Instead—
I walk into the club and stop in my tracks, because I’m hearing a howl, a trilling sound echoing over the amps, like the song of some animal I’ve never heard of, and then a moan coming out of the mouth of the lead singer, joined by the rest of the band. Five boys, nobody wearing an air mask, none older than twenty-three. Long-haired skinny-legged cocktails of rage and despair, and like that, I’m typing in my head, writing this shit down.
Akercock’s music is a chilling cousin of every great band you’ve ever gone horizontal to—but it isn’t that, not really. It’s sexy, but also hurts the ears. And mostly, they aren’t singing words you know. They’re howling and whirring, like a flock of predatory birds over a kill, or like wind coming through a window high in a haunted hotel. All this is interspersed with electric guitar, and then the band begins to play in earnest, riffing their way across history. The band is a hard-on in song form. The kind of thing that makes you look behind you, because what’s there? Death. You’re never nineteen again, not once you’ve failed to appreciate it.
I’m hitting fifty and I don’t want to talk about my dick these days. No one else wants to talk about it either, but I have no shame when it comes to writing about bands. I’m not above diagramming my own decline.
The lead singer clings to the microphone like he’s drinking its blood. His eyes flash in the dark, and I find myself thinking about the ’10’s, that band that figured out how to phosphoresce and freaked everyone out. Nobody remembers their songs now. Only that they glowed.
Onstage at the KingKill Club in Chicago, Eron Chaos, the five-octave wailing lead singer of Akercock, looks down at the audience like he’s a rabid fox. His hands are covered in blood, and he shrugs for us all: this is the way it goes, boys. Then he licks his hands clean, a cat fixing up his paws.
That’s the on-the-record part, the part I’m going to write for the magazine. The off-the-record is that the guy’s eyes are golden and wide as a goat’s, and the muscles in his chest move like he’s full of snakes. I can see his heart beating, on both sides, and I get a pang of weirdness. He’s way too good-looking to be anyone who grew up in America. He reminds me of someone else I know, but the world is big and there are plenty of things in it.
The room isn’t empty anymore. Little flocks of groupies wearing one-eighth of nothing, raddled girls who’ve been wandering down the road in need of ecstasy and some kind of sainting. Where did they come from? They showed up without any noise, or maybe I’m just that into the music.
The air’s thick with a smell one part civet cat and one part flooded forest, and Eron Chaos stands shirtless in front of a room now packed full of fans, people throwing themselves at him, parking their cars in the middle of the road and running in. A girl perches on top of the bar and swan dives. The crowd carries her to him.
Immortal, I think, and then shake my head. A trite thought to have about a girl with long hair and a tight white dress standing in front of a boy in leather. The whole thing reminds me of my marriage, that same sense of things I don’t know and never will. It makes my heart feel like it’s leaking lava.
Thinking of Tania, I assume, is what cues up my vision of batshit.
The girl onstage turns around, looks out into the crowd, and starts to sing. Faint form after faint form climbs out of her mouth, all with tails and hooves, all with thin wings. The creatures flutter into the crowd and whisper in the ears of the kids dancing on the floor. There are maybe fifty of them. Maybe a hundred. I see, for a moment, a rift behind the band, a golden and green doorway, opening into some other place. I blink. No, it’s gone.
Back up to say: I have no small history with hallucinogens. Seriously, fuck those mushrooms I foraged in the PNW with Tania back when I was clueless and didn’t know that mushrooms absorbed radiation.
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 hote
l 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.
“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-
I stop there because I know what that element is, but I don’t know how to write it. It’s something I’ve been craving like a drug since things fell apart with Tania. Adriftica, I think, trying to imagine the boundaries of that country.
Robots vs. Fairies Page 29
