Too Weird for Ziggy (22 page)

Three English rock journalists in free rock T-shirts flop at the next table, looking like cigarettes with the tobacco half poked out. Slumped in total indifference, eyes darting about like guppies, they gob imaginary spitballs of cynicism
at everything they see. They order one of every dumb-named cocktail on the menu and charge it to the record company while slagging off the star.

“The man's a human B-side.”

“Total fucking vegetable.”

“IQ of room temperature.”

“With the air-conditioning on.”

“Look over there, isn't that Pussy?”

As they turn to look an entourage comes out from the lobby. Record company VP, toothy blonde PR girl, a man like an aristocratic psychiatric nurse. And Cal West in a sea-blue suit. He's moving carefully, like he doesn't want to make a mess or make them mad. For all that he looks better than he has in a long time. A hand pressed into the small of his back guides him through French windows into the press conference room. The three English journalists pick up their drinks and follow. Two women in one-piece bathing suits dive into the water and rise to the surface simultaneously like water ballet stars.

The director peels off the top sheet of paper. He reads aloud, “He was in a car with his girlfriend when it happened—very pretty. Underage. ‘I think I'm losing it,' he said, and he did. He started screaming, so did she, and when he finally pulled over she ran off. She hitched a ride and called the cops from the next town. When the ambulance arrived he was comatose.” He looks up. “It
is
Pussy,” he says to his companion. “I thought it was her.” He watches her stretch languidly on the sun lounger, then sit up to sip her drink. He feels his cock ossify as he watches her suck on the straw.

Dignified and willing his clothes not to suffocate him, Cal sits at the long table on a raised platform in the press conference room. The record company VP on his left taps a microphone. The therapist on his right pats his hand. People are piling tape recorders on the table in front of him, then shuffling to the back of the room to get a drink. He is conscious of the hot blush of a shaving rash on his throat. His suit emphasizes his new leanness. Only his hands have stayed fat. His fingers are sweating; he thinks they might smell shameful. He looks at the crowd of journalists, faces he doesn't know. Some look bored, most look curious. He catches the eye of an attractive young woman at the back of the room who is smiling at him expectantly and holds her gaze. The therapist is smiling too, and whispers in his ear, “It's going to be fine, Cal. You'll survive.”

They said he'd die but he didn't, though his brother did. Flapping like a fish as he held him underwater, no one would suspect him, he never left the house. A freak wave, they told him. He thought about it often, his brother on the sand like a white plumped-up pillow, the people all tanned flesh gawking, sea slapping like wet flip-flops, while he was home in bed. He dedicated this new album to him, his first solo record. The one his record company is telling all these people is his best work yet. He knows it isn't really. It would have been if that guy who looked like Buddha let him use the songs about horses, but all they ever want from him is songs about the sea.

The PR announces that anyone who has a question should stand up and give their name and the name of their publication.

“Nathan Jacobs,
Rolling Stone
. Hi, Mr. West. First, welcome back.” There is a small round of applause.

He had spent the last—how many?—one-two-three-four-five years in bed. Half a decade. A twentieth of a century. He gives his head a swift little shake. His brother and sisters had carried on without him, brought in a replacement—“For now,” they always said, “until you're better.” They wrote some awful songs. They raked the thesaurus to find new words for “sea” and “sadness” while he lay in bed ignoring them, happy as a bug. He lived in his pajamas because they made no demands on him. Bed smelled of home. Bed was his whole existence. He came to have a dozen different words for “bed,” like Eskimos have for “snow.”

“My question is: What exactly was it that brought about this comeback?”

“God,” Cal answered. “And Dr. Hank.”

The man on his right shook his head dramatically. “No, Cal, you did it.”

“Did your family have anything to do with your decision?”

When Cal had showed no signs of ever wanting to get up and write again, his family had panicked. They begged and bullied. They hung seaweed in his window. They put a clock by the bed and set it to wake him up with the sound of ocean waves.

“My family,” Cal answers, “have always been behind me.”

“A long way behind,” the man from
Rolling Stone
mutters, and sits down.

“Hutchie Hutchins, the
Sporting Times
.” The PR and
the record company VP both swing their heads round simultaneously and give him a strange look. “Your new fitness regime has become almost as famous as your music. Would you tell us a wee bit more about it?”

