Too Weird for Ziggy

by Sylvie Simmons

  The customs man pulls a paperback from a corner of Spike’s suitcase. He reads out the title. “Life and How to Survive It.” He tosses it back in the case. His cheeks are livid. “Jesus H. Christ! If you’re not satisfied, what fucking hope is there for the rest of us? You’ve got it all, Buttock, don’t you. Living like a kid on a grown man’s money—well, good luck to you, mate. Good fucking luck to you. There but for fortune. There but for one great fucking stroke of fate.”

  Red hands shaking, he tidies up the suitcase.

  And all at once an image flashes into Spike’s mind, so vivid he might have been looking at it in a magazine. It’s Knocker’s bedroom. His new carpet—electric blue with red, black, and yellow swirls. His old wallpaper—“Animals of the Jungle,” he remembers, and it makes him laugh. Knocker said they couldn’t take it down because the British government had designated it a historic inner-city treasure. You could barely see the wall for posters anyway—Beatles, Stones, Arsenal Football Club, and that enormous map of the world he had, with the handmade flyer pinned onto America that said ‘Knocker and the Dawes Tour the Universe 1965.’ On a low bookcase stacked with records was the regulation one-piece, blue vinyl record player they all had. And Knocker’s there on the bed, playing along to the record on his big cheap acoustic guitar, and he’s on the floor, back against the wall, tapping out a rhythm on a Monopoly box lid, and Knocker’s father is yelling up the stairs to keep the bloody noise down and hasn’t he got a home to go to, and back home Mum’s got the dinner on, the house smells of pork chops and brown sauce, and she’s telling him he’d better get the table laid before his dad gets home from work. Poor Dad. Wonder how they’re all holding up.

  Spike reaches a hand across the table.

  The customs man pulls his hand away.

  “I’m all right. You don’t have to lose any sleep over me. No need to lose any of your beauty fucking sleep. I’m sorry. I’m a bit tired. Had a hard week. Night shifts. Long hours. Fluorescent lights. Ultraviolet deprivation. I’m slowly crumbling, you know? The blood’s slowed down. If you bumped into me now I’d crumple up like papier fucking mâché. You could turn me upside down and shake me out and I’d just be full of dust, like a vacuum cleaner bag.

  “Do you want to know what’s frightening, Buttock? Really fucking frightening? Watching what’s happening to yourself and not being able to do a thing about it. Like those dreams where they’re disemboweling you and you’re paralyzed and you’re watching it all going on and you know exactly what is going to happen to you but you can’t move, there’s not a fucking thing you can do.”

  The customs man rolls the numbers back around on the combination lock.

  “Well, there you go then. And give my best to your old man. Spike Mattock, would you believe it? One of us made it. Bloody fucking marvelous, isn’t it? It makes you feel proud. Dawn and the girls are going to get a real kick out of this when I tell them.” He lifts the case down onto the floor.

  “Could I have your autograph?”

  A HAPPY ENDING

  “Famous for fifteen minutes?” The head of A&R was expounding into the speakerphone, something that he very much liked to do. “Fuck that, man. Everyone’s gonna have their own fucking TV channel.” Behind his back they called him BB, short for Buddha Boy, because he was young and soft and fat and had a sweet, sly smile on his baby face like he could bring you back in your next life as a prince or a peanut as soon as look at you. Which, musicbizly speaking, he could, that being the A&R man’s job. Smiling benignly at the present beneficiary of his divine intervention, the Comeback Artist du jour, who was sitting upright in his chair on the other side of the enormous desk, BB leaned back in his leather swivel chair, feet on the desk-edge, swaying his hips from side to side to some private rhythm, like a fat housewife at the gym.

  Cal West’s dark suit, pale face, hands folded precisely in his lap, made him look more like an undertaker than a rockstar poised for a second go. He was fifty years old and looked it, except for his anxious little small-child-dropped-off-at-the-school-gates eyes. His fingers were troubling him. They felt wet and sticky, like seawater. He watched BB’s hips swish forward and back like waves and a surge of seasickness rose in his throat.

  There he was again—his brother, in the corner of the room, slumped up against the life-sized Springsteen promo cardboard cutout with the stars-and-stripes bandanna in the jeans back pocket. He tried looking away, but he could still see him out of the corner of his eye—grotesquely swollen, the color of cold hamburger grease, sprinkled with sand, the top part of his torso leaning out of the black body bag at an unnatural angle. His brother winked and gave him the finger.

