To Be Someone Read Free Page A

closed the door. Pulling the cord to switch on the light, I held my breath and moved toward the towel veiling the mirror. I remembered my old face with affection and regret, like a lost love. How my only previous gripes about it had been the beginnings of those lines that Homer Simpson has, the ones that run down from nostril to mouth on each side, and faint wrinkles on my forehead even when I wasn’t frowning, like a beach at low tide.
    Feeling like Dorian Gray, I closed my eyes and twitched the towel down.
    Oh. My. God. If that was an improvement, I must have been unrecognizable before. Tears flowed down my bumpy, discolored face as I stared at it; it was bristling with stitches and striped with skin grafts. My formerly wonderful nose looked like the model for a Cubist painting. One of my eyebrows had all but disappeared, and I didn’t even dare examine the ridiculous teeth—the ulcers peppering my tongue told me how jagged they were.
    The whole effect was as if someone had taken all the bits of my face off and then reassembled them without following the instructions properly. And my forehead was more wrinkly than ever. Basically, I was pig-ugly.
    I did not stop crying until just before my doctor’s visit two hours later. When he came in to check my progress, I made a last-ditch attempt at optimism.
    “So, once all this heals up, I will look kind of how I looked before, won’t I?”
    The doctor gave me one of those rueful upside-down smiles and took my wrist between his fingers to monitor my pulse.
    “Well, yes, of course,” he said doubtfully. “Kind of.”

THE PLAN
    I ‘D BEEN LYING IN BED, LISTENING ONE-EARED TO RALPH PORTER’S BREAKFAST show through my Walkman headphones, but after only five minutes I couldn’t stand it anymore. The show was testosterone-soaked rubbish, and hearing it in mono was making my head ache. I clicked off the radio and instead stared one-eyed at the dust motes sailing around in the morning sunlight, wondering how old flecks of carpet, dandruff, and naval fluff managed to look so sparkly and beautiful. I wished I could shrink down to that size—pure, uncomplicated, free. I couldn’t think of anything better.
    Then the dust motes reminded me of my favorite movie soundtrack, The Big Blue , which was my “touring album” in 1988, at the height of Blue Idea’s success. It was such a wonderfully mellow record; I’d played it through headphones on tour buses and private jets across the world whenever I wanted to transform from a world-weary lump of exhaustion to a tiny light atom, floating blissfully about in space.
    I imagined myself phoning up my own breakfast show and requesting “Deep Blue Dream” from The Big Blue . Would I play it for me? Yes, I thought, if I described to London exactly how I’d felt back then, reclining in all those luxuriantly upholstered velour seats, being waited on hand and foot, in the days when I was unscarred and in demand. I should have been reveling in the attention, but Sam had been lying ill in hospital at that time, hovering wraithlike between dreaming and death, and there’d been nothing I could do except worry.
    In the remembering, I tasted the bubbles of American Airlines’s mimosas on my tongue, felt the slippery texture of the linen napkins at the Four Seasons in Tokyo, saw the sun rise and set through so many airplane windows. I heard the screams of fans in fifty different countries, how they made my name sound new in each different language. And I remembered how nothing had mattered to me except Sam’s recovery. Behind it all, the tape of “Deep Blue Dream” spooled softly, nostalgically, in my head.
    The pain of my losses stabbed me suddenly. My eye, my Sam, my job, my looks—all gone. It surprised me how much it hurt to lose my job. Only Sam’s death hurt more. I didn’t want to do a two A.M . show. I didn’t want to do a show that wasn’t about people’s memories, their music.
    But I couldn’t just slink away in disgrace. I