Too Weird for Ziggy (16 page)

“Joe-Bob,” says LeeAnn while he's at the bar, “is my guitar player. Seventeen years old.” I guessed right then. “I'm taking him on the road with me—I'm not letting this one out of my sight! Anyhow, you want to have something for the girls to look at as well, don't you? You can't work with older guys because as they get older they'll have either made it as a musician and have their own thing going, or they won't have made it and so they hate you. And old guys always have encumbrances—families, house payments. I think women are so much more flexible, we can work out those little problems much more easily, but I don't like playing with other women on the road, they're too goddamn competitive. So that only leaves younger guys. Tough, huh?” She laughs. Joe-Bob returns with our beers, runs his hand along LeeAnn's cheek, and goes back and sits at the bar.

Does Joe-Bob make her feel like a kid again? I ask, pretty stupidly, but it's hard to think of anything smart to say when all your blood has abandoned your brain and gone to your genitals.

“Hell no!” she exclaims. “Being a kid again—I dreamed about that not long ago, being back home in my bedroom with my sisters and my mom and dad in the next room. I woke up scared stupid. It's number one in my top ten of things that scare me stupid, followed by waking up in bed with my first, my second, my fourth, and my fifth ex-husbands—I still have a soft spot for Lee Starmountain—then waking up and finding I'm waitressing, or finding out there's really a God, or
losing my mind, or losing my teeth, or my tits, or anything beginning with T until you're up to ten.”

She hadn't been back home again since her mother died.

“Shit, that was one crazy time.” She gives a skewy laugh, but you can tell it wasn't funny. “My mother. It was January—real cold. My father had been real ill and my sister—the youngest one, who lives in San Diego; they all moved far away as possible eventually—she told my mother she was coming over to take my father back with her for the winter. Which caused a mighty row, my mother figuring on Southern California as the next best thing to Sodom. But my sister, good as her word, flies out and fetches my father, who is too gaga to protest even if he wanted to.

“Like I said, it was a bitter winter. So cold that my mother got up in the middle of the night, stood on a chair, and took down the suitcase off the top of the wardrobe where she'd packed away their old electric underblanket the year before. She pulled off the bedclothes and strapped it onto the mattress, plugged it in, turned it on, and remade the bed and lay down. The effort made her ill and she reached over for her pills and they say that's when she had the stroke. Couldn't move—couldn't get her pills and couldn't turn off the blanket, which was a real old one, no thermostat, just kept getting hotter and hotter. And she broiled on it for a whole week before a neighbor thought to call the cops.

“I didn't really accept that she was dead till I saw her laid out in the Chapel of Rest. It was my mother all right, looking like one of her overcooked Sunday roasts. My sisters all kissed her and cried, but I couldn't do either. I took a taxi to
the airport and flew right on out of there and when I got home I went to the nearest bar and said, ‘Take everything you've got off those shelves and pour it into one big fucking glass.'”

Her new manager comes over—one of those sharp-suited-young-businessman types, nothing to do with country but fingers in all sorts of pies. Though not LeeAnn's, judging by the way he's looking at Joe-Bob's behind. I figure he must have heard where the conversation was going.

“How are you two doing?” he asks solicitously, which all journalists recognize as shorthand for “Time's up, interview's over, now fuck off.” The pub's starting to fill up anyway and people are staring at us. Show time's less than an hour away.

“Lord, is that the time?” says Lee Ann exaggeratedly. “I do go on. I hope you have everything you need.” Joe-Bob comes over and gives her his arm and helps her up like a real Southern gentleman, and there it is again, at eye level. A hot ball of lust grips my crotch and glides up my insides like a Lava lamp. I think I'm falling in love.

“Have you ever been in love?” LeeAnn asks me, and I must have blushed because she pats my arm and says, “You don't have to answer, honey, I was just being curious. Just wondered how it would be to ask
you
a question instead. You know, you're the first woman interviewer I've had in a long time. Usually I get men. We girls have to stick together. A lot of women say they can really relate to my songs. They say, ‘This is my song,' and I say, ‘Yes, honey, it is.' The best songs are like listening in on a private conversation, don't you think so? Well, it was a real pleasure talking to you—I'm sorry, what was your name again?”

