Jeff Calhoun (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
cacophonish) wrote2022-07-19 07:35 pm
cacophonish) wrote2022-07-19 07:35 pm
Entry tags:
ancient writeup of demon shit
cw: drugs, hallucinations, body horror, possession, suicidal ideation
Now, Ziggy played guitar.
No, that's not how this song begins.
(And there is a song. You know it intimately, because you wrote it. You can hear it play out, behind every moment, a soundtrack to a life derailed. The Rise and Fall of Jeff Calhoun and the Nervous Tix, the has-been who never-was.)
You play guitar. And when you play, and when you sing, that's when magic happens. It's at your fingertips and pours from your throat. Your band's there, too; they're always there, just behind you. The Spiders call themselves The Nervous Tix, but everyone knows there's an unspoken Jeff Calhoun and... prefacing everything. You're the main attraction, a bargain bin, thrift store god. They love you, these kids packed into clubs, writhing and drunk in their adoration. Rock 'n roll disciples, under your spell. They would tear you apart and eat you up if they could.
It's a flip book, snapshot after snapshot of shows, coming to life in a jerky, stop-motion sequence. See, you need to feel the highs to really get the lows. (And boy are there highs! Up your nose, down your throat-- hey, rockstar, why are you always broke?)
You're right there at the cusp of stardom. You can feel it, taste it, it's so close, you just have to reach out and take it. And it all changes with four simple words. Five, if you want to be picky about contractions.
"I'm your biggest fan."
The voice comes from your stereo, right by your head, as you lay on the mattress in that cluttered, messy house you share with too many friends. One second, it's Losing My Religion, and then the instruments stop and Michael Stipe's talking right at you. It's like he's pouring the words straight into your ear. "I'm your biggest fan..."
One beat.
Two beats.
Three.
Four.
The song continues like it never happened. You brush it off and go about your day, too, as if it never happened. But the words start to follow you around. They're in your walkman, in the radio, on the TV. Even fucking ALF turns to the screen, in the middle of a midnight rerun, looks right at you with his glossy black eyes, and says, "I'm your biggest fan." And you have to laugh at the sheer absurdity of it, even as you try to find the bottom of a bottle in record time.
You're crying and hungover the first time you have an actual conversation with the words. You're listening to a Bowie album, because of course you are. You know where this is going. You finally ask it what it is, and what it wants. You learn that it comes from someplace else, that it comes from magic, itself. It heard your music, through whatever veil separates its reality from yours, and followed the sound, little by little, every time you cast your musical spells for your adoring crowds. It found you, and you, obliviously, in your carefree, youthful self absorption, trapped it here with you.
But that's okay. The demon isn't mad at you, because it loves you. It wants you, it wants to be you, and twist the two of you together into one beautiful being. All you have to do is open the door and let it in.
"I want what you have."
You name it Ziggy Stardust, and it likes that. But you won't give it what it wants. Days start to bleed together, and you start bailing on friends, on rehearsals, but you never miss a show. Ziggy keeps talking to you, and now you can see it in the mirror, sort of, just out of the corner of your eye. You start to avoid mirrors whenever possible. TVs, too. But you can't give up music, never, never, so Ziggy always finds a way back to you.
"I'm just like you. I want their eyes on me. I want their ears. I want their hearts."
The first time Ziggy talks to you, directly to you, right in your head, without any airwaves to ride in on, you think you must still be high. It talks like a ransom note, words stitched together in other people's voices, picked up from everyone around you, your bandmates, your friends, the strangers who pass by every day, and all the voices you've ever heard in your short life.
Even when Ziggy's quiet, it's never really gone. You know that, too. You can feel it, always there, in your head, in your soul, linked to you by the thing you love most. You never learn how to shut it up, but you figure out the best ways to turn up the noise and drown it out. You were always a dilettante of life's intoxicants, and you quickly become a true connoisseur, learning which ones work better than others. Coke's your favorite, because it works fast and makes you feel invincible.
Sometimes you can't tell where the person ends and the instrument begins. You see your drummer's hands as sticks, like in the one and only Shakespeare play she ever got you to read. Your bassist grows a second mouth during backing vocals. You're with someone whose face you can't even remember, and their neck's so long, so elegant, you can't tell it apart from a fretboard. It's beautiful and repulsive and you're crying before you can even get your pants off.
They start to hate you, the Spiders, the Tix. Maybe they've always hated you. (Or maybe they know you've been stealing from them, and you've been pushing them away, and walking all over them.) You always shine brighter than them, even now, tarnished and crazy and decaying from the inside out. No matter how much they hate you, the crowd still adores you. You have their eyes and ears and hearts, and maybe you aren't so different from Ziggy.
