Too Weird for Ziggy (17 page)

Ten days went by. Perry was nervous as a spider, up early each morning for the first time since his school days to check the post, call the office, see if anything had arrived. There were tearstained letters of condolence from teenage girls on mauve writing paper, a couple of encouraging faxes from fellow popstars' management offices, the expected weirdo stuff, like the letter telling him to look for it in Princess Diana's apartment in Kensington Palace, and
the package with the joke-shop rubber penis tattooed with his name.

And then it came. His assistant, looking terrified, crept in carrying a white Chinese take-away box. From the way he held it it might have contained cat-sick. On a bed of noodles sat two rubber fingers like fat spring rolls. And a photo of the puppet propped outside a restaurant in London's Chinatown. Its two remaining fingers were raised in a rude sign at the camera, its now-unbandaged one-eared face looking puzzled and forlorn. The assistant shook his head: There wasn't any letter. Perry cried out—it had been building up; he couldn't stop himself—“It's not fair!” He could feel the tears welling in the back of his eyes as he picked up the fingers and rolled them gently in his hand. “They said they'd tell me what to do and they didn't! It's not fair!”

The audiences who flocked to the Lloyd Webber musical had to be content with Perry's understudy. Perry, lied his manager, was extremely sorry to have to let his fans down but he had been smitten with a bad case of the Asian flu. The soap opera writers had to rewrite furiously, sending Perry's character to Florida to search for his missing granny, who had cashed in her pension and run off from her residential care home with a young male nurse.

And Perry spent his days sitting on the daybed staring at the walls, or sitting on the floor staring at the daybed, or lying on his back staring at the ceiling, listening to the phone ring, his voice on the answering machine announcing brightly that he wasn't at home. He didn't read his mail. He didn't read the papers. He didn't even read the dozens of glossy magazines with his face beaming from the cover, which were piled
up, pristine and unread, on the floor. He would look up listlessly as his assistant appeared at irregular intervals with another strange container with another rubber body part. He would look at the accompanying photos almost indifferently, as if they were holiday snapshots an aunt was showing him. Each featured his puppet in a different location: standing on one foot beside the Eiffel Tower, waving a stump outside St. Peter's in Rome, dressed in child-sized lederhosen outside a Munich
bierkeller
, two toes stuck rakishly in its Tyrolean hat. There wasn't any ransom note. He would hand them back and go on staring at the wall.

There were rumors in the papers that due to Perry's lengthy absence his soap opera character was going to be killed off—carjacked in Florida and sent home in a box. The manager got on the phone and threatened lawsuits. A scriptwriter came up with the inspired idea of having Perry's character kidnapped by a Florida drug baron who mistook him for the son of the boss of a rival cartel. Not only would it inject some
Miami Vice
glam, but they could show his picture in every episode and keep it going until Perry came back. But nothing could be done about the musical. His understudy—blond, bland and as white-bread as the music—was getting rave reviews in Perry's role, so after three months they gave him the job.

Meanwhile, several thousand miles away in Los Angeles, at five in the morning a tour bus pulls up outside Mann's Chinese Theatre. It has dark windows like cheap sunglasses and dead flies clinging to the radiator grille. In the front of the bus is a pale, English pop band; in the back, a cluster of big, black equipment flight-cases. A couple are stenciled with the name of a band: Swallow. On others the
name has been spray-painted out and replaced with a new name: Femme Fatale.

Someone lifts the lid of a guitar case. Inside, wedged inside the square foam-rubber insert like an oversized turkey in a small microwave oven, its extremities either folded in or missing, is Perry's puppet. A young man—slim, good-looking, wavy-haired, pulpy-lipped—tugs out the puppet, which in its better days might well have been the Spitting Image of himself. He jumps down off the bus, two of his bandmates following. One is holding a large cardboard square with a pink star drawn on it—a homemade copy of a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.

