I AM AN Amy Winehouse person. One of the hundreds of thousands who feel we are her kin in a very special way that no other person can claim. Except for the other hundreds of thousands. We all love her for deeply specific, personal reasons and for exactly the same reasons. John Darnielle, the singer for the band The Mountain Goats, wrote a song called “Amy AKA Spent Gladiator 1” and it begins with the lyrics “Do every stupid thing that makes you feel alive / Do every stupid thing to try to drive the dark away.” He told The Nashville Sun that it was “a meditation on those drawn to extremes — addicts in particular — who don't always end up surviving their torments.” He said, “She's a junkie, and so am I. I don't use now, and I lived. It was kind of a miracle. But not everybody makes it.”

I’m not a junkie. A lot of Amy people are. But the thing is Amy wasn’t just a junkie. And I don’t mean, she wasn’t just a junkie she was also a musical genius and a daughter and a lover and a friend and had the voice of an angel and now she’s up in heaven, I mean she was a depressive and a bulimic like me, and that’s the part people forget a lot. About both of us. Her because there was so much other fucked up shit about her that society treated those other problems as second-tier (even though they were instrumental in her death — how can a wrung-out malnourished body and heaving gasping heart handle so many drugs?) Me because I generally keep my shit together, keep my problems quiet on the outside. But that’s why I’m an Amy person. She can be the parts of me that I have to smash down in my life and let out in pieces of writing that I can only hope people will read.

The first time I went to London, I was 21 and almost normal. My mother’s cancer hadn’t come back. I was traveling overseas for the first time — with a boy I thought I was going to marry. He paid for everything and then broke my heart on the final night. I spent two weeks asking him to take photographs of me in front of historical monuments and wondering why he wouldn’t join me for selfies. I spent two weeks asking him what was wrong and getting increasingly sharp nothings in response. I planned every moment and none of those moments had anything to do with music or bodies: they were for a simple happy couple. But I did not know that we weren’t a simple happy couple.

The Amy trip was different. Six years later I was alone, an editor by day and a music journalist by night, having found like so many others a powerful sanctuary in the drowning dark and noise of small clubs. In the sonic and physical spaces of music, I don’t have to have an external shape, only a pulsing internal system of sensations. This time, I paid for myself. I was taking a short break from my job in Amsterdam and unlike before, I had no plans but one: I wanted to see Camden. In the years since the first London Trip, I’d developed my own attitude, perspective, opinions. I could look at a British market and think that while culture was meant to live here, as it turned out, a thin T-shirt with a laser-print of Bob Marley looks much the same in a stall in Camden as it does in a stall in Houston, in New York, in New Orleans. A bong is a bong is a bong is a tie-dyed tapestry is a burlap tote is a Kurt Cobain airbrush caricature is a wire-wrapped crystal pendant is a bar of hemp soap is a reproduction Ramones tee with “Dee Dee” spelled wrong.

In my youth, I’d imagined seeing all sorts of parts of the world and always being in love while it happened, being with a person I loved. Sharing everything to double the wonder, the noticings, the narrative voices in future retellings of the memories. Now comfortably a globe-trotter, I was one for two. I didn’t expect to be standing alone, needing to imagine I was being followed by a helicopter camera crew just to spur myself on through the endless tapestries. Someone’s watching this, right? Someone’s paying attention?

I paused in front of a mirror leaning against a stall to admire my hair, newly pink, and reflect on whether I was brave enough to do something more permanent like a tattoo. I snapped a quick selfie on my phone, looked at myself among the endless tchotchkes, and wondered stupidly if the picture was art. Forget it. I wouldn’t really be able to decide for another four to six weeks, when I could evaluate my appearance more clearly. That’s how it always went. Every picture, every time, a dysmorphic trait I could not escape.

Enough. The main event. I meandered with my head down, following the directions on Google Maps until I was a block away, then I shoved my phone in my pocket so I could walk up without seeming like I’d planned it. The building’s worn sign read The White Horse.

I went straight to the centerpiece, to sit directly at the bar where I knew she’d sat so many times before. It was early afternoon, my favorite time to drink, and the place was pretty empty.

“What brings you in here?” The bartender asked. He was thin, white, a little pockmarked, a bit past middle-aged, and kind of hot in the sense that I was almost certain he was the one who knew the place inside and out, who’d been here during the height of Amy’s rule, who’d lived through it all. In fact, just by his age and demeanor and my own obsessive internet habits, I actually literally knew he wasn’t just the bartender but the White Horse manager for the past several decades.

I saw his eyes examine my chest, the curves underneath my worn and torn Misfits T-shirt, before moving up to the sharp neon pink bob framing my face.

I answered. “I want a beer.”

It was so easy not to say the truth, not to say, “Everything I know about Camden I learned from caring about Amy Winehouse,” not to say “I read every listicle that every fan reads and I came here because every listicle tells every fan to come here,” not to say “you’re my destination and I want something from you.”

