Too Weird for Ziggy by Sylvie Simmons

sultry Elvis-sneer looked like a cold sore beside Reeve’s smoldering pout.
    A music critic wrote: “What’s refreshing about Reeve’s performance is that there is none of the surliness, none of the done-it-all-before-to-the-point-where-I-hate-it-but-not-as-much-as-I-hate-
you
thing that you get from most rock artists you see on a stage. From Jim Morrison, certainly. The famous Miami ’69 incident, the one where the singer was arrested for taking his cock out onstage, the one that is now cited as evidence of his coolness, his rebelliousness, his dedication to art, his
sexiness
? The truth of the matter was he was drunk. He had nothing but contempt for the audience, the show, the whole debacle. He couldn’t be bothered. He forgot the words. He stumbled about.
    â€œAnd when the people who had paid to come and hear him sing—and if he wanted to throw in a little of that famous wild-and-crazy behavior for the price of a ticket then fine, but the bottom line was they wanted to hear some
songs
—when they turned on him and for once the artist-audience hatred was mutual, he taunted them. He asked them, ‘Do you want to see my cock?’ And he pulled it out and it was
soft
. It wasn’t cool or rebellious or artistic or sexy, it was soft and floppy as a dead fish.
    â€œAll rockstars at some point come face-to-face with the utter pointlessness of what they’re doing. Some get there quicker than others, some hide it better than others, but it happens to all of them. Reeve, however, can never suffer from pointlessness. Because it’s not
him
. The wholemessy business of self has been done away with. He’s doing it for someone else. He’s been taken out of himself. He is like a religious devotee, he has that gleam in his eyes of someone who knows, whose conviction cannot be shaken, that there really
is
a point. In some way, Jim Morrison did die for him.”
    They did a special show on the third of July, the anniversary of Morrison’s death. Reeve, dressed Morrisonesquely, tailed by the TV crew, walked around Paris, pointing out landmarks, places where Jim had or might have been. At the spot where Morrison died in the bathtub, the camera lingered on a mongrel dog pissing on the wall. Next stop, of course, was Père Lachaise cemetery, the camera moving sedately up the manicured aisle, following the arrows scratched onto monuments saying “Jim this way.” It wove through tombstones splattered with graffiti: cartoon genitalia and declarations of love, snatches of Jim poems, often badly spelled, names and countries and messages in a dozen languages.
    The graves were packed in tight like a ghetto. Jim’s was hardly big enough to hold a circus dwarf. The stone was a squat plain slab the color of tarmac. It was mobbed with young people. They were sitting around talking and laughing, drinking beer and putting notes and flowers in the empties, placing them gently on his grave. It was really quite moving. Reeve melted in among them, kissed a few cheeks and shook lots of hands.
    â€œI’ve made a lot of friends here,” he told the camera. “It’s amazing. It’s like a sort of club. I’ve made the pilgrimage, I don’t know, at least a dozen times. The first time I waseighteen years old. I brought a sleeping bag and camped out on his grave. The first time I came I wrote my name on his gravestone in the bottom right-hand corner. I wanted it to be right at ‘
The End
.’ It’s gone now. This stone is really ugly. The others got stolen piece by piece.”
    He led us up through the cemetery to where Oscar Wilde was buried. “Look at this.” The camera closes up on the inscription. “The first time I came here I saw this. It’s really incredible.” He recited Wilde’s words, etched onto the tomb.
    And alien tears will fill for him
Pity’s long-broken urn
For his mourners will be outcast men
And outcasts