Too Weird for Ziggy (14 page)

The waiter soon appeared with an enormous stemmed bowl of gray-green slush. He placed the tray by the pool, took out his lighter, and touched it to the tequila in the scooped-out lime shell on top. It twitched into flame. I signed the tab damply and peeled the
News of the World
off the top of the pile. On the cover of the newspaper was a pneumatic young blonde who looked all of sixteen, and a smaller inset picture
of Spike. Big red letters told me to turn to the center pages for the full story, and I did as instructed, sipping my margarita. When someone spoke my name the glass almost flew out of my hand.

It was Pussy. She was standing on the edge of the steps dressed in a fifties swimsuit and a white hotel bathrobe. “Hey there, mind if I join you?” She dropped the robe carelessly by the steps so that the bottom dangled in the water and stepped down and sat right across from me, stretching herself out, her feet floating up through a carpet of froth. The bubbles coughed at her bathrobe, willing the rest of it to fall in.

“What are
you
doing here?” she said with a smile, like she'd run into an old friend. “When did you get in?”

“Just arrived, twenty minutes ago,” I said, and outlined my mission. When I got to the subject of Rex, her eyes lit up.

“That guy has the
cutest
butt, don't you think? But I hear he's pretty psycho.”

I confirmed that both observations were true. Pussy shrugged. “Hey, all the men in this town are either fruits or nuts. A girl needs a dick transplant to get laid around here.” I didn't think it would help this unexpected new atmosphere of fellowship to point out that until a month or two ago she had been dating Spike and that she didn't look as if she'd been too deprived in that department since.

“Mmm,” she said, eyeing my glass, “good idea.” She reached out and hit the red button. I noticed that the Taylor identity bracelet was gone. “Drink up,” she commanded, “there's another one on its way. So, what's the gossip back
home? Ah!” she said, spotting my pile of publications. “Are those new? Brilliant. Can I?”

“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 newspaper 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.

“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.”