Nick Hornby - Juliet, Naked

Table of Contents

ALSO BY NICK HORNBY

FICTION
HIGH FIDELITY
ABOUT A BOY
HOW TO BE GOOD
A LONG WAY DOWN
SLAM

NONFICTION
FEVER PITCH
SONGBOOK
THE POLYSYLLABIC SPREE
HOUSEKEEPING VS. THE DIRT
SHAKESPEARE WROTE FOR MONEY

ANTHOLOGY
SPEAKING WITH THE ANGEL

RIVERHEAD BOOKS
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Copyright 2009 by Nick Hornby

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Published simultaneously in Canada

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Hornby, Nick.
Juliet, naked / Nick Hornby.
p. cm.

eISBN : 978-1-101-14054-3

1. Rock music fansFiction. 2. Man-woman relationshipsFiction.
3. LonelinessFiction. 4. Musical fiction. I. Title.
PR6058.0689J
823.914dc22

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either
are the product of the authors imagination or are used fictitiously, and any
resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies,
events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

While the author has made every effort to provide accurate telephone numbers and
Internet addresses at the time of publication, neither the publisher nor the author
assumes any responsibility for errors, or for changes that occur after publication.
Further, the publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any
responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

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For Amanda, with love and thanks

one

T hey had flown from England to Minneapolis to look at a toilet. The simple truth of this only struck Annie when they were actually inside it: apart from the graffiti on the walls, some of which made some kind of reference to the toilets importance in musical history, it was dank, dark, smelly and entirely unremarkable. Americans were very good at making the most of their heritage, but there wasnt much even they could do here.

Have you got the camera, Annie? said Duncan.

Yes. But what do you want a picture of ?

Just, you know...

No.

Well... the toilet.

What, the... What do you call those things?

The urinals. Yeah.

Do you want to be in it?

Shall I pretend to have a pee?

If you want.

So Duncan stood in front of the middle of the three urinals, his hands placed convincingly in front of him, and smiled back over his shoulder at Annie.

Got it?

Im not sure the flash worked.

One more. Be silly to come all the way here and not get a good one.

This time Duncan stood just inside one of the stalls, with the door open. The light was better there, for some reason. Annie took as good a picture of a man in a toilet as one could reasonably expect. When Duncan moved, she could see that this toilet, like just about every other one shed ever seen in a rock club, was blocked.

Come on, said Annie. He didnt even want me in here.

This was true. The guy behind the bar had initially suspected that they were looking for a place where they could shoot up, or perhaps have sex. Eventually, and hurtfully, the barman had clearly decided that they were capable of doing neither thing.

Duncan took one last look and shook his head. If toilets could talk, eh?

Annie was glad this one couldnt. Duncan would have wanted to chat to it all night.

Most people are unaware of Tucker Crowes music, let alone some of the darker moments of his career, so the story of what may or may not have happened to him in the restroom of the Pits Club is probably worth repeating here. Crowe was in Minneapolis for a show and had turned up at the Pits to see a local band called the Napoleon Solos which hed heard good things about. (Some Crowe com pletists, Duncan being one, own a copy of the local bands one and only album, The Napoleon Solos Sing Their Songs and Play Their Guitars .) In the middle of the set, Tucker went to the toilet. Nobody knows what happened in there, but when he came out, he went straight back to his hotel and phoned his manager to cancel the rest of the tour. The next morning he began what we must now think of as his retirement. That was in June 1986. Nothing more has been heard of him sinceno new recordings, no gigs, no interviews. If you love Tucker Crowe as much as Duncan and a couple of thousand other people in the world do, that toilet has a lot to answer for. And since, as Duncan had so rightly observed, it cant speak, Crowe fans have to speak on its behalf. Some claim that Tucker saw God, or one of His representatives, in there; others claim he had a near-death experience after an overdose. Another school of thought has it that he caught his girlfriend having sex with his bass player in there, although Annie found this theory a little fanciful. Could the sight of a woman screwing a musician in a toilet really have resulted in twenty-two years of silence? Perhaps it could. Perhaps it was just that Annie had never experienced passion that intense. Anyway. Whatever. All you need to know is that something profound and life-changing took place in the smallest room of a small club.

Annie and Duncan were in the middle of a Tucker Crowe pilgrimage. They had wandered around New York, looking at various clubs and bars that had some kind of Crowe connection, although most of these sites of historic interest were now designer clothes stores, or branches of McDonalds. They had been to his childhood home in Bozeman, Montana, where, thrillingly, an old lady came out of her house to tell them that Tucker used to clean her husbands old Buick when he was a kid. The Crowe family home was small and pleasant and was now owned by the manager of a small printing business, who was surprised that they had traveled all the way from England to see the outside of his house, but who didnt ask them in. From Montana they flew to Memphis, where they visited the site of the old American Sound Studio (the studio itself having been knocked down in 1990), where Tucker, drunk and grieving, recorded Juliet , his legendary breakup album, and the one Annie liked the most. Still to come: Berkeley, California, where Julietin real life a former model and socialite called Julie Beattystill lived to this day. They would stand outside her house, just as they had stood outside the printers house, until Duncan could think of no reason to carry on looking, or until Julie called the police, a fate that had befallen a couple of other Crowe fans that Duncan knew from the message boards.