Rock Bottom (14 page)

No. Ninety minutes in bumper-to-bumper traffic was what it was. Open season for hecklers was what it was. Harassment from the cops, as in, You got a permit for that? was what it was.

The Rolling Stones did it, officer. Don’t you like the Stones?

Just tell me who the hell you are and why there’s no license plate.

Come on, it’s good times all around, Officer … Blake.

Yeah, right, kid.

Don’t be a cooze, man.

Excuse me?

Don’t mind him, he’s just the drummer.

You just watch it, kid. This ticket’s got to go to someone.

Honk honk!
Get out of the road!

And then it started to rain.

Teen taunters threw tomatoes. Someone spit on Shane. Warners got a fine for not having the right permits.

The Dixieland band and the good-time revelers waved to him, rolling on the canal. Darlo gave them the finger. The band played on. Doubt scratched at the surface of his indomitable soul.

He wondered if Blood Orphans had done anything right. Maybe they should tell Warners to fuck off and then get on an indie. That would help. It would complement the strategy of touring with someone cool, anyone on one of those hip labels. Take a hundred-dollar guarantee to show the proper humility. Perfect first step for the band’s reinvention. Totally.

Either way, the next record needed a power ballad.

His phone rang. The Mummy on line one.

“What’s up, faggot?” he said.

“Nothing, faggot. You ought to —”

“Fuck your mother?”

“Yeah, you ought to fuck your mother. That would help you figure shit out for sure. Once you roll off her, you ought to go down to a record store called Fame over here on Kalverstraat. There’s some pretty amazing shit there.”

“What, like Aerosmith?”

“Yeah, like Aerosmith,” he said. “You can finally get that remastered version of
Toys in the Attic.
Other stuff too.”

“Like what?”

“A poster of us. Two copies of
Rocket Heart.
”

“So what?”

“When’s the last time you found any trace of us in a record store?”

Darlo said nothing. Point-of-sale issues were a soft spot.

“That’s what I thought,” Bobby said. “It’ll fuck you up, seeing what you used to be.”

Fucking Mummy. Whiner. Passenger.

“Hello?” Bobby said. “Paging the band sex addict.”

Darlo couldn’t speak. An unseen hand covered his mouth. Tax evasion?

“Signing off,” Bobby said. “Kiss my hairy ass!”

Dead line. Euro static. Fucking Bobby. Sore loser in the pussy wars. Disgusting hands. No self-respect.

The Dixieland band drifted on, the people in the boat waving their arms in the cold Dutch air like they just didn’t care. He needed money, now that his dad was in deep. Now that doubt flickered around his tarnished spirit. He dialed the manager. She would understand.

“He had it coming,” Joey said. “Nasty old fuck.”

“He’s innocent.”

“And I’m the pope, bitch.”

“Fuck you, babe,” he said. “My dad’s totally on the level.”

“On the
level?
”

“That’s right.”

She tittered, amazed. “So on the level that you had no idea your money was tied to his?”

“It’s not illegal.”

“No, but it is forty kinds of fucked up.”

“I don’t want to hear it.” The riverboat drifted out of sight. “Just loan me some money. Please, babe.”

She sighed, and Darlo wished she wouldn’t. When she sighed, something inside him unhinged.

“That fucker’s been taking you for a ride for a long time,
man.
”

“You’re just jealous,” he said. “Jealous of people who understand power.”

She laughed. “Nice to put up a brave face while you’re getting your ass fucked.”

Doubt, falling faintly.

“Don’t tell anyone yet,” he said. “No one.”

“Just hurry up,” Joey said. “I’m at the Van Gogh and I ain’t got all day. Wait — yes, I do!”

Darlo lit a smoke and started on his way, hurt at Joey’s utter faithlessness. He knew that his dad had long since stopped operating at full strength. His killer instinct had gone all Fat Elvis. He wasn’t staying on top of things, walking around in his silk robe all day, but not like Hugh Hefner. More like Brian Wilson. And those mob guys had been sucking him dry.

