Too Weird for Ziggy

TOO WEIRD FOR ZIGGY

Also by Sylvie Simmons:

Serge Gainsbourg: A Fistful of Gitanes

Neil Young: Reflections in Broken Glass

Sylvie Simmons

Copyright © 2004 by Sylvie Simmons

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review. Any members of educational institutions wishing to photocopy part or all of the work for classroom use, or publishers who would like to obtain permission to include the work in an anthology, should send their inquiries to Grove/Atlantic, Inc., 841 Broadway, New York, NY 10003.

Published simultaneously in Canada
Printed in the United States ofAmerica

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Simmons, Sylvie.

Too weird for Ziggy / Sylvie Simmons.

    p. cm.

eBook ISBN-13: 978-1-5558-4736-4

1. Great Britain—Social life and customs—Fiction. 2. Rock musicians—Fiction. 3. Music trade—Fiction. I. Title.

PR6119.I46L56 2004
823′.92—dc22                                                                              2004052318

Black Cat
a paperback original imprint of Grove/Atlantic, Inc.
841 Broadway
New York, NY 10003

Pussy

Greetings From Finsbury Park

A Happy Ending

Love Stain

Rhinestone Tombstone Blues

Close to You (Cover Song)

From a Great Height

And Alien Tears

Allergic to Kansas

Diet Cola Cancer

I Kissed Willie Nelson's Nipple

Spitting Image (The '80s Retro Track)

Too Weird for Ziggy (A Dream of Holes)

Jeremiah 18:1–10

The Audience Isn't Listening

Baudelaire's Dog

Autograph

Patron Saint of Amputees

I can't say I liked her, though I talked to her enough times, every time a new album or a tour came along. And then she disappeared, simply dematerialized. I don't think I'd thought about her until that night at the Conrad.

She had, like a lot of stars, a very big head. Not big as in arrogant, big as in oversized for her body like a doll, or like one of those space alien photos in the
National Enquirer
. A feline face, but like a child's drawing of a cat: big round head, big almond eyes, exaggerated cheekbones, and a pink marshmallow mouth neatly outlined and filled in like in a coloring book. And this tiny body. Like she'd had everything below the neck liposuctioned and injected into her lips.

Editors would send me along for the “female perspective,” since the male journalists would simply worship and leave puddles on the floor. I'd do the hey, we're both girls, you can trust me trick, you know, bind us together with some sort of spiritual fallopian tube. But she'd look about her vaguely like a queen, or like a cow grazing, stare straight past me like her poster must have stared from the walls of teenage bedrooms up and down the country past all those hot-faced boys with their spongy Kleenexed palms. She'd recite her answers in a voice as dull and flat as Holland, and my mind would wander and I'd glance guiltily at the tape recorder to see if it had switched off too.

People called her Pussy and it pissed her off. She wasn't Pussy, she'd say, bored and sullen. Pussy was the
band. She was the singer. The voice of a child explaining something to its mother. They'd sent out promo baseball caps saying “Pussy Is a Group”—Terri Allen and four men. She lived with one of them, Taylor, the guitar player. He was small and dark with bright eyes black as T-shirts and a paddle nose like a little tit ironed on top. He looked like what you'd get if you let Roman Polanski and Michael Hutchence go to the Saturday night dance unchaperoned. His hands were tiny; he had to have his guitars custom-made to fit them. He'd sit in on the interviews off-piste, observing, saying nothing, merely exuding a practiced intensity, flopped like a noodle over the arm of a chair. He formed the band, he wrote the songs, he produced the records, and he fucked everything that didn't crawl away fast enough.

One time I watched him pick up the publicist—during the interview, right in front of both of us, while Pussy sat there like a still life, balancing that huge head on her neck by an enormous act of will. He gestured the woman out and down the hotel corridor. I heard another room door open and close. The publicist told me—a long time later, after he'd fired her for contradicting him and replaced her with some guy who used to run the fan club—that he didn't say anything, just pulled up her dress and put his hand up her. She said she felt like a ventriloquist's doll.

At the outset he'd make a point of speaking to the press before Pussy did, meeting the boys—it was usually boys—in the bar. He'd stroke their brains, flatter their intelligence, wrap the whole stupid-kewpie thing in a web of irony and convolution, letting them feel in on an intellectual joke. He'd remind them of the arty band he had before he
found her working as a waitress in a cocktail bar. Then primed, male-bonded, male chauvinist Pygmalions, they'd be led in to talk to her. And she'd chafe at their assumption that she was his creation, that he was the screenwriter, the director, the whole fucking play, that she was just the bottle-blonde stuck up front to look pretty. Yet all the while she sat straight in her chair and mouthed his lines through her pink-pillow lips. And they'd nod sympathetically, leaning toward her, within lipstick-sniffing distance of the dreamy face, the disheveled, bleached hair, the colossal goddess head on the little girl's body, small and curved with a huge sphere on top, like that roll-on deodorant with the big wide ball.

