Lola Bensky Read online

  Lola thought that Jimi Hendrix would understand exactly what she was talking about. He could think of his mother as being a groovy mother, despite the fact that she drank too much and couldn’t take care of herself and couldn’t take care of him. He could still see the goodness in her. Jimi Hendrix wouldn’t think Lola was referring to a scarf or a belt that had been left behind in Auschwitz.

  ‘Are you Jewish?’ Jimi Hendrix said.

  ‘Very,’ said Lola.

  Jimi Hendrix laughed. ‘My first gig was in the basement of a synagogue, the Temple De Hirsch Sinai, in Seattle. It didn’t go well.’

  ‘Why?’ said Lola.

  ‘I was fired between sets,’ he said.

  Lola started laughing. ‘What for?’ she asked.

  ‘For showing off,’ said Jimi Hendrix. ‘I was trying to play from my soul and the other band members thought I was showing off.’

  ‘Maybe the rest of the band thought that in synagogues and churches anything to do with the soul had to be very quiet,’ Lola said.

  For someone who made such unabashed, unequivocal, unrestricted movements with his body and his voice on stage, Jimi Hendrix’s speech was surprisingly hesitant. For a man who plucked and caressed his guitar strings with such a potent urgency, Jimi Hendrix was unexpectedly measured. He spoke slowly and his voice was soft. He thought before he answered questions. He spoke haltingly, his words coming out in groups of three or four at a time.

  His lips, which on stage had been disconcertingly lustful, were now carefully formulating and forming vowels and consonants. Jimi Hendrix’s lips had an almost chaste purity about them now. His pelvis now looked merely functional. It no longer looked dangerous. It seemed to be just a bony frame at the base of his spine, to which his limbs were attached. A regular, everyday pelvis.

  There was a lot about Jimi Hendrix that seemed regular, Lola thought. There was a sense of humility about him. His hit song ‘Hey Joe’ was number four in the Melody Maker charts in London that week. ‘Purple Haze’ was coming out next month. Rock stars were streaming in to his performances.

  A few nights ago at the Bag O’ Nails, the decidedly dank but ultra-cool basement nightclub in Soho, Lola heard Brian Jones telling everyone within earshot that Jimi Hendrix was one of the most brilliant guitarists he’d ever heard. Brian Jones had looked very excited. Brian Jones didn’t seem to be an excitable person, to Lola. She had only seen him a few times, but each time he had appeared to be quite subdued. In a few months, Lola would see Brian Jones again, at the Monterey International Pop Festival in California. At Monterey he would appear even more subdued, almost comatose.

  Eric Clapton, Paul McCartney, Ringo Starr, Mick Jagger and Brian Epstein, The Beatles’ manager, were just a few of the other people who’d come to see Jimi at the Bag O’ Nails that night. Everyone wanted to meet him. You could tell none of this from Jimi Hendrix’s demeanour. He was quiet and he was thoughtful. If he inadvertently interrupted Lola, he immediately stopped and said, ‘No, please do go on.’

  The large black cowboy hat adorned with brooches and badges that Jimi had been wearing on stage, was on a bench beside him. Lola looked at him. Jimi Hendrix clearly dressed with care. The sleeves of the floral-patterned satin shirt he was wearing were gathered at the shoulders and stitched into a loose cuff at the wrist. It looked as though it were made for him.

  Jimi Hendrix also wore velvet trousers. Crushed velvet trousers in bright colours. No man Lola knew wore crushed velvet trousers. Crushed velvet was for girls. There was, however, nothing girlish about Jimi Hendrix.

  On stage it was impossible to forget that Jimi Hendrix had a penis. He rubbed his guitar against his penis. He thrust his hips out. He made short, sharp, rhythmical movements with his crotch. His penis almost seemed to be playing the guitar. Making the music. And talking, pointedly, to the audience. Which could be a bit bothering if, like Lola Bensky, you hadn’t had a lot of experience communicating with a penis.

  While his penis strutted and pointed and shuddered, Jimi Hendrix was lost in his music. He had blended himself into the whining, cajoling, moaning, pleading notes. His body movements were completely intertwined and integrated with the music. It was impossible to tell what part of him was doing what to which note. Jimi had merged himself into the vibrato he was manoeuvring and controlling until each note sounded like a human voice.

