“What the fuck is up with Leo?” Ian asked. His pants were around his ankles; a young woman’s head bobbed in his lap.
“LSD,” said Angus, unscrewing the cap from a whisky bottle. Lead Singer Disease.
“Can I have that when you’re done?” said Kevin, the drummer. Angus held up the bottle. “No, that.” Kevin nodded at the guitar player.
“I mean what’s with that fucking jacket? It looks like shit.”
Angus nodded. “He looks like a girl.”
“It’s like he’s not even part of the band anymore,” said Ian. The girl lifted her head, took a lipstick out of her purse, and put it on without looking in the mirror. Kevin gestured for her to come over. “I mean, all this shit with his own dressing room. Locked doors all the time. The only person he spends time with these days is Murray.”
“Maybe he’s turned queer,” said Kevin, unzipping.
“The Judas Priest circa 19-fucking-80 jacket doesn’t hurt your argument,” said Angus, taking a long swig and burping.
“We should insist on a band meeting,” said Ian. “Get everything out in the open.”
Leo, his curves concealed by a thick, loose sweatshirt, unlocked the dressing room door and peered along the corridor. At one end two groupies in tight blue spandex, chained together, stared at him. Leo stared back, for a long time, but without lust. If he was looking at anything, it was for whatever part of himself could be found in them. He came up blank and turned toward the exit. Murray leaned out and beckoned them into the room.
“Hey, Murray, look at this!” shouted Leo. In the dressing room in Detroit, two days later, he’d found an old copy of the National Enquirer, and he was pointing at an article in it. It was a report on the increasing amount of female hormones in urban American water supplies. “Look. There was a study done in Kansas City—motherfucking Kansas! That’s where we were! All these women taking the pill and pissing—that’s it! I’ve been drinking female motherfucking piss-hormones!” Leo made a face and put down his bottle of mineral water.
“But you haven’t been drinking tap water,” said Murray, calmly.
“But the fucking caterers are cooking in it, washing the food in it. You should have insisted they use bottled water. If you’d been doing your job properly—“
It was against all the laws of nature for a tour manager to hit a star, but by Christ, did he feel tempted. “From what I’ve read,” he muttered, “there are more hormones in American meat.” By that night, Leo was a strict vegetarian—the reason Murray posited for the nagging stomach cramps that Leo had started to complain about.
Leo’s breasts were blossoming on his new healthy diet. Since he’d stopped drinking, he’d slimmed down, so they looked even bigger. Leo thought his voice was becoming thinner too. ‘That’s it!” he announced as Murray appeared in his hotel room one night to put on the bandage—Leo had promised at the band’s “openness” meeting not to lock them out of the dressing room anymore, but he had yet to mention the mammaries. “I’ve had it. I’m out of here,” he said. Zipping the leather jacket over his naked chest, he picked up his suitcase—for the first time since he’d been on tour—and headed for the door. Murray blocked his path.
“Wait! MacFee’s on his way over. He’ll sort it out.”
Clive MacFee, Leo’s manager, was in Florida, where he’d been busy closing a deal on a substantial waterside property funded by his share of The Nympholeptics’ hits. He was not happy at having to fly out to baby-talk his client, even if the plane ride wasn’t exactly long; that was Murray’s job. But the tour manager’s calls had become increasingly agitated: MacFee’s golden egg was sprouting ovaries. From what Murray said, Leo would be looking for work as a lap dancer if someone didn’t do something quick.
“Leo wants to pull the tour,” Murray had told him. “Impossible,” MacFee had answered. “The promoters would sue the bollocks off of us—apart from which, the album’s heading for number one in the States and I’m not having it fall back now. Call a fockin’ doctor.”
“I have. Three of them.”
“Then call afockinother one. What do they say it is?”
“No one fucking knows.”
In Leo’s room, Murray’s cell phone chirped. “It’s MacFee. His plane has landed. He’ll be here in twenty minutes. He’s got a specialist with him,” he repeated every line to Leo, who was trying to dodge past him, badly, like a girl playing football. “He’ll take care of everything. He’ll know what to do,” he soothed, leading Leo back to the bed, helping him off with his jacket like a child.
