Whoever Duggsy’s girlfriend might be, one thing was for sure: She was not going to be a timid girl with a flat chest on a mission from God.
Up all night and still we managed to get to the airport late, so I found myself stuck in a middle seat on the plane next to a stranger. Turned out he had been staying in our hotel. Somewhere over the Atlantic he told me about this strange thing that happened to him the previous night. There was a knock on his door. He was fast asleep, disoriented, and got up and opened it without thinking and the girl from the bar walked straight in. It was two-thirty in the morning, she was dressed, he wasn’t, apart from his underpants, and the etiquette of the situation left him at a disadvantage. And he could see she was upset. Plus I guess he saw something in her face, just like I did. She sat on the edge of his bed, back straight, hands in her lap, rubbing one thumb slowly around the other, while he went and grabbed the toweling robe from the edge of the tub. She told him she’d had a bad experience but she was all right now. She said her name was Jeanie and she that she taught English as a foreign language. She asked to use the bathroom and he couldn’t see how he could say no.
She was in there almost an hour. Finally he rapped on the door and asked if she was okay, scared to death at what he would find. Only she came out and with a little smile said, “I’m fine. Thank you, you’ve been very kind.” And then she left. He went back to bed but of course he couldn’t sleep, all he could do was lie there. It was only when he used the bathroom once he got up that he saw what she’d been doing.
It was the toilet roll. It was covered from beginning to end with neat handwriting. The whole thing, written on and wound up again. He’d flushed the first few sheets down the pan before he’d noticed it but he could just make out the heading on the mangled top-sheet: “Message From God.” He sat back down and tugged on the rest of the roll. There was a detailed account of when and where she got her epiphany, a long and intricate treatise on why she was chosen, some verses from the Bible—Jeremiah 18, he remembered it said, verses 1 to 10—and what appeared to him to be an original love sonnet in the Elizabethan tradition. On the last sheet was the message: “To the Maid, Rm 2021 Lexus Inn, from Miss Jeanie Jackson. Please deliver this to hotel guest Mr. J. Dugsdale (registered under the name Mr. Hugh G. Reckshun).”
“What did you do with it?”
“I left it,” he said. “I don’t suppose you have any idea who this Dugsdale character is?”
Back in London, eight weeks later Shoot 2 Kill were over on the U.K. leg of their tour. It was then that I saw her again, Wembley Arena, second row, eyes fixed on Duggsy like a zoom lens with a mouth on the end sucking him in. When I went backstage afterward to say hi to the band, she wasn’t there. Disgusting Trousers was, though, one hand clamped around a can of beer, the other patting a blonde girl’s arse. The blonde didn’t seem to notice. She had her sights on Rex, who’d just stepped out of his dressing room, and without a word to the roadie she charged in his direction.
“How do you do, my little friend from the fourth estate,” the roadie greeted me in that dreadful Monty Python upper-class accent. “You’ll simply never guess who was here. Remember that unfortunate young lady from the Long Beach show, the one so enamored of Mr. Dugsdale?”
“You mean Saint Duggsy of the Sacred Drumstick?”
“Indeed.”
“I saw her in the crowd,” I said. “Is she still on her mission from God?”
“She is.”
“And how is it progressing?”
“Well, Sir Duggs unfortunately was unable to talk to her. He’s got his mouth full”—he gestured toward a dressing room. “He’s back there with his wife du jour, Amber Lee.” Registering my blank look, he made the internationally recognized gesture of extremely large breasts and licked his lips. “Stripper. Sadly, Amber found her own way backstage so I was unable to grease her for him first. Well, must run, toodle pip,” he said, and sauntered off.
And that’s when I spotted her. She was sitting on a flight-case, talking to the wardrobe girl. They were laughing like old friends. “Look,” I said to Eric when he came out of the guitarist’s dressing room, three big cameras draped around his neck. She hadn’t noticed me. She was concentrating on helping fold away the sweaty stage clothes into their respective boxes. “Ah, the future Mrs. Dugsdale,” Eric beamed and began snapping at her with his long lens.
