Rock Bottom (36 page)

Pathetic. Poseur. Perfunctory.

“ ‘When are you going to get a real bass player?’ he said. ‘Bobby just can’t go the distance.’ ”

Bobby fell down and down. The drummer’s voice snatched up every bit of his happiness in its dragon maw and crushed it.

“Kind of fucked up to say it at all,” Darlo said. “Kind of pointless. But you oughta know, Bobby, that no one cared whether or not you made the cut. You just got lucky is all. You just got lucky.”

14

WHATEVER BAD NEWS JOEY HAD
for them, Adam was feeling pretty fucking great right now. The worse the news, the better, really. A sense of freedom had lit in Adam as the tour drew to a close, like a little pilot light looking for some gas to turn it into a full flame. That flame had been stoked by Deena Freeze and her slick manager, awed by his chops and stunned by his talent. That flame had been the look the two had given each other, a look of surprise, and joy. So the worse the news out of Joey, who sat there chewing her nails, a condemned woman about to receive her punishment, the better.

When he returned to LA, he would do a series of paintings called
The Bidding War,
in which these lowly apostles were visited by various spirits of the rock-and-roll ether, demons both petty and grand, like old wraiths of biblical temptation: the hoary Witch of Warner Bros., the black-winged Saruman of Sire, the dank Balrog of Bertelsmann, come as emissaries from worlds of wonder with contracts and codicils. These tempters all had the Vision and swore they also had the Execution. In the painting, they would sit in the reverse formation of how they now sat, with Darlo and Shane near the A&R action and Bobby and Adam at the fringes. Of course, this time the action was no action at all. It was just their manager, Joey Jane Fredericks, having just come back from a twenty-minute trip to the bathroom, here to untie the knot for good.

“Warners dropped Blood Orphans today,” she said. “They sent John Hackney. Remember him?” She swigged her Grolsch and bent over the table as if they were wily thieves in a medieval tavern, plotting a highway heist over steins of hearty grog. “I want you to know I’m going to fight it. With all my heart and soul, I’m going to fight to keep Blood Orphans on the Warner roster. We will prevail.” She banged the table. “We will
prevail.
”

She sat back, arms crossed, expecting someone to join the insurrection. But no one did. Adam thought of Instructor Samuels in his second-year atelier, talking about how every painting must construct a narrative. Joey was trying to create a portrait of defiance, but no one was going along.

“You guys aren’t just going to roll over, are you?” She held up her hands. “Is that all that this band means to you?”

Four faces, exhausted, stared her down.

“Amazing,” she said. “I was thinking that you guys would care about staying with a label with global reach and distribution. I was thinking that maybe you’d want the giant steel arm of the Time Warner empire at your back. I thought that maybe —”

“Shut up, Joey,” Bobby said. “I can’t take the speech right now.”

She looked at them, furious. “That’s it?” she said. “No fight left? That’s
it?
”

“What do you want us to say?” Shane said. “Fuck Warners? What choice do we have?”

Tears ran down her face. “The choice to fight.”

They just laughed at that one.

She threw down her napkin, got up, and hobbled out of there. Adam saw how Joey had changed; she who had once loomed huge now resembled a hollow piece of show-biz balsa wood. In the end, he thought, she was the one who had lost the most in the whole mess. At least they had lived the dream. They’d carry that with them forever. All Joey had were the receipts, sums due and owing.

“Assholes!” she yelled, her voice echoing through the atrium.

15

JOEY STORMED OFF
in a furious hobble. They watched the gimp clip-clop away, yelling obscenities and bumping into tables.

Dropped? Darlo thought. Sure, Joey, whatever. He had bigger problems right now.

But then he got stuck on that word. Dropped?

Oh, that’s what it was. A ploy. They were just trying to cut her out. When he got back to the States and charged up his cell phone, there’d be a message from Steadman, long-lost Steadman, waiting for him with the score. They were cleaning house and wanted to bring in a new manager. It was a Joey purge. Their lawyers had it all planned out. McFadden was withholding until his return. Joey’s lost her touch, he’d say. We have to let her go. But we still believe in Blood Orphans.

Belief.
The longer the word floated up there in his head, flapping like a tattered flag, the realer it became.

Darlo turned to Bobby and grinned. He actually felt shitty about unloading on him. Dude was just too easy to pick on. Dude was a stationary target.