MacFee blustered into the lobby, ignoring the concierge, still talking on his phone to Murray as he got into the crowded lift, the doctor three yards behind. The tour manager opened the door.
“Oh my good fockin’ God,” MacFee spluttered when he set eyes on his singer’s B-cups. The doctor opened his bag and sat on the edge of the bed. The manager could not stop gawking.
“What the fuck am I going to do?” whimpered Leo. “I’m a worm, a cockroach. I’m a motherfucking freak.”
“Don’t talk like that,” admonished MacFee. “You’re a fockin’ star. Top of the charts in the U.K. Thundering up the fockin’ charts over here. Top five next week. Number one, I fockin’ promise you, by the time you get to L.A.” The last date on the U.S tour.
The doctor took out a hypodermic. “I’ve sedated him,” he told Murray and MacFee as Leo dropped off to sleep like a baby. “He’ll be out until morning. We need to calm his system down. He appears to be suffering an acute stress reaction.”
“Ain’t no one more fockin’ stressed than me and I’m not sprouting tits,” growled the manager.
“People react to stress in very different ways,” said the doctor, patiently. “An imbalance in the endocrine glands is one of them.”
“Can’t you give him testosterone shots or something?”
“I think it will take more than that,” said the doctor. “What he needs is to be isolated from all potential sources of tension.”
“Well, right now,” said MacFee, “he can’t. “After Los Angeles he can have some time off—I’ll book him in somewhere, get it dealt with. When the tour’s finished he can do what the fock he wants—get a job as Madonna’s fockin’ body double for all I care at this present moment in time. Or have ’em off—there’s always surgery. Thank fock there’s no gig tonight.” He looked over at Leo, sleeping peacefully. “I can rely on your cooperation,” he addressed the doctor and Murray jointly, “and, it goes without saying, your discretion. Do whatever you have to do, but read my lips: The show stays on the road.”
“In his present mental state, that might be difficult,” said the doctor.
“Then we’ll get him a fockin’ shrink,” barked MacFee. “A lot of bands have them on the road these days. Arrange one and send me the bill.” He looked at his watch. “I’m out of here—meeting in Miami. You finished?” he asked the doctor as he strode out of the room. As he did so, a door down the corridor opened and Ian emerged.
“Clive,” he said, “am I fucking glad to see you,” and proceeded to list their grievances with the singer: They felt left out; he did things without consulting them; it didn’t feel like a band anymore; something had to be done about the awful fucking jacket he’d taken to wearing—it made him look like a girl. Clive put his arm around the guitarist’s shoulder, whispered all manner of flatteries and promises: Leo was going through some changes, and it was important to bear with him; in two weeks’ time the tour would be over, and there would be time off and big money; their album would be the U.S. number one. “Leo needs you fockin’ guys more than he ever did,” said MacFee, steering him back to his room. “You’re a band. Be there for him. If you won’t do it for him, do it for yourself. Do it for me. Ian, thank you. Without you there would be no band.” The manager stiffened up, as if to hold back tears. Ian did too. “I’ll see you in L.A. for the fockin’ celebrations.” MacFee smiled and gave him the high five. “Hey! Nympholeptics! Number one!”
/> Back in Florida, the manager was poring through a pile of press clippings, frowning. The latest live reviews were lamentable. “To drive the dictator General Noriega out of Panama,” wrote one, “they played AC/DC at full volume. To prise the cult leader David Koresh out of Waco they played the sound of rabbits being slaughtered. If they want to flush Osama bin Laden out of the caves, they’d only have to broadcast videos of The Nympholeptics at the Premier Auditorium and he’d come crawling on his belly with his hands up. The band’s frontman, who pranced about the stage like a drag artist, sweating heavily and constantly feeling himself up”—Leo had been scratching himself as unobtrusively as possible; the bandage made him itch—“sounded so much like a battered baby seal that you half expected a dancing band of Canadian fur trappers to come out onstage. A dancing band of Canadian fur trappers would certainly have had more charisma and star quality than this overrated, underachieving band.”
