Rock Bottom (18 page)

“They’re not assholes,” Joey said. “They’re angry.”

Darlo ran tongue over teeth. “Spare me the fucking sociology, babe,” he said, “because you were sitting in your fucking office filing your nails while we were stuck in a van wasting time, wasting our fucking time because Warners didn’t do their fucking job, because
you
didn’t do your job. Fucking stuck in there going insane at eighty miles per hour, the black hole of rock-and-roll fucking Calcutta.”

They stood at the fringe of the mass. A young man with a blond beard, a real Dutch Guevara, stood on a platform, raised his fist, and railed. Joey didn’t understand a word, but the strident tone said it all.

Darlo pointed at a few choice female backsides. “We’re all the same, man. The way they put their ass in the air in those European beds, it’s no different from American girls. Except European girls like it more. Euros love getting fucked in the ass. Let history be my guide.”

Joey thought it best to not continue this line of conversation. It would end in an entanglement of her mind and spirit, and right now she needed to feel elevated over Darlo.

“All of them,” the drummer said. “Ungrateful worms.”

No one turned to look.

“All of them. Just like my band.”

Worrying about her dudes ran deep in the manager’s blood; Joey enjoyed the privilege, the exceptional vantage from which she could watch, diagnose, and take care of her boys. Even Darlo. Especially Darlo. Her old partner in crime, who now, in the midst of this bracing autumnal moment, at this late, late hour, was cracking hard and cracking ugly. Oh, to the untrained eye the young man appeared to be like any other snot-nosed hottie in a leather jacket, just another chauvinist-cum-tourist-cum-two-week-drunk, some frat boy with a little clothes sense. But Joey knew better. Darlo, waving his arms and mumbling about the undeserving, was a magician throwing blank spells. His abrasion and bravado, usually a vibe that came off him in feral waves, had lost transmission.

He continued to piss and moan. His ill-fitting amalgam of pettiness, bitterness, and flat-out incoherence looked to passersby like nothing more than the whinings of a sulky and privileged American son. But actually, this stink bomb of emotional dry charges constituted Darlo’s cry for help.

“Babe,” she said, grabbing his shoulders. “It’s OK.”

Darlo’s eyes popped at her. “Don’t look at me like that,” he said.

“Like what?”

“You know.”

“I don’t.”

“You do. Like you’re gonna let me in. Like you’re finally going to let it happen.”

“Jesus Christ.”

“You know how hard it is for me,” he said. “You totally know.”

Joey knew that she couldn’t go the tenderness route. Her sentiments hardened. “I’m worried about you. Look at you. You’re a mess.”

Cheering came up from the crowd. Dutch Guevara left the stage.

“Maybe I am,” he said. “But you can’t fucking help.”

“Because I won’t
let it happen?
”

He shook his head, as if he’d grown tired of explaining something important.

Everything was lost. Her band, her career, her twenties. The weight of it sank in while people around her grew louder, became strident, thought about things outside the purview of the radius of their collective navel. Joey wished she had any fucking idea how to navigate the maze of Darlo’s heart without getting lost in its bloated curves.

And then they were burning a replica of President Bush. Joey thought of the footage she’d seen as a child, of Iranian protesters parading the hostages, chanting, dancing, doing the anti-American hokeypokey. Hopefully they would circle her and Darlo and try to rip them to pieces. Bring it on, you bitches, she thought. Bring it on.

13

ADAM IMMERSED HIMSELF
in the rush of cyclists moving along the Amstel. Joey’s behavior at the museum had freaked him out. Something about her mania felt dead serious, felt steady-on bad, portended doom. He was starting to feel as if today was a special day, profoundly special.

He wondered what had happened with Darlo’s dad. When the two had met in the Cox kitchen, the old freak’s eyes had climbed over him like spiders.

“You’re an artist, huh?” Cox asked. Wearing a karate outfit, he’d been practicing his forms on the back lawn while the band was swimming. Now he stood by the butcher block, sweaty, sipping water, thinning hair slicked back, looking at Adam as if he wore a stolen heirloom. “An artist, I said?”

“Yes. I’m at CalArts, studying —”

“My sister was an artist.” Sip. “Acid casualty.” Sip. “What do you think of that?”

“Think of what?”

“Art’s relationship to being fucked up.”

“Sometimes an intense vision comes with an inability to cope.”

“Ooh, smart guy.” Sip. “I think that art is for people who want to cover the walls of people with real jobs.” Sip.

“You’re entitled to your opinion.”

