Too Weird for Ziggy by Sylvie Simmons Page A

their mikes into the PA system, and journalists hand back the signed papers and arrange their tape recorders on the table at the front. The band is already there, sitting in a row, but no one acknowledges them, everybody’s looking at the door to see if Rex is going to show. He’s late, as always, but they dare not start without him. Everybody waits and nobody complains.
    And suddenly Rex is standing in the doorway, his bodyguard beside him, and all eyes turn. He’s wearing tight black jeans and a cutoff white T-shirt with what looks like a road sign on it, a big red circle with a crucifix in the middle and a red line through it and the words “No Martyrs” written underneath. He’s in the mood for talking, which is unusual. Words gush out of him and the journalists stoop to scoop them up.
    â€œIt’s not
me
that’s pissing on them, it’s
authority
that’s pissing on them. Have you
looked
at your fucking government lately, man? Or your police? Where were you and your TV cameras when the cops were beating the shit outof these same kids at the gig last night? You want to know what this band’s message is? It’s sticking in your face like a dick in a ten-dollar brothel and it’s saying:
Question authority
, man. It’s your
duty
to question the assholes in power. A fan’s love is total. It is totally without limits. The
kids
aren’t questioning what I did, it’s the assholes in power that are giving me shit. You people have always gotten me wrong. I don’t give a fuck what people say about me. Dirt sells; I’m not stupid, but there’s enough
true
dirt out there, you know what I’m saying? You could at least get the stories right. I’m sick of being someone’s fucking TV sitcom they think they can just switch on and off. I mean, how long was Jesus on the cross? He must have taken a piss, right? From a great height. Onto his disciples’ heads. And did they crucify
him
for it?”
    While he’s soliloquizing, the band members ignore him. They sit either side of him and talk over the top of him like friends on a tube train separated by the raving madman who’s got the middle seat. They laugh and mess with things on the table. The drummer picks up a little tape recorder, puts it on rewind, and holds it up to the microphone, and he plays back what Rex just said about Jesus while Rex continues talking with a five-second time delay, like on a phone-in program when the caller hasn’t switched his radio off. The cassette recorder’s owner looks a little desperate and tries to catch the PR’s eye.
    â€œLook, 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 ofhis 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