You come across a lot of nuts in this line of work—“superfans,” I believe is the polite term. More men than girls, it might surprise you to know, and normally it’s the singer who gets them, though I met a guy once who claimed that every time the bass player of Earthkwake had an orgasm no matter where he was he came too. But you can usually spot them a mile off, and little Jeanie Jackson just didn’t look like one. Too sensible. Though her blowing two roadies to meet a borderline psycho drummer under divine injunction doesn’t help my argument. Still, she seemed to have got in with the band’s wardrobe girl, which is a pretty smart move if you want to meet a band. And, I don’t know, she just intrigued me.
Then, a few days later, Eric showed me the contact sheet. The series of tiny black-and-whites clearly showed her reaching into the flight-case marked in big white letters “DUGGSY” when the wardrobe girl wasn’t looking and taking something out. A black book—a Filofax maybe. Next picture it’s vanished and she’s back folding things again.
There hadn’t been any good stalker stories in the Sundays for an age and I figured that Jeanie might make a good one: Suburban teacher falls for big-time star, ditches her fiancé, abandons her students—leaving them wandering the town like zombies babbling in bad pidgin English with nowhere to turn for help—takes all her savings out of the bank, and follows Duggsy around the world from show to show, sleeping on the floor outside his hotel room. You could write it without having to interview her. But just for the hell of it I had a go at tracking her down. I e-mailed the tour manager—the tour by now had moved on to Europe—but he said there had been no sign of her at any of the shows. She’d probably given up and gone home, he said, which is exactly what the band was going to do after its German dates. I checked out the Shoot 2 Kill sites on the Net—plenty of crackpot fans, but no Jeanie Jackson. Then, like any self-respecting rock journalist, I gave up, had a drink, and moved on to another story.
In the end she found me. Around nine months later—the same day the newspapers announced that Duggsy and his “dancer girlfriend Amber” planned to tie the knot in Hawaii—I got home to find a message from her on my answering machine. A chiming Southern voice I recognized at once as Jeanie’s said, “Hi, my name is Angie Carson. You don’t know me but John Dugsdale of Shoot 2 Kill gave me your number. There is something important I would like to speak with you about. I’ll try calling again later.” And she did—a short conversation in which “Angie” arranged to meet me the following afternoon at a coffee bar in Soho.
The place was one of those old Italian jobs that the Starbucks and Coffee Republics hadn’t quite managed to elbow out. Formica tables, thick white cups with coffee stains etched into the cracks in the china, and a clientele roughly divided between media types in black and Italian blokes who looked like they were on their tea break from a low-budget Mafia film. I was impressed that Jeanie knew the place; she must have been in town for a while. She was already there when I arrived, sitting in the corner clutching a coffee.
She looked different—her hair was blonder, or worn differently maybe, so that it accentuated her eyes. Though she still wore leggings and a big, loose, pastel sweater, on a gray day in a London café they looked less pathetic, less out of place than among the tight bright spandex and fake glamour of backstage. Anyhow, her air of vulnerability had gone—though she still looked very young, twenty-five tops, an American twenty-five the rough equivalent of a sixteen-year-old Londoner. When she saw me come through the door, she looked shocked. I guess when she’d called she’d had no idea that the person on the other end of the phone was the journalist she’d met in Long Beach; she evidently t
hought I was just another of the long list of girls in Duggsy’s life. I ordered a coffee at the counter and sat down opposite her.
“Thank you for coming” was all she said. She would not look me in the eye, just stared at her cup. I didn’t say anything—old journalist trick: I wanted her to be the one to break the silence—but she looked like she’d be content just sitting there forever swirling the coffee around and around. So I asked her why she called me. After quite a long while she answered, “It’s complicated.” I said Duggsy didn’t give her my number, she hadn’t even met Duggsy, had she, and she went pale. I’d figured out that the book she’d lifted from Duggsy’s case must have been his address book, and I confronted her with it. She confessed at once, almost gratefully, telling me how bad she felt about committing a sin. She launched into a long, convoluted explanation—like she was explaining one of the more complicated forms of English grammar to her students—which boiled down to the fact that they’re God’s commandments and if He wanted them broken, then what was she to do? I asked her if she’d been ordered to break any others and she smiled sadly and shook her head.
