“I’m calling you,” the manager said, “because I just got to Amsterdam, and I’m sitting here at a café outside my hotel.”
“And?”
“And I knew you’d be the only one up.”
“And?”
“And I thought you’d want to come over here and imbibe, partake, and otherwise dilate.”
He put the coffee cup down. “Is that so?”
“Yeah,” she replied. “It is so.”
“You and that bindle of coke getting a wittle wone-wey?”
She waited for a second. “I’m trying to reach out to you, Bobby. Don’t be a dick.”
He hung up on her.
Fucking Joey. Her talents, which had seemed so formidable at first, had a wicked fucking half-life now. The conniving witch hadn’t delivered shit for them since the day the ink went dry on their Warners contract.
Had she stopped the absolutely career-crippling racism charge? No.
Had she kept Aerosmith from dropping Blood Orphans from their tour of America’s finest sports arenas? No.
Had she stopped their slow slide into booking agent hell, from favorites at William Morris to the laughingstock of the interns’ desk at Who Gives a Shit Booking? She had not.
At least she hadn’t slept with Darlo. At least, if only for reasons involving power and control, she had denied the drummer a place between her slamming little legs, kept him hurting, kept him frustrated. That made Joey a little bit of a saint to Bobby, carved out a special place for her in his weary, bitter heart.
Big deal, he thought. She was still an incompetent cokehead shill, and they were still the worst fucking band in existence.
A wasp flew by his head and started banging itself against the cold windowpane. This wasp had missed the last flight out of summer and would soon die a cold, exoskeletal death in a bland Amsterdam apartment.
Bobby always appreciated others with whom he could find kinship, and this wasp fit the bill nicely. Like the wasp, he too had been led astray by his instincts and was now at the whim of vast forces, forces beyond comprehension in the complexity with which they had ruined his life. Every day was a cold window to bang one’s head against.
“Oh, little wasp,” he said, “ye I shall free.”
And with that he smashed the insect against the pane, exploding its rust-orange exo-body but also creating a solid fracture in the glass, a flat skein that resembled the interstate in North Dakota, upon which they had often trod.
The wasp, splattered in the center, was reborn as Bismarck.
“Bad omen,” Bobby said. “I’m outta here.”
He donned his bomber jacket and went down the Dutch stairs, into this last miserable morning of tour. On the banister, he left behind a goo of rot.
Morten’s apartment lay on a fashionable street. Lanterns decorated the sidewalk. Scanning the storefronts, Bobby saw three posh clothing stores, a pharmacy with a hand-carved dove for a sign, and several restaurants with thousand-euro signage. Next door to Morten’s, an Internet café was opening.
“Oh, sweet,” he said, and flicked his cigarette to the pavement.
The café had that chic modern primitive vibe that plagued European hipster establishments, and smelled of sandalwood, cloves, and espresso. Behind the counter, a skinny aging hippie in overalls read a copy of
De Telegraaf.
Brown dreadlocks accentuated his receding hairline. He was smoking a fat spliff, and smiled as Bobby approached.
“Do you mind speaking English?” Bobby asked. “I no sprecken ze Dutch.”
Natty Dread nodded. “Sure, man. Sure.”
“A double espresso, please.” He looked in the glass case. “And that pastry.”
“The mazette?”
“Yeah, I guess. What’s a mazette?”
The hippie’s sallow stoned eyes gazed at him. “French for fool.”
“Perfect, then.”
A short, foxy girl with shoulder-length henna-red hair came in. She looked like that chick from
Run Lola Run,
wearing black eye shadow and something in the vein of a Catholic schoolgirl’s uniform. Bobby’s hands tingled. She smiled at him and sat down at a computer.
If Darlo were here, he thought reflexively, that girl wouldn’t stand a chance.
Chewing on his mazette, which was just a safe house for powdered sugar, Bobby stared at the front page of yesterday’s
International Herald Tribune,
which someone had left on a stool. He read the headlines, America this and America that, but nothing registered. After five futile weeks combing Europe for an audience, America was just a dream now. Until he emerged from the gate at Long Beach, America would feel no closer to him than Atlantis.
“What is that you are humming, man?” asked Natty Dread.
“Jethro Tull,” he said. “ ‘Aqualung.’ ”
The man smiled, then pointed to the ceiling.
