DOUBLE DIAMOND

Gray go to Geezer and tickled his tum. Geezer guffawed and fell to the floor, Double Diamond upended, upholstery tin-frothed and soaking. The grimaces of stewardesses approached then stopped a beerstink away. A busload of biker chicks sprawled over the seats, busting out of their zipperslick leathers, their oilsump behinds oozing ever closer to Ray now that Geezer was incapacitated by the superstriker. Footballers weren't their scene, these girls. All those communal baths and I'm forever blowing bubbles. Gray loved all that, this tickle assault was straight from the towel-slapping changing room. It was a monolithic clash of backstage cultures, rock versus footy. Both were incomprehensible to Ray, who stirred a little but remained entranced.
He was from a heavy metal village. You don't get many heavy metal villages nowadays, but you did then. You couldn't leave the house if you weren't heavy metal. Heavy metal girls shunned Ray. He wasn't tough enough, his hair was the wrong kind of long, his jeans had no patches, no winged men, no fallen angels, no bastardisation of Paradise Lost imagery embroidered on his behind. And he thought the music sounded like shit, except for 'Since You Been Gone' by Richie Blackmore's Rainbow. He said as much in the youth club attic, thinking the Rainbow element would soften the blow, earn him some leniency. The youth club attic smelled of damp and desperation, a million miles from the private jet pictures he'd been gazing at in Shoot! Andy Gray with Black Sabbath. His one true idol soiling himself with Sabbath, the bane of Ray's existence, his upside-down cross to bear. So he turned his back on football, decided he'd never liked it in the first place. Metal never bothered him, not really, but he didn't see the appeal of looking at gatefold sleeves with pictures of people in coffins. Dead people, supposedly. So he waited for music that was dirtier, filthier, rougher and softer, noisy and melodic. Music for which his head had the right hair. Music that made the radio sound like it was broken and so could only be broadcast at night, when people who worried about such things were watching television. Music that put his dad's stereo in apparent danger of collpase. Guitars that had lost their voices, sun-bleached or waterlogged, depending on Ray's mood. But of course the main reason he deftly extradited himself from the land of metal and headed in the direction of this music was that the girls didn't live in his village, they lived elsewhere, though about other things, Proust and that. And they were prettier and they had fewer zips to contend with.