  Cal spun around, looking for his shrink, but of course he wasn’t there, this was a Cal Alone Day. He tightened his grip on his fingers, which were slithering about in his lap like squids, and focused for equilibrium on a platinum album on the wall. He tried to picture what David Letterman would do. David Letterman would tug on his cuffs, relax back in his chair, drape his arm across the armrest, and smile inanely. Which is what Cal did.

  He jumped as the door behind him opened. “Later, gotta go,” BB said to the speakerphone. “Joel. My man. Come in.” He gestured a man into his office. “We were just talking about you.” Joel was a record producer, trim, tanned, of indeterminate age, with an ’80s gold satin jacket and a ’90s shaved head and goatee. He strode up to BB, heartily swatted his legs off the desk, and bent down and gave him a bear hug. “Looking good, man. How ya doin’!”

  “I’m doin’. Joel, meet Cal. Cal, Joel. Like I’ve been explaining to Cal, I’m putting you guys together on this project.”

  Joel strode over, clasped Cal on the shoulder, and perched on the corner of the desk, blocking the cardboard Springsteen from view. Cal tried to peer around him but couldn’t see anything.

  “Man, I’m your biggest fan. Numero uno. I’ve listened to your tape, and there’s some wicked shit on there. ‘The Sea Sighs,’ ‘Dirty Orange Sky’—they’re fucking ace, man. And ‘The Old Man and the Sea’—that song brought tears to my eyes, I swear to God. Best thing you’ve done. I’ve got this superb rhythm section I’m working with,” adding, as if he’d just that moment thought of it, “you’d be so fucking cool together. And I know an amazing keyboard guy—been on eight top fives in a row. You two would relate. You know,” he said softly, “he lost a brother too—carjack down in Venice Beach, I’m not shitting you. I talked to him about working with you on your comeback and he came in his pants. He loves you.”

  “Did you like the song about the horses?” asked Cal. “That’s my favorite. It’s the first one I wrote when I came back. ‘Those big strong horses sure are sweaty,’” he sang quietly. He sounded like an angel force-fed D. H. Lawrence novels and Gauloise cigarettes. BB threw Joel a look that said that right now sweaty horses were list-topping VH1-unfriendly, and if he did like it he should unlike it, immediafuckingmente.

  “Cool,” Buddha Boy grinned. “We’re ninety percent there, Cal. Like I said, I love what you’re doing and I’m with you all the way. All it wants is to be a little bit more now, you know what I’m saying? What I’m seeing is a Crosby Stills and Nash-meets-Public Enemy kinda vibe, a kinda double-edged protest deal, a cry from the heart, but with harmonies, you got me? Not so in your face. Hard but heart. Your music was the summer. Now it’s the fall, you know what I’m saying? You’re a living legend, you’ve been through it, man—everybody knows what you’ve been through, the drugs and the breakdown and all the crazy shit—and you’ve come out the other end, thank God.” (Not God, Cal thought. Thank Hank, his therapist, cowriter, hairdresser, guru, his best—his only—friend. Cal Alone Days sucked donkey dick.) “And there’s so many of your contemporaries who haven’t, Cal, I don’t need to tell you that. And everybody wants to hear all about it—they’re all rooting for you out there: the critics, the public, a huge fucking demographic. They’re eager. In this business, I can’t tell you just how sweet a sound that is, man. This—I hate the word �
��comeback’—album is gonna take you onto a whole other phase.”

  Cal already had his new phase figured out, and he knew what it was and he knew it was right because he’d been through so many wrong ones. It was his David Letterman phase. David Letterman, he told his shrink, is the most admired and imitated man in American culture today. He’s all ego and no ego. He wears smart, dark suits and makes them look like he showered and shat in them. And word on the street is he’s one of the best-endowed men in showbiz too—up there with Lyle Lovett and Tommy “T-bone” Lee. Cal bought a suit, same cut, same color, and in his visualizing sessions now he fixes on Pammie and Julia, their big shiny mouths all wet and salty, opening up for him like two great tins of sardines.

  “Well, whadda you say, Cal?”