“You are staying with Morten, no doubt?”
“Roger that.”
“Over and out.” He made a thumbs-up. “Sweet, dude.”
Europeans all spoke American differently. Each had cobbled together a personal mishmash of idiom, cliché, and insult. Marta, the band’s continental publicist, punctuated everything with “to the max!” She consistently described people she didn’t like as “total blowjobs.” President Bush was “a cowboy fascist” and Ronald McDonald was an “American materialist ass-clown.” The one time she and Bobby had slept together, she had whispered “Hit that magic kitty” over and over into his ear, her breath a mixture of pork and whiskey, until he went soft.
Naturally, Darlo had refused her first. But whatever.
“She’s a cooze,” he’d said, and left the club with twins.
Natty Dread introduced himself. Ullee. Another wimpy Euro name.
“I am a musician too,” he said. “We play a lot here in Amsterdam. Jazz and rock, kind of together, kind of at the same time. Simultaneously, dude.”
“Jazz is nice,” Bobby said. He hated jazz. “Cool.”
“We are called Past Tense,” Ullee said. “We played Rotterdam once, and Maastricht too. Groningen, we never played there.”
“I was mugged in Groningen,” Bobby said.
“Ah, mugged,” Ullee said wistfully, as if remembering the most beautiful sunset. “Mugged is not fun.”
“No. It’s not.”
“And what is the name of your band?”
“Blood Orphans.”
Ullee scrunched his face up. Bobby waited for the sad smile of recognition, for all those ad buys that Warners had taken out in a hundred magazines to pay off. But those ads had been pulled long ago. And that smile never came.
“Blood Orphans,” Ullee said. “What does that mean?”
“Fuck if I know,” Bobby said. “I used to think it had to do with brotherhood. But now I’m pretty sure it’s about death.”
The
Run Lola Run
girl giggled. He stole a look at her, but she appeared to be giggling at the screen, not his weak attempt at wisdom.
Ullee giggled too. His onion skin stretched into a smile. Some real light showed up in his eyes.
“OK,” he said. “That’s a good name.”
Bobby decided that Ullee was his guardian angel, come to grant him three wishes. That was how it worked in
Twilight Zone
episodes, and Blood Orphans had long since fallen into that fifth dimension little known to man, of sight, of sound, of mind.
The first wish would be two years of his life back, before Blood Orphans existed, so he could be scrubbed of the different emotions that accompanied this downward spiral: excitement, joy, confusion, worry, disappointment, and finally despair. He didn’t need these emotions anymore. He would find others. Just put me back in my apartment, up there in the loft with the Sabbath posters, the autographed Jet Li lithograph, and the vague smell of cat piss, tuck me in, raise the moon high over Costa Mesa, and let me sleep it all away.
The second wish would be for Jessica to fall in love with him again, truly, madly, deeply. Give her a tattoo of his name over her carotid artery. Make every dream she ever had be about what a self-assured, centered, and well-endowed guy he was. Have every one of her paintings be epic scenes of him in Viking gear, standing at the mast of a mighty warship, ready to fight the hordes, singing and crying. Her strong prince. Her Nordic master. Her Overlord.
The third wish would be for someone to slice up Darlo’s face until it looked like a Levolor blind. Then Jessica would never have fucked him.
“We broke up a year ago!” she’d said. “You have no right to get mad!”
Bobby took another bite of the mazette, moaning in approval. His dreadlocked guardian angel smiled, and Bobby smiled back, held his breath, anticipated the good news.
“I am trying not to be rude,” Ullee said. “But dude, your hands look like cottage cheese.”
A warm wave of shame, like pissing on oneself, passed through him.
“What happened to them?” Ullee said, but the bass player was already drifting, humiliated, over to a computer, his head down, pastry and coffee held in his itching putridities.
Run Lola Run looked up at him and smiled. In pity, no doubt.
“Hi,” she said.
“Hi,” he said, and looked down.
While you were lost in the swirling toilet of tour, e-mail was one of those valuable life preservers that kept you from going right down the hole. It gave you some sense that there might be a more humane life somewhere over the broken-glass rock-and-roll rainbow, an engagement with those unenslaved by the wet dream of stardom.