You and Ziggy both know this is unsustainable. It doesn't belong in this world; it fundamentally cannot exist here, where things are understood in the flesh and physical. Ziggy is too Other, and it's going mad from the mundanity of living.
You're starting to get the impression that you don't belong here, either. There's no point in listening to others anymore. When they speak, you hear jarring, discordant notes. A babbling cacophony, spilling out from faces you can't quite recognize anymore. Dreams and imagination and madness spill out into the world around you, and you've become resigned to the way reality is always splitting into a kaleidoscope of nonsense and noise. You see things everywhere, even when you're not looking, always in the corner of your eye, or in the distance, or just beyond your field of vision. You think there are other worlds in every reflection, because why else do they look so strange and wrong and different from what you see around you?
All you can think about is how badly you want to touch a star and burn up. All you can think about is how much you want the crowd to tear you to pieces in one final act of adoration and worship. Go out like Orpheus, until you're nothing but a head singing in a river.
This is no way to exist, not for Ziggy, and not for you. You don't know how to set it free and send it home, so you know there's only one option left. Open the door and let it in, so that it can join this world. Ziggy deserves a chance.
You see melodies everywhere, and you decide it's time to write a new song. It's the song playing right now, the soundtrack to your regrets, the song that no longer exists outside of memories. It's music and magic, threaded together with every note in tribute to the demon in your head. You write it as a send-off to yourself. When you perform this song, backed by a band that hates you, in front of an audience that worships you as some kind of underground god (even now, thin and sick and wasted), you're going to open the door.
Your magnum opus. A beautiful rock 'n roll suicide.
But it doesn't go that way. Even though you're half dead and nothing makes sense, your fingers never fumble, and you hit every note just right. Singing feels like agony, like the lyrics are being ripped out of your throat, but nobody around you can tell. It's beautiful, and it's a failure. The ritual's a failure; the song's a failure, a tainted composition to its core. Your magnum opus never stood a chance.
In one terrible moment, you lose your voice. You're choking on a melody you can't sing out. Somebody grabs you, tries to steady you, and you shove them away with whatever strength you have left, because in that moment you hate them just as much as they hate you. You throw your guitar away and collapse under your own failure, sobbing until your stomach contracts on itself and you puke bile onto the stage. You crawl to the edge, through your own filth, and you don't even hear the world around you, the concerned panic erupting from your bandmates. All you can hear is Ziggy's voice, and you can swear it's crying, too, howling in grief and madness. It's trapped in a world it can never truly exist in, and you're trapped with it, and this is never going to end.
"When the kids had killed a man I had to break up the band."
Now, Ziggy played guitar.
No, that's not how this song begins.
(And there is a song. You know it intimately, because you wrote it. You can hear it play out, behind every moment, a soundtrack to a life derailed. The Rise and Fall of Jeff Calhoun and the Nervous Tix, the has-been who never-was.)
You play guitar. And when you play, and when you sing, that's when magic happens. It's at your fingertips and pours from your throat. Your band's there, too; they're always there, just behind you. The Spiders call themselves The Nervous Tix, but everyone knows there's an unspoken Jeff Calhoun and... prefacing everything. You're the main attraction, a bargain bin, thrift store god. They love you, these kids packed into clubs, writhing and drunk in their adoration. Rock 'n roll disciples, under your spell. They would tear you apart and eat you up if they could.
It's a flip book, snapshot after snapshot of shows, coming to life in a jerky, stop-motion sequence. See, you need to feel the highs to really get the lows. (And boy are there highs! Up your nose, down your throat-- hey, rockstar, why are you always broke?)
You're right there at the cusp of stardom. You can feel it, taste it, it's so close, you just have to reach out and take it. And it all changes with four simple words. Five, if you want to be picky about contractions.
The voice comes from your stereo, right by your head, as you lay on the mattress in that cluttered, messy house you share with too many friends. One second, it's Losing My Religion, and then the instruments stop and Michael Stipe's talking right at you. It's like he's pouring the words straight into your ear. "I'm your biggest fan..."
One beat.
Two beats.
Three.
Four.
The song continues like it never happened. You brush it off and go about your day, too, as if it never happened. But the words start to follow you around. They're in your walkman, in the radio, on the TV. Even fucking ALF turns to the screen, in the middle of a midnight rerun, looks right at you with his glossy black eyes, and says, "I'm your biggest fan." And you have to laugh at the sheer absurdity of it, even as you try to find the bottom of a bottle in record time.
You're crying and hungover the first time you have an actual conversation with the words. You're listening to a Bowie album, because of course you are. You know where this is going. You finally ask it what it is, and what it wants. You learn that it comes from someplace else, that it comes from magic, itself. It heard your music, through whatever veil separates its reality from yours, and followed the sound, little by little, every time you cast your musical spells for your adoring crowds. It found you, and you, obliviously, in your carefree, youthful self absorption, trapped it here with you.
