Short story: Me and Pete Doherty By Karl Whitney - - - - I never went to school with Pete, but he was like my brother. I remember once I went up to him in the street, the first time I saw him, and I said: “Alright Pete.” He ignored me. I knew it was the start of something special. The next time I saw him he was onstage with Babyshambles and I was in the crowd trying to pick up one of my contact lenses in the mosh pit. He was a rock star like no other. I knew from that day I would make it my destiny to video him shooting up, then try to blackmail his management, then sell the footage to a tabloid newspaper for a bag of cash. I used to be a crack addict. I carried blowtorches everywhere with me at first, freebasing on the number 67 while having a chat to Mrs Muggins from down the road. Soon that stopped. My back was sore from the blowtorches (they were heavy) and I couldn’t deal with it anymore. So I stayed in and smoked crack while watching Doctors on BBC1. Soon I had visions. Weird, ungodly visions. There were plot holes the size of killer whales in this medical drama. No wonder they showed it at 11.30 in the morning. I now could see I was wasting my life: on soap operas. They were even starting to distract me from my role as crack addict. I decided to change my career. There was a sale on in Curry’s, so I picked up a video camera there with the intention of submitting amusing accidents to cable TV programmes. A moose got hit by a combine harvester: I was there; a bassoonist in the London Philarmonic had a panic attack: I stuck the camera in his face and waited for the tears. My career was really taking off. Oh yeah, Pete. Anyway, after the gig I was still scrabbling around in the mosh pit among the plastic beer glasses looking for my contact lens, when I ran into Pete. I say ‘ran into him’. What I really mean is I cracked him over the head with a snooker ball in a sock and dragged him into a room in the bar. I convinced him that I was a documentary maker who had filmed panic attacks and moose-slicings, and I could handle a band like his no problem. He called me a self-hating Jew and I had to laugh: he knew me so well. “Perhaps you could even make some money out of it,” I said. “You know, to blow on gear.” And here I pointed towards the syringe that was sticking out of his chin. “Yeah, gear would be good” he said, and hit the floor. So that was that. I became his best friend and got kicked around for a few months. The best months of my life. Pete was so smart: sometimes I’d misquote a line from Goethe I’d memorised and Pete would sit up from his heroin haze and correct me. He was smarter than Jesus. Then, one day I shut the door of the tourbus on Pete’s favourite syringe. It was gold. He liked it. I was out. I was no longer cool. I spent a month in bed, then got hungry, ate, then spent another month in bed. During this time, I did not compose anything comparable to ‘Good Vibrations’. I was depressed. I started to watch the footage I had taken of the band, and whenever I did, I either hugged the TV or cried. I was in that sort of mood. It was very moving. Then, I had no money, what with the couple of months in bed and the entire day of eating in the middle: cashwise, I was cleared out. Then it came to me: I had footage of Pete shooting up. I could cut this footage to techno music and use it to sell perfume or, maybe, life insurance. I would be rich. This sounded like too much work, so I ended up offering it to the tabloids. Then it struck me: I could sell a story about the story to the Guardian. Is there anything more rock and roll than that? Pete is a true rock star. By that I mean: he’s fucked up, and if he dies soon there’s a lot of us who’ll make a lot of money from the glorious, trashed rock and rollness of the whole thing. Pete’s my friend, although he never answers his phone to me anymore. I presume he sold it for gear. The end. By Arnold Rankin, age 34. -------- Stories | Home | About This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.5 License.