I’ve seen groupies before, but never like Akercock’s. These girls are the old-fashioned kind, dancing in the front row, their fingers clacking over their heads like tiny jaws, their nipples pointing out of their T-shirts like thorns. And plenty aren’t wearing shirts at all. When they cheer, they cheer like owls diving at prey. They dance like little kids in a sprinkler, but the kind of little kids you won’t mess with because they might be Satan in girl form.
I relax a little, watching them. If the band has groupies, it can’t be that weird. Whatever I just saw can easily be blamed on my own wrongful history. The main weird thing here is that the whole audience, I mean all of it, is in their twenties or younger.
As in, the audience is made up of kids.
I Lazarus up, phone Rolling Stone, and shout that they’d better send me to cover this for real.
The idiot on the phone gives a whine translating into O ancient tragedy of a writer, you won a Pulitzer like-that-even-matters so I’m supposed to let you slide and give you expenses. FINE.
I’m set. I insinuate myself backstage, flashing credentials and giving the journalist swagger that theoretically compensates for the gray in my beard and the undeniable hair in my ears.
“Bro,” I say to Eron Chaos, trying to keep my old man situation in check. “I’m Heck Limmer from Rolling Stone.”
The kid looks at me. “I’m not your brother, and that’s not your real name,” he says.
Of course it’s not. No one’s named Heck, unless they named themselves after a country-western misunderstanding in the eighties and it stuck, because they were the only Heck.
“Simon,” I say. “Originally.”
“I know who you are. You wrote that book, right? The one about bacchanals causing God hallucinations, heart attacks caused by bass, and whether you can deal with the devil or summon the dead if you play the right kind of song? I liked that book.”
It’s unclear whether he’s full of shit. I did write that book. It was famous. But it was before he was born. Also, this isn’t how it’s normally described. Normally people say it’s a book about Bowie.
“My name’s not my real name either,” he tells me, like I don’t know. You don’t get named Chaos by your parents. I don’t know anything about his parents, though. There’s no story on this guy.
“Wanna give me the real version?” I ask him. “For the record?”
He inhales, and sings a note, and the note goes on way the fuck too long, a tangled string of syllables that don’t sound like language, or at least, not like any language I know.
“Mind if I record that?”
“Yeah,” he says. “I mind. You don’t get to record that. It’s my name and it’s precious.”
They’re all eccentrics, but there’s something about the tone he uses, and I leave it alone for the moment. I tell the rest of the band I’m coming on the road with them, feature story, big deal. They just look at me, with their animal eyes. Not in a bad way. In a way that says I’m an asshole king of rock, motherfucker, and you’re going to listen to me sing. In a way that says You’d better listen to me sing, because I’m not gonna talk.
I glance toward the couch where Eron Chaos is making out with the girl from the stage. The two of them are a knot of leather and lethargy.
“Who’s that?” I asked the drummer.
“Mabel,” he says, and rolls his eyes. “He’s hers, she’s his, don’t mess with Mother Nature. Eron had a shit divorce, and everything’s been fucked since, all over hill and dale. That’s why we’re touring.”
Hill and dale. Please.
I let myself have one long look at Mabel with her long tangled hair and her white dress, and that’s all, because Mabel, if anything, is about a million years too young for me, and not only that, she reminds me, in a shitload too many ways, of Tania. Mabel’s teeth look like they belong to an animal, all of them pointy, in stark contrast to her painted lips. I look away as Chaos tears the front of her dress open. Poser, I think, reflexively, but then it feels realer than that. This isn’t a motel-room-wrecking band. This is something else. Something that calls me in.
Outside, the crowd’s dispersing, and I make my way with them. I get to my hotel and write a chunk of profile. I’m high as a drone on some powder I bought off a groupie. Akercock. I could’ve chosen a different name for the late-night radio hosts to say, but late-night radio doesn’t exist anymore. Nothing exists anymore. I could talk about pop eating itself. I could talk about punk rock and Sid, and the Ramones, all of whom I knew, in that fanboy drugswap way, before they fell down. I could talk about disasters. I don’t know the angle yet on this band, but I have a few ideas.
I’ve been around. I was there when grunge was born, midwifing that poor howling thing, screaming on the floor of some crap room in Seattle. I was there when it died, Cobain on the same floor, bleeding it out like he was killing a religion. I was there for part of punk rock, for Fugazi and King Missile, for Bad Religion, I was there for Public Enemy, I was there for clubs in places like Boise, Idaho, where all the kids had shaved their jack-Mormon mullets into Mohawks. I’ve been writing these pages for years, in a state of despair, feeling like a biologist diagramming a decline. Rock is dead, I’ve been writing, like God is dead, like love is dead, like butterflies are dead. Like polar bears are dead. Like the Great Barrier Reef is dead. Like all the dead things are dead.
I wasn’t expecting a band like Akercock.
I’m going on record now, readers, saying fuck that. I was wrong. I thought rock & roll was rotting. I thought it was so dead it was a bone sculpture in the desert, and then?
Then there was Akercock. People of America, I take it back, all the things I said about burying the dead.
Rock & roll is resurrected.
I’m so wired, so on, that I dial Tania. Is she even my wife anymore? My son picks up and calls me Daddy, and I remember better days before we all went crazy. I’m picturing him, looking at me, his strange, feral little face. I’m trying to tell him I love him, when Tania picks up and asks me if I know what time it is.
“No,” I tell her, and make an attempt at humor. “Later than you think?”
I met Tania at her own show, when she appeared onstage in a bright red dress, this brown-skinned woman with a twisted tangle of hair, eyes the color of an oil spill, and a mouth full of curses. She didn’t sing rock. She sang a twisted rhyming course like the rapids of a river, spitting it out syllable by syllable, a skittering indictment of everyone who’d ruined the corners of the earth, a history of America in geologic time, and then in leaders of fools. She named them all in a frenzy that scanned, from Pilgrims to preachers to power-mongers.
“You can be saved,” she sang, and called each person in the audience by name. Some kind of crazy trick, but it was a beautiful one.
Standing in the crowd, unnamed, apparently I wanted her to name me, too, and name me as her man.
I proceeded to fall at her feet and tell her I’d do anything to help her, and she looked down at me, put a boot on my back, and said sure, she’d stick around awhile, she’d just left a band anyway and had time to kill.
“Yes,” I said.
“Just so you know, I have a kid,” she said.