The manager thumped out a phone number. Murray picked straight up. “What’s going on out there?” Leo, Murray told him, was worse than ever. He had fired the shrink—said he didn’t trust her. “Her eyes are too far apart—like sheep’s eyes,” he’d said.
“He had a problem with her fockin’ eyes?” MacFee roared.
“We’re not talking Jackie Onassis,” said Murray, placidly, “we’re talking close personal friends of her ears.”
“But what the fock did she say was wrong with him?” MacFee thundered.
Her initial theory had been cocaine paranoia. A common problem with rockstars, she said. The bigger they got, the more their cocaine intake increased, which inflated their ego and sent it into battle with their id, the innate, unconscious feeling that they didn’t deserve what they had and that it would be snatched away from them like a toy from a baby. Since, in order to become successful, artists suppressed these insecurities, she went on, they would either come to the surface as an obsession that someone or something was trying to stop them from doing as well as they could, or they themselves would do something, subliminally, to make their deepest fears come true. Get sick, for instance, or break a leg.
“But why the motherfuck would I grow tits?” Leo asked her.
“Unresolved issues with your mother,” said the psychiatrist. “She tried to stop you becoming who you are, and those feelings are exacerbated by cocaine use.”
“But she didn’t try to stop me,” Leo protested. “She was great.”
“So great,” the shrink went on, like a windup toy that hits a wall and simply bounces off in another direction, “you want to be her. You’ve produced a hit album, Leo, but that’s nothing compared to what she, a woman, has produced. You. Whatever you’ve achieved, your unconscious knows came out of her body. The body that yours, Leo, is trying so hard to duplicate.”
That night, when Ian and Angus went backstage to the catering area, they found Leo chasing the cooks, the wardrobe girl, even the on-tour gardener he’d had Murray hire to attend to his pots of fresh organic herbs, all in the direction of the exit ramp. “No more motherfucking women!” he was screaming. “Get ’em out of here!”
“What’s going on?” said Angus.
“Leo wants all the chicks fired,” said Kevin, who was sitting at an oilclothed folding table, pouring HP Sauce on a plate of sausages.
“Who’s going to do the ironing then?” the bass player said.
“He says chicks are bad voodoo on the road,” said Kevin.
“He just can’t stand them,” muttered Ian, “because they’ve got bigger tits than him.” The guitar player stood close enough to them onstage to see them bouncing under Leo’s thick leather jacket.
“Only just,” said Angus. He’d seen them too. Their frontman, Angus and Ian had decided at their postshow drinking sessions, was undergoing a sex change; he probably planned to get the snip in L.A. They were touring with a trannie—which at least accounted for the mood swings. Once Clive came by with their money at the end of the tour, they planned to bail.
“I’ve found another shrink,” Murray told MacFee before the manager hung up. “A male one. Comes highly recommended.” He named some famous names.
Dr. Robert Mason was a big bear of a man: chest hair sprouting out of his shirt collar, deep, stentorian voice. “Why me?” had been Leo’s first question to him.
“Did you ask yourself that when you became a rockstar? Why me?” the doctor boomed back. “Because you’re special.”
Leo took to him right away.
“Do you think I should have sex?” Leo asked him. He felt he could talk to Bob.
“Do you want to have sex?” asked the shrink. “And who do you want to have sex with? Your girlfriend?” Leo shook his head. Phoebe was planning to meet him in Los Angeles in a few days’ time. He couldn’t even bear thinking about it.
“These ‘groupies’ you said you had sex with. Can you tell me about them? How would you describe your sexual relations?”
“You mean what do I do?” said Leo, and he couldn’t help smiling sentimentally as he recalled the countless compliant girls he had commanded where to put what orifice and what to do with it when it got there. The doctor listened, unshocked, sometimes nodding sagely, grunting to himself academically at various descriptions of urination and cigarette burns.
“When you get big—as big as you are, Leo—you’re like a supertanker that just keeps right on going. It takes no notice of what’s going on around it, because it doesn’t have to.”
“I think I understand what you mean,” said Leo.
