Rock Bottom (8 page)
“My stepdad is a musician,” Sarah said. She wore chunky heels and still barely cleared five feet. “He plays the ukulele and the guitar. Folk music mainly. I think that he wanted to be a professional musician too, go live in a van, screw girls he barely knew.”
“We never do that,” he said. “That’s a myth. It moves product.”
“Yeah, right. Now he’s a house builder with an anger management problem. He has a wine cellar and loves to ski. I wouldn’t describe him as an unhappy guy. But when I play the Sex Pistols or the Clash in the car, it’s like he goes into another world. I wonder if meeting you would break his heart a little.”
“He has no idea what he didn’t miss,” Bobby said. “I promise you.”
His cell phone rang; the number had no ID. Maybe Darlo had died a violent death, his face slashed, yes, why not, like a Levolor blind, and the morgue needed Bobby to ID the body. That would be an honor well earned.
Dream on.
“Hello?”
“It’s Shane. Hello?”
“Yeah, I’m here. What do you want, Siddhartha?”
“Oh, Bobby, thank God.”
“What
is
it?”
Static overcame the line, then faded off.
“I need money,” Shane said. “My money was stolen from my wallet.”
“What makes you think I have any?”
“Because you
always
do,” Shane said. “Come on, man, just help me.”
It was true that Bobby had plenty of money. Bobby actually lived on his per diems. But hearing Shane’s voice, a little tinny and gravelly, leached all the generosity right out of him.
While listening to Shane recount his shitty morning, Bobby exchanged a glance with Sarah that transmitted all kinds of undeserved affection. He had never felt more fortunate than Shane, so it was so very satisfying to hear the little Christian Buddhist whatever-the-fuck-he-was whine away from the bottom of life’s well while Bobby hung out with his new Dutch fox.
“On top of that,” Shane said, “my hair’s covered in peanut butter.”
“Peanut butter, huh?” Bobby said. “Kinky.”
“Are you going to help me or what?”
“Hmm,” he said. “Actually, no.”
Shane huffed. “Why are you doing this?”
“Because I hate you.”
“It’s an emergency.”
“Talk to God about it.”
“Fuck you, Bobby,” he said. “Fuck you and your fucking —”
Bobby hung up, satisfied. Contributing to Shane’s despair cast a dazzling ray over his already bright mood.
“Your bandmate?” Sarah asked.
“That’s right. The singer. Piece of shit.”
“That’s not a nice thing to say,” she said. “Really.”
“I have my reasons,” he said, and cracked a rotting knuckle.
They’d come upon the superstore, which was called Fame.
“This is silly,” he said, stepping back. “We’re not going to find the record.”
She raised her eyebrows. “You’re not making all of this up, are you?”
“Of course not.”
She took his hand. “Let’s go in. My curiosity is killing me.”
The bass player felt the familiar hum of humiliation coming on. Aerosmith’s new record,
Rockin’ the Joint,
was prominently displayed, and Franz Ferdinand blasted through the speakers, their ferocious, angular, and undeniably pro stomp coming down on Bobby to call bullshit on his very soul.
“Oh, I love this song!” Sarah said, and shook her plaid ass.
Bobby had been in this situation before, experienced the awfulness of not being able to find the record in a megastore while trying to impress a girl, saw the way he shrank in said girl’s eyes when the store clerk tried not to laugh when she said that he was in Blood Orphans, and come on, there must be one copy of the record here! No? Not one?
Not one?
And then Bobby’s heart skipped a beat. In a corner, in the farthest shadowy reaches of the pop/rock section, he saw his face.
“Oh my God!” Sarah said. “Look at that!”
Bobby’s mouth dropped wide open, gaped at the wall display. An oversized poster of their album cover. The four faces of Blood Orphans gazing up from some primeval darkness, looking tough, righteous, and blissfully unaware of the misery ahead.
They were arranged like a compass. Darlo was north, Adam was west, Shane was east, and Bobby was dead south.
Below them, in Old English font,
Blood Orphans,
and below that,
Rocket Heart,
and below that,
June 23.
Down at the edge, someone had tagged a small Post-it note and scrawled
Star Club November 24–25.
Four faces in the shadows, come from mighty Los Angeles to completely fucking fool themselves.
Sarah grabbed his arm and jumped up and down. “Holy shit!” she said. “That’s totally you!”
