Outside, the grass was wet and the sky lulling and soothing. An hour passed, and the band hadn’t appeared. Someone said they’d gotten into another fight in the backstage area. Lori and I had been there earlier, and it was all industry types sitting around pretending to look important. No debauchery of any description whatsoever. The band were probably sniffing for a fight anyway, as they usually do. I felt so shallow, I wanted an orgy.
The band finally showed up, drugged up to their eyelashes. Especially Dirk. I hadn’t been with him since the airport hotel three weeks earlier, and I’d missed him. It was poison—you cannot miss, or have feelings for, a rocker. I wanted to be with him so badly, but he was so full of chemicals that his eyes were whirring like cuckoo-clock birds and his walk and talk were comedic. When he flirted with other girls, I didn’t care—not this time. He was twenty-five, after all, and in a rock band, with girls throwing themselves at him. But when he made out with my friends, it hurt badly. I knew that it shouldn’t, that he wasn’t my boyfriend, but when it was right in my face, it shredded me like the abrasive side of a scouring pad against my wrists.
Until December 2005, I hung out with Towers in every city in Europe and even Canada. Fucking on tour buses, trashed hotel rooms, backstage love-ins, and fistfights—it was all rolled into one kaleidoscopic photoplay before my eyes like the hum of the projector all those years ago.
But, along the way, I realized I still wasn’t rock ‘n’ roll. I couldn’t bear to see Dirk with other girls. It hurt too much. I was a wuss. So I turned to a teenage glam band: Kid Ego. They were just starting out—and therefore ripe for corruption. Their songs fucking rocked. I wanted to take advantage of them all.
Chapter 34
Tonight, I will do The Whole Band. First, The Sixteen-Year-Old Drummer must be had.
I had never slept with a sixteen-year-old boy. But tonight I was gonna do it. Nickky was Kid Ego’s drummer. His face looked like it had been carbon-copied from a photo of a teenage Jim Morrison, and he played drums like Tommy Lee. He was a miniature miracle, and everyone stared gape-jawed when he played.
Rookie, the eighteen-year-old bassist, like so many male rock-star wannabes on the planet, used the Nikki Sixx formula to create his image. Zakk, the lead singer, also eighteen, was a bit tubby—he looked more like he had shouted at the donut than the devil—but his voice was magnificent when he belted out their sleazy rock numbers. And there were two others: Phil, with dreadlocks, and Birdy, a dirty, nasty, sleazy, hot motherfucker.
Their songs were volcanic, and swung me to roller-coaster heights. They were playing Cardiff, and even though Cardiff was bleak in my memory—all grayness, dirt, fucking, and seizure—I went there alone. I was nervous as a rabbit, and felt as if my knees had been sucked hollow. My bones were like tea biscuits, ready to snap. I hoped this time Cardiff would be kinder to me.
The Barfly, proud owner of the sallow and constipated, repulsed me, as it had before. I entered the minute back room with Kid Ego and their support band. It was full of the evil drink, and although I’d promised myself I’d stay away, I smuggled swigs of whiskey into my mouth. A photographer snapped away with deft precision—capturing me with ten boys full of raging hormones and unruly erections, all wanting to put their teenage, throbbing, quivering willies in me and suck my boobies, which they proceeded to do.
The young girl fans, all milky and full of stripy tights and Kerrang! posters, didn’t even try to enter the room; instead, they just peeked in and saw me getting my breasts sucked and my body mauled by all ten boys. It must have looked like a cat with a litter of kittens. Then, in one swift motion, the band’s manager slammed the door shut and all the boys gathered around, with me standing in the middle. With the sixteen-year-old drummer Nickky helping me, I unzipped and stripped off the remainder of my clothes. I took off my panties and stood there in my high heels. I wasn’t sure if I had the energy to take on ten teenage boys.
Kid Ego, their support band, and I were taken by van to their hotel. I was surprised to find it was the same hotel I’d been in nine months earlier with Towers. Was it compulsory for me to do whole bands in this hotel? I saw the receptionist and wondered whether she recognized me with my clothes on. I was sure she hadn’t forgotten the smell of congealed vomit and sperm and red perfume I’d left behind last time, and was still furious at the degree of my obscenity. But she looked at me with a motherly tenderness and addressed me with a knowing smile.
