Too Weird for Ziggy by Sylvie Simmons Page B

reporter from a South American daily dares to break into the monologue with a question. He stands up. All eyes turn to him. “In your song ‘White Trash War’ you caused a controversy in the United States with your attack on Hispanic immigrants. Is this incident merely another way of pissing on us?” Nobody has expected this; he looks so timid. Rex shoots up from his seat like an overwound spring, his eyes bright, his pale face livid. He knocks over microphones. He and his bodyguard are ready to fight.
    The cat has jumped onto the girl’s bed and is clawing the pillow. Circling, it lifts its tail and sprays on the wallbehind. An oily yellow splash dribbles slowly down. She didn’t know how long she’d been asleep. Or for that matter if she was still sleeping and only dreaming that she was looking at the clock and it was ten o’ clock. There was still time for her to get to the concert. The band would go on late again tonight, she was sure. She didn’t care what she had to do, she was going. If her mother tried to stop her she would kill her—a knife through the back of the neck while she was watching TV. Paco would take her. She would show him her breasts and he would drive her there.
    And she stood at the top at the back of the stadium. From the distance the band onstage looked like fleas jumping on a white dog’s back, but she could see Rex in close-up on the giant video screens on either side. Some people who recognized her from the television pointed her out to each other. A girl came up and touched her, two boys in new concert T-shirts still smelling of ink shuffled over shyly to talk. But she looked straight ahead at the screens. Hot tears puffed up in her eyes, and through them the image on the screen was squashed and livid like a rainbow melting.

AND ALIEN TEARS

    Jim’s dead and Reeve isn’t, which is why the Germans are here talking to Reeve and not to Jim. Though if Jim weren’t dead, of course, there wouldn’t be any need for them to be here at all. They’re here to make a film about Jim, or more accurately, a film about the film about Jim, a TV documentary to tie in with the movie. They’ve rounded up the usual suspects—the director, the actor, the biographer, the record company, old girlfriends, rock critics who were rockcriticking back when Jim was still alive—but Reeve is their prize catch.
    Reeve, so the story goes, was driving with his girlfriend, a Doors tape was on the stereo, and just as it got to their song “The End” the car swerved off the road. Reeve went through the windscreen. Three weeks in a coma and when he finally came to he told the doctor and his mother and his girlfriend and the clutch of faces peering down at him that he had broken through to the other side and he had seen Jim Morrison. Jim had supposedly told him to go back and that he would walk beside him, and the spirit of Jim had entered his body while he was lying blotto on the hospital bed. Reeve denies it now, says it was something his former manager made up to tell the press. “It’s ridiculous. I never said that. That sort of thing doesn’t happen to people. Dead guys don’t just regurgitate into someone else.” He calls his show a tribute, not an impersonation. “I like to think I help people remember what a huge talent he was.”
    Whatever it is, the shows are sellouts. Pale-faced young women with ironed hair and skinny grave-faced boys in floppy white shirts they bought in the girls department and leather pants with brass door knocker belts pile into the clubs and mouth all the words. Reeve’s publicity blurb says: “The recession and the takeover of the music business by the big corporations have instilled a yearning for the honesty and simplicity of the sixties,” which Reeve’s Jim show is satisfying. Death is big business. Hendrix is alive and selling jeans, Elvis is flogging supermarket tabloids