American Dream Machine (21 page)

A skinny man came onto the stage, looking vaguely like Axl. A drummer, a guitar player—not Slash—and someone else, their cigarettes wandering through the dark. A top hat sat on the drum riser, two bottles of Jack. There were all these signifiers, suggestions of the band, and yet—

“All right, fuckin’ Los Angeles!” the singer said, not Axl, as the lights came up. “Let’s fuckin’ get it on!”

The band blasted into a cover of Aerosmith’s “Mama Kin,” which was a song Guns N’ Roses, too, had covered, but it was not them.

What the hell?

The rest of the crowd roiled, perplexed but into it. They were like dogs, you didn’t need meat if you could just wave a bone in front of their noses.
Aerosmith
,
metal
,
right on
, went the equation. Something
like this. A few boos, maybe a distinct plateauing of what had seemed ready to become a frenzy. But they were digging it.

I grabbed Severin’s shoulder. “Dude, what’s going on here?”

He shrugged. “I dunno.”

Not that I didn’t know all the words, myself, the ones about dreaming, floating downstream. It was loud, but not as loud as I wanted it to be. I missed Slash’s guitar, that crunching, kinetic, teeth-rattling sound that was their essence for me. These guys were understudies, some sad relation—they had the hair, the scarves, but they weren’t superstars.

“Opening band,” Sev yelled.

I didn’t think so. It was nearly three in the morning. Were Guns N’ Roses going to go on at five, were they going to be upstaged by openers playing their own version of someone else’s song the band had already appropriated? This had the feel of a complete experience, something final in itself. We watched the rest of the show, and this ticky-tack outfit turned out to be, on closer inspection,
L.A.
Guns. In the mid-1980s, Melrose Avenue was littered with fliers advertising the two bands,
L.A.
Guns and Guns N’ Roses, as if they were interchangeable, which they almost were. Axl Rose was
in
L.A.
Guns for a while, and then Tracii Guns was in Guns N’ Roses, a perfect mess that should’ve confused everyone. It was the Paxton-Pullman Principle in full effect, except the one band made it and the other most definitely did not. And maybe, just maybe this wasn’t even
L.A.
Guns, maybe it was some still more tragic set of impostors—like that guy from Florida you’d read about in
Rolling Stone
who’d pretended to be Paul Stanley of Kiss—crawling around in the shadow of a has-been glam metal band that in fact never got very far in the first place, never-weres if ever there was such a thing as a never-was, this being something of a contradiction in terms to begin with.

“Keeping track!” The singer was up there vamping now, on and on about keeping tabs on Mama Kin, not knowing where she’d been.

Still, though. Wasn’t everyone in Hollywood a part of this liminal condition, chasing the apparitions of our future selves, falling out of favor with our pasts? One’s yearning never ended. Even so, it almost worked. For a moment Severin and I were like dogs ourselves,
pogoing in place to that Aerosmith number that described to us the sound of sixth grade.

Where’s your mother been?

I scanned the crowd. Where was Will? He would’ve eaten this up, should’ve been levitating over our heads and floating toward the stage. But he was gone.

“All right, you fuckers,” the singer—Tracii, I supposed—sneered after three songs, two more I didn’t recognize. “Here’s what you’ve been waiting for!”

Just like that, fuckin’ Axl Rose—
fuckin’ Axl
, but what else was I supposed to call him just then?—walked out of the wings, with Slash, the two of them arm-in-arm almost, like they were still the best of friends. The howl that went out from the crowd was indescribable, a primal shriek that might only occur after expectations have been dashed and then, unexpectedly, fulfilled in an instant. Slash jacked his Telecaster into the main amp and flipped on his top hat and the band railed right into “Paradise City.” Holy shit!

Severin and I were swept up, carried in this great moshing wave toward the stage. Electricity jolted through our skulls. It didn’t matter whether we hated this band on principle. They killed us. They played everything, all the songs we knew, including the shitty ones (ahem, “November Rain”), which we were suddenly unashamed to love. They finished up with the really big one, the
t-na-na-na-na-na-knees
,
KNEES
. one. Sev and I were pulverized, torn apart from the very first note as the crowd spun us off in separate directions, but this didn’t matter either: we were complete. I spotted him once, with the glasses knocked off his face and the sweaty, hectic expression of a swimmer fighting a riptide. Then he was gone and I was too, whirled away in my own crossfire hurricane. It wasn’t that anybody was trying to hurt us. Violence was just the name of the game, the lingua franca, the American method as it came down at the end of the twentieth century. My foot, my eye, my chest, my ribs and thigh: all these parts were banged, punched, jostled. The women in the crowd might’ve been taking revenge for all the subversive squeezing I’d enjoyed before the set. Except I didn’t see any women now, not one. It was all men, doing all this homoerotic hammering, a fistfight ballet.

