Ramone and Rubin stare at him.

"Like this," Bono says, and he slaps on a big, toothy smile and emotes like a Methodist minister: "Don't you know, old foooool."

Ramone and Rubin stare at him.

"Like a father and son," Bono says. "But not so much fighting over the car as fighting over the same girl."

[335]

Ramone and Rubin stare at each other. They stare back at Bono. Finally Ramone says, "Okay, we'll try it. And if the old man doesn't like it, what kind of boots do you like better? Rubber or cement?"

There's a pregnant pause and then Bono smiles and says, "I want the kind of boots Nancy wears!" Everybody laughs. (Nancy Sinatra's boots, you younger readers may not know, were made for walkin'.)

Bono tries singing the Old Fool line and everybody gets itchy. It sounds nasty. So he tries: "Don't you know, Blue Eyes, you never can win." That gets a much warmer reception from the record men.

On the next pass Bono sings the whole song through, without hear­ing Sinatra's vocal. The first time the line comes up he sings "Blue Eyes," the second time he breaks out in a smile so wide it should carry through the microphone and sings, "Don't ye know y'auld fool, ye never can win!" like a happy Irish grandma teasing her beloved husband. When Ramone plays it back everybody breaks up laughing. Bono is delighted. He's proud of the way the track is turning out.

By suppertime Bono's done. Ramone will be working for a while yet. Bono invites Don Rubin and his wife—who's been out seeing Dublin— to join him for dinner. At the restaurant the waitress brings a little battery-powered phone over to the table and tells Bono he has a call. It's Gavin. Bono asks him to come over while puffing on one of his little cigars.

"Bono," I say, "how could you, Larry, and Edge go without smoking until you were thirty and then all start? That's nuts."

"I don't smoke," Bono says, utterly sincere. I point out that there is a lit cigar hanging out of his mouth. "Well," he says, backtracking, "I don't inhale."

He says that it started as a camp affectation and then he got to enjoy it. The members of U2 probably all liked smoking as teenagers and then Bono, Larry, and Edge went into their ascetic spiritual period and denied themselves. Edge's smoking picked up when his marriage broke up. Larry's girlfriend, Ann, is very much against it, but there is some suspicion that Larry may have been sneaking smokes when she wasn't looking.

"When people are staring at you all the time," Bono says, "smoking a cigarette can give you something to do. Otherwise you just . . ." He grins self-consciously, fiddles with his fork, messes with his hair. I never would have thought of that, but I look around the restaurant and, sure

[336]

enough, from behind menus, columns, and raised cups, eyes are glanc­ing, studying, peeking, staring, and looking sideways at Bono. It's a constant ocular flutter that moves from person to person like fireflies flickering across a meadow. Fame is a bizarre thing to have happen to you. Bono exhales a stream of smoke. It occurs to me who else smoked those little cigars. Elvis.

Gavin shows up, is introduced to the Rubins, and everyone has a fine supper. After dinner Bono and Gavin decide to head out to the pubs. As he's leaving, Bono is stopped by the waitress, who asks if she can have her phone back. Bono has lost it. How embarrassing. It's not in his pocket, it's not on the table, it's not under the table. Gavin rolls his eyes. Bono starts lifting tablecloths, poking under chairs. He combs the joint like Inspector Clousseau, finally emerging—waving the phone over his head—from the men's room. He had gone off during dinner to pee and left it on the toilet. The waitress says thank you.

Out on the sidewalk, after saying good night to the Rubins, Gavin lets loose his amusement. "Lost the telephone! It's always been like this. I sussed very early on that you didn't lend Bono anything valuable. I loaned you my Z.iggy Stardust album and you made a big point of the fact that you did return it to me. And I looked inside the jacket and it was some Best of Classics record! And you'd given the lyric sheet to some girl you were trying to impress."

Bono starts to object. Then he mumbles, "Actually, that's completely accurate."

Bono, Gavin and I visit quite a number of saloons over the next few hours. Sometimes there are musicians performing, generally folkies sit­ting on stools. Bono and Gavin offer the opinion that Dublin is too soft on such performers for their own good. We walk into one place where a young woman is singing traditional songs and the crowd is clapping promiscuously. Bono accurately observes that if she got up and did that same thing in London she'd be bottled off the stage. Which would mean that if she really wanted to be a musician she would be forced to get good fast to survive. She would get an electric guitar, develop an attitude, and figure out how to blow that crowd away. Dublin is not so demanding, with the effect that most musicians who achieve Irish suc­cess can't grab the imagination of listeners in other places. "That's the bad thing about Dublin," Bono says as we leave. "It's too easy here."

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