“Don’t count on it,” I say. “Gotta run!”
St. Stephen’s is the trendiest church on the beach. I arrive early and sit in a pew near the door. In the front row I spy a snow-white noggin that belongs to either Cleo Rio or Johnny Winter in drag. Propped on a velvet-cloaked table in the center of the stage are a red Stratocaster and a small brass urn.
I count five TV crews, including one from VH1, hanging around near the confessionals. It’s an eclectic, funky flow of mourners—sunburned dock rats and dive captains; pallid, body-pierced clubbers too young to be Slut Puppies fans; chunky, gray-streaked rockers from primeval bands like Styx and Supertramp; anonymous, half-stoned studio musicians with bad tattoo jobs and black jeans; and a sprinkling of pretty, unattached women in dark glasses, who I assume to be admirers and ex-lovers of the late Jimmy Stoma. One person I don’t see is Janet Thrush—maybe Cleo told her not to come, or maybe Janet felt she’d be uncomfortable. Another person not in attendance is the tall, shimmery-haired guy from the elevator at Cleo and Jimmy’s condo. It makes me curious; if he were a family friend, wouldn’t he attend the funeral?
The church is nearly full when the notables begin arriving—the Van Halen brothers, the wild percussionist Ray Cooper, Joan Jett, Courtney Love, Teena Marie, Ziggy Marley, Michael Penn and an auburn-haired beauty who was either a Bangle or a Go-Go, I’m not sure which. It’s a colorful group and the TV guys are hopping around like meth-crazed marmosets.
The last to enter St. Stephen’s are the surviving ex-Slut Puppies: bass players Danny Gitt and Tito Negraponte, followed by Jimmy’s keyboardist and diving buddy Jay Burns, who in midlife has come to project an unsettling resemblance to Newt Gingrich with a ponytail. Missing from the gathering is the band’s notoriously moody lead guitarist, Peter P. Proust, who three years ago was fatally stabbed in a bizarre confrontation with a sidewalk Santa Claus on Lexington Avenue in Manhattan. As for a drummer, the Slut Puppies went through a dozen and, according to the trades, not one departed on amiable terms.
Jay Burns and the two bass players walk stiffly up the aisle and file into the pew where Cleo Rio waits. Scanning the crowd, it occurs to me that this doesn’t look or smell like the funeral of a man who turned his back on the record business. The church is packed with musicians and ripe with reefer.
As the priest instructs us to rise, two more women slip in the back door. They sit near me—one is black and one is Latin, both in their early twenties. Pals of Cleo, I’m guessing. The black woman notices the notebook in my hand and reacts with a shaded smile. “I’m with the newspaper,” I whisper. She nods, and passes the information to her friend, who is mouthing along to the Lord’s Prayer. Afterwards, the priest, an earnest Father Riordan, begins reflecting upon the short but full life of James Bradley Stomarti. It is painfully obvious to the whole assembly that Father Riordan never met the deceased, but he’s giving it the old college try.
I lean over to the two women and ask, not too smoothly, “Were you friends, or just fans?”
“Both,” the Latin girl says, flaring an eyebrow.
“Can I get your names?”
Maria Bonilla and Ajax, no last name.
“We’re singers,” Ajax says.
“Backup singers,” Maria adds. “We worked with Jimmy.”
I’m skeptical, since neither one could have been older than fourteen when his last CD came out.
“No kidding? On which album?”
The women glance glumly at each other, Ajax saying: “The one nobody’s ever gonna hear.”
At the podium, a former A&R man from MCA is telling a humorous anecdote about Jimmy blasting a mixing board with an Uzi during the recording of A Painful Burning Sensation. Normally I’d be taking down every word, but today the notebook is a prop.
To the backup singers I say, “Yeah, I heard he was working on some great new stuff.”
“Not from us you didn’t,” sniffs Maria.
Again the door opens, and into the church strolls T. O. “Timmy” Buckminster, our so-called music critic. I shrink into the pew and lower my head, hoping not to be seen. Obviously the smarmy little shitweasel is here to cover the funeral—or, more accurately, the widow. He couldn’t care less about Jimmy Stoma.