Too Weird for Ziggy

by Sylvie Simmons

  To look at them, they were harmless enough. No more or less obsessive than young men who paint their faces to look like dragons, cats, and spacemen and go to see KISS. But the brutality with which the elders fought for their own clique’s position as the chosen church of Karen, the underhanded tactics—the art restorers sneaking in at night to make subtle improvements to the image; the checks the wealthy divorcées sent to Karen’s brother (all of them returned) in the hope of buying his support; the private detectives hired to get the dirt on the leaders of the rival Karen Clubs—all made it pretty clear that these women weren’t to be messed with.

  In the lower ranks there was some interfaction squabbling, but it was mostly confined to the message boards: “This is SO not in the spirit of Karen,” someone or other would write somewhere—but no one had quite agreed what the spirit of Karen should be. The Americans and Australians seemed to focus on homemaking, low-fat recipes, and working out. The Japanese were into merchandise. The Lesbos franchise seemed to have better things to do than spend too much time online. And the Germans were heavily into analyzing the meaning of the lyrics—“‘Calling Occupants of Interplanetary Craft’: proof of extraterrestrial life or divine prophecy?”—and exploring the Antigone myth.

  “What if her brother had been her lover?” posed one club member.

  “You are one WEIRD SICKO,” came the answer. “And anyhow if he had it would not have been the same.”

  “Downey, California,” another replied, “is not Ancient Greece.”

  “Ah, but remember, the London Karen,” wrote a British visitor to the Berlin site, “WAS first discovered by an ancient Greek.”

  “Don’t mention those BLASPHEMERS,” wrote someone else.

  The Kentish Town branch had changed its name, on its door and website, to the High Kathedral of Karen. Its members were talking about organizing a synod, bringing in Karen Club reps from across the world for a Sacred Grilling. They invited the press—a little party with canapés and white wine, the stereo playing “Solitaire” and “Superstar” and “Sweet Sweet Smile”—and the three leaders gave a short speech. Then they turned up the volume and turned on the halogen lights above the refrigerated counter. A dark shape became visible under the translucent curved cover. The oldest member of the church, blushing at the honor and the attention, stood ready to lift it up. “Sisters,” she pronounced, “it’s yesterday once more.”

  Some of the invitees gasped. Several more laughed out loud. Lying in state underneath the lid was what appeared to be a full-sized mummy. A cat dozed in its hollow rib cage.

  “Karen Carpenter!” declared the spokeswoman.

  Of course, it wasn’t Karen; it was way too plump. But one club member was upset enough to call someone in from Christie’s to prove that it was a fake before she defected to the American division. As the weeks went on, she was followed by almost all of the Karen Club founding members, as it became clear that a younger crowd—fashionable, ironists—were taking over. For a while the Kentish Town Kathedral became the hip London club to belong to. Female celebrities groveled for membership. There was even talk of admitting men.

  But as lively as it was in London, the Tampa branch was getting the most attention. American TV reported marauding bands of Karenistas roaming the streets, causing terror among the unrighteous and abusing men. Blacked-out male faces told the cameras in trembling voices how they were captured and defiled, with Carpenters CDs (The Collection being a particular favorite) playing some unnamed part in their violation. Strident feminists would be given a few seconds to explain to the camera that since history began men have been making up stories of scary spinsters ganging together to emasculate them and create social havoc—usually getting cut off just as they started on about witches and fires. Three women were later arrested—a deceptively shy-looking vicar’s wife who’d joined up when she discovered her husband had been unfaithful, and two other new members she’d persuaded to help her beat him and his mistress up, remove their underwear, and wash them of their sin. “It’s what Karen would have wanted,” they told the police.

  The Karen Clubs each issued its own official statement. “The attempt by some misguided women to associate Karen with either violence or soiled undergarments,” said the American one, “is an abhorrence. They have been expelled and an investigation is under way.” Wrote Germany, “We apologize unreservedly. We are reviewing our policy toward unpopular groups.” “It wasn’t women,” said the Greeks, “it was gay men in Karen drag.” Said Japan, “There’s nothing wrong in traveling in groups. And you will know our members by their official Karen ID bracelets, on sale via our website.” The British site posted the picture of a large pink heart with Karen and Richard, smiling beatifically, head to head, inside. It was underlined with the motto: “Sisters and Brothers Love One Another.”

