Rock On (30 page)

You break the scone and lay the larger portion on Loki’s empty plate.

He sniffles and ignores it. “They called me ‘a Ziggy Stardust-influenced Elvis impersonator.’ Bunch of ignorant fuckers in the press.”

“Yeah,” you say.

He’s not even drinking the coffee anymore.

SINGER COLLAPSES ON STAGE

British pop idol Loki collapsed during a concert last night at the Tingley Coliseum in Albuquerque, NM. The performer, 26, has been hospitalized for exhaustion. Presbyterian Hospital reports that he is in stable condition, receiving intravenous fluids, and in no immediate danger.

Band member Robbin “Hob” Just issued a public statement early this morning, blaming Loki’s illness on fatigue and “dieting prior to a photo shoot.”

He also said, “[The weather] is never this beastly in London. It’s hard on the whole band.”

Temperatures remained in the triple digits throughout the night, and attendance at last night’s performance was estimated at over 11,500.

Tonight’s show has been postponed. Changes to any further tour dates have not been announced.

Loki is known for shocking stage antics and provocative lyrics. But his most recent album failed to chart a single, and the current tour has not performed to expectations, half-filling arena venues in seven states.
[8]

While he’s in the hospital, you clean out his stash. There’ll be Hell to pay when he gets back, and you’ve no illusions you can keep him straight for long. But he’ll be straight when they let him out, and he might still be straight long enough to yell at, if the pills and cocaine are gone.

Of course, he can get more. There are
always
people around who will get it for him.

But Ramona, the bass player, catches you going through the trunks and suitcases.

Silently, she helps you flush the pills.

Melody Monitor:
Would you say you go out of your way to make yourself seem unusual?

Loki:
D’you know about left-hander syndrome? No? Left-handed people make up around thirteen percent of the population. About the same percentage as homosexuals, give or take. And left-handed people die, depending on who you listen to, two or nine years earlier than right-handed people.

This might be because of accidents caused by bleedin’ navigating through a right-handed world.

Being different can kill you, can’t it?

Melody Monitor:
Are you left-handed?

Loki:
I’m ambidextrous. As in so many things.
[9]

He breaks his hand when he hits you.

Actually, he was swinging at Ramona, but you step in front of it and take the punch on the side of the head, to nobody’s lingering pleasure. He’s taller than you by a good ten inches, but frail from starvation and speed, and the swing that barely turns your head lands him, flailing, on his ass, all spiky elbows and knees.

He sits there, spraddle-legged as a colt in black leather and heavy boots, his T-shirt untucked at the waist, and shifts his gaze from the hand he clutches, to your face, and back again.

Ramona steps forward. You stand your ground, the same way you stood it beside him when the Aesir handed the sentence down and the rest of the dvergar stepped away.

You wonder if he can read the memory in your face, or if he has one of his own. He doesn’t get up. He doesn’t look down.

“Hob, can you get me into a program?” he says.

In 1977, the punk zine
Beat Down
proclaimed of
The Esoteric Adventures of Kittie Calamatie,
“What the fuck is this? It sounds like Frank Zappa mating with an alley cat. Who told this bloated arena rock asshole that he should ditch the laser show and synthesizers? And what’s with the fucking mandolin? And
why do I like it
?”

It marked a new creative era for Loki, a regeneration of the innovative, questing spirit of the early 1970’s. The album and subsequent tour, in which he assumed the persona of a drag queen punk rocker—the eponymous Kittie Calamatie—rejuvenated interest in his work, and the album reached #5 on the UK charts and #3 in the U.S.

Loki was sober and pissed off again, and the result was beautiful music.
[10]

“Oh, fuck me running,” Loki moans, head down in his hands, his hair—black again—standing in spikes between his fingers. There’s a newspaper open on the table, dented by his elbows; you have come to know it as a sign of dread warning.

“What is it this time?”

Wordlessly, he leans back and rotates the paper with a fingertip. You shuffle forward, slippers scuffing on the tile, and clutch your bathrobe closed over your chest. There’s a photo from a recent gig on page five. You’re not in it, but Ramona and Loki are leaned together, jamming, guitar and bass necks bobbing in time. “It’s a rave,” you say, scanning the review.

“Look at my face.”

You stare; it looks like Loki. Both the photo and the man sitting in front of you, idly turning his orange juice glass around inside its ring of condensate.

“I’m not getting any younger,” he says, when you blink at him stupidly.

“Oh,” you say, and sit down in the other chair. “Right. Happy birthday.”

He tosses the wing of black hair out of his eyes. He’s wearing a shaggy long-fronted punk cut, streaked purple and indigo, these days. It changes without notice, like the music on the stereo.

“It’s not working,” he says.

“Of course it’s not working.” You pour coffee from the thermal carafe, add cream, two lumps of sugar with the tongs. So civilized these days. There’s only his cereal spoon on the table, so you swipe it and stir. “What did you expect?”

“I thought I could make them understand,” he says. “But it’s all I can do to keep their attention.”

“Some of it gets through. Subliminally.” The coffee is delicious, hot enough that for a moment you forget the cold of the world. You pour a second cup. “Change takes time.”

Fretfully, he picks the skin at the back of his hand. It snaps down, taut, but you know what he’s imagining. “I haven’t
got
time.”

You don’t answer.

“What if I showed them?” he says, conversationally, ten minutes later.

It’s a tone you know not to trust. “Showed them what?”

He shrugs. “How silly the categories are. I got Thor into a wig and dress. Surely I can inject a little chaos into a complacent, self-consumptive media culture. I mean, Reagan’s president-elect. Iron Maggie . . . don’t even get me started on her. It’s like the counterculture never happened. So . . . what if I turned into a girl?”