He lays it out on the ground while his colleague keeps a lookout. From his pocket he takes a joke-shop dog turd, and stumbling around like a drunk with laughter, he puts it on the cardboard star, on which Perry's name is written in gold. The puppet is slumped against the wall like a beggar, gazing down at the star with its one dead eye. The bus driver jumps down, laughing, brandishing a camera. A dangerous-looking character staggering down Hollywood Boulevard, cursing at shop windows, sees them and throws them a cheery grin and waves. Back inside the bus, the bass player is sitting at a table with a penknife, prising the bottom off a domed snow globe that says “L.A. snowman”—a little top hat, cane, and carrot floating around in water. Spilling out the liquid, he plunks in the puppet's eyeball and squashes the plastic base back on.

Back in London, Perry's manager is in no mood for arguments. He's just taken on a new girl singer whose record is already tearing up the charts, whom the pop papers are calling the next big thing, and whose PMT is driving him to
drink. All he needs is another moody popstar. He drives over to Perry's house, yells into the entry phone, strides in, and unrolls a chart he's made listing all the magazines and newspapers in Britain, logged with entries when anything on Perry has appeared. Blank. Nothing on the radio, nothing on the television. Perry's book is hardly selling. The soap opera contract has finally run out. Perry's last appearance was at a ratings-busting funeral, where his mates scattered his ashes at his local pub. The record company was screaming because a new album had been scheduled for the summer and Perry still hadn't written one new song. Feeling too feeble to put up a protest, Perry agreed to go into the studio and record a cover version of a maudlin hotel bar ballad. It hardly dented the charts at home but was climbing up the Top 100 in the States. MacFee had hired an L.A. publicist who had arranged a spot for Perry on the TV program
Solid Gold
. Unless Perry wanted to find a new manager, he told him—assuming he could get one—he'd better get his ass in gear.

Backstage in the green room at the Hollywood TV station, an assortment of people so disparate it's hard to believe they belong to the same species are studying a video monitor and waiting for their turn. What they are watching is a TV station floor manager with comic aspirations trying to liven up a studio audience consisting of several rows of teenagers on metal folding chairs. There are muscular women dancers in red tube tops and sequined leg warmers stretching, and an equally muscular man running through his warm-up routine with an unlit cigarette in his mouth. In one corner is an English popstar dressed in a
highwayman's outfit; in another corner, a tiny American rockstar, hiding from view behind his enormous white-haired bodyguard. Perry Kaye is wandering about the room with a towel around his waist. He hasn't dressed yet. He stops and stares at himself in the mirror. The fluorescent lights are harsh. It seems to him his cheeks are beginning to sag.

Someone calls someone to call Perry in for makeup and he enters the room just as the newly oranged, pale English pop band are leaving. Their guitarist spots Perry and comes over, smiling, and slaps him on the back.

“Perry, hey, how's it going? Good to see you, man. You know, we should get together sometime, do something for old times' sake?”

As the man smiles and babbles, Perry looks at him blank-faced. Until one of his bandmates comes over, glares at Perry, puts his hand around the guitarist's shoulder, and pulls him away. It's only as Perry sits there being slapped in tan foundation that he puts a name to the face. He needs a break; he must be losing it. They'd only played in the same group together for five years. Swallow. The band he'd quit for a solo career. Perry screws up his forehead. The makeup girl complains as the foundation rises like little sandworms on his brow.

A former teen idol dressed in something uncle-y, a sweater and loose-fronted, bumpless, Ken doll pants, is standing on a stage which is dotted here and there with glittery white columns. He's reading felt-tipped clichés from cue cards that someone's holding by the camera. “You know? One of the hardest things in life is to say good-bye.” Cut to Perry Kaye onstage, surrounded on all sides by columns and
sequined amazons. They're playing the introduction to his mawkish remake of “Let's Just Kiss and Say Good-Bye.” He glances at his feet; lifts his head, impassioned, to the ceiling; raises his arms; undulates his body slowly, first the top, then the bottom, like the two halves were on ball bearings; and fixes a seductive gaze on a young pimply girl in the studio audience who is staring at him, transfixed.

And he opens his mouth to mime to the song. And it stays open. He grinds to a halt. The producer shouts: “Cut.” Perry has just seen, at the back of the studio, behind the pimply girl's head, his posterior on one of the folding chairs. Cut off clumsily at the waist and thighs, it is gyrating nonchalantly in time to the music, the left cheek pivoting coquettishly, the right executing a stately pavane.