“Fair enough. Welcome, young American. I’m Grant.”

Then, from behind him came another bartender, seemingly a second-in-command and the most beautiful boy I’d ever seen in my life. Pretty face and big big blue eyes with a stubborn lock of auburn hair falling into them. He asked, “What’ll it be?” and of course it was in a melodic Irish accent and of course something happened in my panties when I heard it and of course he was even wearing suspenders with his trousers for fuck’s sake and I even forgot about Amy and Grant and for a second I was in a much different kind of fantasy.

And then Grant, perceptive and clearly invested in whatever my small American presence was giving him, snarked “Stop droolin’” and I realized my jaw had dropped and another man at the bar was snickering at me. That turned out to be Fergus, a White Horse regular if ever there was one, dopey and stalwart and long-faced and pretty much there, I learned, to be razzed. But he was pleased not to be the target for a brief moment, and in his joy, he told Jamie to pour pints of Guinness for the four of us, and that was that.

Grant, Jamie, Fergus, and an American girl raised on promises. I didn’t know why they chose to focus so much attention on me, to what degree I was something to do, but they were something to do for me too. I’ve never had so much Guinness in my life. At every half hour, Fergus would say he was leaving on the next hour — “Ought to be leaving at 7, mates” — only for 7 to roll around just in time for him to order another round.

Despite the occasional basket of bar chips, we got sloppier, by 9 p.m. reaching a level of sozzled I found surprising that a bar owner and his bartenders could handle so early in the night — before I remembered that pubs close at 12 so those who work at them are free to fuck off shortly after into whatever blurry mischief they choose for the rest of the night.

Every subject we talked about was horny — past fights with lovers, irresponsible hookups. Even when I asked Grant and Fergus, “what was London like when you were growing up?” the subject was imbued with the inherent eroticism of age difference, of a power differential. Did I smirk to emphasize oh-how-ancient these fellows were compared to me? Or did I coo to suggest their age made them oh-so-experienced? I don’t remember now. We’d had so much to drink, and we were approaching the point in the night where Grant was about to ask me if I liked blow.

“Say,” Grant said, “do you like blow?”

I replied, “Extremely yes.”

His eyes widened as he smiled, the direction of the night suddenly taking on a new and exciting shape in his mind.

“Come on, come on! Up to my office!”

I did as told, noticing how Jamie’s face fell when he was told to man the bar while we were gone. Grant politely signaled ladies first on the way up the smelly carpeted stairs, then as I climbed I felt him playfully smack me in the “arse.” I knew to expect this in the way where, as a woman you always knew to expect this, and yet somehow it had not at all entered my mind that our riotous bar banter would translate to a physical interaction. Plus, my mind was playing a lot of movies starring Jamie without clothes on. I stumbled over my next words, thinking I sounded cool and inaccessible but on reflection it’s unlikely I did.

“Just like, a heads up,” I said, “I’m not going to have sex with you. So, um. That’s not something I’m going to do.”

He put on a church face. “Oh, yeah, yeah, no. Right-o babe. Right-o. But.” He smiled as we reached the top of the stairs and the closed door of his office. “You’re gonna wanna see this.” I was skeptical. But when he swung the door open and flicked the light on, sitting on the swivel chair where one might imagine he regularly counted cash and violated certain low-level ethics sat a tiny gray terrier.

“Murrayyy!” Grant shouted gleefully like it was the reveal moment at a surprise party, reaching his hands out to showcase the dog.

Murray yelped agreeably and, in an impressive display of behavioral training, stayed put while wagging his tail. I loved him.

“Step-daughter’s. Watchin’ ’im for the night. Thought you’d like the little guy.”

While I sat in the swivel chair with Murray on my lap, feeding him treats and fluffing his ears, Grant rummaged through an ancient desk. He spoke to me as he searched.

“Murray’s not the only reason I brought you up here though. Do you really not know anything about this pub? Do you know who used to come here all the time?”

I just stared at him until he said it.

“Amy Winehouse.” Like an incantation. Summoning a woman long dead, a time long deader.

All I could do was pretend to be impressed in this way that was insincere in both its amazement, because of course I already knew, and its chillness, because of course being a person who already knew meant being a person to whom this mattered so so much.

He looked away from me as he opened a drawer and spoke. “God, I miss her so much. She was one of a kind. We had the best times… Aha!”

He spun around, baggy in hand, offering this cheap coke like a man thrice-married holding out a wedding ring. I gave him a tiny cheer by lifting Murray’s paws and saying “woohoo!” feeling somehow like he needed it.

Those first bumps were just us up there in Grant’s office, feeling as one usually does with the initial consumption of cocaine, like you are shedding the skin of an average beer drinker and emerging as a more superior, more alive human who can get intimate with the sexier chemicals.

When we settled back down at the bar, I noticed Jamie making puppy dog nudge faces at Grant’s pocket and I was about to suggest we go off for another line when I caught sight of a large group of people, clearly tourists in my enlightened opinion, being led in and sat down by a guide. Grant sauntered over with a big hello. I asked Jamie what the deal was.

