Rock Bottom (22 page)

Joey slammed into him. He wasn’t running. When had he stopped running? Her breath climbed all over him. She pulled him, but he wasn’t running; she pulled him down into the canyon. She would help him find that girl. Into the canyon. She was always there for him. He wanted to tell her. He wasn’t running.

Doors opened, and Joey pulled him into a room. Faucets and tile. Coat of arms and Guinness signs. Leather seats like in the dungeon. Green leather here, black leather there. Going down into the canyon. Not running anymore.

20

ADAM HID BEHIND A TREE
while Darlo whaled on the skinhead. He knew that, hidden deep inside a number of less savory motivations, Darlo’s act of extreme violence was payback for the time Adam had saved his life at Crow Head.

Crow Head was a big chunk of rock that jutted out of the water about two hundred yards from the shore at Paradise, the five-hundred-dollar-a-day studio in St. Croix where they made
Rocket Heart.
During low tide a sandbar emerged, and Adam would walk out to the end of it to draw and listen to music. People avoided the sandbar, an incongruity to the perfect, smooth aspect of everything else in sight, but Adam loved being out there. A former member of the Bakersfield High swim team, he would often leap off the sandbar and breast-stroke the fifty yards over to Crow Head. He hit riptides now and then, but he knew how to handle them, and would sometimes end up on one of the adjacent beaches, appearing to people in the shallows like some castaway from Faggy Boy University.

Darlo hated it when someone could do something he couldn’t do. Adam could play every known instrument, and that grated on the drummer.

“I’m gonna come out there one day and we’re gonna race to that fuckin’ rock,” he said one night at dinner as they broke open lobster. “Yeah. I’m gonna come out there and school your ass.”

Shane smashed a claw. “Drown
your
ass is more like it.”

Bobby sucked at a leg and nodded. “It’s rough out there, man. People go down every year.”

“That is such bullshit,” Darlo said, and pointed at Adam, who was trying to be delicate with his sea bug. “I
will
school you.”

Bobby ripped open his lobster’s middle, spraying green liver goo on his Iron Maiden T-shirt. “Goddamn,” he said. “This is a collector’s item.”

Darlo made his lobster dance. “School you,” he repeated.

Adam nodded, and Shane laughed.

“So fucking arrogant,” the singer said. “God did not —”

“No God at the table,” Darlo said. “None. Nada.”

Shane stuck his nose up. “You’ll drown, Darlo. That’s all I’m saying.”

A few days later, Adam was out there, trying to make good on Instructor Samuels’s dictum on sketching out one’s narcissism, when Darlo came stumbling up the sandbar. The day was out of a Club Med ad, with little white wisps against a deep blue sky and the sound of steel drums echoing from the shore. Darlo coming toward him was the lone storm cloud fucking it all up.

“What’s up, faggot?”

He just stared at the drummer.

“What are you doing out here all day, anyway?”

“Drawing. Thinking.”

“Well, la-dee-da,” Darlo said, and plunked down.

Adam had been there an hour, his only visitors a few Jet-Skidiots, silly Frenchies who made Adam look masculine. The Jet-Skidiots would splash him and call him dirty French names while he detailed the curves of a bodacious, war-lusted maiden in a plate-mail bustier.

Darlo looked at Adam’s sketch. “Hot,” he said. “You wanna race?”

“It’s not as easy as it looks.”

Darlo looked at Crow Head and grunted in contempt. “It’ll be a piece of cake.”

Adam pondered the ethics of dissuading Darlo. “There’s riptides.”

“Is that your way of saying no?”

“It’s my way of saying you’d better really know how to swim.”

“Watch me.” The drummer pulled off his shirt and cannonballed in. Adam rolled his eyes, annoyed.

“Come on, dude,” Darlo said, sweeping back his luxurious black mane. He looked strong enough to swim to Africa. “I’m gonna get one hell of a jump on you.”

You’re gonna need it, Adam thought. He put down his sketchbook and dove in. On down the watery line, Crow Head resembled the Loch Ness Monster, a big inverted
J
of black stone.

Darlo’s strokes were sloppy and uneconomical. Adam knew that the drummer would tire halfway and, like a fucking tortoise, Adam would catch up and easily overtake him.

The sound of steel drums rose from the beach but seemed to be coming from above, like a rogue god tuning the atmosphere. Adam did a sidestroke and watched a cloud change shape from a mouse to a dragon.