You’re trained, by now. You don’t let him see you choke on the scalding coffee. “It’s not like turning yourself into a mare by magic, Jotunsson.”

He tweaks skin between nails again. “It’s only meat. What’s the difference? It’s just meat. It’s dying anyway.”

By the last days of 1980, John Bonham and Keith Moon are dead, Mick Jagger is divorced, David Bowie is sober, and Loki has finally pulled off a stunt that defies comparison.

Loki:
You wankers—and when I say you wankers, I mean the press, Bob—never let go of anything. You take it all out of context. When I started reassignment, you should have seen reporters trying to come up with coded ways to ask me if I’d had my pizzle cut off yet.

It’s all a fucking hype machine. You say something like, rock and roll, it’s the devil’s music, it’s concerned with subversion and revolution and kicking back at authority, and the headline the next day is “Loki Declares Self Lucifer!”

Badger:
Well, that’ll certainly be my headline.

Smoke wreathes her face as she studies me. I can see the moment when she decides it’s funny after all, and gives a weak laugh.

Loki:
Don’t be silly, I hate fire. Ask me about the drugs, why don’t you?

Badger:
What about the drugs?

Loki:
Don’t ever fucking get started. And if you are started, stop right now. I’m not a role model, and you don’t want to be like me.

Badger:
Like you? Famous, talented, respected? Or like you, a freak?

Loki:
Oh, the freak part is fine. That’s a scream. If anybody gets anything from my life, I hope it’s that the real freaks are the ones who try to program and condition everybody to conform to a conqueror’s culture.

But I’d rather nobody emulated the drug abuse. You should see the films from my last nasal endoscopy. Not pretty.

Of course, the way it works is people want to idolize rock stars, pretend these stage personas are gods. They want to make rock star mistakes, but they’re so busy pretending we’re immortal and special that they don’t want to learn from those mistakes. Live big, die gagging on their own vomit.

All these lovely illustrations of perfectly asinine behavior, and people want to be just like them. Same thing you people have always done with gods.

Badger:
You people?

Loki:
I’m an atheist. And you know, I could
make
people listen. But it’d be the last thing they ever heard.
[11]

In 1980, when Loki revealed his plans to become a woman, the announcement was greeted by a jaded media with first derision and then disbelief [needs cite(s)]. While the singer had long been open about his bisexuality, his confession that he had entered treatment for Gender Identity Disorder and decided to undergo sex reassignment surgery was treated as a publicity stunt.

In 1983,
Badger
published a nude photo layout of Loki, post-op, provoking a media frenzy.
[12]

Loki walks around where you can see her, catches your eye with her upraised hands. “What are you doing, Hob?” she signs.

Your fingers lift from the keyboard. She watches intently. “Updating your Clikipedia entry.”

“Packing it with lies, I hope.”

“Do you want me to take out the bit where it says you’re controversial in the trans community for refusal to politicize your sexuality?”

“Is that code for
I fuck people who aren’t transfolk
?”

“I guess.”

She sighs, swings the opposite chair around, throws a leg over it and plunks down. She straddles the back and leans forward on crossed arms. A moment later, she leans back. Her hands work jaggedly. “Even when they learn to listen,” she says, “they still want to force you to say what they think you should be saying. Everybody wants the power of mind control. I just wanted to make them stop and
think.
”

She stops talking. You let her sit motionless until she shakes herself and finishes, “Besides, I fuck transfolk too.”

“Sweetie,” you tell her (you never called her sweetie when she was a man), “you fuck anybody you think is sexy.”

She grins, runs her tongue along her upper lip, and bats her eyelashes. “And what the hell is wrong with that?”

“Here,” you sign, and wave her over. “You’ll like this bit.”

Since her retirement from music, Loki remains a controversial and public figure. Her refusal to conform to political or social ideology has been described as anarchistic by some; however, the maverick ideology has been embraced by youth culture, some of whom describe her as a messiah.
[13]

“Fuck, Hobnoblin, you wanker,” she says. “Take out that word,
messiah.
And this bit in the quotes, ‘Half of what I say is meaningless, but I say it so you’ll hear the other half.’ That’s me misquoting John Lennon misquoting Kahlil Gibran. Take that out.”

“Consider it done. You know you’re not supposed to edit your own entry.”

She laughs and kisses you on the head. “You’re editing it, not me. I like this bit though—‘The real freaks are the ones who try to program and condition everybody to conform to a conqueror’s culture.’ Did I say that?”

“In 1982.”

The stars crack in the cold.

The only messenger is you.

Ride on

Killing horses.
[14]

Groovecutter
: How would you categorize what you do?

Loki:
I leave that to the critics. They have time.
[15]

Melody Monitor:
You must get asked about your surgery a great deal, and what influenced your decision. Before your gender reassignment, you were very open about your relationships—

Loki:
Relationships. There’s a juiceless euphemism.

Melody Monitor:
How has your gender reassignment changed things?

Loki:
[inaudible]

Melody Monitor:
Could you repeat that?

Loki:
I said, should it have?
[16]

The media still depresses her. The mortal world is both too subjective and not fluid enough. She doesn’t read the papers anymore, or the biographies, or watch the tell-all exposes. She’s aging. You both are.

The exile is a death sentence, too.

It’s not as if anything mere humans could devise would shock
her,
who knew the treachery of the Aesir overlords. But thirty-odd years of this nonsense isn’t enough to make either of you used to it, or resigned.

People, it seems, still assume you’re fucking her. And some people still don’t approve.