04-09-2008
"He's not signing autographs, stop asking."I huffed my cigarette like Harry Knowles huffs a chocolate milkshake.
"The nerve of these thick fucks..."
Oni shuddered, looking at the cosplayers like each one might be a suicide bomber.
They'd been coming up to us for half an hour, asking for autographs. Apparently, Oni, in his stained and dusty plaid slacks and dollar store golf-pro tee, strongly resembled some eccentric voice actor.
Only at Dragon*con.
I was regretting having worn a pair of pink, green, and blue stripped gym shorts. They were Sweets'. I'd pulled them off a pile of dirty laundry in the middle of the night and narrowly avoided tumbling down the stairs trying to put both feet through one leghole, only to slip, Marx Bros. style, at the bottom, after running into a slowly expanding pool of warm vomit.
Fuck, sometimes I get tired of Oni.
As I thought this, the frail little man bent over a nearby trash can and noisily threw up the entire bottle of Schnapps I'd gone to such great trouble to procure for him at six o'clock in the cock sucking morning.
Lance had called the week before, asking if we were going to "con."
When I said, "Who's WE?" he offered to get us passes.
Billy Joel's She's Got a Way< was playing in the background, which felt rather odd. That feeling intensified when he began to softly sing along like some tired, drunken, danish sailor, sometimes singing the lyrics to Hey Jude, but adapting them to the melody of Piano Man.
I just put the phone down, he didn't seem to notice.
Even though I'd washed them out in the sink, and dried them in the dryer, the shorts felt damp and smelled faintly sour; but also like dryer sheets, which kind of made it worse.
I'd spent the morning watching Andy, Merryweathers' house keeper, air brush powdered jade (the stone, not the film) onto Sweets' arms and legs as she stretched out languorously on the kitchen counter in a pair of pink and black mesh hot pants.
It was part of a BareMinerals beauty package Merryweather had on auto delivery from QVC, but never used. The stuff piled up in a corner of the living room next to a mountain of old Hollywood Reporters, a heap of empty cigar boxes, and two hundred unauthorized copies of My Edens After Burns by Val Kilmer.
"I never got the mineral cosmetics craze. What's the appeal of covering your body with ground up rocks?"
"The jade's supposed to make your skin sparkle and glow," she said.
"Just cover yourself with glitter."
"This is subtle. And green. Like Lo Pan."
"It wasn't worth fifty dollars," Merry groused, wafting into the kitchen, going straight to the coffee press. "Or even ten."
"Why don't you stop the autodelivery?" I asked.
Merry waved his hand dismissively. "Andy doesn't speak English well enough to work the phone."
Andy, a five foot tall, eighty year old, Vietnamese man, back braced against the sink, arms crossed, drawing down hard on a limp-looking Pall Mall, nodded in agreement.
We were listening to The Blue Album, and the The Ballad of John and Yoko was power fucking my cranium to the tune of Tiny Dancer.
I started searching my pockets for Excedrin.
"What the fuck was wrong with John Lennon?" I muttered. "Singing about that deb, Mia Farrows' sister. What a fucking retard. Ob-la-di, ob-la-DIE. Yoko sucks cock and collects checks."
"Ob-la-di, ob-la-da: McCartney's the real retard, since he wrote that," Merry quipped with a smile.
"Dear Prudence should have been Dear Frump," Sweet added. "She's at the intersection of her Inbox, and hasn't had a day off since the fifth grade."
"Did you just quote a State Farm commercial?"
She ignored me.
"Yoko and McCartney humped Lennon's leg like they thought it would bring magic money from the sky," she continued. "And it did. Rice that stuck to the pot, both of them."
Bungalo Bill was playing on the upstairs radio while Oh Yoko! blew out the living room and Dear Prudence went three rounds with the kitchen sink.
The household was being held hostage in a "Beatles" vortex, it seemed, and I was thinking of checking the clocks for missing time, and checking the front door to see if Michael Jackson was there expecting royalties.
How could they have known, in their wildest dreams, back in 1970, after the Beatles broke up, that the little boy from The Jackson Five would one day own all of their songs, molest a bunch of kids, and still go broke blowing everything on late-night trips to Costco in Dubai?
Dear Beatles, I got your songs.
"I guess that answered McCartneys' question, 'What're we gonna do for money?' after his mom died. Start pumping Lennon for cash, that's what. Prudence hasn't had a day off since the fifth grade, but McCartney hasn't done an honest days work in his life."
"He was a masterful song writer - still is. You have to admire that."
As he said this, Merry gazed reverently at an old cut-out of McCartney tacked above the Urban Craftsman dinette set.
"But he didn't know how to be what Lennon was. John understood that being famous was about being the same recognizable thing over and over. And that to be famous in terms of being a rock star, that one thing had to be mysterious, dangerous, youthful, and sexual. You have to be COOL. McCartney plays a part, but never the same part. In Helter Skelter he's (to the best of his ability) violent and dirty. In Honey Pie, he's cranking out hot mid-thirties swing. In Maybe, he's a heterosexual man, singing about the woman he loves. Without Lennon and the Beatles, McCartney would just be A GOOD SONG WRITER. Like Billy Joel, or Lindsey Buckingham."
"I'll give you that. Not the part about Billy Joel and Lindsey Buckingham (because I think you're going a bit far there)," he said, brow furrowed. "But you're right about one thing: no one in the twentieth century knew more about being an icon than John Lennon. Except for maybe Chairman Mao."
"Listen," I said, getting a little worked up. "On his own, McCartney would have been as cheesy and contrived as he was running around with Wings. Great music, great songs--but where's the attitude? Where's the cool?"
Lennon's voice began belting out I'm So Tired on the hi'cuping kitchen radio.
["I'm soooo tiiiired, I don't know what to do."]
Merry smiled. "I do."
["YOU'D say.... I'm putting you on, but it's NO JOKE... it's doin' me harm..."]
"...McCartney thought he was ripping off the blues, getting really down to earth. But he was like, the whitest man on earth, making the whitest music of all time..."
["You know, it's THREE WEEKS... I'm goin' INSANE. I'd give you everything I've got for a little peace of miiiind..."]
Merry smirked. "Very little."
["I'm soooo tired, I'm feelin' so upset. Although I'm sooooo tired, I'll have ah-noth-er cig-a-rette... and curse Sir Walter Raleigh, he was such a stupid GIT...."]
"Did Lennon read about Sir Walter Raleigh some where and just build this song around the tobacco reference?" Merry asked. "Because I don't think he was knowledgeable to the extent that he could drop a name like that."
I crushed a handful of pills on the counter.
Smoke circling, cigarette dangling from dry lips, I swept the powder into a plastic tumbler full of commercial-grade Taiwanese green tea, stirred it fast and dirty with a finger and knocked it back.
"Read Lennon in America."
"Why don't you read it to me?"
"Why don't you wait for Andy to learn English, then he can read it to you in addition to answering the phone."
Merry frowned.
There was a knock at the door two seconds before it burst open and Crimson Hide tumbled in with a stack of boxes.
Sweet threw her legs over the counter and jumped down. Crimson Hide (a.k.a. Dale the white trash Indian) dropped his load just in time to catch the half-naked girl as she rocked him into the door frame.
Merry was bending down to slice open the masking tape on one of the boxes with a small kitchen knife.
Sweet jumped down.
"What's all this?"
"Well," Merry said, pushing back the card board flaps. "Since you're all going to be at Dragon*con, I thought I'd use this opportunity to further our cause."
He stood up, holding out a t-shirt with a fine-pencil drawing of his face, and the site logo.
"You've got to be kidding."
Continued in pt 2...
