He is from nowhere. I realize that sounds coyly rhetorical—in this day and age, it's even a boast, right? Socioeconomic code for I went to a second-tier school and had no connections and made all this money myself.

Yeah, I don't mean it that way. I mean he is from nowhere. Given the relevant maps and a pointer, I think I could convince even the most exacting minds that when the vast and blood-soaked jigsaw puzzle that is this country's regional scheme coalesced into more or less its present configuration after the Civil War, somebody dropped a piece, which left a void, and they called the void Central Indiana. I'm not trying to say there's no there there. I'm trying to say there's no there. Think about it; let's get systematic on it. What's the most nowhere part of America? The Midwest, right? But once you get into the Midwest, you find that each of the different nowherenesses has laid claim to its own somewhereness. There are the lonely plains in Iowa. In Michigan there is a Gordon Lightfoot song. And Ohio has its very blandness and averageness, faintly comical, to cling to. All of them have something. And now I invite you to close your eyes, and when I say "Indiana"…blue screen, no? And we are speaking only of Indiana generally, which includes Southern Indiana, where I grew up, and Northern Indiana, which touches a Great Lake. We have not even narrowed it down to Central Indiana. Central Indiana? That's like, "Where are you?" "I'm nowhere." "Go there." And when I asked Jeff Strange, a morning-rock deejay in Lafayette, how he thought about this part of the world—for instance, did he think of it as the South? after all, it's a Klan hot spot (which I am inclined to read as a somewhat desperate affectation); or did he think of it as the Midwest or what—you know what he told me? He goes, "Some people here would call it 'the region.'"

That's where he's from.

William Bruce Rose Jr.; William Bruce Bailey; Bill Bailey; William Rose; Axl Rose; W. Axl Rose.

That's where he's from. Bear that in mind.

(II)

On May 15, he came out in jeans and a black leather jacket and giant black sunglasses, all lens, that made him look like a wasp-man. We had been waiting—I don't really know how to calculate how long we'd been waiting. It was the third of the four comeback shows in New York, at the Hammerstein Ballroom. The doors had opened at seven o'clock. The opening act had been off by eight thirty. It was now after eleven o'clock. There'd already been fights on the floor, and it didn't feel like the room could get any tenser without some type of event. I was next to a really nice woman from New Jersey, a hairdresser, who told me her husband "did pyro" for Bon Jovi. She kept text-messaging one of her husband's friends, who was "doing pyro" for this show, and asking him, "When's it gonna start?" And he'd text-message back, "We haven't even gone inside." I said to her at one point, "Have you ever seen a crowd this pumped up before a show?" She goes, "Yeah, they get this pumped up every night before Bon Jovi." I didn't want to report that last part, but in the post-James Frey era, you have to watch your topknot.

Then he was there. And apologies to the nice woman, but people do not go that nuts when Bon Jovi appears. People were: Going. Nuts. He is not a tall man—I doubt even the heels of his boots (red leather) put him at over five feet ten. He walked toward us with stalking, cartoonish pugnaciousness. I feel like all anybody talks about with Axl anymore is his strange new appearance, but it is hard to get past the unusual impression he makes. To me he looks like he's wearing an Axl Rose mask. He looks like a man I saw eating by himself at a truck stop in Monteagle, Tennessee, at two o'clock in the morning about twelve years ago. He looks increasingly like the albino reggae legend Yellowman. His mane evokes a gathering of strawberry red intricately braided hempen fibers, the sharply twisted ends of which have been punched, individually, a half inch into his scalp. His chest hair is the color of a new penny. With the wasp-man sunglasses and the braids and the goatee, he reminds one of the monster in Predator, or of that monster's wife on its home planet. When he first came onto the scene, he often looked, in photographs, like a beautiful, slender, redheaded 20-year-old girl. I hope the magazine will run a picture of him from about 1988 so the foregoing will seem a slightly less creepy observation and the fundamental spade-called-spade exactitude of it will be laid bare. But if not, I stand by it. Now he has thickened through the middle—muscly thickness, not the lard-ass thickness of some years back. He grabs his package tightly, and his package is huge. Only reporting. Now he plants his feet apart. "You know where you are?" he asks, and we bellow that we do, we do know, but he tells us anyway. "You're in the jungle, baby," he says, and then he tells us that we are going to die.