“Dropped?” Darlo said. “No.”

Bobby turned to him, red in the face, still smarting. “Fuck you, Darlo,” he said, and stormed off too.

Shane and Adam looked at him with their stock expressions, unimpressed and amused, but Darlo had been stuck with them long enough to detect their disgust for picking on the weak. This disgust really hurt. He felt … what was it called? Vulnerable? He turned to Adam.

“Quad-band,” he said. “One more time.”

Adam handed the phone over. “Bobby,” he said. “Too bad.”

“He’ll be back,” Darlo said, with a false confidence essential to maintaining his sanity. “I’d like to see him go start a new band.”

“We’re all going to have to start a new band,” Shane said, and wolfed his scotch in one big non-Buddhist gulp. “We’re toast. Man, my ears are killing me.”

Dropped? Darlo turned the word over in his mind. He opened his mouth but could not say it, felt a dryness at the back of his throat, and returned to the memory of hovering over that prostitute’s throat in her little cum-’n-go. He had felt tears running down his face and thought that he might be bleeding. She had been trying to suppress a laugh, but when the tears started falling into her mouth, she started to show panic. And the more panic she showed, the more he cried. He had found himself in a loop there, a vicious cycle; the worse her discomfort, the more despairing he became, but he couldn’t stop because he was finally in a moment he had been searching for, looking down into her mouth for all those lost girls. Here he was, staring down the dark cave of memory, falling into loss.

“Darlo,” Shane said. “Be careful.”

His hand strangled the water glass. “Dropped? What the fuck?”

“You’re going to fucking destroy your hand, dude.”

The drummer imagined himself as handless. He imagined life as a handless porn maker, inheritor of his dad’s fortune after the fucker died awaiting trial for the deaths of numerous women, their bones found in the basement of his house. Their bones found directly below Darlo’s bedroom. Their bones found directly below his guns and his knives. Sitting on a throne of flesh.

He had installed the lock. A secret door behind a fake-fronted bookcase. Six sixty-four. Neighbor of the beast. They had laughed over that one.

Run a pole straight down from his bedroom floor and it would nestle in tibula and fibula. Run a pole from the den, where he’d fucked countless teenage girls, and find bones. Run dancer’s poles down through any point in the house. Find bones everywhere.

Bones everywhere. Darlo handless, trying to sift through them.

Find a graveyard under the house. Find Darlo the Handless, inheritor of ghosts, sifting through, on his flesh throne. Find him. This is his fate. Bone sifter.

He got up and raced out to the street. Standing outside the hotel, snow in his face, he dialed McFadden.

“Jesus, Darlo,” McFadden said. “This has to stop.”

“Hope I didn’t catch you in the middle of a really important squash game, Bob,” he said. “It’s just that you need to hear me out.”

He explained the theory again.

“Darlo, I’m really starting to worry about you. Are you losing it?”

“You fucking bet I am. How could I have ignored all those screams? Did I hear them from the kitchen while I was making dinner?”

“Darlo …”

“Like, what was I thinking the next morning, after that girl escaped and I went down to breakfast? Where the fuck was I when Dad took his Viagra and muttered, Well, shit, she was a cooze anyway. Where was I? All the times Dad was making his slap-and-burn movies, the ones that aren’t sold at the fucking Hustler store, the ones where he paid a lot of girls to get burned with cigarettes while they were taking on two guys. And where was I, besides upstairs jerking off or watching some fucking Bruce Willis movie? Where did I go, man? Those screams were like engines revving in a ditch.”

He bent forward, tears falling onto the flat Dutch earth. “How did this all happen, Bob?”

“Darlo,” McFadden said. “Just calm down.”

“Like revving engines,” he said, sobbing. “Bob, I’m part of it. Bob, my therapist, he said I was part of it and I laughed, but he was right.” He made his own turbine sound. He made his own grinding hum, sputtering and sliding down an incline, falling, white smoke floating away. “You have to help me, and help those girls in those dungeons. Help me.”

Spitting up dirt off the tires, fusing rubber with earth.

“Look, OK,” McFadden said. “Darlo, you need to calm down.”

“He wants to take them apart,” he said. “He wants them dismembered. He’s my dad, Bob. He’s my dad.”

McFadden’s breath on the line was a puffy, useless cloud. Seagulls flying through it.

