CELEBRITY BREAKDOWN.
BY BRENDAN BENNETT

Tommy Rex - the A-list turned Z-list, just-released-greatest-hits-album, fading but once iconic rock star - wakes up in his palace, the result of his seven-month-running number one smash during the 80s.  He drags his body to the curtains, pulling them wide to view the grassy hilltops rolling down towards the town, the lime light of the morning sun making his flesh seem even paler.  With a grunt, he stumbles down the stairs, and then the second flight of stairs, and then the third so that he reaches his hallway at last, rubbing his haggard and stubbled face with a lazy hand.  He reaches the kitchen, he pulls the refrigerator open with an effort, ignoring the yellow post-it note recently pressed against its surface, and he drinks some milk, the organic kind.  He steps towards the curvaceous frame of his porch door, towards his morning hot tub dip, where his lovely, air-headed, twenty-something year old wife would be waiting, when he remembers the yellow post-it note.  He retraces his weary steps to the refrigerator door, and pokes his blurry eyes up close.

“Ihavele,” His eyes strain to focus.

“I have left you, you disgusting, crippled nobody.  Love from Paris xxx.”

He stares at the note which he realises is from his wife, from the juvé heart-dotted ‘i’.  He turns his neck with some effort to the curvaceous frame of his porch door.  She’s definitely not in the hot tub.  He turns back to the post-it note, and grunts, removes it from the fridge, screws it up, and hurls it at a wall, before continuing with his routine.  

The young ones were never worth more than a shrug, no entertaining reaction, by experience; overwhelmingly they all seemed to be in it for the money.  Tommy Rex - old man - didn’t mind.

A knocking on his royal mahogany front doors disturbs his morning dip.  He drags his scrawny, drug-crippled appendages through his kitchen, reaching the door with humorous lack of speed, nearly forgetting to betowel himself [though saving himself from huge embarrassment at the last second].  He opens the door, confronted with the image of a business-suit and two grey and jumpsuited lackeys.  Tommy Rex coughs.

‘Mr Recksfield?’  The man in the business-suit with a new-looking clipboard in hand addresses the owner of the house.

‘It’s Rex… Mr Rex.’

‘My apologies, sir.  Sorry to interrupt at this early hour,’ he says as his eyes skim over the exposed ribcage of the rock star with an underlying disgust, but keeping the straight face masked over any outward dislike, ‘but I am from the bank.  It has been brought to our attention that you have not paid your taxes for three years.

Paid his what?  His – oh, his taxes, right.  Interesting.  He had always let his ladies do the accountancy, part of their duty as the latest of his perverted conquests.  Paris wasn’t good with numbers.  She had obviously forgotten to do her job.  For three years.

‘Oh, I see, I see.’

‘Pardon?’

‘I said that I see.’ Tommy’s drugs and rock and roll lifestyle as a young man had left him, along with a typically impenetrable Birmingham accent, incoherent to the human race.

‘Oh, good.  We have come to take your possessions.  May we come in?’

May they what - oh, come in.

Predatorial, like they had done this a thousand times in a rehearsal, the jump-suits march through the doors into Tommy’s hall, brushing past him like he were a prop, and begin eyeing up the antique grandfather clock, the Persian rug, the solid gold stair lift.

‘May you what?’  Tommy Rex, ever slow, turns on his naked heels with a quivering frown of incomprehension.

‘Listen, Mr Recksfield,’ the businessman obstructs any futile attempt from Tommy to get between with the jumpsuits and the valuable-in-money furniture, ‘but would you step outside with me for a minute?  I understand that this can be a very difficult thing for any man to go through – I have dealt with many uncompromising customers in my time - but I assure you that everything will turn out fine.  Have a nice day.’  The business suit slips inside and puts the gigantic door in the gigantic hole, right in the face of Tommy Rex.

Are they in my house?  Yes, they are.  It becomes clear to Tommy Rex, with much consideration, that the business-suit and his company were not from the bank after all.  They had not come for his furniture.  They had come for his house.  And now they had it with the help of a rather convincing and well-executed coup.  It’d happened to celebrities before, he was sure, but he never thought he would be the victim.  After a few hours of attempted hammering [more of a patter] on the doors of his usurped house, darkness covers the countryside hilltop and the police arrive to find a man, in his towel, body stretched out against the wall of the mansion shouting something, perhaps northern, mostly sounding like gibberish.

They take him away.  Lock him in the back of the car, despite his protests.  ‘You don’t understand,’ he croons, ‘I’m Tommy Rex, not that man who reported me, he’s stolen my house, it’s my house, surely you must recognise me!’

