Too Weird for Ziggy (5 page)

I printed off a page from the KillEmAll site, which offered helpful instructions on how to top yourself in the exact same way as your favorite star. Right above Kurt Cobain (quantity of heroin; size and gauge of shotgun; where to lie down; head position; angle of shooting arm) and Mama Cass (precise ham sandwich recipe) I found Frankie Rose and the formula for “John Belushis”—cocaine and heroin speedballs, apparently his drug of choice. When I ran into Leo Nympholeptic at the Underworld a fortnight later, it looked like Frankie had bequeathed him his drug dealer. He was staggering about the place, bumping into people—girls mostly, I noticed—before heading for the bar at the back. He was
staring at himself in the mirror when I dragged over a stool and sat down next to him. When he saw my reflection he said, “You're a journalist, aren't you. I saw you taking notes.”

“You caught me out.” I smiled.

“Who're you writing about?” He swung around on the stool and looked at me, or to be more precise at my breasts—first the left, then the right, then the left one again, like I was Wimbledon.

“You,” I said, and then
he
smiled. I made some small talk about his band and where they were playing next, then slipped in the subject of the night they played Snakehouse. He gave a blow-by-blow account of The Nympholeptics' triumphant performance, not mentioning Frankie once. I told him I met someone who said he'd seen Frankie in the men's room while The Nympholeptics were onstage. He was leaning over the filthy urinal, head rested on the smeared white tiles like he was in pain, and staring at a frayed wet butt-end floating in a puddle of piss. The guy had asked him if he was all right and Frankie said “Sure,” stood straight upright, and strolled back into the club.

Leo looked me in the eyes. “None of those mother-fuckers know nothing about Frankie.
Nothing
.” But you do, I said gently. He looked away. I asked him if he'd put the record straight but he answered, “I don't want to talk about it.” I wrote down my phone number and told him to call if he changed his mind and that I was serious about doing a story on him and The Nympholeptics. There was a message from him on my answering machine when I got home.

Leo's flat was above a dry cleaner's off the Seven Sisters Road. A social security–style bedsit with bumpy woodchip wallpaper painted shiny cream, like baby-sick. There
was a bed with a filthy pink velvet headboard and a filthier Playboy quilt cover, a cheap white laminated chest of drawers, a table, and an unfolded folding chair, all of them with their edges chewed off. There was a clump of brown wilted organic matter in a pot on the windowsill that might have been a spider plant once before a combination of neglect and dry-cleaning fumes became too much to bear. Not a huge record company advance, then.

I sat down on the chair by the open window. It was uncomfortably hot. The air, outside and in, was rancid—a thick, cheesy mix of car fumes, armpits, dry-cleaning fluid, burnt rubber, and piss-dipped cotton-wool.

“Want some tea?” Leo asked. He was wearing a stained T-shirt that might possibly once have been white.

“Thanks,” I said.

“If I make you a cup will you show me your tits?” He smirked as he dug a mug out of the sink, tipped out what appeared to be plankton, and held it for a moment or two under the gas heater spout. As the kettle boiled, he took a carton of milk and a can of Special Brew out of the fridge. “Last one,” he said, snapping back the ring-pull and taking a slug while dunking my teabag in the water. The more he dunked, the more his face clouded over.

“I think,” he said, finally fishing out the teabag with his fingers and chucking it in the sink, “that it is very possible that Frankie was killed.”

“What do you mean?”

He handed me the mug and looked at my tape recorder. “Is that thing off?” Frankie had obviously taught him a trick or two about interviews.

“It is if you want it to be,” I said.

He watched me push the button, then went over and sat on the bed with his beer. And started to tell me a strange—well, ridiculous—story.

“Frankie's manager, Clive MacFee, once used to manage this decrepit old motherfucker name of Perry Kaye—you heard of him? Had a bunch of hits in the early eighties but hadn't done shit in years. Kaye, so MacFee told Frankie, was giving him a hard time about getting him some gigs or something, but like MacFee said, what the motherfuck can you do with these old farts except stick 'em on them cheap Christmas nostalgia compilations and trot em out for awards shows?”

Leo raised his right buttock. I braced myself for an additional room fragrance but instead he excavated a squashed pack of Camels from his back pocket. When his attempts to coolly tap a cigarette through a hole in the top corner failed, he ripped the packet open, taking out what looked like a small, sad, sculptural representation of a Greek letter S. Straightening it out as best he could, he lit it with a Zippo.