And I loved it. I loved it. I loved it.
We went to a room where one of the guys from the opening act was staying. I felt seventeen, shy but omnipotent. I was one girl in a room with ten boys—sweaty and unpredictable, hormone-buckled and leather-clad young boys. I was kind of scared, though I shouldn’t have been. Both the bands were crammed into the room, impossibly wanting, waiting for something to happen.
I felt like I should start something, maybe fireworks and a show. I was the only girl. I felt as though I was in a desert at midnight with a group of Arabian smugglers. I suddenly became protective of my body, my womb, my femininity, as if it were in danger of being tainted. I folded my arms over my breasts and crossed my legs as my skimpy clothes clung to my body.
After a few minutes, though, I got bored. And I realized: these weren’t Hell’s Angels. They were just teenage English boys with tankfuls of sperm. And I could have any one of them. A gleam singed my eyes. I could choose whoever the fuck I wanted.
I thought. I decided. Tonight, I would do the whole band.
But before I did that, I did something nasty. I left the room to walk around for a minute—and got laid by one of the guys from the support band. He was cute, and horny as hell. But in my gut, a spew began to rise, produced by a rule embedded in my brain: Never fuck anyone from the support band.
We’d gone to his room, and when we were done I left him to go find Kid Ego and he walked off into the Cardiff streets to find a low-rent prostitute to administer things I wasn’t capable of.
“The support band, Roxie!?” the Kid Ego boys sniggered when I entered the room. I hung my head in shame.
The lights were low, and as the boys taunted me, I started to play with Birdy. His loyalty to his girlfriend made him even hotter. I made him sit on the bed, and I sat in front of him and opened my legs as the others watched.
“Fuck, I can’t,” he said. “I really want to . . .” He looked pained, torn between loyalty to his girlfriend and my open naked body spread in front of him. “You’re a fucking fag, Birdy,” the others jeered from all directions. Birdy looked at me, aching desire dripping off his face, and tried not to cry.
I was cruel. How could I do this to someone who’d heroically managed to remain Super Glued to his love despite the hordes of girls chasing him every night?
“I’m so sorry,” he said, crushed. I left him lying there, and went with Zakk, Rookie, and Nickky to their room of fun. Once inside, the boys ripped off my clothes in seconds.
“Do you think she’s ready for us?” Zakk asked, way too confident for his age.
I felt all giddy. Should I be acting more responsibly? If I were a man with three teenage girls, I’d be in heaven. Fuck it, I thought. I’m a legend. My reputation in rock precedes me.
First, Nickky must be had. He was a wasted, staggering child. I took him to the bed and climbed under the sheets with him. I must be gentle, I thought. I don’t want to scare him.
But he was dirty as hell. His fingers and tongue were everywhere, like a young, wild jackal. As Zakk and Rookie watched from the other bed, I slipped Nickky’s cock in me. He thrusted a few times and came.
I threw the condom aside and opened myself like cake for Zakk and Rookie.
Zakk took me doggy style, penetrating me anally while Rookie fucked me so good that I took Nickky’s cock in my mouth. Three childhood friends. They will never forget me. We fell into a sweet sleep: them dreaming of Mum’s cooking up north and me having had my fill of three young boys.
Chapter 35
I had to Remind Mys
elf that I was Here in a Groupie Capacity, not to have a Fucking Romantic Time.
I had just recovered from my night with the Kid Ego boys and started to walk properly again when I got itchy—and it wasn’t from an STD. Like an inmate from One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, I paced and jumped around, brittle and bitchy, to get a new hit of action.
In December 2005, I started my MA in English Studies in Bath. I felt safe and happy being swirled into academia again. It was a fairy-tale world that nourished my soul; I gobbled up one book after another, those beautiful literary works dancing through my head. Returning to school allowed me to see my mummy more often than I used to, but my relationship with my stepfather was still sour and dreadful. Every time he surfaced in the living room, I felt a spiky concrete pole shoot up my spine, and I stiffened with discomfort.
