Too Weird for Ziggy

by Sylvie Simmons

  “Help yourself,” I said, instantly regretting my generosity when she went straight for the News of the World. I didn’t think she’d find the cover story as entertaining as I did. But I was wrong. Pussy devoured the tale of Spike’s affair with the young girl she’d thrown the glass of Coke at with complete delight. She shrieked at certain passages and read her favorite bits aloud.

  “Did you see this?” She put on a dumb Valley Girl accent and read, “‘I am not what you would call a shrinking violet, but when Spike first stood before me naked I was alarmed! I had never seen anything like it. He was enormous! Hung like a horse.’ A horse? What was the poor child on? The man needed tweezers to jerk off. Oh, hello—” The waiter had just arrived with our drinks. She looked up at him sideways, through her eyelashes—the old Princess Diana trick; men can’t resist it. You could see the effect it had on the waiter. “Be a sweetheart, would you, and put these on my account? I’ll take care of you later.”

  For over an hour we sat there and talked. Every now and then my brain would do a double take, wondering if this could be the same two-dimensional poster girl I’d interviewed all those years back, or the lost soul in the back of that car in London. Whatever that Shining Star bunch had done to her, Pussy certainly seemed changed. She was vibrant. A real talker, and a champion gossip—people told her things, and she had no qualms about passing them on. There was one story she had about—I’d better not say his name—a top ten singer who paid young boys to crap on glass-topped coffee tables while he lay with his head underneath. The kid lost his balance, the glass broke, the star got a mouthful of shit and splinters and was hospitalized, as Pussy nicely put it, with “chronic coprophilia.” The only reason I’m telling you this is to show that bodily functions did appear to still hold a fascination for her, whether or not all that stuff about her lost years in New York was true.

  There was something she said about Spike too that stuck in my mind. “Some people are born with the rockstar gene. Me, I never ever considered myself a rockstar, but Spike definitely did.” When I asked her what, in her opinion, a “rockstar” was she said, “Rockstars live in a world that kind of looks like the real world the rest of us inhabit, but it’s more like one of those parallel universes they had in the old sci-fi comics, where things look the same but have completely different functions. They have these huge houses they don’t live in, because they’re always on the road. They have fancy cars they don’t drive because they’ve always lost their license. They have wives they don’t make love with, friends who hate them, families who resent them, magazines they don’t read except to see if they’re in there. You know,” she added, “it was always very, very difficult for Taylor.”

  “Why?” I said. “It never appeared to me that he was finding things hard—quite the opposite.”

  “It was hard because Taylor wrote all these brilliant songs, but he’d written them for a woman to sing—see, that’s really where the problems came in. Because he needed a woman who would sing them exactly the way that he would—but of course any woman who could do that wouldn’t have been a woman, if you get my drift.”

  “So he figured he could go to some rock ’n’ roll IKEA and pick up a flat-pack of the perfect woman and just bang it together?” I said.

  “Kinda,” she said. “He used to go to this cocktail bar where I worked. And he used to sit at the table and just look at me. But not like the other guys there looked at me—more like observing. I said to him once it looked like he was planning to paint my picture, and he said yes, he was doing something like that. That I was his Dream of Art and Beauty Made Flesh.” She said it like each word was capitalized. “Other guys, it would have bothered me. I can’t explain, but with Taylor it didn’t. We became good friends. And when he put the band together—in the beginning it was this big joke that we were all in on and the rest of you weren’t; we would laugh about the Pussy calendars and Pussy condoms—we’d sit around, Taylor, Johnnie, Robbie, Chas, and me, coming up with the craziest merchandising ideas. Pussy credit cards where you’d earn Pussy miles that got you free entry to lap-dancing clubs if you were a guy. I can’t remember what we figured the girls would get.

  “I guess I didn’t realize at the time that Taylor wasn’t really laughing. As far as he was concerned, he was Pussy. At the end of the day, what it really came down to was he wanted to be me.”

  “Ach,” I said—the drink must have gone to my head, since I don’t normally do bad impressions of German psychiatrists in company. “Vat ve haff hier is a classic case of vagina envy.”

