Coffin-board, heavy stone, Lie on her breast, I vex my heart alone, She is at rest.

Peace, peace, she cannot hear Lyre or sonnet, All my life's buried here Heap earth upon it.

Willie and I are in the bar, drinking a toast to World AIDS Day, here at the end of the world.

Adam Agonistes

Clayton at the crossroads/ a visit to the wonderbar/ bono does an art deal/ an aztec experience/ larry mullen: frugal or tightwad?/ sunrise over one tree hill

OH, SAY, can you set your internal clock to this: it is late November, so your body is prepared to start sprouting extra fur and layers of protective fat. But here in New Zealand it is the first day of summer and although it was a shock to go from the early winter of Ireland to the nose-peeling heat of Australia, you got the hang of it. The Christmas decorations going up were overruled by the post-ozone sunburns. Christchurch, however, is as close as you're ever likely to be dragged to the South Pole and as the brave fans huddle under blankets and cheer through frosty breath at U2's outdoor concert to­night, Christchurch is freezing.

The band are playing well, but they are moving around far more than usual to keep from icing over. "I've never been so cold onstage!" Larry says when he ducks behind the curtain to warm himself during Bono and Edge's "Satellite" duet. He chats for a while and then says in an upper-class voice, "Will you excuse me for a moment? I'm in the middle of something," and turns and lands back on his drum stool for the k'ck into "Dirty Day."

Adam is taking the temperature more stoically—he is simply adding another item of clothing every ten or fifteen minutes, like the Madonna of the Bizzaro World. He starts the concert in a T-shirt, he ends in overcoat, wool hat pulled down to his nose, and fingerless gloves.

I'm no fool. I head down to the warmth of underworld, where the crew are brewing hot toddys behind the guitar tuner and passing around a bottle of brandy. At one point a pudgy roadie attaches himself to the outside of the Plexiglas window of Dallas's little guitar shop like the

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Gremlin on the airplane window in Twilight Zone and begs to come in where it's warm. Sitting down here rubbing hands together and passing the bottle while the mighty amps of a rock concert blast above our heads is like huddling in a little Vermont cabin while a blizzard rages outside.

After the show Bono and Larry head to Americano, but word has spread that U2 have been going there and the place is full of U2 fans in U2 T-shirts. The band members are led to a corner with couches facing each other and sit down while Eric and David stand at parade rest, forming a human fence between U2 and the kids, who line up staring at them as if it were feeding time at Sea World. It is impossible to relax, so the group heads off to a campy club by the docks called Wonderbar, full of Italian sailors, old drunks, and weirdos. Bono loves it immedi­ately, Larry starts shooting pool, and over the course of the next couple of hours McGuinness, Sebastian, and Zoo deejay Paul Oakenfold all show up there. A neckless man with a spherical head shoved into a trapezoid torso sticks his face in Bono's and tells him he was a pal of Greg Carroll's. They chat for a minute and the neckless man goes back to the bar, but he returns every half hour or so to make the same announcement. An old sunken-cheeked sea dog with coal-black eyes presses up and begs Bono to bring him along to Tokyo. A sixtyish stevedore with a white chin beard down to his clavicle leans across the table into Bono's nose and sings Irish songs. Nothing unusual, Bono keeps drinking and talking.

A thin, doe-eyed young woman in a cape and beret comes up and tells Bono she's a painter and her studio's nearby, would he like to come over. He looks at his watch and says, sorry, it's 3:30 and he has an early flight, but if she has color Xeroxes of her stuff she could leave them at his hotel in the morning. The next day at breakfast Bono comes down waving the Xeroxes. He really likes them. He just bought two of her paintings and is having them shipped home to Dublin. He shows me the copies. One is a nude, clearly an art-school model, dappled in impres­sionist reds. The other is a sketch for a painting called "Spilled Milk" of a big-eyed figure curled up and flipping out, a little like "The Scream. That Bono is a soft touch.

On the plane up to Auckland, at the top of New Zealand's north island and back in the tropical heat wave, the flight attendants have been warned about the Zoo crew. They announce, "In case of sudden loss of

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cabin pressure your shoes will descend." It is a wobbly flight. Edge sits engrossed in some technical magazine for electrical engineers. Adam asks Larry if he's closed the deal on his apartment in New York. Larry says he hasn't signed the papers. Adam has heard about a great house in London and hopes to run over and see it on the way home to Ireland, after Japan. He tells Larry the price and Larry, ever vigilant, warns him of the potential for spending much more in repairs and modifications,

I mention to Paul McGuinness that Forbes or one of those magazines that lists the highest-paid entertainers had put Bono in one position, Edge somewhere beneath him, Adam down below Edge, and Larry not on the chart at all—pretty funny considering that they have a long tradition of splitting their income equally.

"The truth is," McGuinness says, "Bono is always broke, while Larry still has his First Communion money." (It sometimes causes a little sore feeling that when Edge and Bono are off working on songs for U2, Adam and Larry have free time to grow their fortunes.)

Adam and Larry ask Paul how he enjoyed a Madonna concert he flew off to see in Australia while they were cooling their heels in Christ-church. Paul says it was good, maybe not big enough for a football stadium, but she's a real star and a far better dancer than he'd ever appreciated. He says she stopped the show at one point to talk about two friends who had died of AIDS. "Ah," Adam says. "Her Sarajevo Moment."

