Rock Bottom (7 page)
“Like you fucking care,” Bobby replied, wiping ashes from his shirt.
Standing in the crowd, one could be forgiven for thinking that this hatred would dissipate; one could easily imagine, if one really didn’t know anything about how a band worked, that a little collective sympathy would rise up, providing time for the hurt band member to compose himself. But the knowledgeable ones in the crowd knew the laws of rock-band interaction. They knew commandment A-number one: find kindness and destroy it. Pick on the small. Kill the weak.
“Seriously,” Adam said into the mike, worried about poor, afflicted Bobby. “Are you OK?”
Genuine concern was chum in the water. And here came the sharks.
“Oh, the artist has spoken,” Bobby said, peeling his hands like they were bananas. “Oh, quiver quiver, shiver me timbers!”
Darlo laughed and chucked a stick at Adam. “Ladies and gentlemen, Mother fucking Teresa!”
Shane became the emcee of a roast. He picked up his beer and toasted the universe. “Well, the little precious artist musician has spoken. We should all be careful not to hurt his feelings.” He turned to Adam. “Wouldn’t want your pussy all sore, now would we?”
Adam shrank in his velvet and thought, Why are you still standing here? Where is your self-respect? There would never have been any Blood Orphans without you. You are the one in control.
You write all the music.
It was the nature of their taunting that put him over the top. Their disdain for him was a bond, and this bond made Adam feel doubly alone. In their mockery, they recognized each other but kept him out.
“All right,” Shane said, trying unsuccessfully to sweep back his dread-nots. “While Adam over here can never get enough of the punishment, I think you fine Dutch people have suffered plenty watching us attack our pathetic guitar player. So let’s play a little music?”
“Oh yes, please, faggot!” yelled Darlo, and they launched into Bobby’s favorite, “Dave’s Really a Girl.”
“All right!” the bass player said, and turned up his Marshall.
Jealousy kicked in Adam, and he felt, for the hundredth time, a profound sense of being used. They sure hadn’t shat on him in the beginning. Quite the opposite — they’d treated him like a fucking Jedi master, a musical Rosetta stone, a walking hit factory. They bowed down to his every quietly uttered suggestion. They acted like he was the lost son of Jimmy Page, here to bestow melodic genius upon their crass musical plan.
Unappreciative pricks.
From his Euro cot, Adam looked down Morten’s hallway. He had woken up briefly an hour before to the sound of a windowpane cracking, and had watched the elongated shadow of Bobby in the kitchen as he lifted his hands to the heavens for forgiveness. For a moment Bobby was a saint, the poor suffering fool, the lost one, tearing himself apart. Then Adam snapped out of it. At least Bobby was part of the club, the merrymaking fellowship of rock-and-roll stupidity. Granted, the club had no front door, the windows were smashed out, and shit riddled the walls, but it was a club nonetheless, and Adam wasn’t allowed inside.
He’d watched Bobby’s sainted shadow-hands lift to the gods. Then the bass player had taken to the stairs and let the door slam.
At which point Darlo had let out an orgasmic groan. “Yeah, baby,” he said, far away. “That’s right.”
Even when Darlo’s asleep, Adam mused, he has a good time.
He thought of his family, deep in the macho misery of Bakersfield, in the dirty depressed basin of the Central Valley. He thought about his father, the cop, his leather gloves filled with buckshot. He visualized the Cadillac Ranch in the backyard, which Dave and Ike spent endless hours restoring and recalibrating. They were good at two things: fixing cars and selling drugs. Rage ran in his family, and Adam, the mellow aberration, wanted to extract some of that rough ancestral mitochondria, graft it to his cause, use it for a good end against his bandmates.
Being the one everyone picked on had at least one advantage: it provided some objectivity, allowed Adam to see the mess that they were without any mitigating delusions of grandeur. There was no way the record company would continue flushing money down the toilet on their per diems, their gasoline, their van, their accommodations, and, on occasion, their bail bond. Maybe Warners had long ago decided to use them as a test case, to see how long a bad thing can keep on trucking before it completely self-destructs.
But the last show was tonight. Joey was coming. How could she not be the bearer of the final nail?
The Final Nail.
If Adam were in charge, that would be the title of their live record.
The other three were in their own worlds of pain, consumed by different addictions: gnarliest eczema, flabby spirituality, sex as oxygen. They had constructed realities of their own, and for these realities to keep on keeping on, they couldn’t fathom the band ending.
