Rock Bottom (32 page)

“The funny thing is,” Adam said, “he can’t swim.”

“That
is
funny,” Fritz said. “The ironies of this turning world. God and all of his follies. All of the many ways, man, the countless ways He shows that we are silly and after a fashion of the times. Our laments. The messes that show His glory in contrast.”

“Beretta-Couda” finished and “Double Mocha Lattay” began.

Fritz climbed up on a Marshall four-by-twelve and crossed his legs. “All of these songs, man,” he said. “Darlo and his unconquerable women, Darlo and his elusive feminines, the anger, the torment.” He chewed the apple. “Such sadness in the boy. Can you hear it?”

Adam imagined Darlo as a little kid, sitting in some palatial room while the whole house moaned orgasmically around him. But he couldn’t imagine Darlo as a little kid. Instead he saw the adult Darlo, in giant OshKosh overalls, sucking his thumb, rocking back and forth.

“Now it is all over,” Fritz said. “Blood Orphans goes kaput. What will happen when little Darlo has to open that door and march downstairs?”

Fritz turned off the boom box and tapped at the cross on his neck. Behind him, Amsterdam’s lights twinkled. “What about Shane? He’s a Buddhist now, you say?”

“Ever since some girl he had sex with gave him a copy of
Siddhartha.
”

“The seeker,” he said. “He told me he was a seeker. And good for you, I told him. But work on your attitude.” His voice got a little rough. “Arrogance is the fastest way to slow down the quest.”

Adam found Fritz’s interest in Shane’s well-being to be unjustified and aggravating. Truth be told, he had always thought that Shane was the band lightweight. Bobby couldn’t really play, but Shane wasn’t really very smart. If Darlo hadn’t come along, he’d still be playing in The Dragon Slayed, trying to turn psalms into lyrics. And those lectures he gave from the stage were just disgusting. Often Adam would get some serious feedback going, in the hope of drowning the lectures out. Darlo cheered him on; it was the only time he felt like he and the drummer were communicating at all.

“Let’s give the seeker a call,” Fritz said. “I want to talk to him.”

7

SHANE STUMBLED BACK
toward Joey’s room. Had he ever felt so low? Certainly when his father expressed displeasure at Blood Orphans, Shane had felt as if he had deeply betrayed his morality … No he hadn’t. He hadn’t cared what his father had thought, that pious engineer with his fireside family bullshit. Who needed a fireplace in Orange County? The man lived inside a Royal Doulton miniature world, where everything was tidy and bodies were really made of gingerbread and bathrooms didn’t have toilets and crotches were smooth. A fucking fireplace in Orange County, where it never got cold enough to put on a cotton sweater.

The muscles in his calves quivered a little. Two maids walked by, providing faint dirty looks. He could not bear to be a beggar just now, and kept his head down until they walked away. His phone rang.

Fritz?

“I am calling to check on my Christian brother,” said the renter of musical goods. “Adam says you are struggling with questions of theology.”

“Yes,” he said, dumbstruck by the timing, wondering if it was more than mere accident, if perhaps this was a prelude to a vision. Accidents had to be visions now. Accidents were all he had.

“Adam is sitting here,” Fritz said, “telling me of the end of days.”

“It’s true. We’re fucked.”

“Have faith,” Fritz said, and crunched an apple in Shane’s ear. “In every end is a beginning. Like when I stopped drinking, man. Like when I stopped whoring.”

“I have been whoring,” Shane said. “I have been cruel. What can I do, Fritz?”

“Be kind.”

The face of Fritz appeared to him from the ceiling. Fritz with his mole on his chin, his gaggle of crow’s-feet, his slowly browning teeth. Fritz peering down at him as he squatted against the wall, shielding his eyes a little from the man’s spectral light. The overseer of the rock-and-roll junkyard, outfitter of almost-rans and pretend-to-bes. Adam hovered somewhere in that awesome haze, somewhere beneath, between, behind Fritz’s magic countenance, and Shane had to give the guitar player credit for that.

“I tried everything,” the singer said. “I tried all the routes and nothing worked. We’re no good. Our songs suck. We suck. I suck.”

“Hey, man, listen,” Fritz said. “You have to keep your eyes on the road, you know. It is the journey, not the destination.”

“No, Fritz, I have to tell you, actually it
is
the destination.”