“Damn right —” Sip — “I am.”

Cox adjusted his black belt. No way, Adam thought, that black belt was real. Cox spit water into the sink. The man’s skin looked like distressed leather. Adam felt retchy.

“At least you play the guitar,” Cox said. “You can make some money out of that. And play quite well, Darlo says.”

“That’s very kind of him.”

“Kind?” he said. “No, not my son.”

Following the flow of traffic, Adam imagined Cox being escorted away from his porn palace in cuffs and thought maybe, a few years down the road, when all had been forgotten, he’d paint that scene, but switch Dad out for Darlo.

Now and then Adam had lobbied for changes in the music. Blood Orphans could evolve if they wanted, away from songs about girls who imitate vacuum cleaners, florid nuclear scenarios, and motorcycles that talked.

They had tried to learn one cover, early on: “Eighties,” by Killing Joke, because Darlo heard it in
Weird Science
and thought it sounded tough. They recorded it for the record, but Shane did Jaz Coleman about as well as George W. Bush did Abraham Lincoln.

“No good,” Sheridan, their stoner producer, had said from the control room. “Too soft.”

On the third tour, Adam broached the subject of adding acoustic elements to the next record, suggesting covers — Neutral Milk Hotel, Cat Stevens, Nick Drake — as a way into the soft parade.

“Neutral Milk Hotel?” Darlo had said. “The fuck’s a Neutral Milk Hotel?”

They were driving on I-15 through Idaho, one of the ugliest stretches of interstate, second only to I-20 across west Texas. Shane was at the wheel, which meant they were stuck in the right lane, cruise control set at sixty.

“They’re really amazing,” Adam said.

“They sound gay,” Darlo replied, and turned up the AC/DC.

Adam looked to Bobby for support. The bass player lit a Marlboro.

“Fu Manchu is right,” Bobby said. “You should listen to him for once. All the cool girls like it.”

“Is that so?”

“Yup. And you know who cool girls don’t like?”

“Who?”

Sometimes the drummer could be so thick.

“Us, Darlo. They don’t like us. Cool critics don’t like us either.”

“No critics like us,” Shane said. “We’re racists.”

They all laughed. It was still early enough in the game for them to laugh together, once or twice a week.

“We need some cool points, that’s for sure,” Darlo said. “Neutral what-did-you-call-it?”

The next day Adam stuck
In the Aeroplane over the Sea
into the car stereo while Darlo was driving.

“This is the band I was telling you about.”

“Uh-huh,” Darlo said, picking his nose. “Fine.”

They listened to about half the record, and Darlo seemed to be enjoying it. But then he reached for his soda, pulling through the piles, and came up with one of Shane’s Gideon Bibles, which, since the demise of his Extreme Teen Bible, the singer had begun stealing en masse from motels. He lobbed the volume back and popped Shane, asleep and drooling, in the head.

“I thought I told you to stop stuffing the van with these.”

Shane threw it back. “I’m collecting colors.”

“You can’t do that shit, dude. It’s not funny and it serves no purpose and we
get
it that you’re mad.”

Shane put the Bible under his pillow to prop his head. “I’ll do what I want, sex addict.”

And then it was on. The Shane and Darlo Show.

Darlo grabbed the CD out of the player. “This fucking whiny gay music is driving me fucking crazy!”

The next time Adam brought up the idea, a week later in a Nashville green room, Darlo rolled his eyes. “Oh my God. Will you just give it a rest, Adam?”

“This is only the second time I’ve mentioned it.”

Darlo adjusted his balls and threw an acidic smile. “Then I guess it’s two times too many.”

Adam looked at Bobby, but Bobby appeared to be operating on his hands. He squared up his weak jaw.

“We’re going to have to —”

“— shake it up for the next record. Yeah, yeah, I know, Adam.”

“That’s not what I was going to say.”

“Shut up about it!” Darlo chucked a drumstick at him. “Stop trying to undermine what we’re doing with your faggy folk-music ideas! Can you imagine me writing lyrics like ‘Double Mocha Lattay’ to some stupid acoustic music?”

“That’s his point,” Shane said. “You retard.”

Everyone, even Darlo, knew that the second record had to be different. They weren’t even the laughingstock of the music business anymore; other bands had taken their place. They were simply a synonym for utter lame-itude. As in, man, that song’s a real Blood Orphan, or, Jesus, that tour routing is just utter Blood Orphans, or, Fuckin’ A, the turnout tonight was full-on Blood Orphans. I mean, was
anybody
there?

