In the spacious two-room pool house sits a serving table laden with delicacies. Pearl Jam take up pool cues and begin the billiards. Larry

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comes over and asks how their show went tonight. "A lot better than yesterday," they say, "because today we got a half-song sound check. Of course, the arena was half full at the time, but still . . ."

"That should never happen!" Larry says, putting on his sheriffs hat. In Rome Pearl Jam will get a full sound check before the doors open! Larry guarantees it! He will personally make sure that U2 gets to the venue early, finishes their sound check promptly, and leaves Pearl Jam plenty of time! Leave it to Larry to walk into paradise and search out an injustice to battle.

One of U2's celebrity guests seems to have quit the hotel. Axl Rose arrived here yesterday between Italian Guns N' Roses shows, checked in and came to the U2 concert. Now the rumor is that Axl didn't like the accommodations and split. No fan of continental cuisine, Axl sent one of his lackeys out to find a McDonald's.

Adam holds court with his harem in the Ping-Pong room. He is improbably dressed in sandals and a sharp black dinner jacket over a long red dress, a sort of kimono. The babes, the feast, and the toga conspire to give Adam the bearing of a Caesar (one of the late, inbred, lunatic Caesars, perhaps, but a Caesar nonetheless).

"I don't wear it lightly," Adam says when he sees me gawking, and at first I think he means some imagined laurel wreath. He tugs at the fabric of his muumuu. "I feel that in a hot climate like this the only sort of clothing that makes any sense is a light piece of material wrapped around you." Then, taking the broader philosophical view we expect of the enrobed, he announces, "Men should not be forced to wear pants when it's not cold."

Sheila Roche, trained by years with U2 to betray no emotion beyond slight bemusement or feigned interest, joins us and lends an ear to Adam's oration. She asks if he has ever worn his frock onstage. Just once, Adam says. "It was great because I wore no underwear! I kept teasing the front row. It added a whole other dimension to the show."

"You're rock's own Sharon Stone!" I say.

"I'll tell you," Adam declares. "You learn a lot about women from dressing up in women's clothes! You learn that when a woman asks you, 'Do I look all right?' what she's really saying is, T have just spent a lot of time making myself uncomfortable. If I go out in this condition will I look foolish, or is it worth it?"

"Sheila," I say, "you're a woman. Is that true?"

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"There is a lot of truth in it," Sheila says. "High heels are murder."

"Sure," Adam says. "When you ask a woman to go out to dinner it's not like asking one of your mates. She has to stop and think, 'Hmm, dinner. That will be four hours of being uncomfortable.' And if she says yes and then after four hours you say, 'Let's go dancing, let's go to a club,' and she says, 'No, I want to go home,' it's because she has figured on four hours and now those four hours are up and she can only think of getting home and out of those clothes!"

"Ah," I say, "so that's why women take their clothes off after you buy them a fancy dinner!"

Adam smiles the wise smile of Archimedes overflowing the bathtub and says, "Let me go get some more wine and I'll give you some more insights into the female psychology."

He sashays off in his sarong and I say to Sheila, "I've got a new name for Adam Clayton."

"What?"

"Madame Clayton."

Bono and Edge are pulled from the poolside to go talk to Carter Alan, a disc jockey from Boston radio station WBCN. This hotel is set up like Zorro's hacienda, and Alan is sitting under an arched roof in an old stone grotto waiting to tape-record an interview with U2 for Ameri­can radio. For the disc jockey it is quite a big deal; Alan is an old friend of the band who was cast out of Paradise for breaches of etiquette. This interview represents his formal readmittance to favor.

Alan's sin was turning his proximity to U2 into a book: Outside It's America, U2 in the U.S. To Larry Mullen this was treason; Alan had always presented himself to U2 as a friend, not a journalist, and Larry consid­ered that Alan had cashed in on that friendship. The other members of U2 seemed less bothered about it, but they don't break ranks over matters of policy, so Alan was out. That the book was entirely compli­mentary was irrelevent.

I've known Alan for years, and while I would not presume to look into his soul or motives, I know he's always loved U2 and I suspect that if any member of the band had, early on in his project, picked up the phone and asked him not to write the book, he would have killed it. Edge once told me that they just assumed that as Alan was not a writer, the book he talked about would never really happen, so they ducked his

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