Curbing The Appetite

Stokey

Few people are aware that ageing rock stars are prone to develop what can only be described as a destructive appetite. This can be for a great many things, though my own cravings have become quite particular with time. Perhaps it is to do with my typically British beginnings in life. Perhaps I was conceived so closely to All Hallows, Samhain, whatever you want to call it, that there is nothing more the craving can do but grow inside of me. 

Growing up in the doldrums of Staffordshire, I eventually managed to work my way towards L.A. I could hardly believe it—me, Stokey, in the city of angels where all the cool and non-destructive people live. It wasn’t that I was particularly talented at music or lyrics; it was an appetite for whatever thing was put in front of me. Hard times will do that. At five years old this just so happened to be an electric guitar. 

Or at least that’s how you would expect the story to go. But for this Stokey, it was not an actual electric guitar but a one-stringed mandolin, a mouldy bedsit with a net curtain, and a washing line stringed with old tea bags that obscured the view of persistent precipitation outside. But the appetite, the destructive appetite, each year grew stronger. It was as if these humble beginnings were a catalyst for the avid consumption of life and everything it had to offer me.  Since then, I have seen a lot and learned a lot. I have been around a long, long time.

I often reflected on these difficult memories of my past whilst munching on the mushy fingers and wrists of my longtime L.A. girlfriend, Elettra. Finally, I was starting to understand myself, how this desperate start had led me here. My obsessive consumptive powers (without gaining a pound) had been accelerated by the onset of this latest pandemic strain, the one that turned the body to a delicate slutch, held in place by the sharp tang of a taut bag of skin. These people, these hanger-on-the-vine type of people, these grape-squishy delicacies were sallow, juicy and, I soon discovered, potentially fermentable.

So far, Elettra had only let me take a few small nibbles from the fingers of her left hand and the tiniest nips at the wrists, but I was already hooked. I may well have been immune to this particular viral strain, but not to the charms of this intelligent, wild, and wonderful girl. After rehearsals and concerts, we would meet up at a local bar. Sometimes we would sit in a booth so I could gaze deep into her dark eyes, secretly always wondering what her brain tasted like. I could only imagine its pinkish hue would be reminiscent of some white grenache, ripe from the Napa Valley. 

There were the infected souls and then there was everybody else. Therein lies the dilemma—how to fall in love in the middle of a pandemic when the one you need in your life, the one you love, is so…delicious. The appetite for destruction and love are two paths constantly crisscrossing.

***

Elettra

When I first met Stokey, a lot of people found him frightening. Not physically, but because of his intensity, his appetite for all things. He burned through friends and lovers. I might be the only one who lasted this long with him. I remember early on he made some joke about coming back from the dead and I said I quite liked zombies. But he insisted he wasn’t a zombie—he was revenant. He promised he wouldn’t eat my brains and I suppressed a dirty joke about what else he might want to eat. I didn’t know him well enough just yet.

But I knew I wanted to get to know him. Not because he was famous or such a talented musician. It was the appetite that drew me in.

Back in the early days, ’85 and ’86, a hardcore fan could catch a show once a week, sometimes twice. His band played all the small venues: the Troubador, the Roxy, Whiskey A Go Go. I met Stokey backstage at one such gig and we drove at 2 a.m. to Pink’s Hot Dogs on La Brea. The restaurant wasn’t even supposed to be open, but the owner loved Stokey and stayed up for his visit.

He pulled into the empty lot and ordered a dozen chili cheese dogs and a pineapple soda.

“What do you want, babe?” he asked, biting into his first dog.

“It’s too late to eat this crap.”

It was surprisingly easy for a skinny 20-something girl with big hair to get away without eating anything in public in the early ’80s. Not because I had an eating disorder or anything but, well, let’s not get into that yet.

Stokey finished off all those hot dogs in one go.

He looked at me, eyes silver-gray and marred at the edges, clouded by years of insatiability. 

“Satisfied?” I always asked questions I knew the answers to. 

“Never.” Stokey pawed at his straw with his tongue until it hit, cold saccharine liquid to wash away the chili’s overcooked brutality, phony pineapple punch. My black vinyl skirt was stuck to the seat and the jukebox needle skipped. The owner milled about, waved, wiped down a counter from inside the throwback drive-in style joint. To him (or to anyone watching), it was just another of Stokey’s infamous dates, but I knew it was different. It felt different, like when you close your eyes for just a few minutes and wake up hours later. Sometimes days later. Sometimes with just bits and pieces to remember what was once hot-blooded love. But again, this was different.

Back then, I spent my days in a call center, a suspiciously-stained cubicle with a broken fluorescent light overhead. I asked for one away from the window and wound up dead center of the row, gum cracking, filing my nails while trying to sell sweet old ladies junk magazine subscriptions. They took me up on it every time, after my story about a couple of babies at home, daddy’s run off to pursue a rock ‘n’ roll career, I don’t remember the specifics anymore. But after I caught one of Stokey’s shows at the Roxy, I clipped a newspaper photo of him and stuck it in a frame, used it as a muse. Kind of felt like cheating when I had finished with all of my male coworkers, pale and dry in neckties, more hair gel than anything substantial. Always a pull back to that photo, always a compass pointing the way with a sepia-toned Gibson Flying V.

But in the car that night, with the windows cracked and Stokey’s own song blaring from his crackly car radio, one hand playing air guitar and the other shaking the shaved ice in his cup to the beat, it felt different. It felt real.

“Drink up, love,” I thought to myself, glancing casually at my watch. “I like it sweet.”

