Too Weird for Ziggy (9 page)

“Look, man, it's been twenty years since the Rolling Stones were arrested for pissing on a garage wall. Times have changed, the world's moved on. Don't you read your own newspapers? Jim Bayley left a fucking
turd
in the middle of
his hotel bed and it wound up at Sotheby's, fetched a fucking fortune.”

The journalists, like they always do, nod and laugh too loud. He continues at length, self-righteously, on the noble tradition of rock 'n' roll micturition, how The Who posed latrinally on an album cover, Ozzy made water on the Alamo, Izzy irrigated an airplane aisle—“Because,” Rex says, pausing for emphasis,
“his fucking bladder was bursting
, and he'd paid ten trillion dollars to fly first fucking class, and when he needed to take a piss the toilets were all taken.
I
was dying to empty my bladder. The maid was in my bathroom. She'd been fucking around in there for over half an hour, probably going through my waste bin for used fucking condoms to sell to my fans. So what the fuck was I to do? I pissed out of the window. Was it
my
fault there were people out there staring up at me? Was it
my
fault a hotel that charges over two hundred and fifty fucking bucks a night can't spend some of it paying for security to keep them out of the fucking line of fire?”

A reporter from a South American daily dares to break into the monologue with a question. He stands up. All eyes turn to him. “In your song ‘White Trash War' you caused a controversy in the United States with your attack on Hispanic immigrants. Is this incident merely another way of pissing on us?” Nobody has expected this; he looks so timid. Rex shoots up from his seat like an overwound spring, his eyes bright, his pale face livid. He knocks over microphones. He and his bodyguard are ready to fight.

The cat has jumped onto the girl's bed and is clawing the pillow. Circling, it lifts its tail and sprays on the wall
behind. An oily yellow splash dribbles slowly down. She didn't know how long she'd been asleep. Or for that matter if she was still sleeping and only dreaming that she was looking at the clock and it was ten o' clock. There was still time for her to get to the concert. The band would go on late again tonight, she was sure. She didn't care what she had to do, she was going. If her mother tried to stop her she would kill her—a knife through the back of the neck while she was watching TV. Paco would take her. She would show him her breasts and he would drive her there.

And she stood at the top at the back of the stadium. From the distance the band onstage looked like fleas jumping on a white dog's back, but she could see Rex in close-up on the giant video screens on either side. Some people who recognized her from the television pointed her out to each other. A girl came up and touched her, two boys in new concert T-shirts still smelling of ink shuffled over shyly to talk. But she looked straight ahead at the screens. Hot tears puffed up in her eyes, and through them the image on the screen was squashed and livid like a rainbow melting.

Jim's dead and Reeve isn't, which is why the Germans are here talking to Reeve and not to Jim. Though if Jim weren't dead, of course, there wouldn't be any need for them to be here at all. They're here to make a film about Jim, or more accurately, a film about the film about Jim, a TV documentary to tie in with the movie. They've rounded up the usual suspects—the director, the actor, the biographer, the record company, old girlfriends, rock critics who were rockcriticking back when Jim was still alive—but Reeve is their prize catch.

Reeve, so the story goes, was driving with his girlfriend, a Doors tape was on the stereo, and just as it got to their song “The End” the car swerved off the road. Reeve went through the windscreen. Three weeks in a coma and when he finally came to he told the doctor and his mother and his girlfriend and the clutch of faces peering down at him that he had broken through to the other side and he had seen Jim Morrison. Jim had supposedly told him to go back and that he would walk beside him, and the spirit of Jim had entered his body while he was lying blotto on the hospital bed. Reeve denies it now, says it was something his former manager made up to tell the press. “It's ridiculous. I never said that. That sort of thing doesn't happen to people. Dead guys don't just regurgitate into someone else.” He calls his show a tribute, not an impersonation. “I like to think I help people remember what a huge talent he was.”

Whatever it is, the shows are sellouts. Pale-faced young women with ironed hair and skinny grave-faced boys in floppy white shirts they bought in the girls department and leather pants with brass door knocker belts pile into the clubs and mouth all the words. Reeve's publicity blurb says: “The recession and the takeover of the music business by the big corporations have instilled a yearning for the honesty and simplicity of the sixties,” which Reeve's Jim show is satisfying. Death is big business. Hendrix is alive and selling jeans, Elvis is flogging supermarket tabloids and fathering children up and down the country; if it ain't stiff it ain't worth a fuck. They flocked to The Doors film, and they flock to see Reeve with Jim walking beside him. The German TV crew was there last night, but there was a technical problem, and they've brought him back this afternoon to run through a couple of numbers again.

