Too Weird for Ziggy (19 page)

“Only,” she continued, undaunted for someone who looked so small and meek, “I saw you backstage earlier talking to Rex.”

“She's doing a story for
Pulp
,” said Rollo, “June issue, cover, double spread.” Like all publicists, he couldn't go long without telling everyone what a good job he was doing. The girl ignored him. “Do you know Duggsy?” she asked. She meant John Dugsdale, Shoot 2 Kill's drummer.
“Everyone knows Duggsy,” Jerry said, chuckling. “Genius! The star of the show!”

“You know, God's a good bloke,” Eric joined in, “only he does keep thinking he's Duggsy.” The girl just looked perplexed.

“Modesty,” Eric explained, “is not Duggsy's strongest suit.”

“Neither's drumming,” I said, and we all fell about in exaggerated drunken laughter. Except the girl. She just stood there with her thin hair and long, baggy sweater and pale, waxy face and said in a pained voice, “Do you know where I can find him?”

Just then two of the band's roadies walked into the bar. “Hey!” shouted the fat one in the faded black Aerosmith T-shirt. “It's the snorkeling Southerner. Back for another mouthful, darling?”

“Our cocks,” said the other in a bad fake-posh English accent, “are quite frankly irresistible.” He had scrawny gray hair that stuck out from his bald patch and disgusting trousers whose crotch dangled close to his knees.

“She wants to know where the drummer is,” said Eric. “Last time I looked,” said Disgusting Trousers, “he was backstage in a room with a camcorder and two naked birds on the concrete floor, stoned as fuck, eating each other out.” I don't know what she wanted to hear but it wasn't this. The girl visibly crumpled. She ran out of the bar. I felt bad. I almost went after her—she had that innocence about her that the Japanese girl fans have; it makes you want to protect them. But there are certain rules of rock journalism that are inviolable, chief among them abandoning the bar when
someone's getting in the drinks, and anyhow I didn't want to give the boys any excuse to go thinking I was soft.

“Mad cunt,” said Aerosmith. He told us they'd found her hovering by the pit when the show was over while they were doing the rounds with backstage passes, trawling for blondes who wanted to meet the band. “She comes up to me and says she has to see the
drummer
. So I say”—he knocks back a beer, a good third of it spilling onto his T-shirt and softening up a blob of what I hoped was mashed potato on his chest—“you know the routine. Only apparently she doesn't. Though her being blonde and female and breathing, naturally, we figure that she does.”

As a point of information for females, this is the basics of the Backstage Pass Transaction. A sordid business. In a nutshell: They've got something you want (band access), you've got something they want (XX chromosomes), and so a deal is struck. To get to the vocalist you fuck the tour manager; for the guitarist you blow two roadies; for the bass player you blow one; and if it's the drummer you're after they'll send you off for a brain scan, bum a cigarette, and give you an Access All Areas. Drummers, you might have gathered, do not rate high in the rock pecking order. Neither, for that matter, do girls.

“So, when the dirty deed is done I ask her what the fuck she wants with the
drummer
. I tell her that there was this drummer one time who was touring with Alice Cooper and Alice's rattlesnake gets out of its snake box backstage and bites him on the dick. And there's this rancid old groupie wandering around the corridors looking for famous knobs to suck and the drummer yells for her to go and get the
doctor. So she goes to the doctor's and tells him the drummer's been bitten on his dick by a snake. There's just one cure, the doctor tells her: Suck out the venom or he'll die. So she goes back.” He fell about laughing. “And the drummer says, well what did the doctor say? And she says—”

Paul interrupted: “‘The doctor says you're going to die!' Come on, that's an antique.” Aerosmith was choking with laughter, tears rolling down his cheeks. If you didn't know better you might have thought he was crying.

“And,” he managed to get out between gasps, “the girl doesn't even
smile
. She says, she's going to
marry
him. That she's had a message from
God
. I say, ‘Why the hell would God want you to marry Duggs? Fucking Jesus, he must have it in for you.'” Duggsy already has three exwives—and three jail terms for assault and battery. Plus an ongoing lawsuit from an ex-girlfriend, the mother of his child, who says he abused their little girl. Duggsy hits things. He's a drummer.

“And
she
says”—he rolled his eyes to heaven—“‘It is not for me to question God.'”

“Wicked!” Rollo grinned.

