Rock Bottom

by Michael Shilling

  “The temptations of the modern world! How can we heal the lost if we do not understand what brought them to a sorry state?”

  He took her hand and looked into her eyes, but he was thinking about a girl he had recently met at a show who could knot a cherry stem with her tongue.

  “Seriously,” he said, “how can you not see the irony of the situation?”

  She twisted at her promise ring. “Irony? Is that a Darlo word?”

  “What does that mean?” he said, his mind’s eye drifting into a sea of wet female lips and slick, smooth tongues. All those tongues! “Donna, you’re lost in doctrine!”

  She twisted at her promise ring until it came off. “It is so over, Shane,” she cried. “I don’t know you anymore. Who are you? Where is my Saint George? Where is my slayer of the dragon?” She threw the promise ring into the bushes. “Shane Warner, you break my tender heart!”

  Shane stared at her belly-button ring and thought of her as just as much of a seeker as he was, yet unknowing, unaware of the different paths one could take to God. So he chose a winding path that, to his friends and family, looked sacrilegious and misguided, ill-conceived and paved in sin. He chose the path marked Blood Orphans.

  “Danika!” said a woman’s voice in Dutch. “Danika!”

  He had obeyed her. He had come to her, and was about to slide into home when she hit reverse.

  “Oh, that’s my mom,” she said, and moved away from his embrace. “I’m up, Mama!” She put on her black terry-cloth robe, shook her dreads a little, and went down the hall. Shane rubbed some peanut butter between thumb and forefinger. The shower began to run.

  He smelled bacon cooking. That smell hit him before he could remember that he was vegan. Nose hairs stood at attention, begging for the heavy scent.

  Closing his eyes, he tried to imagine the Buddha, walking through the forest in ancient lands, among grains of peace, trees of tranquillity. But his erection stayed put, and the fantasy went haywire. The Buddha disappeared in the shadow of an enormous canopied tuber.

  Shane looked out the window, seeing low clouds, feeling cold suddenly, remembering how miserable his life had become. Buddhism was the oasis of hope that he could turn band life around. He’d thought that it would be a bulwark against bad vibes, sad times, problem realities, but he was starting to see that it was as flimsy as any other faith he had tried, a cruddy last theological stand against utter, complete, and stunning foolishness.

  Danika peeked in from the hallway. Where her robe opened, soft teenage hip beckoned.

  “Are you coming?” she said. “The water’s nice. Très sympathique.”

  These Europeans could speak, like, twelve languages.

  “Mon petit chou,” she said. “Allons-y!”

  He smiled and made a face. “Une … minute … s’il vous plaît.”

  She galloped back into the bathroom.

  “Merde,” he said. He got out of bed and put on his clothes, which reeked of cigarettes and beer and sweat. He wondered if perhaps he should take her up on that offer, but no. Prime Dutch pussy would be nice, but he had to get out of the house before Marcus the pervert stepdad showed up again.

  A yearning for the warmth and palm trees and surf of Los Angeles stabbed at him. It didn’t seem possible that he would be there in forty-eight hours. Like a prisoner who’s always known his release date, he felt like the closer it got, the more distant it was.

  Buddha said to reconcile your dualistic nature. Put away your desire. Let it flow from you. Let it become a focus point in your mind and watch it drift away. Smaller, smaller. Out with desire, in with peace.

  Every once in a while this worked.

  Something felt wrong — a strange weight distribution in his body. He opened his wallet to find that somewhere between the Star Club and Danika’s sticky teen bed, someone had stolen all his money, two hundred essential euros. He scanned the room, hoping that the money lay here, thrown aside in the black-magic moments of the previous night’s passionate disrobing.

  No time for that, though. He heard Danika’s mother’s voice climbing the stairs. He put on his jean jacket and, falling out of harmony for a moment, stuffed a pair of Danika’s dirty panties into his pocket.

  Duality could be a real bitch.

  He peeked out into the hall and spotted a back set of stairs, which he rushed down, bursting through a mud room and out a side door. He made his way through a yard littered with children’s toys, but then he ran right into Marcus, standing between him and freedom, taking out the trash. In each of his hands, Captain Dutch Mustache held a galvanized steel garbage can top.

  They locked eyes.

  “Scum,” Marcus said.

  Shane felt in his body a negative nostalgia. Buddha didn’t discuss premonition, but here it was. On the other side of the next thirty seconds, a memory waited for him.

  “Hi, Marcus,” he said, the way you speak to a rabid Doberman, and walked toward him.

  “Little American scum,” Marcus said, and lunged.

  Shane tried to dodge him, but the fucker was fast. Marcus smashed Shane’s head with the tops, one clang, a Venus flytrap.

  “Asshole,” Marcus said. He cursed in Dutch, triumphantly threw the lids to the ground, and marched back into the house.

  Though Shane reeled from the pain, he was also trying to be at peace with the dualistic nature of the universe, the mixture of pleasure and anguish. He stumbled off, feeling Danika’s dirty underwear bulging in his pocket. He was whimpering, his inner peace blown completely.

  “Ungh,” he unghed, and tumbled into the bushes.

  He tasted dirt, felt twigs against his scalp, and imagined himself as an ape, a dirty blond ape who got beaten up by weird, pedophilic Dutch family men. He had devolved into a primate, and no amount of half-baked synthesized theology was going to get him back up the evolutionary ladder. What if his mother, sitting on the porch of their house in mostly sunny Anaheim, saw him now? What would she think as she sipped her decaf English Breakfast? Reeking of over two years of mistakes, of every bit of windborne errata he’d acquired in his long fall from grace to defamy, he buried his broken head in the brambles.