“How?” he said through the fog of war. “What?”
A clerk stopped, looked at the picture, looked at him, pushed his lower lip out, tapped his clipboard. “You?” he said while blasts of Scottish melody and syncopation thundered out of the speakers. “You?”
“Him!” Sarah said, and pulled Bobby close to the poster. “Wow!”
Bobby stared at himself and barely recognized the kid he saw. He looked healthy and free, happy and cocksure.
“I totally thought you were lying,” she said. “I don’t believe it!”
As he stood there with this adorable girl suddenly holding on to his arm with both hands, a certainty about the finalities of time settled and took hold. The boy in the picture, his head pushed defiantly upward, could never have imagined anything that Bobby felt here, without the use of his opposable thumbs and two weeks before his twenty-seventh birthday. The picture was a relic from a lost place to which he would never return, from that Elysian time that had been rubbed out of his memory, from the endless summer, from the perpetual kiss of the warmth of the sun, from the frolic in the lush fields of future fame. He knew that he was now, at this moment, officially in the twilight of his youth.
DARLO’S MOTHER, ANN ATCHISON
, had helped found Dirty Darling and had performed in many of the company’s early films. She shouldn’t have been one of the big stars because she would only fuck girls on camera, but that didn’t matter, because she looked like she should have been emblazoned across the Mexican flag: pneumatic tits and ass, mocha skin, a smile that could start a revolution, and black hair that rose over her head like storm clouds. She stood just over six feet tall. Her license plate was
Inca Fire.
That didn’t last long. By the time Darlo was three, she had left her husband and young child, pulled a Linda Lovelace, gone Moral Majority. She remarried, to an oilman, got a J.D. from Texas Christian, and worked for a right-wing legal organization determined to stamp out everyone’s constitutionally guaranteed right to watch complete strangers rut on each other. She wrote to Darlo once a year, on his birthday, but aside from that, Ann Atchison was a stranger.
“Your mother’s the poster child for all the suppression and rage of American sexual life,” his dad would often say. “When I met her she was a lovely flower, the softest of sweet red petals, the most delicious glass of
agua fresca
I’d ever tasted. Now she makes Ed Meese look like a friend to the industry. But don’t let me stop you. You’re old enough to make your own decisions.”
Darlo saw his mother as the crazy woman who’d abandoned him, and considering that sex had always been waiting for him, a best friend and a comfort, any enemy of its free-flowing goodness was highly suspect. His dad seemed to live a happy polygamous life, rich and rejoicing 24/7, while she sat in the middle of
west fucking Texas
with the idiots who had tried to impeach President Clinton for doing only the most natural thing in the world: getting a little on the side. How could anyone turn down a hot piece of twenty-year-old intern ass?
But when Darlo was seventeen, his mother gave up being all God Squad, got divorced, and moved to Iowa to become a farmer. She met a man there, an Allstate agent. She mellowed and tried to make things right with her son.
“Your father has surrounded you with the trappings of Sodom,” she wrote in a letter. “You think that pleasure is holy. Pleasure as an end
and
a means. Pleasure at all costs. Satisfaction without accountability. That is the thrust of your father’s philosophy. It is a dead end: morally, spiritually, ethically. You must think about your actions in life. Do they serve a higher end? Do they enrich the lives of others beside yourself? Do they connect you with a higher purpose? Ask yourself. We would love to see you anytime here in Iowa. Fares are cheap. American has very good fares. Have you ever ridden a horse? We have many beautiful fillies in our stable. But ask yourself, seriously, Darlington, if —”
Darlo crushed the letter. His mother was a crank. But when he went to tear it up, his hands went still. Deep in that thick young-pirate head of his, he knew she was on to something. That awareness reached up through the tar of his testosterone.
She was on to something. He kept the letter.
She wrote again. “We were out in the meadow today, Darlo, and I was thinking of you. I was with John and Robert, your stepbrothers, and the wind was in our faces, cold and crisp and fresh, and I thought, wouldn’t it be great for you to be with us? I remember when you were a little boy, how we would go to the park in Encino and you’d love the bees and the birds, the flowers and the grass. You were a clear nature baby. You were Adam in his garden, and had His blessing. How I wished, I said to your stepbrothers, that you could be out here on the plain and see the real unfolding of nature, as opposed to the false idols that are daily painted upon your young eyes. Eyes so inured to kindness. Idols drawn across them, a jaded shroud.”