  Lola envied Jimi’s ability to get lost like that. She couldn’t. She was always on guard. Prepared. Prepared for what? A pogrom? A war? The Gestapo? She didn’t know. Unlike other people her age, she couldn’t relax and hang around the house in her pyjamas or underwear. Lola always had to be fully dressed. And ready. Ready for what? Lola had no idea.

  The heat in Jimi Hendrix’s dressing-room was starting to make Lola’s hair frizz. She tried to straighten it by tugging on the ends.

  Jimi Hendrix had been talking for about ten minutes. He was talking about the difference between playing live and being in a recording studio. Lola was trying hard to concentrate. She knew she wasn’t all that interested in the technical details of his music. How he got the sounds that he did and how he had been experimenting with feedback and which notes would feed back.

  Lola had asked him the question because she knew that there were readers of Rock-Out who would want to know. But she was having trouble focusing.

  She did hear him say several times that he got bored easily and liked to move on. Both in his music, and in the other parts of his life. ‘I don’t like to stay in one place for too long,’ he said. ‘I might not be here tomorrow, so I do what I want to be doing.’ Lola was startled. She didn’t think when he said he might not be here tomorrow, that he was talking about leaving London. She thought he was talking about the possibility of leaving this earth.

  Lola realised that she hadn’t heard half of what Jimi Hendrix had been saying for the last ten minutes. She looked at her tape recorder. It was still on and recording. She had been distracted by the feedback details, her concern about her fishnet tights digging into her thighs and her rapidly frizzing hair.

  Jimi Hendrix’s hair was wild. His curls, which grew in great profusion, streamed and screamed in every direction. Lola loved the abandoned way his curls mingled with each other. Her own curls had been ironed flat. Tamped down. Every strand of hair had been ironed until it was ramrod straight. Flattened and battened down. Until now, when the heat and humidity in the room had started an unruly uprising. Curls were springing into action. At odd angles. And in odd places. With no co-ordination or thought about what the rest of her hair was doing. She knew she must look strange. But there was nothing she could do about it.

  She decided to focus on Jimi Hendrix’s hair. ‘I heard that you’ve got a set of hair curlers,’ Lola said to him. Lola had read this in an article talking about how concerned Jimi Hendrix was about his appearance.

  In Australia, hair curlers were called rollers. All of the women her mother’s age had hair curlers. And so did quite a few of Lola’s friends. It was not unusual to visit a friend on the weekend to find the friend and/or her mother with a head full of hair curlers. Lola had never seen a man with a head full of hair curlers.

  ‘Yes, I’ve got a set of hair curlers,’ Jimi Hendrix said. ‘I brought my hair curlers with me, from America, when I came to London. That was practically all I brought with me.’

  ‘Really?’ said Lola.

  ‘I wear my hair in the same way I wear my scarves and rings and jackets. It’s all part of who I am,’ he said. He smiled, and looked at Lola. ‘There’s nothing weird about that,’ he said.

  ‘No,’ Lola said. ‘It’s less weird than the fact that I iron my hair straight. I lay it out on an ironing board and iron it, with my head bent as low as I can, in order to get every curl out.’

  ‘You do a good job,’ Jimi Hendrix said. ‘You got no curls left.’

  ‘It was fine until the humidity in here started to curl it,’ Lola said.

  ‘Miss Bensky, you look mighty fine to me,’ he said.

>   Lola was startled that Jimi Hendrix would remember her name for a start, and secondly that instead of referring to her as Lola would call her Miss Bensky. There was something strangely at odds about that with who he was, and something strangely appealing.

  ‘I started using hair curlers because I thought it was a groovy style,’ Jimi Hendrix said. ‘Now everyone is running around with these curls. Most of them are perms. I’ve got nothing against perms. I used to get my hair straightened and they use the same solution they use for perms.’

  ‘I know,’ Lola said. ‘I used to get my hair straightened, too. I hated the smell of the perm solution.’

  ‘I didn’t like it either,’ Jimi Hendrix said.

  Jimi Hendrix was very satisfying to talk to, Lola thought. ‘Do you arrange your hair curlers in rows?’ she said.

  ‘No,’ he said, ‘but I know exactly where I need to put them.’

  Where to put hair curlers and whether they were in rows or not was not the sort of conversation Lola had expected to have with Jimi Hendrix. Lola wasn’t at all sure that this sort of stuff was exactly what her newspaper was looking for.