“Darlo,” he said. “What I can do is …” but Darlo went numb again. Numbness overtook him, down in his own dungeon. Numbness fermenting, growing, distending, and now bursting forth with a hideous strength. So he tried to separate from it, tried to float away, tried to snap the line again and move high into the sky, but his body held him to the horizon. No new meridian. Same old latitude. The dungeon chains held him. Handless and sifting through those bones. Chained up.

An ocher swell of ancestral filth rolled him over. McFadden couldn’t help. Jesse couldn’t help. No one could help. Who knew what his father hid? Who knew and who cared? No one could help him avoid the wave of garbage and shit that was his life, that kept his sunlight low in the sky, that pinned his sunlight down.

16

IF SHANE HAD KNOWN
Blood Orphans was being dropped at the start of the day, he would have been surprised, upset, defiant. But on the other side of this
dies horribilis,
after getting his ears clubbed by Danika’s stepfather, after the Starbucks baristas treated him like a worm, and after the humiliation at the hands of Tennessee and the vision of Fritz in the Dutch hallway, defiance had no bearing. That quadrant of bad experiences provided the tipping point for his distress, sent the treacle of failure cascading down over every pore of his frail, paper-thin confidence.

He left the restaurant without eating — they all did — and walked to the Star Club. Amsterdam was lit up in festive lights. Dutch Christmas season was in full force, and their take on the holiday was considerably more Brothers Grimm than New Testament. In front of a department store, handfuls of Dutchies were dressed as elves, but in blackface. These ebony goblins were called Black Peter — he had learned about them in church — and they gave out candy to children. One of them scurried up to the singer, yelled something happily in Dutch, and handed him a big swirl lollipop.

“Racist,” Shane said, and threw the lolly back in Black Peter’s face.

In the months before
Rocket Heart
’s release, Shane had lived in a spare room at Joey’s house in Silver Lake. The band had a residency at Spaceland, playing every Monday night, and he’d enjoyed walking from his temporary lodgings on Crestmont Avenue to the club. Life ran smooth as silk; girls were swallowing his sperm, the band was pretending to be a united front, and Silver Lake was just one of the lovely wildernesses upon which the seeker would travel, a place blessed with eternal, lovely light.

He pretended on these walks that he was a character in a Bible story, enacting some outtake from the rough draft, not good enough to make the final cut but still worthy of consideration in the best-selling book of all time.

Passing by the black-faced elves and on to the Star Club, he grafted that memory onto this evening’s walk. All it took was a little faith. He imbued the scene with that biblical outtake vibe.

The Star Club, which lay in a tricked-out basement on the Amstel, was set up with the bar on the right, pool tables on a raised platform to the left, and the stage through swinging doors. It didn’t look anything like a place the Beatles would have played, with red velvet, marble tables, and brass handles. The Beatles would have had to pay five kroner just to peer inside. Bobby stood against the wall with a cute girl who looked like a kinky Raggedy Ann. She wore a tight skirt that appeared to be the skimpy remains of an Amish quilt, socks striped in yellow and purple, and well-kept crimson hair.

His tenuous generosity of spirit flagged when he saw Bobby, but Shane rallied. Bobby’s eternally grating personality wasn’t going to let him break ranks with his good mood. They’d actually had a nice time at the hotel room, hadn’t they? The singer appealed to the beat-up better angels of his nature.

“Nice to meet you, Sarah,” Shane said. “How did you and Bobby meet?”

“I think I picked him up today in a café.”

“Sounds good to me,” Bobby said, braying.

“Bobby is a great bass player,” Shane said. “He’s solid as a rock, even with his hands the way they are. He’s really someone you can depend on in the musical trenches. Have I ever told you that, man?”

Bobby look confused, rubbed his ass against the wall, breathed a little heavily. Shane realized he should have killed him with kindness from the beginning. Still, against all desire to the contrary, witnessing Bobby’s new love affair sent Shane’s good mood straight out his ass. The bass player had found his Narnia, had blundered into that magic wardrobe. But Shane had no such escape hatch. He had never found love in his time in Blood Orphans. He’d found Tantra and deep throat, threesomes and twins and bondage, but not love. He’d plowed almost as many female fields as Darlo, but not one of them had yielded a single flower of inner peace. Bobby mocked the honest travails of the vision quest, yet here he was, all up in this girl, their connection simple and effortless. It’s all I’ve ever wanted, Shane thought. What the fuck do I have to do?