Fritz laughed up in the ceiling. His holy maw dissolved Shane’s resistance. Celestial smoke billowed from his ears. “The engineer’s son,” he said. “The stubborn boy.”

“I have no right to complain,” Shane said. “But I’ve fallen from God’s grace faster than Lucifer himself. You know what I mean? Hello?”

His sweaty fingers had slipped and hung up on Fritz. He looked at the ceiling; no holy vision up there. Frantically he punched in Fritz’s number, but it wasn’t Fritz on the other end.

“Shane?” Adam said. “Fritz will be right back. He went to talk to this other band that just showed up. Are you OK?”

Now would be a perfect time to be thankful, to turn a corner on Adam and his precious, touchy-feely bullshit. But that voice was so fucking soft.

Wandering in the forest, did the Buddha, in his most sacred moments, ever experience this disjunction? Was there a scene like that in the book? He really should have read the last thirty pages. But a seeker didn’t need to depend on words. A seeker was able to distill the —

“Shane?” Adam said.

“I have another call,” Shane said, and switched over to the blinking Dutch digits. “Danika, what do you want?”

“Blondie boy,” she said. “I am walking in the street and thinking of you.”

The smell of her voodoo butter rolled up his nose.

“Thought about you all day in school,” she purred. “Thought about you so much I had to take a special little break with my pocket rocket.”

“Look, I’m a little busy right now, Danika.”

“So moody.” She giggled. He got a hard-on, which flailed in his pants like a broken weather vane.

“See you tonight?” she asked. “Guest list?”

All the girls he had known, and what good had they done him? All the twisting and turning and sweating and spewing and Tantric waiting and fast against the wall heaving and moaning and swearing and occasionally bleeding and sometimes begging, all the time looking for God this and God that. And to what spiritual profit?

Collages of wretched pleasure contorted and spun around him. He crawled across the hall. He crawled without destination, lost in the wilderness.

8

JOEY WENT MARCHING
down the street, dry-popped a few Tylenols, hoped that analgesics and shit-grade alcohol didn’t totally knock her out. The falling snow, which a moment ago had been freezing rain, refined her general sense of renewal and mission. She took out the slip of paper Hackney had given her with the name of his hotel on it.

“Near here,” she said. “Right on.”

Managers did everything for their band. Sometimes you just had to whore yourself out. She had always wanted to fuck Hackney, but now she had utility and purpose to underwrite her lust. There had to be some way around Warners’ dropping them, at least here in Europe. Euros liked cheesy stuff; they liked what American companies told them to like. All it would take was for Warners to show a little marketing muscle. All it would take was for her to ride Hackney hard enough for him to forget everything he had previously thought about them, so he’d line up with her plan and start parroting the new gospel.

“That’s right,” she said. “Here I come, Clive fucking Owen.”

Applejack never tasted so good. She gulped it down. Her phone rang. “Adam?”

“Hey, Joey. I’m outside of Fritz’s. He says you owe him a whole bunch of money.”

“So now you’re his errand boy?”

“Looks that way.”

Joey didn’t like this at all. Adam sounded happy and carefree, not like he’d just had the shit kicked out of him.

“Tell Fritz to go eat a bag of apples,” she said. “Is that it?”

“Sure. Uh, actually,” Adam continued, all jaunty-like, “I was wondering what time you wanted us at the hotel for dinner.”

“Six. How’s your face?”

“Puffed up but OK. Hey, I met the people who’re staying at Morten’s after us. A singer-songwriter named Deena Freeze and her manager. She just got signed to Warners and she’s opening for us tonight.”

Joey’s stomach rolled a little. “Oh yeah?” she said, faking nonchalance. “Had they heard of us?”

Hesitation on the line said it all. In that millisecond of hesitation lay the difference between hitting the ball out of the park and striking out. “Yeah, they had.”

“And what did they say?”

Another second of hesitation, a dagger in her heart.

“They said that they liked us. I played them a Bach fugue.”

“On the guitar.”

“No, on the stereo. Yes, on the guitar.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know. So they’d take us seriously.”

The word
traitor
rushed up in her throat like a surging crowd at Riverfront Stadium, ready to trample all her remaining hope. Take
us
seriously. Oh, please. This is the thanks I get — I help stop two thugs from eating your velvet-covered ass and you go and audition for some Euro Tori Amos ripoff. Little sneaky fuck.