On the bus into Auckland we pass One Tree Hill, lonely and majestic as U2 mythology would imply but closer to superhighways and urban sprawl than one would expect, just as U2's "One Tree Hill" comes on the bus radio. (Here's a better one: when we were driving back to Christchurch on World AIDS Day we were listening to Elvis Costello's new album and a song came on called "Rocking Horse Road." I said, "You know, that song was written about a street Costello got lost on somewhere in New Zealand." The driver said, "Rockm' Horse Road? Why, that's it right over there." We were passing it. Spooky, huh? I'm going to put on "Abraham, Martin, and John" down here and see who shows up.)

If Christchurch was twenty or thirty years in the past, Auckland is a generation in the future. It's a shining, seaside city full of new buildings and prosperity. There are Japanese signs next to the English signs everywhere, and Japanese tourists and immigrants mingling among the

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Anglos. The Japanese are more welcome here than in Australia, which still has a lot of bitter World War II memories, so there is plenty of Japanese investment. There is also, both here and in Australia, tons of money being moved from Hong Kong before the British lease expires and the Communist Chinese take over in 1997.

(Communism may be dead in Europe and Russia, but it's mutated into something particularly ugly in the Far East. As long as the Chinese are willing to kick in their tribute to capitalism—which in their case means exporting goods made with slave labor and giving George Bush's family the Chinese golf course concession—the West doesn't much care how brutally they oppress their people. The Western rationale is that the men who rule China are all about ninety-nine years old and will be dead soon and places like Hong Kong will inoculate the Chinese virus with a healthy shot of free market vaccine. Maybe so, but I think the Chinese dictators have realized that a little capitalism does not mean they have to kick in political freedom. The same old pigs who rolled over the demonstrators in Tiananmen Square could spill a lot of blood in Hong Kong, and as long as they don't screw up the cash flow there's no indication the Western powers will much care.)

As soon as we get settled in the hotel I go down the hall to Adam's room for a heart-to-heart. The missed gig in Sydney is still looming in the air. The band has been nervous about Adam's love for getting crocked for a long time, but after the tabloid scandal with the hookers last summer it became too big to be left to Adam's discretion. He stayed on the wagon from that point till this, but he fell off in Sydney with a crash heard around the world. Now he knows he's got to either commit to cleaning up completely, with outside help if that's what it takes, or walk away from the band. The other guys have made it clear that they will break up U2 before they will lose a member to rock star excess. To submit to that tragic and stupid cliche would pretty much ruin everything else U2 has stood for.

Although he's put on his usual all's-well face this week, Adam's been in a steel-cage death match with his demons, wishing the tour would hurry up and end so he can get his life back. He is torn between wanting to run away from music and into the good life with Naomi and wanting to turn away from all that flash and high life and spend the year-off studying music. Right now rock & roll represents the bars of Adam's prison and he wants out. "I'm empty, completely empty," he says. ' We

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really need to take time off, to go live without thinking about music." When I tell him that those are the exact words Bono's been using he is surprised, he says he didn't know Bono felt that way.

"I feel like we have really got something out of our system," Adam says. "I think we have become the group that we always wanted to become. That in itself inevitably brings you to yet another border in your life and I suppose it means that we really are free to let our imaginations run wild in terms of what we could be now. We've got to the point where we may well be the greatest group in the world. Now what do you do with it?

"I'd love to say I feel like we can kick back and rest a bit and do a few guest appearances on other people's work, but that isn't really satisfying. It's the ongoing U2 work that's important. I don't even want to think what that could be. In the same way that when we started Achtung Baby we had to acknowledge what had happened in music during that three-or four-year period, I'm sure we will have to react to whatever happens next. Live work, I could not even imagine what we could do now. I don't know if we will feel the necessity for live work. We might just want to get the records out and enjoy time with our families and creative time. We could think about recording two or three records and fringe projects and then think about touring as we get to the end of this decade. I personally feel it would be very hard to beat Zoo TV, and I wouldn't want to do another two-year tour. What is more rewarding is actually creating the music. Playing concerts is great to a certain point. Al­though getting big is a challenge and being successful is nice, it doesn't really give you the fuel that you need."

I suggest that over the course of the long journey from Hansa to here, Adam and Edge have both stepped into the spotlight that used to be only Bono's—the place where you're famous even to people who don't follow music. Only Larry has managed to retain (it's silly to say anonym­ity when he's world famous) a separation from a general showbiz sort of celebrity.

"Larry's always been noticed 'cause he's the pretty one," Adam says. He's honed that character down in a way that he can feel comfortable in public as he didn't used to. And that's enough. His very silence speaks louder than anything else.

'It is going to be especially different for Larry and myself. Bono and Edge have a different mindset which allows them to work at a fairly

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Manic pace and they like that. Maybe I'll get to like it, I'm not sure if I do. I suppose it's a psychological issue in many ways. I don't feel psychologically prepared for that, I like the anonymity of being able to seek out things and reel them back to my life and then be able to create from that. I don't like the culture where you are reacting and that is a large part of the way the culture has become. As communciation speeds up, art becomes much more a reaction than an intellectual process, and I prefer it as an intellectual process.

"I find celebrity-dom, being a personality, a Hollywoodization. Peo­ple in Hollywood seek it knowing that their gig may be getting up and being very funny or being on TV or reading the news, but they're very good at saying, 'If you're not paying me I'm not going to be funny, I'm not going to do what you want, this is my life.' As Irish people we're not used to being that cold about it, that blunt about it. I find it hard to come back to Dublin and realize that Irish people now expect me to be that man, they expect you to always be Hollywood in that you're always performing for them and, secondly, willing to hand out if not the secrets of your success certainly the rewards of your success. And that's hard to live with. I'm not running away from Dublin; I just don't feel it's inspiring to me at the moment."

I observe that the change in Dublin's attitude toward U2 that was so apparent last summer seems to have all happened in the last year or two;

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