He was on the outside, denied entrance to the clubhouse, but that meant when the house burned down, he would survive. When the whole thing incinerated, any minute now, he would watch from across the street with other passersby. When Darlo and Shane and Bobby came running through the rotted doorway, choking on soot and ash, he would crack his knuckles, shed a tear, and walk on by. His jealousy of exclusion turned to relief, and his relief turned to contempt. He had finally found a way to contempt, that shiny, brand-new, antiseptic room in his mind. For a while he walked in this new room, untouched, unstained. Then two cars honked at each other, breaking the spell, and Adam rose to his last day as a Blood Orphan.
BOBBY STOOD OUTSIDE
Ullee’s Internet café, talking with the girl who looked all
Run Lola Run.
Her name was Sarah, and she was an art student at some school Bobby couldn’t even begin to pronounce.
“Blood Orphans?” she said. “Are you lying?”
“No. We’re on Warner Brothers. We were the next big thing once.”
“Oh, really?” She lit another cigarette. “You sure?”
“Yeah. We used to be the shit.”
She French-inhaled. “Sure. I totally believe you.”
But it was true. Back in the beginning, Blood Orphans had roamed in fields of goodwill, picked apples from the tree of rock-and-roll goodness, and rolled in the green grass of collective bump-and-grind dreams. Bobby had a weakness for the medieval metaphor, and so he had a fixed image of Blood Orphans as pied pipers at the gates of dawn, wearing bells and vibrant-colored patchwork clothes, rousing up the people of all the good villages to follow them to a place of cultural harmonic convergence. It had been amazing. Elysian, even.
Elysian
was one of his favorite words. One time Shane had tried to lecture him on the Elysian nature of Tantric Buddhism, and he had flicked a lit cigarette at the singer’s face.
“My word, you prick,” he said. “Find your own fucking word.”
And truthfully, getting their wings had been effortless. Having played the ironic/not ironic card masterfully — Adam’s heavy riffs, Darlo’s parody lyrics, Bobby’s stupid-basic bass parts, and Shane’s blond-sylph caterwaul, fused into a package by Joey’s fast-talking impressariette jive — the A&R hordes arrived in a tizzy. Within five shows, representatives from all the major labels stormed the barricades of Silver Lake in a blazing idiot wind. One of these walking expense accounts claimed that Blood Orphans was the missing link between Aerosmith, Korn, and the Strokes. Another described them as a nucleus around which a completely new musical style could be constructed. Yet another said that in his twenty years of A&R, he’d seen three acts that blew his mind: Nirvana, Jane’s Addiction, and Blood Orphans.
You could always tell a normal human being from A&R. They had an extra chromosome of utter insincerity, a covalent ion of free-floating bullshit, making them unlinkable to other, more stable molecular structures. This insincerity most often manifested itself in their appearance — always too dressed up, or not dressed up enough, or wearing a chain of precious metal around their neck, or sporting an extreme version of a hairstyle that went out of fashion six years ago. No one but A&R wore a white suit to a show. No one but A&R would go on and on about how great it was to drink top-shelf vodka. And no one but A&R, except for Darlo, would speak of Caribbean vacations, the crystal blue water, so perfect for snorkeling, the deep-sea fishing trips. Caught a swordfish! It was sweet!
And so the A&R hurricane arrived, in a flurry of free dinners, free whiskey, free lap dances. No independent labels needed to apply; Joey made that clear to all.
“Blood Orphans doesn’t have the bandwidth for small fry,” she’d declared. “We want planetary dominion and total wealth accumulation. We want France and Greece and Brazil. We want it all. Street cred, you ask? Does it pay my bills? Does it help my stock portfolio? Fuck the little panty-waisted Buddy-Holly-glasses-and-V-neck-sweater-wearing emo shitheads! Zeppelin wasn’t indie. Sabbath wasn’t indie. Fuck the fifty-fifty split after cost. I want distribution in motherfucking Nowhere, Idaho. I want to see our faces in fucking Bulgaria, Romania, all the eastern bloc countries that never made it to the twenty-first century. Blood Orphans isn’t looking to be the house band of white ghetto cool. We want to rock Wembley! Rock the Coliseum in Rome! Rock the LA Forum! Twee, integrity-bound motherfuckers, look upon me and despair!”