Blood Orphans without Adam.
Great.

“Dinner,” she said. “Don’t be late for it.”

Adam was saying something plaintive, but Joey hung up.

“You suck, Nickerson,” she said. “How could you do that to me?”

Truth be told, when they all got back to LA, she planned on getting Adam into Natalia’s Edge, one of her new bands, but she still wanted all her options open. Just her luck to have Adam find a little confidence. Though better late than early; if he had any sense of his power as a shredder, Blood Orphans would never have happened. He’d be in a band called Adam Orphans, full of songs centered around long, silly, pyro guitar solos. He’d be the twenty-first-century Robert Fripp, and Darlo would still be hanging out at Spaceland, trying to get in her pants. Shane would still be in New Testament Express, or whatever the fuck his Christian Nation band was called. And Bobby would be scratching his hands in his apartment, watching Guy Ritchie films and feeling sorry for himself.

Adam. The prime mover. Who knew?

She neared the Grand Amsterdam, which resembled an in-city manor for kings and queens wedged between two canals off Dam Square. Hackney had done quite well for himself. She’d make him understand how much Blood Orphans meant to her. She’d get him down with the concept.

She dialed his number.

“Joey,” he said, sounding smooth and sleepy. “Hello, love.”

“I’m walking into the lobby of your baronial mansion,” she said. “We need to talk. We need some privacy. Know what I’m saying, babe?”

He just laughed.

“Cur,” she said, and felt a little dizzy.

Joey had once had a boyfriend, a musician of no talent but fine Sid Vicious–type looks, who liked the old trick-and-hooker role-play. She’d don her grandmother’s above-the-knee rabbit coat, gold stiletto heels, and not much else, plaster her face in rust-colored glitter and flesh-colored lipstick, and take a walk over to the Renaissance Hollywood. Those stilettos fucked her bum leg up pretty bad, but by the time she made it up the elevator, her hoop earrings swinging and nose ice-cold from the coke, she was soaked all the way through and ready to move on him like a butter churn.

Yes, acting like a ho on occasion really got her slick. So why, in the elevator of the Grand Amsterdam, was she dry as the Gobi? Coming here, she assured herself, was a good idea. She was saving her band, her career, her reputation, by whatever means necessary. She saw herself across the arc of the past few years, a highlight film of decree-making, fast talking, and other heroic business-related acts that required her to wave her arms around and prove significant points. She pepped herself to the task, looking at her distorted cute-as-a-button face in the elevator mirror, lost in the funhouse.

The elevator door opened. She marched on down the hallway of chrome and vanilla carpet, an odd color she had never seen in the States, and banged on the door of room 305.

“Candygram,” she said, turning the knob. “Love bunny.”

He sat at the foot of the bed, in slacks but shirtless, lit cigarette in mouth. He looked twice as good half naked as fully clothed — just the perfect spot of black chest hair, thick at the sternum and lightly spreading toward his nipples. Broad chest. Washboard abs.

“Damn,” she said. “Aren’t you a sight.”

“As are you. What a surprise.”

She put hands on hips in a bratty pose, pulling up the skirt a little so the hem lay halfway between knee and crotch.

“Wondered all day what you and me were all about,” she said, though she had no idea what that meant. “Wondered how maybe we could” — she unzipped her skirt — “get along a little better. I just don’t think that we …” She blinked, wondered what to say that could come across as witty. “… understand each other.”

Hackney snickered and stood up.

“We understand each other just fine,” he said, and went to her.

Across the room he came. Hackney took her in, a smile growing on his face, and Joey thought about how many times this scene had been presented to him: a young woman, in nicer clothes than she could afford, offering up her body. She wondered if anything she did to, for, or with this man would be different from what the other pieces of ass that had come to one of his hundreds of five-star hotel rooms had done. She wondered where that sense of righteous mission had gone. She wondered what the hell she was doing here, and why she felt as if, for the first time in her life, she was being unfaithful.

The manager put her hands up. “No,” she said. “No.”

Hackney stuck out his lower lip. “No what?”

“Fucking you … This, this stupid …”

Hackney smiled, put his hand on her shoulder, and kissed her. For a moment she saw it all, was on top of him, riding that rock-hard Midlands steed. She kept her tongue in his mouth long enough to get wet, but when she didn’t, her suspicions were confirmed, and she pushed him off.