  ‘You can come and see me in my hair curlers, tonight if you like,’ Jimi Hendrix said. Lola had heard a lot about Jimi Hendrix’s sexual appetite. She hadn’t even known you could have an appetite for sex. She’d thought an appetite only referred to food. Lola had heard that Jimi often had sex with several women in one evening, sometimes with all of them present, and possibly in one bed. She’d also heard that he had sex anywhere. Everywhere. In hallways, dressing-rooms, bathrooms, and often in the presence of other people who just happened to be there at the time.

  Lola didn’t think a late-night visit to Jimi Hendrix would be a good idea.

  ‘I might,’ she said.

  ‘You don’t look as though you mean it,’ Jimi Hendrix said, and grinned.

  2

  Lola stood at the front door of Mick Jagger’s apartment. She took a deep breath and tried to flatten her stomach. It didn’t really work. Holding her breath wasn’t flattening her stomach. She didn’t know why she was bothering. She would have to breathe eventually. And no other part of her was flat.

  Last night she’d been to a reception for the supermodel Twiggy. Twiggy was seventeen and one of the thinnest girls Lola had ever seen. Twiggy’s arms and legs were so thin they looked as though they couldn’t possibly have enough space for the bones, muscles, joints, ten-dons, veins and arteries they needed to contain. Twiggy was about to change the shape women wanted to be – a change that would last decades, and have almost every female in the developed world on a diet.

  Twiggy was very pretty. Her huge blue eyes shone and her short blond hair gleamed. Standing next to Twiggy, Lola felt as big as a piece of furniture. A large, clunky piece of furniture. Twiggy looked as light as a leaf. It must feel so comfortable to be that thin, Lola thought. You must feel closer to your own heart and lungs and bones. Lola wondered if that sort of proximity to what you were composed of made you feel more at ease with yourself. Less worried about who you were. The only bones that Lola could feel were the bones in her wrists and her feet.

  She would have to diet for a decade to be as thin as Twiggy, she decided. Lola usually planned eight- to ten-week diets. Then she would delay the start. There was usually a goal. At the moment, she was planning to lose sixty pounds before her trip to New York and to California, to the Monterey International Pop Festival, in three months. She had already delayed the start of this diet.

  It was a new diet she had devised while watching The Walker Brothers perform ‘The Sun Ain’t Gonna Shine Anymore’. She called it the Apple, Banana and Egg Diet. Each day she would have seven bananas, seven apples and three eggs, divided into four meals. She would have two apples, two bananas and one egg, three times a day, and one apple and one banana, once a day. It came to a total of approximately 1640 calories a day.

  Lola thought that this diet sounded very promising. She would feel relatively full because of the bulk in the food and she wouldn’t look odd taking an apple or a banana with her to most places. She might have to be a little more careful with the boiled egg. It wasn’t easy to peel and eat a boiled egg in public with dignity, unless you were at a picnic.

  Last week, just as she was about to begin the Apple, Banana and Egg Diet, the lead guitarist of The Troggs had ordered fish and chips for everyone and Lola had had to eat them. They had been in a small fish-and-chip shop somewhere in the north of England and Lola had felt too embarrassed to bring out the banana and apple and egg she had packed at the bottom of her bag. Lola had been on tour with The Troggs for six days. She had heard ‘Wild Thing’ and ‘I Can’t Control Myself’ one time too many. Lola didn’t like loud music. It gave her a headache.

  In her article about The Troggs, she had written about their high-voltage, explosive sound and how Reg Presley, the lead singer, lured in the audience with his sensual moves and flirtatious lyrics. She had also mentioned that despite their string of hits, The Troggs were straightforward and unpretentious. She had said nothing about her headache.

  The thought of trying to be as slim as Twiggy daunted Lola. It had made her think about Caramello Bars. Caramello Bars were blocks of milk chocolate with a thick, almost runny caramel sauce at the centre of each square. Lola thought that few of the people surrounding Twiggy were thinking about Caramello Bars at that very moment.

  Twiggy’s blue eyes were fringed with the thickest black lashes Lola had ever seen. In the two minutes she’d had alone with Twiggy, Lola had asked her where she got her eyelashes from. ‘They’re just ordinary false eyelashes. I layer three pairs over my own,’ Twiggy had said. Lola didn’t think she would try to do that. She didn’t think she was dexterous enough to glue on three layers of lashes.

