Part 3
Paul swung the door slightly open and peeked out of the crack uncertainly. Tears stained with mascara ran like rivulets down his cheeks, his hair had obviously been clawed through with his fingers and his hands were slightly shaking. He studied me with caution, wondering whether this stranger was all he seemed to be, or whethe I was only there to ridicule and debase him. He looked a mess; I pulled an unused tissue from my pocket and held it out to him. As he managed a small smile of gratitude and took the tissue from my hands, he nodded his head towards the bathroom door.
"Is anyone else there?" he asked. I leaned over to check - when I saw the bathroom was empty, I turned back to him and shook my head.
"Good. I don't want anyone else to see me." He pulled the stall open fully and propped his feet against it to keep it open. He dabbed away the dark tear streams from his face, sniffling, while I simply watched, my mind groping for the right words to say. "It'll be okay" was silly - whatever was upsetting him was obviously not okay, otherwise he wouldn't have been crying. And I, as yet, didn't know what was wrong, so how could I guarantee that things would get better? Instead I offered to be his confidant and asked, "Do you want to talk about it?"
He leant his back against the painted purple walls and shrugged. "There's nothing much to say. I just buckled under the pressure."
"What was applying the pressure?"
Paul pulled a slightly bent cigarette from his back pocket and lit it, drawing it in deeply. "Life. It's all become a rat-race. It was okay at first - I thought I could handle all these changes. But now..."
I nodded with understanding - it was a familiar scenario, a story told by many people in similar positions. "Unfortunately, once you're in, it's hard to get out."
"Yeah, i've figured that out already." He mustered a smile. "Sorry, I don't even know your name."
"Richard Fidler." We shook hands. He had a firm but warm handshake that I took an instant liking to. "I hope i'm not sounding nosy, but where are those people you came in with?"
He crinkled his eyebrows in confusion for a moment before clicking on to who I was talking about. "Oh, them." He dismissed their mention with the wave of a hand. "They're hangers-on. They're just using me as an access pass - so they get into the same exclusive places I do. They want to be seen by and with the right people." He offered me his cigarette, which I took with a nod of thanks. "The sad thing is, I let them do it. In a way, I use them as well. It's good to have some company."
"So there's nobody in particular you like to hang out with?"
"People come and go in the blink of an eye. I don't get to know their names most of the time."
"But what about girlfriends or boyfriends?"
He shrugged. "I've had my share of both. But since I became a singer, there hasn't been anyone serious. Not yet, anyway."
Conversation faded into silence, both of us lost in our own thoughts. Why should someone like him have to be alone? It was incredibly unfair. I'd only known him for a few minutes, but already I felt as though he was the kind of guy i'd want as a friend, or even more. He certainly wasn't unapproachable, he was friendly and there was no denying the fact that he was very attractive. Yet here he was, alone and unhappy on New Year's Eve. My heart was almost breaking for this man. Nobody should have to live like that, especially not anyone like Paul. I decided that if he was only going to have one true friend, someone who was going to want to be with him for the person that he was, and not because of his occupation and his social ranking, then I wanted to be that person.
I was sure that he wanted to be elsewhere and so did I, so I rose to a stand and dusted myself off. "What say we continue this somewhere else?"
"Bloody oath." Paul leant on the closet toilet seat as he stood up. "I don't want to spend the final minutes of 1998 in a bathroom." He walked to the row of sinks and mirror lining the opposite wall, bent down and began splashing his face with cold water. I leant against the wall and continued smoking his cigarette, watching the cosmetic-tinted water spiral down the drain. For some strange reason I thought of this as Paul washing away his celebrity persona, revealing the true person underneath, the person i'd already had the priviledge of meeting. I'd come to him when he was at his most vulnerable - when he'd let down his guard. I didn't know as yet how he acted in front of other, more unreal people, but on the other hand I didn't care much. The celebrity cloak was just that - an act. The person onstage is so separated from the person when they're not onstage, when they're not in character trying to entertain and be everything to everyone. But Paul introduced elements of his personal life and his thoughts and feelings into the act, particularly with his songwriting. 'Happiness' has such strong honesty that people could find themselves identifying with the story being told. So Paul the performer was, in a way, the everyday Paul, only magnified and intensified. This was how most people knew him - the stage version. But what I couldn't understand was why the normal Paul had to live in solitude while the stage Paul was the opposite. When Paul let down his guard and washed away the makeup, why didn't people want to know him anymore? Was he suddenly less desirable? On the contrary - as I was discovering, the appeal only increased.