Back when David Cox was getting started, after he quit assistant-directing for VCA, the seventies porn powerhouse, and went looking for capital, the seed money came from the mob. There weren’t any weekend libertarian day-trippers who wanted to drop bills and invest. There was no such thing as porn chic until
Boogie Nights.
Ask anyone who’d ever purveyed pussy in the Valley. Nowadays the porn industry chilled with freewheeling congressmen and chorused about government oppression. Back then you went to Tony and Fabrizio and Ricky and secured a little control. All these men, Darlo remembered, wore strong cologne, but their heavy goaty smell pushed right through the Aramis, the Paco Rabanne, the Old Spice. These guys would hug little Darlo — and whadda fuck kyna name is dat? — so tight he thought his eyes would pop. Then they’d crouch down and put out their palms. “Come on,” they’d say. “Show us your jab, Darlo. Show us your right hook. Give it whatcha got!”

These men used the Cox house as a brothel. They banged girls left and right. They slapped girls silly. Sometimes Darlo, eight or ten or twelve, wandered upon such moments. No doors closed in the Cox mansion. Sometimes the girls, under punches, locked eyes with the boy in the hallway. Faraway eyes. Doll’s eyes.

“Hey, cherry!” the man — or men — would yell to him. “Wanna get up in this bitch? She’s good to go!”

Dead doll’s eyes. Nodding out.

But the men looked so strong. The men could not be hurt. They were like thunderous skies over small lakes. They became Darlo’s heroes.

His dad said, Respect women, but it was like an oilman saying, Respect the environment.

After the Meese Commission report, after what his dad called “the year of the fucking knives-out cockless Republican fuckwad witch-hunt,” organized crime gave up the porn hobby. But David Cox kept the dregs around. He admired them. They were his friends. He kept them around and he became one of them, loan-sharking. He told Darlo he loved shaking people down.

“I’m not going to get any fucking AVN awards acting like Nice Guy Eddie,” he said. “But you find some prick bigger than his britches and you put his ass out on a line. You stretch him and then you let him snap back. You take him cleaning and then you take him for a swim.”

He talked to Darlo in this seminonsense; the house had been bugged for years, and the old man thought this gibberish was clever
and
effective. How he had escaped the Meese Commission was anyone’s guess. So much talk of blackmail and blood spilled and legs broken. And for all those taps, no one tipped off enforcement. No criminal charges.

“They keep me out,” Cox told his son, “because I’m bait.”

“Are you an informant?”

“That’s a terrible thing to say!”

So now the bait had run rancid, and they were hauling him in. The bait was used up and rotting. That’s what it was.

Is that what it was?

Such bad timing for Darlo. Everything connected to his dad. All his credit cards. His American Express. His
Hustler
house account.

And then he thought about the sack of cocaine hidden in his closet. Had the authorities seized the house? Had they torn the place apart?

Freaking out wouldn’t help. He had to get Joey’s big stupid phone and make calls pronto.

As he headed over the canal toward the Van Gogh, a bunch of earnest-looking Dutch college kids came toward him, holding banners and cloth signs that said that the U.S. sucked, blood for oil, all that shit that Darlo hated so much. Out of Iraq, Boycott the Oppressor, yadda yadda yadda, a big stuffed Bush doll they were no doubt going to burn. Fucking clichés, Darlo thought. They acted like America was some Nazi state that didn’t save their ass every thirty years. Where was the respect for history? Why couldn’t they separate shit out? Why did his dad have to go and get arrested for tax evasion? Why was his band so irrevocably fucked?

He grabbed a
US out of Iraq
banner from the hands of some hot hippie girl with long, shiny hair.

She said something in Dutch that indicated her displeasure.

“Fuck you!” he said, spit flying, teeth bared. “Get your own army!”

She held up her hands and walked away backward. Leaves swirled on the ground.

“Bitch!” he said. “Surrender!”

Dead doll’s eyes. In the hallway. Good to go.

She was away now, in the river of faces, some of her fellow protesters looking back at him as he stamped the banner into the ground, grinding it with his boots.

“Bitch!” he yelled, as if she were still there.

Dead eyes. Looking through cracks in doorways. Skies over lakes.

He walked in the direction of the Museumplein, chain-smoking, and wondered what the fuck else they were finding in that house when they tore it apart. His fucking dad’s house. His house. Their dirty fed hands. Just because some prosecutor wanted to make a name for himself.

He felt the knife in his jacket pocket. The oversized switchblade he’d bought on that Sioux reservation in South Dakota. The Magic Wand.

“That is so fucking illegal,” Bobby had said as they stood in the most weapon-filled gas station minimart they’d ever seen. “You get caught with that, you’ll get so fucking busted.”

