had wanted anything in my drab 17-year old life.

She came up real close and almost kissed me as she whispered in my ear, “Have you ever done it in a coffin, Rexie?” She graced my face with her lips and then sank to her knees. I looked down as she unzipped my pants. “Oh, my, Rexie. You really are hung like a donkey. What are we to do with such an immense cock?” And at that she gave me the best blowjob of my life. To this day I still have never had a blowjob like that. It’s like heroin or Ecstasy. You spend your whole life as a user, chasing that first high - because nothing will ever be that good again. Maybe that’s why I am such a sex junkie to this day. Hannah’s mom ruined me for all future women. Before I could cum, however, she walked over to a very wide black coffin on the floor, and opened it up. It was lined with silver silk, or something, and she climbed into it, letting her legs dangle over the sides, spread apart. “Come here, Rexie. Fuck me like we both have wanted for some time now.” I went over there, and I fucked her. It was heaven. What can I tell you? As I was about to come, she pushed me to my back and oozed to the side so she could finish the blowjob to end all blowjobs. I came in her mouth, on her breasts, on my suit, on the lining of the coffin. It was everywhere. I came like I hadn’t come ever before. The seed on her chin dripped down on my pants and she just beamed at me. “Now we know, Rexie,” she said and with that she walked out the door, leaving me drained and bewildered.

At the funeral the next day I was the one with the stained suit, reeking of formaldehyde and Old Spice. Hannah’s mom looked even more beautiful than ever and she and I stole glances at each other throughout the ceremony. Nobody ever knew my dad was buried in my old “War Pigs” t-shirt instead.

Two weeks after the funeral Hannah’s mom ran away from home and went to live with some rich lover she had been entertaining all those years. Apparently she had been making quite a fortune, servicing all sorts of chaps in the higher echelons of society. The last I heard she's co-hosting some TV show in Los Angeles, not looking a day older than the day she left. I am seriously thinking about looking her up. It’s like a curse.

Anyway, after that I lost the will to live. In England that is… I felt I had run into a dead fucking end. With my dad in the ground we had less money than ever and I didn’t want to take up plumbing, so I did what all responsible sons to when their drunken white trash mothers are in desperate need of love, support and money – I took the next boat to America to become a rock star. I defected. I wanted to be adopted by somebody better. Oliver Motherfucking Twist was going home.