But that's okay. The demon isn't mad at you, because it loves you. It wants you, it wants to be you, and twist the two of you together into one beautiful being. All you have to do is open the door and let it in.
"I want what you have."
You name it Ziggy Stardust, and it likes that. But you won't give it what it wants. Days start to bleed together, and you start bailing on friends, on rehearsals, but you never miss a show. Ziggy keeps talking to you, and now you can see it in the mirror, sort of, just out of the corner of your eye. You start to avoid mirrors whenever possible. TVs, too. But you can't give up music, never, never, so Ziggy always finds a way back to you.
"I'm just like you. I want their eyes on me. I want their ears. I want their hearts."
The first time Ziggy talks to you, directly to you, right in your head, without any airwaves to ride in on, you think you must still be high. It talks like a ransom note, words stitched together in other people's voices, picked up from everyone around you, your bandmates, your friends, the strangers who pass by every day, and all the voices you've ever heard in your short life.
Even when Ziggy's quiet, it's never really gone. You know that, too. You can feel it, always there, in your head, in your soul, linked to you by the thing you love most. You never learn how to shut it up, but you figure out the best ways to turn up the noise and drown it out. You were always a dilettante of life's intoxicants, and you quickly become a true connoisseur, learning which ones work better than others. Coke's your favorite, because it works fast and makes you feel invincible.
Sometimes you can't tell where the person ends and the instrument begins. You see your drummer's hands as sticks, like in the one and only Shakespeare play she ever got you to read. Your bassist grows a second mouth during backing vocals. You're with someone whose face you can't even remember, and their neck's so long, so elegant, you can't tell it apart from a fretboard. It's beautiful and repulsive and you're crying before you can even get your pants off.
They start to hate you, the Spiders, the Tix. Maybe they've always hated you. (Or maybe they know you've been stealing from them, and you've been pushing them away, and walking all over them.) You always shine brighter than them, even now, tarnished and crazy and decaying from the inside out. No matter how much they hate you, the crowd still adores you. You have their eyes and ears and hearts, and maybe you aren't so different from Ziggy.
You and Ziggy both know this is unsustainable. It doesn't belong in this world; it fundamentally cannot exist here, where things are understood in the flesh and physical. Ziggy is too Other, and it's going mad from the mundanity of living.
You're starting to get the impression that you don't belong here, either. There's no point in listening to others anymore. When they speak, you hear jarring, discordant notes. A babbling cacophony, spilling out from faces you can't quite recognize anymore. Dreams and imagination and madness spill out into the world around you, and you've become resigned to the way reality is always splitting into a kaleidoscope of nonsense and noise. You see things everywhere, even when you're not looking, always in the corner of your eye, or in the distance, or just beyond your field of vision. You think there are other worlds in every reflection, because why else do they look so strange and wrong and different from what you see around you?
All you can think about is how badly you want to touch a star and burn up. All you can think about is how much you want the crowd to tear you to pieces in one final act of adoration and worship. Go out like Orpheus, until you're nothing but a head singing in a river.
This is no way to exist, not for Ziggy, and not for you. You don't know how to set it free and send it home, so you know there's only one option left. Open the door and let it in, so that it can join this world. Ziggy deserves a chance.
You see melodies everywhere, and you decide it's time to write a new song. It's the song playing right now, the soundtrack to your regrets, the song that no longer exists outside of memories. It's music and magic, threaded together with every note in tribute to the demon in your head. You write it as a send-off to yourself. When you perform this song, backed by a band that hates you, in front of an audience that worships you as some kind of underground god (even now, thin and sick and wasted), you're going to open the door.
Your magnum opus. A beautiful rock 'n roll suicide.
But it doesn't go that way. Even though you're half dead and nothing makes sense, your fingers never fumble, and you hit every note just right. Singing feels like agony, like the lyrics are being ripped out of your throat, but nobody around you can tell. It's beautiful, and it's a failure. The ritual's a failure; the song's a failure, a tainted composition to its core. Your magnum opus never stood a chance.
In one terrible moment, you lose your voice. You're choking on a melody you can't sing out. Somebody grabs you, tries to steady you, and you shove them away with whatever strength you have left, because in that moment you hate them just as much as they hate you. You throw your guitar away and collapse under your own failure, sobbing until your stomach contracts on itself and you puke bile onto the stage. You crawl to the edge, through your own filth, and you don't even hear the world around you, the concerned panic erupting from your bandmates. All you can hear is Ziggy's voice, and you can swear it's crying, too, howling in grief and madness. It's trapped in a world it can never truly exist in, and you're trapped with it, and this is never going to end.
"When the kids had killed a man I had to break up the band."