Too Weird for Ziggy (12 page)

“Clive,” he said, “am I fucking glad to see you,” and proceeded to list their grievances with the singer: They felt left out; he did things without consulting them; it didn't feel like a band anymore; something had to be done about the awful fucking jacket he'd taken to wearing—it made him look like a girl. Clive put his arm around the guitarist's shoulder, whispered all manner of flatteries and promises:
Leo was going through some changes, and it was important to bear with him; in two weeks' time the tour would be over, and there would be time off and big money; their album would be the U.S. number one. “Leo needs you fockin' guys more than he ever did,” said MacFee, steering him back to his room. “You're a
band. Be
there for him. If you won't do it for him, do it for yourself. Do it for
me
. Ian, thank you. Without you there would
be
no band.” The manager stiffened up, as if to hold back tears. Ian did too. “I'll see you in L.A. for the fockin' celebrations.” MacFee smiled and gave him the high five. “Hey! Nympholeptics! Number one!”

Back in Florida, the manager was poring through a pile of press clippings, frowning. The latest live reviews were lamentable. “To drive the dictator General Noriega out of Panama,” wrote one, “they played AC/DC at full volume. To prise the cult leader David Koresh out of Waco they played the sound of rabbits being slaughtered. If they want to flush Osama bin Laden out of the caves, they'd only have to broadcast videos of The Nympholeptics at the Premier Auditorium and he'd come crawling on his belly with his hands up. The band's frontman, who pranced about the stage like a drag artist, sweating heavily and constantly feeling himself up”—Leo had been scratching himself as unobtrusively as possible; the bandage made him itch—“sounded so much like a battered baby seal that you half expected a dancing band of Canadian fur trappers to come out onstage. A dancing band of Canadian fur trappers would certainly have had more charisma and star quality than this overrated, underachieving band.”

The manager thumped out a phone number. Murray picked straight up. “What's going on out there?” Leo, Murray told him, was worse than ever. He had fired the shrink—said he didn't trust her. “Her eyes are too far apart—like sheep's eyes,” he'd said.

“He had a problem with her fockin'
eyes
?” MacFee roared.

“We're not talking Jackie Onassis,” said Murray, placidly, “we're talking close personal friends of her ears.”

“But what the fock did she say was
wrong
with him?” MacFee thundered.

Her initial theory had been cocaine paranoia. A common problem with rockstars, she said. The bigger they got, the more their cocaine intake increased, which inflated their ego and sent it into battle with their id, the innate, unconscious feeling that they didn't deserve what they had and that it would be snatched away from them like a toy from a baby. Since, in order to become successful, artists suppressed these insecurities, she went on, they would either come to the surface as an obsession that someone or something was trying to stop them from doing as well as they could, or they themselves would do something, subliminally, to make their deepest fears come true. Get sick, for instance, or break a leg.

“But why the motherfuck would I grow tits?” Leo asked her.

“Unresolved issues with your mother,” said the psychiatrist. “She tried to stop you becoming who you are, and those feelings are exacerbated by cocaine use.”

“But she didn't try to stop me,” Leo protested. “She was great.”

“So great,” the shrink went on, like a windup toy that hits a wall and simply bounces off in another direction, “you want to
be
her. You've produced a hit album, Leo, but that's nothing compared to what
she
, a
woman
, has produced.
You
. Whatever you've achieved, your unconscious knows came out of
her body
. The body that yours, Leo, is trying so hard to duplicate.”

That night, when Ian and Angus went backstage to the catering area, they found Leo chasing the cooks, the wardrobe girl, even the on-tour gardener he'd had Murray hire to attend to his pots of fresh organic herbs, all in the direction of the exit ramp. “No more motherfucking women!” he was screaming. “Get 'em out of here!”

“What's going on?” said Angus.

“Leo wants all the chicks fired,” said Kevin, who was sitting at an oilclothed folding table, pouring HP Sauce on a plate of sausages.

“Who's going to do the ironing then?” the bass player said.

“He says chicks are bad voodoo on the road,” said Kevin.