“Where’s Williams?” I screamed in Sev’s face once I found him, once it was over and the band had left the stage. I’d yelled myself
hoarse during the set and now confronted semideafness there on the edge of the throng while it clapped and pounded for an encore.

“He’s here.”

“No.” I looked around. “He wouldn’t watch from this far away. He wouldn’t hang back at the bar.
He
wanted to be here in the first place.”

“Yeah,” Severin said, but it went up at the end like a question, like he suddenly understood my concern. At last. “Where is he?”

As disciplined as his father was, as clean, Little Will was the opposite. I grabbed Sev’s elbow, and since we didn’t care about seconds, about anything the band might think to do now, we raced toward the bathrooms. The crowd had thinned just enough so we were able to push our way through. My vocal cords ached; the room was so dense with cigarette smoke and marijuana it hurt just to breathe. My eyes stung with the sweat that dripped off my forehead. We raced past a couple making out and into the bathroom, Severin and I like cops on a bust. We kicked open the door but the room looked empty. Surely no one wanted to blow it and miss the encore—they might play “Patience,” or “Sweet Child”—but the second stall was locked. The “stall,” such as it was. You can imagine what the crapper was like in this place. One set of walls was completely demolished, leaving only a basin without a seat, while the remaining one looked like a public school broom closet.

“Yo,” Severin said. The green door was crisscrossed with switchblade graffiti. To our left was a slender urinal, one tiny sink. “Anybody in there?”

No answer.
Yo
would’ve provoked one. I mean, what if we’d been black people?

“Yo?”

We rushed the stall on Sev’s second
yo
. It smelled like a port-o-let, like ancient turds and urine and vomit, a medicinal touch of something—Jäger, tequila—besides, like whoever’d barfed hadn’t digested the liquid he’d yakked up. The door gave against our weight and we tumbled into the tiny stall. Williams was on the floor, down among the muck and the slime and the brown mire, those viscous strands that caked the base of the toilet.

“Shit.” I knelt next to him, Severin crowding in behind me. What did it matter where we put our hands? “What is this?”

I grabbed him. His body’s pure inertia made it look like he was sleeping, though when I knelt and touched him he was perfectly still, and the back of his head was wet. He’d been lying in this place for a while.

“Jesus!” I lifted him up. He was breathing. The front of his shirt was wet too, and I realized people had come in here and pissed on him, just let him stay crumpled where he was when they hosed him down.

“Oh!” I lifted him. Not till I got him out of the stall did I realize the liquid on the back of his head was blood. “Oh fuck, Sev, look!”

There was a blue bandanna, Crip-colored, knotted above his elbow.

“What is this?”

Sev just grunted. We were dragging him toward the sink when it hit me. If we’d searched the floor we’d have found matches, spoon, baggie, syringe. How much evidence did I need?

“Severin, what the fuck?” I turned the spigot uselessly. What were you supposed to do? When someone
OD
’d weren’t you supposed to put him in the bath, use cold water, ice cubes, something like that?
I
didn’t know. “How long has Williams been using heroin?”

We ran water on his face for a second. A pathetic trickle.

“Not long,” Sev said. “And not often.”

“Have you been using it too?”

Severin just looked at me ambiguously. “Let’s get him out of here.”

We lugged him by the hair and I draped one of his arms over my shoulders, Severin taking the other. He was breathing. Alive, but perhaps barely, and for how long?

“Christ, Sev!” It was amazing how fast you could travel when you needed to, how fast and slow you could go at once. “What exactly is going on here?”

My face and his in the mirror, my own a sick parody of its schoolboy self—with my longish hair plastered to my forehead, I looked ten again, supercilious and vacant and beautiful—while Sev’s was wise and sharp-chinned. Not for the first time, that vast gulf yawned between who we were and what we knew, of ourselves and of one another. We lunged through the door, dragging our half-living friend. Outside we’d look for a cab, an ambulance, what?

“You’re not going to answer me?”

We made it to the street. I hadn’t seen the band return, but now that we were outside, the building started to vibrate again with muffled, cavernous sound. The night was empty, whatever time it was, that morally uncertain hour when the cars came far apart and all drove slow.

Split-second decision time. We went for Sev’s car. We had to go now! Williams wasn’t dead, he wasn’t even bluish, quite, though his skin had a fishy pallor. He moaned as we dragged him across Sunset.

“Let’s get him to the hospital,” Sev said. We’d pushed him into the passenger seat and now I was scrambling into the back. “Let’s fucking go.”

“Fine.” I was in and he was starting up the car and the radio blared the elephantine screeching of some treated art–rock guitar. “Hit it!”