“Where was I?”

“Awards shows.”

“Right, MacFee told Frankie about this show he was at where Kaye was doing some kind of god-awful greatest hits medley, and MacFee and this bloke from Kaye's record company were watching him on a monitor in the green room. Both of them were shaking their heads. ‘They should be forced to retire at fifty,' said MacFee, ‘like in the army.'

“‘Better still,' said the record company bloke, ‘shoot 'em. There's nothing does more for record sales than death.'
‘Can't argue there,' says MacFee. ‘Look what it did for Lennon. That comeback album of his was a
dog
. Wouldn't have shifted shit if it wasn't for that mad cunt with the gun.'

“The record company bloke held up his glass and made a toast. ‘To Mark David Chapman.' ‘Mark David Chapman.' MacFee bashed his glass. They were laughing, but the thought is obviously niggling at MacFee because later he starts getting obsessed with dreaming up all these different ways of killing Perry Kaye off. He told Frankie all this crazy shit he'd tried. Like the photo session on the White Cliffs of Dover with the photographer going, ‘Back just a touch, Perry—just a little more.' Or the pair of antique pistols MacFee bought Kaye for his birthday that nearly blew the cleaning lady's head off when she was dusting them.”

“It was a joke,” I said. “He was taking the piss.”

“Judging by what happened to Kaye
and
to Frankie, I know what I think. Kaye died while making the video for ‘Catch Me I'm Falling,' right? The stuntman doesn't show up; the video director has a motherfucking fit and threatens to charge double if he has to reshoot; the young blonde who's meant to be his love interest is staring at his Elton John hair weave like she's about to toss her cookies. So next thing you know Kaye is up in the plane, jumping. The chute doesn't open. And his last album, a masterpiece of motherfucking scrofulosity, suddenly soars to number one.”

“So that's it then. The manager did it.”

“All I'm saying is it's too coincidental to be a coincidence.”

“But why kill Frankie? What doesn't fit is Frankie wasn't past it. Everything he touched topped the charts. Everyone loved Frankie.” Except Frankie. Frankie could have
captained the Olympics self-hate team. That throat infection that made him cancel that last tour? MacFee got a call from him at four in the morning and rushed round to find his star strung out and naked—strung up too, a belt around his neck fixed to the top of the door, and gripping his dick and crying like an abandoned baby. He told MacFee he wanted out.

“What you don't know,” said Leo, after a pause, “is that Frankie wanted out.”

“From what?”

“I'll tell you from what,” though he doesn't. He changes the subject, “Do you want to know what
really
motherfucks me off? It's that shit going round that the whole thing was staged.”

“Sorry?”

“You know, that it was a put-up job and he's still alive. What they're saying, right, is that Frankie, who is now in the back of an ambulance screaming down Camden High Street, has to unzip the body bag from the inside, rustle up a look-alike, jump out of the ambulance at fifty miles an hour without anyone seeing him, and disappear.”

“You mean disappear like his girlfriend Pussy did.”

“Motherfuck!” He rescued the last squashed cigarette from the packet, lit it, and fell back onto the bed, dragging on it furiously. He lay there for a while kicking his heels, glaring at the ceiling. The traffic appeared to have stopped for the moment and the room was quiet, aside from the chug and whir of the dry-cleaning machines downstairs.

Leo finally broke the silence. “I mean,” he said slowly, like he was figuring the whole thing out as he went along, “let's just say that in theory that the first bit could have happened—the ambulance might have hit a hole in the road,
the jolt might have kick-started Frankie's heart, and he opens his eyes, sees where he is, and decides to get the motherfuck out. I accept that is possible. But
disappear
? Someone like Frankie can't disappear. I mean,
I
could disappear. It would be tough,” he added quickly as his new musician-with-a-record-deal ego kicked in, “but Frankie's the biggest rockstar in the country. And anyway, if he had've disappeared, I'd know about it. I mean I'm his best motherfucking mate.”

That's why Frankie was at The Nympholeptics' show. That's why The Nympholeptics had a record deal.

“Face it, Frankie's dead. End of interview. Now,” he said, springing up from his horizontal position and onto the edge of the bed, “do I get to see your tits?”

“No, the tea was shit, but thanks for asking.”

“Fair enough,” he said shrugging. “Any chance of a cover story?”