  “You know,” she said, laughing, “you could be right.” Then the smile disappeared. “But what can I say? I adored him.” We both stared at the bubbles for a bit. Pussy broke the silence. “I’ve been reading this book on Andy Warhol, Taylor’s favorite artist. There was something he said that stuck with me: When your personal philosophy runs out, you have to tread water for a bit because you just get fed up with being you. I can relate to that, I really can. But,” she said, brightening, “maybe it’ll be easier this time around. Because this time I’ve chosen it.”

  I could hear voices. Two gay guys—an Englishman in a sarong, an American in a tiny black swimsuit and two big hotel towels over his arm—were heading toward us, bickering. “May we join you, ladies?” the American asked as he shimmied into the water. The Englishman lingered on the edge. Ignoring us, the American continued his quarrel.

  “Oh do get real, honey, if you had her money and you looked like that, you wouldn’t do something? Even if you didn’t have the money!” He sank beneath the water and surfaced in a waterspout of bubbles. The Englishman rolled his eyes as he lowered himself in. “If I was Streisand I would Not Change a Thing.”

  Pussy tossed back the last inch of her margarita. I could sense our time was up. “Well, time to make a move,” she said. As she got up out of the water the Englishman put his hand over his mouth and screamed, “Pussy! Oh my God, oh my God, I don’t believe it. I am your biggest fan.”

  “Thank you.” Pussy smiled her honeyed smile, and the man melted. His companion looked unimpressed. “Well,” she said, using me as an excuse, “you must be shattered; go get some sleep. See you tomorrow?” Aware of our eyes on her, she sashayed slowly up the steps, curtsied to pick up her bathrobe, hung it over one shoulder, and walked to her apartment like a star.

  The Englishman was beaming. “I do not believe that I was in a Jacuzzi with Pussy; pinch me!”

  “She has not aged well,” muttered the American. “Did you see those thighs? That’s not cellulite, it’s a cry for help.” I gave him a withering look as I stepped over his legs and out onto dry land, but he probably couldn’t see it in the dark.

  I didn’t see Pussy the next night, nor the one after that—Rex pretty much monopolized my time. The third night, my last, I went to the Jacuzzi but Pussy wasn’t around. After that it was back into an economy window seat and heading for home.

  After a wait at the Heathrow luggage carousel that was almost as long as the flight, I wheeled my case unmolested through customs and stopped to buy a newspaper to read on the tube. It was a cold, gray morning, still making its mind up if it could be bothered to rain or not, and I was too tired and dispirited for anything more than a desultory look at the pictures; whatever they were they’d be an improvement on dingy suburbs and a Tupperware sky. Then, as the train disappeared underground, I noticed Pussy’s picture in the Showbiz section. It said she was being sued by the hand-job girl. “Diet cola,” the news item quoted the lawyer, “is known to contain potential carcinogens,” and his young client—currently undergoing cancer counseling and trauma therapy—was demanding five million dollars for medical endangerment and emotional distress.

  What was it the Ghost of Taylor said? Anyone can make a start in rock music, it’s the end that kills you. Another bundle of gray-faced women in black Puffa jackets and men in cheap navy suits surged unsmiling into the already-packed carriage. As they pressed into the narrow gap between the seats, the newspap
er was pushed into my face. The words and pictures blurred into a Rorschach stain which bumped and vibrated before my eyes as the train continued its long lurch east.

  I KISSED WILLIE NELSON’S NIPPLE

  “My grandma taught me how to fish, play poker, and find myself a husband. My other grandma taught me how to save my soul. Grandma One had six hundred record albums, all of them country music. She used to say, ‘Country music is life. If you love life, you’ll love country music.’ I despised country music. When she died she left me all her records. I took ’em down to the used record store, traded ’em in for some rhythm and blues records and an old saxophone. Never did learn to play it—my mother wouldn’t allow it—but I tell you, girl, with that old sax I learned to give the best blow jobs.”

  LeeAnn Starmountain clasps my arm with her redtaloned nails and smiles a big, wide, lacquered-lipped, country music star smile.

  “Then a friend called me up one day and said, ‘My husband’s left me.’ Around about that time I was having trouble with my man too.” A bluebottle circling our bar table lands in a puddle of spilled red wine and spins around, around, buzzing, on its belly. Without missing a beat, LeeAnn picks up the magazine I brought along for her to see where our interview will wind up and rolls it tight, lowers the tip toward the swimming fly, and—slowly, so as not to make a mess—scrunches it into bluebottle paté.