  The official Carpenters fan club disowned them all.

  Then something happened. Across the world, on the same day, at pretty much the exact same time, the paintwork on each of the Karen Club walls started to bubble. A dark excrescence collected at the bottom of the closed eyelids and moved up through the sockets, melting the paint as it went, leaving in its wake what looked like dark, piercing eyes. And a strange foam, some kind of fungus in the brickwork, started to appear between Karen’s lips. It dribbled slowly out of her smiling mouth and along her chin, trailing down her breasts, right to the bottom of the wall and onto the pavement. When they saw it, some of the club members danced and rejoiced. Others fell to the ground and wept. Within moments, the leaders posted messages on their websites. By some miracle they were identical.

  “By Her Holy Puke, Karen has declared herself sick of the deviancy of contemporary society and its music. Karen lives!”

  The church of Karen was united.

  I hadn’t looked in on the Kentish Town Kathedral for a while. But last night, on my way home from the Underworld, I noticed that the place was in darkness. The curtains had been removed and the windows and doors were boarded up. There was a contractor’s sign on the boards and a notice from Camden Council warning of dangerous falling masonry and telling us to keep away. Scaffolding buttressed the side wall. On closer examination, an occipital chunk had gone missing off the top of Karen’s head. In the yolky lamplight, she looked like a napalmed hard-boiled egg. There were a few wet, scraggly bouquets kicked into one corner by the builders; some still had cards attached. I bent down and picked up a black-and-white photo of The Carpenters from which Richard had been carefully cut out. “We love you, Karen,” someone had written on the back. “We want to be—close to you.” I propped it against the wall and moved on.

  FROM A GREAT HEIGHT

  Rex pissed off the balcony of the ninth floor of the five-star hotel onto the heads of two dozen fans. A news camera caught the whole episode. For several days on Argentina’s national TV channel, Rex pissed over and over, pissed from several angles, sometimes in slow motion, with grainy close-ups of his open zip, his laughing face, and the fans down below. The newspapers went crazy. They called for the stiffest punishments: detention, deportation, de-penisification. The Archbishop led a service praying for his soul. A popular talk show host took a match to the band’s record company promo photograph on prime-time television and told parents to do the same with their children’s tickets to the show. Then they’d run the clip again: his smug face, his insolent decanting, and a fifteen-year-old girl, chief pissee, holding up to the balcony a drenched and happy face.

  A tight-knit group of teenage girls had gathered, in tight tops and too much makeup, talking loudly, laughing, and tugging at their fishnet tights. Whenever someone clothed or coiffed rockishly appeared in the lobby, they’d squeeze out one of their number like a pimple, and she’d sidle over to the doorman and try unsuccessfully to chat him into letting her go inside to see if the band had come down. There were solemn boys in bandannas and cheap copies of the band’s black concert T-shirts with the bright-colored comic book designs cracking off. They hovered separately, clutching
magazine posters and records to be signed.

  She’d been there, on her own, holding vigil since dawn. At three o’clock in the afternoon God smiled on her, Rex pissed on her, and the others gathered round her, reverential, jealous, touching the wet hair that stuck to her face.

  When she came home the cat sniffed her, curious. In her bedroom she peeled off the piss-soaked shirt, held it to her face, then stored it safely in a plastic supermarket bag. Her hair was stiff and sticky and she pulled the longest strand into her mouth and sucked it. She stared at herself in the mirror. Her locket was piss-glued to the path between her small breasts. She took it off and laid it on her dresser and walked naked across the hallway to the bathroom. She had no desire to wash him off, but her mother would be home soon, her mother didn’t understand, her mother believed the crap in the newspapers, her mother did not want her to go to the show. There had been reports of riots all along the tour; when the band refused to come back for an encore in Brazil, the fans erupted, they root-canaled metal chairs and hurled them at each other. In Mexico City cops cracked heads and fans dripped blood like statues of Jesus. The first night in Buenos Aires was sold out, over fifty thousand people, but they’d put on another show and she’d managed to get hold of a ticket. She was so determined to go that her mother would not have tried to stop her. If she hadn’t seen Rex pissing on the news. On her daughter, on the television. Her daughter blissfully smiling as the man she’s paid a fortune to see stands on the balcony of the luxury hotel room that she has helped to pay for, and laughs as he pisses down on her from a great height.

