“Are you married?”
“Divorced. His dad’s not in the picture,” she told me, turned around, and I saw my son for the first time, in a sling on her back. He was sleeping there like his mother hadn’t been singing loud enough to wake the dead. He opened iridescent eyes and smiled a toothless smile at me, and I was done for. I adopted him the moment we got married.
That was right before the world fell apart.
Now, I tell Tania I’m heading off on tour, and Tania tells me to fuck right off. I sympathize with her, I do. She’s a rocker too. You can’t have two of those in a marriage, and she’s more than I am.
Before this band, Tania was the only thing I ever saw that made me wonder if the world was bigger than I thought.
“Should we go back?” I said once. “For a visit? Don’t you miss your family?”
“You can’t go back,” she told me. “Not once you come here. They don’t let you go if you’re from where I’m from. I made a big mess when I left. I wasn’t supposed to go, and there was a price.”
This was the only time I ever saw her sad. I assumed some things about where she’d come from. I figured it was another continent, judging by her accent from everywhere at once, but when I asked, she looked at me, told me I was an asshole, and said, “There are countries there, you know, and they’re not the same country. It’s not just one big heap of same.”
“Is that where you’re from?” I asked, offended that she assumed my whiteness meant I didn’t know anything about anything. “I know what Africa is.”
“No,” she said. She was wearing a pair of jeans and a work shirt, and she looked almost—I caught myself thinking the word “human,” which was the wrong word. She didn’t look human. She looked like the queen of the coast.
She was breastfeeding our son, and he was singing to himself as he nursed. I could see plants growing in my peripheral vision.
“Adriftica, maybe,” she said. “Call it that. Call it somewhere you can’t get to unless they want you to get to it. I left my band, and I left my country, and I don’t want you to try to fix it. It was a bloody breakup. Now I’m trying to clean up the mess it made. I thought I could fix it, but no one wants to listen. You’ve never been married before. You don’t know what it’s like when you leave. You don’t know how it feels.”
She looked up at me, and the tears in her eyes reflected light in a way I’ve never seen any other tears reflect. She was like a prism.
“The world isn’t ending because of you,” I told her.
“He’s tipping it over,” she said. “But I had to leave him. You don’t know.”
The last time I heard any band play like Akercock, it was Tania alone in front of a half-empty room, wearing a torn red dress, with thorns in her hair, looking like she was in the middle of running away from something. A baby on her back, bare feet, singing something that made the room shake. People were looking at her like she was magic, but no one was doing anything about what she was singing. She was trying to get people to stop doing all the things that make money for millionaires, and make water dry up in towns where no millionaires live. She was a revolutionary, I guess, and that’s what made me crazy for her, but then things took a steep slide, and everyone put their hands over their eyes and ears. The world went wooden roller coaster.
Tania told me over and over, those first years, that she was trying to save the world, and sometimes she told me it was her fault the world was collapsing. I talked her down. Obviously not her fault, one, and who could save the world, two? I never felt like I could. I felt like I’d be better off getting stoned, and so I got stoned.
In fact, that’s my plan right now. I get high, pass out, dream of wings.
The next day, I’m fucking off onto the Akercock tour bus, rolling a wheelie bag full of what I need, prescriptions and notebooks, condoms and vitamins. Air mask.
Normally, I do the whole tour with the band. I write in my notebook, record the band’s shit-talking as we drive up the coast, or down the coast, or deep into the Midwest. It’s not the old days, but touring’s the one thing that’s not too different. Upholstered seats. Driver. Video games. Everybody on the bus sending texts to the girl they kind of remember and plan to fuck in the next town. I remember when it was all pay phones and hope. Now it’s easier to get laid. Not that most of these bands even want to. Mostly, they want to nap. Not this one.
This band doesn’t sleep, literally.
Mabel says “Touch Eron and get a shock” and she’s not kidding. She’s bleeding a little bit, from one of her ears, and I feel old even telling her. There he is, wearing radioactive pants all day and night, not giving a fuck. First gig of the tour, I’m in the front row with the groupies, and they’re crying, and he’s lighting them up. Their fingers on the front of the stage. I can see their skeletons through their skin. It’s a show. We all know it. But it’s a damn good one.
Onstage, Eron Chaos is twenty-two years old, six foot three, a look about him like he’s never been loved. Offstage, he has an elderly dignity punctuated by obscenity.
Eron won’t generally talk to me. I interview a girl at the back of a gig, who says he gives it all up when he sings, “so listen to him sing, stupid. He isn’t safe onstage. He scares me, and I’m not just scared for him. I’m scared for myself. But it feels good. I’d follow him anywhere.”
She gives me a smile that still has baby teeth. It’s surreal. I haven’t seen a fan this young in years. I feel like I’m dead and walking through an imaginary world, one that conforms to my dreams. These are the sixties I didn’t live through.
A couple tours lately, there’ve been accordions on board, and fiddles. Somebody singing “Hard Times,” which I never appreciate. No matter how hard the times are, rock bands are supposed to be playing songs about screwing in the bathroom, driving too fast, and breaking the world apart. Yeah, times are hard. Yeah, times are bleak. Yeah, you want to talk about the things going on?
I want to talk about the music. The music is always the guts of the revolution. The music scene these days is nostalgia trying to mash up with science fiction, because people stopped wanting to imagine the future but still liked the costumes.
Akercock, on the other hand, is an orgy, akin to watching the gods of rock in bed together, straight boys in glitter eyeliner dancing with their pants tight enough to tourniquet, but some kind of other element alongside all that too—