  “So we drove to the bar and got us something to drink. We drank all night. When we walked out of that place we couldn’t even stand. It was the worst weather in forty years and the snow was up to here. And there’s this old guy lying on his back in the snow—dead, drunk, I don’t know; maybe he’s just fallen over. So I say to my friend, ‘I’m gonna go check on the old guy,’ and I go shlooping back over to where he is—I made up that word, ‘shlooping’—and I say to him, ‘Hey, mister, d’ya need help?’ And my friend is laughing fit to piss her pants. And I say, ‘What?’ And then I see it, and I scream. He’s got his thing out, and he’s pumping away at it in the snow with his eyes closed—wonder it didn’t snap off in the cold. ‘Go on,’ my friend says, ‘help the man.’ And we’re both laughing and trying to run at the same time and getting nowhere, it was like sleepwalking.

  “Whenever I get seriously drunk I sleep three hours exactly and then I’m bolt upright, wide awake, and there’s nothing can get me back to sleep again. So I got up and went down to the kitchen and made some coffee. And I started thinking about that old guy back there and how he was dealing with all the shit life had thrown at him far better than any of us were. And that’s when I started writing country songs.”

  She’s a handsome woman—in her late forties, though she looks older. Mostly it’s what she’s wearing—everything too tight or too bright, too low-or too high-cut. That and the ozone-eating hairdo and trawled-on makeup that make her look like your mother trying to look sexy. If it weren’t for the American accent, she’d be right at home behind the bar of this down-at-heel London pub chosen simply for its proximity to the arena where she’s playing tonight. Funnily enough, four days ago I was in a different drab London pub, this time interviewing her ex-husband—her fifth if you’re counting, “Big” Willie Bean. It was just after last weekend’s Royal Command Performance, when LeeAnn opened the show with a cover of the Queen Mum’s favorite, “Stand By Your Man.” “Big” Willie was in the audience, and when LeeAnn hit the chorus all six-foot-four of him stood up and shouted, “Which one, you cheating bitch?” and they gently but firmly led him out. He told me later, “My ex-wife put the cunt into country.”

  LeeAnn was the oldest of seven girls. Judging by the photos they all looked like their mother, who looked like Tammy Bakker, all hairspray and thick black mascara and Jesus. Or, in LeeAnn’s case, two out of three. Her mother loved God, and LeeAnn hated her mother. She married her first husband on her sixteenth birthday to get away.

  “Tommy Moorhead was the cutest guy. Moorhead by name, Moorhead by nature. I was fourteen years old when we first did it. My mother would have killed me. The bad thing about having sex so young is you’ve got nothing to look forward to later. The good thing about having sex so young is it’s bad. “She laughs out loud. “I was fourteen and Tommy Moorhead was eighteen and he could say ‘I love you’ in more ways than a Barry White record. One night we were out walking in the woods and he stops and unzips and takes it out and asks me to touch it. Begs. Gets on his knees in the mud and the leaves and, tears in his eyes, pleads with me.” I’m suddenly aware that all this time, unconsciously, she has been running her middle finger and thumb up and down the tightly rolled magazine. Seeing me look at her hands, she misunderstands and says, laughing, “Oh I didn’t have these nails back then, honey!

  “Well, I could never stand to see a man cry, so—you’re not going to print this, are you? The worst thing is I’ve always had a real strong sense of smell, and Tommy’s thing smelled warm and damp, ammonia-y, kinda like a dishwashing cloth. Then, when he put the rubber on, it smelled more like dishwashing gloves. In the end I guess it was all so domesticated-smelling I figured I might as well marry him. It lasted, God help me, five years.”

  He was a lineman for the county. He drank and he beat her, then he cried in his beer. He played around. Her dog died. Class-A, straight-down-the-line country material. She packed her bags and went back to her mother, and her mother prayed and beat her some more and sent her back to him again.