He spat out his vitamins; he tantrumed for junk food. They brought him ice cream by the barrel, donuts and Cheerios. But he still wouldn't write. He grew as fat and white as a spaceship. He was like a planet with stars revolving around him. He had never been so happy, and dreamed happy sea-slapped dreams.

“Dr. Hank can tell you about it,” says Cal, handing him his microphone, resulting in a pained squeal of feedback.

“Hi Cal, John Davidson, freelance, here. Your parents, reportedly, have said they do not approve of your solo record and that families should stick together.”

It was a year before his mother came to visit. His father would drop by once in a while, his sisters all the time, he didn't know what had happened to his brother, he just disappeared. But Mom never could deal with sickness, not even when they were kids.

Overweight, overjeweled, overblonde, looking like the decor in a Polynesian restaurant, Mom bent over him and butted his cheek with hers. She smelled of Revlon; the bed smelled of babies. Her clipped nose was wrinkled. Her voice was strained and distant like in a computer game. On and on it droned and zapped; he wasn't even listening, he'd quite forgotten she was there until he was suddenly aware that his hand was inside his pajama pants, automatically tweaking. His mother's voice grated across his balls like a saw. He
sat bolt upright like a sleepwalker, and his mother started from her chair. He hadn't said a word to her—nor to anybody else all year. His first words were to the man sitting by his side at the press conference, helping him face these people who are insolently gawking, clutching their free copies of his CD under their arms.

Another one stands up—ah, it's the pretty young woman he was looking at earlier. He doesn't catch her name, her magazine sounds like it's called
Pulp
. He likes the word. He taps out a rhythm on the table as
Pulp
ping-pongs around in his head.

“I'm curious about the closing song on your new album”—he notices she has an English accent—“‘The Dream of a Dying Wave.'”

It was late afternoon. He'd just woken up after late-afternoon dreams, little things with pickaxes climbing up the bedposts onto the pillows and carving some sort of message about fame on the inside of his arm, when a knock came at the door. He was startled as he woke to see the sun starting to set, as if the world were somehow inside out. The room smelled wet and cottony. His father ushered a grave man with pale blue eyes into the room. He was lean, lightly tanned, glittering in voluminous white clothes. He walked to the window and sat on the inside ledge, posed in soft focus against the pink outside light.

“It sounds like you're saying that you're the dying wave?”

The man gazed at the pale slug underneath the sheets. He pressed himself up athletically and walked toward the bed. Cal's sisters appeared at the door, one at a time,
and stood against the far bedroom wall. The man in white paused, rummaged in his pocket, and took out a small pink sachet. He slowly tore it open, pulled out a small scented square. He sniffed it like a love letter, then rubbed it over his hands. He crunched and dunked it into the trash can by the bed. He put his clean fingertips together as if in prayer. He held his hands over the shape in the sheets as if holding an imaginary basketball. His father shuffled, awkward, like a little boy in church. His sisters simply stared. The man muttered, maybe hummed something, looked up at the ceiling, then bent and whispered something in his ear.

“Except of course a wave never dies.”

He clears his throat to answer the Englishwoman.

A noise came from Cal's pillow. A gluey, phlegmy cough. Then a voice, once so famous, that used to sound like angels, that sounded like everything good and innocent and American that ever was, a voice rusty from disuse started to say something. His father and sisters leaned forward and strained to listen. It sounded like: “Those big strong horses sure are sweaty, aren't they? I tell you one thing, though, if they're hungry enough they'll eat anything you give 'em and that's a fact. Well, that about solves the mysteries today. I repeat, that about solved the mystery of the great field of horses, did it not.” His family crept around his bed like shepherds round the cradle and sucked in the words as if the greatest fibers of thought were contained therein. Or at the very least some new lyrics. Therapy, the man in white told them, would not come easily or cheap.

And now he sits at the conference table, people are still firing questions, some spray-painted little shorthaired
escapee from a Gap ad is napalming him nonstop with a flashgun. They're asking about God, his politics, his girlfriends, how he writes his lyrics and where he buys his clothes. Does he still take medicine? Does he still need treatment? Does he feel like a spokesman for the damaged of the world? What is his philosophy? What is his ambition? Is it true he'll have a psychic with him on the road? People with funny accents want a special message for the fans in some country or another on the tour.