Now that I think of it I do remember seeing something, in the whatever-happened-to section of a music magazine. The writer couldn't answer and threw the question open, and letters came in—one from the old drummer, self-publicizing a project he was doing with Philip Glass, and one from some New Yorker claiming he'd trailed her through Central Park. He said she looked like a bag lady, middle-aged and lumpy, and she was mumbling to herself the lyrics for a batch of new songs. He followed at a distance, he said, taking notes, and they printed this dreadful teenage poem about sex and murder that anyone could see the wacko had written himself.

Of course no one believed him, though I suppose it could have happened. You just wonder how someone, no matter how they've aged, even if their face and body have altered out of all recognition, how they can pass unnoticed among ordinary people when, at some point in their life, a hundred thousand boys have jerked off to their photograph
or gazed up at them in the spotlight from down dark in the crowd. Something like that must be tattooed all over you. It must leave the kind of mark that can't be covered up.

There was a bunch of us at the Conrad in a corner of the lobby over by the window, the rain sheeting down outside. Interviews were running late as usual, and by early evening there were seven or eight of us backlogged, bitching, drinking, running up the record company's tab. We were killing time telling old war stories and swapping gossip—just enough to swell your reputation, not enough to give the competition something to print. I'm trying to remember how the conversation got around to Pussy. That's it, there was a slime from the tabloids sitting with us, telling sick jokes about Freddie Mercury and AIDS. When they finally scraped him off the seat and took him upstairs for his interview, we all started talking about rock stars who'd died, and Pussy's guitarist came up.

They shot Taylor's funeral for a video for the tribute album. Fat, nasty paparazzi jostled through the crosses and stone angels for the best hanky-clutching celebrity shots. The place was black with rockstars; at least most of them didn't have to buy special clothes. Quite a production it was too. The coffin was shaped like a guitar case, according to his instructions, although they left out the window he wanted on top—so he could lie there and watch the goings-on, I suppose, silently, like he always had done; but no one fancied looking at a hundred and twenty pounds of mincemeat. It was a car wreck; quick but messy. Record company people, promoters, musicians played their parts professionally. Two of his girlfriends looked videogenically stricken, various
relatives looked lost and out of place. And the band, as they walked in, were self-consciously solemn. There would be a jam session later on.

The minister arrived. She walked beside him, a tiny figure in a short black dress and a black Jackie Kennedy hat with a veil that came down to just above her lips, which trembled as she stood by the hole in the ground scraping her thumbnail up and down the stem of the rose she held in her hand. Then everyone filed around the grave in choreographed misery, a whir of camera motor drives started up a rhythm, the minister's dusty old voice came in on lead, and as the coffin was lowered into the ground the first fat raindrop percussed onto the camcorder lens, blurring the picture. And that was that. Afterward I forgot all about her. We all did. That's the thing with this business, someone else always comes along.

Though I do recall seeing a photo in the papers. It was when they released the greatest hits album—this was years ago, Pussy had stopped doing press, but a New York photographer shot her walking down the street. She looked fuzzy and fragmented in the picture, grainy. Like those old newspaper photos of the Rolling Stones' ex-girlfriends when they'd moved on from methadone to menopause before fading right away. The photo seemed inverted. Her body was bloated and her face seemed smaller. She was biting her mouth; it looked as if she might have punctured her lips and the flesh had all run down her neck and settled down below.

So we're in the hotel lobby, empty bottles and glasses piling up on the low table, and the PR has come down to lead the next victim upstairs when this young guy who freelances
for one of the rock weeklies says he's just done an interview with Pussy. I missed the start—I was watching another journalist announce his arrival at the reception desk, and anyway, it's a well-known journalistic trait, switching off when someone's soliloquizing, figuring you'll catch it when you play the tape back later on. It's a habit, like people who use the video remote to try and fast-forward when it's the television, not a video, that's on.

When I plugged back in, he was telling how, after Taylor's funeral, Pussy had gone back to New York and lived there for a while with her old wardrobe girl. Then she came back to England, had an affair with the band's manager, Jack Mackie, and moved in with him.

“He was talking about putting something together with her—he'd hooked up with some musicians and written some songs that he thought would work great with her voice. He was one of those managers—you come across them now and then—who really want to be in the band. But she left him,” said the freelance. “And she left the music business. She said she wanted to be by herself for a while. That she was coming on for forty and it sounded ridiculous but she'd never in her life ever lived on her own. So she went back to New York, told Mackie she'd call him with her address and phone number, but she never did. She didn't contact anyone. She just fell off the map.”

“Hold the front fucking page,” sneered the guy from '
XO
, looking up from the new mobile phone whose display he had been studying with fascination ever since he arrived.

“Fuck you,” said the freelance, reddening. He slid his thin butt to the edge of his seat and leaned forward. The pair
stared each other down for a few moments until each was satisfied he'd won. Cheeks still hot, the freelance reached for his beer, identifying it from the dozen identical bottles littering the coffee table with the acumen of a mother bird locating its eggs. He threw his head back theatrically and drained the bottle dry.