Robots vs. Fairies(93)
Thinking of Tania, I assume, is what cues up my vision of batshit.
The girl onstage turns around, looks out into the crowd, and starts to sing. Faint form after faint form climbs out of her mouth, all with tails and hooves, all with thin wings. The creatures flutter into the crowd and whisper in the ears of the kids dancing on the floor. There are maybe fifty of them. Maybe a hundred. I see, for a moment, a rift behind the band, a golden and green doorway, opening into some other place. I blink. No, it’s gone.
Back up to say: I have no small history with hallucinogens. Seriously, fuck those mushrooms I foraged in the PNW with Tania back when I was clueless and didn’t know that mushrooms absorbed radiation.
I’ve seen groupies before, but never like Akercock’s. These girls are the old-fashioned kind, dancing in the front row, their fingers clacking over their heads like tiny jaws, their nipples pointing out of their T-shirts like thorns. And plenty aren’t wearing shirts at all. When they cheer, they cheer like owls diving at prey. They dance like little kids in a sprinkler, but the kind of little kids you won’t mess with because they might be Satan in girl form.
I relax a little, watching them. If the band has groupies, it can’t be that weird. Whatever I just saw can easily be blamed on my own wrongful history. The main weird thing here is that the whole audience, I mean all of it, is in their twenties or younger.
As in, the audience is made up of kids.
I Lazarus up, phone Rolling Stone, and shout that they’d better send me to cover this for real.
The idiot on the phone gives a whine translating into O ancient tragedy of a writer, you won a Pulitzer like-that-even-matters so I’m supposed to let you slide and give you expenses. FINE.
I’m set. I insinuate myself backstage, flashing credentials and giving the journalist swagger that theoretically compensates for the gray in my beard and the undeniable hair in my ears.
“Bro,” I say to Eron Chaos, trying to keep my old man situation in check. “I’m Heck Limmer from Rolling Stone.”
The kid looks at me. “I’m not your brother, and that’s not your real name,” he says.
Of course it’s not. No one’s named Heck, unless they named themselves after a country-western misunderstanding in the eighties and it stuck, because they were the only Heck.
“Simon,” I say. “Originally.”
“I know who you are. You wrote that book, right? The one about bacchanals causing God hallucinations, heart attacks caused by bass, and whether you can deal with the devil or summon the dead if you play the right kind of song? I liked that book.”
It’s unclear whether he’s full of shit. I did write that book. It was famous. But it was before he was born. Also, this isn’t how it’s normally described. Normally people say it’s a book about Bowie.
“My name’s not my real name either,” he tells me, like I don’t know. You don’t get named Chaos by your parents. I don’t know anything about his parents, though. There’s no story on this guy.
“Wanna give me the real version?” I ask him. “For the record?”
He inhales, and sings a note, and the note goes on way the fuck too long, a tangled string of syllables that don’t sound like language, or at least, not like any language I know.
“Mind if I record that?”
“Yeah,” he says. “I mind. You don’t get to record that. It’s my name and it’s precious.”
They’re all eccentrics, but there’s something about the tone he uses, and I leave it alone for the moment. I tell the rest of the band I’m coming on the road with them, feature story, big deal. They just look at me, with their animal eyes. Not in a bad way. In a way that says I’m an asshole king of rock, motherfucker, and you’re going to listen to me sing. In a way that says You’d better listen to me sing, because I’m not gonna talk.
I glance toward the couch where Eron Chaos is making out with the girl from the stage. The two of them are a knot of leather and lethargy.
“Who’s that?” I asked the drummer.
“Mabel,” he says, and rolls his eyes. “He’s hers, she’s his, don’t mess with Mother Nature. Eron had a shit divorce, and everything’s been fucked since, all over hill and dale. That’s why we’re touring.”
Hill and dale. Please.
I let myself have one long look at Mabel with her long tangled hair and her white dress, and that’s all, because Mabel, if anything, is about a million years too young for me, and not only that, she reminds me, in a shitload too many ways, of Tania. Mabel’s teeth look like they belong to an animal, all of them pointy, in stark contrast to her painted lips. I look away as Chaos tears the front of her dress open. Poser, I think, reflexively, but then it feels realer than that. This isn’t a motel-room-wrecking band. This is something else. Something that calls me in.
Outside, the crowd’s dispersing, and I make my way with them. I get to my hotel and write a chunk of profile. I’m high as a drone on some powder I bought off a groupie. Akercock. I could’ve chosen a different name for the late-night radio hosts to say, but late-night radio doesn’t exist anymore. Nothing exists anymore. I could talk about pop eating itself. I could talk about punk rock and Sid, and the Ramones, all of whom I knew, in that fanboy drugswap way, before they fell down. I could talk about disasters. I don’t know the angle yet on this band, but I have a few ideas.