Anyone still watching the monitor in the green room would have seen Perry collapsing into the arms of the muscular male dancer, who by now has lost the cigarette. He is led offstage, shoulders slumped, sobbing. The audience is gawking. The song goes on playing without him until someone thinks of turning the record off. And the English pop band are all falling about the room, laughing, except for the guitar player, who has a thoughtful look on his face. The drummer comes over and gives him a playful one-two punch to the chest. “Joke him,” he says, “if he can't take a fuck.” And the singer and the bassist strike up a singsong like drunk English football fans, the dirty version of “Amazing Grace.” The guitarist laughs too now and joins in loudly. They whoop and applaud as the stagehand carries off the still-grinding rubber rump.

The party was too weird for Ziggy. “This is too weird for me, man,” Ziggy said and split. It was weird, even by L.A. standards. By rock 'n' roll standards too it was weird—a party centered around a hole. Like regular parties, parties without holes, there were security men in black suits guarding the gate. Limos circled and disgorged in the driveway, valet parkers in red brocade waistcoats shunted back and forth in cars that could make you cry. Night was starting to fall, someone was lighting the outdoor heaters. Someone else was digging a hole in the sand.

At a carved wooden table on the beach sat a sharp-eyed man with wealthy skin. His shirt, despite the evening chill, was open. He was covered in chest hair; it looked like he'd walked head-on into a pube-spraying machine. “Where's Ziggy?” he said.

“He's fucked off,” said an aide.

“He can fuck off then.” The man frowned. “Asshole. Like he doesn't need the publicity.” A sand-brown blonde stood behind him kneading his shoulders. His head was jammed back into her man-made chest like it was the head-rest in his Porsche. He stared straight ahead at the man by the ocean, digging in the wet sand. The hole was now wedge-shaped, five and a half feet long, not too wide. The digger was beveling the edges, pushing the sharp edge of the shovel straight down into the sand. Nearby, a film crew erected an elaborate Meccano set of lights and microphones. If they had
been any nearer they would have heard his body hair crunch under her fingers.

“Is
she
here yet?”

He couldn't see her among the party guests who were starting to spill out onto the beach. Top-of-the-range celebrities—Irving's parties were legendary—with just enough grade twos and threes to make the great feel ogled and envied and thus even greater, but not so many that they'd feel they'd been misfiled in a B-list event. Young women in tiny dresses with spaghetti straps buzzed like mosquitoes around the biggest stars.

The young man he was addressing wore petrified hair and a face frozen into a permanent state of anxiety.

“Don't believe so, Irv, but I'll check.” He muttered into his headset. “No she's not, but wife, excuse me widow, number one is. Just this minute arrived. Apparently she's got a camera crew with her, from CPB. They're doing a story on her life with the great man.”

“Not here they're not. Tell them to get the fuck out, MTV has the exclusive.” The aide spoke again into the headset, more forcefully this time. Irving watched her glide through the French doors onto the terrace, closely followed by a girl with a furry microphone on a long boom and two men with camcorders, visibily remonstrating with his staff. The Baroness's ex-wife wore an orange dress, tight as a condom. She looked magnificent. The Baroness sure could pick them, bastard, Irving thought.

“Irv, Mr. Narcisse is here,” the aide announced.

“Good. Tell Kelly to bring him straight down.” A sharp breeze whipped in off the water; Irving buttoned his
shirt. Moments later a slim young woman with big hair appeared, leading a large black man in a verdigris cape that appeared to be made out of something lumpy and still alive, like vulture's legs. He was carrying a case. Irving got up, shook his hard brown hand, and gestured him to sit down.

“Mr. Narcisse, what can I get you?” He signaled to a drinks waiter.

“My payment. Cash. In advance.”

This amused Irving. “You and Chuck Berry,” he laughed, and extracted a billfold, peeled off a wodge of notes. Narcisse flicked the edges expertly before stashing them away about his person. He sat down and put his case on the table.

“Kelly, get Mr. Narcisse whatever he needs,” said Irving. “Time to go meet and greet.” On a stage erected on the beach a five-piece covers band, each of them dressed to reflect one of the Baroness's many stage incarnations—space alien, hermaphrodite, cowboy, gigolo, vampire—struck up one of his classic songs.