“He just can't stand them,” muttered Ian, “because they've got bigger tits than him.” The guitar player stood close enough to them onstage to see them bouncing under Leo's thick leather jacket.

“Only just,” said Angus. He'd seen them too. Their frontman, Angus and Ian had decided at their postshow
drinking sessions, was undergoing a sex change; he probably planned to get the snip in L.A. They were touring with a trannie—which at least accounted for the mood swings. Once Clive came by with their money at the end of the tour, they planned to bail.

“I've found another shrink,” Murray told MacFee before the manager hung up. “A male one. Comes highly recommended.” He named some famous names.

Dr. Robert Mason was a big bear of a man: chest hair sprouting out of his shirt collar, deep, stentorian voice. “Why me?” had been Leo's first question to him.

“Did you ask yourself that when you became a rockstar? Why me?” the doctor boomed back. “Because you're
special
.”

Leo took to him right away.

“Do you think I should have sex?” Leo asked him. He felt he could talk to Bob.

“Do you want to have sex?” asked the shrink. “And who do you want to have sex with? Your girlfriend?” Leo shook his head. Phoebe was planning to meet him in Los Angeles in a few days' time. He couldn't even bear thinking about it.

“These ‘groupies' you said you had sex with. Can you tell me about them? How would you describe your sexual relations?”

“You mean what do I do?” said Leo, and he couldn't help smiling sentimentally as he recalled the countless compliant girls he had commanded where to put what orifice and what to do with it when it got there. The doctor listened,
unshocked, sometimes nodding sagely, grunting to himself academically at various descriptions of urination and cigarette burns.

“When you get big—as big as you are, Leo—you're like a supertanker that just keeps right on going. It takes no notice of what's going on around it, because it doesn't have to.”

“I think I understand what you mean,” said Leo.

“But in your case it's all happened so fast. Things can still get to you. It's growing pains, Leo, just growing pains. But back to sex—would you call yourself a breast man?”

“I would,” Leo confessed. It was as good as a diagnosis.

“Next time”—the doctor closed his notebook and shuffled back his chair—“we'll talk about disassociation. You turn on the TV and you see yourself on the screen, or you'll open a magazine and the article you read is about you. You cease to live in your own body. It's a kind of public contamination. In our next session we'll figure out a way to decontaminate you.”

After a week of twice-daily meetings with Bob, Leo was starting to feel pretty good about himself. When he went to bed at night and his breasts flattened out, he could dream they weren't there at all. The tour was nearly over, he could go home, his mum would look after him, it would all be all right. “You can look at it,” Bob had said, “as an advanced form of homesickness. You've been away for so long that home has become an abstract. Before this, did you ever go on vacation with your buddies? Then you know
what I mean when I say that a different set of rules apply. There's a different kind of normality. This tour is an extension of that.”

Then, on the morning of the Bakersfield show, one month after the protrusions had first appeared, Leo was awakened by a deep, gnawing ache in his chest and a stabbing pain in his stomach.

“You are obsessing,” Bob said when he complained about his bloated belly and tender breasts. “But it is not your fault, Leo. Being obsessional about your body is a by-product of your job.”

“But it
hurts
. “Leo very nearly cried. He had been feeling tearful all day. He had a killer headache. “And Phoebs is coming tomorrow. And I've still got
these
.” He cupped his hand under his heavy mounds.

“What is the worst that could happen, Leo?” said the shrink. “I want you to think about that. Since fighting this thing hasn't helped, try the opposite. Go with it. And by the time you've discovered what is going on you might even have lost the urge to fight it. You never know—you might actually like it. Phoebe might like it too.”

That night, just before the encore, Leo was doubled over by a fierce pain in his gut. He stumbled offstage into the dressing room, clutching his stomach, while the band stayed on, applauding the audience, in the hope of nurturing their enthusiasm to reciprocate. A halfhearted, slow hand-clap for more gathered pace around the arena. Leo sat on the toilet, in a cold sweat. The wound in his groin, which he thought had healed, had reopened, red and swollen.
There was blood trickling down his thighs. He rested his head against the cool tiled wall and wept.