“Hey, what the fuck, Adam?” Darlo treaded water, huffing and puffing, maybe twenty feet ahead. “Don’t handicap me, bitch. Make it for real.”

Adam sighed at Darlo’s stupidity. In water, you saved your strength. You didn’t yell out taunts at the top of your lungs.

“Always staring at me!” Darlo yelled. “Fucking say something!”

“Save your strength,” he said.

In response, Darlo sang in a bellow, as if he already stood atop Crow Head, pounding his chest in victory. “Wish I … was ocean size! They cannot move you, man — no one tries!”

The drummer drifted away from Crow Head, which loomed above them like a piton. The steel drums rained on them in a flange of sonic mist.

“Fucking love that song!” Darlo yelled. “Makes me feel so fucking alive!”

“Good for you,” Adam grumbled.

The sound of Jet-Skidiots came across the water.

“Come on!” Darlo yelled, and started swimming again, his strokes becoming more like flailing. He didn’t know the water any better than he knew the inside of a homeless shelter.

Adam changed to a crawl, his movements in time with the rhythm of the bay. Steel drum notes drifted above him like guiding gulls, and he experienced a moment of total bliss, rudely interrupted when he slapped Darlo in the face.

“Whoa, sorry,” Adam said, turning away, waiting for a promise of retribution. None came, and he looked back.

The drummer looked at him. His eyes were wide open. His tongue pushed out his lower lip.

“Darlo?”

Darlo did a water dance. The panic Watusi. And then, silent and straight as an arrow, he dropped.

Now the steel drums turned to carrion vultures and dove in sharp. Adam took a second — a sinful, very un-Adam kind of second — to confirm that the song was indeed “Don’t Worry, Be Happy.” During this second he was the king; he ran the show, and complete freedom was his to slice into any shape he wanted, because Darlo was moving beneath the surface, drowning. Then Adam dove down to save the scourge of his existence.

Once Adam had rescued a child from the deep end of a pool in Bakersfield, and the child had thrashed in the same way that Darlo did as Adam grabbed his midsection and hoisted him.

Darlo tried to climb on top of him in a piggyback, as if Adam stood on concrete. The drummer whimpered and shivered in Adam’s arms and then toppled off. Adam grabbed his midsection again, feeling a cramp in his back from having to support their collective weight. The water grew syrupy. In Darlo’s eyes he saw nothing but black; the drummer was in shock and somewhere else. Adam needed to bring him back. He couldn’t do this alone.

“Get it together, Darlo.”

Darlo shook his head and made a wheezy grunt. Beachside, an impossible quarter-mile away, people laughed over their vacations. The clouds laughed over their ability to change shape. The sky laughed over its ability to reflect all colors save the most gorgeous blue. Laughter laughter laughter.

“Oh no,” Darlo peeped, in about the most unharmonious, choked-up wail. “Oh no no no.”

“You need to help me with this. You need to help me.”

The drummer started to cry. “I don’t want to die. I don’t —”

And then he took in some water and started coughing.

Reality spread its billowing blanket and blocked out the sun. Darlo would kill them both if Adam didn’t get his attention, so he grabbed Darlo’s hair and pulled as hard as he could. The drummer cried out like a newborn, slipping off Adam’s shoulders.

“My fucking hair — Jesus!”

“Do you want to live?”

“Fucking prick, I don’t want to die!”

Then Darlo took in more water, coughed it up, thrashed about. Adam tried to get him on his back, navigating the tangle of arms, but then he started flailing too, because suddenly he was sure, absolutely sure, that the drummer had given up and was trying to drag them both down. The desire to live overtook the desire to help, and Adam threw Darlo off, completely certain that if there was one person not worth the trouble, it was Darlo, so fuck him, just
fuck him,
when he banged his arm into Crow Head. They had blundered their way right into the finish line, and they had tied.

Darlo’s shoulder slammed into Crow Head, which was riddled with guano. The steel drum god-echoes rose all around, wings turning white.

“I don’t want to die,” the drummer said. Blood ran down his tanned, sinewy shoulder. Adam smarted at how much Darlo looked like an illustration from a book of Greek myths. “What are we going to do?”

“Just shut up and hold on.”

“But what are we going to do?”

Amazing things happened when you were out of your watery depth and totally fucked. Amazing things showed up from the deeps of one’s personality.

“I can’t swim, Adam. I mean, I really can’t swim!”

“You swam here!”

“No, no, I didn’t!”

Adam grabbed Darlo’s nonbleeding shoulder, feeling the rock nick and cut at his legs. “Calm down.”