  Cal was actually busy thinking. About some of his wrong phases. Like that one when he tried pretending he was pregnant, that was pretty crazy, though no crazier, as Hank pointed out to him, than a rockstar pretending to be a normal guy. He would bend over the toilet every morning with his fingers down his throat. When his sisters tried to coax him out of his bed and back into the studio he’d point at his bloated belly and shake his head. Over the years, people had made all sorts of attempts to bring him out of retirement. There was a vogue for a while of young popstars dragging all these oldies back into the limelight, like the Pet Shop Boys did with Dusty Springfield—Cal liked Dusty. There was one guy, he’d forgotten his name—he was a big hit with teenage girls in England for singing miserable songs about living in a bedsit in Manchester, although the return address, he remembered, was Chelsea, London—this guy was totally devoted to him and kept writing him letters. They were love letters, really. He said he wasn’t homosexual but he’d consider having his dick cut off if Cal would make a record with him. Cal wrote him back once. “I left the business because I didn’t want to be famous anymore. I found it very painful really. I really would rather be left alone and not bothered. Really I’m quite content to stay at home and just sit, or sleep mostly, which takes up quite a lot of time. Good luck. Cal.” That was his bed phase, one of his all-time favorites.

  So Cal said nothing, not for a long time anyway. And then finally he grinned a David Letterman grin.

  “This’ll amaze you—no, really.” They were all attention. “Barbie is thirty-two years old this year. Now that makes a man feel old. Interesting fact: Placed end to end, all the Barbie dolls ever sold would circle the earth ten times. They said that about my records once—there’s tens of millions of them out there. If instead of circling the earth with them you heaped ’em all up in one big pile in Southern California, Los Angeles would sink into the ocean and we’d all be drowning right now instead of sitting here talking, though the Barbies would be all right, they’d go boob-up and float. But I guess that’s talking vinyl records, though, which were a whole deal heavier than the records they make now. I made some heavy records in my time.” He chuckled. “There are sixty new Barbie outfits designed each year, can you believe that? That’s right, folks: time for a top ten. Number ten: Bikini Barbie—now I don’t know about you but I’d find it hard to top Bikini Barbie… .”

  BB rolled his eyes at Joel. Joel gave him a wry smile out of the left side of his mouth that said it’s cool, I’ve seen worse, and they’ve gone triple platinum. BB smiled at Cal. He swung to his feet and shuffled plumply to the other side of the desk. He put one arm around Joel, the other around Cal. He gave them a big, paternal Head of A&R hug, then shooed them theatrically toward the door.

  “Okay, you guys, outta here, you’ve got an album to make, get to fucking work. I’ll come by Friday and see how you’re getting on.” His phone rang. “Life is tough,” grimaced Buddha Boy, “ain’t that the truth?”

  Cal stopped on the threshold and looked him in the eye. “It’s all right,” he said sweetly. “I’ve read the book. It has a happy ending.”

  LOVE STAIN

  Frankie Rose died on the pavement outside the Snakehouse in Camden Town. Everywhere you went that day people would say, ‘Have you heard … ?’—all these incomplete sentences dotting the city. Everyone was so shocked. But soon enough everyone knew that Frankie was gone, though no one could quite believe it. It was like Princess Di all over again, but a freak show Princess Di, with all these clubbers with their huge shoes, rainbow hair extensions, and clown clothes lining the streets, staying up after sunrise and paying their respects.

  There was, like there always seems to be nowadays, the “amateur video” which we could all examine from the comfort of our sofas. This time it came courtesy of two young Japanese tourists. Shaky art-house footage of a slightly-built young man jerking about on his back in the street like a strobe-lit break dancer, his skull banging out a rhythm on the paving stones. Then he stopped, twitched, went rigid. His young female companion—conspicuously not his famous girlfriend Pussy, but at least dressed appropriately for the occasion in black—sat slumped against the Snakehouse wall, clutching her thin legs and staring wildly. Leo, the singer with The Nympholeptics, ran out of the club and started yelling at the bouncers to do something. They took no notice—which seemed to upset him more, to tell you the truth, than his friend’s dead body. In the three weeks since Frankie had got him his record deal, Leo was already getting used to people doing what he said.

  Then the camcorder jerked around and we saw a tiny Japanese woman with little-girl pigtails, spotted miniskirt, hooped leggings, and platform trainers standing next to Frankie’s body, waving and giggling shyly. She went up close to the lens and everything went fuzzy. Then came a skinny Japanese man with dyed yellow hair and voluminous combat trousers, posing coolly in front of the Snakehouse sign. Then, for no apparent reason, the camera swung out toward the road and stopped for a few moments on a pair of baby’s bootees hanging on a car’s rearview mirror, before lurching drunkenly back to Frankie’s corpse and the people coming out of the club down the road—stepping over him, not bothering to look down, like he was just another of the countless losers lying in the street in Camden Town.