Perry Kaye was number one. Princess Diana loved him. Quite how much she loved him led to a good deal of speculation in the press. His lips were ripe and full without being meaty or dangerous, his chin was lightly stubbled, and his hair, short and wavy, was slicked back off his face. He had a part in a bad soap opera and a worse Lloyd Webber musical and an album and two singles high in the charts. He had just released the second part of his autobiography,
Don't Just Sit There
(
It's Your Life, Get On With It
); part one,
You Can Do It
(
If You Really Want
), still topped the
Times
best-seller list. His face was in all the Sunday magazines, and his butt was in tiny cycling shorts. Whatever you thought of Perry, his ass was a masterpiece. What Elvis was to lip curls, Perry was to butts. So when Spitting Image made Perry's puppet they started at the bottom.

The original plan was to recycle the puppet of Andrew Ridgely of Wham!, which had been sitting in a cupboard since the first series, but no one could find it; it'd probably gone the same way as Andrew Ridgely. Then someone came in from the storeroom waving Samantha Fox's talking mammaries. And in a studio that smelled of scorching latex and looked like the Texas Chainsaw Massacre—dripping heads and limbs on meat hooks above vats of steaming glob—they prised off Samantha Fox's puppet's lip-nipples and messed with the electronics so that each buttock rolled and bumped independently. And from piles
of photographs they built the perfect popstar parody. Not an easy job when most popstars are already parodies of themselves.

Not every famous person loved their Spitting Image but Perry did, with its fat red lips like double-parked London buses, how when they parted in a smile the other puppets would throw their arms across their eyes to shield them from the dazzle. He loved the sketch where his puppet sat at a desk chewing on a pencil, scrawling titles with lots of brackets in and scribbling them out, while Princess Di, gooey-eyed, hovered by him with a Biro, playing join-the-dots with the stubble on his cheeks. He adored the “Botty Ford Clinic” sketch, where a puppet George Michael, shamefaced and in shapeless trousers, shuffled into a room full of aging popstars whose rear ends all spread over the edge of their seats. As each of them got onstage to confess their backside backsliding, Perry's puppet watched from the corner, his tight round buttocks sliding gaily from side to side like a cow chewing the cud.

He sat in front of the TV with his remote control and reran the videos over and over. He decided without bias that his was the best puppet Spitting Image had ever made. He had to have it.

Clive MacFee, Perry's manager, called the TV company. First he tried to get it for nothing, in exchange for promises of lots of valuable coverage in the press. They laughed and said it wasn't for sale. Finally, after long negotiations, everyone agreed on a sum that equaled the economy of a small third-world country, and Perry started readying his home for its arrival.

The den—the room where he kept his gold and platinum records and framed photos of himself with his arm draped chummily round Donald Trump, Madonna, Michael Jackson, Fergie, the Pope, politicians left, right, center, and Cicciolina, and Princesses Diana and Stephanie, plus the statue of him currently on display in the Whitney that Jeff Koons had made—would henceforth be Puppet Perry's room. Decorators redid the white walls and matte-black designer minimalism in Saudi Moderne rococo red and gold. Heavy gilt frames now encased the awards and pictures. Fat rugs squatted on the floor. In the center of the room stood an ornate French daybed. Perry's personal assistant was kneeling in the corner, blowing up the sex doll that Perry had sent him out to buy, in a moment of inspiration, as a partner for his puppet. He propped it up on the pillow, where it sat staring dumbly, its red mouth yawning, its plastic pussy puckering between splayed pointy legs.

Perry decided he should throw his Spitting Image a “Welcome Home” party. MacFee called up columnists and all his famous friends. Paparazzi scaled his walls when word got out that Princess Di would be there, and hurled abuse at an army of shed-shaped men in dinner jackets who threatened them with castration if they didn't remove themselves pronto to the other side of the street. Flashes flashed as Mick and Jerry, tailed by Saint Bob and Paula, glided up the pathway and through the door. A famous politician sat on the daybed swigging Cristal, while two even more famous footballers kicked the blowup doll across the floor. Perry wove among them, theatrically cuddling, noisily kissing everybody's lips, gripping their shoulders
and jumping back dramatically to ooh and aah at their svelteness or their clothes. He accepted their outsized compliments with a burr of his eyelashes and a birdlike wiggle of his butt. He chatted with the selected journalists and posed beaming with designers, stars, and supermodels for the photographer his PR had hired for the night.

