Hellfire!

A stochastic encounter with the shade of Nick Tosches

Darren Tofts

“To rend the tawdry man-made fabric of the intellect, to cut the throat of fear and ask our gods nothing” (If I Were Robert Stack)

DT

So it’s a given that at some point you would have gone down to the crossroads on Highway 51 to meet Old Scratch. What happened?

NT

Straight to the chase. Salut consigliere. Muthafucker never turned up. Anyway what were you expecting? Ralph Macchio from that Crossroads disaster?

I presumed you wouldn’t rate it but maybe you forget that Steve Vai was in it as the devil’s guitar slinger, who sold his soul for his chops. So was Ry Cooder in the soundtrack as well as performing Ralph Macchio’s guitar parts.

Lester and I napalmed the very idea of that film’s chirpy re-telling of Robert Johnson and his whoring of Beelzebub.

Speaking of Lester, you know his name is a short sentence right?

[Silence]

Ok how about this. You once described Bangs wearing a pair of sharkskin britches that previously belonged to the Holy Ghost. What size was the Holy Ghost?

I tire of this shit.

[Uncomfortable silence]

Is it true you only type with the index finger of your right hand?

Sure. Doesn’t everybody?

No. I not only think it is totally odd but overwhelmingly exhausting. And dull. I mean, how long does it take you to write anything? How do you possibly meet deadlines? And surely you must have arthritis in your hands.

You clearly know how much I have written. Go figure it out yourself.

“If I Were Robert Stack” is one of my favourite pieces of yours.

Oh yeah? Sizing you up I would have picked “Oedipus Tex”.

Well if it was “Oedipus Text” sure.

Same again.

*

We are sitting in some kind of simulacrum of a Louisiana beer barn and it’s really sweaty and smoky. It was Tosches’ choice and he is methodically downing shots of Bushmills at a steady rate. I’m gently nursing a Sazerac. I remember it from Live and Let Die. When Bond requests his ubiquitous vodka martini in some New Orleans dive he is overruled by his American counterpart who orders two Sazeracs immediately, urging 007 to relax. It’s actually quite good. Tosches has a new deck of Lucky Strike. As he unwraps it slowly he glares at me askance, noticing my choice of drink. I have to be bold.

You once called Keith Richards a “disinterred corpse”. By your vaunting standards of killer turns of phrase and high flung conceits, that’s a bit obvious isn’t it?

Well pastafazool is also hot on my tongue and you certainly qualify as one with plaudits.

I’ll take that as a compliment.

I wouldn’t if I were you.

It’s a famous desert isn’t it?

Not the way I use it.

How do you use it?

Like some wop curse.

Hmm. You smoke too much.

Don’t smoke enough. Nor do you.

So does smoke get in your

I’ll cut you off there.

*

You have described heavy metal as “sound and fury”. I presume you nicked that from Faulkner.

No I didn’t. That phrase has passed into the vernacular from him, in the States anyway, but it actually belongs to Shakespeare.

Well, to quote another doyen of the gilded word, Darius Jedberg, no shit Sherlock.

Can we just leave tawdry fictions out of this?

If we must, though you are being very Craven.

[He stands abruptly and I cajole him to sit down]

Ok tell me this Word Magus, can you spell Yoknapatawpha?

[Tosches kicks over the table, sending drinks and cigarette ash over anyone within earshot]

Cafone!

*

[As the evening wears on Tosches’ becomes, if it’s humanly possible, even more drunk, pissed off and irascible. Throwing caution to the wind I ramp up the decibels on the bear-baiting. As he lopes back yet again from the bar, I strike]

As a lyricist of language I’m sure you are an aficionado of the anagram.

Yeah, so?

Thinking of your name, how about Cheston Sick? Or even more fitting, Nike Scotchs?

Enough of this fucking gibber.

It’s not actually gibber and speaking of which you use that word in Country, as well as the term “fevered glossolalia”. Kind of like someone I know.

[Silence, a plume of cigarette smoke and the stare of a Gorgon]

Ok, how about a game of Three Card Monty?

*

Tosches’ inevitably and deliciously invites the turning of the screw that he relentlessly imposes upon his reader, whoever, as he would no doubt say, the fuck that is. Yes, he is the bad boy of infamy and verbal sophistry, bravado and sheer alarming brilliance. Talk about, in his own words, “rapids of psilocybin”, another great hostage from Country that is suggestively reflexive as much as figurative. He left quite a trail of substance destruction as a young man and even then some as a mature scribbler. The aura of shadowing Rimbaud as clochard genius made his prose hum and sizzle with both a hallucinogenic edge and intimation of apocalypse, whatever that might mean. And it has left me, for one, speechless with awe. And that’s no exaggeration. As Billie Holiday may have once mellifluously intoned, channelling Tosches’ own words in a perverse future tense to come, they bore “greater and stranger fruit”.

*

So ’bout time we cut to the chase.

Do it already.

Where exactly are you? And moreover what are you?

It’s certainly not dark, nor is there the fire and brimstone I imagine most of you above dust think I had waiting for me. I don’t feel I’m in anything like a body.

Above dust. Now that’s straight out of Faulkner. I think your bathos is showing. Well, again.

Do you wanna continue with this or not?

Alright alright good o’l boy, keep your shirt on.

What?

Forget it. Anyway I ask again, prudently: Where. The. Fuck. Are. You?

Hard to say.

Oh thanks for that concision. Can you at least describe it?

I wish it was like that extraordinarily elegant room in 2001 where Dave is lying in bed, an old man in the agon of his last gasp, paired with cognac and chandelier. I think that’s a good endgame for a bad boy of infamy.

Are you gasping?

Well, from too many coffin nails [pause] sure.

Now you’ll dig this, it’s called “irony”. You know those things will kill you.

You are such [pauses for breath] a...

You’re beginning to fade. Quelle domage.

Cocksucker.

Thank you.

Old age is carrion. I’m beyond [long silence] that. You ain’t.

“The end is in the beginning and yet you go on” eh?

Damn [clears throat] straight. And you can leave [pause] Beckett out of this, he’s been gone a long [pause] time. So stick this up your ass [coughs] you simply don’t know when or what [long pause] the end is going to be. So [his breathing is getting harder to sustain the next word] after [long pause] Dylan, how does it [silence].

[Five minutes later]

Feel?

You got it out in the end.

I’ll say it [long pause] differently.

Drifting in and out of consciousness he seems to be about to vanish. He raises his eyelids, looking at no-one or anything in particular. Slowly and very quietly he utters, his eyelids closing the parapet to his vast intellect for the last time.

Va fungool…

Tosches is gone in a puff of smoke and flames, leaving behind the dank reek of single malt. I can only think this, his final flourish, is quoting Marlowe’s Faustus. I would have picked something from The Godfather.

Anyway, his hair really was pretty good.