Robots vs. Fairies(95)
Tania told me over and over, those first years, that she was trying to save the world, and sometimes she told me it was her fault the world was collapsing. I talked her down. Obviously not her fault, one, and who could save the world, two? I never felt like I could. I felt like I’d be better off getting stoned, and so I got stoned.
In fact, that’s my plan right now. I get high, pass out, dream of wings.
The next day, I’m fucking off onto the Akercock tour bus, rolling a wheelie bag full of what I need, prescriptions and notebooks, condoms and vitamins. Air mask.
Normally, I do the whole tour with the band. I write in my notebook, record the band’s shit-talking as we drive up the coast, or down the coast, or deep into the Midwest. It’s not the old days, but touring’s the one thing that’s not too different. Upholstered seats. Driver. Video games. Everybody on the bus sending texts to the girl they kind of remember and plan to fuck in the next town. I remember when it was all pay phones and hope. Now it’s easier to get laid. Not that most of these bands even want to. Mostly, they want to nap. Not this one.
This band doesn’t sleep, literally.
Mabel says “Touch Eron and get a shock” and she’s not kidding. She’s bleeding a little bit, from one of her ears, and I feel old even telling her. There he is, wearing radioactive pants all day and night, not giving a fuck. First gig of the tour, I’m in the front row with the groupies, and they’re crying, and he’s lighting them up. Their fingers on the front of the stage. I can see their skeletons through their skin. It’s a show. We all know it. But it’s a damn good one.
Onstage, Eron Chaos is twenty-two years old, six foot three, a look about him like he’s never been loved. Offstage, he has an elderly dignity punctuated by obscenity.
Eron won’t generally talk to me. I interview a girl at the back of a gig, who says he gives it all up when he sings, “so listen to him sing, stupid. He isn’t safe onstage. He scares me, and I’m not just scared for him. I’m scared for myself. But it feels good. I’d follow him anywhere.”
She gives me a smile that still has baby teeth. It’s surreal. I haven’t seen a fan this young in years. I feel like I’m dead and walking through an imaginary world, one that conforms to my dreams. These are the sixties I didn’t live through.
A couple tours lately, there’ve been accordions on board, and fiddles. Somebody singing “Hard Times,” which I never appreciate. No matter how hard the times are, rock bands are supposed to be playing songs about screwing in the bathroom, driving too fast, and breaking the world apart. Yeah, times are hard. Yeah, times are bleak. Yeah, you want to talk about the things going on?
I want to talk about the music. The music is always the guts of the revolution. The music scene these days is nostalgia trying to mash up with science fiction, because people stopped wanting to imagine the future but still liked the costumes.
Akercock, on the other hand, is an orgy, akin to watching the gods of rock in bed together, straight boys in glitter eyeliner dancing with their pants tight enough to tourniquet, but some kind of other element alongside all that too—
I stop there because I know what that element is, but I don’t know how to write it. It’s something I’ve been craving like a drug since things fell apart with Tania. Adriftica, I think, trying to imagine the boundaries of that country.
Every night I see that thing behind the band, and it’s not a light cue. It’s not a thing the band brings along. The rest of the band just keeps playing, and they grin at Eron, who writhes in front of a door to elsewhere. Every time I see it, I want to run to it, and every time it’s just a drum kit and a brick wall when they stop playing. Mabel dives every night, and half the time she just disappears. The crowd loves it. I don’t. Magic tricks and mirrors, but none of that appears on the bus. I miss how they do things, and no one will tell me.
“It’s only rock & roll, bro,” says the bassist, and I say, “It’s not,” and he looks at me and shakes his shoulders, and for a moment I swear I see a set of dark blue-black wings, but then they’re gone again, and he’s in the tightest pants and a shirt cut to the top of them, his skin glowing a little, like he’s been roaming in the psychedelic pastures of the PNW, like he’s been there too, and I think about asking him if I can score anything, but I don’t do the band’s drugs, and they don’t do mine.
The audiences of kids keep getting bigger.
“How did Akercock start?” I ask the drummer. Drummers are always easier than the rest. They’ll talk. Not that I even know this guy’s name. He changes his mind every time he tells me. Says he can’t really recall, and people’ve called him lots of things.
“Somebody hired us to play a gig,” he says, “and we came out to do it.”
“But how did you start? Before someone hired you, right, you were already a band?”
“Somebody hired us,” the drummer says, “to get rid of some pests. They paid us a lot of money.”
“You were that bad?”
“We were that good,” he says. “Know how hard it is to get rid of pests? This was, what, an industrial moment, sky black with soot, everyone burning coal. We got the pests and took them down.”
I look at him suspiciously, because this is the classic exaggeration of boys who think they’re cool. I’ve seen it before. Mythologizing themselves into two hundred years of history.