The band resembled a new Maserati coming off the line, souped up and tricked out, mad, bad, and nationwide. But beneath the slick exterior, Blood Orphans was Pinto through and through. Rear-end them the wrong way and they’d explode all over the big rock interstate.
Luckily, Warner Bros. saw no need to take them for a test drive.
Bobby longed for those early days, now that the downward spiral was something he looked up to see.
“Yes,” Sarah said as they walked down Kalverstraat, a boulevard of tourists and consumer goods. “A very sad story. But are you sure you’re not totally full of shit?”
“Very sure,” Bobby said. “If you think I’m so full of shit, maybe you ought to leave me to my misery.”
She made a contemplative expression. “I was going to spend the day studying, but that can wait. This is more fun. You are more fun.”
“That’s funny,” Bobby said. “I was just stepping out to get a coffee before I killed myself. But this is more fun.”
His hands itched so badly he wanted to bite them off. He had actually bitten at his hands before, like a rodent pinned in a trap; Shane had caught him doing so in the bathroom of the Bowery Ballroom, before they played the thousand-capacity venue to about fifty hecklers. It was like getting caught masturbating.
Please bite me, his hands said. Bite me now. But if he did, he would lose his hot new Dutch friend.
“It looks like you stuck your hands in a furnace,” she said.
“They’ve been like this for months,” he said. “I don’t know how to turn the corner.”
She gingerly took them, examining. “We should get you to my doctor,” she said. “I wonder if we can get you some painkillers.”
“Painkillers sound lovely.”
Even at the darkest moment of this two-year experience, he found that being in a touring rock-and-roll band afforded special treatment from the large chunk of the Western world known as Females Under Thirty. He had small but authentic powers; he was a traveling spirit, a little bit holy, a metaphor for adventure. Being a rock musician was one of the last good ways to catch a break.
“Hey, rock star,” she’d said, and here she was, Florence fucking Nightingale with a perky rack, vintage clothes, and fire-red hair. She stroked his hands like a fortune-teller.
“It’s your mind acting up on your body,” she said. “My friend picked out his hair from stress for a long time.”
“I feel like a cripple,” he said, and looked into her eyes. “It completely changes your life. There are all kinds of everyday things I cannot do.”
She looked over his hands with a clinical expression. “Your band must be so worried about you.”
He twiddled his fingers in the air. “Are you kidding?” he said. “They call me the Mummy.”
She laughed, then covered her mouth to try to be polite, which was the best response he could hope for. So he laughed along with her, milked the wounded monster card. Mee a funny monsterr. Mee have feelings too. People they passed tried and failed to keep their eyes off the deformed American fool.
“What was the name of your band again?”
“Blood Orphans.”
“I’m not sure if I’ve heard of you. What was the name of the record?”
“
Rocket Heart.
”
She lit a cigarette and winked. “If we went to a record store, then I would know if you are lying. You could just be trying to get with me, huh?”
“I wouldn’t do that,” he said. “I have a rotten imagination. I’m no good with girls. Not smooth at all.”
“But you’re cute.” She took a drag. “Still, I want to see your record. See if you’re legit, you know?”
“We won’t find it,” he said. “The record’s as rare as a three-dollar bill.”
She giggled, undaunted. And he wasn’t cute, he knew that. He looked like a Baldwin brother, but not Alec. Billy, maybe, but minus the raffish charm.
“Amsterdam’s big record store is this way,” she said, her tight little plaid-covered Dutch ass leading the way. “Let’s settle this, huh?”
In every city, it was as if Warners had erased the memory of Blood Orphans from history. The last time he’d seen
Rocket Heart
in a record shop was in Gainesville, back in August, and even then it was an accident. Adam found three copies hidden in the torch song section, behind
The Best of Billie Holiday.
Darlo had demanded an explanation, loudly enough to get himself forcibly removed by a girl wearing a Bettie Page haircut and a Misfits T-shirt. “I heard about you and your stupid band!” she screamed. “Racists! Disgusting!” Darlo, who normally had a retort for every occasion, scurried backward, a crab swallowed by the rising tide of public opinion.
On Kalverstraat, armies of young Dutchies bearing colorful scarves zoomed by on rickety bicycles, the kind Bobby’s old hippie grandmother rode down the streets of Venice Beach. These bikes shouldn’t have worked at all, but they had a mysterious Dutch efficiency. Everything worked better here. Despite the congestion, the cyclists moved like water rolling through perfectly oiled urban cogs.