“Top five lies told by drummers!” announced Paul. Uh-oh, circle joke. “Number five: I taught John Bonham everything he knew. “Four,” the guy from
XO
joined in, “I practice eight hours a day.” “Three,” yelled Eric—why do men get so excited over lists?—“I'm on the cover of
Modern Drummer
any day now.” “Two,” guffawed Paul, “they'd never fire me. I hold the band together.” Aerosmith nodded, and said, “Good one.” “Number one,” said Rollo, “my girlfriend's a supermodel.” “Nah,” screamed Disgusting
Trousers, “she's a fucking great singer and the record label has asked me to produce her album!”

Whoever Duggsy's girlfriend might be, one thing was for sure: She was not going to be a timid girl with a flat chest on a mission from God.

Up all night and still we managed to get to the airport late, so I found myself stuck in a middle seat on the plane next to a stranger. Turned out he had been staying in our hotel. Somewhere over the Atlantic he told me about this strange thing that happened to him the previous night. There was a knock on his door. He was fast asleep, disoriented, and got up and opened it without thinking and the girl from the bar walked straight in. It was two-thirty in the morning, she was dressed, he wasn't, apart from his underpants, and the etiquette of the situation left him at a disadvantage. And he could see she was upset. Plus I guess he saw something in her face, just like I did. She sat on the edge of his bed, back straight, hands in her lap, rubbing one thumb slowly around the other, while he went and grabbed the toweling robe from the edge of the tub. She told him she'd had a bad experience but she was all right now. She said her name was Jeanie and she that she taught English as a foreign language. She asked to use the bathroom and he couldn't see how he could say no.

She was in there almost an hour. Finally he rapped on the door and asked if she was okay, scared to death at what he would find. Only she came out and with a little smile said, “I'm fine. Thank you, you've been very kind.” And then she left. He went back to bed but of course he couldn't sleep, all he could do was lie there. It was only
when he used the bathroom once he got up that he saw what she'd been doing.

It was the toilet roll. It was covered from beginning to end with neat handwriting. The whole thing, written on and wound up again. He'd flushed the first few sheets down the pan before he'd noticed it but he could just make out the heading on the mangled top-sheet: “Message From God.” He sat back down and tugged on the rest of the roll. There was a detailed account of when and where she got her epiphany, a long and intricate treatise on why she was chosen, some verses from the Bible—Jeremiah 18, he remembered it said, verses 1 to 10—and what appeared to him to be an original love sonnet in the Elizabethan tradition. On the last sheet was the message: “To the Maid, Rm 2021 Lexus Inn, from Miss Jeanie Jackson. Please deliver this to hotel guest Mr. J. Dugsdale (registered under the name Mr. Hugh G. Reckshun).”

“What did you do with it?”

“I left it,” he said. “I don't suppose you have any idea who this Dugsdale character is?”

Back in London, eight weeks later Shoot 2 Kill were over on the U.K. leg of their tour. It was then that I saw her again, Wembley Arena, second row, eyes fixed on Duggsy like a zoom lens with a mouth on the end sucking him in. When I went backstage afterward to say hi to the band, she wasn't there. Disgusting Trousers was, though, one hand clamped around a can of beer, the other patting a blonde girl's arse. The blonde didn't seem to notice. She had her sights on Rex, who'd just stepped out of his dressing room, and without a word to the roadie she charged in his direction.

“How do you do, my little friend from the fourth estate,” the roadie greeted me in that dreadful Monty Python upper-class accent. “You'll simply never guess who was here. Remember that unfortunate young lady from the Long Beach show, the one so enamored of Mr. Dugsdale?”

“You mean Saint Duggsy of the Sacred Drumstick?”

“Indeed.”

“I saw her in the crowd,” I said. “Is she still on her mission from God?”

“She is.”

“And how is it progressing?”

“Well, Sir Duggs unfortunately was unable to talk to her. He's got his mouth full”—he gestured toward a dressing room. “He's back there with his wife du jour, Amber Lee.” Registering my blank look, he made the internationally recognized gesture of extremely large breasts and licked his lips. “Stripper. Sadly, Amber found her own way backstage so I was unable to grease her for him first. Well, must run, toodle pip,” he said, and sauntered off.

And that's when I spotted her. She was sitting on a flight-case, talking to the wardrobe girl. They were laughing like old friends. “Look,” I said to Eric when he came out of the guitarist's dressing room, three big cameras draped around his neck. She hadn't noticed me. She was concentrating on helping fold away the sweaty stage clothes into their respective boxes. “Ah, the future Mrs. Dugsdale,” Eric beamed and began snapping at her with his long lens.