‘Pardon?’ they said.  It was fruitless.  They don’t put him away, mind you.  They don’t have the space for him in the county jail cell.  They just throw him into the street with some grubby clothes from lost property and Tommy Rex, once A-list, once wealthy, once iconic but now fading rock star is left alone in the cold.  He curses, swears incessantly under his breath as the wind howls around him.  He shudders past shop windows, the lime light of their neon signs exposing the lack of flesh on his forearms, bony, the bags and wrinkles under his eyes; nobody in the street recognises his distress, they don’t recognise him at all, and he crawls into the alcove of the leisure centre.  It is a metallic, upright building, with big, grey girders of architectural horror.  Its doorstep now his home.  His arthritic shoulder stabs at him like a claw, with conviction.  He gasps, a whimper.  Up on the hill, his million pound mansion glimmers like a precious rock on one of his rings, looks like a home he never even had, so far away.

Pain he has never known: the cold jabs at him, gets in his bones, filling them with ice and discomfort; he rolls onto his side, he shivers, pulling his shabby overalls over him, fetal.  He looks up to the precious rock; it fades.  He remembers six years old, sunshine, long grass, a swing, a beachball, pink and blue and yellow; he remembers an aggressive father at fourteen; he remembers sex in a forest, first love; he remembers the first show; he remembers the crowds singing his song back to him; he remembers his life.  He gets ready to die a cold, unimportant death.

Heaven is full of Les Paul guitars, women with breasts the size of your head, waterfalls of vodka, clouds of cocaine powder.  

And sharp, kicking pain.

He wakes up abruptly, at the other end of the tunnel; three tall and hazy figures, backlit by the orange streetlight, kick him.  He sits up through their feet, fending off their blows, looking around in panic at a street full of drunks, streaming from pubs in all directions.  The people shattering his bones?  Drunks, too.  He drags himself up from the attack; one boot swings in and blows him around the head, pushing him to the floor once again and he feels the hot rush of blood against his filtrum and over his lips, but his body, scared, is filled with an energy he hadn’t had since he was six years old in the sunshine and long grass with his beachball.  He hobbles at such a pace that when he finally reaches a safe place and the three youths behind him have disappeared he collapses to the floor again.  The energy drains, cold replaces it once again.  A pain in the back of his head like cardboard wedged into his brain causes him to sob, his lungs heave, heave, heave, cough.  They heave but then, when they exhale, it’s not carbon dioxide or smoke that lingers from years ago that enter the atmosphere.  It’s tears.  Tommy Rex, A-list turned Z-list, fading rock star, grown man, weeps; a flood through gates that had not been opened for a long, very long time.

He wipes the tears from his eyes, looking to his leafy surroundings, the circle of trees; a pair of bright eyes face back at him.  

As the eyes come towards him he stumbles back.  The darkness of the trees seems to dissipate as a giant cat – a lion – a wild lion comes towards him?  

The moonlight seems to brighten, shimmers on the whiskers of the predator which towers above the tiny, broken celebrity.  The warm breath of the lion against his face – why did he have to die like this? – his bones tremble – what was a lion doing out here anyway?  

The sound of laughter around him signals the time that this old Brummy would die!

Laughter?

“Open your eyes, Tommy Rex!  But please, don’t swear – you’re on live TV!”

Tommy opens his eyes to see a sight much more terrifying than the lion, which now is tamed in the hands of a yellow official:  Devina McCall with a microphone surrounded by suddenly screaming followers of the latest TV craze.  The moonlight gets brighter still, the television studio around him is just bright enough to see.  Standing in the corner of the room: his wife, waving.  The house-thieves, smug!  He stumbles to his feet, but the heart pounding hatred in his chest and the yell of the reality TV hostess knocks him back to his knees.

“You’re on the first ever edition of Celebrity Breakdown – the show where celebrities’ boundaries are pushed beyond their limits for the pleasure of our viewers!  How do you feel?”

The microphone is suddenly in his face, he notices though tears bruise his eyes, and he rather prefers the feeling of the lion’s fur against it.  He whimpers.  Through the watery haze he sees her face, grinning and joyous, rallying up an audience who had spent the whole of a four-hour special watching an old man going through pain that exceeded any withdrawal, any detox.

“Look at this, everybody.  Tommy Rex has had a hard time today, hasn’t he?”

The audience let out an ‘aw’ appropriately.

“Let’s show Tommy Rex what has happened to him today.”

Music plays – unhealthily happy music – as a gigantic screen at the end of the television studio [which had emerged completely now, the trees of his encounter having been moved away like cardboard trees in a school nativity] rolls a comedic montage: Tommy naked in his mansion, Tommy being thrown out of his mansion, Tommy being arrested, thrown to the streets, freezing, beaten, chased.  Emotionally fucked.  The crowd laughs at each segment of footage.

Tommy Rex looks left, and looks desperately right, at the hyenas that are the public guffawing and wailing and spluttering hideously and enjoying themselves on Tommy’s behalf.  The tears well up in his eyes, but rather than cursing his audience incoherently, rather than assaulting Mrs McCall as the figurehead of such a damaging and relentless scheme, he finds himself… laughing.

He laughs, with the audience.  He laughs, at his misery.  And that’s how the show ends.  Tommy Rex, faded rock star, shamed public figure, he accepts, as he has to.