  She didn’t see the news program. She was in her bedroom, making up her face and fastening her locket when her mother burst in screaming and calling her names. She dropped the locket. It fell open on the dresser, and a driblet of golden liquid trickled out. Her mother left and locked her in her room.

  She screamed and she cried, she prayed to God and to the magazine pictures of Rex that were taped above her bed. Her eyelids were puffed and quilted, her red mouth corrugated. She looked at herself in the mirror, and the pathetic picture she saw there made her cry even more. She beat on the door and called her mother all the filthy names she could think of. She made impossible promises to the Virgin Mary. But the door did not fly open, the walls did not tumble, night fell instead and she sat saggy on the bed, fat with tears, eyes swollen and fragile like eggs. She could hear the television in the living room, the happy babbling presenter, the insanely cheerful music. She wanted to switch on the light but would not give her mother the pleasure. Besides, she wanted to suffer more completely.

  She heard her mother’s footsteps walking to the kitchen, heard the fridge door open, knew from the snap of a ring-pull that she’d taken out a beer. She heard the footsteps coming toward her door, heard the key turn back in the lock, but still the girl did not move from the bed. She lay there like concrete, trying not to hear the TV in the next room, a singer crooning some yearny, clinging love song. She was swollen with love, raw with hatred, and utterly miserable.

  She had no idea how long she had been lying on the bed; the darkness and the crying had jumbled everything up. She felt feverish, wet and spongy. It was hard to see, but she thought she could make out people in her room. She recognized the doctor, their priest, her mother. Her mother was smiling, full of love and concern. She noticed she was lying on rubber sheets and that all around the bed there were troughs and the sound of running water.

  She felt liquid flowing off her body. It was seeping up from under her cuticles, bubbling from the mosquito bite on her wrist, beading the palms of her hands and her forehead and her feet. It streamed from her locket and down the gutter between her breasts and over her small round stomach and into the troughs below. The doctor was taking her pulse, liquid welling around his thumb and forefinger as they circled her wrist, and smiling at her mother, and her mother was smiling back and scooping tiny glass bottles in the trough, and people were filing in and out of the room looking at her respectfully, just as they had looked at her outside the hotel. And they all want something from her—a cure, a benediction. A young couple stand hand in hand beside the bed wanting a blessing on their forthcoming marriage.

  Then a clamor at the front door. Rex is standing in the doorway; photographers and news cameras wedge themselves behind him shouting questions and instructions to turn this way or that. His manager has his arms out, herding them off, smiling with his teeth, lying overtime, acknowledging their importance, promising them some undefined something special at some undefined later on. And he empties the bedroom, whispering conspiratorially to her mother as they go, “Should you wish to pursue a licensing deal for the product you propose to sell, Rex of course owns the rights to his own body products but I’m sure we could come to some arrangement acceptable to all parties.”

  And Rex stands beside her bed, his crotch just inches from her face, and drinks in her adoration.

  Back at the hotel, the PR is fielding phone calls from newspapers and magazines all around the world. Dressed in her business skin, her face taut with efficiency, we overhear her saying, “As of this moment there is no talk of charges being filed against Rex. If it did come to a court case, his defense would be simple—preshow pressure and the responsibilities of performing to a hundred thousand people over two nights led to a temporary paralysis of the central nervous system and a consequent inability to control his bladder. I’m sorry? It’s estimated at between three and three and a half ounces of urine voided. Hold on a minute.” She puts her hand over the mouthpiece and asks the tour manager, who’s just come into the room with the guitar player in tow, “What’s three ounces metrically?”

  The tour manager shrugs. “Fucked if I know.”