“The Amy Tours. They pay money to go ’round to all these spots Amy Winehouse is associated with. When they stop here, they all get a pint and Grant goes over to preen. Happens a few times a day.”

He grimaced and I felt exactly the same way. I hated these people who had turned this pub into a gimmick, these mourners and pilgrims who had diluted the experience into a simple transaction. But who, then, was I?

I needed more coke.

Over the course of the night we did it all, and all over the pub from the basement kitchen to the office to the loos. Me and Grant, Grant and me and Jamie, Grant and Jamie, rarely Fergus, he somehow always missed the cues. Never me and Jamie. Never me and Jamie. It was 11:20 when I realized it would never be me and Jamie just like it would never be me and Amy and so I got up while the others were doing rails in the loo and I walked out without a goodbye and I got in a cab.

On the taxi ride back to my hostel, I thought dizzily about what had occurred, tried to put it down in my notebook for the future, for some reason. Memories. To mine these lives and my life for anecdotes that might get friends or strangers’ rocks off in future bars. Or maybe, hopefully, to write the story for a mid-range music publication that might pay me a few hundred bucks in the wake of whatever relevant news peg I could scrounge up.

I fantasized: Why’d the aging spectre of The White Horse and his young apprentices choose me for attention? Did they see something... potential? A future story to tell the tabloids? Did they think my particular mess might one day matter the way Amy’s did? Hah.

Or could they see through me, recognize that this place mattered to me just like so many other unspecial fans and admirers? Maybe they selected someone every night, gave them attention and booze and blow, knowing this would bring the customer to the even more sublime high of imagining they were something like similar to their fallen idol. For a moment. A spoonful of recklessness doled out each evening to keep the myth alive and thriving long after the woman who made it died.

But then, maybe it was neither, and these were just some men in a Camden pub turned on by a young American ass, hoping that enough substances would turn “I’m not gonna sleep with you” into a hazy giggling whoopsie daisies, measuring the progress from redolence to readiness by how long their hand could linger after each slap on the bum. When they saw this girl had slipped away, did they resent the unpaid tab, having expected a better kind of compensation for all those baskets of chips?

Perhaps, though, all the players on that stage simply meant what they said and did what they meant. It’s nice to ask a clever American girl what she thinks of the pub you spent your whole life running, even if she’s nobody. It’s nice to pass the time with a pretty Irish boy who's pulling pints and itchy for his next bump, even if he’s never ever gonna kiss your face, even if the pub owner’s the one who’s gonna feel you up. It’s nice to fake a feeling, to role play a life that’s real because it’s happening but also not real, because no one will ever see each other again.

There’s a reason I dyed my hair but not my skin. There’s a reason I could be there for a night and not a lifetime. No one ever tried to make me go to rehab, I took myself. And it wasn’t for the front-page reasons. What I had in common with Amy were in her footnotes, the parts of her suffering people only glanced at. At The White Horse I could vacation in the tabloid life of Amy. And while I know she pulled pints behind the bar til she fell down and I’m sure she snorted powder off every surface of that place from basement storage room to upstairs manager’s office and I have no doubt she found corners in which to shoot up before she ultimately died alone just ’round the corner, I know that I left the bar and Camden and London unfucked and undead and I basically never had any chance at all of living Amy’s life and I should be glad.

But there was a moment after the fifth basement bump, maybe the seventh, when I think we might actually have been a little bit truly the same, really, no bullshit. I pulled my head up from the plastic folding table in that basement side room, searched for Jamie’s eyes and found them, hoped the hum migrating down my face into my body would pull his hips into mine but felt no ecstatic transfer of energy, saw nothing gather between us, saw him smile politely and then look up at Grant the way I was looking at him, or maybe the way I looked at Amy every time I watched videos of her on YouTube, and Grant looked down at both of us like nothing more than who he was, a bar manager pleased to be high again with his accessories for this particular Tuesday night.

But that wasn’t the moment. It was right after, when I said “I need to pee,” and I skipped to the women’s bathrooms and chose a stall and inside I saw a hundred notes to Amy scrawled all over the door and the walls and I read them but then I turned around and crouched and stared at the toilet and I became a red-eyed woman alone jamming a finger down her throat to bring up the Guinness and bar chips that she couldn’t stand to have in her body one second longer.

Back in the cab, I felt the acid in my stomach churning, searching for something new to devour, and I wondered if the sound I heard it making was real.

Kayleigh Hughes has an MFA from Virginia Commonwealth University and a BA in English from UT-Austin. Her literary work has appeared in The Audacity, Northwest Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, Catapult, and The Establishment. Her work has been longlisted for the Disquiet International Literary Prize in Nonfiction, and she was a finalist for the Michigan Quarterly Review James A. Winn Prize in Nonfiction. She previously worked as a music journalist.