  5

  IT WAS NOT EASY being the kind, sweet, vulnerable one. Just ask Ringo. Everything you thought, felt, imagined, you couldn’t keep it in because you were a flower, an artist, a sensitive soul. That was what made your music so sublime. That was what made you such a standout. That was what got you taken for granted and laughed at and prodded by the animals you shared a van with. You couldn’t hide your nature, yet you were stranded in the regiment of rock, where kindness meant being left alone for a few hours to sketch and daydream without interruption while the animals said their words — pussy, cunt, ass, tits — over and over outside the walls of your earphones, banged those words against your consciousness like barbarians at the falling gate of calm.

  It was not easy being Adam Nickerson, guitar player of Blood Orphans.

  Adam was the soft rose in a garden of black orchids. His pollen had been sent by an evil wind into the wrong field, a field of machismo gone mad, cruelty, greed, lust serving the insatiable master of testosterone. His role in Blood Orphans was a replay of his role in his family, a bunch of REO Speedealers in Bakersfield. Darlo and Bobby were like his brothers, Dave and Ike, always working on another car, always bleeding from putting their hands in the wrong spinning places, always throwing a punch on their way to the next mess, while his dad said boys will be boys and his mom hid in her room, smoking Kools and watching Oprah.

  She had given him a paint set for his tenth birthday. Saved his ass. He never forgot.

  When Blood Orphans was through and Adam was back at CalArts, he planned to do a series of paintings on the history of the band, a fresco of their march from holiness to damnation. To the viewer, it would be a combination of Narnia, Middle-earth, Dante’s Inferno, and West Hollywood. He would tell the story his way.

  In the morning murk of Morten’s apartment, having been awoken by
Darlo’s slam of the front door, Adam stroked his Fu Manchu, Mickey Mouse blanket at his chest. He thought about the night before. How pathetic they’d become.

  There’d been maybe twenty people at the Star Club, two hundred fewer than Darlo had promised.

  “We’ve moved units in this town,” the drummer said, dismayed. “Another example of bad fucking Warners publicity.”

  Adam wondered how Darlo could have deluded himself so completely. The SoundScans for Rocket Heart told a stark tale; the record had sold, in the entirety of the greater Amsterdam metropolitan area, forty-three copies. Marketing-budget-wise, that broke down to about seven hundred dollars a disc.

  “We’ve been on the radio and everything,” Darlo continued, backstage in the green room, glugging Stella. “I fucking hate Holland.”

  “Holland hates you too,” Bobby said, wrapping his hands in new bandages for the third time that day. “Holland rightly thinks Blood Orphans are —”

  “Shut up, Mummy!” Darlo said, and threw an empty bottle at him.

  Bobby picked up the bottle and tried to throw it. But with his hands all fucked up and slippery, he just bobbled it, and it crashed to the floor.

  “Loser,” Darlo said, and Bobby kicked an empty at him.

  Shane came in from the bathroom, sporting tight black underwear and nothing else. “Could you guys keep it down?”

  “Oh, sorry,” Darlo said. “Are you trying to meditate? We’ll totally keep it down.”

  “I would appreciate that.”

  “Swami wants total silence,” Darlo said. “Inner-peace bullshit train coming through.”

  “Leave him alone,” Adam said.

  Shane threw him a dirty look. “Fight your own battles, please,” he said in a bitchy voice. “I don’t need your help.”

  “Spoken like a true Buddhist grand master,” Bobby said, and kicked a bottle at the singer.

  Matters deteriorated when they hit the stage. Darlo, a mass of hair behind his six-piece kit, immediately introduced Shane as “our sensei Buddhist faggot, just our top Buddhist faggot bro.” Shane returned the favor by calling upon the audience for a moment of silence for “the animal behind the drums who, many tours ago, lost his way.”

  They stumbled into the first song, the infamous “Double Mocha Lattay.” Being the band musician was Adam’s greatest asset and his largest liability. He had a recurring dream in which he was the favorite son in a family of two-fingered children, the kind on the front page of Weekly World News. The other children, all of whom were jealous of his perfectly formed, five-fingered hands, looked suspiciously like the other members of Blood Orphans, and chased him with their webbed scissorhands until he thought he would drop, promising that they would kill him by cruel, slow, and unusual means. In the dreams, he screamed for his mother but no mother came.

  When shows were going badly, it never had anything to do with Adam. But in the pretzel logic of a rock band, when shows went badly, it had everything to do with Adam. It was Adam’s fault completely. How could he let them down and let the show go bad? It was his job to hold it together.

  So it went after “Double Mocha Lattay” ended thirty seconds early, on account of Bobby burning himself with his cigarette while trying to play and smoke at the same time. He’d reached for the Marlboro resting on his Marshall, but with his mummy hands he dropped it down his black silk shirt. At that, he broke into full-on ants-in-my-pants, throwing off his bass, which bounced on the stage like a monster truck running over a bunch of subcompacts, and pulling at his shirt until the offending cigarette dropped to the ground.

  “That’s a new shirt!” he yelled. “Fucking silk!”

  Sometimes when these mishaps occurred, the crowd was with you. They were in on the joke. They had your sympathy. But not this time. Just a dead silence and a few wincing giggles. Everyone stared at Bobby. A little chunky and a lot of greasy, with a hairline that one could only describe as proceeding, Bobby just wasn’t a sympathetic figure.

  “All right over there?” Shane asked.

  “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 prov
ided 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.

  Part II

  1

  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?”