  “About a hundred milliliters,” says the guitar player casually, and they both look at him shocked, as if he’d just discussed the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle in depth.

  The PR repeats the answer and hangs up the phone. It rings again immediately. Outside she can see a clutch of trembling teenage girls gazing up at the ninth-floor balcony. “Yes, it has been analyzed. No, there’s no trace of illegal substances whatsoever. Just a moment.” She picks up a notepad; the red message light on the phone is flashing its impatience. She reads with no emotion: “Water, inorganic salts, creatinine, ammonia, urea, and pigmented products of blood breakdown. You’re welcome.” A caller from the New York Post wants a comment on the rumor that urinalysis showed the singer to be HIV-positive and that the pissees’ families planned to sue him for attempted murder. The PR sighs inaudibly, says something blandly quotable aimed at filling a column inch or two.

  A call from Britain. A voice smarmy and familiar asks if Rex would like to take the opportunity to make a personal apology to his fans through the pages of the Sun. The PR’s London office had faxed over the clippings from the British dailies an hour or so ago. A full page in the Sun showed Rex posed regally on the balcony, his eyes bright and steely with power and paranoia like the dictator of a small country, his hand just obscuring his open fly. The headline read: “WEE WEE’S BIG ADVENTURE,” with “Rock’s Bad Boys Say: Piss Off, Argies, Urine for It Now!” in bold type underneath.

  Before she gets to answer that Rex isn’t doing interviews, the guitarist grabs the phone and shouts down the receiver, “What’s your problem? You want us to be nice, is that it? You want us to say sorry, we’ll be good boys, we won’t do it again? Rock bands aren’t supposed to be fucking nice. That’s not what we’re here for. You go crazy if your politicians smoke dope or go to whorehouses, because that’s not their fucking job. And it’s not a rock band’s job to behave like politicians and be polite and nice and try and please everybody all the time. Rock’s supposed to be dangerous. These are dirty fucking times and we’re a dirty fucking band.” Grinning, he hangs up the phone and says to the publicist, “Who d’ya have to fuck to get a drink around here?”

  The PR talks the manager into talking Rex into holding a press conference. At the huge oak door of the President
ial Suite the PR stands with a clipboard, checking off the names of the handful of handpicked journalists, making sure they sign the contract agreeing that the story will be published only in the X issue of X magazine and not be resold or syndicated. The journalists argue spiritedly about press freedom, while privately bristling about the future earnings they’re going to lose as a result of not being able to sell the story to magazines that’ve been excluded for something unflattering they’ve written in the past. TV crews fiddle with their lights, plug their mikes into the PA system, and journalists hand back the signed papers and arrange their tape recorders on the table at the front. The band is already there, sitting in a row, but no one acknowledges them, everybody’s looking at the door to see if Rex is going to show. He’s late, as always, but they dare not start without him. Everybody waits and nobody complains.

  And suddenly Rex is standing in the doorway, his bodyguard beside him, and all eyes turn. He’s wearing tight black jeans and a cutoff white T-shirt with what looks like a road sign on it, a big red circle with a crucifix in the middle and a red line through it and the words “No Martyrs” written underneath. He’s in the mood for talking, which is unusual. Words gush out of him and the journalists stoop to scoop them up.

  “It’s not me that’s pissing on them, it’s authority that’s pissing on them. Have you looked at your fucking government lately, man? Or your police? Where were you and your TV cameras when the cops were beating the shit out of these same kids at the gig last night? You want to know what this band’s message is? It’s sticking in your face like a dick in a ten-dollar brothel and it’s saying: Question authority, man. It’s your duty to question the assholes in power. A fan’s love is total. It is totally without limits. The kids aren’t questioning what I did, it’s the assholes in power that are giving me shit. You people have always gotten me wrong. I don’t give a fuck what people say about me. Dirt sells; I’m not stupid, but there’s enough true dirt out there, you know what I’m saying? You could at least get the stories right. I’m sick of being someone’s fucking TV sitcom they think they can just switch on and off. I mean, how long was Jesus on the cross? He must have taken a piss, right? From a great height. Onto his disciples’ heads. And did they crucify him for it?”