“I don’t want to die!”

Adam looked up at the craggy rock god. A mouth could be made out, full of jagged teeth. The sun hid behind the prehistoric silhouette.

Darlo was going on and on about how little he wanted to die, which was music to Adam’s wet ears. If Adam hadn’t been in mortal peril, he would have felt bad about thinking this way. What freedom there was in mortal peril!

He grabbed Darlo’s flailing arm. “It’s only fifty yards, Darlo.”

“No way. And fuck you for getting me out here!”

“Getting
you
out here?”

White piles of bird shit lay there, ruining everything for him.

“I never got you out here,” he said. “How can you blame this on me?”

And that was when the dirty French Jet-Skidiots showed up.

“French french fra-french, french ha ha ha!” They laughed. “French french!”

They wore green fluorescent bathing suits, and each had a shark’s tooth on wire hanging from his neck.

“French french french ha ha ha!”

They circled around, making a wake. Their voices battled for airspace with the steel drums.

“You guys are in need of some assistahnce?” one of them said. “You ’mericans lost yer way?”

“Help us!” Darlo yelled, as if they were a plume of smoke on a dark and stormy horizon. “Help us!”

“Ahh!” one said. “French french bleeding!”

Riding back on a Jet-Ski, his arms around a Frenchie’s skinny waist, Adam felt his relief soon turn to disgust. There was no evidence that anyone had saved anyone, and that galled him. He could never prove it. Darlo would probably say that
he
had saved Adam. Another good deed about to go punished.

Not to mention that the tide was coming in. He watched the crystal-clear water run over the sandbar in lengthening rivulets. His notebook slid in, tipping upward like the nose of a ship as it sinks to the bottom of the ocean.

Adam thought, I should have let him die.

But when they got back to shore, Darlo said nothing. He disappeared into town, and surfaced the next morning when he stumbled into the studio, smelling like he’d fucked half the island. Which he probably had. But he never said a thing.

Except one time, in the middle of the last American tour, when Darlo woke from a dream on I-5 near Grants Pass, woke up yelling so loudly that Bobby practically took the van into the guardrail.

“I don’t want to die!”

They looked at the drummer as if he’d just appeared from another world, covered in cross-dimensional jelly, stinking of the astral plane. He rubbed his eyes, made an expression of awe, and reached over to hit Adam on the shoulder.

“Hey,” he whispered. “Come here.”

Adam put down his copy of
The Onion
and moved close. “What?”

“I remember,” Darlo said, breath stinking of cigarettes. “I
remember.
”

Adam nodded, just barely.

“I was dreaming about it,” Darlo said. “But you weren’t there and I was fucked. The Crow Head laughed at me. I was a goner.”

“But you’re OK.”

Darlo nodded. “You saved my ass.”

“I did.”

“Thanks, man,” he said, and rolled over.

Now, in Vondelpark, Pizza Face was under Darlo and the drummer’s fists were covered in blood and he held that knife up in the air. Red jumped into Adam’s vision like in a two-color photograph, like a Barbara Kruger photo he had seen in a friend’s dorm room.

The skinhead gurgled under Darlo. The other one writhed on the ground, pulling at his face, trying to tear off the pepper spray, trying to get up, falling down, getting up, like an old blind man without his cane. Joey ran over and sprayed him again.

“Die, motherfucker!”

Darlo held the Magic Wand above his head for a moment. He seemed to be stretching, as if to imitate a guillotine.

Defying all gimpy-legged reality, Joey kicked the knife out of Darlo’s hand, yelling for him to run, pulling at him as he collapsed. The autumn breeze smelled like roasted chestnuts, and all the screaming was hail banging and bouncing upon a smooth roof.

Pizza Face rolled on the ground, and his friend bowed down, sort of crawled over, and wailed like a mother over the corpse of her son. Adam could not see the details, could not see Darlo’s anger mapped out and laid bare in all its momentum and leverage. The skinheads looked as if they had absorbed the force of an explosion.

Adam ran forward, grabbing his bag, ducking in the line of fire. He jumped on his bicycle, and for a second wondered if he should turn around and ride his rickety Dutch three-speed into the melee. But shock and disgust smothered the notion. What did he owe them? When had they ever cut him a break? Just for that moment, he wanted them to die. He wanted Joey and Darlo to vanish from the earth and had no interest in helping out, being loyal, lowering their chances for an early burial. As his brothers loved to say,
Mea culpa, Caesar.
Under the hail of shrieking, he rode away.