The Nympholeptics' tour bus smelled of cigarettes, beer, empty Coke bottles, and men. The stickers on the windows read “I Brake for Blondes” and “Wanted: Meaningful Overnight Relationships.” As it cruised down the freeway toward Los Angeles, Kevin dozed peacefully in his bunk, while Ian and Angus were watching
Fawlty Towers
videos for the umpteenth time. Leo was lying in the back, on the double mattress, stretched out on his side, his head in Murray's lap. Murray was smoothing his hair. The white bandage was now wrapped around his groin, stained with blood. Leo's pale face, never handsome, had become sweetly mournful. Transfigured somehow. To an outsider chancing upon them, it might have looked like they were reenacting Michelangelo's
Pieta
.

Sometimes in life something happens, a moment arises, an opportunity for if not complete understanding of what it's all about, then at least some kind of clarification. You're on one side of a line and you step into another. This may well have been one such moment.

Leo stared straight ahead and let it pass.

Since you ask, yes, I did see her again, a couple of times as it happens. First time was back when Frankie Rose was still alive and organizing that Pussy tribute album. He invited me to drop by the studio to check out how it was coming along, and that's precisely what I was doing when Pussy walked in.

She had this strange way of moving—gliding almost, like a hot-air balloon cut off from its moorings. And one of the places she'd drifted, judging by the proprietary way she sidled up to him, was into Frankie's bed. All the while that the music played and Frankie scooted about on his chair, sliding the levels up and down on the mixing board and pointing out favorite parts, Pussy just sat there saying nothing, face blank, like she was contemplating something brain-numbingly dull but a darn sight more interesting than you or I could ever dream of being.

When it was over and I got up to go, someone announced that Pussy's car had arrived, which is how we wound up leaving together. She didn't say much as we negotiated the jumble of passages and fire doors and went out into a sour, London afternoon. If she remembered me from the interviews I'd done with her before her disappearance, she didn't let on. Then again, with the number of people stars encounter once or maybe twice in their lives, I guess every face they see must look vaguely familiar.

Her car wasn't there; the driver must have parked at the door on the other side of the building. There was just a
bunch of teenage girls hanging out on the street. Most of them ignored Pussy—they were here for Frankie, although I suspect they were actually here for each other and Frankie was just the excuse—but Pussy didn't ignore them. She stood facing them, motionless, as if she wasn't quite sure what to make of this unusual audience. Then an older girl—eighteen, nineteen, who didn't look part of the clique—peeled herself off of the car she'd been leaning against and walked over to her. Pussy switched on that embarrassed, childlike smile she had whenever it looked like some kind of attention was coming her way.

The girl said something to her, I couldn't hear what. And all at once Pussy lashed out at her, arms whirling everywhere, all the while making this weird bellowing sound like a wounded animal. They must have been watching on the security monitors because seconds later two studio guys shot out and bustled the girl away. Frankie soon followed. He ran over to Pussy and held her by the shoulders—not intimately but quite formally, almost at arm's length, like they were a couple of awkward schoolkids being taught to ballroom-dance. The girls lined up in the curb like it was a mosh pit and stared at them both, grinning.

“What the fuck was that all about?” one of the guys asked me when Pussy had gone back inside with Frankie and the girls outside had been dispersed. I shrugged. His guess was as good as mine. Though I was to find out soon enough.

I was walking back to the tube station when a car pulled up and the back window rolled down. It was Pussy, offering me a lift. Since her flat was the other side of London to mine, it was curiosity more than anything else that made
me accept. She clearly wanted to talk, although why she chose a rock journalist and not a shrink—other than the fact that we're definitely cheaper and usually better briefed—I couldn't tell you. I was surprised at quite how much she did say, though, considering how quiet she had been in the studio earlier, and considering her habit in the interviews we'd done before of doing little more than lip-sync the thoughts of the band's guitar player, her lover, Taylor, the man whose death brought on that weird disappearing act of hers.