Darlo was fun-loving. He had a party-hearty nature like his dad. But he was not his dad. Who was this strange woman, from whom half of him had sprung?
“Your mother,” his father said, smoking at the pool. A blonde massaged his shoulders. “She was peaches and cream. Peaches … and cream.”
After a bunch of letters, Darlo wrote her back. Hi, I’m Darlo, uh, I read what you wrote, uh, it was good, I have a pretty good average in school. Uhh.
They went back and forth for a while. Darlo kept meaning to rip up her letters, but he didn’t.
When he told his dad about this continued correspondence, David Cox adjusted his jock strap, fingered his graying chest hair, and shrugged. “Good for you,” he said. “Now the son goes looking for the mother. He goes off to the wilderness. The biblical, the biblical. It had to happen. Find out who you are. Hey, can you call the caterer and make sure he doesn’t bring turkey to the shoot? Turkey gives the actors gas. Maybe I ought to have a series about fuckers with a fart fetish! Call it
Blowing Smoke!
”
Her letters, intense as they were, did not illuminate any corners in his past, did not inform, effect, or mitigate his burgeoning sex addiction. For how could you grow up in a world where bodies had no autonomy, when the images of them contorting, twisting, and malleable were more common to you than a family, at a table, eating a meal, and not just roll right into it?
Yes. Sex. The problem with sex.
He lost his virginity at twelve. Her name was Sandy Rose. She was a short, long-lashed, small-bosomed Latina who got paid extra to be his dad’s fluffer. She opened his door one sunny afternoon as light from the swimming pool danced on the windowpane. He was watching
Stripes.
Her bikini was the color of unripe bananas.
“Your poppy says it’s time,” she said, and mounted him.
Seventh grade, eighth grade, ninth grade; the years were a blur of afternoon interludes, morning glories, night visions. Comic flesh configurations, maximum sweat, the rippling of muscles, girls on him, in public and private, among crowds and in churches, dare you to do this, bet you won’t do that. Oh, do that again. Do that again. Over here and over there. Over under sideways down. Clench your teeth and arch your back. Hold still. Over and over till his fucking knees buckled.
Compulsion.
His friends treated Darlo like the luckiest guy alive. But they didn’t see what had happened on the inside. They didn’t see his brain rewired. They didn’t see how his life resembled that of a lab rat, overloaded with sensation, glutted with pleasure, fattened up with ecstasy until the taste went bland and only one feeling was left.
His body ached if he went without it for a day. He couldn’t sleep until he had the smell of it on his fingers, the faint taste of it on his tongue, the assurance of it upon waking.
What people didn’t know was the pain of it. What people didn’t understand was how saying no felt like reversing gravity, how pulling away from pussy was like rending muscle from bone. He could never get in far enough. He could never really touch it.
Compulsion. Cold sweat.
In eleventh grade he started playing the drums as a way to calm this ache. He leveraged his horny groove into four-four rhythm. His girlfriend, Jenni Feingold, had encouraged this hobby when she broke up with him.
“You should see a fucking shrink, too.”
“Fuck that.”
He went and bought a kit at Guitar Center. The bottomless aching hole started to fill up. He could bash away and feel less empty. Still, she wouldn’t get back together with him.
“So you can fuck me and another girl at the same time?” she asked. “So you can pay me to slap her? Darlo, I want a commitment. Not a life in porn.”
Jenni Feingold. Putting the Fine back in Feingold. The only girl who ever understood him. The one who started off as a drug buddy from the estate next door and ended up trying it all with him. Never a kink for her. Never slumming it. They just wanted the same thing. Until she wanted the weakest thing a person could want. Monogamy.
He practiced his drums. The more he practiced, the less he wanted to spend all night looking for tail. Even his dad, the Captain of the Mighty Cumshot Exxon, thought it was good for him.
“You have talent,” he said. They were walking around the fulfillment warehouse in Pasadena. Stacks of tapes and DVDs surrounded them. College boys in USC caps stood at counters, processed orders, stuffed packing popcorn and product into boxes. “I hate it when kids with money just sit around and count it. You’ve got good rhythm. I hear the noises the girls make upstairs, by the pool, in the den. I hear all that. Put that to good use.”