Three messages awaited him. First up was Dave, his roommate in LA, saying, No, I can’t pick you up at the airport, and anyway, what do you want a ride for, you’re the guy on MTV, why don’t you get a limousine? Next up was Giles, a small, androgynous slip of a boy they’d met on their second tour of England, wondering when they’d be back on the sceptred isle. While high on ecstasy, Bobby and Giles had made out in the bathroom of the London Hard Rock Café.
“I can’t forget you man,” wrote the androgyne. “Think we’ll ever cross paths again?”
Bobby winced. One more dumb fucking thing he’d done on the long march to show-biz irrelevance.
“Kill me,” he said, deleting the e-mail. “Please kill me.”
The third and final e-mail was subject-lined
Proust Personality Test for Blood Orphans.
“Hi Blood Orphans,” wrote Rachel from Los Angeles. “I saw you guys on
Carson Daly
the other night and thought you were great. So funny and rocking and hot. Really hot!”
They were showing the band in reruns? More likely her brother TiVoed them a year ago and she was confused.
“I went out and bought
Rocket Heart
like, the next day, though it was kind of hard to find. But the Tower in Anaheim had it. Totally awesome! Your publicist at Warners gave me your e-mail addys. He said you guys had been on the road for, like, a
long
time, and needed encouragement.”
Back in the days of wine and roses, interviews were everywhere, swirling around them like palm fronds over Egyptian monarchs. But they hadn’t had an interview request in forever. And if one showed up at Warners, there was probably a standing order to flush it down the toilet.
Some intern hadn’t got the memo. Awesome.
“Anyway,” Rachel continued, “I’m a psych major at UCLA, and in my seminar on cognitive dissonance my prof handed out this crazy thing written by Marcel Proust, a questionnaire used to gauge one’s personality. They use it in
Vanity Fair
to interview celebrities — I’m also a freelance journalist for music webzines — it’s really fun! — and I’ve been using it for all my interviews. It’s attached. Would you mind filling it out? It’s normally like thirty questions but I’ve narrowed it down to eight because I know you’re busy.”
Proust. He had always wanted to read Proust, but the books were so big.
“Thanks a lot! You guys rawk!”
Bobby looked at his hands. Could they take a little typing? Why not. He hadn’t imagined the band still had fans. Maybe Rachel was a portent of happy days ahead.
“What,” read question one, “do you regard as the lowest depth of misery?”
“Right now,” he replied. “Stuck two-plus years into the worst experience of my life. All my dreams dead and my hands destroyed.”
A little tension left his neck.
“Where,” the next question read, “would you like to live?”
He tapped on the dirty keyboard, stained with the muck of backpackers and itinerants. “Somewhere I never have to fucking see the faces of my bandmates ever fucking again.”
He tapped too hard and opened a crack in the well between thumb and forefinger. A little powdered sugar fell into said crack. It looked like lime in a fresh grave. Run Lola Run smiled at him, then walked outside and lit a cigarette.
“What,” read question number three, “do you most value in friends?”
He typed away, as hard as he could, in the hope of waking the sleeping bandmates above him, in the hope of robbing them of their peace. His hands burned, and the cracks running across his life line and heart line opened wide.
“Friends?” he replied. “I value that they don’t completely laugh in your face when you return from a long journey, with little money to your name, your pride a memory, and your soul ripped to fucking shreds.”
The computer wobbled under the rickety Old World table.
“How about you, Rachel?” he typed. “How about you, Proust?”
He took a breath. Maybe he should stop. Maybe he should go for a walk.
One more question, he thought. I can handle one more.
“What,” the screen asked, “is your idea of earthly happiness?”
And that question kind of killed him. The answer, even a year ago, would have been that this life is my idea of total happiness: on tour, free of the shackles of middle-class expectation, just me and my boys, screaming down the highway to hell, on through the night, just another moonlight mile down the road. The answer would have been set in a clarion call, for once they were righteous soldiers of the cause, purveyors of the swindle, ready to engage in battles cultural, social, and economic, whatever it took to sing the rock-and-roll body electric. The answer would have been two words. The answer would have been Blood Orphans.
But now the answer was a giant sucking sound. Happiness? Happee-ness?
He forehanded the keyboard like a tennis pro, and it crashed to the floor.
Patrons looked up from their coffee and papers. Ullee came out of the kitchen. His dreads seemed thinner. He looked at Bobby like he’d taken a shit in his café.