Getting along was the least of their problems. At some point, Adam would have to go to Darlo and say, We’re fucked and you know it. Give me a turn at the wheel or I quit.

“That’s right,” he said, moving through traffic. “I’ll quit.”

He cursed his mousy voice. He rode his Dutch bike along some canal and contemplated years of big talk and no walk.

How many times had he promised to make things right? At least thirty.

How many times had he actually threatened to leave? Maybe two.

Degree to which he felt like he was a chickenshit loser? Priceless.

The little part of Adam with some cojones, tied up in the cellar of his sensitive-guy mind, marveled at his ability to get all the lessons of his childhood wrong, to come from a family of bullies, get attacked and ridiculed for being a sweet sensitive boy with feelings, and simply take it. To go out in the world and, at his first real opportunity, get into exactly the same dynamic of abuse that he’d promised he would forever be free of.

Adam had always found excuses. In childhood: the brotherly trouble ends sooner when I do nothing. In adolescence: soon I will be done and gone, no use dragging it out by antagonizing the Bakersfield apes. In Blood Orphans: but look at all the money, and the chance for glory, and the publishing money on top of it. Look at my bank balance!

Excuses.

But now the end of the line was here. He really had nothing to lose. Go ahead. Call my bluff. This time he meant it.

“Sure you do,” he said, riding down another beautiful Dutch straat. “Please.”

He took a turn into Vondelpark. He’d find a nice tree and clear his head, make his mind’s eye a blank screen, imagine that he was on some lonely Caribbean beach. The white sand, the deep blue water. Under an almost barren oak, he parked his bike on the grass and conceived the scene, spread a blanket out on the sand, rolled a cigarette, imagined sandcastles and the lush roar of crashing surf.

But no. Here came Darlo and Bobby, over the dune. They had beers in their hands. Bobby didn’t even have eczema. Here they came, infringing even on his meditative dream, and behind them Shane, walking slowly, stiff, trying to approximate a penitent, a pilgrim, a seeker. A poser.

Soon Darlo and Bobby were kicking sand in his face and pouring beer on his head while Shane read a section of the Extreme Teen Bible.
Jesus is the deepest philosopher. Jesus could make better water than Perrier. Jesus makes a better burger than In-N-Out.

They stomped on his sandcastle. He opened his eyes and sat up.

Adam watched, straight ahead in the distance, as kids walked with banners in their hands.
Down with America
sounded fine to him. All America had ever done was saddle him with a shitty family, a crazy-sadistic band, and a hundred thousand guilt-soaked dollars.

To his left, about a hundred yards off, two skinheads passed by. Adam tried to take his eyes off them but could not. He found images of power to be irresistible, and this pair in flight jackets and black jeans strutted across the green like conquerors. They looked over, making eye contact; Adam looked down, fumbled in his pockets for nothing at all. He heard them laugh. When he looked up, they were disappearing into some trees.

He took out his sketchbook and started doodling, trying to relax his mind to a place of creation, from which narrative would flow. You needed a narrative to draw. That was the first rule Michael Samuels, his composition instructor at CalArts, had said as they sat in front of dry, untouched easels. You needed to let your unconscious run free all over the image, let it map out a story, tap your own fears and joys and make commentary on the world around you. Narcissism, he’d said, is not a limitation. Narcissism is the key to a unique worldview.

“Narcissism melting into humanism,” Instructor Samuels had said, “creates a win-win strategy.”

Samuels, even more than the other instructors, sounded like a cheap guru.

“Get moving on your opus now,” he had said, circling the studio, tall, ponytailed, and rapidly balding. “Do not wait for the right subject. The right subject is the known universe.”

That much was true. Production was the key to insight.

“Plumb your narcissism,” Samuels had said, while staring at some hot art-school ass in black wool.

So Adam plumbed his narcissism and returned to a sketch he had started the day before, when he had walked the Amsterdam streets, imagining life here four hundred years back, imagining he was Rembrandt walking in slippers and hose, staring into the windows at the burghers who ran the city, imagining how he would line them up in the portrait for which he had just been commissioned. Standing there channeling the old Dutchmen had filled Adam with a sense of continuity, of being in the right place in the right time, carrying on a tradition, keeping up the magic of collective memory. Perhaps he would make a painting, after Rembrandt, of Blood Orphans. A portrait, hundreds of years later, of four fake nobles. Group pride and individual sorrow, jockeying for space on the crusted canvas.