“We’re going to Cedars of Lebanon.”

“What? Severin, there is no Cedars of Lebanon!” His car tracked out onto Sunset, racing across both lanes under a violet sky, the night that was already beginning to pale. “You’re going in the wrong direction!”

True. The hospital was called Cedars-Sinai now and it was just down the hill in West Hollywood. Cedars of Lebanon had shut down when we were kids. In its place now was the Scientology Centre.

“Where are you going?” I yelled. “Sev, the hospital’s the other way!”

The stereo yipped inanely. We passed Spago, the old one where Beau had taken us both to celebrate our high school graduation. We’d sat next to Prince and Morris Day of the Time, the two men dining out to plot their dominance of the future. It was 1985.

“Turn around! Severin, turn around!”

But he didn’t. And Spago was closed now too, not just for the night but forever, windows sheeted with ply and the once-elegant yellow building grown fissured and decrepit, the façade splintered with spidery lines.
There is no hospital
. We raced down the Strip and I just threw my head back. Williams and my brother had been into something they shouldn’t have. And what did I know, since the two of them had betrayed me this completely? Anyone could’ve
been into anything, our father could’ve been the goddamn pope, Mahatma Gandhi, a pedophile. I closed my eyes and breathed, the wind whipping and fluttering through the poorly sealed joints of the car. The radio wailed. Where in God’s name were we going?

DRUGS ENTERED OUR
lives in 1977. Williams and Severin and I had been together for a year and a half, and until then, nothing could’ve divided us. We hammered out our bond at St. Jerome, a year in which we were all preoccupied with comic books and baseball cards and skateboards. If we argued about anything, it was that Severin was a Mets fan. Seriously? Jerry Koosman? Williams and I were Angelenos, and aside from the detestation of the Yankees seemingly shared by all reasonable people, Severin’s city was a pure abstraction. It was
TV
, it was cop shows, it was mentioned on the news. Severin’s mom had gone missing, we knew that—after his sister died, Rachel had just abandoned him in Beau’s lap—but we never discussed it. Leave that to Hal Linden and Abe Vigoda. Instead we chewed our brittle pink rectangles of Topps gum and sat on my front stoop on summer afternoons. Hung out there and very occasionally at Little Will’s, in the asphalt-and-seawater swamp of the Marina, where Will’s parents bird-dogged us a little more closely than mine. The mood there was louche, dangerous. I don’t suppose I wondered why a youngish agent and his wife would choose to live so far from Bel Air: we were too busy constructing our little cosmos, staining the sidewalk with saliva bombs, and I was too enraptured, too fascinated by the Farquarsens’ more bohemian scene. Teddy and my mom shunted me to public school for fourth grade and off I went, moving from St. Jerome to Roosevelt, on Montana Avenue. God knows what my mom thought when she saw me so tight with Beau’s son. In my darker moments, I’ve wondered if she moved me to keep Severin and me apart, but that probably isn’t true. As my mother
began her disintegration—those first crises of her early thirties, the quiet acceleration of her drinking—I was too youthfully self-absorbed to notice. And while Will and Sev were left in the gentle garden of St. Jerome, I was loosed into the wild. Those Episcopal hippies had nothing on the haggard lifers who ran Roosevelt Elementary, those ossified schoolmarms and weary bureaucrats, nor on the insanity that took hold across the playground’s concrete jungle. As my best friends went on with their youthful arts educations, I embarked upon a different kind. Clifford Contreras pinched my chin and shook it like I was a camel at a bazaar. Kids named Matzel, Leinbach, and O’Brien—Irishers and Germans, whose last names were all anyone ever needed—punished me daily, whipping my ass at basketball and aiming for the head when we played strikeout. A girl named Bunny walked the playground and changed my life, her hair swinging like a bellpull, shaking off light. I was a scrawny little gleep with horn-rims of my own, like Severin, only blonder. The others were from the complexes closer to Wilshire, the boxy sheds whose once-modern “elegance” had curdled toward lower-middle-class neglect. Santa Monica then was just the northerly extension of Venice: not quite ghetto, but hairy enough. You could get jacked in the parking lot of the
A
&
W
Restaurant; there were chicken hawks along the pier. Closer to Pico there was a gang, the I-9ers, whose legend scared me off the streets. Severin, who still had his New Yorker’s instilled fearlessness, walked them without a problem; Little Will, who lived on the edges of the Marina, where the kids were born with criminal records, did the same. Yet I was the one Jamie Cullen approached one day on the playground, while I was standing over by the green wooden backboards that served mixed purposes, for handball or for strikeout, where we chucked tennis balls and called our own pitches. A strike could bruise your ribs.