A nightclub by day unsettles you—too much light, not enough light, just enough to see the smell. Beer, old cocktails, stale cigarettes, ten years of accumulated earwax, most of the right nightclub smell ingredients, but they bear as much resemblance to a nightclub at night as the smell of airline food does to the stuff you eat at ground level. Daytime people smell different to nighttime people. Their movements are more spatial, their body-smells air-conditioned. Men in grubby band T-shirts strew wires across the stage; men in newer, cleaner band T-shirts strew wires across the floor. Two women walk around with clipboards, looking busy. Someone comes in off the street with sandwiches and coffee, and a wedge of dusty light beats him through the door, illuminating the shoddy tables, the tawdry decor, the black
and purple badly painted paint. A nightclub has no right to be up at this time of day.

Reeve is upstairs changing. A rock journalist is being interviewed, they've clipped on a microphone, and he's sitting very still like you do when a movie camera is trained on you, not even blinking, like a rabbit caught in headlights. They look uncomfortable—the American journalist, the German interviewer—unsure of the dance steps, like a doctor going for a checkup or a cop arresting a cop. Should they act comradely? Antagonistic? Superior? Bored? Businesslike? The German goes for businesslike. “What were your impressions of Jim Morrison's sexuality?” and the American answers, “Well, it wasn't black rock 'n' roll sexuality and it wasn't white boys imitating black sexuality and it wasn't cowboy sexuality or New York greasers imitating Elvis imitating whatever. It was middle-class-white sexuality taken to its theoretic limit as the outer limit of your sexuality. What it was was the music of
your
dick.” And you can see by the way the interviewer nods that he feels he's framed the question exactly right and has gotten exactly the answer he needed, exactly what he would have said himself if the positions were reversed. And they thank the American very much and give him a sandwich and a beer from the cooler box with the label slapped on sideways from sitting around in melted ice.

The band comes down, plugs in, tunes up. Reeve, in virgin pirate shirt and creaky leather trousers, goes over to the microphone and leans his forehead for a moment or two against the stand, his shirt flopped open, his arms crucifixional. He lifts off the microphone and encircles it with his dirigible lips, like he's sucking an ice cream, then holds
it away from him and says, “Testestestestestest, one-two, one-two, one-two.” The Germans make the international everything's-okay sign, and they nod in rhythm as a xeroxed “Roadhouse Blues” fills the fake night.

And several million Germans sitting in their living rooms see Reeve stalk the stage like a lion, his crotch shimmering in a leather-lizard sway. They see him pout the Jimpout, see him stare the Jimstare, the hooded one with the lids halfway down and the pupils halfway up, staring across the footlights, across the lines on the television screen and straight into their souls, while the music soars and swirls and curlicues about him.

And then they see him later, at home, being interviewed, and they gasp in amazement. Because the transformation is as total as werewolf back to boy. Offstage Reeve is small and skinny, slight and spare, fuzzy and vague like a bird that's fallen out of the nest. His eyes are small and birdlike. The only thing even vaguely reptilian about him is the bonelessness of his face. It's soft, almost chinless. They wonder, like you wonder when you watch a magic show, how he does it, how he makes those eyes, those chiseled cheekbones, the teen magazine picture-story-hero chin appear like that out of nowhere then disappear again. The only thing about him of any substance is his lips. He looks like a whoopee cushion impaled on a stick. And his eyes light up when he talks about Jim, and dim right down when he talks about himself. They screw up in concentration as if he were peering down a microscope into his life, trying to find something there he can recognize and label, and he scans his sentences desperately for a spot where he can slot Jim's name in again.