She took the book out of her bag and put it on the table between us, looking at it as if it would walk away from her and sort everything out by itself. I asked her again why she’d phoned me and she said she had been trying to get in touch with everyone in the book. She’d already managed to talk to a good three-quarters of the names—on the phone mostly; she only had so much money for airfares and very few of them wanted to meet up. What did she want from them? I asked, and she said she wanted to know what their relationship with Duggsy was like—no, really she wanted to know all about him: what he did, what he said to them, how he felt about things, what his life was like. Everything.
Most of them, as you’d have guessed, were girlfriends of the extremely part-time variety. Several had geographical locations and days of the week scribbled by their names, or what might have been codes for their sexual specialties. She phoned the numbers and told them she was the band’s personal assistant and that they were arranging a surprise party for Duggsy, to which of course the girl in question would be invited. They had given her the job of secretly finding out what Duggsy was into, his likes and dislikes, so they could buy him something a bit more personal than a cymbal and some gold-plated drumsticks. Occasionally she changed the story: She’d been hired to write Shoot 2 Kill’s official biography and Duggsy had specifically requested that she interview the girl in question about the details of their relationship.
She called Duggsy’s parents and told them her name was Amber—they’d seen pictures of their son’s fiancée in the papers but had never actually met her—and she charmed them into talking to her about him at length. They told her what he was like as a child, even told her his health problems. They sent her photos of themselves with Duggsy as a little boy. Armed with these, she was able to pass herself off to other people as his sister. And they believed her. Hell, I almost believed her too. And she even managed to persuade Duggsy’s ex-girlfriend Stephanie—the one who had taken out the child abuse suit—to invite her into the house. Jeanie had hidden a miniature Dictaphone in her pocket and planned to trick Stephanie into admitting on tape that Duggsy was innocent, then take the tape to the cops. But Stephanie kept on saying such dreadful things about him that she slapped her. Stephanie screamed. Neighbors called the police. Jeanie was thrown in a cell.
“The worst thing was they wouldn’t let me keep his picture with me,” she said. She took it out of her handbag. It reminded me of the pictures of rockstars that I’d had as a teenager, carefully cut from a magazine but creased and thin from frequent fingering and kissing. Duggsy looked like a tattooed broom in a baseball cap, a thin wet black ponytail flopping through the gap at the back. In the end Stephanie didn’t press charges—I guess she felt sorry for Jeanie too—and Jeanie was out the next day. She went back to the house that night and spray-painted the words “God alone judges” on Stephanie’s garage door.
But what I still couldn’t figure out was, Why Duggsy? After grilling her for the best part of an hour I was still none the wiser. No, she didn’t want to save him, she said; God alone could save. It wasn’t sex—she had a perfectly nice boyfriend, thank you—and it wasn’t looks; apparently the perfectly nice boyfriend beat him there hands down too. It certainly wasn’t the music—she said she loathed heavy metal. That first time we met in Long Beach was the very first rock concert she’d been to. At first she couldn’t bear it, but, baptized in the sweat that flew off Duggsy’s tattooed arms as he thrashed away at the drum kit, she knew—not that she had ever doubted Him—that God had been right. Her eyes, shiny with joy, gazed past me to some distant place where she and Duggsy would sit side by side on the Eternal Drum platform at the feet of the Almighty.
Poor delusional cow, I thought. I said my good-byes and good lucks and got the hell out, planning to e-mail Shoot 2 Kill’s management as soon as I got home to warn the band to be on nut alert. But I’m ashamed to say I didn’t get around to it. I only remembered a couple of months later, after Duggsy was all over the tabloids in a wedding suit and baseball cap. A baffled look on his face, he stood brideless under a flowered canopy next to a Hawaiian priest. The headline read: “Rock Bad Boy’s No Show Blow.” But it was the story on the front page of the next day’s papers that made me go cold.