“I’m shaking,” Darlo said, and left a hundred-dollar bill on the counter.

On tour, he’d pulled out the Magic Wand a few times and watched people scatter. It was asshole kryptonite.

If cops searched the house, they would find the other knives he’d bought through unregulated channels — the foot-long fillet shiv and the serrated buck knife and the mini-scimitar. Damn, he would miss those. And his guns — the Bren and the Beretta and the Glock. All unlicensed, bought from Cox mansion hangers-on. Well, shit.

What kind of lawyers did his dad have, anyway? What was he paying them for if, in two thousand fucking five, when porn was practically being sold in Wal-Mart, the man could get singled out. Tax evasion!

He called Joey. “I can’t find the fucking place, babe.”

“You’re across the street from it, you fucking idiot.”

He looked up. Joey gave him the finger, which curled into a come-hither.

“Get over here,” she said.

“No, you get over here.”

“Who’s got the money, asshole?” she said. “Now’s no time for stubborn.”

Darlo ran through traffic, middle fingers up at drivers like guns blazing. Seeing Joey’s messy early-drunk face helped ease his troubles.

He kicked a piece of dog shit at the museum line and no one noticed.

“Where’s Adam?”

“Rode away on a bike,” she said. “So cute, our little Adam.”

He shrugged. “I gotta have a talk with him.”

“About what?”

“The next record.” Darlo spat a loogie to the curb. “I have ideas.”

Joey winced.

“What?”

“Nothing.”

Darlo hadn’t seen Joey in over six weeks, since New York at CMJ. The previous year they’d played with Queens of the Stone Age at the Hammerstein Ballroom, but this year Warners wouldn’t even get them a showcase at a fucking piano bar in Queens. Still, they went trolling; Darlo had nabbed a publicist from Interscope, a fat Irish girl named Moira, right under Bobby’s nose, and they tried to get Joey to go back to her hotel room with them. Moira had that condition where your eyes look too big for your sockets.

“I want both of you,” she leered, eyes bulging in her skull. “I love the girls and I love the boys and I want your bodies in my mouth.”

Darlo had smiled and put his arm around Joey. “Come on, babe,” he’d said. “It’s time.”

She had demurred. “You take her,” she said. “You like the fat girls way more than me.”

Now Joey stood there, small and coke-eyed. Seeing her made Darlo think about TV movies where lovers are reunited; his confidence softened a little, and his desire to just run everyone over subsided. He felt framed by some phenomenon that he hoped was not love; he had the urge to take her feet out of those shoes and stroke them. He had the urge to carry her in his arms wherever she wanted to go — a zoo, a department store, another museum, all the places he hated. But he couldn’t trust these feelings, couldn’t imagine from where, in his porny past, these feelings could have derived. He saw no path to them, no back alleyway, no hidden passage to any of these emotions, so he knew they had to be fake. Or at least wrong.

“So,” she said, breaking the fog. “Your dad.”

“My dad.” He nodded. “Tax evasion. That’s what he said on the message. Can’t figure it out.”

“Never heard you say that.”

“He never got arrested before.”

They walked in the direction of the brouhaha. Leaves spun in little tornadoes on the ground. Parts of Darlo separated and drifted off into autonomy, like the continents a million years ago. Between them, seas of unknown emotion appeared and made him dizzy.

“My feet are fucking killing me,” Joey said.

“Cry me a river,” he replied, and sped up.

9

HE WAS REALLY
an Untouchable now. He had gotten what he wanted, standing in line at the McDonald’s, eyes of disgust upon him, noses wrinkling. Was Jesus not also an outcast? Was Buddha not an outcast? He was part of a most fantastic line of questers, seekers. He was, like them, a cross-pollinator, a mixer of cultural influences, a journeyman, a missing link!

“Four cheeseburgers,” Shane said. “Two fries. Large Coke.”

He went to the back, where a trio of old Dutch men sipped coffee in three-piece suits. The ethics of eating meat for the first time in a year wasn’t something he could navigate just now. Just now, this cheeseburger was a lifeboat upon which he would float until he hit the blood-sugar shore. Then he would walk upon the sand and assess the damage.

His mind focused on a series of questions. How had he managed to let everything get so out of hand? He had become so preoccupied with his search, with his seeking, that he had let Darlo run the band into the ground. Endless touring, and for what?