The TV station's switchboard is jammed with phone calls: thirty marriage proposals, two recording contracts, four death threats, and a book deal. A female psychiatrist calls to offer free advice. And all the next day's newspapers carry Reeve's picture, and the critics proclaim he's the star of the show. An East German poet, a famous former dissident, faxes in a poem he wrote while watching the show. In it Reeve becomes the symbol of a disunited Germany, the sad but cheery little East German who rattles about in the giant's leather jackboots and stumbles like Charlie Chaplin as he tries hard to keep up. He wants so much to emulate the powerful giant who always strides ahead of him, but he can only ever be a pale impersonation, an apologetic shadow, dickless, always the smaller of the two. When a lizard's tail is lopped off, it says in the last verse, the lizard keeps walking, it does not stop and look around to see its scrawny buttend writhing in the dirt; it doesn't need it, it can do quite well without it, but the tail will go on wriggling behind it all the same.

Die Zeit
calls up its stringer in L.A. to get an interview and runs it with the headline “The Lizard's Tail.” It shows the pictures, the befores-and-afters, Reeve with his band and Reeve with his mum. He was fourteen years old, he says, when a schoolfriend turned him on to The Doors, lent him copies of
Strange Days
and
Waiting for the Sun
. It was like “a mystical experience. I went out and bought the albums and played them so often I played them literally to death. It was all I had of Jim. I never got to see him—he died when I was seven years old.” He comes across as neither proud nor humble, but as a man who is comfortable with
what he is. He merely takes for granted that people want to hear more about Jim Morrison than they want to hear about him, and it's a subject he knows an awful lot about. His answers veer among those of a first-year psychology student, a fan, and a science nerd.

“The Doors were signed to Elektra Records. It's a little-known fact that Elektra had the best-smelling album sleeves in the world; it was something in the ink they used. Jim was into smell. He had been heavily into the French decadents, and he once told the band that he wanted to smell Paris before he died. Did you know Jim was asthmatic? I don't know if it's true but I read it in an article written by his cousin. It was probably why Jim's father gave him such a hard time. His father was a military man, a rear admiral, and here he has a son who writes poetry and sniffs flowers, and to top it all keels over when he gets a faceful of pollen! His cousin said Jim's first experimentation with drugs was a deliberate overdose of asthma medication.

“If you want to understand Jim you first have to understand his relationship with his father. He hated his father and he hated the military and he hated the whole male domination and violence thing they stood for, and yet at the same time he wanted to
be
like that. He wanted to be the dominant male in a gang of men, he wanted to be the king of the jungle, and of course he wanted to dominate women. Totally. Also the name, Elektra—it was Electra who helped her brother kill their mother and her lover. Electra was like Jim's feminine half. You know those lines in ‘The End': ‘Mother, I want to …'? Think how significant it must have been for Jim to be offered a record deal by a company called Elektra.”

The German TV people flew out to Los Angeles and offered Reeve his own weekly TV show. What the producers had in mind was a kind of Oprah Winfrey interviewing Michael Jackson, the difference being that their Oprah thought she
was
Michael. They settled for a cross between a European variety talk show with song-and-dance celebrities and an American freak show talk show, lots of weirdo guests espousing crazy theories while Reeve refereed.

They called it
The Lizard's Tail
and it was everything they hoped for. Everybody watched it, everybody wanted to be on it, from conspiracy theorists to rockstars passing through. From the teacher who was campaigning to have Jim Morrison's poems added to the school curriculum to the medium who claimed to have contacted Jim in heaven; there was a special heaven, she said, reserved for stars like Morrison, because the hordes still press to see them even when they're dead.

A German in his twenties who bore a slight resemblance to the singer came on the program and claimed to be Jim's son. His mother had gone to London to see The Doors in the sixties and as she stood crushed in front of the stage at the Roundhouse gazing up at Morrison, he stared back down at her, looking just like that photo that everybody knows, the lion picture, chest bare, arms extended, hair tousled, lips half parted, eyes staring straight into her underwear. And after the show she went to his hotel room. She married a publisher and became a Hamburg hausfrau and no one told him anything until a year or so ago when he argued with his father, who called him the bastard son of a fat L.A. rockstar poet, a drunk and bloated blubber Baudelaire who once had some talent
but sold himself by the pound, and wound up wet and wrinkly, dead in his tub. And his mother became hysterical. She wouldn't cooperate when he went for the blood tests and applied to Jim's estate for the DNA. He'd changed his name by deed poll to James Andreas Morrison and his band was currently shopping for a major record deal.