“But in your case it’s all happened so fast. Things can still get to you. It’s growing pains, Leo, just growing pains. But back to sex—would you call yourself a breast man?”
“I would,” Leo confessed. It was as good as a diagnosis.
“Next time”—the doctor closed his notebook and shuffled back his chair—“we’ll talk about disassociation. You turn on the TV and you see yourself on the screen, or you’ll open a magazine and the article you read is about you. You cease to live in your own body. It’s a kind of public contamination. In our next session we’ll figure out a way to decontaminate you.”
After a week of twice-daily meetings with Bob, Leo was starting to feel pretty good about himself. When he went to bed at night and his breasts flattened out, he could dream they weren’t there at all. The tour was nearly over, he could go home, his mum would look after him, it would all be all right. “You can look at it,” Bob had said, “as an advanced form of homesickness. You’ve been away for so long that home has become an abstract. Before this, did you ever go on vacation with your buddies? Then you know what I mean when I say that a different set of rules apply. There’s a different kind of normality. This tour is an extension of that.”
Then, on the morning of the Bakersfield show, one month after the protrusions had first appeared, Leo was awakened by a deep, gnawing ache in his chest and a stabbing pain in his stomach.
“You are obsessing,” Bob said when he complained about his bloated belly and tender breasts. “But it is not your fault, Leo. Being obsessional about your body is a by-product of your job.”
“But it hurts. “Leo very nearly cried. He had been feeling tearful all day. He had a killer headache. “And Phoebs is coming tomorrow. And I’ve still got these.” He cupped his hand under his heavy mounds.
“What is the worst that could happen, Leo?” said the shrink. “I want you to think about that. Since fighting this thing hasn’t helped, try the opposite. Go with it. And by the time you’ve discovered what is going on you might even have lost the urge to fight it. You never know—you might actually like it. Phoebe might like it too.”
That night, just before the encore, Leo was doubled over by a fierce pain in his gut. He stumbled offstage into the dressing room, clutching his stomach, while the band stayed on, applauding the audience, in the hope of nurturing their enthusiasm to reciprocate. A halfhearted, slow hand-clap for more gathered pace around the arena. Leo sat on the toilet, in a cold sweat. The wound in his g
roin, which he thought had healed, had reopened, red and swollen. There was blood trickling down his thighs. He rested his head against the cool tiled wall and wept.
The Nympholeptics’ tour bus smelled of cigarettes, beer, empty Coke bottles, and men. The stickers on the windows read “I Brake for Blondes” and “Wanted: Meaningful Overnight Relationships.” As it cruised down the freeway toward Los Angeles, Kevin dozed peacefully in his bunk, while Ian and Angus were watching Fawlty Towers videos for the umpteenth time. Leo was lying in the back, on the double mattress, stretched out on his side, his head in Murray’s lap. Murray was smoothing his hair. The white bandage was now wrapped around his groin, stained with blood. Leo’s pale face, never handsome, had become sweetly mournful. Transfigured somehow. To an outsider chancing upon them, it might have looked like they were reenacting Michelangelo’s Pieta.
Sometimes in life something happens, a moment arises, an opportunity for if not complete understanding of what it’s all about, then at least some kind of clarification. You’re on one side of a line and you step into another. This may well have been one such moment.
Leo stared straight ahead and let it pass.
DIET COLA CANCER
Since you ask, yes, I did see her again, a couple of times as it happens. First time was back when Frankie Rose was still alive and organizing that Pussy tribute album. He invited me to drop by the studio to check out how it was coming along, and that’s precisely what I was doing when Pussy walked in.
She had this strange way of moving—gliding almost, like a hot-air balloon cut off from its moorings. And one of the places she’d drifted, judging by the proprietary way she sidled up to him, was into Frankie’s bed. All the while that the music played and Frankie scooted about on his chair, sliding the levels up and down on the mixing board and pointing out favorite parts, Pussy just sat there saying nothing, face blank, like she was contemplating something brain-numbingly dull but a darn sight more interesting than you or I could ever dream of being.
Too Weird for Ziggy Page 9