As I thought about this, Paul turned off the tap and reached for a paper towel, dabbing his face clean with his head still lowered over the sink. When he finally lifted his head to study his appearance in the mirror, I thought that he didn't need all of the makeup - when he was fresh and natural, he was even more beautiful than when he was with cosmetics. I found myself dstaring at him, his cigarette burning dangerously close to my fingertips. After checking his hair, he turned to me and noticed me watching him, and he smiled shyly.
"Is there something wrong?" he asked, glancing back into the mirror for any smudges he may have missed.
"No, no, you look fine." I flicked the cigarette into an ashtray and took the paper towel from his hands, dropping it into a garbage bin sitting nearby. "I promise."
He nodded and reached into his pocket, pulling out what looked like the tube of a ballpoint pen, but filled with a suspicious white powder. As he unscrewed the small plug at one end of the tube, he looked up at me and asked, "Do you want some?"
I stepped forward and took the tube from his hands, carefully scrutinizing the contents. I knew what it was - what bothered me was that Paul had possession of the drug. It's not that it came as much of a surprise - almost everyone in the industry was doing or had done drugs at some point in their careers. But Paul...why did he have to do it? It certainly wasn't a necessity. Every time I saw an entertainer injecting, sniffing or swallowing any sort of drug, I felt sickened, and hated the industry for doing this to them.
I shook my head, handing the tube back to Paul. "I don't need that shit. And neither do you."
Paul shrugged again, preparing to bow over the sink once more. "Suit yourself."
He positioned the tube at one nostril, blocked the other with his finger and bent down. I heard him sniff the powder and had to turn away. Should I have stopped him from taking the drug, or would he have become angry and accused me of 'being like a mother'? I'd only been friends with him for a few minutes, I didn't want to ruin it after such a small duration. But I had been a witness numerous times to the effects that drugs have on a person's life - one unfortunate soul had died from an overdose before my very eyes. My instincts told me that Paul hadn't been a user before he became a singer - he'd only started when he realised that if you weren't doing it, then you had no place in the industry, especially in the genre that was his expertise. I wanted to stop him, and help him break out of it, but what would the consequences be? Would he be willing to listen to me? Why would he even want to, after knowing me for such a short time? Or should I just leave it alone? He was a grown man, after all - he wouldn't have been doing it if he didn't think he could handle it, would he?
Before I could answer any of these questions, Paul put the tube back into his pocket, briefly wiped his nose and stood upright. He looked over at me.
"Do you have a place in mind, or should I use where we go?" he asked, letting out a short cough. He seemed to have calmed down, a good change from the state i'd first found him in.
"I don't know. A place where we could watch the fireworks?" I suggested. He nodded in agreement.
"That's just what I had in mind. Come on."
He gently placed a hand on my upper arm and let the way out of the quiet bathroom and into the loud, crowded arena outside the door. I decided to let Tez have his fun and give him a call later the next morning - if he even got home that night, which I doubted he would. He had the true party spirit that I sometimes envied - sometimes I found myself too conventional, too boring. But my mind wasn't on Tez as we left the nightclub - my thoughts and my full attention was on Paul, my new friend. We had only known each-other for five minutes at the most, but already I felt a connection with him that I didn't have with my other friends, not even Tez, whom I considered myself to be close to. I found myself wanting to know everything about Paul, from the good to the bad, and offer him the friendship that he'd been denied since the moment he stepped into the music industry. Little did I know at that point that, in time, we would become so much more.
part 4