That was over ten months ago. Frankie hasn't surfaced, nor for that matter have any of his rumored offspring, and Clive MacFee is now managing Leo's band. Their first single, “My Best Friend,” is due out on the anniversary of Frankie Rose's death. MacFee bought the rights to the Japanese couple's camcorder film for their video.

The Snakehouse is all boarded up now—after a couple of drug raids the authorities closed it down. But the girls are still there, every day, rain or shine, blagging cash from the tourists who want to take their picture and mandating whose photos and trinkets and love letters will be stapled to the heaving front door. The Love Stain is still there too. Probably always will be. Camden Council is notoriously crap at cleaning up.

LeeAnn Starmountain was sitting in front of the window in her favorite writing chair when the phone call came to say her mother was dead.

She had, as it happens, been plotting ways to kill her at the very moment the phone rang. This was nothing unusual for LeeAnn. It had ceased by this stage to be anything personal. It was her way of relaxing, like doing crossword puzzles might be for other folk. A ritual that helped free up her imagination to write songs. She couldn't even say she hated her mother anymore; at least she couldn't summon up the actual emotions. She just accepted that she did and took it from there. Some of the sweetest, most plaintive love songs that LeeAnn ever wrote started life with her mother's head severed by a falling stained-glass window, or a cannibal preacher stir-frying her heart, or her mother pinned and slowly bleeding beneath the wheels of a semitruck with a “Jesus Saves” bumper sticker and LeeAnn in the passenger seat giving the driver the blow job of his life.

By now, over the course of the two hundred seventeen songs she had written, sixty of which had made the country music charts, eight of them at number one, LeeAnn reckoned she'd come up with every conceivable way there was of dispatching her mother to the Happy Homestead in the Sky where the angels wear high-necked nighties and their breath smells of apple pie. Which is why, all the while that her tearful sister Beth was relating how Mom had been
baked alive by her electric blanket, slowly, over the course of a week, LeeAnn felt not so much shocked or sorrowful or horrified or bereaved as resentful. The whole time she was mouthing her oh-my-Gods she was thinking of her mother lying paralyzed by a stroke on her bed, marinating in her own urine, staring night after night at that framed picture of Jesus Christ on the bedroom wall that looked like Brad Pitt in
Legends of the Fall
, and slow-cooking to perfection.

It was just like her to go come up with something LeeAnn hadn't thought of yet. It was as if her mother had deprived her of the perfect, and now never-to-be-written, song.

When she hung up she was shaking; she could have used a drink, but there was nothing in the house, hadn't been since she graduated summa cum laude from Betty Ford's. She went to the bathroom, leaned over the basin, and stared at herself in the mirror for a long time, as if confirming she was still there. She looked older. Maybe it was because she no longer had a mother to measure herself against. She could see the headline above the face in the mirror: “Bizarre Death: The Heartbreak Behind the Glamour of Country's Hottest Star.”

The phone rang again. Her answering machine kicked in. She heard the businesslike voice of her manager, Ross Silver, telling her he'd just gotten off the phone with Todd Tamara—Todd managed the heavy metal group Shoot 2 Kill, the biggest-selling band in the States, who'd spent twelve weeks at number one with their version of her country ballad “Sweet Summer Breeze”; she wound up doing an interview with their singer, Rex, on KLIT, the Los Angeles metal radio
station. Distracted for a moment, LeeAnn pictured Rex's taut twenty-five-year-old body in its trademark tiny tight white shorts. Ross was telling her machine that Todd reckoned Rex was planning to split and go solo and he wanted to get together with LeeAnn and collaborate on some songs.

The phone rang again. “Hi, Miss Starmountain? It's Josh Harris, from
Hats the Way I Like It
in Atlanta”—
Hats
was one of the young, hip New Traditionalist magazines that had sprouted like mushrooms since the latest country music boom. The voice was respectful but resolute. “We've just heard a report that your mother has passed on in, uh, unusual circumstances? First of all, ma'am, our sincere condolences on your tragedy, and my apologies for calling you at home at such a time, but as soon as we heard, we pulled the front page of the March issue and we want to put you on the cover instead, and of course we're working a pretty tight deadline here now, so if we could just get a few words? I've left a message with your manager. Anyhow, I'll keep trying till I get ahold of you. Thank you kindly, Miss Starmountain, and once again, my deepest sympathy on your tragic loss.”