  “Like I said, that’s when I started writing country music, which I’d do of a night when my husband was out working, or whoring. Days, I waitressed in the diner. One day somebody left a magazine behind. There was an article in it about California and sunshine, and I was sick to death of the cold, so I was like, Right, where do I buy the ticket? I hocked my saxophone and I was outta there. It was tough in the beginning, sure it was—L.A.’s a hard town, looks soft on the outside, but inside it’s as hard as steel. I saw an advertisement in a magazine that said, ‘Unusual extras wanted for film work,’ and since I didn’t look too much like the other folk in Los Angeles I figured maybe this was my break. Turns out they were looking for hunchbacks and Siamese twins.

  “But their office was right next to this big bar in Encino, name of Cactus Joe’s. Maybe you’ve heard of it? It got real famous; all the big country stars performed there. And they were the first bar in California to install a mechanical bull, way before that whole big Urban Cowboy thing started happening. Come on, you’ve never seen a mechanical bull? You haven’t lived, honey!” The way LeeAnn explains it, it’s like a tailor’s dummy you’d use if you needed to make a suit for a bison, that’s stuck on pistons that jerk it about. You get on, and you try to stay on, and if you’re a man and you turn the timer to ten and the grader to eleven you can banish any further thought of fatherhood.

  “Though there was none of that back when I first went to Cactus Joe’s. It was an old-fashioned, spit-on-the-floor, drink-two-bottles-and-piss-five kind of cowboy bar. But they had a job going, and a job is all I needed. I slept with the guy who ran the joint to make sure I got it, too, and then I wound up marrying him. Shit, I don’t know, girl, I guess I’m just a serial wife.”

  Cactus Joe’s was the first place Mrs. Wayne B. Marvin ever sang her songs in. Mr. Marvin wasn’t too hot on the idea at first, but his customers seemed to like it, and before long it was making him money and the place was getting a reputation. Dolly Parton put in a surprise appearance when she was playing in town and got up and sang with LeeAnn. After that, all sorts of musicians would show up. LeeAnn sang with them all.

  “The thing about Los Angeles—which is something you would never even dream about back home—is you’re meeting people all the time, and when you’re not meeting people you’re meeting people’s people, and then all of a sudden someone’s saying, ‘I’m gonna put you together with so-and-so,’ or they write down a number and say, ‘Give so-and-so a call and use my name.’ Which is how I ended up in a recording studio with a hotshot producer, making my first record. I don’t have the happiest memories o
f the experience. Wayne B. wasn’t exactly being the supportive husband, you know what I’m saying? I’d come home from the studio, four A.M., excited as a kid, and what would I get?” She jams her lips together. “The silent treatment. Maybe a grunt if his team had won. Have you ever felt like a severed leg, honey? Because that’s how it feels lying there all night, hot and prickly, adrenaline running, staring at the back of your man’s head.” I nod—sincerely, as it happens, making a mental note to deal with the unresolved issue that was sitting up smoking a cigarette in my bed when I left home an hour and a half ago.

  “Then Lee Starmountain came back into my life—the very same day, as it happens, that my third album went to number one in the country music charts. I hadn’t seen Lee Starmountain—yes, Starmountain is my real name, my married name, the third one, he got my money and I kept his name—not since I left home and came out to L.A. I was crazy for him once, big-time, but seeing as how he was a friend of my husband’s—my first husband, Tommy Moorhead, who didn’t even need an excuse to give me a beating—and since he was also pretty tight with Doreen Swensen, who was more than a little psycho and would have taken my baby blues out with a nail file if she’d seen how I looked at him, I left him well alone. A smart move, since he told me Doreen did do some unofficial eye surgery on some other girl after I left town—which is why, when we met up again, Lee Starmountain was a single man and Doreen Swensen was in the crazy house, dribbling down her nightdress.

  “Things had gone from bad to worse with Wayne B. I had no one to turn to, I was tired and worn out from the tour, it was hotter than hell, and I was feeling kind of homesick—I don’t know, for the cold, for real life maybe. It’s easy when you’re at the top to forget that the bottom’s full of shit, and you just start wanting to wallow in it again. I was in the limo coming back from the show when we drove past a truck stop. Lee Starmountain’s truck was in the parking lot. I’d know that truck anywhere—a huge red semi with a charred chrome muffler sticking up at the front, and mud flaps with chrome cutouts of nude girls, and the bumper sticker, ‘My Truck Is Like My Woman: Touch Her and You’re Dead.’ I told my driver to drop me off.