They found Amber’s body in a cheap apartment hotel in Honolulu. A friend of hers had come by the office, the manager said, and paid for two weeks up front, cash—guy, girl, he didn’t remember, but his wife did and it was definitely a woman. His wife hadn’t seen her but they’d spoken on the telephone—she told her that they didn’t want maid service and that they needed to be alone because her friend had some big problems to sort out. She figured they were lesbians, not that it was any of her business. Then maybe that she did have problems and it was suicide. Though the fact that Amber was slit head to foot and skinned didn’t particularly point to that conclusion. I couldn’t stop thinking of Jeanie slipping into Amber’s flesh and turning up at the wedding, popping out at kiss-the-bride time like a little Russian doll.
I scrambled around on my desk and on the floor to see if I could find the piece of paper I’d written her phone number on. Finally I did, and I dialed. I was surprised that my hand was shaking. I had no idea what I would say. “We’re sorry,” said an android voice, “your call cannot be completed as dialed.” I called international directory; there was no listing for a Jeanie Jackson or Angie Carson in Long Beach or Los Angeles or the dozen other U.S. cities I persuaded them to try. Nothing. I called Eric and got his answering machine. Then I called my editor. He asked me if I’d heard the news: Duggsy had been taken in for questioning; with his history of violence against women, it was no great shock.
A couple of years later, I was back in Long Beach, this time to do a story on Wet Dream. Same old arena; different roadies handing out passes after the show to girls. Backstage was smokier than Keith Richards’s lungs and Wet Dream was busy doing the old grip-and-grin, obligingly wrapping tattooed arms around men in designer jeans and logoed jackets who worked for the record company, radio, and TV. A balding promo guy who’d found just enough hair to drag back into a ponytail was hurling superlatives at the band. “That was the greatest, man. You were kill. Fucking brilliant. You guys kicked serious ass.” They’d have kicked him off of Spinal Tap for overdoing it. Backstage really is the most boring place in the world. I looked around for the iced-beer bin and grabbed myself a bottle, then slipped out past the impenetrable crowd of freeloaders protesting that their name most definitely was on the VIP list and roadies running about with equipment. I sat with my beer on a box by the truck-loading bay, welcoming the cold rush of air through the open door, until a crew member came over and ushered me off.
“Wardrobe!” he yelled. “How’re we doing there? Any cases ready to go? What is the new girl’s name?” He was asking me the question, as if by mere intuitive femaleness I should know the answer. “I can’t kee
p up with them. Just got used to the last one and she gets pregnant and fucks off.”
“Hey there.” The tour manager came striding over to me, waving a sheet of fax paper at me and smiling. We’ve bumped into each other backstage off and on for years. “Don’t say I don’t give you anything.” He handed me the fax, and under the management’s letterhead I read: “Dear Harry, Effective next Tuesday, 25th, Aaron Pike in the dumper, Duggs Dugsdale in. Official press release out Friday. Don’t let it drive you to drink. Mitch.”
“Duggsy of Shoot 2 Kill is joining Wet Dream?” I gasped. “Is he out then?” Last I heard he was still in pokey—got six months in Stephanie’s domestic abuse case. He’d never been charged with Amber’s murder, though. No one had.
The tour manager nodded. “Certainly is. A new man, I believe,” he said, rolling his eyes as he took back the fax. “Oh well, I’d better get busy ordering up the video booth equipment.” When I looked askance he added, “Duggsy’s new hobby. You don’t want to know. But just in case, as I can see from your eyes, you do, it encompasses the Dugsdale holy trinity of girls, cameras, and onanism. Right, back to work. Stay out of trouble.” As he turned to go he shouted over to the roadie, “The new girl’s name, as I’ve told you a dozen times already, is Jeanie.”
“Wardrobe, ready to go!” a sweet, bright Southern accent called.
THE AUDIENCE ISN’T LISTENING
“You’re not listening.”
She was. She just didn’t give a fuck; she had things of her own to worry about. She lay on her back on the super-king-size bed like an effigy, eyes closed, hands across her chest. Adam sat on the edge of the bed, smoking a cigarette. A tear in the corner of the blackout blind let in a clot of smoggy afternoon sun that spotlit the guitar propped in the corner. There was something childish about his self-absorption; there was nothing maternal about her. Her big fake breasts were as hard as her heart. She knew what he was going to say anyway. Ants.
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