I wake up in the bath. Because that's where I've been sleeping. I've got Sting staying in my flat and he needs my bedroom for this "press conference" he's been putting together. For the past seven years.
He's relaunching his career, as the "industrial fetish performance body artist" that he's "always been really, at heart."
A sneak preview of his new video "Sex Nazi" made me feel sick, and very, very afraid. There are only so many times you can see a dayglo pink rubber swastika without feeling that there is something really fundamentally wrong with the world.
All this time he's been living here and never once has he even left the building, let alone gone out in order to buy food. If I treat myself to a piece of cake or a sandwich or a glass of water, I have to do it in the bath, with the curtains drawn, and all the taps on, and my eyes shut. It's less scary with eyes closed.
"You're not eating a sandwich in there are you?!" He'll snap, trying the handle for emphasis.
This afternoon a journalist arrived. Dressed up in his rubber Napoleon outfit, Sting thrust open the door and exclaimed something in Shakespeare. The woman from the nudespaper said 'Hi to you, I'm here to see Mr. Roland?' And when Sting shuffled back to my room in disappointment, his massive plastic sword dragging noisily behind him, I swear he looked about four feet tall and several dozen pounds lighter. His clothes no longer fit him. I laughed out loud at that bit.
The journalist light a cigarette (one of those "Posh New Fags" that are made out of bee stings). She paused to exhale a lung-full of milky-green smoke and said she'd come in response to my "cry for help". She'd "read something on the interweb" and did I want to tell her my story? An 'exclusive'. She offered me a theatre school smile of sympathy.
I'd like to think that she was the kind of person that would telephone in advance or perhaps even write me a letter - but as Sting has put himself in charge of 'comms', obsessively picking up the phone every few minutes or so to check that the receiver has been correctly cradled, and checking to make sure that incoming mail - addressed to me - isn't in fact meant for him and has simply been accidentally "mis-torpped".
(I'm going to move on now. You get the picture I'm sure. Perhaps some other rock star has done something similar to you? Perhaps we should form some kind of support group? Let me know? Just don't tell Sting. Just tell him you're a relative who's in hospital or something.)
I couldn't remember what I'd said. I never can. Because, like most people I know, I never listen to anything I say. I'm so boring I actually don't like to be alone, in case I start trying to talk to myself.
Anyway, I figured maybe I was doing too well to ask for directions, so I just lead her into the kitchen, moved things around a bit in the hope that she would think I was making some sort of warm beverage, and then pretended to cry. After that, her questions were so leading all I had to do was nod and mumble incoherently into my sleeve every now and then. Real tears came soon after. Crying is warm.
She started making a tellingbone call to see where the photographic-confabulator was.
"You're fine with having your... face... photographed, like that... you know?" She asked.
"I guess so. It's the only one I have to hand you see..." I kept nodding, even long after she'd gone, and wondered how much money I wouldn't get paid, not having had any real money since about 1987.
Perhaps they would put me under some kind of Sting Protection Program. Get me a Starbar and a can of Tizer while I wait in reception and people smile and pat me on the shoulder when they go past. Attractive people who don't smell of chemicals, in clean clothes, with flawless complexions and eyes that don't hurt to look at. "He's so brave," they'll say, as they decide who will get to 'put me up for a night or two'.
But of course I knew I wasn't going to see a penny, let alone smell the freshly washed hair of some well-toned media exec, fresh from a shower not filled to the shins with pink-rubber nazi insignia.
And as I recently discovered, money that you make yourself doesn't count.
Sting is in the bathroom. And I need to use the toilet. And not just to wash my socks in either.
Thinking of you, while I wait for the loo,
Rollo Kim.
A Mekanoid. Number 9 I think I lost my badge fleeing from some pigeon.
The Mekano Set, Flame On, Pope Joan and My Rhino play Brighton's Engine Room Club on Wednesday 26th July:
http://www.pleasemakesense.com/
Rollo Kim
posted by Rollo Kim @ Thursday, July 20, 2006