You come across a lot of nuts in this line of work—“superfans,” I believe is the polite term. More men than girls, it might surprise you to know, and normally it's the singer
who gets them, though I met a guy once who claimed that every time the bass player of Earthkwake had an orgasm no matter where he was he came too. But you can usually spot them a mile off, and little Jeanie Jackson just didn't look like one. Too sensible. Though her blowing two roadies to meet a borderline psycho drummer under divine injunction doesn't help my argument. Still, she seemed to have got in with the band's wardrobe girl, which is a pretty smart move if you want to meet a band. And, I don't know, she just intrigued me.

Then, a few days later, Eric showed me the contact sheet. The series of tiny black-and-whites clearly showed her reaching into the flight-case marked in big white letters “DUGGSY” when the wardrobe girl wasn't looking and taking something out. A black book—a Filofax maybe. Next picture it's vanished and she's back folding things again.

There hadn't been any good stalker stories in the Sundays for an age and I figured that Jeanie might make a good one: Suburban teacher falls for big-time star, ditches her fiancé, abandons her students—leaving them wandering the town like zombies babbling in bad pidgin English with nowhere to turn for help—takes all her savings out of the bank, and follows Duggsy around the world from show to show, sleeping on the floor outside his hotel room. You could write it without having to interview her. But just for the hell of it I had a go at tracking her down. I e-mailed the tour manager—the tour by now had moved on to Europe—but he said there had been no sign of her at any of the shows. She'd probably given up and gone home, he said, which is exactly what the band was going to do after its German dates.
I checked out the Shoot 2 Kill sites on the Net—plenty of crackpot fans, but no Jeanie Jackson. Then, like any self-respecting rock journalist, I gave up, had a drink, and moved on to another story.

In the end
she
found
me
. Around nine months later—the same day the newspapers announced that Duggsy and his “dancer girlfriend Amber” planned to tie the knot in Hawaii—I got home to find a message from her on my answering machine. A chiming Southern voice I recognized at once as Jeanie's said, “Hi, my name is Angie Carson. You don't know me but John Dugsdale of Shoot 2 Kill gave me your number. There is something important I would like to speak with you about. I'll try calling again later.” And she did—a short conversation in which “Angie” arranged to meet me the following afternoon at a coffee bar in Soho.

The place was one of those old Italian jobs that the Starbucks and Coffee Republics hadn't quite managed to elbow out. Formica tables, thick white cups with coffee stains etched into the cracks in the china, and a clientele roughly divided between media types in black and Italian blokes who looked like they were on their tea break from a low-budget Mafia film. I was impressed that Jeanie knew the place; she must have been in town for a while. She was already there when I arrived, sitting in the corner clutching a coffee.

She looked different—her hair was blonder, or worn differently maybe, so that it accentuated her eyes. Though she still wore leggings and a big, loose, pastel sweater, on a gray day in a London café they looked less pathetic, less out of place than among the tight bright spandex and fake glamour of backstage. Anyhow, her air of vulnerability had
gone—though she still looked very young, twenty-five tops, an American twenty-five the rough equivalent of a sixteen-year-old Londoner. When she saw me come through the door, she looked shocked. I guess when she'd called she'd had no idea that the person on the other end of the phone was the journalist she'd met in Long Beach; she evidently thought I was just another of the long list of girls in Duggsy's life. I ordered a coffee at the counter and sat down opposite her.

“Thank you for coming” was all she said. She would not look me in the eye, just stared at her cup. I didn't say anything—old journalist trick: I wanted her to be the one to break the silence—but she looked like she'd be content just sitting there forever swirling the coffee around and around. So I asked her why she called me. After quite a long while she answered, “It's complicated.” I said Duggsy didn't give her my number, she hadn't even met Duggsy, had she, and she went pale. I'd figured out that the book she'd lifted from Duggsy's case must have been his address book, and I confronted her with it. She confessed at once, almost gratefully, telling me how bad she felt about committing a sin. She launched into a long, convoluted explanation—like she was explaining one of the more complicated forms of English grammar to her students—which boiled down to the fact that they're God's commandments and if He wanted them broken, then what was she to do? I asked her if she'd been ordered to break any others and she smiled sadly and shook her head.