  A car drove past, stopped, and someone took a picture out of the window. A strange still life it must have made: the curious Japanese couple, the girl slumped against the wall, the body lying face-up on the ground, a bouncer and assorted musicians leaning over him, the drummer still clutching his sticks in a V in one hand. An ambulance wailed down the High Street, weaving past the double-parked minicabs, a police car hugging its behind.

  Overnight, the spot where Frankie fell became a shrine. Then it became a party. At first it was small clutches of clubbers, teary-eyed girls and guys leaving bouquets and cards they’d bought at late-night rock ’n’ roll Sainsbury’s, but by morning it had become a torrent. The Northern Line was jammed. The High Street was impassable, a solid mass of people and flowers from Camden to Mornington Crescent tube: cars hooting, people waving out of windows, kids with boom boxes sitting cross-legged on the pavement listening to pirate radio cranking out the beats, calling friends on their mobiles telling them to come down and join them. The police tried to move them on but pretty soon, through sheer force of numbers, they had to give up. Success made people heady and all around you could see them dancing and hugging, sharing Class As and alcopops, as the music got louder and the pavement shimmered like the desert in the hottest summer in London in years.

  In front of the Snakehouse the first to arrive had staked out their territory and were guarding it as fiercely as any cat. Top real estate were the four paving slabs that Frankie Rose had puked on, where some hard-core girls were holding vigil and picking out, like nightclub bouncers, who would or wouldn’t be allowed to get close enough to look. Hawkers were already squeezing through the crowd selling souvenir posters with a photo of the Sacred Paving Stones; the words ‘Love Stain’ were written below in cutout Sex Pistoly letters in the style of Frankie’s last album sleeve.

  Those people who accuse Britain of lacking enterprise can’t have seen the speed with which they got the Dead Frankie merchandise out on the stre
ets. Gone were the usual imitation sixties Indian tat, the fake Afghan jackets and velvet loons, and in came the Frankie mugs and prayer rugs and iconic T-shirts and those great souvenir pens that you held upside down and Frankie’s baggy trousers fell off. By the end of the week there were already three new Frankie Rose biographies in the shops. It made you wonder: Were there really people who could write 75,000 words in less than forty-eight hours, or had the authors got a library of celebrity books ready and waiting on the outside chance one of them might pop off? Or maybe the three of them had got together and hatched a plot to kill Frankie and rake it in. Now, that was one the conspiracy theorists hadn’t come up with yet.

  Though a quick trawl through Google uncovered just about everything else. There were no end of Murder vs. Accidental Overdose debates—the majority opting for the former, with Pussy and Leo Nympholeptic heading the list of suspects. Although Frankie wasn’t really dead, of course, he just wanted to get away from Pussy/Leo/the music business, and right now he’s living in Tuscany/Switzerland/the Australian outback/backpacking with hippies in Peru. Frankie had been spotted in the frozen food section at Ralphs Supermarket in Hollywood and in the baked goods department of Waitrose on Holloway Road—first instance alone, second accompanied by five men dressed like Reservoir Dogs. Someone claimed to have accosted Frankie in the duty-free shop on the Dover-Calais ferry and told him he owed it to his fans to go home. Several girls in several locations several thousand miles apart claimed they’d spent the previous night shagging him and said we would believe them in nine months’ time.

  I printed off a page from the KillEmAll site, which offered helpful instructions on how to top yourself in the exact same way as your favorite star. Right above Kurt Cobain (quantity of heroin; size and gauge of shotgun; where to lie down; head position; angle of shooting arm) and Mama Cass (precise ham sandwich recipe) I found Frankie Rose and the formula for “John Belushis”—cocaine and heroin speedballs, apparently his drug of choice. When I ran into Leo Nympholeptic at the Underworld a fortnight later, it looked like Frankie had bequeathed him his drug dealer. He was staggering about the place, bumping into people—girls mostly, I noticed—before heading for the bar at the back. He was staring at himself in the mirror when I dragged over a stool and sat down next to him. When he saw my reflection he said, “You’re a journalist, aren’t you. I saw you taking notes.”