***

The glam rock scene was devastated by the virus. So many bands lost singers, it was as if this strain was intent on moving the music industry to Seattle way too soon, not allowing these kids to have their heyday. If you had the right genes, you were immune, and the rest of us just had to live with it. It was a curious thing, this illness, in that you weren’t really ill. It just changed you, changed what you were, a societal status change. People knew you had it from the touch of your skin, how it tasted. The look of your body was different—in some ways, more beautiful. But it made you careful.

Stokey and I had been together almost a year when it hit. He promised to stay with me even though I knew his voracious appetite would mean that occasionally he would stray. There was growing unrest, people were going missing, especially those who lived on the streets. There were rumors about some new L.A. gangs perhaps being involved somehow. Rock stars were often in the headlines as part of the growing issue. The whole live fast and die young motif was playing out before our eyes.

Stokey seemed to be untouchable. If anything, because of the limited number of glam rock bands remaining, he became even more popular, like a talisman. There were others, of course, who were virus-free. Ozzy did well and Jon Bon Jovi started his solo career. There were some people who seemed destined for immortality.

I still had the call center gig with the flickering tubes. They had moved us on to the GNR virus strain helpline, not so much selling but trying to help, counseling and such. Families were falling apart, driven by greed. In some cases, literally tearing lumps out of each other. I still had the same cubicle. That summer was so hot the whole place sweltered with the virus, like watermelon and vanilla pods. In winter it was spiced pumpkin and mulled wine.

The vice president had been rumored to have contracted the virus. He had not been seen in public for weeks. But Stokey was still Stokey. Just like the desk photo, unchanged. I was so wrapped up in him and his earthiness. Everything else was going to hell, but he just kept being his all-consuming self. I had to eventually let him take small bites, fulfilling his need. He said I was better than any drug. But I did not want to scar. My wrists were a bracelet of punctures. We never spoke about how this would end. That would have meant telling him everything about the dead-end jobs I took, those transient pale-faced call center boys who I shared an office with, my own hungers.

***

Stokey and I had been together almost 30 years when he discovered my secret. We had survived a virus that made half the population taste like fruit punch, we survived Y2K and the rise of social media. But I’d always somehow managed to keep my truth from him. I kept my apartment even though I practically lived at his estate out in Malibu. I needed a space where I could be myself, out of his view. But when he went on tour, I loved to stay in his big, old hilltop house that looked out on the ocean. If you’ve never been to Malibu, it’s the kind of place where people can get lost, where accidents happen on dark, curved roads. I threw parties and invited college students from local universities—they didn’t worry about viruses or driving drunk. Offer enough free booze and drugs and they show up in droves. I might not have been famous, but all those kids loved me and hardly had a clue who Stokey was.

I bleached gray and silver streaks into my hair to feign age, wore it straight and long down my back, and dressed in designer clothes. I could still get away with not eating anything in the health- and image-obsessed world of Los Angeles, where everyone wanted to be famous. I had been approached through the years to be a model with a capital S, but I couldn’t risk a job so public.

So it was just another Friday when I had the house full of 20-somethings doing Jell-O shots and downing sliders. I pinpointed one guy who had short brown hair and green eyes, chiseled arms from lacrosse. I approached him and ran one manicured finger along his chin.

“I’ve been watching you all night,” I said, and took his hand to lead him to the back of the house. Out of respect for Stokey, I never took anyone into the room we slept in together. Instead, I took the lacrosse player into one of a dozen guest bedrooms and, as he began to pull off his shirt, I sat down to feast.

When I feed, I get intoxicated. My senses dull. It’s when I am at my most vulnerable. I didn’t notice Stokey come home unexpectedly, wander his way up through the party and into the room.

“Elettra, what the fuck are you up to?” he screeched. But of course I couldn’t answer him with my mouth full of blood.

***

Stokey

I had never seen that look on her face before, the intoxication that filled her eyes. I wasn’t sure what I was most angry at but I marched across the room and grabbed her by the throat, holding her face so close to mine I could smell the iron in the blood. 

“I was just so hungry,” she murmured.

That was the moment that changed everything. There was so much happening, like the whole world had started to burn around me. I don’t think I will ever fully understand why I did what I did next. I leaned in and, ever so gently, licked the hot blood from her lips. I dropped my hand from her throat. I barely felt her teeth sink into my neck. I felt the sadness pulsing within her, but there was anger there, too. She had tainted the sweetness the virus had brought her and I knew it would never return. Maybe this was just her way of surviving. We all did things we shouldn’t, especially in the ‘80s, especially me. I guess that was how she had managed to survive for so long, a party here, a party there. A rock drummer, a guitarist, all just victims of a forgotten era. It all made sense.

“I would never hurt you, Stokey,” she whispered. “You were special to me, revenant, remember?”

I did remember how she had told me she quite liked zombies. I felt that reverence for real, in the pit of my empty stomach.

Elettra ripped the sleeve of the dead guy’s T-shirt and used it to dab the corners of her mouth. “You and me, we’ll always be together,'' she said. “That appetite of yours was always so delicious to me. I wanted to make sure that when you bit my wrist, you would get what you deserved, what we deserved.”

“But the others, all those guys, musicians, my friends?”

“Stokey, I am over 900 years old, but till I met you, I had never been in love. There’s no way I could ever let you go.”

“But why would you take all those guys away? The whole music scene nearly disappeared.”

She dropped her gaze for a second, grasped the limp arm of the partially drained corpse and raised it towards me, as if offering a glass of neat whisky. 

“I love you so much, Stokey,” she said. “But to be totally honest, I fucking hate rock and roll.”