One Wednesday evening, Lori and Janie were waiting in Euston Station when I came up the escalators with my tour-weary, concrete-heavy bag. They looked worn, like rag dolls hanging limply from a peg: Janie from touring with Towers of London and Lori from working like a battery hen in some college-administration office. She was still in her work clothes: a navy trouser suit with an icing-white, polyester blouse. We kissed and went to get fried chicken from a Somalian fast-food restaurant around the corner. The two men working behind the counter asked me where I was from, and were happy and proud to hear that I was from Iran.
Lori, Janie, and I hadn’t been together for a while, so as we sat facing each other around the table, our genetically modified chicken was served with verbal diarrhea. Words toppled out of our mouths, competing for space: the Towers boys, Towers boys’ cock sizes, Towers boys’ girlfriends, tour bus stories, and anal sex incidents all crashed into each other like a train wreck, polluting the Halal air. The two Muslim men in traditional attire behind the counter looked on with disappointment as the Iranian girl talked quite scientifically about the techniques of how not to choke while deep-throating.
We seeped into the Wednesday night stuffed with manufactured chicken, and each called tour managers and roadies to find out if they were working with any bands that night and where. Nothing. Every band we wanted to see was either out of town or just about to go onstage in some hick town miles away. Eventually, out of boredom and frustration, we opted for a last resort: Brides of Destruction, the band Nikki Sixx had formed in 2002. Although Nikki had left the previous year to rejoin Mötley Crüe, the band had remained together.
I thought of Camden Underworld as home number two. As I stood outside the venue planning my living arrangements there, complete with cutlery and a kitchen sink, the doorman told me the gig was at capacity and we couldn’t go in until afterward, when the crowd had thinned out.
With her usual military strategy, Lori suggested going next door to the World’s End pub to wait, then trying to get backstage.
With my rock handbag an extension of my hand, Super Glued to my skin like love, I headed straight to the toilets to whore myself up. In the Victorian lavatory, I started the process: bee-stung flesh-pink lips, eyes dressed in soft kohl and shadow. I changed into a skirt, thin as an anorexic belt, and a jubilantly slashed top. I didn’t care about the freezing weather breaking my body anymore. Lori and Janie didn’t give a shit about how they looked; I wished I had their bravery.
When I rejoined them, they were hoovering alcohol as fast as they could. I missed drinking. That floaty, warm feeling, like nestling in my mother’s warm bosom, had detached itself from me. It felt like a cold, hard slap. I couldn’t even turn to cocaine anymore to comfort me.
Around eleven p.m., it was time to penetrate the Camden Underworld. The venue was packed to throttling. Even though the gig had ended, music boomed from the beatbox, blending with the crowd’s voices into a milkshaked frenzy. Brides of Destruction may not have had Nikki Sixx any longer, but people wanted to see them anyway—mostly because of Tracii Guns, a cofounder of Guns N’ Roses and the original guitarist of the ’80s hair-metal band L.A. Guns. As we pushed our way through the crowd to find the backstage area, I prayed he wouldn’t turn out to be like Steven Adler. I wasn’t in the mood to play along with the demands of another junkie.
Brides’ lead singer was London LeGrand. I hadn’t heard of him, but all of a sudden a raw throbbing formation of fine rockers on stage began to take shape in front of my contact-lensed eyes. At the front of the stage, I grabbed some kid and asked which one London was; he pointed out a guy who was as tall as stilts, wearing giant, square, black-rimmed comedy glasses. He had a top hat, a zebra-patterned coat, massive platforms, and lips thick as squid. He stood on the small stage, surrounded by people and popping cameras, all wanting a piece of him.
From some corner, Sasha appeared, still skinny as an eel. Her hair was dyed sherbet-pink, falling down her back like a champagne waterfall. She wore tiger-print hot pants and jumped up and down excitedly, with a devilish Joker smile. “Hey, Rox!” She ran toward me and gave me a love hug.
“London wants me to go back with him, but my boyfriend’s here,” she said. “What should I do?”
“Is your boyfriend in a band?” Lori asked the necessary question.
“Yeah, but they’re unsigned.”
Lori and I looked at her sympathetically.
Janie and Lori followed me toward the stage, beating off little eyeliner boys and wannabe groupie girls. The three of us together were like a Nazi force no one would fuck with. Up by the stage, the guys from the band were having photos taken and signing limbs, asses, shirts, and photos. Lori and Janie started talking to various band members and I aimed straight for London. Then I saw a goth named Mimi. She was so fucking maternal. I loved that girl.