  ‘You are so pretty,’ she’d said to Twiggy.

  ‘I hate the way I look,’ Twiggy said. ‘I think everyone’s gone stark raving mad.’

  Mick Jagger opened the door. He looked more slightly built than he did on stage. Maybe all the movement he made while he was singing made him appear larger. On stage, Mick Jagger moved continuously. He shook his head, he waved his arms. He skipped across the stage and jumped and danced. He radiated energy. The other members of The Rolling Stones looked almost static next to Mick Jagger.

  ‘Hi,’ he said. ‘Come in, I’m a bit tired. I was in the recording studio till five a.m.’

  Lola was thrilled that Mick Jagger was a bit tired. On stage he looked like the sort of person who never got tired.

  Mick Jagger was three-and-a-quarter years older than Lola. He was twenty-three. And vilified by parents of teenagers all over the world. Lola couldn’t quite understand why. Because he had sultry lips and moved his hips while singing ‘Let’s Spend the Night Together’? In America The Rolling Stones had had to change the lyrics to ‘Let’s spend some time together’ when they’d performed on the Ed Sullivan television show. Lola thought that had been a stupid demand. What were the producers of The Ed Sullivan Show worried about? Did they think that hundreds of thousands of teenagers would rush out to spend the night with each other? Lola didn’t think so. She thought it was probably Mick Jagger’s hips and his defiant strutting that bothered older men. And possibly older women.

  Mick Jagger wasn’t skipping or strutting this morning. His movements were slow and leisurely. The apartment looked very large, to Lola. It seemed to be about half a block long. The living-room area was carpeted in a neutral sort of dark-beige tone. One wall was painted blue. Next to a long, refectory-style dining table was a huge record player with hundreds of LPs.

  Mick Jagger pointed to an elongated, five-seater sofa. ‘Would you like to sit there?’ he said. The sofa looked very low, to Lola. She hated low armchairs and sofas. It was impossible to sit on them without your skirt or dress riding up and exposing your knees. And Lola needed to keep her knees covered. They were very chunky knees. Lola was sure they took up more space than Twiggy’s hips. Lola’s knees looked force-fed. As though someo
ne had been stuffing them. Mick Jagger’s sofa, which looked as though it should be on the cover of a home decor magazine, was not where Lola would have preferred to sit. The chairs at the refectory table looked much more comfortable.

  ‘Sure,’ said Lola.

  She sat down, tugged at the hemline of her dress, which had already crept up to her knees, and began to arrange her equipment. She put her tape recorder on the gold-topped coffee table in front of her and arranged her pen and notebook on her lap. She wished she’d brought a larger notebook. It might have covered her knees.

  Mick Jagger sat opposite her on the other side of the coffee table in a black leather armchair. He was curled up in a curiously passive position. He looked very comfortable. He didn’t look like the anti-establishment destroyer of social values that he and the other Rolling Stones had been labelled.

  Lola knew that Mick Jagger’s father and grandfather were both teachers. His mother, a hairdresser, was also active in Conservative Party politics. At the moment, apart from his longish hair, Mick Jagger looked much more like the product of schoolteachers and members of the Conservative Party than the defiant troublemaker he was supposed to be.

  ‘I hope you’re not going to ask me what colour socks I wear,’ Mick Jagger said to Lola.

  ‘No,’ said Lola, ‘I’m not interested in what colour socks you are wearing. I’m not going to ask you if you know Paul McCartney, either.’

  ‘Of course I do,’ said Mick Jagger. ‘He dropped into the recording studio last night and is coming around later today.’ Lola wasn’t sure what to do with that piece of information. She made a note of it in case her tape recorder hadn’t caught the first couple of minutes of their conversation.

  ‘What do you think it is that causes the worship and hysteria among your fans at your concerts?’ she asked Mick Jagger. ‘Is it love?’

  Lola wasn’t sure she knew a lot about either worship or love. Mick Jagger looked perplexed. He brushed his hair away from his face and put his foot on the coffee table as he pondered the question. Lola felt that Mick Jagger wasn’t about to toss off a blithe answer. He looked as though he cared about what he was quoted as saying, and he treated interviews as seriously as he treated his performances. Even interviews with an Australian rock newspaper.