Peter Doherty.

The Stress of Longing.

Freddy was a fusion.
The rags around his minds were torn patchwork quilts of youth cults, forgotten grooves, visions and unprintable politics, with the odd bloody bandage of High Art and an aesthetic to grind away the gap between deep black dub & Oscar Wilde. Because Freddy was a deep black Oscar - his life was his gift, his bomber jacket buttonhole was his anarchy - Black as heaven he was and he lived next to my terrible Auntie Lucy 2 floors up on the White City Estate, in a tenement that reclaimed the colonies for the Hammersmith & Fulham benefits agency. From the window of the kharzi you could see QPR's ground, and for reasons not yet understood Freddy, as a child would squat on the sill groaning with the roars from the left.
Freddy was a fusion. His beliefs a jamboree, a carnival of post everything neo nothin or next to nothing thought. He'd talk about Plato & Malcolm X, the French Revolution & Welsh devolution, Notting Hill, Riots, Chas & Dave & Marx & Earl Spencer. He knew a lot about nothing in particular, & a little of the particulars about lots of things.
Freddy was a fusion - he took me to church, took me joyriding - speeding out of our ears up the A40 - he'd whisper 'All's Quiet On the Western Avenue' not audible above the Val Doonican or the Speed Garage - the sweat & sour smoke of his perennial pipe pumping out the OLD HOLBORN & HONOLOLOU HERBS perfume - clouding, rearranging - brains...

Freddy was a fusion. He said he was. "I'm a fusion' he'd grin, slyly. And it was amusing enough for a while, but all the while Freddy was losing touch with what he could have been, or should have been. King.

I hadn't known him at school, he was a little bit older, a but cool, but we cemented our funny friendship in that wilderness between leaving that school & first real jobs.

Freddy said that this wilderness should ideally last a lifetime.

Now he appears lost for a lifetime - gone into some river of one of his minds he couldn't let go - where is taking you, I would ask, my lips pressed white together. He fell from the sky, never to land - never a sound: just words 'Every blues song in the world has the answer - I'll tell you in the morning.

The boy stood on the burning deck
It was half past nine on Friday
His braces snapped, his trouser fell
He wasn't very tidy

Baring his straight white teeth, letting me note down the results of his experimentation, his fusions.