“Hey, Rox, you have to come meet my friends. You would love them. They’re really wild.”
“Are they in a band?”
“Yeah, they’re the support band.”
I balked, but she dragged me to the corner of the stage anyway, where four guys in leather trousers complete with thick chain belts and aviator shades started to hug and kiss me. They were warm and friendly scallywags, clownlike and down to earth. But they were the openers. I said my greeting and went to meet the Brides of Destruction.
I turned around and noticed a slim, lanky guy with swaggering snake hips, kohl liner, and a cluttered mane of raven hair. Something he was saying to Lori was making her throw back her head and laugh.
“This is Scot,” Lori said, introducing us. “He’s the drummer in Brides.”
He was incredibly beautiful, with a joyous smile lighting up jade green eyes enhanced by kohl liner, and photo-perfect white teeth behind full lips. He made me quiet. I walked away to find London.
“Hey, I’m Roxana,” I said, looking up at him and rubbing my hands along his naked, heavily inked six-pack.
“Hey,” he purred in a wide American rock-star grin, made nerdy by his giant square glasses, all the while squeezing Janie by his side like a schoolgirl.
“She’s so fuckin’ cute, man. I’m really digging her,” he whispered in my ear. “Are you girls gonna come back with us?”
“Sure,” I said. “But you need to sign my tits first.” I knew full well that he’d have to take me somewhere private to do so.
“Yeah, but you know, I can’t do it here. Let’s go back in the dressing room.”
“I’ll be back in a minute, hon,” I whispered to Janie.
“Go for it, babe.” She gave me a triumphant smile and a peck on the cheek.
“You cannot come in here. You have to go back out now,” said a black security guy by the backstage entrance, as patient as a psychopathic bear. He wouldn’t let me through.
“She’s with me, Kekone. It’s cool, man,” London said, stepping in. As I walked through, Kekone gave me an evil look that inhabited me. Backstage was a mess—bottles and coats and people scattered everywhere. I loved it. Holding my hand, London worked fast and methodically, pulling me past people sitting around playing guitar, smoking, play-fighting, and screaming, to a tiny room with a sink in the back.
London clicked the door shut, clean as a surgeon. He pulled out a black marker just as I pulled my top down.
“You have fuckin’ beautiful tits,” he said, breathing in close to the side of my neck, gently and softly kissing me there and on my chest.
“I know,” I whispered, pushing my breasts tight together for him to sign and feeling the cold rush of the pen soaking through my skin.
London didn’t hesitate. He took off his coat and started to massage my breasts. We kissed, fooled around, unzipped things. He slid his hand between my thighs and his fingers found the slit in my crotchless panties. Then someone knocked on the door.
A little boy fan, standing there enviously, told us that everyone was going to the Crobar. So a fistful of us took a cab there, to the west of the city. The Crobar made me ill; every time I’d gone there, I’d vomited from its virus. It is the size of my hand, yet armies of people manage to squeeze their bodies in there night after night to soak in putrid smoke and damage their eardrums. The urine yellow lights are hospital bright and it’s impossible to move unless you possess the ability to fly or are comfortable being violent.
As soon as I walked in, Scot Coogan, the Brides’ drummer, had to be helped; his knees had just abandoned him. All I wanted was to be with London in the men’s toilets, but I had to keep propping Scot up and helping to keep him from passing out. London was downstairs with Janie anyway. He seemed to relish the knowledge that they looked like a circus act together: seven-foot, bug-eyed, top-hatted London as the hot ringmaster, with a flowery, fragile Janie as his baby doll.
Right then, in that moment, London was the only one I’d set my sights on. He was my project for the night, I’d decided. I stumbled down to the toilets as Janie was leaving his embrace. But then, as I locked myself in his body, I discovered that, close up, he was as dull as paper. He was mechanical and robotic, devoid of any natural wildness. It was just his image and lead-singer status that I had wanted. I was disappointed and I didn’t know what to do. I decided to get Lori, who was nursing Scot, and head to the hotel with the band.
The Last Living Slut Page 13