“Jason Parker,
Picture Palace
. How is the biopic coming along. Will Leonardo DiCaprio be playing your brother? How does that make you feel?”

And at once he has a vision; it almost starts him laughing. Dawn hasn't broken, and he's on an empty beach. He's walking in the shallow water back to his bedroom, the sea tossing his brother around and around like a loose sock in a washing machine.

“Ban Johnstone,
Rag
. It's odd you should write about the sea with such innocence and romance when it killed your brother and your band?”

And he sees his therapist shake his head and hold up a hand and he hears the record company man thanking everyone for coming and sees him nod at someone at the other end of the room who puts on the new record. “A masterpiece, and I don't use the word lightly. A little more volume please?” And he sees waiters glide in and out of the badly dressed crowd with overdressed trays of canapés. Half the journalists hover like famine victims by the table where they're setting up the buffet, the others crowd the platform wielding photos to be signed or waving cheap tape recorders
for a personal word or two for the four dozen listeners of a Maltese radio show. The small group of writers drinking Perrier with the PR, who'll get exclusive interviews later in the day, look around, smiling smugly at the rabble, like courtiers granted an audience with the king.

The English woman wrote in her notebook. “The record swoops and soars like a constipated seagull. Last time I looked it was still at number one. Baudelaire, I read somewhere, came back from the city one day with a bottle of rare perfume and held it out for his faithful dog to smell. The dog recoiled in disgust and started barking. Oh, wretched cur, said Baudelaire, or some such, had this been a turd I'd brought you you'd have sniffed it with delight, rolled on your back, and sought out the butthole whence it came. But I offer you something exquisite and you want to kill it. Thus you, my loyal dog, are just like my public, and I shall give you all the shit that you deserve.”

The director waits for Cal outside under the cool white umbrella. He looks at his notes, his cell phone, his watch. A skinny girl with fifties tits walks deliberately close by him, jutting, pointy, bouncing pink rockets aching for employment. The director feigns indifference and stares at the pool. The sun singes a scar across the surface of the water.

Spike's cock was on fire. It throbbed out a 2/4 rhythm in perfect time with the car alarm that whooped outside on the street. Where he was or what he was doing there he had no idea—his eyes wouldn't focus in the unlit room and his head was a sponge—but if the raging in his groin was anything to go by, he'd given her the going-over of her life.

The question was who?

As if in answer, a figure materialized at his left side, which his blurred vision split into two, one circling the air several feet above the other, neither of them quite identifiable. A hand tapped firmly on the inside of his elbow—same tempo as his cock and the car alarm; it was all the operative fragment of his brain could do to stop the inoperative portion from singing along with “Another One Bites the Dust” by Queen. Spike went to sit up but his arms and legs wouldn't move. He was paralyzed! No, that wasn't it, he was strapped down—he could see by double-chinning along his body—arms, waist, and legs, to a table. Naked. Before his brain could assess this information as good or bad, a needle slipped into his arm. Then another slid just as deftly into his genitals. As Spike sank back into unconsciousness, his penis shivered and uncurled, shuffled a short way down his thigh, and pumped itself up in slow motion, before stretching out on his stomach, where, like a beatnik Muppet finger, it casually beat out time.

Minerva Smallwood did not have Spike's autograph. The thought popped into her head as she was making the rounds of the geriatric ward, plumping pillows, emptying pans, folding the papery patients upright in their beds like origami birds. Actually she didn't have anything of Spike's. In all the time she knew him, she hadn't asked him for anything and, obligingly, he never gave her anything, except, one time, the clap. Luckily, Minerva, as a nurse, had easy access to drugs. She had long ago figured out that her easy access to drugs was a big reason why Spike had stuck around as long as he had. The other reason, of course, was that she kept him. She smiled to herself—just one more female patron of the arts. A couple of the old folk smiled back at her. The rest looked at her blankly with milky eyes, even when she spoke to them. She'd noticed that the elderly developed a selective sense of hearing, hearing only what they want to, carrying on, undaunted, on their own track. Just like rockstars. Just like Spike. Although, technically, she reminded herself, he wasn't a rockstar for most of the time she knew him. And he wasn't even Spike, he was Mike.