Then one of the footballers—purple-faced with alcohol, bouncing the sex doll up and down on his knee and telling no one in particular, since everyone had moved away from him, that Perry's puppet's condoms should be made of human skin—suddenly ejaculated: “Well, where is it then?” And the whole room, as it does, went suddenly silent. They looked at him and he grinned sheepishly and repeated, more quietly this time, “Where's the bleeding puppet?” And Perry's smile imperceptibly melted and a droplet of cold panic dribbled down his spine. His manager felt it across the room and teleported to his side.

By means of ancient codes and ventriloquism, Perry, while continuing to smile and chat, communicated to the man paid to take the cares of the world from his shoulders so he could devote himself to art that the limo with the puppet was due two hours ago and he was not a happy star. And that if any of his famous guests should leave before it got here, heads would roll—as heads do, starting at the top.

Which is when one of the dinner-jacketed gorillas appeared unexpectedly. He was clutching a large brown Jiffy envelope, ostentatiously wrapped in a bright red ribbon. He explained that it had been tossed from a passing car. Everyone looked; the manager stepped forward to take charge. He maneuvered the security man into a back room. He took the padded envelope and held it up to the light uselessly, rattled
it like a birthday present, stood staring at it as if it would tell them what was inside of its own free will. He squeezed and prodded the padding, looking for wires. He asked the security guard for his knife. He carefully prised up one of the staples, sweating. He peered in the hole; he couldn't see anything. He sniffed—it smelled of rubber. He worried some more staples out.

Inside was a Polaroid of Perry's puppet. It looked like a wounded soldier from the Crimean War, with a red-stained bandage wrapped around one side of its head. There was something quite heavy in the bottom of the envelope. The manager turned it upside down and it fell onto his hand. It was a rubber ear with red paint crusted on it. And a note made out of letters cut from
Smash Hits
magazine. MacFee was reading it as the
Sun
's gossip columnist came nosing around the door. He saw the bloody ear, screamed, and dropped his glass. The manager walked over and slapped the lump of rubber into his trembling hand. “Perry's puppet,” he said, “has been kidnapped.” And their faces lit up as if someone had turned on a switch behind their eyeballs with glorious visions of headline marching upon headline, of column inch marching upon column inch.

Three daily tabloids put the kidnapping on their cover. Perry loved publicity. He had two full-time publicists on his payroll and a clippings service that sent him a package almost daily. He still had the first thing ever written about him cut out and yellowing and folded in his wallet so that if one day he should lose his memory or the world should forget him he could take it out and unfold who he was. He loved publicity, but he loved the puppet more. Really loved it, like popstars loved their model wives, like Michael Jackson loved Bubbles.

He couldn't work, he couldn't sleep. And when he did he had fitful charcoal dreams filled with images of captivity and torture, of people and things he'd half heard about when MacFee made him go on that Amnesty tour. He'd wake up feeling like a worm had been chewing him inside out. He'd reach for the telephone, then put it down again; there really wasn't anyone he could call. Just columnists, rival popstars, and people on his payroll, and any one of them could have done it, if he stopped to think about it; the bastards all hated him enough. He tried recalling a time when he still had friends, people to hang out with. He thought about his first band, Swallow. They'd done everything together. Until he dumped them for a solo career.

He picked up the phone again and hit the top button and bawled out his manager, who bawled out the publicist for telling the press, as they'd told her to, just how much of a fortune Puppet Perry had cost. He fretted that all the coverage would feed the kidnappers' egos, make them take their time, keep raising the price. They didn't say in the ransom note how much they wanted, just that they would send instructions, and if he failed to pay they'd send the puppet back to him piece by piece.